TWO

 

 

West got up from his chairman’s chair after a few minutes and walked slowly around to all the stations on his bridge, not so much for information, but to give everyone some time and let himself relax a little.

He had been preparing for this moment for four years. Rushing anything now might lead to even more problems.

Finally, after the longest half hour he had ever spent on the bridge, he broke the intense silence.

“Let’s have some reports,” he said. “So everyone can be together on this. And broadcast these reports to the entire ship please.”

Korgan nodded for West to go ahead.

“Anything unusual at all about Destination?”

Three stations reported in that there was nothing unusual. Then Korgan added. “What we are reading matches exactly the last reports of the scout ships two hundred years before the Dreaming Large arrived here.”

West nodded. “Any signs of alien or human habitation?”

Six reports came in quickly, one after another, cutting the small galaxy down into six quadrants, just as it would have been seeded.

Nothing.

No alien life, no human life, no remains of any ship anywhere.

As with most galaxies, this one was empty. And if it had an alien race at any level anywhere in the galaxy, the entire galaxy would have just been left alone and the Dreaming Large would have gone on to the next empty galaxy.

Not one sign that the Dreaming Large had even started terraforming the Goldilocks zone planets around yellow stars. Whatever had happened, it had happened before the Dreaming Large entered Destination.

“More information as we have it,” West said, signaling to Korgan to cut the communication to the entire ship.

West did one more walk around the bridge, looking at details on a few reports, but finding nothing different at all.

Finally, he went down to stand near his station.

“Rescue One,” he said, “please put on the screen a two dimensional representation of the galaxies closest to Destination. Limit the galaxies to a one year travel time for the Dreaming Large from this point.”

Thirty-one galaxies came up, represented as dots. There were a couple clusters and ten galaxies seemed to have formed a group. Over the last three years he had stared at this very map more than he wanted to admit.

But he knew that the Dreaming Large would not have gone to any of those other galaxies without reporting in. And with Destination being an empty galaxy, perfect for seeding, there would have been no reason to move on.

This was exactly what he had feared. What Chairman Ward had also feared.

“Now, Rescue One,” West said to his ship, “please add into the scanning equipment the ability to see pockets of empty space.”

Everyone on the bridge crew just stopped and looked at him like he had lost a marble or two.

Almost no one had heard of empty space. He hadn’t either until this mission started.

West had been briefed by Chairman Ward on the very reality of empty space, or void space as it was sometimes called.

Basically, empty space was a very small bubble in space, often not more than the size of a standard solar system, where space was completely empty and time and the rules of physics did not apply for some reason inside it.

Over the centuries, Seeder ships had just vanished when they ran into a bubble of empty space.

And they would often emerge thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years later having only spent less than a ship-board few hours in empty space.

Chairman Ward had warned West that if there were no logical reasons for Dreaming Large to have vanished, no signs of any debris, or any human survivors, then West was to look for empty space pockets.

The scientists on some of the more advanced Seeder ships had developed a program to show complete emptiness, something normal space did not have.

It had taken the scientists three years of frantic work to finally develop and test the long-range scanning program.

And if this worked, every Seeder ship would get the program as an update and hopefully no more ships would be lost to centuries in an empty space bubble.

For the year that the scanning program had been uploaded to Rescue One, the scientists had continued to make adjustments and sent them along. West had told no one about any of it.

“Loaded,” Rescue One said.

“Display on the screen as dots the empty space areas within four galaxies radius of this location,” West said.

Then red dots appeared. Only about eight total in that much space, but one was seemingly right where they were.

They were within brushing distance of the edge of an empty space bubble.

“Shit!’ West said. “Back us away from the edge of that thing to a distance of two light years.”

West couldn’t believe that they had almost vanished right into empty space as well.

That had been far, far too close.

“We’re back away from it,” Korgan reported. “What exactly is empty space?”

“That’s where the Dreaming Large is trapped,” West said.

The big mother ship was right here very close to them, only stuck in a bubble of no time and space. And the mother ship might not emerge for a hundred thousand years.

All West could see in his mind was the smiling face of his wife.

Somehow, they had to rescue the big ship, even though, more than likely, no one on the big ship even knew anything was wrong yet.

But they had to do it.

Somehow.