Ancient Birthright (6 page)

After scrubbing waste-recy units and helping to clear constipated recycler systems, Saigg admitted that having a clean, well-made bed to fall into at night was heaven. He’d gotten his morning routine streamlined to the point he could get up, make his bed, shower, check his tool pouch, and straighten his room in less than thirty truebeats. Remoo stopped pulling surprise inspections after the first thirty-cycle and now concentrated on the quality of Saigg’s work with the waste-recy units.

Saigg glanced into the main cabin and saw his Dad sitting at his workstation.
Maybe now would be a good time to ask about getting his sentence reduced.
“Dad, can I talk to you?”

Prime Garuu turned on his couch at the interruption. The report he’d been reading wadded in clenched hands.

Saigg noticed his Dad’s hands were shaking, and his color was the washed out gray-green of fear.

Saigg decided now was not the time to ask for leniency. He racked his brain for something positive. “I hear the communications grid has intercepted signals from Treterra.”

Before hearing the fuel report summary at the staff meeting, Saigg felt he was immortal and would be young forever. Now, he’d come face to face with the knowledge that he only had the time it would take to reach Treterra—eight-star cycles. Eight-star cycles to live a lifetime, or the alternative, to face a slow death as the ship continued into deep space with no hope of rescue. The
Universe Explorer
might coast right on by Treterra. But, without fuel, it could as easily run into the planet, its moon, or even end up captured by the gravitational field of the sun. He toyed with the idea of sharing the information with his friends, but rejected the thought.

Prime Garuu’s inner eyelids flashed across his eyes a few times before the haunted look left his face. “Yes. Yes we’re receiving a lot of electromagnetic signals from the home system.”

Saigg had heard the ship was still too far out in space to narrow down which planet or planets were transmitting, but the signals they were receiving were definitely sentient communication signals. The team had little trouble determining that the amplitude and frequency modulated information was verbal communications. Other signals were apparently digital information but without a common reference such as an alphabet, dictionary of terms, or technical specifications to display video, it could take decades to learn the languages. The linguists had expected to have problems understanding the languages currently spoken on Treterra. After the passage of so many star cycles, physical and social evolution would have modified any written of verbal language.

“The team can’t confirm the signals are from Treterra, but they are from that sector,” Prime Garuu said.

The other piece of disturbing information that Saigg had heard was that the
Universe Explorer
scientists had determined by star position measurements that two-hundred and thirty million star cycles had passed since they’d left Treterra on their outbound journey

For some unknown reason the
Universe Explorer’s
data stream had been delayed. Speculation was that something like the intense gravity of a dead binary star had formed a magnetic bubble and captured the transmission for all those star cycles.

#

Saigg was returning to the family quarters after a lighter than normal day of school and waste-recy cleaning when he discovered his four buddies, Jerr, Togg, Kaas and Rnggo lurking in the passageway near his quarters. “What’s up, guys? I haven’t seen you around in quite a while.”

“We just thought we’d stop in and say hi,” responded Jerr, with a partially concealed smirk. “We’ve missed you in the growthbay. You will not believe the course we’ve set up. Kaas figured out how to build a ramp so we can practice jumps and midair spins.” Jerr couldn’t seem to stand still as he looked past Saigg’s shoulder and down the passageway.

“I’ll be finished with punishment duty in a thirty-cycle. Then I’ll have time to get back together with you guys.” Saigg looked at the four and noticed none of them was paying him the slightest bit of attention. They were looking past him at something behind him in the passageway. They had the stupidest mouth agape wide-eyed looks plastered to their faces.

Saigg glanced over his shoulder, but the only thing in the hallway behind him was his sister, Karonna, going into the family quarters. She was wearing her customary ship’s garb of shorts and shirt-vest with soft boots. She squinted at the five of them and flounced through the hatch with a dismissive shrug of her shoulders and flick of her head.

The hatch snapped shut, and the four returned to the here and now.

“Hey, Saigg, why don’t we go to your quarters?” Rnggo tried to settle his quivering dorsal spines into a comfortable position.

“Yeah, I could use a sweet drink or two,” Togg added.

“Sure, come on. Mom should be home anytime now. Her duty shift ended a few truebeats ago.”

Quick glances passed between the four. “On second thought, I need to get going. Things to do,” Jerr said.

“We’ll go with you, Jerr. Maybe some other time, Saigg,” Togg added.

Saigg could hear them talking as they moved down the passageway.

“Did you see the way she moved?”

“She was looking right at me, so the rest of you losers can bow out. She wants me.”

“In your dreams, Rnggo. She wouldn’t give you the time of day if she was holding a chrono.”

“Just looking at her gets my spines quivering. It’s all I can do to keep them from a full mating display.”

The voices stopped abruptly when his mother turned into the passageway directly in front of the four.

Are they talking about Karonna? My sister? No way. She’s pretty enough, but how could anyone be attracted to her? We all grew up together. She’s like a sister to them, too.

“Hi Mom, anything interesting happen on the bridge today?”

“Oh hi, Saigg. You’re off early today,” Caraa responded vaguely as she stopped in front of the hatch, reached for the actiplate and slowly froze with her fingers only inches from it.

“Mom, Is something wrong?”

His mother looked up as if she didn’t remember he was there. “No. No, everything’s fine.”

Saigg reached around her and pushed the actiplate to retract the hatch. He followed his mother into the main room and watched her drop a reportpad on his father’s desk before she walked into the master bedroom and closed the door.

Something’s definitely wrong.

Saigg crossed to the desk and glanced around to make sure Karonna or Davvie weren’t in the room. He tapped the reportpad activation point and read the cover sheet. The title appeared, “Interim Report on Declining Fertility Rate.” Saigg advanced to the next page and scanned the summary. “The drastic decline in fertility since leaving the colony world, Danuaa 3, has reached a critical point. Unless it can be reversed during the life span of the current generation, all sentient species on board the
Universe Explorer
will die out within three generations.”

No...this can’t be happening. Even if we solve the fuel problem, every species on the ship could die out because of this.

The following pages displayed very clear concise data and graphs that even he could understand. They showed the start of the decline shortly after the ship had off-loaded the last of the Treterra grown supplies and assumed a total recycle posture. The fertility rate had held steady at eighty-nine percent for hundreds of generations. The current rate of forty-two percent was projected to decline to thirty-percent within the next star cycle. The report presented several solutions, but the only one that showed any likelihood of slowing the problem was chemically induced forced clutching. The normal cycle for most species on the
Universe Explorer
was to lay a clutch every two to four-star cycles. Three clutches was the norm in an adult’s life span. Drugs could alter that, and add one or perhaps two additional clutches per lifespan, but the strain on the female’s body would be heavy and many wouldn’t make it through a fourth or fifth cycle.

Saigg deactivated the reportpad and returned it to where his mother had placed it. Continuing on to the food area, he pressed actiplates to dispense a cup of sweet drink and a cake of green crumble.

The food dispenser began streaming sweet drink into the rapidly growing disposacup. A sphincter opened, and a green, loosely packed cake of vegetable matter landed on a disposaplate beside the filled cup.

He took his food and sat at the table near the food dispenser.
Since I stopped eating in my bedroom, the skinks have moved on to more productive scavenging grounds. Davvie’s room?

Saigg slumped in a chair, contemplating the future and the ramifications of the fertility report. Without aluminum to go into orbit around Treterra, the ship could just continue on through the solar system and disappear forever in the void between galaxies, dying out, species by species. On the other hand, if they were lucky, they would impact Treterra or Treterra’s moon and die quickly.

The fertility problem is actually the more serious.
We can solve the fuel problem by cutting off the ship’s engines early and coasting. Rather than eight-star cycles to reach Treterra, we could coast for an additional hundred-star cycles and arrive with the fuel we need to achieve a stable orbit.

In one hundred-star cycles with an ever-declining fertility rate, we’d be down to a crew of less than two hundred, and some species would possibly even cease to exist. The other downside to coasting for an extended period is that it adds an equal amount of time to our return to the colony. That time could mean the difference between the colony’s survival or failure.

Saigg watched as his mother opened the door to her bedroom and crossed to the desk. She opened the right hand bottom drawer and removed a similarly colored stack of report pads. His mother then picked up the fertility report, put it in the drawer, and piled the other reports on top. She kneed the drawer closed and, head down, slowly shuffled from the cabin, mumbling, “I can’t add this to his problems. The additional stress could kill him.”

Chapter-6

Socorro, New Mexico: Transjump plus 0 years, 60 days:

Wilkins made good on his threat to schedule eighteen-hour shifts.

Beldon seldom saw his dad, and when he did come home, the toll the extended hours were taking on him was apparent. Beldon noticed his dad had lost at least twenty pounds, and his easy-going, fun-loving attitude had eroded into despondency.

His mother no longer brought home extra work. Now the problem was lack of work. She told him rumors had started that temporary layoffs would be happening as the analysts’ workload decreased. The NRAO Director could save a huge amount of money by furloughing idled workers until the upgrades were complete.

On Monday, the long-rumored furloughs went into effect, and his mother received her layoff notice. On the plus side, Beldon stumbled on a way to tell which antennas had the upgrades completed and were operational but unused.

“With this new series of VLA resources, I can expand my search operation and sweep larger volumes of space without detection. The only ones working at the VLA are the maintenance crews and they’re working on antennas miles from the ones I’ll be using,” Beldon muttered as he pulled his hair in frustration at his family’s crumbling circumstances.

With his dad’s long hours, most weekdays he never made it home. His mom’s unemployment insurance hadn’t kicked in, so they were down to a single income and that income was the same as it’d been when his dad only worked fifty-hour weeks. Sandy babysat and Beldon took on computer repairs and upgrades for friends and neighbors to earn a few dollars. His mom’s attempts to find temporary work kept her tied to the job placement center or attending interviews, so she was seldom home.

Beldon sat in front of a computer he’d taken in for a hard disk upgrade. The fifty dollars he would get for the work would barely pay for the aggravation. He was ready to throw the damn system across the room. The hardware upgrade had installed without a hitch but when the operating system loaded on the new hard drive, the system would start to boot then go to an error screen. Bel was in his third hour of installing updated bios files and hardware drivers when his computer chimed.

The chime told him that one of the observations had located something. He examined the data and found the received information...empty.

What the hell caused the alert?

“I didn’t get a hit on the returned contact information. Nothing’s in the data file. The only other possibility is the pattern search program going through the sequential pulse signature. Why would I get an alarm on the pulse signature but no return data? I wrote the program to recognize my pulse patterns and ignore them,” he scanned the alarm log file again as he clamped his lips shut.

I’ve got to stop talking to myself before someone finds out what I’m doing.

When he had designed the program, he added a patterned binary sequence to the end of each transmission as a date-time stamp. Each transmission added one to the binary number he used for his sequence of coded pulses. If he did receive a return signal days later, he could tell on which day and from which observation it was transmitted.

Beldon ran a comparison on the binary pattern of the received signal and the original transmission. Within moments, he had the answer. The data was the same except the date-time number had been increased by one. The problem was he hadn’t sent that particular pattern...yet.

His heart raced as the significance hit him. The only possible way to receive the signature pattern but not distance or Doppler information would be for the pulse pattern to be received by something then retransmitted to Earth. If the original reflected pulses were weak enough, they would not make it back to the receiver, but the retransmitted pattern would.

He’d found something, and it had altered his pattern to let him know it was intelligent and answering him.

Beldon gasped at the implications
. I wanted to discover something new. And I did, but…Aliens?