Chapter 2: Essco

~~ April - Week 14 ~~

The scientists busily scoured through the data coming in from the probes around Futura.

They needed to learn all they could because they had been spending most of their time learning about Tychy. It kept everyone busy, and there was a lot of excited talk about what they had seen and found so far.

A few days later, as they approached the orbit vector, Sean and Lee found Philip and his wife Ulani with Nicko and his wife Kelli, Kyle and Eze in the dining room. Philip was flipping between the images that they already had from the probes.

Philip had two of the big monitors split into four screens, so he had eight different pictures showing at a time. He was studying them intently when they joined the group.

“What’s up, Philip?” Sean asked.

“Tell me what you see?” he replied.

Lee and Sean studied the images as they appeared on the monitors. Lee looked at Sean, and he returned the look. “This planet is occupied,” replied Sean looking at the group.

While excited, the group also had an underlying fear. This could turn out very good or very bad for Earth.

“Sean, do you believe Ben was acting alone?” Ulani asked him.

Without hesitation, Sean said, “No.”

“We have something to tell you, please take a seat,” Nicko said. “Philip and I have already spoken to the Captain, so he knows what we are going to discuss.”

Sean and Lee joined the group. Sean sat so he could see the rest of the room. He had a feeling they didn’t want others to be privy to this conversation. Several people in the dining room were watching the group with interest.

“Should we take this elsewhere?” he asked.

The group looked at him. “Where?” Nicko asked.

“I think we should grab a couple of those fold-up chairs and a bottle of milk. Then go back to our place for coffee,” suggested Lee.

Everyone nodded. Ulani and Kelli grabbed some snacks while Lee got the milk. Kyle and Sean grabbed a couple of chairs, and they all headed down to Lee’s room. The boys set up the room, pushing the sofa to the wall to make room for the extra chairs. Meanwhile, the girls got the snacks and coffee organised.

Ulani and Kelli hadn’t visited Lee’s place before. They were amazed by the set-up and a little envious of the space Lee and Sean had. In small talk, Lee told them that Miss Piggy was pregnant, and she doubted that the pig would be happy in a breeding pen.

However, Dave had told Lee that he would set up some jump boards and a bigger bed in the next room so the piglets would stay put until weaned. This would let Miss Piggy move around, as she wanted too.

Remembering the pig, Ulani and Kelli decided that they each liked their own bedrooms’ just fine. Everyone soon had a snack and a coffee and somewhere to sit and be comfortable. Philip transferred the pictures to the big screen that Lee and Sean had, so they could discuss what they saw.

Philip narrated the following:

“The four pictures here show some of the areas where we had detected high radiation. See this one,” he pointed out an area. It showed what resembled the remains of flattened dwellings.

“We believe these remains are of a city that was in the outer blast area of a nuclear explosion. Probably, something akin to the type of A-bombs dropped on Hiroshima about one hundred and fifty years ago, only these were a lot bigger. Hiroshima had a ground zero blast area of nearly a kilometre. Some of the blast areas here are closer to three klicks.”

“We believe they may have used an element we don’t know off in the composition of their bombs to still have a hot zone that we should avoid. From the radiation decay of isotopes that we have identified, we think they dropped theirs at least two hundred years ago.”

The information we have had from the probes indicates that unlike us, they didn’t stop at two. We have been able to identify at least thirty sites where we believe the larger bombs were detonated. If the bombs were smaller and had lower yields, we can’t pick the radiation signatures anymore.”

“Sixteen of these sites are in the northern hemisphere, and the other fourteen are in the southern hemisphere. Some of the sites in the southern hemisphere indicate more than one or possibly much larger devices had been used. Most of the locations are towards the polar ends of the temperate regions or about the forty-five to fifty-five-degree latitudes.”

“This indicates this planet was once a lot warmer than it is now. The consensus is that it was a lot like Tychy is, possibly even hotter. We believe that most of the population had lived in the bombed zones at the time. The carbon radiation decay readings indicate that most if not all of these bombs were set off probably within hours or just days of each other.”

“The result is that most of the larger population areas were destroyed and they created a minor nuclear winter. We estimate the population dropped from over a billion people to four to five million. The firestorms they created, as well as several super-volcanoes erupting over the next fifty or so years, probably caused by their folly, didn’t help them either.”

“The mesosphere is thicker than Earths and has higher carbon and ash readings than we expected. Even so, the information we are getting from Kyles last probe suggests that the troposphere is breathable. It’s no worse than Earth’s air was sixty-odd years ago before we finally started to clean up our own backyard.”

“Sandra thinks that this planet is probably still about five to ten degrees cooler on average than our Earth currently is. While that doesn’t sound like much, it is significant. Particular when you take the seasons into consideration and the slightly larger axial rotation.”

“In the regions that were once the most populated, they would now have much longer and colder winters and very short summers. The ice flows would constantly be melting and reforming, making these regions hard to live in.”

“After the bombs were dropped, we think most of the old cities were abandoned, and people shifted to the new tropical zones that were once too hot to live in. The increased rain in these zones and lower temperatures would have caused a boom in the growth of flora once they had sunshine again.”

“Initially, the two moons probably didn’t help the locals. The coastal areas would get very high tides when both were in alignment and conflicting tides when they weren’t. Their distances and sizes are their saving grace as far as lower gravitational effects than our moon, most of the time.”

“Sandra has already indicated that they get some big storms on this planet.” Philip flicked up pictures showing massive cloud formations currently in the southern hemisphere.

Philip had a swallow of his coffee and then popped up a map for his audience to scrutinise. Eze and the other cartographers had built the map from the information they had been able to ascertain from the probes.

[See: wiki: https://keltria.fandom.com/wiki/ for maps of the twin planets.]

Philip then said, “I’ll give you only a brief synopsis. As you can see, the planet had landmasses radiating out from both poles. The northern polar continent looked like runny icing that has slipped to one side, and it barely coved the top of the icecap. As you can see, it has two landmasses branching from it.”

“The dominant section had a spear of land that extended down on the west coast to just over the equator and a few shorter drips that spread mostly to the east. About ninety degrees to the east was a smaller landmass about a third of the size of the mainland. The ice cap segregated the two landmasses quite effectively.”

“Also, in the north are two smaller contents on the other side of the planet. They also had their northernmost ends under the vast polar ice cap. Neither of them extended as close as fifteen degrees to the equator. From what we can tell, they are very lightly populated with mostly scattered and well-hidden farming and fishing villages.”

“It is the dominant northern landmass that is the most populated with several modest-sized cities dotted down the west coast of the spear of land from about the fortieth degree to just over the equator at the horn. This landmass was also extensively bombed in the north and on both coasts.”

“On the east coast, we think we have a cluster of three small cities with several villages up near the forty-degree latitude. We have detected small communities in the coastal regions in the lower latitudes.”

“In the southern hemisphere, the polar ice cap covered a vast region of that landmass. Three prominent regions extend out from under the cap. The two smallest sections seem to be sparsely populated. The dominate section that had a spear of land that almost reached the equator is also near the northern spear.”

“At the end of the spear was a section of land about the size of two UK’s butted together at their widest points. A narrow land bridge joined this area back to the mainland. Towards the equatorial end was a large sprawling city that was the biggest city on the planet.”

“At the other end of the land bridge, was a much smaller city but it was prominent in that it fed these other sites on the west and the east coasts. This landmass had the most areas of radiation in the southern hemisphere.”

“On the east side of the largest southern continent is this stand-alone continent. It reminds me of a Red Delicious apple-shaped continent. Approximately a fifth of the landmass is in the northern hemisphere. This continent had also been bombed in its southernmost region but as heavily.”

“It has three prominent cities all within twelve degrees of the equator. The western city was in the south, and the eastern coast had a city on both sides of the equator. It’s interesting to note that all of the cities are near or in the mountain ranges and the regions are all forested.”

“The last big continent also crossed the equator,” Philip stated.

“It looks like a giant beanbag,” Kyle said jokingly.

Everyone agreed and then Philip continued his narration, “It appears to be mostly uninhabited as far as technology goes. You may notice that the beanbag still has some large desert-like regions across its centre. We have yet to locate any evidence of settlements larger than small towns. The most visible towns are located on the west coast in those mountain ranges.”

“There are a few lower on the eastern coast in similar locations and several tiny settlements scattered across the interior mostly in the mountainous regions and grasslands but towards the northern end.”

“An Interesting feature of this continent is that it doesn’t appear to have been bombed. I would have thought that it would have much higher populations. Mayhaps the nuclear winter hit these people that bit hard or they had a disease that decimated their people.”

“We believe these people are humanoid going by the buildings we have been able to pick at. They also seemed to have developed along with similar levels of accomplishments to us until the bombings. The sophistication of the bombs alone suggests this. Kelli thinks they were planted here.”

Phillip grinned at the shocked looks on the faces of his audience. “Going by the level of industrialisation that we have been able to detect in the three most settled areas; Kelli believes that these people were set back several centuries by the actions of their fore-parents. They are only just starting to recover.”

“Our problem is that if we wish to establish contact, which settlement should we go too? We do not want to upset the locals. We don’t want our presence to cause hostilities between the north and south to reoccur. There is also the issue of if we should make contact at all?” Philip concluded his narrative and looked back at the group.