The Frontiere roared through compressed space traveling as fast as it could without entering a temporal warp and going backwards in time. Talox used his exquisitely sensitive fingers on both hands to delicately manipulate the controls of the Frontiere, keeping its speed several thousandths of a percent under the Sanderford limit. He kept a close look on the clock as it ticked down the seconds until the anticipated discharge of the Cusp neutrino weapon, which would usher in their ‘New Dawn’. He was still not sure he would make it in time, but he knew he had to take the chance. He ran diagnostic checks on the nuclear missile waiting in the launching bay of the Frontiere and felt sure it was ready to carry out its lethal task.
Talox knew he had to drop out of compressed space as close to the Cusp emitter site as possible, to ensure the nuclear missile had the shortest possible travel time to its target. Split-second timing was essential, and he knew the moment of truth was upon him.
On a small, rocky planet spinning around a greenish star in the Abell 1478 cluster, on the side of the planet that was perpetually facing away from their sun and in eternal darkness, a huge, spherical structure sat on four support legs on a vast frozen lava plain. Its light gray surface was of uniform smoothness and appearance, having no windows or other feature. The only discernible disruption in the perfect symmetry of its surface was four portals on the bottom. Resting nearby on the hard, brittle surface of the planet were many scores of ships and transport vessels, all with the flattened crescent of the Cusp Foundation obvious on their sides.
Inside the sphere was a gathering of several thousand of the ruling elite of the Cusp Foundation, all dressed in rich, vividly colored robes trimmed in gold and platinum brocades. Many of the assembled followers grouped together in large choirs, and stood on raised terraced platforms surrounding a raised, central platform, which was bathed in spotlights and surrounded by huge bouquets of flowers. A number of Cusp Foundation officials, all wearing robes of the purest white edged in gold, stood on the raised dais in rapt silence, their attention riveted on the single figure which stood on the highest part of the platform, in front of a huge bank of equipment. Dressed in very beautiful golden robes, which sparkled and shimmered in the bright light and surrounded him with an ethereal, surreal glow, stood a young man with dark hair and a small smile on his face. Everything he had worked so hard for in the past four years, in fact his reason for living all these years, was about to be realized. He raised his arms and the choirs ceased their singing. A thick silence descended on the assembled masses and the soft beeping of the control equipment bounced effortlessly around the curved, inner walls.
“Bring in the Messenger of the Dawn,” the young man said calmly. Immediately the throngs of followers parted on the side, and a number of officials in rich purple robes marched toward the platform. In this group of acolytes was an old man with white hair, wearing robes that were alternating shades of orange, magenta and yellow, the colors of dawn.
The purple-robed men stopped at the foot of a small flight of marble stairs, and the old man wearing the dawn colors slowly ascended the stairs. He continued his ascent until he reached the highest part of the platform and stood before the young man in the gold robes.
“Our brother Claude Wendigo,” the young man said slowly and clearly. “Do you bring us the Keys to the Dawn?” The surrounding multitude of worshipers gasped softly in anticipation.
“I do, Messiah,” the old man answered. “You have but to give the word.”
The young man stepped back several paces and motioned to the center console of the control equipment on the platform. “Deliver us the Keys to the Dawn, and let us all be delivered to our new home and our new universe, one without sin or corruption, and lead us into the Gates of Heaven.” The old man walked over to an input device on the main console and removed a small data cartridge from the inside of his robe. He placed the cartridge in the slot reader and pushed a small button next to it. Instantly the entire control console lit up with brilliant, multicolored lights as the assembled followers screamed, hollered and wailed in ecstasy.
Out in space, the Frontiere exited compressed space in an enormous blast of energy. Because it did not have the luxury to slow down before its exit, the reentry into normal space nearly ripped the vessel to shreds. The orange plasma surrounded it and burned into its silvery hull. Inside Talox was thrown forward with extreme force and slammed against the front wall. Struggling to his feet amid the powerful G-forces and avoiding the shower of sparks from short-circuiting equipment, he fought his way to the tactical station and the console that controlled the launching of the Frontiere’s missiles. The tactical screen showed a small planet being centered in the targeting computer arrays.
Inside the emitter sphere, the cheering and screaming were reaching a fever pitch as the control consoles glittered and flashed with frenetic intensity. The activation sequences worked and the enormous power generators were building the tremendous reserves of energy necessary to send the DNA-encoded neutrino streams to every corner of the galaxy. The old man stepped backwards and bowed his head. All attention was focused on the young man in the gold robes. He held up his arms and the microphones amplified his voice to fill the huge curved expanse of the ceiling above.
“Our Father, Who Art In Heaven …” he prayed.
The Frontiere continued its desperate, headlong plunge toward the planet and the emitter sphere, still trailing orange plasma streamers from compressed space. Inside, Talox fought with all his might to ensure the Frontiere was on the exact path directly to its target – there was absolutely no room for error. He reached over for the firing control of the missile console.
“Hallowed Be Thy Name …” the young man intoned. In the crowd below, several people fainted. The choir was reaching a crescendo of delirious, surreal singing.
Talox activated the launch control and the nuclear missile blasted out of the Frontiere’s launch bay with a very sharp jolt. The relativistic propulsion drive of the missile kicked in and the rocket took off with incredible speed toward its target. Talox looked over to the tactical console and verified that the missile was exactly on target. With a flush of hopeful anticipation, he began to think that the missile would reach its target seconds before the Cuspie emitter discharged. He began to slow down the Frontiere and pull off to starboard, his mission to launch the nuclear missile completed.
“Thy Kingdom Come …” The emitter sphere was filled with crashing, soaring music and singing as the young man moved his hand toward the single switch, made of platinum and inlaid with diamonds, which would activate the neutrino emitter and bring the New Dawn.
Talox held his breath as he watched the tactical display closely, and saw the track of the missile drawing close to the target planet. Suddenly he was startled by the most terrible sound he had ever heard. An alarm on the missile control center began a terrible howling noise and the console lit up with several bright red lights as the word “MALFUNCTION” began flashing on the screen in large red letters. His heart nearly stopped as he realized something had gone horribly, terribly wrong with the nuclear missile. More alarms went off on the missile console and he felt his heart sink as he watched the missile veer off course on the tactical screen. Other missile launch indicators showed the nuclear missile automatically entering a safe mode and disengaging its firing mechanism. There would be no nuclear detonation.
Suddenly some other automated alarms on the Frontiere went off. “Proximity alert!” the computer urgently announced. Without warning the Frontiere was strongly jostled as the much larger U.S.S. Hyperion blasted by it at tremendous, astonishing speed. Talox absolutely could not comprehend what the computers were telling him. “The Hyperion???” he gasped.
On the Hyperion the captain and science officer were grimly huddled over the tactical computer console. “Target acquired?” Captain Timberlane asked.
The tactical officer activated some controls on his weapons monitor. “Neutrino emitter targeted and locked in,” he said dispassionately. The captain turned to the science officer. “Is the nuke ready?” he asked. His science officer replied. “Armed and ready to fly,” he said. “But captain ….”
The captain looked at his officer. “Is there a question?” he asked.
“Sir,” the officer said nervously. “I just realized that if we succeed in destroying the Cuspie emitter, it will cause a lot of disruption in the timeline. If the emitter is not fired, then the Archangel will have no reason to initiate our return from three thousand years in the past. We will be returned to our temporal isolation and never have a chance to reunite with our families and loved ones.”
The captain just stood there with his mouth open, along with the science officer and some of the crew. They all knew instantly that what the science officer was saying was absolutely true. By destroying the neutrino emitter, they were dooming themselves to a return to the lonely, solitary life far outside the galaxy they had led for the past twenty-five years.
“And if we don’t destroy the emitter,” the captain said grimly. “Everyone we would hope to reunite with will be dead in five days. We will be back in an empty universe populated only by insane Cuspies. We cannot allow that, even if we have to sacrifice everything all over again.” The other crewmembers on the bridge uncomfortably agreed with the captain. “The only good thing,” the captain said with a tinge of sadness in his voice, “is that we will not remember this little diversion back to our home and our people.”
The singing and chanting inside the sphere were so loud that no one noticed the missile from the Frontiere impacting on the planet in a rocky outcropping several kilometers away, disintegrating into countless small pieces and blasting out a small crater.
Captain Timberlane turned to his tactical officer. “Fire our missile,” he said.
“Thy Will Be …” the young man cried out triumphantly. Before he could finish his prayer, the nuclear missile from the Hyperion struck the glowing, spherical neutrino emitter. A huge area of the dark side of the planet was treated to a new dawn, as a gigantic dome of white hot nuclear fire blossomed in the dead frigidity of nighttime. A crater approximately seven kilometers in diameter and two and a half kilometers deep was carved out directly underneath the Cusp Foundation emitter. The emitter and several cubic kilometers of rock and iron were vaporized and blown off into space, where within a few hours it would form a glittering, sparkling system of hot, mottled-orange colored rings around the planet. The Hyperion was no where to be found, having been instantly timeshifted three thousand years into the past as the timeline reset itself.
Back on the Archangel the shuttle Dreamcatcher had returned and its passengers were entering the bridge command area. Everyone turned and looked with bemusement at the ungainly, rattling little robot as it sauntered unselfconsciously around looking at everything. Brisbane joined the captain and Alanna near a computer console.
“Three … two … one … zero,” Alanna counted down. “Mark, scheduled discharge of the Cuspie emitter.” She looked up sadly at the Captain and Brisbane. “Our only hope is that Talox and the Frontiere got there in time to launch their nuke.” They stared for a few seconds at the sensor display panel, which showed all of the Kellurian war vessels staring back at them, but absolutely nothing else.
“Talox is still too far away to communicate his status,” Brisbane offered. “Even moving at the Sanderford limit, the neutrino blast can take twenty or thirty seconds to reach us, if one was even created.”
Everyone on the bridge looked around at each other uncomfortably, waiting for the seconds to slowly tick by. With each passing second, people started to relax a little more. Each passing second without a neutrino burst meant a little more hope that Talox had reached the target in time and destroyed it with an atomic explosion.
Ten more seconds went by in the taut silence of the bridge. Then twenty seconds, then thirty. The wait for the possible neutrino detection was excruciating, but every passing second lifted the weary crew’s spirits a little bit. Finally one minute, two minutes, three minutes went by without a neutrino detection alarm. Captain Twillig turned to his science officer. “Alanna, could it be that the emitter has actually been destroyed?” he asked.
“It’s either been destroyed or somehow the firing has been delayed,” she said nervously. Everyone on the bridge was listening very carefully and speaking in hushed tones, not wanting to interfere with any shred of information about the emitter.
Finally, after nearly ten minutes since the nominal neutrino discharge time, an alarm went off on Alanna’s computer console. “We are receiving a compspace sensor uplink from the Frontiere,” she announced excitedly. The Frontiere was still too far away for normal audio and video communication but could still send detailed information from its sensors through compspace. “What are you seeing, Alanna?” the captain asked as everyone held their breath.
Alanna swiftly manipulated her computers to compile and format the complicated, encoded packets of information from the Frontiere. The data started to appear on her computer monitor and then started pouring out rapidly.
“The Frontiere’s sensors have registered an extremely large nuclear blast in its vicinity,” she reported with great excitement. “Her computers triangulated the blast origin coordinates and we are plotting those coordinates now.” A few seconds passed as the information was restored and adjusted for the current location. At long last, Alanna said, “The blast origin coordinates map exactly to the position of the emitter. The Cusp Foundation neutrino emitter has been destroyed!!”
There was a great pandemonium on the bridge of the Archangel as everyone jumped out of their seats and cheered in joy. It was a most unusual outburst for the disciplined, professional crewmembers but all the tension and anxiety of the past days, weeks and months instantly disappeared and were replaced by laughing, crying and hugging. There was much shaking of hands and slapping of backs as Captain Twillig himself could not resist and participated in the rejoicing. Word spread quickly throughout the entire starship and from one end of that magnificent ship to the other, worry, sadness and despair which had covered everything like a stifling blanket were turned to happiness and celebration.
When the Frontiere finally returned to the Archangel there was a huge welcoming committee at the hangar dock. Captain Twillig, Alanna Kosari, Brisbane, the entire bridge crew and many other crewmembers were waiting for Talox to emerge from the battered Frontiere. When he finally did exit through the Frontiere’s hatch, the cheering and applause started anew and was deafening.
Captain Twillig came up to Talox and shook his hand. “Mr. Talox, your work has been most extraordinary,” he said. “This is truly an historic day for the Galactic Alliance, and in fact every living creature in the galaxy. It would not have happened if it wasn’t for your skill and …”
“Please, sir,” Talox interrupted, surprising for the normally impeccably polite Cyclopean. “I can’t take credit for what has happened.”
“Come on, Talox,” Brisbane said. “This is no time for the legendary Cyclopean modesty. Relax and enjoy it! You’ve saved all our butts today.”
“Lieutenant Richardson is correct,” the captain added. “We will have a welcoming ceremony with the assembled crew in twenty minutes.”
Talox looked down at the floor and did not register any excitement for all the praise being directed his way. He reached into his uniform pocket and pulled out a data cartridge. “Sir, before we do any more celebrating,” he said slowly, “you must take a look at these log files.” Captain Twillig gave Talox a surprised, stunned look.
An hour later the senior staff of the Archangel was in the conference room, sitting silently in their chairs in a state of complete disbelief after viewing the log files from the Frontiere. Nobody seemed to be in the mood for celebration anymore.
“The Hyperion destroyed the neutrino emitter?” Brisbane asked, still unable to believe what he saw. Captain Twillig sat pale in his chair literally unable to speak and Alanna had her hand in front of her face, nearly ready to cry.
“Let’s review the evidence once again,” Talox said. “First, the log files indicate conclusively that the nuclear missile I fired at the emitter from the Frontiere had a catastrophic mechanical failure and did not detonate. The sensors even tracked it as it crashed harmlessly on the planet a considerable distance from the emitter. Would you agree with that, Mr. Moreno?” he asked.
Chief Engineer Tony Moreno looked up and said quietly, “That fact is indisputable.”
“Secondly,” Talox continued, “the proximity sensors on the Frontiere recorded the close passage of a large, Corona-class vessel. The transponder information was captured and it matches completely with the last known transponder code assigned to the Hyperion twenty-four years ago, right before it disappeared in the Rosette Nebula. The sensors were able to do a very brief scan of the vessel and the configuration exactly matches that of the Hyperion to the finest resolvable detail. There was even a brief video record taken of the encounter.” The large view screen at the front of the conference room lit up once again and a grainy, low-resolution video, greatly slowed down, showed a large spacecraft flying past the Frontiere. There was no doubt that it had the exact distinctive shape and configuration of the Hyperion.
“Freeze video,” Talox commanded the computer. The video on the screen stopped its motion. “Enlarge and enhance, frame sector 53,85 by 115,74.” One corner of the image of the vessel expanded and filled the view screen area. As the sharpening algorithms ran their course and brought the image into crisp focus, everyone in the room stared in silence at the screen. There was no doubt at all that the letters on the side of the spacecraft spelled out ‘U.S.S. Hyperion.’
“And lastly,” Talox said, “the atomic explosion which annihilated the neutrino emitter was several orders of magnitude greater than any that could have been produced from the nuclear missile fired from the Frontiere, even if it had exploded on target. The amount of radiation and its specific signature matches exactly the cobalt-iridium fusion missiles that the Hyperion had carried when it disappeared.” Talox looked at his crewmates. “I think it’s clear that the Hyperion somehow destroyed the emitter. How that possibly could have happened, I do not know. But the evidence is incontrovertible.” The silence that consumed the conference room implied agreement.
“The questions now are,” Brisbane said, “how did the Hyperion get to that exact place at that precise time, and where is it now?”
“I cannot answer those questions,” Talox said. “After the nuclear strike, I remained in the area and did as many long range scans I could, even scanned compressed space in that entire vicinity. There was absolutely no evidence that the Hyperion was still anywhere in the area, and in fact no indication that the Hyperion had ever been there. No radiation exhaust trace at all.”
“This is most unusual and quite frankly, extremely disquieting,” the captain finally said. “On the one hand the most critical threat to the Alliance that we had ever engaged has been decisively destroyed. On the other hand, we have a deep, intractable mystery as to how it happened. We have irrefutable, undeniable evidence that an Alliance vessel which had been officially declared lost and which has not been heard from in nearly twenty-five years played the pivotal role in neutralizing that danger.” He looked around the room at his officers. “How do we reconcile this enigma?” he asked.
“Do we start believing in ghosts?” Alanna mused quietly.
Ramses was in the room next to Brisbane, carefully listening to everything that we being said. “Maybe it was a joke?” the little robot interjected.
Brisbane leaned over to look at his mechanical companion. “Do you see anyone laughing, Ramses?” he asked pointedly.
“No sir, I do not,” the robot replied. “Therefore, if it is not a ghost and not a joke, then perhaps it is a miracle!”
Everyone in the room opened their eyes quite wide at this statement. No one was more surprised than Brisbane, who said to the robot, “how do you know about miracles, Ramses?”
The robot turned to his human companion and said, “Your son taught me about miracles.” Brisbane sat straight up in his chair when he heard that. “He said he definitely believed in miracles. His mother always told him he inherited that from his father,” the robot said.
“Maybe the smallest among us can teach us something, after all,” Captain Twillig said. “Maybe we should stop believing so much in computers, weapons and technology and start believing more in miracles.”
