The Second Star, page 1
THE SECOND STAR
By Alma Alexander
A Mystique Press Production
Mystique Press is an imprint of Crossroad Press
Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press
Smashwords edition published at Smashwords by Crossroad Press
Digital Edition Copyright © 2020 Alma Alexander
ISBN: ePub Digital Edition - 978-1-951510-45-9
ISBN: Trade Paperback - 978-1-951510-50-3
Partial cover courtesy of Nate Rayfield via Unsplash
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Meet the Author
Alma (A.D.) Alexander's life so far has prepared her very well for her chosen career. She was born in a country which no longer exists on the maps, has lived and worked in seven countries on four continents (and in cyberspace!), has climbed mountains, dived in coral reefs, flown small planes, swum with dolphins, touched two-thousand-year-old tiles in a gate out of Babylon. She is a novelist, anthologist and short story writer who currently shares her life between the Pacific Northwest of the USA (where she lives with her husband and two cats) and the wonderful fantasy worlds of her own imagination. You can find out more about Alma on her website (www.AlmaAlexander.org), her Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/AuthorAlmaAlexander/), on Twitter
(https://twitter.com/AlmaAlexander) or at her Patreon page (https://www.patreon.com/AlmaAlexander)
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“Once I believed that space could have no power over faith, just as I believed that the Heavens declared the glory of God’s handiwork. Now I have seen that handiwork, and my faith is sorely troubled.”
– Arthur C. Clarke, “The Star”
Table of Contents
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1.
The grim-faced man at the head of the conference table wore a uniform unfamiliar to Stella Froud; somehow that simple fact made him strangely threatening. As if to underline that impression, he swept an intense gaze around the table, catching and holding the eyes of each of the six people seated there for one long, powerful moment.
“This meeting is classified,” he said. “You have all already signed documents which state that you will not speak of anything you see or hear in this room to anyone who is not presently in it. The penalties for failing to do so are severe and they will be enforced. Is that absolutely clear to everybody?”
There were wordless nods. The uniformed man frowned.
“I need verbal agreement. Do you understand?”
He went around the table again. Everyone murmured their assent. They had been interested, before. Now some of them were alarmed. Stella, who had trained to observe the tiniest nuance of human reaction, could feel that wariness building behind the carefully schooled expressions of the five people sitting around the table with her. There were no grimaces or scowls—but their eyes had changed. Dr. Vivien Collins’s pupils had dilated in shock. She was the only pure academic in the room and probably not used to this kind of military atmosphere.
“I am General Aristide Niarchos,” the man in uniform said. “You are all here because our history has just collided with our future, and we hope that you—you in this room—will be able to find a path forward for us. Dr. Collins, would you please start us off with what is known about the Parada?”
Vivien Collins took a deep breath. Stella could see her hands clutching at the table in front of her in a white-knuckled grip.
“There are lots of things I could tell you about that ship,” she said. “We have the specs right there—” She flicked a wrist at the screen wall, and it displayed a dense schematic of the guts of a starship, completely meaningless to most of the rest of the people in that room. A further wrist flick started the screen shifting into close-ups of individual parts of the schematic, or scrolling tables full of incomprehensible numbers. Vivien glanced up at the screen with an almost distracted air, and then back at the rest of the group, and with a third flick of the wrist produced an image of a stocky ship floating against space in the orbital shipyard and froze the screen there. “But that’s the Parada,” she said simply.
“We’ve all seen pictures,” muttered John Lumumba, the engineer. “I’d know that ship…”
Another woman at the table, sitting on the far end, as far from the screen wall as was possible in that room, sat forward, peering at the screen with a squint.
“Wait,” she said, hesitating, “that’s not right. The Gamma Wing of the shipyard wasn’t even built when the Parada was made. Is that a composite?”
Vivien swallowed. “No, you’re right. It wasn’t. Not when the original Parada was in the shipyard. But that… is the Parada. Up there. Right now.”
The reaction ran down the table like a shiver.
“It’s been almost a century since the last time anyone heard from that ship!” Alicia Hernandez, the woman who had observed the incongruous Gamma Wing, said. “It’s been nearly two hundred years since it was launched! What do you mean, that’s the Parada? The ship? The actual ship? The real ship? How…?”
“Where did you find it?” John Lumumba interjected.
There was a small awkward pause and then the medic in the room, Dr. Ichiro Amari, cleared his throat. “The crew?” he asked softly.
He was most likely thinking about their physical wellbeing, the state they might have been in when they were found—or their extinction.
But Stella Froud suddenly knew why she was here. It had been something she had been puzzling over ever since she had got the summons and met the rest of the people in this room—all of them might have something to do with the physical mystery of the ghost ship that was the Parada, drifting home from the deep past. But only she, Stella Froud, pioneering Psychometric Counselor, dealt in the mind.
The crew was alive. Somehow, impossibly, the crew was still alive.
And apparently insane enough to require Stella’s ministrations.
Individual pieces of the Parada’s story were laid out in the boardroom as the day unraveled into evening. Stella understood very little of the math—which was presented in detail and which at least two of the people in that room knew enough about to literally gasp as the implications were revealed to them by the numbers—but the number that stopped her in her tracks and sent her deep down the rabbit hole of its potential implications was staggering. She broke the rules and sat up and demanded that the General repeat the last thing he had just said.
“In the two hundred years that the Parada has been out there, its crew has aged by less than three,” General Niarchos said. “Yes, you heard that right. Its drive was calibrated to run at 90 percent of light speed. For reasons unknown to us, it suddenly and somehow went much faster. It ran at closer to 99.99 percent. The tau factor increases by ten in the speed it hit, and the time dilation effects increase exponentially.”
“I don’t understand that,” Stella said impatiently. “It’s technobabble to me. Tell me in real terms.”
“In real terms, at the specifications which the Parada was built for, in the time frame we are talking about, the crew would have aged just over twenty eight years for the two centuries that have passed for us back here. Which in itself feels hard enough to believe. But because their drive impossibly kicked into a higher gear, without their sanction or their knowledge, when we found them the crew had aged by less than three years. 2.8 years exactly, to be precise.”
“So have we found the fountain of youth?” asked John Lumumba with heavy-handed levity.
Stella favored him with a quick scowl, and then turned back to the General. “I can see why they might think I could be of use here,” she said. “That kind of Grand Canyon can be difficult to grasp or to adjust to. Some psychometric issues might well have arisen. But why do I get the feeling that there’s more to this than just a handful of disoriented star-farers trying to come to terms with their two lost centuries?”
“Because there is more to it than that, ” the General said. “The Parada had a crew of six. If we are to believe the evidence we have before us, well, six people went out. More than seventy returned.”
Stella sat up. “What?”
“Extreme stress seems to have fractured…”
She finally got it, in a rush. “They have multiple personalities?” She paused. “All of them?”
The General gave a small, almost unwilling nod. “Some more than others. And then it gets complicated. Rob and Jerry Hillerman are twins. They share a couple of the personalities.”
“That’s… not possible,” Stella said, frowning.
Alicia Hernandez snorted inelegantly. “You’re buying that they aged less than three years in two centuries but you don’t accept that weird shit happened to their minds in the process?”
“I have some idea of what the human mind can do when it’s broken,” Stella said. “But…”
“And then you put that human mind into a thin metal shell and hurl it at the stars,” Alicia said, interrupting. “I think you can throw out the usual equations. I think we’re in uncharted territory. Here there be dragons. And some of them may be itching to eat us.”
“How do they… the multiple personalities… manifest?” Stella persisted.
The General scowled again, and spoke in a low voice into the communicator on his wrist. Moments later, two people in uniform stepped smartly into the room and stood waiting just inside the door. The General tossed his head in their direction.
“Lieutenant Marsh and Lieutenant Colonel—and Doctor—Peck,” he said to Stella. “I think you’d better go with them, I don’t think you’re even going to hear anything else that’s said in this room after this, and, well, given your own specialty, you probably have no need to.”
Ichiro Amari rose and gave a small bow in the General’s direction. “With your leave, this is more my area of expertise, as well,” he said. “I assume I am here to provide some sort of a medical opinion of the crew members. I may as well begin now.”
“And I’d better go with her, too” said another voice, one which had not spoken before, and a man dressed in black, whose presence had been so unobtrusive that some of the people in the room only just realized that he had been there all the time, stood up. He was wearing a priest’s cassock, and his identity was immediately obvious. “Doctor Froud, I am Father Philip Carter. And I think that the reason I am here is the same as the reason you are. The engineers have the problem of the ship’s malfunction. You and I and Doctor Amari, we are here to take care of the people.”
The general nodded and the two military people led the way out of the conference room. Before the door had fully closed behind Philip Carter, Stella had already slipped into place beside the clean-shaven, dark-haired man who had been identified as Dr. Peck.
“Sir—Doctor—what do I call you?” she said, with a tinge of exasperation. Military hobbles in communication were never her thing.
“Outside of the General’s presence, Martin will do,” Martin Peck said. “My fellow officer is Lydia Marsh. And what we can tell you is very little, really, and most of that is difficult to believe.”
“That’s probably why I am here,” Stella said grimly. “You’d be surprised at what I would believe.”
“What do you know about them?” Martin asked.
“What everyone does. They’re historical figures, they’ve been extensively written about—I’ve read that stuff. In the data banks. Online. If you’re asking if I was fan enough to read the biographies and the books and all the accumulated piles of stuff which it is increasingly tough to figure out whether it’s actually true or not, no, I haven’t. I know their names. I could probably tell you one or two things about them. But anything more than that…” Stella shrugged. “Frankly, I’m still trying to wrap my mind around the simple fact that I’m going to be face to face with them in a moment. I haven’t really gone beyond that yet.”
“You’ll know more about them than you ever wanted,” Martin said. “We have entire data banks on them. On what they were. On… on what they have become. Before you get to face them I suspect you’ll want to sit down and do some reading.”
Ichiro stepped up to Martin’s other flank and fell into step. “Excuse me,” he said, “but is there information in those folders on their actual physical wellbeing? I mean, were they examined…”
“Doctor,” Martin said, “they were put through the wringer when we got them back. First they were kept under wraps up in the Parada, you know, just in case they came back carrying some extraterrestrial plague. For at least ten days. They passed their physicals just fine. In fact, they were healthier than we had any right to expect them to be. They read like they’d just stepped off the farm, having eaten healthy food straight from the good earth rather than all that synthetic junk they had to live on while they were out there.”
“But there were indications of a problem, up at the ship. We saw the first manifestations of the splintering up there, as the first medical tests were done. But we chalked it up to the situation—given what they had lived through, they were certainly permitted to be a little stir crazy. So we brought them down here, to see if being back on the actual dirtball of the home world would help,” Lydia Marsh chimed in from behind. “We said nothing to the public, not yet, but their numbers were so good—at least their physical numbers—that we had every intention of releasing them out into the world, straight after their three weeks’ mandatory quarantine period had ended, and we thought we could deal with their… quirks… as necessary. We had no idea that anything was actually really wrong. And then… they began to manifest… or at the very least they began to let us see that there were more of them than we thought…” She grimaced.
“You’d better get that from the transcripts,” Martin said, interrupting. “We don’t want to influence your own reading of the matter.”
“But do I at least get to see them?” Stella persisted. “I mean, before I get taken off to the library to do my homework?”
“Sure,” Martin said. “We have surveillance at all times in their habitat. CCTV, and more sophisticated 3D options if necessary. Them, and the other lot.”
“Habitat?” Stella echoed, frowning. It had a distressing echo of a zoo.
“The other lot?” Ichiro asked, rousing.
Martin glanced at him. “The Juno crew. The ones who found them, who brought them back. After this lot went nuts, we thought we’d better hang onto the other three for a little while, just in case.”
“You have two ships’ crews in lockup?” Philip Carter said incredulously. “What have you told their families?”
“Well, the good news is that the Parada crew don’t have any to speak of,” Martin said. “They themselves had no children—they all left before permanent relationships on Earth anchored them with progeny. Their parents and grandparents and great grandparents have come and gone. The Hillerman twins did us the favor of taking each other’s only sibling along for the ride—so that line ends right there. Two of the others had left siblings behind, and those have gone on to have descendants—but I don’t think they’re losing any sleep over the fate of their great great great uncles and aunts, not this long after they’d been presumed dead and gone.”
“What about the other crew?” Philip asked.
“As for the Juno crew,” Martin went on smoothly, “one of the guys had a wife, and a small daughter. Well, he basically more or less released that woman from the relationship when he boarded the craft. The other two were unmarried, with a couple of living parents in the mix. We just haven’t told those people their kinsmen have returned yet, and won’t until we’re certain that we can.”
“That’s cold,” Philip murmured.
“Wait, have the second ship’s crew also… splintered?” Stella interrupted.
“Not as yet,” Martin said. “They’re under observation.” He grimaced, giving her a side-eyed look. “You’ll have folders on them, too.”
“I will want to examine them,” Ichiro said, softly but insistently.
“Of course,” Martin said. “That, after all, is why you are here. Our doctors have called in a second opinion.”
