Discovery (standard:science fiction, 2623 words) [2/8] show all parts
Author: Goreripper	Added: Nov 04 2000	Views/Reads: 3049/1834	Part vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
The crew and researchers aboard the Discovery are crushed then elated by what they find after they emerge from cryogenic suspension in a far distant solar system.

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natural regrowth, blotting out completely any trace? Or would we find 
some barren desert world, laid waste by a global war, sprinkled with 
the remnants of its former fallen masters? Would there be any planet 
still there at all? Perhaps the world itself had been swallowed by its 
own sun as it had died and consumed its children in its final death 
throes? 

Despite decades of studying the transmissions, splitting them apart into
individual streams and attempting to decode their meaning, no one had 
ever been able to decipher the hundreds of languages made up by each 
one. Certainly the images which had come to us had shown us a people of 
incredible invention, architecture, culture and diversity. 
Biologically, they appeared to resemble our own species in many 
respects, having a single head with a forward set face, eyes above a 
horizontally-set mouth and two other sensory organs which seemed to 
correlate with our own noses and ears. Their species was divided into 
several readily identifiable races, marked most obviously by striking 
variances in colouring, and while individual features were overall the 
same the various races were also marked with particular characteristics 
of their outward appearances. It was also evident from much of the 
visual data that this species was belligerent and violent, to other 
species co-existing on their world and particularly towards each other. 
War seems to have played a very large part in this people's culture. 
Even the visual data which we believe represents entertainment, in 
long-playing video form, seems preoccupied with violent acts of 
assault, murder and even rape, yet there was also stirring evidence of 
deep and devout spiritualism amongst many if not all of the people.  It 
was also highly evident that this species had been incredibly inventive 
and adaptable with an ability to habit virtually any environment with 
which it was presented--desert, jungle, temperate, tropical, tundra and 
even arctic wastes. 

The languages themselves, however, remained a barrier to us, and without
understanding even one of them it was often difficult for us to 
determine exactly what many of the images were attempting to show us. 
It was evident that some of the sounds were obviously electronic 
emissions made by artificial means--computers and other machines, 
musical instruments of various kinds--and others were definitely 
natural languages, and analysts had even detected various dialects 
within separate single languages. But what any of these languages meant 
had always remained a mystery to us. 

The last few frantic broadcasts the Discovery had intercepted failed to
give us a clue as to what had befallen this immensely ancient people. 
Whatever had occurred, it had happened quickly, and no amount of 
preparation or defence had been adequate to stop it. Had the 
inhabitants of this planet been warned of their impending doom? In the 
thousands of years we know of in which they had possessed the ability 
to transmit radio messages, surely they had acquired the technology for 
deep space travel? Perhaps the younger messages our computers were now 
intercepting were from other colonies of this race, spread out and 
established across their own galaxy as the imminent destruction of 
their home world drew near. Our linguists had begun preliminary 
examination of the new signals in order to ascertain if any were like 
those we had received from our primary source. Some similarities had 
indeed been uncovered, but most of them seemed far too recent to be 
concurrent with any mass exodus from the home world, if one had in fact 
taken place. Only arrival at this enigmatic location would provide any 
answer to our questions, and our eagerness to arrive was renewed. 

Our destination lay within the system of a middle-aged medium-sized
yellow star, amazingly similar to our own. As the Discovery neared, its 
instruments at once began to analyse the details of the star's 
heliosphere, and we found its influence reached far beyond the limits 
of the system itself. Like all stellar explorers and colony ships, the 
Discovery was protected by a magnetic field rivalled only by large 
planetary bodies, and when it become clear quite early that the star we 
were approaching was almost like our own, only older and slightly 
smaller, the engineers were quite satisfied that we were in no danger 
from solar wind. 

Our engines shut down, and as if in answer a million screens and
scanners, receivers and trackers and recorders and detectors flickered 
and hummed into life. Teams of astronomers, astrophysicists and 
cosmologists glued themselves to analysis data terminals as the 
Discovery ran programs and collected information. It soon became 
apparent that the system we had entered was heavily populated with 
solar bodies of many kinds and sizes. Most stars either accumulate or 
create their own companion systems, either by way of their incredible 
gravitational influence or in the process of their birth. The nebula 
which had created this star had been a particularly productive one. 

Discovery located four bodies large enough to be gas giants very soon
after we had entered the system; our radio source had not come from any 
of them, as in three hundred years of deep space exploration no 
significant lifeform of any measurable intelligence has ever been found 
on a gas giant. Locked into its terminal trajectory, the Discovery 
could not be redirected to examine these worlds directly. Their orbits 
and distances were established, and within hours eager teams of young 
scientists had taken to stellar explorers to study them more closely. 
The Discovery's main mission had been to track down and contact those 
alien beings responsible for the intergalactic transmissions. But there 
were dozens of satellite teams aboard, and each had their own field of 
study which was separate from, but in some way still pertained to, that 
of Professor Neffergi and the team of which I was a member. 

We had entered the system at an angle which corresponded to -23º to the
equator of the central sun, and our initial observations suggested 
that, like most planetary systems, most of the main bodies circled 
within a solar equatorial plane only a few degrees wide, almost 
directly in line with each other. Unless one or more of the inner 
planets moved in a drastically eccentric orbital plane, which was 
possible but unlikely--only one system so far discovered has a major 
planet which acts in this way--the Discovery would pass beneath the 
southern hemisphere of all of them with-out risk of a collision. It was 
impossible for the ship to collide with anything more substantial than 
a cloud of cosmic dust in any case, but it meant that there would be no 
need for course adjustment. 

The initial observations proved to be correct as further information
came to hand. The major planets of the system did not exhibit signs of 
drastic orbits, although large numbers of smaller bodies which were 
identified as possible comet masses and rogue asteroids most certainly 
did. There seemed to be an inordinate number of these objects, far more 
than any system had any right to, although the space around our own 
world of course can hardly be referred to as empty. Still, this was a 
particu-larly crowded solar family. 

Not only did the system appear to abound in planets, the planets
abounded in moons. A day after they had departed, the first stellar 
explorer crew reported contact with the gas giant which had been 
nearest the Discovery. Enormous, though fairly average in size for a 
gaseous world, it was unremarkable and typical in its aspect: 
fast-spinning and lifeless, an atmosphere topped with dense, thick 
cloud formations which moved at great speed and possessed of a dark, 
almost invisible ring system. In all these factors it resembled a 
hundred other similar planets dotted about the universe, but for its 
collection of moons. Though most were quite tiny in area and virtually 
all were irregular in shape, they were undoubtedly in captured orbits. 
And there were eleven of them! This planet was a system of its own! It 
would be days and weeks before the other explorer craft reached the 
other giant planets we had detected, two of which appeared to be very 
large indeed, and we could barely con-tain our curiosity as to what 
sort of worlds they would be. Indeed the excitement of these findings 
almost overrode our anticipation of finally reaching our true 
destination, which, as the Discovery was travelling at a far greater 
speed than the smaller explorers, was only a few days away. 

Preliminary study of the inner reaches of this system found another four
planets, rocky and much smaller, orbiting quite closely together, 
separated by only a few light minutes. To our incredible surprise, as 
Professor Neffergi and I checked the trajec-tory path late in the sixth 
evening of our journey in this system, we discovered that it was 
leading us to the planet third from the sun. A planet with a single 
satellite whose size ratio compared to its parent was almost enough to 
make it a binary planet. There should be no reason to explain to the 
reader why this astonished us so: the similarity to our own warm and 
cosy home world so remote to us now simply on this score alone was 
almost incomprehensible. From the third planet from our sun we had 
journeyed 100,000 light years to another planet third from its sun, 
where life, intelligent and advanced, had once thrived. The odds 
against this were astronomi-cal of course, but there it was. 

When the findings were announced, the atmosphere aboard Discovery
reached fe-ver pitch. No one could sleep, instead gluing themselves to 
monitors, screens, and windows, for the first glimpse of this world. 

Some hours later, Dr Guillamo Cathariat, an astrophysicist, barked an
excited cry and dragged me toward a visual unit. The Discovery's 
trajectory had brought us within close viewing distance of the first of 
the inner planets, and our telescopes had zoomed in. 

"It's a dead world," she said, "long dead. But amazing!" 

I nodded in agreement. It was a cold, dead world, quite small and
circled by a min-ute, dark moon which by the look of its shape may once 
have been an asteroid. But remarkably the planet was ringed at an 
incredibly low altitude by what the sensors were indicating as small 
particles of iron-based rock. This was indeed an amazing find. 

The woman grabbed my sleeve earnestly. 

"We simply must go there!" she said excitedly, and I agreed, though I
needed to gain the approval of Professor Neffergi. With four teams 
already gone and not due back for some months, would it be practicable 
to send one more? I was doubtful, but when I suggested it he had no 
hesitation, and within hours, another stellar explorer had departed our 
ship. 

Those who remained could do nothing but wait. 

END OF PART TWO. 


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