The Eden Sky - Part 4 - A Secret Coven

The Crowd was silent again. A bubbling murmur began to rise in pockets of the audience. Some sounds of stirring and of mechanical lights being activated. Slowly, the room was lit from above and three large pillars of light cascaded down towards the stage. Every face was a mixture of horror, despair and anger. Some disbelief scattered among the many.

This is it. We’re all that’s left. How is that possible? I can look around and count how many humans are left alive in the universe. I...

“What sort of trite nonsense is that? We all get woken up by a mysterious message and this is it? This – this gibberish about war? We had peace when we left! Treatises and accords being signed across the globe! It’s the only reason many of us are even here right now!”

Across the amphitheatre, a meal looking man stood trembling slightly as he shouted across the void to nobody in particular, voicing the disbelief among the crowd. Yet more chattering began, spreading across everyone. A tidal wave of collective realisation drowning the relatively small congregation. The ships crew had sat down, pensive expressions held in quivering hands. The captain looked perturbed, but resolute. A member of the ships command stood gracefully and strode towards the centre where a pedestal had silently risen.

“With this, shocking, news, I know it’s impossible to comprehend and it sounds insane. When we left ninety-five years ago, everything was fine. But we all know, perhaps know best, just how much can change in one hundred years.”

He was impressive. Calm and collected amongst the chaos erupting around. The calm serenity of the ships normal activity contrasted the bubbling anxiety of the amphitheatre. Relatively few became irate, many remained calm and appeared thoughtful. Several groups began to splinter off and started discussing together as the Captain stood up herself and began to address to crowd.

“No matter what we all think, we have time treat this as accurate information. We have no reason to suspect otherwise and our mission directive is to follow every piece of information given within our order parameters. This changes very little of our mission. We still have to reach Alpha Centauri and build a research base. That’s what we’re here for. That is our goal. Don’t lose sight of that.”

Mila stirred from her stupor, she realised Alexa was squeezing her hand tight. Red marks around white fingers and a tense expression plastered across her usually so angelic face.

“It’s true. I don’t know why but I- i can feel it somehow. I knew it when Alistair first mentioned the rumours, it had to be true.”

She droned on with a flat affect. Emotionless, robotic, as if reciting a litany of mechanical terminology. Alistair was calm, silent. He seemed unaffected by the news. Christian was already standing, pushing the people around him as he tried to get towards the front but he slipped and knocked the person next to him backwards into a small crowd of biologists gathered at the back.

“Watch what you’re doing, assehole!”

The man grabber Christian by the collar of his scruffy jumpsuit. He was wearing the coveralls of the systems engineering crew. Mila knew this man, it was hard not to when he stood six inches above everyone else on the ship. His freshly shaved head glistening in the light.

“I’m just trying to get to the front. Please, I’m one of the mission strategists, I need to talk to the captain, let me go.”

Mila stretched our her arm and tried to shake Christian, he was acting erratically but his words sounded so soothing. Something wasn’t right but too many people had started standing and leaving, forming tight little circles around the amphitheatre, walking towards the dining hall. As scientists tend to do in stressful situations, they blindly wandered to the nearest cup of coffee.

“Alistair, I’m getting Alexa out of here. Go with Christian, make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid and keep in touch okay? I’ll meet you back here in one hour.”

Alistair stirred from his thoughts, vacant eyes lit up as he registered what was being said to him.

“Uhh, sure. Sorry, it’s just a lot to take in. I – i didn’t know. I had some ideas but... surely this can’t be true?”

“It doesn’t matter whether it is or not; we have to act as if it is. As the Captain said, our mission hasn’t changed. We still need to get to the planet and start a base. We’ve got a lot to think about once we get there but we need to focus on getting there or it won’t matter at all whether that message was real or not.”

The Crowd was dispersing faster now, people clamouring out everywhere but the crew remained stationary at the centre. The captain poised over the pedestal, stoic and looming. Christian was near the bottom now, clamouring over the emptying seats, he found Aarpi and sat talking to him. Voices were raised but it was too loud inside. They were arguing. Aarpi pointed towards the Captain and they both walked towards her. They stopped just shy of the pedestal and took a second to compose themselves. Christian looking even more dishevelled than usual, Aarpi had his short black hair slicked back and his lab coat was pristine except for a few pen marks and one singular burn hole on the left sleeve above the elbow.

The Captain looked up and acknowledged her interlocutors. They stepped closer as she stepped down to greet them. A brief handshake and some nodding before they disappears into the throng of people and towards the War Room.

 

The heavy doors to the War Room shuddered open as the Captain Bridgette finished entering the key code.

“Why do we still use a key code for doors? It seems so archaic.”

Bridgette eyed Christian, amused.

“I’m glad you asked. It’s because most other forms of identification are either easy to forge or easy to hack. An old fashioned, long sequence of numbers and letters that comprises a section of words somewhere is far more secure.”

Christian groaned, inaudible to all but him. With her obvious scarlett and military stature it was easy to forget that Captain Bridgette was in fact a Quantum Computational Engineer.

“We’ve used excerpts of a million different books and literature as a hash-key for security for decades. Nearly impossible to crack, even with the knowledge of all the literature we use.”

A trick smugness hung in the air. I hate that quality in her so much. A spacecraft full of the most brilliant minds Earth has to offer and she still feels superior.

... I guess, it’s ‘had’, now.

The great sheet table rise from beneath the carbon fibre floorboards, glossy and metallic, with imperceptible nanofilament strung through almost every inch of it. One tap from the Captain and it came alive. Great arcs of iridescent blue and green rippled from corner to corner as a view of a far-off planet danced beneath the surface before rising through the table to form a sphere of light.

“This, gentlemen, is Virgil, our new home. You are no doubt aware that we scanned this planet before setting out and discovered that it was habitable, at the very least, it was plausibly habitable. What you won't know, however, is that on our journey here, we've been scanning the planet on our own. I had the change to review the ships findings as soon as I was awoken and, the results are astounding.”

 

Bridgette tapped a screen on the table, metal shutter silently slid down the walls of the room, opaque glass rising to cover the doorway. The lighting dimmed, the iridescent sphere swung across the table, paled and shrunk. Another sphere emerged in its place, similar, but more detailed and populated with glistening lights pulsing to an unknown rhythm.

 

“Each of these dots, is an anomaly. Geological, meteorological or otherwise. The ship first detected this unusual weather pattern in the far Northern hemisphere, towards where our North Pole would be. It is a swirling vortex of cold, glacial air that is permanently spinning, however, once every forty-nine days, it switches direction. This causes devastating damage to the surrounding ecosystem but we haven't been able to get any sort of scan of what's actually beneath it. There is an incredible electromagnetic field surrounding the storm which shifts and undulates erratically, scrambling any possible data we could get from it.”

 

The sphere shifted, several dots dimmed and a concentrated cluster came into focus as the sphere fractured into shards which splayed across the table. Bridgette walked around the clusters, moving her hands carefully through the pieces, creating groups of them. Her badly burned left hand came to rest in one particular group of three dotted pieces.

 

“These, are by far the most interesting of all though. If you trace a path through the planet from one to the others, they form a perfect equilateral triangle. That's not even the most amazing part of them. Come around this side, I've got something to show you. None of the other council members know yet and we'd like to keep it that way, by we I mean myself and the ship. We need to get a geologist in to help with this and the best we have is Mila, and she isn't exactly my biggest fan, which is where you both come in.”

 

Christian had crossed his arms and huffed as soon as Mila was mentioned. He knew she'd never agree to something as shady as this. He couldn't deny that it was curious though.

 

“You can't be serious? You said it yourself, she's not your biggest fan but she was also one of the last to wake up. She's in no state to be doing anything this taxing and even if she was, how are we supposed to convince her?”

 

Aarpi looked annoyed. He knew Convincing Mila to do anything she wasn't immediately interested in was difficult enough if she liked the people she'd be working with, but if it was with Bridgette and if it was some 'top secret' task then she'd be even less likely to.

 

“Look, Bridgette, Aarpi and I both know you'll have to do something pretty amazing to even convince Mila to hear you out let alone go so far as to consider doing this. Show us what you have. If we think it'll grab her attention then we'll do it. Agreed Aarpi?”

 

Aarpi tapped his foot, hesitant and still annoyed. He hated being misled and feeling used. He wasn't here because Bridgette wanted him here, he was simply here because of who he knew.

 

“Fine, but this better be something amazing or I'm walking and staying the hell out of this. It's already way more than I needed to know.”

 

The sphere and shards disappeared at a wave of Bridgette's hand. A wry smile played across her thin lips. She tapped at the table once more, it shimmered and the sphere appeared again, it quickly focused on one of the spots from earlier and expanded the view.

 

“Well, you're certainly in for a surprise then.”