Quest for the Conestoga (Colony Ship Conestoga Book 1) (20 page)

“Sandie, I am ready to activate.  Are you ready to oversee our transmissions?”  Cammarry asked.

“I am ready.”

Jerome switched on the fusion pack.  He nodded to Cammarry who began tuning the controls for the teleportation pad.  The grid on the floor made a slight humming noise.  There was a dim glow from the grid as energy slid into it.  The area was wafted by a slight smell of ozone and something burnt.

“Step one operational,” Cammarry stated as she adjusted the controls.  “Now I need to fine tune it over the FTL pseudomagnetronics to be able to establish a direct connection.  I am running the initiation tests on the FTA transceiver.  Everything here looks good. It is functioning at acceptable levels. I can soon scan for the Dome’s signals.  When I lock in on Dome 17, we should have nearly instantaneous communication.  When I have the signal situated, all we will need to do is to connect in and synchronize the final field generator oscillations.  That step might take a short while to establish the final calibrations.”

“All indicators are optimal,” Jerome said as he looked at the console.  Toggling a switch, he said, “Sending FTL carrier wave back to Dome 17.”

“Looking good.  System is ready to receive.”  Cammarry smiled.

“Negative response to carrier wave,” Jerome reported.  “I am adjusting to larger scope and increasing quark synergistic amplitude and ultrasymmetric trios,” he adjusted several dials and checked some gauges on the console. 

“Sandie, I am not registering the Dome 17 signal,” Cammarry said.  “Where is the malfunction?  All my indicators say it is go for connection.”

There was an awkward silence.

“I agree, everything here looks good,” Jerome stated.  “The connection back to the dome should be easy.  The receiving pad is open to receive.”

“Unless someone else already locked in,” Cammarry said with a tremble in her voice.  “Could that be?”

“Brink would not prohibit us from locking in on the signal, even if another team had succeeded.  The way I understand it, the signal and a teleporter lock are separate things.  We might not be able to establish a lock and open an orifice, but the signal would still be there.  The sending pad cannot connect to two separate receivers, but that is different from the signal. Those are two separate parts of the system.  I could understand a failure to lock in and make the orifice, but we should still get the signal anyway, right”

“Sandie?  Sandie?  Answer us!  What is the status of this teleporter?”  Cammarry yelled.  Her voice echoed around the large room, much like the goats bleating had done.  “Answer me!”

“Sandie, what is the issue?”  Jerome added.  “I am sending out the FTL carrier wave at maximum intensity, but I cannot even find the signal, let alone lock in.”

“I was afraid of that,” Sandie the artificial intelligence system finally answered.  “Ever since we had the incident, I have been attempting to locate our astronomical position.  I have only found two confirmed reference points in space, Westerhuis 1066, and Westerhuis 200Q.”

“What does that mean?”  Jerome asked. 

“Those are the only two objects I can positively identify from our present location.  They are some of the most remote, from Earth’s position, of all the celestial objects identified and labeled by Astronomer Westerhuis.  I do have a third celestial object, a pulsar, which I conjecture to possibly be one in the database, but it only roughly approximates the readings from Earth,” Sandie said tentatively.

“What does that mean?” Jerome asked. 

“It means we are way far away from Earth,” Cammarry said in a low tone.  “Dome 17 is far, far, away.”   

“That is why we need the teleportation receiving pad, of course we are light years away from Earth.  The Conestoga was on a hundred-year journey so it traveled a long way,” Jerome replied.  A growing unease was in his voice.

“Neither Westerhuis 1066 nor Westerhuis 200Q were target systems for the colony ship program, were they?  Sandie?  Where are we?”  Cammarry murmured. Then she spoke up. “Just say it!  Where are we?”

“I cannot locate the Earth solar system.  I conjecture that we are between 1,722 and 1,789 light years from Earth, but that is only a rough conjecture with only a moderate level of confidence for accuracy.  If the pulsar is not the one in the database, and that is a distinct possibility, then I cannot even give a rough approximation of distance from Earth,” Sandie replied.

“We are way too far away to find the signal from Dome 17,” Cammarry said.  “Is that what you mean?” 

“That is correct.  I am truly sorry,” Sandie said. “I have attempted every conceivable way to assess our location, and let me repeat, I conjecture that we are between 1,722 and 1,789 light years from Earth. I can see no way to overcome the great distance, even with faster-than-light technology.”

“We are over 1,700 light years further away from Earth than any of the colony ships’ target worlds?”  Jerome asked.  “How?”

“That incident,” Cammarry said.  “That Cosmic Crinkle thing.  It threw us way out somewhere.”  She slammed her fist into the floor.  “No!  It cannot be.”

“Cammarry’s conclusion fits the facts, and she is likely correct, although I cannot explain it myself,” Sandie said.  “The Cosmic Crinkle apparently, to use her term, threw the Conestoga out here as well as throwing the robotic probe and our FTL scout ship.  I have no basis for understanding how that happened, but the facts point to that conclusion.”

“So what we saw at the start of that incident, that first Conestoga, it was a mirage?”  Jerome said.  “Some kind of afterimage or stain in space?  Like I said, a ghost?”

“I have no better word to use than mirage,” Sandie stated.  “We are here now, and I can conjecture no way of making a teleportation connection back to Dome 17.  I am truly sorry.”

Cammarry shut down the teleportation receiving pad.  The hum was gone, the smells were gone, and the glow dissipated.  “We have failed.”

Jerome was pensive.  He stepped over and held onto Cammarry.  He then stated, “We are alive.  We are here.  We can survive here.  That is not a failure.  The great secret of true success, of true happiness, is this: we live in the possible, and that is being successful.  We must not dwell in the past, nor dream of the future, we concentrate our minds on this present moment.”

Cammarry hugged him back.  “But the people in Dome 17, what will happen to them?”

“There are six other missions, one of them must succeed,” Jerome said and together they wept bitterly.   

10 descendants

As time passed, Cammarry and Jerome discovered that the dim lighting of the rooms they had explored did not charge over time.  Sandie reminded them some hours later, as they sat around the teleportation receiving pad, "You may wish to attempt sleep." 

“How long has it been,” Jerome asked.  He stood and did some stretching exercises. 

“It has been thirty-six hours since we had the Cosmic Crinkle incident.  You may wish to begin establishing a day-night cycle.  The lighting on the Conestoga seems to be consistently at the same level.”  Sandie reported. 

“We can try to connect in again,” Cammarry said. 

“We have tried seven times, all without success.”  Sandie’s voice was still infused with a subtle optimism which grated on Cammarry’s nerves. “I will keep monitoring for the Dome 17 signal.  Should I discover it, I will awaken you immediately.”

Jerome and Cammarry retreated back to the scout ship and strapped themselves into the acceleration seats and tried to sleep.  Sandie was able to darken the cockpit, but it was very difficult to relax. 

“Jerome?  The teleporter failed,” Cammarry cried softly. 

“Yes, I know,” he replied as he held onto her. 

“We will never see any of them again.  We will not even know what happened to them, or where they will have gone,” she sobbed. 

Jerome cried as well.  “It has been an exhausting journey.  We still have the majority of the Conestoga to investigate.  Who knows what we will find.”

“I am with you in this,” she answered him. 

Eventually they did drift off into a fitful sleep.

Sandie awoke them after some length of time.  “I am establishing this as morning.  Please wake up.  There is food to consume and things to do.”

“Morning?  Or mourning?”  Cammarry asked.  “I guess I did rest some.”

“Another day, another challenge.  Sandie?  Any luck finding the Dome 17 signal?”  Jerome asked as he wiggled his way out of the scout ship and through the umbilicus.  He grabbed a food ration ate it and sucked down some water.

“No.  I will let you know the moment that changes,” Sandie replied. 

Neither Cammarry nor Jerome spoke much for a while.  They did move out from the floating in the scout to the gravity of the Conestoga.  The airlock room was still a mess, with the remains of the rat mound, and the other debris. 

“We can at least make a clean place for ourselves that is not so cramped,” Jerome suggested. 

And so they cleared out the airlock and threw the remains of the rat mound into the room where the teleportation equipment was still located.  They also scrubbed down the room with the chair, and the storage room with the body in the ruined spacesuit.  All the debris they piled up in a corner of the large room.  The teleporter was on one side of the center hedge of vegetation, and they threw the remains and junk from the other rooms on the far side of the hedge.  Looking at the teleportation receiving pad was hard as it reminded them of their failure.  So they called the great room the goat room. 

The far side of the goat room, had two doors which were stuck open about half way.  Beyond the doors was a hallway which was also lit by the typical dim overhead illumination. There were a couple other doors off the goat room, but they were closed.

“I will remove the seats from the scout, we can use them as beds in the storage room.  That seems the most secure location as it has only the one door.  We can shut that door as we need to,” Jerome said. 

“I will keep working on welding over as many of the rat holes as I can find, so the airlock room will be more secure as well,” Cammarry replied.  “Those animals have not come back.  I sort of wonder where they went.”

“The Conestoga is big,” Jerome replied.  “Especially to a small animal.”

“Or to people so far from home.”

Neither worked with much eagerness or passion, but they did explore the nearby rooms.  If the door off the goat room opened easily they explored what was beyond.  Neither felt like forcing anything open.

One room was overgrown with tall and reedy plants, but it led nowhere else.  Another room had stacks of cargo crates, covered by mold and small plants.  The final door they opened led to a small room with shower stalls, toilets, and sinks.  It took several hours of work to repair the pipes which came into that room, but Cammarry and Jerome established a working sink, and toilet.  The air vents in the toileting area had jammed shut, and there was no evidence that growth medium had ever been present in that room.  It was the first place they had encountered a room without what they called the fungus growth.

“That secures a water source for us,” Jerome said as they finished. “And a waste disposal place.”

“It is far better than what we were using in the corner of the goat room, where the water made those small channels across the growth medium and empties out through the vents in the floor.  That was smelly and nasty.  This is much more sanitary, and I think that will be important in the future,” Cammarry replied. 

Each morning, Cammarry and Jerome turned on the teleportation system and manually scanned for the signal from Dome 17, but it was never located. 

“Sandie, any more information about where we are or how to contact Dome 17?”  Cammarry asked yet again. 

“I am afraid not.  The situation remains the same.  I can conjecture no method of contacting Dome 17,” the AI replied.  “I am still taking readings on this solar system and its planetary bodies.  There are a high number of asteroids and comets, more than I expected.  The oort cloud for this solar system is especially dense. I am tracking and cataloging them.”

“Sandie, it puzzles me how the message about ‘making planet fall’ was sent.  It seems that that first Conestoga, the mirage one, or ghost one, before he incident, well that ship’s location could contact Earth.  The probe proved that.  Yet, we understand that somehow the probe was duplicated and ended up here.  But how did the message about ‘planet fall’ get back to that mirage Conestoga and then back to Dome 17?  Do you understand what I am asking?”

“Yes, Jerome, I understand very well that conundrum.  I have run a multitude of speculations attempting to answer that very question.  I have no answer for you.  It is clear that the tiny message did make it from here to there, and then back to Dome 17, but I have no idea how.  I cannot even locate where that first Conestoga contact took place.  The Cosmic Crinkle incident is unexplainable by my current knowledge and understandings.  I apologize, but will continue to work on solving that problem.”

“Sandie, I empathize.  I have tried every data stick we brought along with every reader and combination thereof, yet none of them work,” Cammarry stated.  “I was hoping to evolve several new artificial intelligence systems and set them to work in tandem on these issues, and put at least one into exploration of the Conestoga’s nonphysicality.  However, I cannot even get the data sticks to activate.  Any idea why all, every one, of them failed?”

“Again, I am not able to provide an answer,” Sandie replied.  “The data stick failures are another mystery.”

Several days passed, and their camp was further developed.  One fusion pack was set to automatically establish a cycle of illumination for their days and nights.  That covered the area of the airlock, the chair room, and the storage room where they had placed the acceleration couches and made them into a bed.  They had secured the bedroom and made the doors operate manually by a lever which shut the door easily and consistently without any power.  Their living quarters were much larger than what they had had back in Dome 17, and they had previously scraped those three rooms clean of the fungus and growth medium.  They had also deactivated the dim lighting system in the ceiling of those rooms.  It was dark at night and light during the day, a more normal pattern for them. 

They went on and did force open the few single action doors that led from the goat room, but they did not venture past the broken double doors where they knew the goats had retreated.  That corridor was left alone.  The other doors from the goat room were single doors, and all led to small rooms without other exits.  Plant growth was especially thick in those rooms and it covered over the horizontal surfaces.  Beneath the plants and the growth medium, the small rooms had stacks of cargo crates or hexagonal containers. Opening every cargo crate and container they found nothing of much use.  There were various gears, disassembled machinery of unknown operation, and several crates full of smaller boxes marked, ‘Micro-organism Enhancement Component’.  Those smaller boxes all had dust inside of them.    

“Well Cammarry we have done our best.  I know how hard this is.  I too will deeply miss all the people from Dome 17, except perhaps for Jubal,” Jerome said.

“I would even be glad to see his face, if it was through the teleporter’s orifice,” Cammarry replied with a weak smile.  “But we will never see any of them again.  We are all alone.  It is almost like we found a survivable dome, but have no way to tell anyone.”

“We are in this together.  This challenge is a time to build and prosper. Our base camp has a source of fresh water and a place for waste.  It is fairly secure.  We have seen no animal life lately, and none has been threatening.  The doors that can be repaired are functional.  The door to the goat room can be secured in case of emergency.  Those doorways where we harvested the permalloy used for the receiving pad, will never shut again, but that is not a major concern.  Overall, the camp is safe, secure, and moderately comfortable,” Jerome observed.  “We have a home, even though it is not what we expected or wanted.  Perhaps Sandie will still figure out a way to locate the dome’s signal.”

“Our mission has failed,” Cammarry said.  “Nothing we do allows us to connect the teleportation receiving pad back to Dome 17.  I have only you to talk to about what we have found, and I feel pretty alone.  What will happen to all those people?  We will never find out.  I know I should be thankful we have established this base of operations, yet what have we accomplished?”

Jerome held her and again they cried together. 

One morning, after they had once more failed to connect with the receiving pad, they were sitting in the goat room.  The dim light was constantly the same in that room, but the brighter light from their living quarters spilled into where they sat. 

“Hello wizards?”  A voice asked from somewhere out in the room.  “Greetings and solicitations to you both!”   The accent was strange, but the words were clear enough. 

Cammarry leaped to her feet, “Who is there?”

“Will you share your magic with me?  I can trade.  I have two cheeses and a full bladder of wine,” the voice answered.

“Come out where we can see you,” Jerome called.  “We mean you no harm.”

“I know.  I have been watching you and your machines.  You are very interesting wizards.  Do you wish to trade knowledge for food?  My cheeses are of excellent quality.  My wine is well fermented and in a quality well-tanned bladder.”

Cammarry looked at Jerome.  She bowed her head and spoke softly into the com-link, “Sandie, can you tell where that voice is coming from?”

“Your spirit-ghost Sandie cannot frighten me,” the voice called back.  “I have protection.”

Responding through the ear piece Sandie said, “The voice is in the far corner of the goat room, lying prone under the bushes near where the water exits.  It belongs to a human, male, roughly fifteen years old.”

Jerome, whose ear piece had also relayed Sandie’s response, waved his hand to Cammarry.  She started to walk along the edge of the room toward the doorway to the toileting room.  “I do not know what you mean by calling us wizards.  Please come and explain that to me.  Maybe we can trade and help each other.”

Jerome crawled stealthily around the other side of the central hedge. 

“I will give you the two cheeses if you show me how to make wizard things,” the voice called back.  “I want to learn to make that bright light.  Can we trade?” 

“That sounds fair,” Cammarry answered.  “You say two cheeses?”  She had no idea what a cheese was, but she was trying to keep the stranger’s attention while Jerome circled around.  “I am called Cammarry.  What is your name?”