Misc. Bits

Silent Garden

A blue and green marble in an endless void. As beautiful as they always described it.

"Holy shit," Martinez says.

Holy shit is right.

I let out a long exhale and eye the crew from my vantage point atop the captain's deck. They take no notice. Their gazes lie across the vacuum toward that nurturing orb. Alien but intimately familiar. The uncanny valley of planets.

"Well, we know it's still here," I say across the com channel.

The crewmembers turn around at once, stiff-backed and wide-eyed.

"Martinez, report from the terrestrial scans?"

"Just like Terra-1 found," he said. "Lots of trees and critters, but not a single primate that walks on two legs and uses tools. No ruins, no nothing. It's like humans were never here."

"Sipes, anything from the scout drones?" I ask.

A short woman with thick square-rimmed glasses pulls up a tablet, and holo-displays flash across my visor. I watch a timelapse of the system's comings and goings over the past 72 hours.

"Here," Sipes says, pausing the timelapse and zooming in.

The room lets out a collective gasp.

"Well, that's still here too, then," I say.

The display shows a celestial body that contradicts everything we were taught back on Centauri-4. Our species' home planet had a single moon. But the display clearly shows two silver moons on parallel orbits around the planet.

On closer examination, however, it is clear that the second moon is not a naturally occurring body. Its exterior is smooth, unlike the moon's pockmarked surface. The sun's rays glint off of its surface, betraying a metal of some sort. There are no obvious entry points, but I know—from an ancestor—that there must be some way to board the structure.

"The Silent Garden," Martinez says over the com link.

The crew's awed silence at once gives way to worried whispers and fidgets.

"Terra-2, this is why we're here," I say. "Cosgrove, play the recording."

With a crackle, the century-old transmission plays across the com channel.

Captain's log, entry 236.5, section 57c. We received a signal we failed to translate. Just a lot of gibberish and something on repeat about a 'Silent Garden.' Decided to investigate and approached its origin. There is – something – drifting out there. Preparing a boarding party. Terra-1 over and out.

"That was the last we heard from Terra-1 more than 100 years ago," I say. "They offered no intel on what happened to Earth. Nothing on what happened to our species a thousand years ago. Nothing on why Centauri was left alone among the stars. Today, after a lifetime in cold sleep, we are here to bring our people the answers they deserve."

The room is silent again, any hint of nervousness replaced with expressions of iron determination. I should hardly be surprised. Terra-2 was volunteer-only. It takes a special kind of person to travel decades in cold sleep to answer the mysteries of the universe, knowing that everyone you ever loved will be long dead by the time you have answers. These are not soft people.

"Sipes, any sign of the Terra-1 vessel?"

"No, Captain," she says.

"Then, by my count, there's only one thing in this solar system worth investigating," I say. "Let's figure out a way into this so-called Silent Garden."

#

"Any sign of our friends' mysterious transmission?" I say through gritted teeth, pinned to the back of my seat by several extra doses of gravity.