Space Relations Pt. 19

Nervously, Washington started tapping his fingers on his armrest. "We don't have any indications of anything dangerous taking place out here. Standard protocol tells us that if a Space Corps vessel is in any way impaired, a capable vessel is obligated to tow it back to where it can be repaired."

"This isn't a faulty fusion drive, sir." Cruz reiterated. "It is something else."

"I think Cruz is full of shit." Margo added.

"That's because lesbians don't think like normal people." Cruz made a face at her. "Lesbians think in squiggly lines, while normal people think in straight lines."

"Enough!" Washington shut the banter down, before turning his chair around again. "Thor, Willow, run all pertinent scans again."

After a couple of minutes, both ensigns reported that nothing on their ship, on the Beagle or in their immediate vicinity of space had changed.

Still, the Captain was anxious about it. The Beagle was out there like a big piece of cheese, and here was the Space Relations about to take the bait. If this was a trap, it was about to get sprung on them. Finally, he said, "Willow, increase the reverse polarity field to keep the Beagle attached to us. The quicker we can get the Beagle over to Starship Neptune, the better for all parties concerned."

"Will do, Captain!"

In the back of the ship, gyroscopes filled with liquid mercury began spinning in an opposite direction than usual. Normally, this created a magnetic field within the ship to keep humans level and grounded, as opposed to having them floating all over the place with no orientation. In this case, the magnetic field was being created outside the ship instead of on the inside. The crew of the Space Relations would feel lightheaded and actually bounce around like astronauts on Luna, but this was the only way their small ship could tow other vessels about.

Everything looked to be going as per procedure, the tense captain noted.

"Captain..." Thor opened his mouth up, his voice tinged with alarm.

Unfortunately, that's as far as he got. In one moment, the apprehension level of those on board the Space Relations was rising. In the next moment, they were aware of nothing at all.

Washington found himself blinking his eyes repeatedly, as if a layer of film was blurring his vision up. Once his sight was focused again, he saw both his battle tech and his systems analyst slumped over at their workstations. Abruptly, the Captain stood up, ready to rush over so he could check on them.

"They're okay, Captain." Mary's voice was heard, causing the man to spin around.

Mary and Cruz were wide awake. They looked concerned, but not anxious.

"What the hell happened?" He asked.

"Temporal disturbance." Cruz nodded back. "At least I think that's what it was."

"Well, I don't know about that," Mary shrugged. "I know that we went through something thick, like molasses or honey. Maybe not physically, but..."

"It was physical, baby." Cruz cut her off. "Believe you me, it was very physical! I know all about physical disturbances, and this was physical!"

"Whatever it was, I only had enough time to shield Cruz and Margo." Mary finished off. "We're still in it, by the way. The molasses."

"Where is Margo?" Washington asked, just now noticing she was absent.

"She went into the kitchen to make popcorn for us." Mary replied. "You guys have been under for the last forty-five minutes. We thought it would be better if you woke up naturally, because you guys looked so peaceful. You weren't dreaming, by the way. You were just zoned out forever."

The bridge doors slip open to allow the cook entry. She came in with two big plastic bowls full of popcorn. "Oh, hey, Cappy. How was your snooze? You want some fresh popcorn?"

"You should have woken us up!" Washington snapped, as he went to rouse his ensigns. "We could be in terrible danger right now!"

"No, Captain, that's why I said we should let you guys take your little naps." Mary argued. "All three of you were worked up as it was. Whatever happened to the Beagle is happening to us, sort of, and they sure didn't get out of their predicament, did they?"

"I told you this was a trap." Cruz reiterated. "But no, nobody ever listens to me."

"Here's the thing, Cappy." Margo walked over to stand next to Washington. "Mary had us hold still and pretend we were frozen, just in case we could figure out something that you technical heads couldn't. It didn't work out, really. The whole time, we knew you were sleeping, like she said, peacefully, instead of frozen like the crew of the Beagle. If we thought there was some kind of danger, all we had to do was yell out, right?"

Washington frowned. Although he didn't agree with that tact, he understood why his science officers had done it. They were observers mostly. Once he roused up his battle tech, he said, "Thor, give me a thorough check on our surroundings, ASAP."

"Yes, sir." The big Viking said, looking both groggy, confused and worried all at once.

Washington woke Willow next. "Complete systems integrity check, on the double."

The analyst simply nodded, as if she too were in a stupor.

"Captain, we are in motion and being pulled further into planet Saturn." Thor spoke up, a few minutes later.

"You mean we're inside Saturn?" Washington asked.

"Yes, sir, we are inside the upper atmosphere of the gas giant. We are surrounded by thick syrup of semi-metallic hydrogen and helium and moving closer to the planet's core. I can't be more precise than that, as the syrup is affecting the reach of our sensors."

"All internal systems operating at normal." Willow chimed in.

"Life support is good?" The Captain asked.

"Yes, sir."

"The reverse polarity field is still on?"

"We never turned it off."

"Let's turn it off." Washington decided.

"Wait, Captain." Thor stopped him. "Because the magnetic field is reversed, Saturn is pulling us closer. If we turn it off completely we might be set adrift, like the Beagle was when we first found it. Perhaps it would be better if we turned the field back to its normal setting first. If we match the planet's polarity, it might repel us out of Saturn's reach again."

"What if you're wrong?" Margo cut in. "What if you do something that tears the ship apart?"

Doubtfully, Thor stared down at his console. "I should really run some tests first. Captain, I have to adjust the ship's computer into accepting this new environment of semi-metallic fluid. Once I do that, I can run simulations regarding the magnetic fields."

"How long?"

"Twenty, thirty minutes." Thor shrugged. "I have to figure out what the parameters of this new environment are first."

"Proceed." Washington nodded. "Willow, keep a close eye on internal systems. Let me know if anything changes. For the time being, I want to keep everybody here on the bridge." He glanced up at the large monitor, seeing that the same static images were still on display. "Thor, will you give us a look outside?"

"I'll have to make a few adjustments first." The technician said. "The cameras are only calibrated to interpret light readings based on the normal hydrogen of space. I have to create an entire new sub-routine for this environment."

The Captain glanced back at his empath. "Mary, are you still catching images from the Beagle?"

"No, Captain. I can't see those people anymore."

"We never locked them in." Willow said. "Whatever happened to us took place right after I started adjusting the magnetic field. We never got in tandem with the Beagle."

"So they're most likely still outside of Saturn?" Washington replied.

"That might be a good thing, Captain." Thor said. "Especially if we need to use a positive polarity to get us out. If we were towing the Beagle now, changing polarities would probably cause our vessels to come apart. The Beagle could be set adrift in this atmosphere, unless her crew suddenly wakes up to steer her. Ah, there we go."

The screen flickered, showing a field of bright red fog.

"Give me one." Thor said. "I think I went too far in the saturation."

A few moments later, the bright red changed into a less intense purple.

"What are we looking at?" Washington asked.

"The gases inside of Saturn." Thor answered. "Adjusted for the range of human perception. Are you familiar with Purple Dawn Theory, Captain?"

"Not at all, Thor. If you think this might be relevant to our situation, go ahead and explain it to me"

"The entire theory is very complicated, involving Birkeland Currents and Herbig-Haro Objects, but I'll give you a synopsis. Basically, the theory states that rocky planets form inside of gas giants. This might explain why gas giants have so many moons around them when rocky planets do not. When a rocky planet is fully formed, the gas giant will eject it out into regular space."

"You're talking about the Cosmic Egg, baby." Cruz spoke up.

"And what is the Cosmic Egg?" The captain wondered.

"Many ancient cultures of Earth have the Cosmic Egg in their legends. I'm talking about Africa and China and some other places as well. It's just like Thor mentioned. Earth was formed in the yolk of a Cosmic Egg. When it was good and ready to pop out, the Cosmic Egg gave birth to it. Do you know that every ancient cosmology had the idea of a great primordial ooze that our planets first came out of? The ooze would be the placenta or the yolk of the Cosmic Egg."

"If the theory is correct, we could be looking at primordial ooze at this very moment." Thor agreed, before he went back to his console. "Let me adjust the sensors to filter out the helium from the display. The hydrogen will still be very compressed when compared to open space, but it will allow us to see a little further away."

It took several minutes until the ensign managed to create a visible image. It looked sort of like open space, but also as if they were looking through a murky body of water as well. Instead of stars, they saw a good number of crude planetoids floating around them. Luckily, these rocky proto-planets were far away from their vessel.

"Willow, will you plot a trajectory for where our ship is going?" Thor requested. "I'll work on the magnetic field simulations."

"You've got it!" The excitable Willow exclaimed.

Washington was having trouble grasping the concept of either a purple dawn or a cosmic egg. People didn't voluntarily fly into planets like Saturn to verify such ideas, either. "Willow, how big are those objects we're looking at?"

"Oh, they're huge!" She replied. "Here, let me scan an estimate for one. That's, uh, at least a couple of hundred miles across for one of the closest. Woo-hoo, look at that big one! That's got to be several thousand miles across."

"Are there any as large as Earth?"

"Not that we can see." Willow shook her head. "But then again, our instruments probably aren't picking everything up like they normally do."

"The objects we're looking at are giving off their own light, and they're giving off magnetic fields our technology can interpret." Thor expounded. "Our devices are taking that information and creating a picture of all that in the visible light spectrum."

"There are people on all these little planetoids, too." Mary added.

This statement caused nearly everyone in the hub to look at her.

"Well, there are." Mary insisted. "I know there are. Oh, yeah!"

"Are you picking up any mental energies from these people?" The captain asked.

"No, but I can sense that they're out there, like one of my psychic predictions. I have no idea what they look like, but they are sentient in one way or another."

Upon hearing this, Thor turned his chair around to face the captain. "Does this change our orders? Our primary directive is to find new people and to interact with them in a peaceful manner."

"I know a little about quantum entanglement." Washington leaned forward in his chair, his brow creasing in thought. "If we go looking for new alien races, sooner or later we will bump into them. Does your Purple Dawn Theory say anything about what these alien races might look like? Will they be aggressive?"

"This is all high speculation, of course." Thor said. "Following the premises of the theory, we are inside the protective sheath of Saturn. Saturn gives off light, and so do all of these other planetoids. The light that Saturn gives off extends to the edge of the sheath and bounces back, so there is illumination from all sides of a planetoid.

"Here is where it gets a little more woo-woo. There is no time here. Think about how we measure time on Earth. We see the rise and descent of Sol and Luna, and we see the progression of stars. That's what time is for us. Inside of Saturn's sheath, we have a thick purple syrup that would obscure all of these little planetoids. The brightest light would be from Saturn's core, and that would be the only celestial light these planetoids ever see. Time does not exist here as we know it to."

"That's a little mind-blowing, but how does it help me understand what the people out here will look like?"

"We simply don't know." Thor shrugged. "We can speculate that the surface of these planetoids will be dark because of the purple light. This would mean that twenty-four-seven we would have something like Earth Standard twilight on these little worlds. The inhabitants would necessitate larger eyes to see in the darker atmosphere. According to the theory, the gravity would be lighter than on Earth because the material on these planetoids must be less dense. This would cause larger beings and larger plants to evolve. Since they move around in perpetual twilight, they would presumably be hunters as well. That means they could potentially be much faster and stronger than humans. This is all high speculation, mind you. I don't know how much credibility we can give to it."

"Let's not go there." Mary said, timidly.

"Hold on, hold on." Washington brushed her off. "If we're here already, we could just drop down on one of these little planets and take a look around. If we run into anything dangerous, we'll simply blast off."

"What if those people are huge?" Willow asked.

"We've got plasma guns this time." Thor told her.

That reminded Washington of the ugly incident at the Edgeworth Observation Platform, where they'd lost a member of their crew. Because the Space Relations and the platform were strictly science vessels, no personal weapons had ever been issued to their personnel. This would be like a space observatory on Earth issuing loaded handguns to their scientists. It just wasn't done and that had been disastrous to both parties.

"Let's do this." The Captain decided. "We'll figure out a way to navigate through this new environment first. If we can do that, we'll cruise around and catalog some of these planetoids so we'll have a record of them. If we happen to find one with surface conditions that approximate Earth, well, we'll see about that when we come to it. By show of hands, who thinks we should actually land on one of these planetoids?"

The vote was leaning toward exploration. Of the six members on board, only the timid Willow and the skeptical Mary dissented. Everyone else, Washington, Thor, Cruz and Margo, was ready to take the plunge. Besides, it was part of their mission statement.

After a time of scanning, calculating and deliberating, the crew of the Space Relations made several important finds. By adjusting the magnetic field on their little ship, they could move sideways or up and down relative to the core of the 'planet.' All of these constant adjustments were somewhat jerky compared to their typical smooth space flights, but for the most part they could control their altitude and attitude. Also, and even more curious, their instruments reported heavy electromagnetic disruptions taking place in the center of Saturn's thick and gassy core. Once this was converted into a series of visible images, they could see huge plasma discharges between the helium / hydrogen core of Saturn and the iron / nickel composites of nearby planetoids.

"Let's, uh, stay away from the Saturnian core." The captain cautioned.

"Those discharges are too far away to affect us, but we will." Thor agreed. "But just look at that. I see a cosmic artist out there, and that future planet is the canvas the artist is painting on."

Washington was fascinated with the science of it, as much as his ensigns were. Saturn was a proto-sun with its own enclosed system of hundreds or maybe thousands of planetoids. Theoretically, Saturn could send out gigantic bursts of lightning that might break planetoids apart or fuse them together. Those massive lightning strikes were potentially creating conditions much like those present on a primordial Earth, with intense Tectonic plate movement and incredible volcanic eruptions. If there was life on any of these planetoids, the flight crew couldn't even begin to imagine what it looked like.

"I was just thinking about this, baby." Cruz spoke up from his spot by the back wall. He was the only person still back there, as both Mary and Margo had gotten bored and gone back to the lounge. "We have the mythology of the Greek god Chronos, who is identified heavily with planet Saturn. In the legends, Chronos was worried that one of his children would unseat him as king of the universe, and the father of the gods and all that. Whenever his consort had a child, Chronos would quickly snatch it up and eat it. We see something similar from astronomical observations of Saturn."

"How so?" Thor asked.

"Well, from Earth, Saturn appears very bright. It has all of these moons around it that can hardly be seen. Sometimes they are seen, but when they vanish behind Saturn, or perhaps when they are masked by the glow of Saturn, for a time the moons are not visible. From the point of view of someone standing on Earth, you could almost say that Saturn is actually eating his children, just like in the myth of Chronos."

"The standard theory is that Saturn's gravity is so strong it captured all of these small planetoids from open space and made them into its moons." Thor recalled. "Even now that we've observed that Sol works more on electromagnetic principles than it does on fusion, people are still adamant on sticking to the old model. Very few people are willing to consider the idea that gas giants might have proto-planets floating around inside of them."

"That's what we're looking at now." Washington commented. "We've got proto-planets all over the place."

"The compatibility report is finishing up now." Willow announced, silencing all hands present on the bridge. "The report shows six planetoids with potential Earth-like conditions within our sensor range, give or take five percent margin of error on the stats. All of them have some kind of atmosphere, three of them have large bodies of water, which is good because the water will absorb most of the Saturnian core's radiation, and they range in size from a couple of hundred miles around to two thousand miles around. Will we try to land on any of these, Captain?"

"These planetoids are stable?" Washington asked.

"As far as we can tell, yes. A couple of the smaller ones have a lot of carbon dioxide and very little vegetation on them. They don't have that much water either, so I don't recommend doing anything more than giving them a closer look. Planetoids One and Three are the most viable for actually setting foot on their surface. Planetoid Two has a very thin atmosphere with hardly any oxygen on it. I'll pass the report over to your terminals."

The moment Washington's computer had the file, he opened it up on his personal screen. As interested as Cruz was, the science officer came over to study the document by looking over the Captain's shoulder.

"Cruz, what do you think?" Washington asked. "Which one of these beauties should we set down on?"