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nobody knew. And second, now that their vision and sense of a purpose had been
inspired, the likes of Calazar, Showm, Caldwell, and just about everyone else
involved in the project, were not going to wait for the philosophers to come
to a consensus. In any case, philosophers of both races had done that too many
times on innumerable occasions before, and then changed their minds.
The object, then, was to appear at Minerva before the calamitous war had ever
happened. Yet, despite all the effort expended on discussions and planning,
exactly what was supposed to happen then was far from resolved. It wasn't that
the Thuriens and Terrans were unable to agree on goals or a strategy for
attaining them. It was simply that surprisingly little was known about the war
and its times, and even less about events over the years leading up to it.
Practically all of Minerva's libraries and records had been destroyed with the
planet. Probably influenced by the guilt they still felt aeons later over
their disastrous attempts to depopulate the Earth of predators, the Thuriens
had adopted a policy of staying out of Lunarian affairs and developing their
own part of the Galaxy centered on Gistar. Only in the war's final days, when
monitors that they had left on the fringes of the Solar System registered the
explosion that signaled Minerva's end, did they throw together a hasty mission
to investigate so hasty that they ignored their normal rule of not projecting
gravitationally disruptive transfer ports into planetary systems. The upheaval
caused by the port created for the rescue mission launched Minerva's orphaned
moon on the trajectory that eventually brought it to Earth. It also impelled
the largest intact piece of Minerva outward to become Pluto.
Miraculously, some Lunarians survived on pieces of what had been Minerva; but
unsurprisingly, there had been very few. They were recovered from niches they
had found in proto-Pluto and other fragments; as bands scattered across the
lunar surface itself a devastated waste from the conflict; and from assorted
craft and orbiting stations left adrift amid all the wreckage. Preserving
political texts and historical records had not been high among the priorities
the survivors had been concerned with at the time. It was only much later that
accounts were obtained from the Lambians brought back to Thurien, who would
later give rise to the Jevlenese. Those accounts had been almost entirely
verbal and reproduced from memory. The people they came from were
disproportionately from such groups as soldiers, space crew, mining and
construction workers, farmers, hunters, villagers, and other from areas remote
from the war zones, rather than urban dwellers, scholars, or professionals
likely to have studied such matters.
The tactic adopted for the Minerva mission, therefore, was the straightforward
one of aiming somewhere "downstream" i.e., a time following the war as best as
could be gauged, and working back "up" in a series of reconnaissance from
which it was hoped to glean enough information to determine a more propitious
intervention point.
VISAR had sent the beacons into the appropriate region accordingly two beacons
was now the norm, although there had been no failures. Preliminary readings
indicated the time period to be about right. The astronomical fixes had
located Jupiter and Saturn but not Minerva, but that didn't mean a lot, since
it could have been on the far side of the Sun. There was some electronic
chatter, but it couldn't be interpreted because the Lunarian communications
procedures of the period were unknown. The only way to find out more would be
for the Shapieron to go there and have a look around.
A tense but curious silence pervaded the Command Deck as all eyes took in the
images from outside being presented on the screens. "The beacons are here,"
ZORAC reported. "We're at the right place, anyhow. The channel back to home is
up and working." Images of Calazar, Caldwell, and anxious faces watching from
MP2, the lab at Quelsang, and a location somewhere in the Government Center at
Thurios formed a montage on the main screen.
"Well, I guess this is it," Caldwell said. "We'll talk to you again when you
check in later." The M-connection from Thurien to the beacons would remain,
and the beacons would still be capable of relaying via a regular
communications beam. However, the Shapieron would be cut off from regular
communications when it activated its main drive, which created an
encapsulating manifold of deformed spacetime that electromagnetic signals
couldn't penetrate.
"It won't be long," Hunt answered. "When we've just had a quick check around."
"Good fortune be with you all," Calazar said.
"We have no doubts about it," Eesyan replied.
"Take it easy with that thing, Junior," VISAR said aimed at ZORAC, to amuse
the bioforms.
"Junior? I was driving this ship before you were a design spec."
"Report local status," the supervisor requested.
"Wave function consolidated and stabilized," Garuth responded. "Ready to
detach."
"Dissolving the bubble."
"Local bubble deactivated," ZORAC advised.
The screens showing he link from Thurien cut out. The Shapieron was a free
body, now part of a different universe, as it had existed somewhere around
fifty thousand years in the past.
"ZORAC, go to main drive," Garuth instructed. "Take us to the first
reference."
This began a series of stops and checks around the Solar System to verify that
the Shapieron was operating normally under main drive conditions, and to
assess where and when they were. Minerva was not to be found. Its moon was
located, already on a course that would carry it inward toward the sun, and
nascent Pluto, emerging from the dispersing cloud of planetary debris. A long
range view from closer in showed the recently arrived Thurien rescue ships
commencing their thankless task. The Shapieron was able to pick up
identifiable Thurien crosstalk on the regular local bands and in h-link mode.
There was little talk around the Shapieron's Command Deck. Garuth decided that
they would not announce themselves. The rescuers out there had enough to think
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