Chapter No. 8. First Evidence.

The planet didn't look like Earth. It was mostly covered in water with some scraggly island chains strung around it's middle like a cheap girdle. The atmosphere was filled with clouds, especially around the equatorial regions. It made studying the islands difficult, but not impossible.

After several hours of observations, Janet and Sharon had something to report.

"There's vegetation covering the islands," Sharon said. "That means that life did evolve here. I don't see evidence of any large animals on both the land and the water, but I would assume that there is animal life of some sort down there."

"I have found something that I think is not natural," Janet said, pointing to an image on her screen. "They're round, which I don't think is natural stone formations."

"Yeah," I said. "They look like igloos."

"Too warm there for that. The bolometric temperature readings indicate that it's hot, probably at least near 40 C."

"How large are they?"

"Approximately twelve meters in diameter."

I tapped a finger to my lips. "Hmm, you might be right about them not being natural."

"Are we going to go down there?" Sharon asked.

"Well, we're here and we don't really have anything else to do, so I think we will."

I received a smug grin for that.

"I recommend that we wear bio suits," Sharon said. "We don't want to get infected by some alien bug."

"I agree," I said.

"When are we going down?" Janet asked.

"I don't know. Why am I the one making all of the decisions?"

Janet and Sharon exchanged glances before Janet turned to me and offered a sly smile. "You outrank us. You're an astronaut, first class. We're both second class."

"Really?"

"Yes. We checked the crew list. The other guy, Vincent, was supposed to be the captain. The other two women were first class."

I leaned back in my chair. "So, that means that the higher ranked astronauts were the ones who succumbed to long term hibernations, but we survived."

"It might have been because they were older," Sharon said. "Vincent was forty. The two women were in their late thirties. We survivors are in our twenties."

"I can't believe that a small difference in age would have been the cause for failure during hibernation."

"I recall reading a paper on hibernation that suggested that age would be a factor when it came to survival in long-term hibernation," Janet said. "I believe it had something to do with blood clotting."

I shook my head. "I suppose it makes sense. We were only supposed to be in hibernation for ten years, which was at the extreme limit of survival. We're lucky that we survived being in it for twenty years."

Janet pointed a finger at me. "You're the captain now, and we're your faithful crew members."

"I would rather have you be my partners," I said with a grin.

"No way," Janet said. "We will do whatever you want." She looked at Sharon. "Right, Sharon?"

"Absolutely!" Sharon said, looking at me. "You're in charge."

I was rather dumbfounded as to why they were willing to have me make all the calls. Maybe they were afraid that I would become despondent. Maybe they felt as if I was their only chance for a sex life, or maybe they were just frightened. It could be all three. In any event, I was dealing with a situation that I was not prepared for.

The next morning, I decided that we would go down to the planet, assuming there were no earthquakes, volcanic eruptions or severe storms affecting the location of the igloos. Since the shuttles were in a hanger deck above our crew wheel, we had to climb up an imbedded ladder in the opposite wall from the one we used to descend into the lower decks.

Once in free fall in the tube that connects to the hanger deck, we used our hands to propel our bodies to that deck. I activated an iris-like cover, allowing us to climb up to the hanger deck where two shuttles sat, their landing rails securely locked into position. One of the shuttles had large tanks instead of landing rails.

I pressed a button on a small activation pad to open the shuttle's door. We had to float over to the entrance and pull ourselves through the air lock and into the crew pod, which consisted of six seats in rows of two facing the front of the shuttles main window.

After strapping in and requesting that COMA depressurize the hanger and then open up the hanger door, I powered up the shuttle's engines and navigation controls. "This is the tricky part," I said. "Getting it out of the hanger deck without hitting anything."

I used the maneuvering controls to slowly make the shuttle lift off of the floor after the landing rails were unlocked. Using maneuvering jets, I slowly caused the shuttle to drift out of the hanger deck hanger door and gradually move away from the ship. We were moving at twenty-four thousand kilometers per hour alongside our ship that was in orbit. The next step was to slow the shuttle enough to make it drop into the planet's atmosphere.

"Hang on to your belly buttons!" I exclaimed. "We're going down!"

I fired the breaking engines to quickly slow the shuttle's velocity, causing it to angle down and rapidly fall into the planet's atmosphere. The maneuver slapped us hard into our restraining belts, enough so to make Sharon cry out.

The trick was to slow the shuttle so that it could skim the top of the atmosphere and slow from friction, which was accomplished by an extreme heat resistant ceramic coating. After slowing enough to allow flight control, I turned to put us on course for the igloos. I decided to come in from the ocean and level out when we passed the beach. After breaking more, I was able to slow enough to drop down near the structures and land in a clearing.

"Okay," I said. "We'll get into our bio suits before we go out."

That was easier said than done. The titanium impregnated fabric silvered bio suits covered everything and included helmets that were hermetically sealed to the suits and had high efficiency filters that eliminated everything from getting into our lungs down to below the size of the tiniest viruses.

I distributed handheld instruments to the women, and I obtained a weapon.

"What's that?" Sharon asked.

"It's a laser pistol. You never know what we might run into."

That earned me concerned looks.

When we were ready, we entered the airlock and waited until the air was replaced by outside air before we opened the main door.

The air temperature was near fifty degrees centigrade, but cooling units on our suits kept us from sweltering. It also helped lower the fogging of our face shields.

I was the first out of the door an onto the ground. Janet was next and Sharon was last.

Janet checked her instrument readings. "I'm not detecting any excessive radiation. The carbon dioxide is a bit high, but we won't suffer any effects from it."

"Let's proceed to the igloos. Hopefully, we can gain entry."

We walked up to the nearest one. The first thing I noted was that there was a symbol over the entrance.

"I'll be damned!"

"What's the matter?" Janet blurted.

"That's the logo for Arrow Industries, one of the largest service industries for NASA."

"What?" Janet cried. "How is that possible?"

"My guess is that they probably sent another mission after they realized that something went wrong with our mission."

"That means that they beat us here," she said.

"Why would they come this far?" Sharon asked. "Our mission was supposed to go to Proxima-Centauri-b."

"Maybe they didn't realize that it's too easy to go into hyperspace using their crazy antimatter generator."

"Fool me once, shame on you," she said. "Fool me twice, shame on me."

"Yes, it appears that they didn't learn from the first mistake."

"Now what are we going to do?" Sharon asked.

"Let's see if we can find something inside these igloos," I said, walking up to the door, which opened without any difficulty.

We entered the igloo-shaped structure and looked around. What we saw emphasized our idea that this was a mission sent after ours. These structures were used as habitats, and it was obvious that whoever stayed here were no longer here.

"Looks like they left in a hurry," Janet said.

"Yes," I said, while walking over to a bunk bed. I picked up a plaque and studied it.

"What is that?" Janet asked.

"It's a list of the crew that came here in 2046. I don't recognize most of the names, but I do recall a George Visor. He was just a cadet when I was at the academy."

"Our mission went out in 2043," Janet said. "They left three years later and beat us here. How is that possible?"

"Good question. Maybe they found a way to speed up hyperspace travel."

"It's also possible that they tried to fix the antimatter problem and made it worse."

"Yes, that's a possibility. Hopefully, we might be able to find something that would verify that."

"I wonder where they went?" Sharon asked.

"That's another good question," I said. "Maybe they tried to go back to Earth."

"I found something that looks like a log," Janet said.

After reading some of it, she looked up at us. "I don't think they went back to Earth."

"Why not?"

"It says that Earth suffered a major climatic inversion that caused devastating storms and volcanic activity. The amount of carbon released resulted in a horrific hot weather event."

"I'm not surprised," I reacted. "Earth's climate was pretty much out of control when we left."

"If they didn't go back to Earth, where did they go?" Sharon asked.

"That's another good question," I replied. "I would assume that it would be somewhere in this galaxy."

"Maybe we can find where they went in the log," Janet said.

We didn't find anything like that, at least not right away, but what we did find was not what we expected.