SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

Jude made a special sweep with his empathic senses, which now engulfed the entire ship’s intricate central nervous throughout the ship, to check for his parents. They were both wedged in the first forward compartments, nervous, sweating. He could slightly read their emotions in the way the empathic link with the Dragon allowed, and knew that they were still not sure they were doing the right thing, and yet afraid that it was absolutely necessary.

The ship could hold approximately seventy passengers. There were ten ships in all, and all of them were completing the intricate frantic dance of passenger loading and Dragon/Pilot interface. Jude could hear the chatter from the inter-ship radio that confirmed all the ships were almost ready, too.

The families that were loaded on this Starship included Judges and all the other staff and legal emigrant candidates that had already applied to the program.

Jude pinged the pod with the two Reuben Judges, who were from a Southern province near the Ocean, to indicate to them that they needed to initiate their takeoff sequencing. They were the only members of the group that did not quite appear ready. They did not have any children yet, although the empathic vibe Jude was getting from the woman suggested the faintest ripple of a mind within her—perhaps a child was coming soon.

The Simeons, two boys and a girl, along with their parents, were loaded in a pod next to Jude’s family. Next to them were the Levis, who had protested and strongly believed this was a premature mistake, but who did not want to risk their family’s safety in the backlash against this action that would likely follow. Those pods were near the back of the ship. Their child was also loaded with them, too young to know what was going on, getting bored and a little sleepy now that the loading process was done.

Judge Issachar, Judge Zebulun, and Judge Benjamin were all unmarried, but they were teachers, also, so they had herded a number of the documented groups of people who had applied to the Interstellar program on board, helped them load into the communal class seating near the center of the back section. The Judges Dan and Naphtali, Gad, and Asher were also on board, and because of their advanced state of training, had already loaded the cryo-sleep programs and were in the light dozing state that was suggested before take-off.

None of the families had ever launched from the planet’s surface before. This was a new experience for everyone, in spite of the months (and for some, years) of training. The Dragons, of course, had been through this all before. They sent calming vibrations through their human pilots, who in turn were able to send those calming thoughts to the other humans.

Pilots were chosen for their ability to interface with the alien mind of the Dragons and the minds of their fellow humans, and Jude had been told he was the best. Jude and Yalta-ba-oath knew that the other ten ships nearby were also finishing up the final stages of pre-flight, but their ship, the Genesis, would be first to go. Yalta-ba-oath had flight seniority.

Jude was proud he had been chosen as Yalta-ba-oath’s navigational partner. Even though he was much newer to the program than many of the other ships’ navigators, he would be the first to touch the atmosphere. First to reach out a hand to the stars and the nearby planet.

The final items of the pre-flight takeoff checklist were lit on Jude’s navigational board, just in front of his seat and to the side. Stewards reported the doors and windows locked. Jude checked, once more, the fuel mixture. It was full rich but would be adjusted once they were out of planetary orbit over 3,000 feet. The ship’s interstellar lights were set and navigational cameras loaded.

The Dragons had agreed to leave the ship’s transponders in the “off” position for now, until it was for certain whether any of the members of the Faction were receiving transmissions. Nobody wanted to tip off the enemy, who was threatening to unleash their weapon any moment now, that the plans for emigration to the Third Planet some were beginning to call Terra, others calling Earth, were activated. Jude checked all the engine instruments and signaled to Yalta-ba-oath that the checklist was covered.

It was time to go!

The ships, ten of them, pierced the atmosphere just above a land mass shaped vaguely like a bare foot without toes. There was a twisting river that the Geographers had decided would be the best possible place to land, and the glaciers which touched most of the planet’s upper quadrant were far enough away that there should be warm weather and fertile soil.

It had been a bumpy trip. Just as the ships, guided by the Dragons (and their capable human navigators) had guided the ships out of the atmosphere of their home and leveled off into space’s quiet vacuum, a great explosion had pierced the planet’s sky.

Clouds of yellow-gold, almost beautiful, definitely terrifying, had billowed upward. Those who were still awake watched the aft cameras, some weeping openly as their planet’s atmosphere was forever changed. The initial plume of golden cloud grew exponentially, quietly for them but probably eardrum piercing on the planet’s surface. The cities could not be seen from this distance, but the flames that could be seen beneath the yellow clouds were undoubtedly destroying everything. The flames reached as high as the clouds for a moment. Near the planet’s southern regions, where the oceans reigned, the watchers could see water plumes vaporizing, the intense heat burning off into steam. As they travelled space and the cameras began to lose the magnification possible to see anything other than a vague shape, they could see the vapor adding itself to the clouds, and lightning-like flashes of whitehot energy blasting the entire southern region near the volcano plains.

There was no hope that anyone who had been left on the planet had survived. The ten ships with seventy passengers and crew each had barely cleared the danger zone when the Factions had exploded their device. Its inventor, John Tycho, was still on the planet, having tried to negotiate with the Faction’s faceless, nameless leaders.

The families on the ships would never know who it was that set off the planet killing bomb.

Those who had opted to take the interplanetary journey without the aid of the cryo sleep chambers eventually rose and gathered in the crew areas, seeking comfort, hugging, crying. It seemed impossible that their home was gone, and they were on the way to an alien planet.

If it hadn’t been for the Dragons, some whispered quietly, perhaps this would not have happened. But if it hadn’t been for the Dragons, they would not have been saved, either. The whisperers looked at their sleeping children, faces slack with the dreamless sleep of the cryo chambers, and sighed.

The new planet was impossibly blue, broken here and there by brown land masses. In the quadrant oriented upwards from the ships, there were large white bodies that the Dragons called glaciers . They were similar to the peaks of the highest volcanoes on their home planet, but so much larger. The Dragons said that this was a temporary cycle of the planet’s position furthest from the Sola, and that it happened at such an infrequent cycle that it wasn’t to be worried about forever.