The Star Beagle Adventures
Episode 15:
Close to the Edge Part IV - Seasons of Man
Scene 13:
Called to the Seed
Called to the seed, right to the sun…
15.13
Called to the Seed
Although the U.S.S. Mako, which was towing the nacelles of the U.S.S. Escort and carrying the U.S.S. Arizona and the U.S.S. Bluebird within its primary shuttlebay, was separated by a growing gulf of lightyears from the following U.S.S. Beagle, which was towing the bulk of the U.S.S. Escort and carrying the U.S.S. Puppy in its shuttlebay, the personnel aboard were able to confer in more or less real time via subspace radio. The delay of less than a second went almost unnoticed.
Both ships were still some distance from the Al Salemais star system, but probes from both ships were coursing through the trinary system, cataloguing the planets orbiting each star. Two G-type yellow stars orbited each other at a great distance, completing a single orbit in just under 829 Earth years. A red dwarf, designated as Al Salemais C (ASC for short) orbited one of these larger stars (ASB) at roughly the same distance that Saturn orbits Sol.
Two planets orbited the red dwarf, with a dense asteroid ring orbiting slightly further out. Four other planets orbited ASB within the orbit of the red dwarf and a dense asteroid ring separated ASC from ASB and its planets. ASA had 7 planets, with 2 gas giants outside of a less dense asteroid ring and 5 rocky planets inside, including 3 M-class planets in the “Goldilocks Zone.”
The conference was taking place in the U.S.S. Beagle’s conference room and the U.S.S. Mako’s holodeck. Using a newly developed function of the Beagle’s unique holotransporter, an extension of the Beagle’s conference table was projected, at which projections of the conference participants from the Mako were seated. This effect was mirrored in the Mako’s holodeck, so that, apparently, all of the participants were in a shared space with Captain Howard and Dean Sakura Nakamura Holland at one end of the doubled conference table and Commodore Yui Song at the other.
The entire program had been designed by Pel, demonstrating that, to someone immersed in the vagaries of the ferengi economic system, the relatively arcane mathematics of holography were child’s play. Holographic systems required sufficient extensive use of imaginary numbers to cause most electrical systems engineers to quail, but even this aspect of holomath was dramatically outmatched by the basics of ferengi accounting, which had elevated the use of imaginary numbers to an art form surpassing the miraculous.
“You might think that the climates of ASA 2, 3, & 4, based on their distance from the ASA star, would be hothouse, temperate, and icebox in that order. But that isn’t the way planetary climates work.” The denobulan planetologist, Cetris Rye, was holding forth. “ASA 2, the closest of the three habitable worlds to the ASA star, is currently undergoing an ice age, while both ASA 3 and ASA 4 are supporting what we would consider temperate climates with ASA 4, the furthest planet from their star, being slightly warmer. All three planets have significant biospheres, including large oceans, forests, and highly developed flora and fauna.”
“All of these variations are in response to conditions local to each planet,” continued Phillip Gorman, the planetologist from Sierra Leone. “Conditions such as location of the tectonic plates and the continental bodies that ride on them, their impact on ocean currents, air currents, particulate matter from volcanos, all have a tremendous climate impact.”
“There is significant panspermia in this system,” added the enormous director of the Tellerite Biological Survey, Drisk javWalirsh. “Oddly, it appears that while life arose independently on each of the planets, that life was modified significantly by contact with single-cell life carried from one of the moons of ASB 4, carried by a number of asteroids that also brought water to those planets.”
javWalirsh brought up close visuals of the close orbit level of each planet. “Also, based on orbital debris, we have significant evidence that intelligent life, apparently arising on ASA 2, visited and colonized ASA 3 and 4, beginning almost 900 thousand years ago and continuing for nearly 60 thousand years, causing traffic in several species among all three planets. After nearly 800 thousand years, we can assume that the vast majority of those lines will have either speciated or become extinct, but the collective impact has been to homogenize the biospheres of all three worlds.”
“Unfortunately, due to the effect of Coulomb’s Law, any electromagnetic signals sent by these intelligent creatures would have faded into the e.m. background long ago,” opined Major Janet Carter, the commanding officer of the U.S. Marines’ elite reconnaissance unit, known by their nickname, the Space Hounds. “The only effective way to attempt to collect any residual signal would require sending a probe more than 800 thousand light years away. That would be eight times the diameter of the Milky Way Galaxy. And even in the darkest, quietest corner of intergalactic space, we would not be able to gather much.”
Commodore Yui Song, along with the other leaders of the expedition, had been digesting this information. “Is there any possibility that descendants of the race that created all that orbital debris persist in this system?”
“That is a question that we have almost no precedent to answer,” Captain Ronald Howard, XIV replied. “I can hazard a conjecture…”
“Please indulge us, Captain Howard.” Yui Song managed to keep the exasperation out of her voice. It took an effort.
“We don’t see any evidence of subsequent orbital hygiene, such as humans and most other warp-capable species engaged in to clean up the orbital mess around their planet to clear the way for interstellar journeys,” Skip Howard replied. “So it seems reasonable to assume that if any of those populations developed interstellar travel, it was not along the lines of warp drive or any other form of travel that would require them to clean up all that orbital junk. Further analysis will probably reveal several periods of near space activity, separated by hundreds or thousands, possibly tens of thousands of years of inactivity, indicating the rise and fall of civilizations capable of local space travel.”
“The last of these went silent more than 800 thousand years ago. Assuming they did not develop another method of interplanetary travel, it is highly probable that their descendants are either extinct, or have evolved into species no longer capable of developing interplanetary travel.”
Shadow surprised everyone by speaking up. “Assume, for the moment, that either they, or some other capable, intelligent species, persists on one of those planets. If that is the case, the anointed, the people you refer to as the holy landers, will attempt to enslave them. And we will have led the holy landers right to them.”
15.13
" and then the author's note mercifully confirmed I hadn't started fanfic-ing the fanfic. 
