Mindshard (ON HOLD)

Prologue: An Unexpected Encounter

     Unfortunately the G1-type star discovered by the DESE sensor array on Ikaris 7 was partially hidden in a Thor class nebula, several blue-white giants hovering in the nebula’s heart acting as graviometric lenses that bent the physical dimensions of space in the nebula’s neighborhood.  Originally they had thought the star was within two weeks’ hard extra light speed travel but, as the mission moved into its fourth week outbound from Icarus, Abdul was beginning to suspect the gravity-lens effect of the Thor class nebula had distorted the scans over and above original estimates.

     The dapper captain grimaced at that thought.  He could just hear his mission partner now, upon receiving the news the distance estimates were incorrect: ‘The eggheads at Deep Space have their heads so firmly up their ass, it’s a wonder they didn’t give us the measurements from their rectum to their stomachs instead.’  A devout Muslim and quite fastidious in manner and behavior, Abdul had to suppress a shudder of revulsion every time the man spoke.

     Captain Keven Bernard, while a competent officer, engineer and Ranger, was a slob of a man, both intellectually and behaviorally, a confirmed atheist and anarchist.  Operations couldn’t have selected a worse man for Abdul to pair up with for a deep space mission.  Thank Allah the pool of seconded officers was big enough at Scout Command to avoid a second pairing or Abdul would seriously consider the need to murder someone.  At least Bernard was intelligent enough to know how much his mannerisms bothered Abdul and hid himself, for the most part, in and amongst the tangle of the XLS drive down in engineering.

     Giving his neatly pressed khaki jumpsuit a tug to remove any wrinkles garnered by sitting too long in one position, the wiry Arab made to stand.  His eight-hour duty shift was drawing to a close; time to go and get Commander Anka Bin Hadad, the mission’s commander, its second pilot and a Naval Arm officer.  She should be coming off her sleep shift and in the galley making breakfast right about now.  Her shift partner, Leftenant Markus van Buren would relieve Bernard in engineering.

     Before Abdul could pull himself free of the reclined pilot’s chair, positioned for maximal support during high-gravity maneuvering, a soft ‘peep’ from one of the readouts captured his attention.  Frowning, he settling back into the chair and, fingers darting over a command touch pad set in the center control cluster to his right, he brought up the alert’s reason.  And almost immediately laughed aloud in relief.

     It was a stellar proximity warning, the sensor array calibrated to automatically sound an alert when the Pixie and her time/space XLS bubble passed within a parsec of a star.  Hopefully in this case, the star that they were passing by was the one discovered by DESE.

     Again Abdul’s fingers danced over the command touch pad, bringing the array’s XLS capabilities online to reconfirm the star’s identity.  Yes, there on the monitor a G1-type star, its profile, including core temperature, coronal activity, magnetic and graviometric silhouettes and composition of outgassed compounds scrolling past a recreated image of the massive stellar object.  A keystroke brought up the archival profile from the DESE scan and he ran a quick comparison.

     The G1 was their target all right, LSB 10256 Alpha on the DESE star charts, Camphor Iridani in the named charts.  If everything went according to plan, it would have an earth-sized planet in it’s theoretical life zone, the distance from the star where temperature and radiation levels would keep water liquid.  Unfortunately the XLS calibrations on their array weren’t sufficient to see that amount of detail at this distance.  The Pixie had to drop from XLS space, swing in and take a closer look.  And that required command permission.

  “Commander Hadad to the bridge, please.”  He murmured into his voice-activated throat mike.

  “On my way, captain.”  The commander’s crisp and efficient reply was short in coming, sounding directly into the earpiece he had connected to his mike, only a moment after his summons.