Chapter 1
The voyage of centuries ended with a thunderous crash.
Moments prior, Willow had been dreaming sweetly of places she'd never seen. Many times over the years, her imagination had worked with the bits and pieces and pictures she had been given in her Origins classes, and mentally recreated the planet that had never been home.
"It was once known as the blue planet," Henrietta - known to all of the ship's denizens, including her own young daughter, as simply Hen - had told Willow, handing her a photo. "But most often it was called Earth." Willow, ever the earnest little sponge of a student, gazed at the photo, studying its details: the expansive oceans, the tan and green land masses, and the lovely swirls of clouds marbling the atmosphere.
Cole, another student in class, although on the Pilot track and therefore not especially interested in the details of humanity's terrestrial history, snatched the photo right out of Willow's hand. "And we sent out the ships because Earth was a total dump, right?"
"It doesn't look like a dump to me," Willow said wistfully, admiring over Cole's arm this lonely little blue droplet hovering in space. "It's so beautiful."
"As you know, children, I have never seen Earth," Hen said, a hint of sadness evident in her voice. "My great-great-grandparents did, however, and they made sure to pass down their knowledge through stories, pictures, and films. That is the knowledge I am now passing along to you. And yes, Cole, the original ships were sent to Incognitus in order to find a more hospitable place to live. Human selfishness and centuries of war made survival on Earth increasingly difficult. When Incognitus was discovered across the Milky Way as possessing an Earth-like atmosphere and temperature, the first trio of ships was launched."
"And what happened to them?" Cole was always interested in the unanswerable, and so much the better if it involved violence and gore.
"A mayday transmission was received from the Globally 3 long before you were all born, about thirty years ago. There were no further communications. In the end, we don't really know what happened to them. What we are going to find on Incognitus is still, alas, a mystery."
"So it could be a total wasteland? Inhospitable to human life?" Cole asked, almost eagerly.
"It could," Hen conceded. "Maybe the pioneers never even made it to Incognitus." Willow paused in her furious note-taking for a moment to ponder the magnitude of that statement.
Willow's track, although of less immediate importance than Cole's, was nevertheless critical to the small sliver of Earth's society that had been venturing across the galaxy all these many years. The young people in the History track, though not in training to take the helm of the Globally 11 like Cole was, were also training for an important job: to be the knowledge guardians of Earth's culture, history, and societal structure. "A people that doesn't know where it's come from can never know where it's going," Hen had told Willow solemnly one day.
"But we do know where we're going," Willow had responded, unclear on what her mother was trying to tell her. "We're going to Planet Incognitus."
Hen simply shook her head. "Without you and the other Keepers, the importance of what we are doing, and all that we have given up, will be lost. All of humanity's thousands of years of history on Earth would vanish for us."
Willow felt as though she had never stopped dreaming about Earth, despite being born long after the Globally 11's launch, and she had never stopped dreaming about Incognitus, either. She, unlike most of the colonists in the several generations prior, was going to be able to set her feet on the solid ground of a planet: what few of the scientists on board that remained had long ago estimated that an Incognitus landing was to occur in her lifetime; in fact, if all went well, it would be coming very soon. She frequently passed the dull, interminable days of soaring through featureless space by imagining what Incognitus would look like. She thought about some of the many geographic and environmental features of Earth she had learned about in her Origins classes: deserts, tundras, mountains, forests, plains, lakes, oceans. If Incognitus was supposed to be like Earth, then it would probably have many of those same features, she reasoned.
And on that particular day in ZAC 2059 right before the crash, when Willow was fifteen years old and eagerly anticipating the Incognitus landing that was soon to come, she was cozily ensconced in her teardrop-shaped sleep pod after a long afternoon of packing her belongings in preparation for touchdown. In her pod, soft, thick padding comfortably surrounded her, and all sounds outside were artificially blocked so as to allow her a good rest. Indeed, the designers and engineers of the Globally 11, as they had with all of the pioneer ships, had given substantial thought to how to keep a population of nearly a thousand people - meant to be entirely self-sustaining for a couple of centuries in the unyielding isolation of their ship - healthy and in good enough spirits to be able to handle the mental rigors of space travel and the physical difficulties of eventually settling on a new world.
Cocooned in her silent pod as she was, dreaming colorful dreams of Earth and Incognitus and the stars, Willow was unaware of the final round of horrors taking place at that moment several floors away. In retrospect, it seemed an almost fitting end to the slow but inexorable decline of the civilization marooned aboard the Globally 11: over several generations, illnesses, infighting, and insanity had exacted their grim tolls on the dwindling number of colonists. And it was at this particular time - with final landing preparations underway between the sole remaining Pilot and her sole remaining apprentice, Cole - that the very last tendrils of psychological stability of one of the Sentinels, the only members of the ship permitted to bear arms, had at last slipped away.
"You cannot be trusted!" he raved, brandishing his machine gun wildly at the Pilot and Cole. "It's a trap! This isn't Incognitus after all, but the planet where you will sell us into slavery!"
"Please," pleaded the Pilot. "Look there, out the window. Do you see that pretty blue marble coming closer and closer? That is Incognitus. We're going to land there and start our lives anew."
"We're going to crash!" cried the Sentinel, unmoved. "I can't let you kill us!"
"Just relax," Cole said, as one might speak to a frightened animal, not that he had ever encountered a non-human animal before. "It's going to be fine. We've all waited for many, many years, and we're almost there. Just another half hour or so. Please, just let us do our jobs and we will land everyone safely."
Willow did not hear the gunshots in her sleep pod.
She did not wake up at all, in fact, until the Globally 11 - its gargantuan nose raised at the last possible second in a miraculous act of heroism by an apprentice Pilot dizzy with blood loss and dying - smashed into a desolate, rocky desert on a new planet.
-.-.-.-
Author's Note:
This story takes place in a continuity that doesn't exist within the Zoids canon: an amalgamation of the Battle Story and Chaotic Century timelines. Nevertheless, aside from the contradictions between the two, I have made valiant attempts to ensure accuracy. Corrections to any errors I may have made are welcome.
And, as always, reviews are deeply appreciated. Thank you for reading.