A planet hung silently in the stillness of space. No poets had ever seen it. If George had the talent, he would have written a ballad for it himself.
For six years, he had been imprisoned on the Facem along with approximately two thousand other poor souls. During that time, the vessel had traversed the vast gulfs between the stars, spanning twenty light years between Sol and this far away planet. It had embarked almost exactly twenty-five years before, but the blessing of relativity made it so that the passengers only had to experience six.
In those six years, George Archer had come to realize that the stars were companions best known from a distance; soaring among them was maddeningly dull. Absolutely nothing had occurred during the grand voyage. The ship performed all its function perfectly, and the passengers remained quite complacent, having the onboard entertainment database to amuse them. George meanwhile, could not bring himself to distraction by the limitless quantities of literature, film, and art at his disposal. He needed something meaningful. But none of his old habits were satisfied. Even his ever-stolid companions, the stars, with their myriad of familiar constellations, had begun to change as the Facem roared its way through the night, changing with each passing week as though they were nothing but motes of dust in a dark room, and he an insect lurching his way through them.
George panned the camera's view, moving it to include the planet's large moon as well. The two spheres looked almost identical in appearance. The only real difference was the red-brown tinge of the larger one, as opposed to the cool blue of the smaller.
George continued to adjust the camera's view, until he sighted the planet's three suns. The brightest one was orange, shining the same color as a volcanic sunset. The other two, much further away, were white, bright pinpricks barely distinguishable from the stars.
The Facem was on its final approach. In a mere two weeks, it would complete its final burn, which would bring it into orbit around the planet. Until then, the admiral had required the crew to live, eat, and sleep in the bridge, where they watched idly at the computers as they guided the ship with more grace than a human could ever manage.
The days dragged on. Information pamphlets were handed out, instructing in bold, friendly letters how the impending exodus would be handled. The passengers were told how to operate the shuttle's emergency systems in the event of disaster, what to do upon landing, and given a general idea of what to expect on the surface. Impatience built as the planet grew nearer.
Probes and telescopes targeted the planet and the star which it orbited, watching them closely. They confirmed what was already known. The star was part of a trinary system, existing beside two others. It orbited its two companions at a great distance, completing a revolution every seven hundred years. The other two stars, larger and hotter, wheeled around each other closely, completing a full ballet ever forty-two years.
The smallest of the three was a red dwarf star, dim and calm, perfect for a habitable world. The small red star held two planets in its gravitational embrace. One was a small gas giant, fluttering around the sun in a mere seven days, boiling at several thousand degrees Kelvin. The other, the important one, was a terrestrial world, swathed in a protective layer of oxygen and nitrogen. It had a year of about forty days, and revolved about its own axis in precisely the same amount of time. This meant that it forever kept the same hemisphere facing the sun. The planet was about three times as massive as the Earth, with twice the surface gravity. It had a single, icy moon. The name the world had been given was Gaea, from the Greco-Roman deity of the earth.
Yan Liu regarded the planet from an observation deck. It was unfamiliar, alien and confusing, even when viewed from such an immense distance. Because of its orbital characteristics, one of its hemispheres was doomed to an endless staring contest with the sun. That side was burned and grey. An enormous cyclone, birthed from the continually boiling air, raged across the entire surface, its white arms holding the planet like a celestial octopus.
The other side was subject to an even worse fate. The sun never shone there, and ice had slowly accumulated over the millennia. The two extremes of hot and cold currently existed in an uneasy equilibrium; the heat continuously ate away at the ice, and wisps of superheated moisture were always freezing into a light, powdery snow that fell in the darkness.
In between the two warring titans lay an oasis of relative tranquility. It was only between day and night that liquid water could exist. Here, there was constant dusk. From high orbit, it appeared a thin strip of brown and blue, tinged red by the sun's light. There were no obvious signs of life, though microbial populations were still a possible
Liu would tell herself that the planet was immensely exciting, a new opportunity to discover. Even so, there was disappointment. She had hoped for an ecology as complicated as Earth's once was, a new world to study and understand, a living, breathing copy of what grew and crawled across the Earth's surface. So far, all the probes had found nothing. There were small oceans and lakes, even transient rivers. But somehow, there was no sign of life.
Of course, she couldn't have expected much more. The planet was tidally locked, which would have doomed any native life to eke out a living in a thin strip of latitudinal ground. Bodies of water were limited to about two hundred miles in breadth, and experienced temperature gradients of nearly ninety Kelvin, as the hot and cold air currents above battled their way across the sky. There was very little chance for anything to grow.
Liu sighed and left the observation deck, returning to the frantic action of the ship.
As the day of landing approached, the passengers began to prepare for it in an ever-greater frenzy. There were several hundred tons of supplies to load onto landing vehicles, personal effects to be collected, plans to be made. The planet came closer every passing second. The colonists needed to be ready to meet it.
Admiral Pierce regarded the spheroid that rolled by above her. The Facem was in a low orbit around the planet passing over the dark side of the planet. Far below, the pale blue moon glowed, bathing the ship and the ice both in a dim light. Caroline could see the centuries-old valleys and mountains of solid ice, locked forever into their crystalline shapes.
In exactly ten hours and thirteen minutes, the first of the passenger transport shuttles would detach from the main structure and burn down to the surface. The larger dropships, currently sitting idle in the main cargo hold, would follow in three days, bearing their massive loads of soil, crops, building material, and machinery. The seeds of civilization were about to thunder down on this unsuspecting world.
Caroline went over a mental checklist of the supplies. For the most part, it consisted of huge bags of dirt for growing food. Most of the remainder was fabric and metal poles for building temporary shelters. A few of the dropships were loaded with labor robots, to help carry heavy loads over the surface.
Emergency supplies took up two dropships. They included, in order of aggregate mass, an armored truck, a radio dish array, five tons of packaged food, four tons of rocket fuel, two tons of incendiary explosives, five UDSN servicemen, two inflatable pressurized environments, and several crates of assorted antibiotics. Caroline found it prudent to know the emergency supplies by heart, if only to understand just how screwed you really were in the event of catastrophe.
Looking down at the planet below, with its endlessly stacked glaciers and dire winds, and went through the list again.
For the sake of clarity in conversation, many had begun to call the planet by the name Gaea. The moniker was that of the old Greek earth goddess, which seemed sickeningly ironic to Caroline. Nevertheless, the name had caught on, and she had to agree that it was a nice-sounding one, if ill-fitting. The colony's name, however, had been decided before the Facem was even built. It was Eridu, a whimsical absurdity, everyone agreed, but it too was already worn by the colonist's tongues. Very few of those who used the name were familiar with the old biblical city from which it came. Caroline was one of them, and she found it almost as depressingly sardonic as Gaea.
The sun suddenly burst from behind the curve of the planet. It glared at Caroline. She turned away, and began preparing for this final flight.
While Admiral Pierce watched the planet Gaea, ten satellites peeled away from the Facem. The tiny spacecraft drifted silently through the ether around the planet below, like pollen floating on a cosmic breeze. Over several hours, they were guided into precise orbits by faraway pilots, until all ten of them had strong radio communication with every point on the planetary sphere. There they remained for exactly twenty-one weeks, five days, three hours, forty-five minutes and ten seconds.
During that time, most of them saw nothing of any importance. They circled slowly, completing identical spirals every two hours. Most of the satellites saw nothing of interest on their short vigil above Gaea. One however, caught sight of a very unusual light gleaming from the frozen night-side of the planet. Dimly realizing the anomaly for what it was, the craft patiently contacted its human masters. Four minutes and thirty-two seconds later, it stopped broadcasting.