The Starward Exiles Entry 9: The Wormhole and the Shadow
Once we’d returned to the ship and left the Droguldai way station, I felt a desire to say something, but a somber silence had fallen over the crew, and I couldn’t break it. Throughout the initial part of our journey, I’d remained in the hull, feverishly writing these entries and trying to recount Earth’s history and the lore. Now, I found myself in the front of the ship. It reminded me of the old-fashioned cars—something called a “van.” The Eagle Seven was a large ship, but the flight deck was surprisingly small. This did not help the tension. Heath had taken the pilot seat, and Jill sat in the copilot seat beside him. Cinthia and Helen sat in front of me in the two chairs behind Heath and Jill, while I sat on a long bench-like seat in the back row. The brown leather seats were worn and cracked. Buttons and controls I didn’t recognize flashed all around me. I couldn’t guess what any of them did, and the whole compartment smelled of rust and mold. Stars streaked past us, but even at such a rate, it would take years for us to reach our destination. Dry air tormented my nostrils, and silence filled my ears.
The first to speak was Helen, and her words didn’t improve matters. “So, are we perverts, Monk?”
Jill snapped her head back and hissed, “Shut up, Helen.”
“I knew about the zoos,” I said quietly. “Although, I’ve never met anyone who was forced into them.”
“It put us in a real spot,” Helen said. “Should we have died rather than given up our virtue? Should we have died rather than give up our babies?”
“Please stop,” Cinthia whispered.
“I want an answer,” Helen said, smiling, and there was no humor behind that grin. “It’s tormented me for years. How’s God going to judge all of that?”
“I don’t think you sinned,” I said. I had my reasons for believing this, but something told me Helen wasn’t really interested in hearing them.
“What about the jealousy I felt when Madulluel let Mary keep her next set of kids?” Helen asked. “I was happy for her, sure. But I was jealous. Furious even.” She looked up at Heath. “Was that the deal, Heath? Mary got to keep her kids if you dated the alien queen?”
Heath was quiet for a long time. I heard his knuckles popping on the wheel from my seat. Finally, he whispered, “How long have you been wanting to ask that, Helen?”
Something about his tone defeated Helen. She leaned back in her seat and cupped her hands in her face. She let out a long sigh and practically melted. “Sorry,” she muttered. “Seeing your kid got in my head is all. She’s cute and everything, but that just . . . brought stuff back.”
“I know,” Heath said.
More silence filled the cockpit. Jill eventually broke it. “At least, we know where Jeena and Silby are. What’s the plan, Heath?”
“Do we have to?” Helen asked. “They led the coup.”
“Coup?” Cinthia asked with a wry grin.
“Whatever,” Helen said. “I say leave them.”
“That’s not going to happen,” Heath said.
Helen groaned. “I know. Just thought I’d bring it up.”
“What’s the plan?” Jill repeated.
“Not now,” Heath said. He gave Jill a sharp look, and she nodded. Cinthia stiffened in her seat and frowned.
The silence returned. After a while, Heath knelt down and began flipping switches. Two antenna-like arms extended from the left and right sides of our window. There was no noise from outside the ship, but some motor inside the cockpit began humming, and I knew I was about to see something I’d only heard of. A few seconds later, the stars in front of us shifted. That was all there was to it. There was no swirling mass of energy, no distortion that appeared as rippling waves in front of us, just a subtle shifting of the stars in front of us because they were no longer our stars.
By the time the Nordics had made their duplicitous play during the Treaty of Introduction, the US government had long since figured out how to use wormholes, but they’d failed to tell the public—for reasons of national security, I suppose. Again, I am not a technician, so I couldn’t tell you how these wormholes were created, but the trouble was that they produced a great deal of radiation, and the first men who attempted to use these portals quickly died. It took a great deal of time to figure out how to properly insulate the ships, both from the radiation produced by the wormholes and the radiation put out by the elements required to make them. There were also rumors. The men who traveled through those portals claimed to see things, but I’ve never met anybody who knows what. It’s been said that these portals are dangerous if one remains within them for too long, so everyone flies in and out as quickly as possible, but the length of these portals is something unknown to me, so it’s impossible for me to say how long a ship remains inside them. The other issue with these portals was that the coordinates had to be very precise. A pilot was required to have intimate knowledge of star charts and be capable of pinpointing the exact location of their destination in the Milky Way. If a pilot risked too many jumps at once, the ship’s controls would begin to malfunction. Even after centuries of effort, the protection against the radiation isn’t complete. How many jumps it takes to start experiencing deleterious effects is still a debated issue.
Heath didn’t seem bothered by any of this. He flew straight toward these new stars, and before I’d realized it, we were inside the portal. How to describe the experience? It was darkness of a sort, but not quite a void. All the stars, save the circle of stars in front of us, disappeared. The familiar light of the sun, which was quite faint, became sorely missed when it vanished from the window. Yet there was a light, a dark light, something blue and purple and undulating as if it were alive. It wasn’t still, steady, constant. I’d always envisioned the inside of a wormhole to be like going underwater. The sun wavers and shifts beneath the surface, making you aware of the liquid between you and it, but, this light, it was like the faint glow of a bulb, which becomes flickering and uncertain as it’s about to go out forever. Then something moved.
I saw it only for an instance, but I did see it! A black mountain shifted from the left side of the window. There was nothing but a blackish curtain with a blue and purple hue. There were no discernible shapes. That is until a shape, a mound, perhaps with a head, perhaps not—I couldn’t be sure—leaned to one side. Then the whole monstrous thing was there, and what’s worse, that motion revealed an army of somethings. I couldn’t see them, but there was more than one of that . . . something. Jill winced but did not speak. Heath kept his eyes forward, intent on the stars, the only source of light, before him. Helen and Cinthia kept their eyes downward, staring at their laps. They didn’t seem afraid, but they didn’t look. They must’ve seen that something before. Then that mountain began to turn, and we were out of the wormhole. Everyone let out their held breaths. I looked down and saw that I was clutching the cross draped around my neck. Then I wondered if we were playing with forces that should best be left alone.
Before I could ponder the question, I saw a small blue planet centered in the middle of our former circle of stars. The familiar constellations were gone, and although I am no expert when it comes to charting stars, I felt their absence. I knew I was somewhere wholly new, another region inside the Milky Way. But did we cheat to get here? I wasn’t sure.
“I’m going to land,” Heath said. “Then Jill, Helen, and I are going to talk. Cinthia, I want you to stay with the Monk.” Heath turned and eyed me. “I don’t care what you see. Stay on this ship. This is Nordic territory. If they find a Christian anywhere on one of their planets, you might be put in a zoo yourself, if you’re lucky. They still exist here. Stay on the ship. Understand?”
I nodded.
No one spoke as Heath landed. So far as I could tell, the planet looked exactly like Earth. The buildings, some skyscrapers, others more house-like in appearance, were oval-shaped structures, and as we descended toward a city, I saw that the roads and sidewalks were covered in metal plates instead of asphalt. There were ariel vehicles hovering over the plates, and I supposed that all the craft were using a form of magnetism for propulsion, but that’s just a guess on my part. Heath lowered the craft until it rested on a large parking lot surrounded by other ships that were similar in size to the Eagle Seven. In the middle of this parking lot, there was a low, wide building. It was as round and as wide as a stadium, but the domed roof led me to believe that the structure was a single story. Heath flipped a few more switches, and the craft landed with a thud. Then he was out of his chair, eyeing first me, then Jill and Helen, who removed their seatbelts and stood, intending to follow him.
Heath crossed to the back of the cockpit and turned. “Stay here.” But he wasn’t eyeing me as he spoke these words. He was eyeing Cinthia.
I’ll describe what happened next in the following entry, Lord willing.
May God grant you peace.
Hieromonk Nicholas Petrov
