Chapter 648 Mars Could Wait
“How long...” Fleet Admiral Jason Ryfczinski said. “How long ago did this happen?”
{Initial scans indicate a range of 30 to 75 years ago, Admiral. More detailed scans will narrow the field,} Teegarden, the task force’s AI, replied.
“So there’s a chance of survivors. Signal the fleet: launch a satellite constellation and put the explorer team on short call. Their orders are to find the survivors of this... this unholy massacre, should any exist. If there are no survivors, I want bodies,” the fleet admiral ordered.
“Yes, Sir,” the flag comms officer replied, then turned back to his display to distribute the orders to the fleet. “Satellites deployed, Admiral, they’ll be on station in approximately five hours.”
“Split the fleet, send half of it to Teegarden c. The other half, including the Teegarden herself, is to approach Teegarden b and enter a high equatorial orbit.”
“Aye aye, Admiral,” the flag tactical officer replied. “ETA to high equatorial orbit around Teegarden b is eleven hours.”
Thus began the exploration of the Teegarden’s Star system. The occasion was a solemn one, as the planets they were set to explore were in the grip of a nuclear winter, likely caused by an interplanetary war the likes of which no human could imagine.
Nobody knew what they would find, but they knew one thing for certain: whatever was dirtside would most definitely fuel their nightmares for years, if not decades to come.
Although they had a protocol in place to handle incoming objects, this was the first time they were putting it into use outside of their training simulations. Thus, even though they were almost a hundred percent positive that the incoming object was friendly, they were still using it as a drill for the sailors of the Terran Fleet. And not a single person in the SMCC, or by extension, the rest of the fleet, wanted to fuck it up, by the numbers or otherwise.
“Yes, Sir....” The analyst attempted to respond to the man, but had ended up talking to nothing but the door.
Still, he returned to his work with a serious look on his face that showed exactly how seriously he was taking his assigned tasks.
......
Precisely three hours and fifty minutes later.
The meteor-class messenger boat left warp speed directly below the ecliptic in a brilliant display of visible Cherenkov radiation reminiscent of a bird mantling and spreading its wings. The visible radiation was accompanied by a much deadlier invisible blast of ionizing radiation and supercharged particles that spread out in a cone in front of the small automated craft with enough force to strip the atmosphere off a planet, even with a strong magnetosphere around it.
(Ed note: While we can’t know for certain, the general consensus among scientists is that any ship coming out of an Alcubierre warp bubble would immediately launch all of the cosmic dust that got pasted to the front of the bubble and approximately all of the radiation ever in a spreading cone like it was fired from a shotgun. Not everything would stick to the bubble, of course, but even if 99% of the dust slides around it, that’s still a lot of particulate matter being shot out at relativistic speed.)
A few seconds later, quantum communications were established with the waiting picket ships. They hadn’t missed the mark by much, and in a feat of excellent stellar navigation, had come to full stop only five thousand kilometers away from the messenger.
The messenger herself, having performed outstandingly well on her maiden voyage, squawked her ident codes and signaled that she carried eyes-only dispatches for one Aron Michael, emperor of the Terran Empire from his subjects in the Proxima Centauri system and requested an escort to Earth to deliver those dispatches.
Mars could wait. There were more important deliveries to make first.