Chapter 2.4

“What happened here?” Marc asked.

“I’m not really sure. Obviously, it wasn’t like this when we left.”

“I’m sure of that,” John said. “Where can we find records?”

“The capitol was in Honolulu. Diamond Head. We’ll probably find what we need there.”

“We’ve stopped our roll. Engines are ready to fire, Sir.”

“Fire them and turn on main engines to slow.”

“Roll?” I asked.

“The station rolls. That way, if anything happened to the gravity, we’d have some form.”

“Yeah, but we’d be standing on the ceilings,” I argued, “and we’d hit those hard. It’s eighty feet up.”

“Yes, Rose. That’s true, but the station normally spins at a rate that makes gravity about twenty-five percent.”

“I see.” I didn’t, as physics was not my strong suit.

John smiled indulgently. He knew me too well.

Suddenly, we felt the station shudder, and I had a momentary flutter in my stomach. For several minutes, I felt like gravity was at an angle to the floor. I had to lean to one side. I guessed that our direction of travel was the opposite of my lean.

And then, I was scared. I looked at my husband, whose hand I was holding, and I was terrified of him. I hadn’t felt this way for over three hundred years. I let go and cowered against a wall as far away from the men as I could. The men got as far away from me and the navigator as they could as well.

Smythe had never felt anything like this, but John had. “Roll us over and get us out of here. As fast as you can, but don’t hit the sun, okay?” The navigator was paralyzed, so I jumped to her side. “Please, I know you’re scared, but I don’t know how to fly this thing. Set a course away from Earth, and get us out of here, as quick as you can. Please!”

She looked up at me and then she did what I asked.

In a few moments, the fear disappeared. “That was stage one, wasn’t it,” Smythe said. Slowly, he approached the navigation station, and looked at the screens to see where we were headed. “How much fuel do we have.”

“Not much, Sir.” she said, pointing to a gauge on the screen in front of her.

Smythe turned to John. “What do you think?”

“There’s something on the planet that’s starting the nanites. We can’t go down there.”

“Well, we could, but we couldn’t stay long.”

“How long did they have?” I asked, rhetorically.

“Quite right, Mrs. Carlson.”

“Miss Smith,” he asked the navigator, “Is it possible to pick up speed if we swing around the sun, then use the rest of out fuel to break away the direction we’ve come?”

“Yes, Sir.” I think we can do that. I’ve aimed us into orbit of Sol. I’ll have to burn our fuel anyway, because even if we were to stay in orbit, it would decay soon.”

“Okay, do it.”

“Rashda,” I said as we were preparing. Is there any way we can get close enough to the Earth to see what is causing the nanites to activate?”

“Why? We’ll be going at a speed where we can’t stay in orbit.”

Miss Smith did some figures. “I can bring us close enough to use Earth’s gravity to swing around and head out the way we came into the galaxy. The only problem is we’ll touch the outer atmosphere to do it.”

I looked at Smythe. “It’s your ship.”

“Mrs. Carlson, arrange two observation posts. One for men, and one for women. John, you and Marc, separate the men and women in the rest of the ship. Tell them what we’re going to do.”

“Thank you, Commander,” I said. “And it’s Rose!” Before he could reply, I had left the command center.

I hurried down to the observation posts. I told them what we were planning, and they segregated themselves. I stayed with the women. I had no idea what they were going to do, but I wanted to hear as soon as possible. I got a call from John and Marc after a few minutes. They were wondering what observation posts the different sexes were in. A couple of women came up to me. “We should leave, Rose.”

“Why?”

“I’m bisexual, and Cindy is intersex.”

Alright, Carla. Go ahead. I understand.”

They hurried out. Suddenly, I felt the room getting hotter and hotter. One of the women shouted, “We’re going around the sun!”

“Our environmental systems are having trouble keeping up,” another woman said.

We were on the side of the ship away from the sun. I hated to think what the men were feeling, as they were on the other side. I called John.

“We’re really feeling it, but the systems are favoring our side of the ship.”

I acknowledged what he told me, then said, “John, when we get close to Earth...” I stopped for a moment.

“Yes?” he said.

“Remember that I love you.”

“Keep that in mind yourself. I love you to, Rose.”

I’m not sure how long it took us to swing around the sun, but when it started cooling off, I was very happy. Not long afterwards, the revulsion returned. I had been here so many times, I was able to keep in mind John and my love, but the thought of him still made me sick to my stomach. Soon, we felt a buffeting of the ship, then it was gone. Not long after, stage one abruptly turned off. Several of the women in the room sighed in relief. They did not have the experience with stage one that I had.

A few minutes later, some of the men hesitantly walked into the post, including Marc and John. “We need to get the data to the lab,” Marc told the women. The men’s data is heading there as we speak.”

Carla pushed some buttons in front of her. “It’s on it’s way.” She turned to me. “Mrs. Carlson; Request permission to head to the lab?”

I was shocked that she asked, but then realized I was a commander. “Granted,” I told her. I think I was the only one who noticed Marc head out with her.

Three hundred years,” I murmured.

John snapped his head in my direction, then noticed that Marc was no longer beside him. He smiled at me. “I can’t even imagine what he has gone through losing his bond mate, but I don’t know if I could ever take another woman if something happened to you.”

I had to look away, because my eyes started to water.

Passing Mars,” one of the women said. “We have a fair amount of speed.”

Do you know how much fuel we have left?” John asked.

None,” the woman said after she switched her screen to mirror Miss Smith’s.

She cut it to the wire,” I commented.

So we will leave the galaxy never to come back,” John said quietly.

Unless we made some fuel,” I said to him.

We need every ounce of matter on board, Ma’am,” the same woman told me. “Food, air; it’s all necessary.”

There was a thump, then, “There go the engines.”

I guess Commander Smythe feels the same,” John said.

Later that night, we were in the back room of my restaurant. Carla was there with Marc, and surprisingly, Miss Smith was there with Commander Smythe.

Personally, I thought both relationships were cute.

“That was some impressive navigating, Colleen,” the commander told her.

“Thank you, Rashda.”

“We all agreed, and she blushed.”

“Well, we think we know what was causing stage one,” Carla told us.

“What?” I was very curious, even though I probably wouldn’t understand.

“There was a magnetic shift in the Earth’s core.”

“How would that affect us?” John wanted to know. “I thought the core was changing anyway.”

“I’m not sure how Caesar shifted it, but any shift from the way it was was enough to cause stage one.”

“So you’re saying it would have happened eventually anyway.”

“It appears that way,” she said.

“So did our magnetic field change on N21?”

“Perhaps,” Marc said, “But I think it’s more likely that there was a computer hidden somewhere on board that was controlling the nanites. That single bit turned it on.”

“So are you saying the computers on Earth used the same idea?” I asked. “Why would he make a trigger so hard to set off? Certainly changing the magnetic field of a planet was not easy.”

“My guess,” explained Carla, “is at some point, he wanted to know if he could do it. When he found that he could… Well, a magnetic sensor wouldn’t he hard to make. You could actually do it with a compass. In fact, by turning the compass, he could ‘Total Fun’ from happening.”

“So the compass switch would turn on the computer?”

“Well, it might have been more sophisticated than that, but essentially, yes,” Marc said.

“What destroyed the cities?” Smythe asked.

“We’re not sure of that,” Carla told him. “We’re still investigating that.”

Later that night, John and I were laying in bed. “I was so freaked out when I was scared of you,” I told him. “I haven’t felt that way for three hundred years.”

“I was too.”

I moved closer to him and put my head on his chest. “I never want to feel that way again.”

“I don’t think you’ll have to,” he told me.

“By the way,” I told him, “I’ve noticed that my period is two weeks late, and shows no sign of starting.”

“Does that mean what I think it means?” he asked cautiously.

“It might,” I told him, smiling.

“I thought all the women on the station were taking birth control.”

“John,” I said, “there will be mistakes. I’m not sure how it happened, but it did. I think I’ll like being a mother, and I’m sure you’ll like being a father.”

“But we’re still not sure?”

“No, my darling husband, we’re not. I’ll see if any of the labs can test me tomorrow, okay?”

He kissed me on the forehead, as I looked up at his face. “I know we’re not supposed to have a baby, but I like the possibility.”

I smiled and kissed him on the lips. Then I told him, “Me too.”

I put my head back on his chest. Soon, I felt myself drifting off.

That night, I dreamed of having not one baby, but twins. A boy and a girl. I was ecstatic, as was John. We made Marc and Carla their grandparents.

A girl can dream, right?