Eyes Looking Outward

Version 1.3

“Secure that… box thing! The one with the three knobs on the--”

Yet another small explosion ripped through the command bridge, cutting off anything else the Controller might have been attempting to shout to his panicked crew. To say that the Controller was annoyed would have been a rather disastrous understatement. He was fuming to the core, he was pissed-off beyond comprehension, he was totally lost. The Controller had never been trained for this. In fact, he hadn’t really been trained at all. His genetic code had a slant towards leadership, a slant that landed him in the Big Chair. That chair was now smoldering beneath him as the ship lurched with an ominous groan of stressed metal.

The Engineer looked back towards him with a painfully worried expression. She had managed to wiggle herself under a console just as another static burst slammed into their hull through the sputtering shields. Mostly protected by the overhanging bridge station and the body of its occupant, she still screamed as a shower of molten shrapnel bit into her legs. The offending shards came from a catastrophically dying piece of machinery imbedded in the ceiling of the bridge--she had no idea what that thing used to do, but it sure hurt like hell now.

“Controller!” she shouted amidst the din, “I can’t get the protective grid back online!” Not that she really expected to; it's difficult to fix something when you don’t know how it works in the first place.

“Two Faction micro-ships closing on our port side at, ummmm, really quickly sir,” reported the navigation officer, attempting to glean information from his flickering monitor. He had somehow managed to stay at his post through all of this; to which the Controller was mildly impressed. Not like it mattered, they would all die soon anyway. They always died, Fleet Frigates that survived an encounter with the Factions were outnumbered by their opposite ten to one. Very few Fleet crews in the service ever returned to see the light of their homestar. For many, the last thing they saw was the brilliant blue swirl of a Faction Static-pulse. He knew that his ship was doomed, that was a certainty the moment the Faction micros hopped into system. His crew stood even less of a chance, as they were only on board because humans tended to survive slightly longer against the electro-magnetic pulses than the on-board computers did. They were backups for machines that had already died, and were going to be sucking vacuum themselves in mere moments.

“Sir!” screamed the Navigator, “Snapshot from the lead ship!”

“Target?”

“Bridge section, impact in less than five seconds!”

“Hang on everyone!”

The crew grabbed any available handhold as the ball of energy engulfed the tower-like command deck. It wrapped itself around them and bled its charge directly into the hull. The already ionized air, stinking with the sickly-sweet smell of ozone, was cast alive by jumping bolts of electricity. The lights stammered under the assault, finally giving up just as a massive arc leapt from the cramped recesses of the forebridge to the aft access hatch. It burned through controls and crewmen alike, leaving behind a trail of shattered machinery and fried corpses. All was silent on the bridge as the sparking died out and the surviving crew stations attempted to restart themselves. The Controller had to cover his mouth and nose with his hand to keep from gagging on the stench of burnt flesh that surrounded him.

“Controller,” the Pilot weakly croaked, his head down and terrified eyes fixed on the screen before him, “monitors report that they’ve closed to optimal range.”

“Sir, Faction micros are firing a tight spread,” the Navigator stated, the calm of imminent doom slowly overtaking him, “estimate complete breach of the power-doughnut device upon impact.” The Controller nodded, gripping the arms of his chair a little tighter. It was a pretty stupid name for the thing, he admitted to himself in a sudden moment of clarity. Somewhere along the line some unknown crewman had christened it thus, probably much to the chagrin of the Fleet Technician Corps. Nevertheless, the object did look like a gigantic metal doughnut made up of centrally connected rings. The thing somehow provided power to most of the ship, but the knowledge of why it worked was far above his level of understanding. Like most devices on this ship, it operated without the crew ever really knowing how--the Fleet didn’t have the time or the personnel to spare in order to train mere Frigate crews in the technical aspects of the ships they would be taking to their inevitable deaths. Gripping the Big Chair a little tighter, the Controller awaited his own.

"Time to impact?"

"Twenty seconds," the Pilot said as he slowly moved from his useless station to help pull the Engineer from the hole she had opened up under the propulsion controls. The underarm of her gray jumpsuit had snagged on a jut of twisted metal during the last assault and she was having trouble freeing herself from it. He held her legs gingerly and pulled while she attacked the offending spar with the blunt end of a hand-held welder. The Pilot paused, straining to hear the sound that would never come—unconsciously believing the fanciful entertainment vids of his youth that had mistakenly shown him that there was sound in space. Again he was disappointed, for when the static pulses drew close the first sensation you received was a tingling across your body. It was something the he now associated with pure terror.

“Sound collision,” the Controller stated forcefully from behind sunken eyes, “prepare to launch the buoy.”

“Aye sir,” responded the Navigator, releasing the safety from the explosive bolts that held the ship’s shielded log to the top of the jutting bridge section. The device recorded data feeds from every operational system on the ship, intended as a terminal message back to the Fleet. It had to be launched in the flaming last seconds before the ship’s destruction to hide the jettison; else the Factions would recover it for their own purposes. It was, in all ways, their final message to home--tossed out to the ultimate sea in a very small technological bottle.

“Wait for it…” Came a calm voice from the Big Chair. The Navigator felt his palms start to sweat as the tingling began. There was a scuffling from the front of the ovaloid bridge as the Pilot desperately pulled the Engineer from her entrapment. He ripped another bloody gash in her side but had managed to free her from the console while she screamed in pain, thrashing around in his grip and flailing in near-shock. Sadly, it had been deemed unnecessary to show the Pilot proper medical protocol. He tried to force her to stop the thrashing by pining her, accidentally releasing the arc-welder inside the machine in the process. It haphazardly tumbled for a few seconds in mid-air before intersecting one of the innumerable sections of wiring within the device. The lights flashed out with a pop from the uncontrolled mega-watt discharge, instantly throwing the crew into darkness yet again.

“What the hell is that?!?” shouted the Controller.

“Discharge sir, the wel-”

“No! The sound! Someone report!”

“Engines sir,” the Pilot stated in disbelief, staggering back to his station by the dim orange glow of the console controls.

“We’ve got engines!” he shouted as the static charges rippled into the hull. The mysterious device that had before threatened the Engineer now threw its full fury into the Pilot’s backside. The ship lurched sharply to starboard and began a slow roll the same direction. The last of the charges spent themselves against the heavily-armored belly of the Fleet Frigate, bursting into a brilliant display of blue and white lightning as the ship slowly powered harmlessly through them.

“Controller, the Faction micros are passing us,” reported the Navigator, “coming astern for another run.”

“What is our speed?”

“Barely 10 kps sir, we’re crawling.”

“No faster?”

“Not without using the Hop-drive,” suggested the Navigator with a wary grimace, “but in our condition…”

“How fast do we need to be going to turn the damn thing on?”
“The Pilot, he…”

“You don’t know?”

“No sir.”

“Engineer!” shouted the Controller, “give me full speed!”

“Aye sir,” she moaned as she collapsed into the Pilot’s station, shoving his slumped body off of the control surface, “full ahead.”

The ship groaned as she babied the controls forward. A chunking, shuddering sound came from somewhere deep within in the bowels of the vessel. Somehow, the power-doughnut thingy had survived the attack and she was now slowly pushing it toward the critical mark. She glanced to the Navigator to see if the space ahead of them was clear for their run and caught him looking up from his controls in alarm.

“Sir, Faction micro-ships have launched a wide spread. Directly astern and closing fast.”

“Can we turn?”

“No sir,” came the reply from the occupied Pilot’s station.

“Very well then. Navigator, take over for the Engineer and maintain acceleration as long as you can. Heliene,” he said to the Engineer, calling her by name for the first time since they had both signed on to this God-forsaken mission, “prepare the Hop-drive.”

“But…”

“Just do it, please?”

“Yes Joason,” she said, hobbling over to the Stellar-Cartography station, “Course?”

“Point our nose to Delparv and prepare to abandon ship once we enter Fleet space.”

“Aye sir,” came the replies from his two surviving bridge officers, God only knew how many had survived below-decks.

“Here they come,” observed the Navigator as the familiar tingling began anew.

“Ready everyone,” the Controller said, holding a bloodied hand above his head as a signal to pause, “Wait for it….”

The tingling became almost unbearable as the static charges slowly overtook the ever-accelerating Frigate. High frequency energy discharges lanced out to the stern of the ship, scorching paint and armor from her battered flank. Just as the swirls of lethal bolts began to meld with the hull the Controller dropped his hand and the stored energies of the mystical power-doughnut device were released to rip a hole in space-time directly in front of the ship. The screaming hulk of the Fleet Frigate dove into the breach just as the static charges slammed into her. When the rainbow gash closed behind them there was no sign, save for some drifting debris, that they had even been there at all.

* * *

The ship re-entered normal space sideways. From an observer on this end there would have been a flash of rainbow light, emanating from infrared all the way into the gamma bands. This was followed by a twisted hulk covered bow to stern in rippling arcs of Faction static charges. She plowed through the waves of color, throwing off bolts of energy as the hole closed behind her. It violated nearly every Fleet hop-regulation in the book.

“Report!”

“Joason,” said the Engineer, unable to keep his name, or her excitement, from her voice, “it worked!”

“Did we make it? Are we at Delparv?”

“Aye sir,” the Navigator confirmed as he scrambled back to his station, “the spectral class checks out.”

“Good,” grunted the Controller, lifting the ship’s com from the arm of his chair, unwilling to give the next command but knowing it had to come, “This is the Controller to all surviving crew. Report to the nearest escape pods and abandon ship, repeat, abandon ship. We will be picked up by Fleet ships within a few hours.”

“No we won’t,” commented the Navigator from his station.

“What was that?” asked the Controller, already rising to assist Heliene to the bridge pods.

“There are no Fleet ships here, Sir.”

“Standby,” Joason quipped, shutting off the microphone, “what the hell do you mean there are no Fleet ships here!?!”

“No ships, no bases, no picket lines, no signals, no nothing! Monitors are clean, Sir.”

“Did you check the star again?”

“Yes sir, we are 701 million kilometers from Delta Parvonis, spectral class G8V, 5.7078 Parsecs from the Accepted Navigational Center. There are no Fleet ships anywhere in the area.”

“That’s impossible!” shouted the Controller, beginning to lose his wits with a man that had already clearly lost his. “There is a God-damned Fleet Battlestation here! I was transferred through it on my way to the ship construction docks!”

Delta Parvonis was one of the first colonies that Humanity fled to during The Exodus. The Fleet had evacuated as much of the population as they could here before the Faction warships hopped into the Earth system on their mission of destruction. The far-flung human colonies like Delparv had marched on stoically after the destruction of Earth, but with half a heart since the loss of their emotional center. The Fleet was all that was left of the Earth government, and it did it's best to protect them against the terror of the Factions. What made it doubly painful was that the Factions too could claim Earth as their ancestral homeworld. Without the Fleet they were at the mercy of the genocidal Factions, and were very much alone.

“Sir, spectral typing and constellation matches both confirm that we are indeed at Delparv,” the beleaguered Navigator pressed, relieved to see the Engineer try to calm the Controller a bit, “There is no Fleet presence on any of our monitors.”

“How is this possible?”

“Unknown sir,” the Navigator commented, indicating a light blinking on the arm of the Big Chair, “the crew, Sir?”

“Controller here.”

“Thank God,” came a scared voice from the crackling speaker, “are we going to abandon ship or not, Sir?”

The Controller looked to his two officers, receiving shrugs in reply.

“Not at this time crewman.”

“Why the hell not!?”

“Identify yourself!” shouted the Controller into the tiny microphone.

“This is Loader1, Sir. We fled back towards the power-doughnut when the last static charges hit.”

“What are the conditions in the engine room?” asked the Engineer, cutting into the conversation.

“It’s cold,” he answered.

“Can you be more specific?” the Controller growled.

“It’s dark too.”

“Where is the Chief?”

“Dead sir.”

“Weapons?”

“Her too.”

“Who’s in charge down there?”

“Ummm, I am sir.”

“How many are left alive?”

“Four counting Loader2 and myself sir. We have Galley and the Medic down here. He cracked a rib but we can send him up to you.”

“No,” the Controller responded wistfully, looking around his shattered and nearly useless bridge, “we’ll head down there.”

* * *

Artificial gravity and the last of the lights cut out halfway down the switchback stairs to the below-decks section of the ship. Unaccustomed to the change in orientation, the bridge crew managed to bump and scrape themselves along the tight passageways to the center of the ship with the assistance of one of the Navigator’s small map-lights. Designed along classic Fleet patterns, the Frigate was little more than a blunt-nosed cylindrical weapons-platform with a bridge tower placed precariously atop the amidships section. Small winglets on the tower, bow, and stern assisted in maneuvering and weapons fire, as well as having something to do with the hop. The crew really never knew what that function was—then again, the crew was never supposed to be on this class of Frigate. Designed to be completely autonomous, it was quickly discovered by Fleet technicians that the delicate computer brain was the first thing to go when a Faction static charge hit. Pressed by the war against the Factions, Fleet Command had little choice but to order the computers ripped out and replaced with minimal crew accommodations. As the conflict pressed on the Fleet’s only option was to cut back even more. With the rate of losses in the field, the few remaining experienced crews were transferred to the larger warships. The training centers turned out as many partly qualified people as possible, but most ships were still sent out on their maiden voyage with crews that barely knew how to operate them. This was the root of the problem that faced the surviving seven members of the crew as they sat huddled in the engine room. Despite being raised in a highly technological culture, they were now surrounded by mysterious black-box marvels of technology that none of them really understood.

“So you’re telling me that you have no idea how to fix it.”

“No Controller,” said the Engineer for what seemed the hundredth time, “I don’t”

She winced from the pain in her side as the Medic hastily stitched her up, but pressed on before Joason could start in again.

“You don’t get it do you? Every time we went back to a Fleet repair station the technicians would swarm aboard, pull out the damaged components and pop new ones in their places. None of this was supposed to be repaired in the field!” The attempt to wave her arms to encompass the room and the silent power-doughnut above them resulted in a sharp pain and an even sharper glare from the Medic. The pause gave the Controller a chance to cut in once more.

“And where the hell is the Fleet anyway?” he questioned, casting an accusatory glare towards the Navigator.

“I don’t know where they are Sir, but I can assure you that we are where we're supposed to be.”

The Medic cleared his throat, forcing the Navigator to again concentrate on holding the light steady for him. As it was, a fine mist of blood droplets were forming around the wound; forcing them to stop occasionally to brush the cloud away and clean off the lens.

“Heliene,” the Controller asked, more quietly this time, “can you do anything with this stuff?”

“Yes, maybe,” she said as the Medic finished patching her up, “I don’t know. I’d need to get access to the power-doughnut to get anything up and running.”

“Loaders, take a map-light and help her out. Medic, will Galley make it?” the Controller questioned, indicating the unconscious female floating nearby.

“Yes, she suffered minor head trauma and I had to sedate her to keep her from aggravating the wound. She should be up and moving in about ten hours, assuming that any of us are still alive at that point.”

“I’ll have none of that,” said the Controller forcefully, “Engineer, what have you got?”

“I’ve found the access panel sir,” came her voice from across the darkened room, “but you’d better take a look at this.”

Grudgingly they followed the Engineer’s feeble light to a large computer bank under the massive skeletal curve of the power-doughnut. Across the hatch were emblazoned the words:

==================================================

DANGER! ACHTUNG! PELIGROSO! KIKENCHITAI!

TOKOMAK FUSION REACTOR OVERRIDE/STARTUP ACCESS

TECHNICAL RATING 12 OR HIGHER REQUIRED

==================================================

The Controller looked a little worried.

“Heliene, what’s your rating?” he hesitantly queried.

“Three.”

“I see. Well, it’s not like we have a choice in the matter. Crack this thing open.”

It was eight hours before they had it open with any sort of understanding of how the contents beyond functioned. In the end it came down to some brute-force rewiring and some simple luck. By that point the air was getting a little thin and the hull had taken on a dangerously biting cold. Puffing as she breathed, the Engineer finally called to the Controller that all was ready. With nothing left to lose but their lives, he ordered the mystical power-doughnut to be activated.

The Engineer nodded, flipping on multiple switches and jamming together a couple of hastily rigged bypass lines. Each sparked with power drawn from some well-hidden reserve batteries, instantly welding into place as she forced the leads together. Whispering a silent prayer to the Almighty, she touched the last line into place with an acrid pop of melting metal. To her surprise, nothing happened. She half thought that she was going to die instantly, or perhaps that the thing would actually work. Having absolutely nothing happen was not what she expected.

"Engineer?"

"Yes Controller?"

"It's still dark."

"Yes Controller."

He was about to comment further when a slow tingling began to spread across his body. The Controller looked around the barely-lit room in alarm, seeing similar stunned expressions from his crew.

"Faction static charge!" shouted Loader1 as he futilely began a panicked dive for cover.

"Everyone to the bridge!" commanded the Controller as he launched into the darkened passageway ahead of the confused crew, "Now!"

The disorganized rush for the command deck began in earnest. They took turns with the lights and the unconscious form of Galley as they threaded their way up the maintenance passageways to the still-smoking bridge.

"Hang on everyone," stated the Controller calmly, "not like you'd know it, but this is still the most shielded part of the ship."

Seconds passed without anything happening. The crew clung to the various bridge stations, doing little more than breathing shallowly and awaiting the charge to strike. It was some time before anyone noticed that the tingling had stopped. The Controller looked across the battered room, noting a single blue light blinking on a station to his right.

"Engineer, what the hell is that?" he asked as she made her way to the station.

"The monitor indicates that the fusion reactor is primed for restart."

"And that means?"

"The power-doughnut is fixed?" she replied uncertainly.

"Then turn it on!"

The Engineer reached out to touch the button like a person sticking their finger in an armed laser roach-trap. It beeped once, followed by a loud and unhealthy tapping sound from deep below them. The ship groaned as artificial gravity was suddenly restored, slamming the crew into the deck amidst glowing control panels and sputtering main lights. The Engineer blinked her long lashes in the suddenly bright room and squinted to read the panel.

"Monitors report that we have life-support, gravity, minimal protective screens and limited propulsion."

"What about the weapons?" asked one of the Loaders.

"Negative, that system is trashed. We've got no offensive capability sir."

"Navigator, what's around us?"

"Nothing Controller. No ships, no static charges, no signals, no Fleet."

"Crap," was Joason's only reply.

"Wait, I take that back sir," said the Navigator, slight apprehension creeping into his voice as he strained to listen to the working half of the headphone set that he had pressed against his ear, "I'm picking up coherent background signals, the stuff that we usually filter out."

"The standard Earth leakage?"

"Yes sir, but… it's different."

"Different how?"

The conversation had the attention of everyone on the bridge. The Navigator chose his next words carefully, as the topic of the human homeworld had been taboo for centuries. Soon after The Exodus, Earth was quarantined by the Fleet; no ship was to go there, despite the pleading calls from help from the population. Successive generations had eked out a living on the dying world, but all knew that they were doomed in time.

"It's not the standard entertainment vids and… distress calls… that the communications system automatically filters out. This is a distress call, but not of the usual variety."

"How so," asked the Controller, interested despite himself.

"It's a warning to stay away sir, being repeated in all languages--Factions included."

"But… but... why? How?" the Controller was flustered. Earth was a graveyard, but was far from resting in peace--as its surviving population could attest to with the passing of each agonizing year. Dying, but not quite dead, the Factions had bombed the planet mercilessly with every type of mass-destruction weapon they could get their hands on. The fact that they were receiving a message from Earth itself to stay away was an affront to over three hundred years of what could only be called "tradition".

"Any other signals?"

"No Controller."

"Not even Faction?" he asked, half-hoping that the answer would be negative.

"No sir, only the warning from Earth."

"Alright people, give me options."

"The way I see it," started the Engineer, "we wait here and keep trying to raise the Fleet. There has to be something wrong with the monitors, or with the com system. We'll just keep transmitting to the Fleet and they'll get us out of this situation."

"The com is working perfectly," the Navigator hissed, "if you had been able to keep the screens up then we wouldn't be in this situation in the first place!"

"People! Stand down, that's an order," stated the weary Controller.

"The way I see it," began the Medic, "the only option we have is to follow the signal to Earth. It's the only thing we have to go on."

"He would want to go there," snarled the Navigator, "new mutations to catalog perhaps?"

"No, I agree with him."

"What was that Joason?" asked the Engineer.

"I said," repeated the Controller, lifting his head from his hands, "that I agree with him. It's the only lead we have. If the Fleet is out there then they'll detect us crossing the picket-line into the Earth system and will respond a hell of a lot faster than by us just sitting here pinging out distress calls."

He stood, taking strength from his decision. "Heliene, prepare the hop drive. Everyone else to your stations, those that don't have places to go just stay out of the way and hang on."

"We're ready on your command sir," said the Engineer from the Stellar-Cartography station.

"Navigator, full ahead. Heliene, point our nose to Earth."

* * *

They arrived in-system only slightly less dramatically than their last hop. Somewhat off kilter and external lights sputtering, it was otherwise a textbook perfect entry.

"Status!"

"Drop back into normal space successful," reported the Engineer.

"Picket-lines?"

"Negative sir," observed the Navigator glumly, "the skies are empty."

The Controller gave him a quizzical look.

"Completely empty sir. I am still receiving the signal, it's coming from the third planet in the system."

"Very well, set course for the signal."

"How?"

"What do you mean how? You're the Navigator, just do it!"

"Sir, I mean that, we have no Pilot sir."

The Navigator had a point, but luckily the Engineer had a solution.

"I can control the ship Joason… kind of."

"Close enough. Aim us towards the source of that signal and keep us moving--we'll worry about the details when we get there."

The details as it turned out were surprisingly simple. When they got close to the planet and its oddly massive moon, they simply rotated the ship halfway around its axis and thrust full ahead until they ended up in a high orbit. From there they crowded around the few functioning external monitors and saw something that none of them had expected.

"There's so many of them!" observed the recently-conscious Galley, taking her turn, "What are they?"

"Most look like Type-4 spysats," commented the Engineer as she buried her face in the monitor, "I also see quite a few infrared detectors, gamma-ray spectrometers, and ten or twelve other electromagnetic detection arrays. But, they're all pointing outward."

"So?" asked the Medic.

"Shouldn't spysats point down?"

"Those are telescopes," answered the Navigator, "hundreds of orbiting telescopes."

"What?"

"Those aren't Type-4 spysats, they're Hubble-class optical telescopes. I accessed the orbiting communications satellites, those that were still functional. Their designs are Fleet, if a bit old. The surface stations are in chaos, the few that are operating are running on automatic. As far as I can tell there isn't anyone down there."

"No one at all?" prompted the Controller.

"Sir, when I say that there is no-one down there, I mean that there isn't a single living Homo Sapien capable of accessing a communications array on the entire surface of the planet. They're dead sir, all of them."

"But how?"

"The last updates to the news-nets all relate to the Navideep outbreak of 2102."

"But wasn't that easily cured by aggressive retroviral white-blood cells found on Tau Ceti?" asked the Medic.

"I guess," agreed the Navigator, "but these people never made it to space, not much past the moon at any rate."

"And without the spores from Taucet…" the Medic began, "My God, they must have died by the millions."

"But why the telescopes?" questioned Galley.

"Without advanced spaceflight they couldn't go out into universe, they had to just sit here," continued the Navigator, "Just sit and wait for it all to come to them."

"But Earth had interstellar ships by 2102!" interjected the Controller.

"Not this Earth."

"Then they're all dead eyes," concluded Joason slowly, watching a slowly-tumbling Hubble telescope in the monitor before him, "all dead eyes looking outward in vain."

"That's about the sum of it sir."

"My God, we've hopped into a mass-graveyard."

There was silence on the command deck as the enormity of it all sunk in. It was a short while before the Controller could regain his voice to speak.

"Ok people," he croaked, "give me options."

"Joason…"

"What?" he snapped to the Engineer.

"The ship is nearly dead in space," she said, ignoring his barb, "and there is no way we can simulate a Faction static burst if that's what you're thinking."

His slumped expression told her that her guess was correct. Reenacting the accident that brought them here was probably the best way back, but she knew of no way to do it without the help of an equally lost Faction micro-ship.

"So then…"

"So then we're stuck here sir."

"We could go around hopping until the life support ran out," added the Navigator, "but I doubt that we'll find any habitable system but this one. All of the colony worlds that we could hope to reach were terraformed by humans at one point or another in their histories. We wouldn't find anything but deadly atmospheres or equally lethal local lifeforms. "

"Earth?"

"We are immune to the Navideep virus sir," interjected the Medic.

"I guess that's it then," pondered the Controller. "What do we have to do to land?"

"Get a Pilot," said Galley.

"Fix the protection screens," added the Medic.

"Pray to God," concluded the Engineer.

"Ok people, let's get to it. Navigator, you just became the new Pilot. Everyone else, help Heliene get the screens back up."

"And what will you be doing sir?" asked the Engineer.

"Prayin' to God."

* * *

"Controller's Log, 341 P.E., final entry."

"Sir," asked the Engineer, "shouldn't that be 2558? We are in a reality where the exodus never occurred."

"Controller's Log, 341 Post-Exodus," he emphasized defiantly, "final entry. The surviving crew of the ship have loaded their last massages into the terminal buoy and we are preparing to launch it into a stable orbit before we begin our descent. To anyone that finds this, please get it back to our families--if you can. We don't know what we are going to find down there, and certainly do not have the genetic diversity to repopulate a planet, but if you find this…" He stopped, not wanting to raise too many false hopes, "please get it to our people, wherever they may be found. This is the Controller of Fleet Frigate 12015 signing off."

There was a short silence as he set the microphone back into its slot in the arm of the Big Chair.

"Jettison buoy Engineer."

Heliene pressed the button; blasting the small pod from the top of the bridge section with a pop, "Buoy away sir."

"Very well," he said quietly, looking over the expectant faces of the men and women surrounding him, "Whenever you're ready Navigator."

"Aye sir," he said as he gingerly took the controls, slowly nudging them closer to the blue orb below them.

"Screens aligned forward sir," informed the Engineer.

"Thank you, please set them to maximum output and prepare for re-entry everyone,” stated the Controller with a forced calm.

“Re?" teased Heliene, "Have you ever been to Earth before this sir?”

“Point taken," said Joason, smiling at her despite the tenseness of the moment, "prepare for entry. In some strange way we’re all going home. Godspeed my friends.”

The Controller settled back into his chair as the faces of the crew nodded their agreements to him. A slight groaning sound, like the call of a Terran whale, was the first sign that they were falling into the gravity well of the planet.

"Protective screens have begun touching atmosphere," reported the Engineer.

"What's the procedure here Navigator?"

"There isn't one sir, Fleet Frigates were never designed to land on planetary bodies with an atmosphere."

"But they have landed on dead worlds right?"

"Yes, Sir."

"So what could a thin little atmosphere do to us?"

"Apparently, it can burn us to a cinder," commented the Engineer with a grim expression.

"What!?!" the Controller shouted over an increasingly loud whistling noise from the outer hull.

"It's the friction Joason, the outer hull is baking from it!"

"Can we pull back up?"

"No Sir!" shouted the Navigator, "I can barely control our decent!"

Everyone grabbed handholds as the ship suddenly lurched with the sound of ripping metal. A loud clanging thumped its way down the main hull before throwing the rear control surfaces into disarray. The vessel began a slow list to port, with a corresponding increase in the screaming from the walls.

"Controller, I've lost one of the forward fins! I can't keep the nose up!"

"That means?"

"Crash and Burn, Sir."

"Oh my God, but we've come all this way…"

"Not far enough Joason," commented the Engineer as the deck began a jarringly visible tilt.

"Try to re-align the screens!"

"It's no use, Sir," she screamed, almost matching the roar from outside, "they're locked forward!"

As the ship rolled over they were all flung sharply into the walls and former-ceiling. The ship moaned, and for the first time the Controller could feel heat through the walls.

"How much time?"

"Seconds!" the Navigator shouted back.

"Then this is where we get off," he said quietly to himself. "Abandon ship! Everyone to the pods!"

The crew scrambled as best they could to the six pod hatchways lining the rear of the bridge. The ship slowly completed its roll, and the Controller found himself standing near his much-loved chair. Through shimmering waves of heat he could see his people assisting each other into the pods, the doors slicing shut in turn.

"My God! Hurry Joason!"

The Controller turned slowly, hands clasped behind his back like he had seen his Instructor do on his first day at the construction docks.

"There are but six pods Engineer," he calmly shouted to the solely open hatchway, the others already having detached from the ship. "Go."

"Hell no!" she shouted, crossing the violently vibrating deck towards him. "We joined up together, and if God so wills it then we're checking out together!" She forcefully grabbed him and pulled him towards the last remaining lifeboat.

"I love you Heliene," he said to her, grinning.

"I know," she replied with a smile, pushing him into the cramped pod before her. Climbing in, she forcefully yanked the large activation lever. The door whisked shut, cutting them off from the ominously warping deck-plates of the bridge beyond.

"Emergency Destruction Escape Nodule now activated," the pod told them soothingly.

The technology of spaceflight had inadvertently saved the people of their Earth twice before, and now it would hopefully save the lives of the crew yet again. Heliene and Joason held onto each other in a lover's embrace as the pear-shaped pod explosively released itself from the twisted and burning hulk of the dying Fleet Frigate. They momentarily skirted up the plasma wave and away from the ship before beginning their long fall downward. The thin tendrils of atmosphere slowly caressed the pod with warmth as it drew closer. Soon after, they were fully taken into the embrace of their mother planet for the very first, and for the very last, time. D