Quest for the Conestoga (Colony Ship Conestoga Book 1) (16 page)

“Yes, I agree with Jerome.  Sandie, take us to the hull, please,” Cammarry said. 

“Your suggestion is appropriate.  I concur.  The three of us will work out these troublesome snags in observation.  We will attach to the hull near the robotic probe,” Sandie said.  “I apologize for not understanding this situation in its entirety.”

The scout ship’s thrusters fired.  It slowly approached the robotic probe.  The probe’s flashing red light was at the center of the view. 

“Approaching Conestoga.  Five hundred meters.  Three hundred meters.  One hundred meters.  Despite what thruster navigation plotting shows, FTL targeting states we just passed the exact place where we arrived.  I cannot explain the contradictions in those findings.  Both systems are functional.  Continuing approach to the Conestoga’s hull.  Fifty meters.  Slowing approach.”

Jerome and Cammarry could see that the hull was right before them.  It looked like an enormous and looming wall.  The robotic probe with its tan colored permalloy and the flashing red light were directly in the center of that huge wall. 

“Ten meters.  Deploying mooring lines,” Sandie said. 

Two lines shot out from the nose of the scout ship.  They both had ends designed to connect via magnetic, mechanical grappler, and adhesive systems.  They could be seen jetting right toward the hull next to the probe.

“Contact,” Sandie announced.  “Mooring lines attached.”

The entire universe changed!

8 The cosmic crinkle

Zap!  Swirling, twirling, expanding, contracting, squeezing and bloating, all happened at the same moment to the scout ship and its occupants.

Jerome felt something very remarkably unusual.  He heard screaming, and then realized it was his own voice, yet he could close his lips but the sound continued.  The sounds echoed throughout the scout ship, but also reverberated in his bones and shook his teeth. 

Cammarry also experienced things beyond her scope of familiarity.  Her eyes saw rays of light emerge from them, split into rainbows of colors, and then fuse into blobs which shrunk and snapped as they disappeared.

Sandie activated every recording instrument on board the scout ship.  Visual, optical, auditory, heat, cold, gravity, radiation, quarkites, and every other item that could be measures was measured.  The readings were bizarre, and shifted radically back and forth and on and off the spectrum of each monitor.  Sandie tried to assess what was happening, but the flood of energy, and the lack of energy, as well as the flux of energy was too much for the artificial intelligence system.  Sandie observed beginning on the outside and then being pulled inward and reversed.  Sandie sealed off her Atomic Level Processor and hid her essential personality traits inside.  The ALP was the most heavily shielded item in the scout ship.

The occurrence went straight and curved and twisted all on the same planes of existence, and yet on none at all, at least to the recording instruments on the scout ship.  Stretching, twisting, warping, and compressing all occurred, simultaneously, and not at all, on the same monitoring systems.  It was odd.  Nothing was left undistorted, yet nothing changed, yet nothing remained the same.   

Jerome reached out his hand and found Cammarry’s fingers.  He grabbed on and held tight.  He tried to form words, but his own screaming prevented his mouth from working, even though he moved his tongue and lips and pushed air out as if speaking. His mind made words which his lips and mouth tried to form, but sound was not the same and the screaming continued, even though he held back.  Echoes, and reverberations, and reflections of sound bounced around the scout ship.

Cammarry felt Jerome’s hand and tried to look toward him, but the bursts of color surrounded her like a raging inferno.  While she could feel Jerome’s hand, she could not see him or anything else inside the scout ship.  The colorful conflagration was thicker and deeper than the dimensions of the scout ship could allow, and yet it was all real.  Colors twirled, swirled, mixed, and melted together. 

Sandie sent a tendril out of the ALP, and monitored, on one detector, an electromagnetic sheer which looked most of all like a tunnel of some kind.  A brief image was captured of the FTL scout ship anchored next to the robotic probe, but seen in a reverse point of view which was rapidly receding.  The next views showed the scout ship was inside something, in an approximately bizarre manner, yet when looking back at the rear optical views, Sandie snapped images of the scout ship and the clear permalloy viewports.  These were different than the receding reverse point of view image.  Cammarry’s and Jerome’s faces were there, under the window, and they were terrified, yet still and impassive.  The scout then dipped suddenly around and about as if it were in a gravity field, and yet no gravity showed on the scans.  It all happened so suddenly that Sandie, the fastest processing machine humanity ever created, could not quantity the time involved.   

The artificial intelligence system with its mechanical parts perceived what was happening in one way, but the two humans perceived in in vastly different ways, both from the AI and from each other.  And so the event went on and on and on, seemingly without end. 

Cammarry tried to look around again and make out what she was coming to, or where the scout was, or what was happening.  But now all the colors were washed out and running along like rivulets of antiseptic foam flipping off her hands.  Her eyes told her it was too dark to see anything; then she looked at the sides of her own hand as she pressed it against her eyes.  Jerome’s hand was still attached and she felt his warm skin as she rubbed her face. 

“What is happening?”  Cammarry finally spoke out.

There was no sound at all from Jerome.  She had not heard a single scream, or word, or noise from him of any kind.

“Jerome!  Where are you?”   The words floated in front of her in bubbles of sound.  When they burst, the noises they made did not sound human at all, and instead of words, what Cammarry perceived was smells.  Smells which did not register any memory in her mind except strangeness. Looking at the smells, or so her mind told her, it felt like she was gazing for hours and hours.  She finally blew out a breath of air and the smells changed to colors which then changed to small sizzling sounds and then were gone. 

Jerome saw none of the colors Cammarry perceived.  The echoes of his screams also changed and now became tingling sensation along his face and ears.  He was unsure if they were his screams or something else.  No longer did they register as sounds, but now as feeling and sensations. He looked down at his body and could see the chair underneath him.  At the same time he could see his RAM suit as well as his skin underneath it.  The layers in his vision were not clear, and yet they were not opaque. His mind did not know how to interpret what he was experiencing and he cried out, “Cammarry!  Are you safe?”  And that verbal ejaculation became itching on his skin. 

Something burst all around them.  None of them knew what it was that burst.  When it burst, the universe returned, in a way. 

“It is over,” Sandie stated.

“Jerome, what happened?”  Cammarry asked as she looked around. The scout ship looked just as she remembered.  Nothing seemed any different.  The tan overtone of the permalloy, the blue of her RAM suit, and the handsome face of Jerome.  All was unchanged, and yet she felt exhausted by the length of time she had been in, whatever it was she had been experiencing.  She briefly glanced over and saw the blackness of space outside the view port.

The cabin’s light came on. 

“Cammarry, I have you,” Jerome answered and he gently squeezed her hand in his own.  “What happened?”

“I am computing that right now.  Compiling information and running conjectures,” Sandie replied.

“Are you injured?”  Jerome asked as he carefully looked over Cammarry as she sat still strapped in her acceleration seat.

“My mind is spinning, but I seem intact.  How are you Jerome?”

“I feel like I was pulled inside out and then put back together again.  Very weird.  What happened?  How long were we in that? I do not know what to call it, that incident?”

“And where is the Conestoga?”  Cammarry asked as she returned her gave to the outside.  “Sandie report!”

“Medical readings on both of you show high levels of stress, but no other untoward effects.  Your health is safe.”  The AI then hesitated for a long while before continuing.   “I will use Jerome’s term, ‘incident’ as I have no better term to apply.  We have experienced something extraordinary.  My measuring of chronology is questionable.  I cannot explain it.  I apologize.”

“How long did that last?”  Jerome asked. “It felt like hours, or seconds, I am not sure which.  What was that incident?”

“According to my facilities, there was no passage of time in that incident, at least none I was able to measure,” Sandie said.  “I cannot explain it.  It seems impossible.  I am checking for malfunctions.  The moment the mooring lines made contact seems to be when the incident began.  I cannot detect any transition of time from that beginning until I stated, ‘It is over.’  I apologize for the confusion and erroneous reports.  I had perception of time, yet the systems on this shop say no time elapsed.  I have no explanation of this incident.”

Jerome had been pondering and said softly, “In some world everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is because everything would be what it is not. Or contrary-wise; what it is it would not be, and what it would not be, it would actually be. You see?”

“Sandie, tell me what happened,” Cammarry barked.  “Where is the Conestoga?”

“Your first request is much harder to answer than your second.  I have relocated the Conestoga, or at least what I believe is a major segment of the Conestoga.  Or perhaps a better way to say it is another Conestoga.  It is in orbit around the planet 74,562 kilometers from here.  Let me show you,” Sandie replied.

“Planet?  You said there was no planet,” Cammarry said. 

“That is correct, there was no planet.  There is a planet and solar system here now.  I cannot explain it,” Sandie said.  “Let me show you.”

The display screen lit up and there was a ship on it.  Behind the ship was a deep green colored planet with white swirls in the atmosphere across its surface. 

“I will magnify,” Sandie said.  “Optics are now working perfectly.  Even from this distance, I can get images down to a meter square in perfect resolution.  I have compared these images with those taken after we exited FTL before the incident.  That comparison gives a 95.67% similarity.  I conclude that that is the central drive section of the Conestoga we encountered before our incident.  The only difference is that this Conestoga is missing the eight large cylindrical attachments.”

“How?”  Jerome asked to himself.  “How can this be?”

“They made planet fall.  The habitats landed,” Cammarry stated.

The ship was very long and slender.  There were outcropping in sixteen different places, but the overall shape was thin and elongated.  Light from the planet reflected up and off the ship.  Additionally, the ship was illuminated by the light from the sun in the solar system.  That light was redder than the sunlight they had seen from Earth’s sun. 

“So the report was correct and here we are,” Cammarry said.   

“But where is here?”  Jerome asked.  “And how did we go from trying to dock next to the robotic probe on the hull of the Conestoga to this place?”

“Sandie, are we safe here?  How are the systems?”  Cammarry asked. She was rubbing her eyes and pinching her nose.

“All systems are fully operational and no damage has been detected from the incident,” Sandie said.  “We have all the supplies we had before the incident.  Thruster fuel levels are the same.  We have more than enough fuel to reach the orbiting Conestoga.  I can find no untoward effects on any of my systems.  Mooring lines are recoiled and intact.”

“But what was that incident?”  Jerome asked. “Just where are we?  Was there an explosion of some kind?”

“No explosion in the conventional definition of that term.  Analysis of the incident’s composition is uncertain.  Answering your question about what the incident was, is the much more difficult question to answer.  I am not sure how we got here, nor where here actually is,” Sandie replied.  “I am running tests and making observations.  Initial astronomical findings show we are not where we were before.  I am searching for celestial reference points to establish our galactic location.  I have located the robotic probe.”