Chapters:

Chapter One

If a human in space looked in its direction at that moment they would have been blinded immediately. Retinas scorched, arms flaying, fingers clawing inside the cavern of a new darkness until, mercifully, they would enter the eternal icy tomb.

The view of the stars expanded, as if a drop of clear, viscous liquid was dropped on an ancient star map, warping the image, making the stars bulge around its edges and those in its center lifted up and grew larger. This illusion lasted for all of a few milliseconds before space ripped apart with a flash of blinding negative energy as bright as a sun.

In the place where the terrifying glow eventually subsided, a featureless metallic cylinder shone brightly. The white-hot hull, exposed to the bitter cold of space, cooled down, and its color rapidly moved down the color spectrum from blinding white, to the cooler blue until finally it shone red-hot. The front was bulbous and thin. Tendrils so thin as to be invisible to the human eye snaked to the outside, as if sniffing around.

The machine turned its attention to the planets in the system. It dismissed four of them quickly - they were either too far or too close to the sun to be of any interest, but there was a fifth. A section of its hull opened and a smooth platform containing a range of sensors soundlessly rose up out of a well. It focused its main telescope on the remaining planet. Spotting a glint of ice at the poles, the soulless machine immediately kicked into a higher drive. For the first time in the probe’s one hundred year existence, a specific list of commands made its way through its decision-systems. It immediately retracted the telescope. The hyper-drive engines were already humming at fever-pitch when the sensor platform finally folded in and the hull closed over it. Tremendous energies enfolded it, and it shimmered for an infinitesimally small moment before it disappeared in a burst of energy. A second later it snapped back out of hyperspace and appeared with a flash into orbit around the planet to take a closer look.

Their planet should have remained hidden, out on the Milky Way’s edge, where the great star spiral finally surrendered to the cold, dark abyss between the galaxies. It was not even that noticeable from afar – a pale brown dot of no importance to anyone; orbiting around a star no more significant than any other.

Down on the planet surface, in its northern hemisphere, lay a mountain range set like a bony spine atop a ridge of sandstone as if a giant creature lay buried underneath the dead desert sands. Towards the end of this range, roughly where the creature’s head would be, was a mountaintop. From this peak, looking back out over the stretch of rock, the rest of the mountain range appeared as if that ancient creature was on the verge of fighting its way out of its sand-prison to the freedom of the surface, but that was only if one had the imagination of a young woman like the one sitting on its very peak. She was seventeen already, but giants and mythical creatures lived in her mind, an escape from the cooped up caverns carved into the mountain below.

She sat still, sphinxlike; from a distance she would appear to be no more than an outcrop of rock. She wore a blue skin-suit topped with a transparent hood. Her eyes shone with gently concentration; the strands of golden hair closest to the tiny air-vents in the bottom of the helmet gently moved in the airflow. On the ridge below her, a group of similarly dressed children played a game of Three Steps Sareta with delighted cries, but her focus was fixed only on the view on the plains below.

The setting sun silhouetted wind turbines, and in the orange purple of the horizon, the big white blades gracefully sliced the poisonous air. Their shadows stretched out over the desert sands and in the dying moments of daylight she imagined them as grotesque giants that swished and swooped and cut and scythed over undulating dunes, metal warriors locked forever in battle.

A few strands of blond hair wisped around in the airflow inside her helmet, and she absentmindedly wiped her faceplate as if she could brush it away and groaned. She wished she tied her hair back, as her mother always said, as all mothers say to their children, "Once your hair comes loose in the helmet and it all flops forwards over your head and covers your eyes you will have to take your helmet off to get them out of the way. Always tie your hair back or put a net on.’ She forgot the hairnet. So stupid! Sonia shook her head to one side in order to get the clump of hair blocking her view out of the way. She was only half-successful in this and managed to at least clear the view for her right eye.

Out on the vista below, as the sun dipped over the horizon, the sun’s rays first retreated from the ground and the desert sands were hulled in deep shadow. The shadow was a deep blackness that looked as if the desert sand turned into a bottomless inky black lake. Her imagination conjured up a creature that rose up from the depths below.

“It steals its glorious sunset to spite the world because it dared embrace the night,” the girl mouthed the last words of the shadow-creature story Elder Farran taught the children. She missed the old man. It has been a month since he stepped into the next world. She has never herself attended one of his classes, but loved standing at the door to his class while he told stories to the little ones.

The dust-brown landscape changed to hues of blue and black without even a star in the sky to light it, all that was left was a ring of light on the horizon where the sun was setting in a place more distant. As soon as the sun dropped below the horizon the temperature plummeted. Sonia shivered and folded her arms over her chest as the sudden cold gripped her skinsuit.

The setting sun intensified the children’s fervor to cram in all the playing time that they had left of the day, as if they could stay the inevitable siren that would call them back to the airlock.

It would take some time for all of them to get back in through the airlock so Sonia laid down flat on the rock. The open sky blackened as she watched. It was a starless sky – they called it The Great Void. She imagined that the inky black nothingness sucked her upwards into it. It would drag her along trillions of miles across the chocking gasping-for-air vacuum until she got her bearings and courageously leap from star to star and only had to hold her breath while doing so. Mitchell, he was her stepdad and she could just could not get herself to call him dad, told her that they were on the edge of the galaxy. For nine months of their year, stars graced their night sky; but during the three winter months, when they were on the far side of their sun, the sky had nothing but faint smudges of light from galaxies afar. She looked to the East, towards they faint puffy smudge that was Andromeda, with a terrifying black hole monster at its center. She marveled at how the people from Earth could see so far and know so much, but here on this planet all knowledge stood still. The stars were now nothing but distant specks of light. Once star explorers, now they were chocking in the dust of deserts.

A bright flash appeared in the dark space above.

She wiped an imaginary thin layer of dust from her helmet’s visor and stared in awe. It was a star. A moving star, where seconds ago there was nothing. She stared at it for a couple of seconds more. It was not the right time of year; there should be nothing in the sky.

"Sonia," her eight-your-old brother’s voice came over the speakers in her helmet. She looked and saw Quinton standing to her side. She waved him silent with a quick motion of her hand.

"What are you looking at?" he persisted and came to stand by her. He froze when he saw it too and they both watched it traversed the sky, inching its way overhead.

"We got to tell Mitch," she said.

They navigated their way down the rocks back to the flat open space on the mountaintop and after a quick dash reached a small earth colored dome with two airlock doors. . Sonia pulled the lever to let the entry-door slide to the side and they stepped into the cubicle. Just before the door closed she had her last view of the bright star.

 “What was that?” Quinton asked.

“I don’t know,” she said.

It took four immeasurably long minutes, three for the poisonous air to be cleared and a vacuum to be created, and one for fresh, clean air to be pumped in. As the poisonous air hissed out of the chamber, she felt her envirosuit puff out. Once the clean air returned her suit clung to her skin again.

All this time the questions gnawed at her. A new star? Moving that fast? Certainly not. And it appeared with a flash. She was growing crazy, right? But Quinton saw it too. A star would not move, and the object in the sky clearly did.

When the air pressure equalized, the inside door popped open and they stepped through to the other side. She took off her helmet and plonked it down on one of the waiting benches without putting it back in its designated place even though it was against the rules and Quinton did the same. They sped out of the change room and ran through the tunnels to the archive located three levels below.

Mitchell cut a lone figure as he sat in a solitary pool of light in the darkness of the archive where he hulked over his workbench. The shadows on his desk jerked and jumped like startled miniature creatures as he adjusted his desk light every now and then to have a better look at the machine on his desk.

Burly, with a beard and a focus in his eyes, Mitchell frowned in concentration as he peered through the magnifying glass and saw small cracks in the metal – he grimaced; small crack spider-webbed their way around a join. The pump valve had done its service. He adjusted the light again and paused just for a second, sitting perfectly still. All around him were sounds of the habitat – sounds of life. Down the hall there was an outburst of far-off laughter and excited voices, but the place, the place itself breathed in the hissing of valves, in electricity that hummed softly, in the dripping of water in the pipes as filters extracted excess moisture from the air. It was as if the entire habitat was alive. That and many other sounds were a symphony of life to a habitat engineer.

He looked up at the urgent sound of running  thundering over the steel plates outside just before Sonia and Quinton burst into his workshop

"A star appeared in the sky," his stepdaughter, Sonia, blurted out as she tried to catch her breath. He raised his bushy eyebrows.

"It moves, daddy, it moves like this over the sky," said Quinton, and he pointed his finger through an arc in the air with one eye closed. "Just like this."

He sat up. "A comet?" he said. Mitchell wondered aloud as he searched his memory. His eyes narrowed into slits and he rubbed his beard. Now that would be interesting. There were no recorded sightings of any comet in the archives on Vaarda since planet-fall over three hundred years ago. He remembered a picture of one from his studies of the records their ancestors brought from Earth, but he had never seen one himself. "Did the star have a tail?" he asked looking at the children with rapt attention.

"No," the kids said in unison and Mitchell’s shoulders sagged.

"And it is not a shooting star or the colony ship," Sonia added.

"Well let’s go and see shall we?" he said and got up from his workbench.