Free The Long Road to Gaia by Timothy Ellis Page B

excitement, but also his commitment to the mission, and his wanting
to justify his Captain-father's faith in him.
    The scout ship jumped.
    "Woah!" said Twelve. "That
is sheer rotten luck!"
    "It's only rotten luck if it couldn’t
be prevented," I said.
    "This couldn’t."
    "Yes it could. It just needed one of
us to check the jump first."
    "What are we? Nursemaids?"
    "Feels like it to me."
    "Well we're not. As it happens I did
check it."
    I looked at him in shock. The longer I was
locked into this job, the less I liked my supposed supervisor.
    The system Galactica was in was empty.
There was nothing but a sun, with not even a stray asteroid out at Oort
distance.
    On the other hand, the scout ship had down
jumped strait into a rogue planetoid, which was on a strange elliptical orbit.
It was incredible bad luck, that on the only day in its orbit it was in a
position to threaten a ship jumping in, a ship had jumped in.
    They waited a week before sending another
scout ship. This was necessitated by the need to not repeat whatever had
happened to put the scout ship out of touch, or unable to return. Wait a while
so conditions change. Also wait a while in case it was one of those mundane
breakdown sort of reasons why they didn’t jump back on time. The scout ships
were supplied for several weeks, so unless something catastrophic happened,
they would be fine even if they couldn’t return.
    The wreckage was found on the side of the
planetoid facing the jump point. There had been no chance of survivors, even if
someone had successfully jumped in shortly after the first one.
    The rock was called 'Bad Wolf' by someone
in the crew, and the name stuck.
    Before they left, Galactica made an effort
to change the orbit of the planetoid, so it wouldn’t get so close to the jump
point ever again. Later on, when the tech to move it safely came along, it
would be moved even further off its original orbit.
    "Are you sure you don’t want me to do
anything?" I asked Twelve.
    "No. His kid brother will carry on the
family line."
    "What a waste," I said.
"Potentially good lad I thought."
    "That’s the way it goes."
    I pondered that.
    It was increasingly obvious that people
meant nothing to the others. All they cared about was preserving the bloodline
to generate the one person they wanted.
    Maybe that meant I'd changed. Somewhere
along this road, I'd started to care more about humans.
    I pondered that too.

Two
     
    The Hunter family were still in mourning
when Galactica jumped into the next system. George Hunter was a man torn in
half. He'd lost his oldest son, but he had a job to do. The stress was killing
him, and finding something really unusual wasn’t what he'd been hoping for.
He'd been Captain for a long time, and all he knew was this ship, and the
handful of planets he'd been able to get down to for a few days each. Losing
his son was the straw that was breaking him.
    "The journey is almost done," I
whispered to him. "Hang in there."
    They found something unexpected. Two jump
points were showing without anyone searching for them, and neither of them were
in the usual orientation, in or around the Oort cloud of the system. It had
never happened before.
    "We're here," announced a voice
from the rear of the bridge.
    George startled. He hadn't heard this voice
before. He looked around, preparing to yell at whoever it was to get off his
bridge, but the words died in his mouth when he saw who it was.
    The Keeper walked slowly up to him.
    "We're here," he said again.
    "Where?" George couldn’t help but
ask.
    "Where prophesy begins."
    "Prophesy?"
    George started going red in the face.
    "Who cares about your stupid prophesy?
Where was prophesy when my son died!"
    The Keeper looked at the grief stricken man
desperate to hold on to his professional sanity.
    "I'm sorry," he said. "There
is a Jon Hunter mentioned in prophesy, but he hasn’t been born yet."
    He raised his hand to stop the outburst he
knew was coming from George.
    "Until we arrived