— The Force of the Heavens —
Discover the force of the heavens O Men:
Once recognized it may be put to use.
— Johannes Kepler, German Astronomer
The ship was dying. Of that, the commander had no doubt. The question at hand was if the crew and cargo could be saved. Their ship was hurtling through space at an incredible speed. Unfortunately, the ship’s power reserves were too low for anything but a few brief navigational adjustments. The main drives were unresponsive; a cold lifeless blue on the monitors.
Closer examination revealed that the drives were not merely unresponsive; error messages and failed packet routing showed catastrophic hardware failure. Shifting gravitational eddies had crumpled the frame. The drive housings had been torn from the hull, leaving shredded cabling and fragments of titanium superstructure twisting into the void. On the screens, these remnants resembled the shattered bones and ligaments of a small animal that had been crushed in a giant's unforgiving fist.
The commander knew that they had been lucky. In spite of the damage, their ship was relatively intact. It was capable of holding an atmosphere. They had functional life support. And, they were still alive, even after so many others had died in the cataclysm which had engulfed the colony world. It was possible that the home system was also destroyed, but at this point there was no way to be sure; and there was little hope of ever seeing it again. Their ship was, for all practical purposes, stranded.
By some miracle the star system they were approaching was capable of supporting life. Yet for all its promise, there were no signals pointing to the existence of an advanced civilization. Repairs were out of the question. The ship had been constructed in zero gravity, and would require an orbital dockyard to rebuild. Of greater concern than the lack of orbital docks was the reality that even planetary orbit was out of the question.
The ship’s velocity was too high. The disaster at the colony had destroyed the drives, and with their limited power reserves they could do nothing to slow the ship. They had one small chance. The third planet from the star had an atmosphere. Not the thick soup of a gas giant, but rather the thinly spread miasma of nitrogen and oxygen which made life possible. A precisely calculated approach would allow them to brush the atmosphere shedding speed as thermal energy. Speed outward away from the system; loop around a gas giant, using its gravity well to turn the ship, and speed back in system repeating the process until the ship had slowed enough to safely achieve a stable orbit.
It was incredibly risky. Sort of like waterskiing at supersonic speeds, the commander thought wryly. Dip the tip of the ski into the water and you disappear under the surface like a submarine. Hit a wave at the wrong angle and you fly like a bird before landing with a splash. Either mistake ended with the skier cracking every bone in their body; or in this case, splitting the hull of the ship like an egg.
The shipboard AI wasn’t fond of the plan, but there was a reason the non-sentient programs had never been given full command. AI’s lacked intuition and as a result they never saw reasons to take extreme risks. The officer settled back in the command seat and gave the orders for the first approach. It might take fifty years to effectively slow the ship, but there was time to wait; all the time in the world.
Canterbury England
AD 1178
It was a summer evening and the barley ears were a soft rippling white in the starlight. A gentle breeze blew off the Stour cooling the city. The sky was clear, and the stars were visible with a bright crescent moon hanging like a sliver of gold in the sky. A group of monks sat in the courtyard of the old Canterbury Cathedral watching the heavens. The pale green flicker of an aurora had been seen in the sky the night before and the monks were eager to glimpse this phenomenon for themselves. It was an uncommon occurrence so far south in England.
There was wild speculation outside the abbey walls as to the cause and significance of the heavenly portents. Some decried it as the end of the age, while others remembered that the lights appeared about once a decade and merely admired their brilliance. On this night there was nothing to see. The sky remained shrouded in inky darkness, speckled with points of light, but no color.
One of the monks held his thumb to the sky and blocked the moon leaving the sliver of light to extend like a second fingernail. He moved his thumb to reveal the black expanse of the waning moon, then flicked it back into place. Suddenly, there was an explosion of light just above the center of his thumb. He dropped his hand in shock.
The moon was aflame!
A gout of fire shot from its surface out into the void. The entire celestial body seemed to shake as if worried in the teeth of a dog. Something had struck the moon a mortal blow. The monks who were standing dropped to their knees. “Pater noster, qui es in caelis.” One of the monks began in a whisper that was somewhere between fear and awe. “Our Father, which art in heaven: Hallowed be Thy Name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, in earth, as it is in heaven.”
As they continued to stare, the surface of the moon began to darken, as if it were slowly turning to ash. “‘The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and the terrible day of the LORD come.’” A second monk quoted as another flash of light erupted from the celestial surface. It was a sight unlike any the monks or any other man in England had seen before. A sight which each would carry to his deathbed permanently engraved on his mind.
The next day the official historian of their order told their tale in his chronicle, penning the following statement.
“On the Sunday before the feast of St. John the Baptist, after sunset when the moon had first become visible, a marvelous phenomenon was witnessed by some five or more men who were seated facing the moon. There was a bright new moon, and as usual in that phase, its horns were tilted towards the east. Suddenly, the upper horn split in two. From the midpoint of the division a flaming torch sprang up, spewing out, over a considerable distance, fire, hot coals and sparks. Meanwhile the body of the moon which was below writhed, as it were in anxiety, and to put it in the words of those who reported it to me and saw it with their own eyes, the Moon throbbed like a wounded snake. Afterwards it resumed its proper state. This phenomenon was repeated a dozen times or more, the flame assuming various twisting shapes at random and then returning to normal. Then, after these transformations, the moon from horn to horn, that is along its whole length, took on a blackish appearance These men reported to me that they saw this with their own eyes, and upon their faith are ready to give any oath, that they added to the above statement nothing of falsehood.”
As he set the goose quill down on the table and waited for the ink to dry, he wondered what this sign could possible foretell.
Mount Everest
May 29th 1953
The cylinder was small. It sat embedded in a rock face a hundred yards below the summit. The metallic tube’s size made it easy to overlook, one small object on a great mountain. Even in 1953, Everest was already littered with the debris of many expeditions. While no one had made it so far up the slopes before, it was likely that that this small object would have gone entirely unnoticed, except for one simple fact. Just as the two climbers started to edge along the ten meter high face, the cylinder’s surface burst with an iridescent green glow. For a hundred yards in every direction, the snow and ice was illuminated with a strange green light.
The lead climber stopped and glanced at the watch fastened over his jacket’s cuff, 11:00. They were close to the summit, so very close. Once they scaled this face, it was a simple walk up the last hundred yards to the summit. Fortune and glory: the honor of being the first man to climb Everest, was just a few hundred feet away. The light source winked out and then turned on again. Three short pulses, three long pulses, three short pulses: SOS. Some men might have ignored the message with their goal so close, but Edmund Hillary was no such man.
“Edmund?” It was Tenzing Norgay. He glanced up and saw the Sherpa watching him. Before he had a chance to speak, another voice broke the silence. “Edmund Hillary, if you are present please speak your full name.” The voice came from the small glowing tube.
Both of the climbers stared in wonder; each one trying to figure how this object had arrived here. Finally, Hillary broke the silence. “I am Edmund Percival Hillary.”
“Thank you for your assistance.” The device said. “Stand by for message.” The head and shoulders of a man appeared; the image projected against the snow. “Edmund Hillary.” The apparition said. “We need your help.”