Captain’s Log: A New Planet “Arcadia”

Following the same plan as last time, we slowed to conventional speeds as we came into sensor range.  The sight was, I’m afraid to say, outwardly disappointing.  A greenish-bluish planet, with forests and deserts and plains.  Not the pure green ball of C-131, but also no conspicuous trace of human life – just a beautifully terraformed planet.

As well it should be – according to records, the colonization attempt involved sending radiation hardened robotic terraformers far ahead of the lumbering generation ship.  The machines would arrive centuries ahead of the generation ships, replicate themselves, and terraform the planet.  So at first I assumed that the generation ships had never reached the planet.  Zephyr reminded me that the location of a perfectly terraformed planet might be quite a valuable commodity, particularly if space exploration speeds up, and waiting centuries to terraform a planet becomes, as she put it, “unfashionable.”

Upon closer examination of the long-range sensor data (it providing a ‘picture’ would be a gross exaggeration) Maria and Susana agreed upon orbital anomalies indicating the presence of orbital structures, nearly a ring of them.  This was good news, particularly given their repeatedly voiced concerns about the dangers of Zephyr landing on a planet.

However, our jubilation was short-lived.  On my order, we used the FTL drives to move into clear visual range of the planet, and, we hoped, sensor and communication range of the orbital habitats.

Instead of finding a thriving orbital community, all we found was a ring of orbital debris.  The sensors were able to identify the composition of the debris, determining it to be consistent with the materials that would have been used in building the colony ships (as per the technology used on New Montreal at the time of departure), as well as containing material from the nearby asteroid belt (one assumes they were pulled in to use as ready-to-use orbital colonies by the terraforming robots).

This was disappointing on a whole new level, with the current probable scenario being that the colony ships made it here, but at least one inexplicably crashed with the orbital structures, creating a field of debris that wiped out the other ships.  It presupposes a terrifying degree of incompetence, but I suppose that anything can happen over the course of hundreds of years of travel.

Or maybe that’s not the case!  Susana just messaged me that there are indications of life on the surface, so I’m going to meet her now.  I hope that everything I just wrote is wrong and irrelevant!