Seneca and Hots continued piloting the Yellow Rover back towards Sehnack. Sarker remained huddled over the tactical command post watching the ship’s computer cycle through the alien data. Yuliya stood beside her, her brain was still too fraught to focus. Her growing concern for her twin brother’s well-being was hindering her ability to think straight. They were the only crew members who had another relative on board—which made this even more personal for her.
From the moment they left the womb, Leon and Yuliya Hodacova were inseparable, while at the same time, being fiercely competitive. If either one performed a task better than the other, that simply meant the stakes had been raised. It was easy for Yuliya to be self-motivated when there was a look-a-like trying to one-up her at every turn. Acceptance into Major Thayer’s technician training program changed everything for the young Hodacovas. They became two brains acting as one, which made them an idyllic pairing for the sciences.
All of this waiting was beginning to get to Yuliya, as she rubbed up and down the sides of her face—just trying to keep herself from having a nervous breakdown.
“Hey, Yulie. Check it out.”
She sidled up next to Sarker. The cycling process was coming to an end as a cascade of data appeared on the left side of the post’s display, almost as if it were an option menu. Sarker scrolled down a bit. There were well over a hundred options before them. She scrolled back up to the top and clicked on it. The rest of the display transformed, generating a digital map for them.
“Holy shit, I think you cracked it.”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, just yet. Best to keep our emotions in check. You get me?” Sarker said.
Yuliya nodded as Sarker widened out the display.
This was definitely something new. Before them was a comprehensive view into the star system that they currently found themselves located in. At its epicenter was a vibrant celestial body. What Thayer had named Heru, was actually known as Genara, at least according to the alien tech. There were multiple planets, most of which were marked by red x’s. The ones that were not, had also been given names.
“What do you think the red x’s are about?” Yuliya asked.
“Pfft. Your guess is as good as mine. Maybe they’re un-inhabitable or better yet—habitable, but not for them.”
Yuliya stood there for a moment, pondering Sarker’s theory. There was so much they didn’t know or understand about these aliens.
“Hold on. Is that an asteroid belt?” Yuliya said.
“Looks like it.”
Yuliya isolated the map on the asteroid belt, expanding it to give them a better view. One of the asteroids was named Conesus—which had been hidden when in its condensed form.
“Conesus? What do you think that means?”
“I don’t know, Yulie, but—I think we’re getting a little distracted here. Our focus needs to be on Sehnack right now, not this.”
“Right. Of course.”
Sarker condensed the map again, this time centering on Sehnack, which had also been named on the display. There were two visible moons within its orbit. They were named Evinia and Cirix.
“That’s new. According to this, there’s another moon on the other side of the planet.” Sarker said.
“Maybe there’s another base as well.”
“After what we’ve seen. The surprise would be if there wasn’t.”
Sarker double-tapped on Sehnack. The display morphed into a secondary map, this one revealing the entirety of the planet’s interior.
“That’s the same layout we saw in the alien lab.” Yuliya pointed.
“Uh huh, but we both know this isn’t to scale. This could be a lot of ground to cover. The odds of them staying in the same place for this long are—what would you say?”
“Shitty.”
“I was gonna say terrible. But your version works too. At this point, they could be anywhere.”
Sarker rubbed her brow.
“Even in the water. And from the looks of things, there’s a heckuva lot more of it than when these maps were first originated.”
“Well, this still doesn’t look like a lot of ground to me.” Yuliya rotated the planetary map. The constitution of the rest of Sehnack appeared to be solely oceanic.
“You were saying?” Sarker said.
Yuliya nodded. She was a believer now. The continent was merely a sliver of the planet’s genuine size. And judging by their original maps provided by Thayer—they weren’t close to accurate. Sarker rotated the map back to the section with the continent at its epicenter.
“Look, let’s not make this more complicated than it needs to be. Not only do we have the Yellow Rover’s digital flight logs to look through, but Seneca knows better than any of us—the exact locations of where the WaftMars might have gone down.”
Yuliya looked at her for a moment, almost like she was processing this information. She turned towards the front of the ship.
“Seneca. Are you picking up any signals for the WaftMars?”
Seneca swiveled the pilot’s seat around to face them.
“Not at the moment. We may still be out of range.”
“Keep us posted.”
“Affirmative.”
The android swiveled back to piloting as Yuliya turned back to Sarker.
“So what do we do now?”
“Until Seneca picks up a signal, there’s not much we can do aside from combing through this data. There’s gotta be a workaround somewhere.” Sarker said.
“All right.”
Yuliya nodded several times. It was fairly obvious that the longer this went on, the more worried she was for Leon and the others. Sarker returned her attention to the display and clicked on the next section of the menu bar.
“Hello. Ask and ye shall receive.”
The display revealed an impressive dossier to them on the Inkarotians, Xelexians and Lodricans—the three alien civilizations that they had also seen inside the moon base laboratory. The dossier included their dimensions, character traits and approximate population numbers within Sehnack.
If these two sections of the alien data were an example of what they were going to find moving forward, they might’ve been in a better position to find their mates than they had previously thought.