Wormholes.
By TimeTraveller-1900.
-8-
Dr Helena Russell breathed a sigh of relief under her breath as one of the newest mothers in the Moonbase's population finally gave birth after being in labour for over 12 hours. Roberta Tovey's pregnancy had had so many false alarms even her partner was starting to wonder if their baby even wanted to leave the womb, but luckily it happened. The newborns - twins - had been born less than half an hour ago, and Helena felt waves of exhaustion as she'd been on her feet for too long.
Once she and Dr Mathias had finished giving Roberta and her twins the once over and gave the new mother and her husband advice, Helena was relieved when she let her nurses and the next doctor on duty take over. Helena received a surprise when she saw John in her Med Bay office.
He held out some coffee and some chocolate. He smiled mischievously as she saw the treat.
"You are too evil for your own good, John," she moaned as she swilled the coffee down and sat in her chair heavily.
"And you look exhausted," John shot back, a concerned smile on his face. "How are they?"
"All of them are doing as well as can be expected, John. Roberta's more exhausted than I am. Peter's dead on his feet, and the twins are howling away."
"I know, I heard." John knew what was coming.
It came.
"John, we can't keep wandering like this. We need to find a planet and set down roots. Even if it's hazardous, we need to get away from Alpha. Roberta's the newest mother we have. What kind of future do her children have?" Helena asked earnestly.
John sighed. He'd had this conversation with Helena ever since the first children were born. And it just kept coming. He understood her dilemma, and he shared it too.
Moonbase Alpha was never meant to be an independent colony. It had never been designed to be cut off from Earth. They had relied on a continuous supply of fresh foods, and water. Engineers would frequently come to the base while Alpha was evacuated on scheduled times, so essential maintenance could be done. It was never meant to remain active indefinitely.
But then again, Moonbase Alpha's situation had never factored into other people's minds. Back when the base was being designed and then built, nobody had ever so much as considered the possibility the moon would be caught in the games of a malevolent alien power who wanted human bodies, manipulating events so humans would build an explorer ship that would be sent to them. They never imagined that a signal would be aimed squarely at the nuclear waste dumps and convert the energy of the waste into exotic matter, a substance that had been believed hypothetical and existed only on paper.
They had never imagined the base would suddenly be torn out of orbit by a traversable wormhole, and over 300 people out of a thousand would survive, condemned to wander the stars. Koenig knew there had been plans in the works to convert Moonbase Alpha into a lunar colony, but it would likely have been in the future, a future that would never happen now.
Sometimes he wondered what would have happened if the Commission had instead decided to build a lunar city. They would have more resources for food and water production, designed the place to be more resilient and independent. When they left Earth, John and the others in the command council had come up with a long-term plan to try to maximise and extend their limited resources. Occasionally they plundered asteroids to get to the resources inside to make repairs and make life easier, but what they needed was a new planet that could support them, and continually support them as they grew in size.
But all of the planets they'd encountered had been hazardous. The last solar system they'd passed through had a barren desert where the only forms of life on it were giant creatures, the rock snakes and had been hostile. They couldn't live there. Nobody would want to live in such an environment. And the other planets had been too hazardous as well, despite one of them having some kind of bacteria that consumed CO2 and released oxygen in bulk. That had been a massive boon to their life support problems. They had hacked dozens of asteroids at the time, of course, and made temporary repairs to the life support system, and to others that needed it.
They had also built and successfully launched a new long-range probe, using what they had learnt from alien spaceships and their own experiences to make it truly long-range and to collect and gather tonnes of information. But they hadn't detected any planets the moon was coming into range, and it had been 5 months since their visit to the desert planet, and they hadn't discovered any planets since.
"Helena, I know. I've decided that the next time we discover a planet, we will try our hardest to make projections on whether or not we could colonise it," John replied at last.
"I know. I heard. I also know it will be hard."
"Yeah, but until the probe get back with anything, we're gonna have to keep waiting. There's nothing I can do."
"I know, you're right. Sorry to heap this on you."
"It's okay."
Helena bit her lip, "I've been doing a bit of eavesdropping," she admitted. "Many are losing faith Earthbound could ever work."
John made a face remembering Earthbound. Some time ago, Simmonds had arranged a coup by igniting people's hopes they could return to Earth. Koenig had been forced into a corner to keep command over the base by going along with it. Victor had been shoved into an even bigger corner, spending day and night working on a way to break the light barrier and return them all home. But Koenig had hated what Earthbound and Simmond's selfish promises had done to everyone. Suddenly everyone in the base was targeting people like Sandra, David and Dashka Kano, threatening them, and himself. But in his case, he had made certain they regretted it. John Koenig was a tough man and not one to mess with despite his kind-hearted demeanour.
"I never thought it would work, Helena," John said. "Victor worked on those equations harder and longer than anybody else. He did it because of how dangerous everyone was getting."
Helena grimaced angrily as she remembered what Simmonds had done, whipping everyone up into a mob. And she remembered her advice to Sandra, just a little too well. She had thought Simmonds had been stupid during the whole lead-up to the mess which caused them to end up out here in the first place, but that...
"Okay, we might have had a chance if we'd evacuated to Meta-."
"Which we couldn't do," Helena pointed out.
"Yeah, exactly. But now, we've been travelling so fast, gone through several wormholes since. We've put a lot of distance between us and Earth, and even if we did somehow break the light barrier and go faster-than-light, we've been travelling so long we're lost; we're just gonna have to stay on our plans to evacuate to a new planet. There's nothing else we can do," John said.
"But you're still keeping those Earthbound die-hard idiots happy by promising them," Helena said.
"Nothing I can do, Helena. It's the only way I can keep order, and besides a part of me hoped that, maybe, Victor could manage it. But now I'm ambivalent about the whole thing," John said.
A comlock chirped and buzzed. "Main Mission to Commander Koenig," Dashka Kano's voice shouted from the communicator. That alone made Koenig and Helena forget whatever plans they might have had; it was not common for the Kano twins to shout like this, and when they did it was for a good reason.
"Kano, what is it?"
"The long-range probe has detected wormholes up ahead, sir."
John and Helena were frozen to silence. "What did you say?"
-8-
On the main monitor in Main Mission were images showing many bubbles floating in space. These bubbles appeared and disappeared, popping like bubbles floating in boiling water and popping to release the gas within. In this case, the wormholes seemed to just appear, swelling larger and larger. Their bubble-like image was reinforced by their shape, the way they showed a distorted image of the space; nebulae, suns, stars, other moons, and planets. But they popped out of existence extremely quickly.
When John and Helena both arrived in Main Mission they found everyone staring in awe and shock, and even hope. Many of them wanted to return to Earth, the others had accepted it could and would never happen.
"What happened?" John asked.
"The probe we launched ahead of the moon a few months ago stopped when it detected something unusual before it transmitted these images and clips back to us," David said.
"We've had to command the probe to move back a few times; the wormholes are popping in and out of existence we're having problems keeping up," Dashka added.
Koenig took a second to study the clips. "They look similar to those pictures of the wormhole that swallowed us up, taking us away from Earth, and the wormholes we've passed through since."
"Exactly."
"Lemme guess, we're heading for them, right?" Helena asked.
"Got it in one, doctor," Sandra said.
"How long before we get there?" Koenig asked.
"3 hours from now."
"3 hours? That's just enough time to prepare," Helena echoed.
The last time they'd passed through a wormhole, they hadn't had the chance to react before it catapulted them a good distance away from their last location. According to the calculations, they had jumped 100 light years from their last location. But the base had suffered even more damage than the first time around, nobody wanted it to happen again.
"Why are they appearing and disappearing like that? Victor, any ideas?" John turned to the base's leading scientist.
But everyone could see Victor was stumped. "I don't know, John. But my best guess is the wormholes, well like balloons on Earth can pop if too much gas - air or helium - is pumped into them. I suspect the same is true of exotic matter; too much exotic matter, they pop, but it's only a theory, John. I can't say for sure."
One thing about Victor Bergman, he wasn't too prideful to not admit when he didn't know.
"It's a good theory, though," John said, wondering what they could do about this. But this time they had the time and opportunity to plan out what they were going to do. "Okay, we can evacuate all but Main Mission crew down to the lower shelters of the base. The Main Mission crew can monitor and record everything while keeping everyone else safe."
"That's a bit extreme, John," Simmonds, who'd just walked in, commented.
"Can't be helped. The Life support systems are still on the blink, and we all know how unstable wormholes can be. I don't want to take any chances," Koenig turned around. "Take us to Yellow Alert. Stand by the shelters. Have supplies taken to them now."