Ilika knew that when he didn’t say otherwise, and especially when the situation was colored by emotions, his crew always returned to their original stations. On the flight to Ko-tera Three, he felt it too.
This was his crew’s first mission observing, and possibly influencing, a world approaching a critical turning point. On all their other missions to date, big decisions about the survival of the local people were already in the past, or far in the future.
Ko-tera Three was face to face with the knife-edge of a planetary crisis.
They had all the science necessary to understand the threat facing them. They had enough time and resources to fix it. They just hadn’t yet decided whether or not they wanted to.
Ashley had trouble relaxing and clearing her mind for star transit, as she was painfully aware of all the situations that could get the mission team tangled up in the affairs of Ko-tera Three. Eventually she settled into a meditative state and felt the star drive engage.
When they popped back into space and time, Mati sat at the helm blinking for a moment, trying to remember how she had gone from pulling a few weeds in her masters’ gardens, to piloting a starship and assisting a contact specialist during the most important moment in a planet’s entire history. She shook her
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head slightly and reached for her display selector.
As Rini re-activated his sensors, he felt in his bones that the world they were rushing toward was going to need more from them than they realized, more than just a deep-space response ship witnessing events so that others could learn from them.
Boro, gazing at the tiny planet floating all alone in the star-studded blackness, took a deep breath to calm his stomach before warming up the engines he knew his pilot would need. The sensation of being all alone suddenly made him shudder, and feel very glad that he, his friends, and even his backward little home planet, were being watched over by Melorania, Kerloran, and others.
Kolarrr’ka fluffed up his feathers as he gazed at the large display over the steward’s station, feeling a tiny bit of the deep cold of space, even though the air temperature inside the Manessa Kwi had not changed at all.
Toran Takil smiled to himself, seeing the planet where the sacred trust he had been given would continue to play itself out, and, with a bit of luck, be completed.
As Ko-tera Three grew larger on the screen and the blue color of its oceans became visible, Trekila Spimalo let out a soft squeak of excitement from the open part of the tank. She knew her contact assignment would be teaching her many new skills, building her confidence, and hopefully allowing her to go on other challenging missions in the future.
T’sss’lisss peered at the display, glimpsed the yellow of desert sands on two or three continents, and reminded herself that the next time she was surrounded by hungry canines, Rini might not be there to lift her up to the safety of a large boulder.
As they rushed closer and closer to the little planet, Malika-Terno began to see the shades of green that meant grasslands and temperate forests — the homes of most equines. He swallowed, knowing well the deep fears that often caused his fellows to be stubborn and inflexible, sometimes to their deaths.
Sata found all the necessary charts with her hands, but her mind was struggling to understand how the universe could be thought of as friendly, even loving, when the survival of an entire race hinged on the decisions those monkey mammals made in the very near future. She knew they had to make
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those decisions, or they would just continue to avoid them and never grow up, but it still felt a little unfair. “Chart to our base of operations is on channel five, a tiny tropical island far from anything.”
Ss’klexna Rrr’tak’fi glanced up when Kibi switched to the chart view. She looked forward to breathing salty air and loping along the beach before preparing for her contact mission that she had a hunch was going to require everything she could give . . . and perhaps a little more.
“Prepare to de-orbit,” Kibi heard Ilika say, and switched the large screen to the forward visual, knowing most Nebador citizens enjoyed watching the ground rush toward them. She had learned to tolerate the falling, crashing, about-to-die sensation, but would never love it. What she couldn’t avoid, by not looking, was the mixture of excitement and dread, deep inside herself, when she imagined being alone with Toran Takil again.
After the rapid descent under ion drive, the ocean and small tropical island froze on the display screen a thousand meters beneath the ship. The near-smile on Memsala’s turtle face matched the deep calm she felt, knowing that she might live or die on this mission, and the monkey mammals of Ko-tera Three might fix their reproductive, political, and ecological problems, or they might not, and in either case the universe would continue to unfold as it should.