Dark Star Rising Second Edition (Pebbles in The Sky) (57 page)

The second encounter with a planetary system had been a system with a yellow star a little smaller than the one in the system that it was now traversing. The encounter with the second star system had been more violent than the first one.  The Dwarf Star had passed deep into that stars gravity well.  A planet that resided at just the perfect distance from its sun in the zone where there was liquid water on its surface had the misfortune of lying right in the Dwarf’s Path.  The Dwarf had absorbed most of the mass of that blue and green world.  The myriads of life forms on that warm world had been extinguished as the world had fallen and merged with the Dwarf.  There were no survivors, except for a handful that had observed the destruction of their home world from an icy planet in orbit farther out away from their sun. 

              As the Dwarf left that star system it grabbed that far orbiting planet and stole it from its mother star.  The Dwarf swung around the yellow star and settled into a new path. The frozen world that it had stolen settled into a wide elliptical orbit around the Dwarf.  One hundred and eighty light years, and nine thousand years ahead of it, another yellow star sat in its path.  It also had a beautiful blue and green planet with life upon it.  One of the life forms on that distant world there was evolved enough to look up at the sky from its mud brick village and wonder what the stars really were.

             
Now as the Dwarf was rushing out of this system it was leaving behind the icy planet that it had stolen from the second sun.  Even though it was leaving a gift behind, the Dwarf was causing all sorts of havoc in this systems asteroid belt as it left, scattering those rocks like marbles.  It would soon sling a gas giant and its moons out of this system, and would have a violent collision with another gas giant and absorb its mass as well as that of the moons in orbit around that planet.  Then, the Dwarf would pass again out into the cold of interstellar space.  Perhaps in another twenty to thirty thousand years, it would encounter another star system.  Such systems were just pebbles in the sky.

This ends book one of the Pebbles in the Sky series

The following is the first chapter from the second book in the series, Blue Planet Rising

Chapter 1

7007 BC (Earth Modern Calendar)

180 Light Years from Earth

              Ranor Ungor Hanth sat alone in the control center.   Twenty revolutions ago, the rest of his tanth, or crew, had taken the journey of their ancestors.  In recognition of his place as the senior Ranor in the tanth, they had left him alone to contemplate the destruction of their world.  With food supplies diminishing rapidly, and only partial power production left for essential systems, they had taken the Taal that would painlessly send them to join their ancestors and the rest of their doomed race.  Now, only Ungor remained to behold the aftermath of the catastrophe that had encompassed his world.

             
Ptrafath, the invader, the destroyer of his world, had been detected over three cycles ago.  The astronomers of his world had caught their first glimpse of the approaching dark star at about the same time that his people had first started venturing out among the planets of the yellow star system where they had originated.

The Barbakath, Ungor’s people, had possessed the capability of space travel for several cycles prior to the discovery of Ptrafath, but their star system was a poor one.  Other than Horast, the blue green planet of their birth, the planetary system around their star consisted only of two gas giants that were barren of any moons and a far flung ice world that was circling far out at the edges of their star’s influence.  With no interplanetary resources to tempt them, his race had no reason to venture out into space.  His people had been content to remain on their warm and wet planet slowly contemplating and solving the mysteries of the universe.

That satisfaction and philosophical contentment with taking and using only what was at hand, and desiring no more than that, came crashing down on the Barbakath with the discovery of Ptrafath.  The fact that Ptrafath was going to be the destroyer of their world drove many of Ungor’s people insane with depression.  Many of them chose to take the journey of their ancestors early rather than live out the days that remained for their planet in despair and hopelessness.  There were some Barbakath however, often considered the radical and undisciplined by the majority of his people, that were not content to wait for the destroyer to come and erase their race from existence along with the planet of their birth.

Ungor’s clan was one that contained a disproportionate number of the
Barbakath scientists and engineers.  Having been given a deadline of around three birth cycles until Ptrafath arrived, his clan embarked on a race to try and preserve the heritage of their people and home planet.  Initially, they had planned on building a huge ship, an interstellar biosphere that could transport specimens of their people and their planets abundant biodiversity to another star system. There, they hoped to re-establish the Barbakath.  They invested enormous amounts of time and research in developing the technologies that would be required to do this.  Ungor’s people mastered the ability to produce energy by the same fusion processes that their life giving star did.  They even discovered how to manipulate gravity itself.  The things they did not possess however, were the resources or time needed to build a ship of the size required to take a biosphere with enough diversity to survive on a multi generation interstellar voyage.  They knew that the nearest star system with a potentially habitable planet was over seventy light years distant, and that world was only deemed marginal at best.  Even with all of their scientific breakthroughs, Ungor’s people had not solved the mysteries of faster than light travel.  The realization came early in the planning phases of the giant ship that this strategy of survival was impractical.

Looking at their other options, it was decided that if they could not transport life itself to a new world, then it was still possible that the very blueprints of the life on their world could be transported and then re-created upon arrival at a new home world.  Two projects had been started to try and accomplish this process.  The first was the construction of a ship that would have the genetic information for all the life that existed on Horast, their home world.  The ship would be controlled by an intelligent computer designed for that very purpose.  There would be no need for vast supplies of food, water, or atmospheric gases on the ship since only the encoded data would be contained in the computer’s data banks. The ship itself was merely the shell of the computer.  Since the ship contained very little more than the computers data banks and a small re-generation area, it could be built very compactly and given the ability to travel the vast distances needed to find a habitable world to deposit the seeds it carried.  A journey with a length of a thousand cycles would mean nothing to an artificial intelligence.

The mission was planned so that when the seed ship found a planet compatible with the blueprints of life it carried, it would re-create a small breeding group of Barbakath.  The Barbakath infants would be nurtured in tanks of nutrients that would simulate the warmth and safety of a Sabba’s gestational pouch.  The ship would raise and educate the first generation of that new race of Barbakath. When they were mature and had become Ranor, the computer would turn over the responsibility of colonization of the new world to the members of the re-created race.

There were myriads of engineering details that had to be worked out.  The philosophers of their race had many disagreements over how the new adolescents that had known no Sabba or Ranor in their infancy would mature intellectually.  The problem over how to produce the first mature Ranor had been worked out by the simple administration of the required hormones to one of the un-mated Sabba.  The philosophers and medical experts of the Barbakath had heated debates while trying to decide if a Sabba that had never given birth could maintain its sanity when it became a Ranor.  The ship was eventually completed and launched with its precious cargo of genetic blueprints a cycle before the destroyer arrived.

As a backup plan, and as the debate over whether any Barbakath could maintain sanity after being raised by a machine intelligence continued, it was decided to put a second cache of genetic blueprints on the far orbiting ice world of their star system.  Exploration probes sent to the ice planet had given evidence that the planet had at one time orbited much closer to its mother star.  It was theorized that it had been thrown out into its distant orbit by interactions with the gravity of the systems two gas giants.  Primitive life forms had even been discovered deep beneath its frozen oceans.

Shortly after the project was started, it was calculated that Ptrafath would steal this planet from its parent star even as it devoured the home world of the Barbakath.  The project was almost canceled, until one of the leading philosophers of his cycle had come up with a plan that would not depend wholly upon computer intelligence for success.

Ranor Alraric Potrath was one of the leading philosophers that had specialized in debating what other types of intelligent life may inhabit the galaxy.  He made a proposal that caused quite a bit of emotional distress and heated debate among the Ranor of his people.  He made his proposal In an emotional speech that was transmitted to all the clans.  Standing on his hind feet and gesticulating with his hands and front feet, he proposed putting a cache of their world’s life blueprints on the ice world and letting the Destroyer take the cache with it on its interstellar wanderings.  Astronomers predicted that in the next twenty thousand cycles Ptrafath would pass near at least six star systems that had planets that potentially harbored life.  He argued that if just one of those systems had evolved intelligent life, it was possible that they could retrieve the cache and could use the information there to re-create the race of Barbakath.  It was considered a low percentage chance, but worth the effort when compared to complete extinction.

Ranor Alraric Potrath’s speech started another great debate over what an alien race may do with the cache of biological data if discovered.  Many opposing philosophers argued that their proud race could possibly be used as experimental animals, or enslaved for the benefit of the race who found the cache.  There were others who feared that any race that could re-create the Barbakath from the genetic information could also alter their genome in such a way that would make them unrecognizable to their ancestors.  They argued that when those deformed and altered Barbakath took the path of their ancestors, they may not be recognized by those that went before them and would be lost for eternity.  The Barbakath were also fearful that the cache would be found by a race that was greedy and had a tendency toward violence.  Violence and hostility were the bane of Barbakath culture and philosophy for good reasons.

Deep in the jungles of their home world Horast, Barbakath explorers had found the ruins of another intelligent race.  That race had gone extinct long before the ascension of the Barbakath on Horast.  Close examination of the civilizations ruins gave evidence that the ancient ones had perished in a violent struggle.  The ruins showed evidence of damage by powerful weapons that had rocked an entire world and had caused mass extinctions.  In contrast, the Barbakath were a peaceful and pastoral species they had never known war and abhorred all violence.  Conflict in their society was settled by philosophical debate and compromise.

After all the debates were finally over, it was decided that taking a chance on sending out their biological profiles and those of their world’s diversity was better than certain extinction.  The Barbakath re-started work on the ice planet’s cache.  Another artificial intelligence, similar to the one placed on the first seed ship, was created there and given instructions to attempt to contact and communicate with any intelligent race that it encountered.  The outpost and data storage facilities were given several backup power sources and made as
impervious to the cold and emptiness of interstellar space as possible.  In addition to the vast stores of biological data, the entire knowledge of the Barbakath race was placed in the memory of the artificial intelligence that would oversee the outpost on its interstellar wanderings.

Less than half a cycle before the arrival of the destroyer, the scientists of his world made the scientific breakthrough that they had struggled so hard for.  The irony of the discovery was almost too great to bear.  They had discovered a way to create a faster than light starship.  For the Barbakath however, it was too late to accomplish their original plan of building a huge biosphere ship.  Ptrafath was upon them, and there was no longer enough time to build the colony ship that they had originally dreamed of.

Ranor Ungor Hanth had watched with the rest of his tanth as Ptrafath, the dark destroyer from the depths of space, consumed his home world.  Then, when it was at last over with, his crew had filed past and given him a last embrace of respect and goodbye.  They had gone below to take the Taal.  They would all take the final journey of their ancestors.  Ungor was left as the last living member of his entire race.  He had maintained his lonely vigilance until it was a certainty that Ptrafath had indeed captured the ice planet and started its long journey.  The cache of genetic information that resided in the computer memory below the outpost he was in was now on its way to an uncertain future.  With nothing left for him to accomplish, he realized that it was now time for him to take his own journey and follow his tanth and ancestors.  There was only one more important thing that he had to do before he departed.