Chapter 13
Glaucus
Cadence turned the Zephyr’s sensors and spotlights on as she maneuvered the ship around Glaucus, which was circling 93 Minerva. Like 93 Minerva, it was dark grey and had a carbonaceous composition.
“This shouldn’t take too long,” Cadence said to the crew who were packed like sardines in the small bridge. “It’s not very big, maybe three or four kilometers at most.” Just as she finished her sentence, a beeping noise sounded from her dashboard, indicating that the sensors had detected something. She pressed a tab on her screen, and a visual of a depression on the rock appeared. She then double-tapped the screen with her finger, enlarging the image. At the base of the depression was a small ship about the size of the Zephyr. It had a long, rectangular-shaped front and wings that angled downward with several mounted guns below them. The tail of the ship housed two large thruster engines and two smaller, pivoting engines for atmosphere.
“That’s a Payra ship alright,” Jedrek observed. “It’s a Speersa. How did it go unnoticed for over sixteen years?”
“Who cares about an asteroid?” Gedeon replied with a shrug of his shoulders. “Unless there’s something worth mining, no one’s going to care about it.”
“Good point.”
“Do you guys recognize it?” Ben asked curiously.
“Other than being a Payra-style ship, no, but that doesn’t mean anything. Every time we met Azaria and Boaz, they were in a small shuttle. Probably the same shuttle they were killed in.”
Ben nodded his head in understanding.
“Alright, here’s what we’re going to do. I have a feeling we’re going to have to cut our way into that ship, so Rangi and I will go down with Ben and Kara in the recovery shuttle and create a vacuum seal with that side door,” the captain said while pointing at a door on the starboard side of the ship near its bridge. “The cutting equipment is still in the recovery shuttle, right?” Rangi nodded his head yes.
“Good. Cadence, can you land near it?” the captain asked her.
“It’ll be a tight fit, but I can do it.”
“Okay. You and Warrina will stay on board,” Gedeon said as he looked over at Warrina. “Like last time, stay in your medical hold in case we need you. It’s better for all of us if you don’t become a casualty if there’s something on that ship that could hurt us.”
“Yes, sir,” Warrina replied respectfully.
“Let’s do this.”
A short time later, Gedeon carefully steered the recovery shuttle to the side door of the Speersa, and extended a large tube towards the door, which created a vacuum seal around it. After Rangi verified the seal, Gedeon set the recovery shuttle’s controls to hover, and then they opened their own door to the tube.
“Hey, Captain, come take a look at this,” Jedrek called back to Gedeon after he walked up to the Speersa’s door to examine it.
The captain walked through the tube to where Jedrek was standing. On the side of the Speersa’s door was a hand pad.
“Is that normal?” Gedeon asked him.
“Not for this model,” Jedrek replied. “It was installed after market. You can tell by the weld around the pad’s plate. That and the plate is a slightly different shade of grey.”
“Oh man,” Gedeon said as a chill ran up his spine. “They must have been planning for this. It’s like they knew something was going to happen.”
“Taking precautions was one way they could speak from the grave,” Jedrek said with a nod of his head.
“Ben, come up here,” the captain yelled back.
Ben and Kara scuttled ahead. Rangi dropped the cutting equipment and followed suit.
“Think you can work your magic again, Boy Wonder?” the captain said as he pointed at the hand pad.
Ben shrugged his shoulder and then placed his hand on the pad but quickly pulled it back. “It’s freezing cold,” he said, shaking his hand.
“It’s been exposed to space for over sixteen years,” Jedrek said. “What do you expect?”
“For you to have warmed it up a little before having me touch it,” Ben shot back.
“Yeah, guess that would’a helped. Hey Rangi, can you grab the torch and wave a flame about six inches away from it?” Jedrek asked him.
Rangi did as instructed. After about sixty seconds, Ben touched the pad with his fingertips to test its temperature. He was satisfied with what he felt, so he placed his hand flat against the pad. Just like the hand pad back on the moon, this hand pad turned reddish-orange, pulsed, and then pulsed red twice.
The door opened to a flood of rushing air. A low hum could be heard coming from the belly of the ship, and the lights in front of them turned on.
“That’s the life support systems coming on. Your parents really did think of everything, kid,” Jedrek said, patting him on the back.
“You know,” Rangi piped up, “we probably should have put our helmets on before he opened the door. It sucked out all the oxygen.”
The Captain squinted an eye and looked over at him. “You’re still breathing, you gasbag,” he said sarcastically.
“I’m just say’n.”
“Jedrek,” Gedeon said, “you know these ships. Take the lead. Let’s see if we can find their workroom or their bedroom.”
“The living quarters would be down over there to the right,” he said, pointing in that direction. “The workroom, or conference room, or whatever, would be straight ahead, close to the bridge.”
“Alright, that’s where we’ll go first. Everyone, stay together for now.”
Jedrek led them down a narrow corridor that gently curved to the left until they were standing in a moderately sized room towards the front of the ship. There were two workstations in the room, along with a round, glass-topped center table.
“Ben,” Jedrek began, “I mean this with all due respect, but this is seriously getting creepy!” He pointed a finger at the glass table. On the table was another hand pad, except this one was nearly transparent, making it difficult to see from a distance.
Ben walked over to the table and placed his hand down on the pad, but nothing happened.
“Okay, maybe that’s not what’s creeping me out,” Jedrek said after he exhaled a stagnant breath.
“Over here, guys,” they heard Gedeon say to them. He and Kara were standing next to one of the workstations. “I think this was your father’s side.”
“How do you figure that?” Ben asked.
“Cause it’s messy.”
Sure enough, the desk was a mess with papers and stacked Simpads, but there was something curious about the scene.
“There’s no writing on any of these papers,” Kara observed.
“The Simpads don’t work either,” the captain said, holding one in his hands. “Could be because the batteries are dead, though.”
“And it could be because they want people focusing on this desk,” Ben said. The others looked at him quizzically. “Think about it,” he said, “it looks busy. It looks important. In fact, it almost looks like he’s trying to draw attention to it.”
“Maybe he was,” Kara said flatly.
“I don’t think so. They didn’t know they were going to die, but from all appearances, they took precautions in the event they did. If their assailants were looking for something, they would go here, they would go to the bridge, and they would go to their bedroom.”
“So, you’re saying there’s nothing here?” the captain asked.
“Not exactly. They wouldn’t want to make it too difficult for me to figure it out, but they would want it to be something that I would have to figure out to prevent others from doing it.”
“I think I’m tracking,” Kara told him. “It would have to be something specifically related to you. Maybe something personal that you would want to learn about.”
“Right! And what would an orphan want to learn about the most?” Ben asked pointedly.
“Your parents,” Kara surmised with a smile.
“Yep. I think we should head over to their bedroom,” Be replied. “Jedrek, can you take us there?”
“You’re the boss.”
Jedrek walked them through a short maze until they reached the living quarters in the back, middle of the ship. The largest room was a combined kitchen/living room area with all of the standard features. Three rooms branched off from this area, and all of the doors to those rooms were open. The room in the middle was the largest of the three, and likely the captain’s bedroom.
Ben was the first one in. It looked like a typical bedroom. The head of a fluffy king-sized bed was against the far wall. It had a full frame and drawers underneath it. The wall to their left had six drawers built into it, and next to the drawers was an open door to a nice-sized bathroom with a standalone tub. The wall to their right was barren, except for a baby’s crib next to it. The crib looked similar to the one that Ben and Kara had seen on the moon.
They walked over to it and looked at the soft, blue blankets neatly wrapped around the small mattress.
Kara put a hand around Ben’s arm and said, “Just think. You used to sleep in that tiny crib. That means your mother probably slept on that side of the bed.” She nodded to the side of the bed closest to them. “A mother always sleeps close to her baby’s crib.”
“I hate to say it, Ben, but nothing’s jumping out at me,” Gedeon said. He and Jedrek had pilfered through the drawers in the walls, and Rangi had gone into the bathroom. “As far as it goes, this is just a typical room of a ship. Almost everything is built into the walls.”
“I didn’t see anything in the bathroom either,” Rangi said as he walked out of it. “There’s a small walk-in closet in there, but other than a few clothes and shoes, there’s not much in it.
“I don’t even see any hand pads around here,” Jedrek said, pushing his emerging fixation with them.
“I know I’m not wrong about this,” Ben said, shaking his head. “It’s just like those puzzle and abstract thinking modules in the aptitude test. There’s always a purpose, there’s always patterns, and there’s always hooks – even if they’re all unconventional or not easily recognizable. It’s obvious that the purpose is figuring out what my parents were hiding – or rather what they discovered that led to their death.”
“Ben’s right,” Kara agreed. “Let’s take a step back and think about this for a second. What do we know? We know your parents knew they were being followed and that their lives were in danger. As a result of this, they sent you to an orphanage for your safety. In the meantime, they cleaned out their observation post and made it so only you could access it with a DNA-reading hand pad. They told you to come here, where they had another hand pad that it seems only you could operate.
“They must have known that Colonel Stoddard would eventually find you. I mean, they did tell you to trust him after all.”
“That they did,” Ben said. “Notice what the patterns are – DNA and hand pads. They had to have known that Colonel Stoddard would find me via DNA. They gave him samples of their own DNA after all. And that hand pad outside of this ship did the same exact thing the hand pad on the moon did, which means it probably read my DNA.”
“Might I remind you that the hand pad back in the lab didn’t work,” Jedrek injected.
“It’s a different type of pad, though, right?”
“It looks different, but I’m sure it serves the same function.”
“It probably does, or perhaps a similar function, which brings us to the hook. The thing that brings the other two together.”
“Don’t forget that the pattern and the hook are often the same thing, or at least they can be similar,” Kara reminded him.
“That’s true. In this case, it’s family. I share the same DNA with them. I am also an orphan, and like we talked about before, the one thing an orphan would want to do is learn about their parents. Learn about their family.
“Using deductive reasoning, there has to be something in this room with their DNA on it. Or at least DNA from one of them.”
“There’s old toothbrushes in the bathroom,” Rangi said.
“I don’t know if their saliva would still be readable after all of these years.”
“Maybe it’s something in another room?” Kara said.
Ben put a hand up to his face in contemplation as he scanned the room.
“You said mothers always stay close to their baby’s crib,” Ben said as he looked over at Kara. “And that would be her side of the bed.”
Ben walked over to the bedside closest to the crib and knelt down. There were two drawers under the bed. He opened up the one to his left and saw women’s undergarments in there, but nothing else. He then opened up the other drawer to his right where he found some baby clothes. But on top of the baby clothes was a small clear bag with a long, braided lock of blond hair bound to a short stock of brown hair by a thin red ribbon.
Ben slowly pulled the bag out of the drawer and stood up. He held the bag out in front of him and examined it.
“Yeah, this is getting to be really spooky,” Jedrek said.
“To anyone else scavenging through here, this would look like nothing more than a bride’s keepsake,” Ben said.
“Let’s go make sure it wasn’t,” Gedeon told him.
They made their way back to the lab where they anxiously gathered around the glass table, waiting breathlessly for Ben to put the locks of hair on the pad.
“Another moment of truth,” he said as he pulled the hair out of the clear bag and placed them down, with his hand pressed flat against them. The area of the pad around the hair began to turn yellow and then red, and then the pad went clear again, but nothing happened.
“That was anticlimactic,” Rangi said as he exhaled a deeply held breath.
“At least it did something this time.” Ben stood motionless, running every variable through his head. He tried to think about everything his mother and father said in the video, all of the events that led them here, the hand pads, DNA…and then he turned and looked at his crutch. “We’re missing something Kara.”
“I’m racking my brains, Ben, but I can’t think of anything we missed.”
“Find Glaucus, find Glaucus…” Ben muttered to himself. “Glaucus holds the truth. Black box. Keys. Hand pads. They sent me away to save me. DNA. Families are bound forever…families are bound forever.”
Ben looked up at Kara with a broad smile on his face. “Families are bound forever!” He lifted his hand to his head and ripped out a patch of his own hair without thinking twice about it, and put the hair on the pad next to his parents. The pad slowly turned yellow and then red again, and then like magic, a holographic image of his parents appeared above the table, but this time, his mother held a small infant child in her arms.
“Benjamin,” his mother began with a kind smile and a thick accent. “If you’re seeing this, then the worst has happened, and you found your way here from our post on the moon. Families are bound forever. And as you can see,” she said as she leaned down and kissed his infant forehead, “you are bound to us forever. Our prayer is that it won’t come to this, and that we’ll be able to destroy this video someday.”
“Son,” his father started, “we know you’re on a journey right now, and time is of the essence. We have left you several databalls that contain a plethora of information about us and our extended families. But right now, you need to focus on your journey. You need to focus on the mission that we couldn’t complete.
“We are excited that you were clever enough to decipher the clues we left for you that led you here. Please understand that we had to do it this way so that no one with malicious intent could uncover the truth. The people who killed us want to suppress the truth, and as of now, we have no way to communicate with anyone back home about the dangers we face. We believe that all of our families and friends are being watched. All of their communications are being monitored for signs that they are collaborating with us. We hope that time will serve as a buffer and that the political climate will have settled enough by the time you see this, so that you can reveal the truth to our people and to the people of our ancestral Earth. Yes, you heard that correctly. Our people originated from Earth.”
Everyone in the room shot bewildered glances at each other, stunned by the revelation.
“Here are the facts that you need to continue on with your journey. Do not waste any time trying to locate the young woman who will take you – or rather – who took you to Naroon. We are paying an anonymous person a lot of money to take you there. We have put mechanisms in place to make sure it happens. The point is, it’s a dead end, and there’s no reason to pursue it.
“The next thing is the black box. The box is nearly indestructible, and it contains most of our important research as well as the databalls that I spoke of earlier. We are going to make plans to transfer this box over to Captain Stoddard for safekeeping, but in the event that we can’t, we’re hoping that he finds a way to get it. If you don’t have that box, all of our work will become pointless to the scientific community.
“That box contains proof that there is a DNA link between our two worlds, dating back nearly nine thousand years.”
Ben lifted his head in shock, only to see that everyone was staring back at him with the same look. There was a noticeable pause in the video as if Boaz knew that Ben would be so stunned he wouldn’t be able to pay attention for a few seconds.
“There’s more to it, Ben,” His mother finally said. “We were always more scientifically inclined than religiously inclined. We don’t have the time to get into the political debates raging back home, but it is important for you to know that, while we still profess our devotion to science, we have come to the conclusion that science and religion are very much compatible.
“Our scientific community believes that all human life, no matter what planet it’s on, evolved from the same microscopic organisms from a planet that exploded billions of years ago. Those microorganisms landed on planets that were conducive for evolution, and because they were all the same microorganisms, they all evolved basically the same way, with a few variances, of course.
“However, our ancient religious texts state very clearly that people from our planet came from another planet. Those original people are called the First Tribe.
“Scientifically speaking, it would not be out of the realm of possibility that humans from two different planets that evolved from the same microorganisms could end up having the same DNA. The primary obstacle to this theory is that our scientists have never been able to find a DNA link between the two races of people. But we found that link in a set of human remains that we’ve carbon-dated to be nearly nine thousand years old.
“Please don’t misunderstand something here, son. Our mission was not to find a link between our two planets. That was done by sheer accident…or…and I can’t believe I’m saying this, but by divine intervention.”
“We are spies, Ben,” Boaz picked up. “We were sent here to look into the Federation. The Alliance has been trying to encourage our government, that’s the Payra government, to form a military alliance with them so that they can destroy the Federation. The Alliance has all but convinced a certain faction of our government that the Federation is evil and must be destroyed for the sake of our galaxy. We were sent here to determine if that was true or not.
“During the course of that investigation, we discovered that the Alliance is a totalitarian nightmare and that the Federation is, for the most part, a freedom-loving society. If there is a threat, it comes from the Alliance. But thanks to my passion for science and my off-duty hobbies, I discovered the link.
“Two very distinct problems arose. One, the Federation should clearly not be our enemy. Two, our societies are linked. Neither one of these problems sat well with our leadership. To understand why, you need to understand a little about our people’s past engagements with Earth.
“Very few people from Payra know about this. Several hundred years ago, our scientists began to study the Earth, but a few of them became so deeply immersed in their research that they chose to live among the people. This was sometime around the eighteen hundreds, Earth years.
“One of them lived in a tribe in Africa. He was black. He fell in love and married a woman from the tribe, but the tribe was raided by another tribe. The scientist was mortally wounded, and his wife was captured and enslaved – ultimately taken to the Americas. Before he died, he made it to his ship and sent off a transmission to his compatriots on Earth’s moon, the same base we used, alerting them to what had happened. And he let them know that his wife was pregnant.
“As you can imagine, this was a scientific discovery like none other. A human from Payra successfully mated with a human from Earth. But it wasn’t without controversy. Nobody wanted to take responsibility for this if word leaked out to the general public. Because so few people in the government knew about it, they decided it was in everyone’s best interest to cover it up. But that wasn’t the end of it.
“The people of Payra, who didn’t know anything about this, voted to ban all scientific research and contact with Earth. However, the officials who knew about the pregnancy were concerned that it could eventually lead to problems down the road, so they secretly commissioned a team to eradicate the bloodline. They didn’t know where the woman was taken, but after several generations of searching, they discovered the bloodline in America. They secretly and systematically killed off the entire bloodline, all except for one person who was rescued by a sympathizer.
“I’m sorry, but I don’t have time to get into further details about it. What’s next is more important. One of the last ships to eventually leave the planet was lost in space. It was by sheer accident, or again, divine intervention, that the Alliance discovered the ship about five years ago.
“It turned out that the life support systems had failed, and the engines seized. When they turned the systems back on, a duress signal was sent to Payra. It was by chance that our military still had communications networks that understood the older codes.
“The military immediately dispatched a ship to the area. A brief standoff ensued, but a tentative relationship was eventually established.
“For the exception of a few military people who have been sworn to secrecy, only government officials at the highest level know about this. And now these same people do not want the secrets of our past to be exposed, nor do they want the truth about how our societies are linked to be exposed. They are convinced that they would lose power. The religious factions would band together and overthrow them.
“At the same time, there are laws in place that prevent us from having any contact with Earth, but that is becoming increasingly more difficult to abide by, as people from Earth explore deeper into space. It will eventually get to the point where both of our societies will collide. It can either be peaceful, or it will be violent.
“Earth’s history tells us that people from Earth are more domineering than people from Payra. They’re more prone to totalitarianism. For this reason, there is a faction of our government that believes that we should divide and conquer Earth for our own long-term protection. That is to say, we ally with the Alliance, we assist them with conquering the Federation, and then we conquer the Alliance and put them all under our control.
“You can see the obvious error of logic here. We would do to them first what we think they would do to us. But we would justify it with circumstantial evidence at best.
“Of course, the two glaring reasons for not doing this are that the Federation is not domineering or evil, and they would make a great ally for us. And secondly, we have a common ancestral link that would bridge the divide between our two peoples and could bring us together peacefully.
“We tried our best to get our handlers to listen to reason, but it seems that we’ve failed. We went against our orders and reached out to the Federation, specifically through their spy network via Captain Stoddard. We’ve been courting him, trying to build a trusting relationship with him and his team, but these things take time, and unfortunately, our time is running out.”
“You, Ben, are our family,” Ben’s mother said as she made a head motion to his infant self. “You are the only person that we absolutely know we can trust. Together with Captain Stoddard’s team, you can go to Payra and find my sister Cadence and Boaz’s friend Gedeon Baas. Gedeon was running supplies to us, but we’ve not heard from him in months. We fear the worst for him, but we’re praying for the best.
“We were unbelievers, Ben, but we have found our peace with God. Science and religion can coexist, just as the people from Earth and Payra can coexist. Bring them together. Bring peace. The black box is the bridge.
“After this video ends, the key to the box will be revealed. Please remember that we love you Ben, and we wish that it didn’t have to be this way, but sometimes we need to do what’s in the interest of the greater good.”
“Remember Ben,” Boaz said, “families are eternal, and we will embrace you again someday. Until then, we love you.”
Ben could tell that his mother was getting emotional, and he watched as his father put a loving arm around her. She touched her cheek to his infant head and then kissed it. “I love you, Ben,” she wept.
The image dissolved instantly, and as soon as it did, the pad that had the locks of hair on it burned bright red and began to mold itself around the hair. At first, it was cylindrical, but then three distinct prongs began to jet out from it. By the time it was done, it looked kind of like a large, red, three-pronged comb.
“Like I said…spooky!” Jedrek said, breaking the awkward silence.