Chapter 2

The two crews of the multipurpose space ships went on a second adventure as much to give us something to do while we waited for the engagement of the enemy as it was to have more target practice and to explore some more.

Exploration included heading back to Jupiter to circle more moons independently, Home steadily heading away from the giant planet. Like any scouts our craft had greater speed than Home and could easily catch back up. These were more of a close up view of the moons rather than extracting samples, though we did send probes into the material of the subjects to get data, making me wonder if it was for just us geniuses to study or if the information would be sent back to earth if it survived. It wouldn’t be backtracking all that much to head back towards earth since we planned to travel through space for generations to come. Or were we if we no longer became the ark, the last vestige of humanity? And Jock did seem to have invited several alien species to the proximity of our solar system. Would they be invited to Earth, us being the go-betweens to make that happen? And though we had our common enemy, would these most likely more advanced creatures continue to be allies or would they turn on earth and conquer it, many of the creatures if not all of them had lost their home planets after all.

“Yes,” said Emily when I expressed my concerns, “I have thought of that. The old man’s wife, Martha has worked with the cyborg AI Rosetta to translate from the little data we have received from these aliens.”

“What do you mean little?”

“Visual images have been mostly what we’ve received since as they say pictures are worth a thousand words. Only a couple exceptions had more than images, some coding, a written language has been included with the images sent from one species, but another has been much more forthcoming, sending us lengthy writing of some sort along with sounds, presumably their recitation, and images matching these words. Martha just received the latter as if they’d been waiting to see if we actually managed to escape earth before sending it. Like the former, they had added coding and were the only one to add sound before that for the images they sent, so Martha’s had a bit of a head start. Still not a lot to go on until now, and Martha sent both of these aliens Jock’s proprietary version of Wikipedia in English which includes vocalizing the words, along with our own translation of the images. Still early going and...”

“We still don’t know if they’ll be friend or foe in the end.”

“Whether they end up parasitic after our help or create a mutual relationship.”

“I suppose they could worry about the same thing considering our divisive history.”

“A history of us against them, especially when them is decidedly different.”

“Shit.”

“Except there’s one thing that might end up making our relationships remain mutual.”

“What’s that?”

“Exterminating the vermin, which means going to every planet they took over and destroying it or at least them if we can, and finding any other advance team they may have.”

“Having one being destroyed makes it even more worrisome they may be back.”

“Or they may hopefully be cowards avoiding us, but we can’t expect that. What we do hope to do is to capture the main ship and if they’re a hive mind like they may be, be able to find them wherever they are.”

“Capture a creature or the ship.”

“Both hopefully.”

The most incredible thing we tried was space walking. For our first times Emily and I tethered to our ship. Tiny jets at our wrists and ankles helped to stabilize us, and a larger jet attached to our backs could give us some acceleration if we wanted. Control came from verbal commands, each jet getting a designation like LH for left hand and RF for right foot and, amusingly, BJ for back jet, with a number designating the amount of propulsion. No flames emerged from these jets, rather an expulsion of gas similar to the way the space crafts operated. Emily and I experimented for over an hour, getting gradually better at it, Emily especially, before Joan, untethered, joined us, obviously with vastly more experience. Their craft hovered about 100 meters from ours.