The Edge | Episode 10 | Another Satisfied Customer

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“To: kiteekat21@rattle.fun

From: king@galileo.sci

Subject: Re:

“Dear Catherine,

I really enjoyed reading your email. It certainly would be exciting to answer the mystery of the Lost Colonies, and it is something I would love to discover. Unfortunately, the colony ships are so small in comparison to the size of a planet that it is impossible for us to detect their wreckage directly from this great distance. There may be some other clue as to the final resting place of the colony ships, and I dearly hope to be able to tell you more about it one day!

Living on Galileo with Dr. Shah isn’t quite what I would call fun, but it is often interesting. For example, Dr. Shah can be a very silly man. Just the other day, in some kind of gardening accident I don’t fully understand, he almost cut his own finger off!

Naturally, I came to the rescue. He wriggled rather a lot, and then I almost cut his finger off too! The scalpel we have here is very sharp—I do hope neither of us needs to use it for any kind of important surgery!

You’ll be happy to know that Dr. Shah’s finger survived the incident, and after I gave him a few stitches he is right as rain.

That’s what friends do—help each other! Especially when you are months away from the nearest real doctor. There was no one else to help me sew up Dr. Shah’s finger, so I had to do it all by myself. I’m not too squeamish, fortunately, but I wouldn’t make a very good tailor!

I applaud your efforts. You can do anything you want to, if you put your mind to it. In the meantime, read all you can about science and astronomy, and perhaps one day you will visit me out here on the edge of the Solar System?

Don’t forget to do your homework!

Yours sincerely,

Prof. A. King.”

There. That should do it. Another satisfied customer.

Before he could move on to the next message, however, his mind’s eye fixated on the crash, as he had always imagined it, the malfunction, the mutiny, all the things that weren’t talked about in public these days. When it had all happened, he had watched avidly, and there had been some wild theories at the time.

Even after all these years, there had been no reliable way to get any evidence. Until this mission: this project. Even so, it would take years for the array to reach a wide enough distribution that he’d be able to make out the impact crater of something as small as the colony ships.

But he would find them. Perhaps if the wreck were still in orbit of one of the planets, or stars, there might be a chance of finding it. Them, he reminded himself. Both missions had failed, the main one headed to Alpha Centauri, and the smaller one intended for Proxima. So many questions.

And in the whole Solar System, there were only two people with the capability of discovering the truth of the Lost Colonies. Himself, and the good doctor.

I started this project. It’s only fair that I be the one to study Alpha Centauri. It’s my prerogative as executive, as the senior scientist of the mission. I owe it to little Catherine. I owe it to posterity. I owe it to myself.

He would make sure that this mystery was his to solve, that he was the one to find out what had really happened. And indeed, he would make sure that Shah did not.

*

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