Chapter 134

Dear Sister of my heart,

To you and your family; greetings. Life just can't seem to get worse at times. Will is gone, Katy has fallen in the rabbit hole (or worm hole, or whatever) and disappeared. The plate, if you can call a piece of planetary crust less than a mile in any direction a plate, that our house and township are situated on, is either being subducted on one side or we are overriding something on the other. We have a decided tilt, nearly two degrees lately from left to right, or east to west, though without a planetary magnetic field and being unable to see the actual sun, that is a rather arbitrary designation (I've been told by the AI that the direction that has been designated east is spin-ward) or I thought it was ... that seems to be increasing slightly every day.

We've known that the planetary crust for our adopted home-world was quite active so having what Will calls 'growlers' several times a day was not a big deal. If, and our GPS system confirmed it, we were moving at absolute lightning speed for geological formations, then we could expect some sort of grinding as the pieces of planetary crust moved past each other. Not to much to worry about, all things considered. Now we have to place sensors at both the upper and lower edge of our little piece of paradise to see if we need to move. An inch or more a year of movement makes such things a bit more urgent than they were where I grew up along the San Andreas fault. Of course in some ways I'd much rather live with constant 'growlers' than with sudden shifts!

So that is how my home life is going. You of course have Will's last letter, at least since I got a copy I assume you did. So now I have two of my family off in terra incognito. Yeah I know they are actually in space rather than somewhere unexplored on our planet. But with Confederacy tech enhanced GPS systems there really isn't such a thing as terra incognito on a planet. You, and everyone else may not have seen it but, still with all the gear that has been practically built into our heads, we might not know where we are but our computers can tell us where we are, and bring rescue to us if we need that.

But in space? We might as well be sailing for the edge of the world. That is especially true when you consider the fact of wormholes, which our allies conveniently forgot to warn us about. Or even to give us the signature for so that we could recognize them. One thing we have been doing now that Will and Lily have gotten the AI's to cough up the parameters of several types of wormholes we've been running a massive drone building effort and sending out tens, even hundreds of thousands of them to look for such things in our neighborhood. Not to surprisingly we have several. One is even closer than the Confederacy data says such a thing can be to an existing planetary system. We're putting up beacons, or something akin to buoys so that they can be avoided. Though just mapping them will help a lot. After all it is not wise to cross them in any way.

One thing I would like to know, that is if you know that is; did Will have a penchant for poking his nose into abandoned houses and the like while he was growing up? Not that I should gripe, Will wouldn't be Will if he wasn't almost driven to rescue the helpless. So if he thinks, and he won't say but he does imply, that he thinks he is hearing a distress beacon from a Confederacy ship. Reading between the lines, both Lily and I have perhaps jumped to the conclusion that the missing ship that is most likely to be wherever Will got carried off to by hitting a navigational hazard that hadn't been mapped. Of course that was only speculation until we discovered that at some time in the past Atlantis-at must have been at the center of a lost civilization. The reason we say that is that within about eight cubic light-years of us we have discovered at least half a dozen star-gates. One of which is a good deal closer than it ought to be, which is where we think Katy went, as it is on the azimuth that she had as her heading when she disappeared, even if she disappeared quite some distance from where the nexus of the star-gate is.