Time Out of Place
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The burn of our fusion-powered jets even at the modest output which was all they were required to reach our destination would be clearly visible to any intelligent observers watching the skies. The deceleration process went smoothly over the months, ramping down the acceleration to reach a nominal single gravity. We were all on tenterhooks, constantly checking and re-checking every system expecting something, anything, to sneak up upon us unawares and bite us in the posterior. The surprise came just as we were approaching the orbit of the biggest planet in the system, a gas-giant larger than Jupiter yet extravagantly ringed like Saturn. Not an explosion, some catastrophic failure of a vital subsystem; just a simple message from a source we did not expect. As I and all others aboard would learn shortly, the Endurance was hailed using a transmission whose ciphering was only known to the inner circle of the Expansionist faction we had been a part of, a few months and several hundred years ago. The hail was a loop: a plain-text greeting and identification, followed by a heavily-encrypted message which turned out to be an audio-video clip. The message came from another ship; more precisely, another Expansionist ship called the Constellation and one which, if the speed-of-light delays were believed, was only a couple of million kilometres away - almost next door even by in-system standards. The hail was answered, cryptographic credentials exchanged and mutual authentication established - there was little doubt that the other ship was exactly what it said it was. This was a position made yet more certain when telescopes and other instruments showed images of a ice-ball not dissimilar to our own and the plasma glare of its engines - firing intermittently as it manoeuvred on an interception course - displayed an emission signature which matched exactly our records. Several of us aboard knew people who were part of the crew of the Constellation. In the early days, there was a certain amount of rotation between various vessels, before we had been forced to take extreme quarantine measures to keep the existence of our planed interstellar jaunt from the military might of the Consolidationists. Many years before, I had served with a talented young officer called Alan Chun aboard an in-system exploration craft called the Moment of Inertia. We had been acquaintances rather than friends; Alan was ambitious and determined as well as talented, and I was not surprised to now learn that he had been rapidly promoted, finally becoming Captain of the Constellation. The entire crew were glued to the screens and readouts detailing both the nature of the stellar system - which aligned strongly with the details provided by Waldo - and the approaching Constellation. Captain Edith Tan, the Endurance's Captain - acting, I suspect, on her instinct for full disclosure at all times - played a recording of a conversation between herself and Alan Chun, the two parts of the conversation separated by the inevitable few seconds pause caused by the speed of light delay. Alan's familiar voice emerged from the screen speakers; he had aged, matured with time, but he still the timbre of one confident in his own decisions. "So I see that the Gods brought you here, too!" "The Gods?" she said, "Who are they?" "You will have met them, if you're here," Alan replied, sounding one part amused and two parts frustrated, "Oh, they're not human. Never were human, not from planet Earth at all." Suddenly it all fell into place for me. Waldo must have known I was getting suspicious; our relationship was an attempt - a very successful attempt, as it turned out - to counter that suspicion. He had certainly seemed entirely - almost - human to me. The conversation on the screen went on, but I was barely listening to it. The mission of the Yelcho was not one of rescue and resettlement, but the gathering up all of humanity into a couple of places to prevent us from spreading across the galaxy - having failed to contain us in just one solar system, perhaps even subtly helping the Consolidationist faction from our recent past. We were, all of us, exhibits in a zoo.
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Part 7
