2251-2261 - The First Odek Administration (Part 2)
Count o'er those lamps of quenchless light,
That sparkle through the shades of night;
Behold them!–can a mortal boast
To number that celestial host?
Mark well each little star, whose rays
In distant splendor meet thy gaze;
Each is a world by Him sustained,
Who from eternity hath reigned.
Each, shining not for earth alone,
Hath suns and planets of its own,
And beings, whose existence springs
From Him, th' all-powerful King of kings.
What then art thou, oh! child of clay!
Amid creation's grandeur, say?
–E'en as an insect on the breeze,
E'en as a dew-drop, lost in seas!
Be thou at peace!–th' all-seeing eye,
Pervading earth, and air, and sky,
The searching glance which none may flee,
Is still, in mercy, turned on thee.
- from "The Stars.", Felicia Hemans
The Theta Spacecraft
In early 2257, an alien object moving under its own power hurtled into the Solar System from deep space. It did not respond to hails of any kind. United Nations research outposts on the moons of Saturn attempted to transmit every conceivable message: greetings in four hundred languages living and dead, mathematical sequences, astronomical data, even rudimentary scans of the instruder itself. The entity did not change course or speed, and remained completely silent.
The extrasolar spacecraft, dubbed "Theta" by one of the transmission specialists charged with finding a way to make contact, traveled at speeds never before seen by UNE scientists. (While the Balangao Drive could theoretically achieve nigh-unlimited speed with sufficient access to negative matter, at the time of the Theta incident scientists had kept the prototype FTL systems firmly below even those primitive systems' limited capacity.) A cylindrical object with a shield-shaped nose, Theta appeared to lack armaments, shields, or even a recognizable bridge. The 6 kilometer-long object was awash in strange blue lighting, which pierced through its hull in a pattern than resembled side windows on a conventional spacecraft. Nevertheless, no sign of activity within the vessel was ever recorded.
President Musa Odek held an emergency Cabinet meeting at Nairobi the day Theta was detected. After three days of frantic attempts at contact and no change in the object's behavior, Odek made the decision to activate the Earth Defense Fleet and intercept Theta before it could cross the Asteroid Belt. Though the Fleet's Admiral, Maria Guimarães, had been given orders to attempt peaceful contact, the President's orders were clear:
Should the Theta entity pose a threat to Earth or any of the solar Republics, it is to be fired upon and destroyed.
Initially secret, the Fleet's orders were leaked two weeks before the expected rendezvous with Theta past Mars orbit. In Parliament, the reaction was pandemonium. President Odek was accused of warmongering, of overreaching his authority, of jeopardizing the safety of humanity by initiating belligerent first contact. A particularly incensed Sovereignist delegate even accused Odek and Labour of manufacturing the crisis, and Theta, in order to seize the Fleet and use it to take total control of the government. Impeachment papers were drawn up, though never voted upon. Amidst the political chaos, Odek held firm, giving a press conference on March 25th in which he reaffirmed his standing orders, insisted on his legal right to command the Fleet as Commander-in-Chief, and dismissed the parliamentary opposition as "dangerous to stability and the safety of humanity [...] in this time of peril".
Mankind waited with anticipation as Admiral Guimarães and the five railgun-armed ships of the Earth Defense Fleet intercepted Theta just past the Asteroid Belt on April 3rd. In order to force a response, the UNS
America was placed directly in the path of the alien vessel. At 11:19 Nairobi time, Theta arrived as expected, whistling through the asteroid belt at a breakneck 14.6 times the speed of light. The Admiral broadcasted her messages, demanding that the intruder stand down and explain its purpose in the system, but she barely had time to finish before the spacecraft careened wide
around the UNS
America, never once losing speed. Guimarães ordered the Fleet around to pursue, but the sublight chemical drives of the first human corvettes could not hope to catch the object.
Earth watched these events with horror. The Fleet had proven less than useless; with its ships now trapped on the far side of the Asteroid Belt for weeks at least, Earth was undefended should Theta change course again. For another three weeks humanity held its collective breath, only to breathe a sigh of relief as Theta ignored Earth entirely, leaving the Solar System on June 6th. Since its last recorded heading led towards Alpha Centauri, the UNS
Galaxy was given warning and asked to investigate Theta further should it appear.
The Theta crisis shook Musa Odek's first administration to its bones. Besides a small boost after a signal from the UNS
Sputnik in UV Ceti was received in 2258, popular opinion of the Odek government plummeted steadily in the final years of his term. The Earth Defense Fleet, crawling home after its humiliation at the Asteroid Belt, became a target for ridicule, while the opposition of the anti-Fleet factions in Parliament remained no less stalwart. A coalition of delegates from sixty-three Earth Member States, plus Mars and Ceres, formally initiated legislation in the General Assembly to disband the Fleet in 2259, which failed.
President Odek lost the election of 2261 to Lu Guozhi, chief of the Research Council's sociology department, and an outspoken defender of institutional checks on executive power. But despite his first term ending in embarrassment and disgrace, the political legacy of Musa Odek was far from over.
Around all the breathless relief and political fury, one fact remained frighteningly apparent. Had the Theta spacecraft meant harm to Earth, no force on any of humanity's four worlds could have stopped it.
It took three years for the response from
Galaxy to arrive. Theta had been seen in Alpha Centauri only two months after it departed Sol, but for once, the bizarre spacecraft lay completely stationary. As
Galaxy had approached, it had set off towards the galactic north, again at great speed, but at its former position, the science vessel discovered something extraordinary.
Bathed in the light of three foreign stars, and orbiting an immense gas giant, a picturesque green world glimmered in the cosmic dark.
[Dates in this chapter - and future ones - may not match precisely with dates in screenshots. This is an intentional narrative choice. For example, although the crew of the UNS
Galaxy observed Theta in Alpha Centauri in 2257, in that era of pre-subspace transmission, Earth did not receive its report on the encounter until 2260.]