Photo by Monika Grabkowska on Unsplash
“Epsilon Eridani, with Ran right in the life zone as recorded from Earth and the huge AEgir keeping it company.” Navigator Mia Young greeted her captain as Isabella Baker came in carrying her favorite stimulant in one hand and a tablet in the other. “We dropped out of relativistic drive thirty minutes ago within two A.U.s of our goal and have sent confirmation via gravity-wave back to Earth per standard procedure. Expected response, thanks to the buoys we dropped on the way here, will be three hours, specifically eleven hundred sixteen at the earliest, if no one bothers to get a response from the brass. Our six days travel out equaled to eleven Earth years.”
“I have command,” the captain said.
“Aye ma’am. You have command.” Mia tapped the panel in front of her, moving her work over to her normal station, and followed it to the seat there, leaving the bridge command chair empty for Baker.
“Everyone, I know it is early, but drop me a report.” Isabella put her precious near-coffee, because god-forbid uncontrolled stimulants be used on a “not-really military” space-going vessel, into the secured holder in case they lost control of the artificial gravity, again. The shakedown cruise was over a hundred years ago according to Earth’s calendar, but it was less than seven months ago according to her vivid memory. The quick trip back from Alpha Centauri, after letting the colonists there know they were not as alone as they had thought when they had escaped the World War Three their ancestors policies had created before the bastards had bugged out, had been much more exciting than the two-day inaugural trip to Sol’s closest neighboring star.
She dropped the tablet into the arm of her command chair to recharge and download the incoming reports.
***
Three hours later the ping acknowledgement came back from Earth. Always reassuring that the planet hadn’t destroyed itself while they were gone. She wasn’t sure if they and their sister ship, the Enterprise and Shuguang (a Mandurian word meaning Dawn or First Light) respectively, returning back to Earth in their very peculiar leapfrog through time kept the world governments stable or they had become a forgotten curiosity until they reappeared like a Flying Dutchman out of the mists of history. She expected it would take at least another hour before they got any official response from someone whose job wasn’t to watch a little workstation for a communication that came in every two to three years.
In the meantime, it was time to jog the elbow of Lieutenant Loong. Past time. Isabella stood, as she tried to do every hour, and toured the bridge, offering words of encouragement, snapping people awake from mid-morning slumps, and bringing a certain junior officer to heel. Quietly, no louder than any of the other communications she had offered to the others, she asked, “When should I expect Planetary’s first report, Ms. Loong?”
The American-born Chinese national practically jumped out of her skin. “Ma’am.”
Isabella waited, smiling gently, grateful once again the powers-that-be decided that humanity would send non-warships to explore the universe and staff them solely with women, and a shit-load of sperm in case they had to limp back with a failed relativistic drive trading a “three-year” deployment into a multi-generational trip. With the bonus of less air, less food, and less space needed for women. And less dominant battles for her command structure, though she still needed to regularly rein in Commander Julie Carter from engineering.
Prodding Loong Yang was unusual. “The report I asked for when I first stepped on the bridge this morning.”
“Oh, that report.”
“Yes, that report.”
“Um, well, I had some unusual findings.”
“To be expected. We are in a completely new planetary system. Only six planets.”
Loong pressed her lips together, before saying quietly. “That’s not it.”
“Then what?”
“I don’t think. Well, I do think, anyway Ran” her voice dropped to a near whisper and she switched to Mandurian, something Isabella had to learn on top of her fluency in Spanish and her functional German in case she got transferred to First Light, “is not natural.”
“Please repeat.” While Isabella had learned Mandurian, she hadn’t been immersed in it as yet.
The Lieutenant returned to English but kept her voice very low. “Ran is too much like Earth; it isn’t natural. Look.” She showed Isabella her screen where a blue-green planet turned. The only thing missing in the picture was the Moon for scale.
Fluffy clouds streaked across the atmosphere. Green and brown land masses floated by in the three-hour time lapse since the Enterprise had first aimed its scopes at the planet located in the life zone. Another set of scopes was aimed at the gas giant, another at the speedy rock near the orange star. A single camera was aimed at the three other, more boring planets of the system. A hurricane swirled across the girth of Ran between the two snowcapped poles during the first hour of the recording before the planet rotated it out of sight. The only thing missing was electric lights in the dark areas of the planet.
“Gravity?”
“Based on the bounce, within .03 of Earth, but on the lighter side.”
“Diameter.”
“2% more than Earth, but the density of the core looks slightly less than Earth, hence the gravity being lighter.”
“Day.”
“The spin is slightly faster than Earth, bringing the day within three seconds of our normal. And before you ask, same planetary tilt so same seasons.”
“Atmosphere.”
“Nitrogen-Oxygen mix within human range, though higher Oxygen than is presently found on Earth.”
“I want that full report an hour ago. Failing that, put together everything you have checked and get it to me as soon as you can.”
Captain Baker then order the ship to forget the slow pass through the system gathering information to send back to Earth and to get to the orbit of the second planet pronto. Two hours later, once the basic navigation was figured out to avoid AEgir and the small asteroid belt, Isabella retired to eat and parse the ongoing reports about Ran.
As much as she wanted to have all cameras pointed at Ran, she had instead ordered a full navigation analysis of the system. She wanted to know if there were visitors other than them, she wanted to know how to bug out, and she wanted to know if anything else was weird. She also gave Loong three Ensigns to get everything they could from their little suite of information. They had nineteen days to get to orbit without their relativistic drive online.
First, after getting today’s near-chicken made from fish meat and the dreams of the cook, Isabella reviewed the bullshit “thank you for your service and adding to mankind’s (oh, dear, we are back to that gendered word again, I guess it was time for it to swing back around) knowledge base” from the brass, now entitled “The United Americas.” In particular this missive was written by the “President for Life” and co-signed by the Director-General of the “American Space Exploration and Military Department” which it seemed she now fell under. The language was Spanish.
Finishing the pretend meat and the pretend gladhanding at the same time, Isabella moved to review the reports, to discover one of pings into her queue was another letter from back on Earth. This one from the European and African Union; a third ping hit while she opened that one came in from the Hauo Dynasty. Nice to know who the players are back home. The Hauo Dynasty had been two decades into solidifying the Asian union, actually successfully bringing both Japan and Australia under their umbrella last time the Enterprise passed through Earth. Looks like they finished cementing themselves into power if they managed to get information out of the United Americas within two hours of it hitting the planet and turning something around.
After reading both letters, she verified her communication officer had pinged acknowledgment back on all three and then she ordered all reports to be locked down. No outgoing information at all back to Earth. Fortunately with over a hundred years passing on Earth since they had lifted out of the gravity well to board the Enterprise, none of her crew had an urgent need to write home.
Finally cleared of all other duties, she poured over the reports about the Earth-like planet circling a star ten light years from home.
***
“Thank you, Lieutenant Loong for your presentation.” The captain watched as the junior officer scurried back to her chair behind her commanding officer, a Russian scientist who kept mostly to herself, an enigma to both the people who served under her and Isabella. With this discovery, she couldn’t let that phoned-in leadership continue. Baker stood and went the center of the room, looking around at her command staff and their support.
“We have been in orbit a month now. Thank you to Brooks and Price for creating the reports about AEgir and Zips to send back home. Now, we need to decide what to send back to Earth about Ran. Plants and animals seem to match Earth’s Pilocene period, somewhere between just two and five million years ago. I want to authorize a shuttle to verify, taking samples of plants, animals, and soil.” Baker gritted her teeth into a grim smile. “I want a damn core, as deep as we can make one. Commander Carter, I sent you my requirements two days ago. Think you can print something by the end of the week?”
“More like fourteen days if it is going to stand up to that sort of dig.”
“You got seven.” She looked around the table, making eye contact. “This is too much of a trap. Nearest solitary K-star to our planet having a planet in the life zone a 99.9 however many nines following percentage match to our homeworld. That isn’t right. We have seen what life looks like developed on other planets, and this isn’t it. Toss in the clear modifications of comets and to the Oorts cloud Navigation has found, someone made this. And since it is so much like our Earth, they made it for us. Why?”
“A gift?” suggested a ranking supporting the wall.
“It would take thousands of years if not millions, with technology we don’t understand. We barely can keep Earth habitable, forget about Terra-forming another world to be within a fraction of our gravity. To build a planet up for that would take slamming comet after asteroid after meteor into a world. Why would anyone leave something like this for us?”
“I wonder if they did this elsewhere. What is the next closest yellow or orange star to Earth that isn’t a flare star?” Lieutenant Brooks asked.
“I would try Tau Ceti. At just under 12 light years, that would be my pick to explore.” Ensign Price suggested. “With Groombridge being a nice runner-up at 16 light years.”
“Let me guess, none of these are close to each other.” Isabella stated.
“Opposite sides of Sol.”
“We don’t have time.”
***
“Between three hundred and five hundred thousand years, someone has been working on this.” Isabella placed her tablet on the desk.
Lieutenant Loong looked over at Lieutenant Brooks. Commander Stepanova, the director of the science division, had sent them alone. Seems she had kept a secret stash of vodka and was making her way through it.
Loong, more familiar with Captain Baker’s moods as a bridge officer, confirmed, “Oort cloud record shows modifications starting about 500,000 years ago with it stopping about 100,000 years after that. The planet record shows plant life like ferns, starting a “fossilized,” if you can even call it that, record about 220,000 years ago. That shows an accelerated change of forced evolution for about 80,000 years before that stops abruptly.”
“Metallic debris has been found within the ocean, in one area it looks like a space station about the size of the Enterprise. Several other land and ocean locations show smaller ships, all from about one-four-zero thousand. We looked for other evidence in space but found none. Whatever was fought, was fought here and gravity cleaned up the evidence.” Brooks shifted her papers around. “We have found three weak signals on the inner edge of the Oorts cloud. Scope magnification shows nothing.”
“That is a long trip out on sublight engines.” The captain rubbed her face. She looked over to her second-in-command. “Musa, I’m going to drop most of the Science department on planet. Volunteers will be impregnated. Half will volunteer for the procedure.”
“Clear ma’am.”
“That includes you. You are grounding with the rest. We are also dropping three-quarters of the seed and equipment in the cargo for colonization. Just in case. You will get a grav-repeater too. You will be on your own either for…” Baker’s eyes grew hazy as she did the calculations “…two months, or, and I hate to admit this is highly likely, I am going to do a quick run out to investigate those two star systems Price suggested, quick run for us being about a month or so, for you it will be more like forty years. See if you can get Shuguang in the mix. Last I heard, they were heading out to Ross.”
“Ma’am, I don’t speak Mandarin.”
“Learn. You get Loong. We need them here, not part of Earth, until we understand what is happening here and at home. Crank down the reports to a minimum. Say we crashed or some sort of shit.”
***
Seeing her sister ship in orbit around Ran reassured Captain Baker as she dropped out of realitivistic. She knew intellectually First Light had picked up one of the Tortoises Notes while they assisted the Ran colony for the last two decades. Between their efforts, and her own ship’s admittedly brief time thanks to relativistic speeds, they had deciphered the Tortoise comments as well as the Bird, Scorpion, and the Crocabilly additions. But talking in a careful code while keeping Earth and Alpha Centuri and the science station now at Barnard’s Star out of the loop had been a challenge. Most of the success wasn’t their own sneakiness but the United Americas attacking the Hauo Dynasty when their God-Emperor died, which brought the EAU into the conflict and ignited the fourth world war.
Would it be a good or bad time after twenty years – a generation of bad blood, to let Earth know they had three viable worlds ready for colonization and using the Notes they could finish off three additional ones which hadn’t been processed with the Crocabillies ruthless efficiency within a “short” ten thousand years into three more Edens?
Would it be a good or bad time to let the fractured Earth governments know there had been two intergalactic civilizations before humans made space flight? That we might have nine neighbors waiting or already reaching for the stars who may be as lovely as the Tortoises and Birds or as dangerous as the Competitors or the Threads.
Could she trust other humans not to wipe out the Potential threats? Could she trust the other Potentials not to be a threat?
She rubbed her belly, considering. Her pregnancy was just beginning to show after their five months of travel, something she had started just before dropping off the reproductive suite for the colony. About twenty percent of her crew opted to reproduce as well, just in case, which made the months of investigating Tau Ceti a nightmare of morning sickness for everyone.
What come next would need to be put to a vote, but her preference was let Earth, now a hundred fifty years ahead or behind her depending on how you looked at things, stew in its special crazy. She had a future to prepare for.
(words 2,642; first published 3/29/2026)
Laying Easter Eggs Series
- The Tortoises (3/8/2026)
- The Dinobirds (3/15/2026)
- Crocabillies (3/22/2026)
- Monkeys Start Hunting for Eggs (3/29/2026)
