Chapter 126

Dear Willow and family,

I know that you think that I'm taking time away from working on getting back to my family to write these letters to you. That however is not true. We've snuggled up to a fair sized asteroid, something in the neighborhood of a hundred tons of the right metal combination for the replicator to use for building drones. The project for the next month or so will be expanding either the replicator or building several so that they can each produce components of what will be drones that can be used to explore the area where we find ourselves stranded.

Except that we don't have a place to get out and walk around what has happened to us is a lot like the tales of being shipwrecked on an uncharted island on Earth. We are building several types of drones that hopefully will allow us to search for the (suspected) star-gate that we came through. Some other ones are going to be used to build a directional antennae so that we can hopefully get a fix on the 'echos' that we think we're hearing of an IFF beacon from an unidentified Confederacy ship.

The thing is that after we have set all of this in motion there isn't much for us to do except wait for the data to begin to flow. And before that it was wait for the drones to be built. So what else should I do? Chase Holly around the pod? We do that quite a bit even if she is bulging quite a bit with my baby. And no I'm not complaining about her size. She says that she feels like a beached whale. I just tell her she is gloriously beautiful.

Why is it that women all think that being pregnant makes them ugly? I can't imagine a time when I thought that my wives were more beautiful than when they were in the last trimester of their pregnancies. Yet that is the time when they are all certain that they've become most unlovely.

The worst thing about that is that they won't hear me at all. Indeed they seem to be sure that I'm lying even when I make love to them for hours at a time. Something that I do as often as Holly is in the mood for. And even if she doesn't think she's attractive she certainly is horny to the point that we've both about had to take breaks in the med-tube!

The drones we've made have begun to show some results. The 'gate' is there, it is ancient and we don't know how to control where we'll be if we enter it. There should be a control station here, the issue is finding something that has had a million or more years to cool to the temperature of the space around it. Something that may have been intended to be mostly invisible at the time it was built, and something that is possibly partially in another dimension.

All of those are questions we have to answer before we decide to use the 'gate' in an attempt to return to home. We've tuned the hyperspace engines of a special drone to hopefully activate the 'gate' and had the ship's AI bud the least instance of an AI to guide the drone on it's trip and to record any data that it may experience. It has an entirely different set of sensors than a usual space probe, or ship would have. Now that we're certain that there is a gate here we know about what sorts of sensors will 'map' it if the drone can get it to activate.

We sent the drone off the other day. The main problem we may face is that the AI instance that was installed was so small that it couldn't sustain a 'hyperspace' 'radio' so we'll just have to hope that it can map the 'gate' and return by it. It was awesome to see our screens light up to show the 'gate' opening since we had our sensors tuned to it. At the same time we had regular light cameras out to catch what they could of the event. Their take is somewhat more disappointing. That is because they only saw the navigation lights of the drone seem to disappear into nothingness. I'll tell you this, it is enough to make a man believe in magic. One second the drone was there, and the next it wasn't. Of course that is what should have happened if it entered hyperspace as well. The thing is that we are fairly certain that the drone didn't go into regular hyperspace. That's because a hyperspace transition would have left an entirely different set of electronic emissions. Indeed the 'gate' transfer that we're fairly certain did happen left almost no signature to show where or in what direction the probe drone might have gone.