Continued from last week’s episode…
It wasn’t more than an hour of two after breakfast when Commander Stacey summoned us back to the command centre for an emergency meeting.
She brought up a holographic display of our course from Earth.
“As you know our destination was this exo-planet, code-named Bahumat, which orbits a star that from Earth would have appeared to be in the constellation of Capricorn.”
The course was plotted out dimensionally. The carefully calculated trajectory was meant to accommodate for thousands of years of cosmic drift. I should know, I’m the one who programmed it along with my team of researchers back on Earth.
Next she brought up a display which illustrated the The Elysian Fields as being situated somewhere in deep space, outside of the Milky Way galaxy altogether. The assembled crew let out a simultaneous gasp.
“What the HE...” Chief Engineer Jorge Tio’s words trailed off as we were all struck dumb for a moment.
Commander Stacey then brought up a new holographic map which was split in two. On one side of the display was our original course up until about a thousand parsecs from our destination solar system. At this point our location seemingly and suddenly had jumped clear across the cosmos.
Zooming out the display to the point where our original course had been disrupted she spoke.
“As far as I can tell The Elysian Fields struck some kind of time-space distortion at this point, perhaps a wormhole and reemerged into this section of deep space.”
“How is this possible?” I asked before realizing that I was the one who should actually be answering that question.
“I don’t know. Our coordinates were here, completely on track for the verge of our target solar system. An earth-like exo-planet based around Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory Star #189856.”
The assembled crew was examining the holographic star chart with interest.
“Then suddenly we’re in deep space, hundreds of millions o flight-years off-course. In fact, we’re so far outside of the regular universe that the only galaxy which is clearly visible is this one.”
The display showed a humble round galaxy designated PGC 13434 which from Earth would have appeared to have been in the constellation of Fornax.
“How could this happen?”
“This doesn’t make sense.”
“When did the spatial anomaly occur?”
From the eerie chill of our earlier silence we were now all talking at once.
“That’s the troubling part. According to the record we haven’t been asleep for thousands of years, it’s actually been millions. The autonomous W.A.R.D.E.N. system was designed to awaken us under given circumstances, one of which being reaching the approach to our exo-planet destination.”
“Which we never did.” I completed her statement, already the scenario was unfolding in my head.
“Right and the other being when The Elysian Fields is immanently threatened.”
“Such as being critically low on fuel and other resources.” Inside I began cursing my tragic lack of foresight.
“Yes, having spent millions of years in deep space slowly expending our energy resources until the point where an emergency awakening was initiated.”
“If you don’t mind me saying, Commander there’s an awful lot of data missing here.”
Commander Stacey nodded, “There’s no coincidence with how vague I’m being on this one, Jorge. All of the data from the disruption point is completely missing. There are no sensor logs, nothing. It’s like we were at one place and then suddenly appeared in the other. No fancy light show, no energy spikes. Nothing.”
“As a space scientist you will forgive me for not believing in magic.” Said Jorge.
“Neither do I”, replied Commander Stacey.
Continued next week only on MECHA MESIAH!
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