A.S. Orgua
TheAurian Spacecraft Orgua (Transplant), traveling 50,000 miles per second, approached a star system 3 million miles from its outer planet. Optical and electronic sensors embedded in the matter-antimatter-propelled Orgua, a long square tubular structure with a sphere half Orgua’s length in diameter at the front and a large nozzle at the rear, scanned the system’s eight major planets. Orgua’s quartz computer searched for positive answers to four questions: Did the system have a planet an optimal distance from its star so that its surface was neither too hot nor too cold? If yes, did that planet have an oxygen-based atmosphere? Did it have oceans of salt water? Did civilization exist on the planet, evidenced by lights and communications broadcast? Only data received from the third planet contained positive answers to all four questions.
For the first time during its journey of many light years through dozens of star systems, positive answers to these queries set an irreversible process in motion. Orgua altered its course, putting it on a trajectory to pass between the planet and its singular moon. Once the course correction was accomplished, a door in Orgua’s body slid open, ejecting a small conical atmospheric-entry vehicle. A long pulse of energy from the cone’s base began to slow it as Orgua continued on at full speed. Having accomplished its only mission, Orgua’s computer shut down, never to restart. Its sensors became deaf and blind. It severed all communications with the cone as it continued its journey through the galaxy, as if losing a part of itself was of no consequence.
The cone continued to slow. By the time it crossed the moon’s orbit it was traveling less than 50,000 miles per hour. The planet’s gravitational pull drew it closer until it went into orbit around it. The computer aboard the cone initiated another energy pulse from its base to slow it again and put it on a course to enter the planet’s atmosphere and descend to a landing in salt water close to a land mass to avoid mountains, deserts and jungles. It was on target except for a minor malfunction in its computer that failed to detect the weather; the cone was headed for the center of an extreme hurricane.
Rion and Sena, refugees from the planet Auria, had designed and built Orgua with the help of thousands of Aurians, so the couple could cross the galaxy in suspended animation in search of a habitable planet to save their species from extinction. They were the sole survivors of Auria, destroyed by a collision with an errant moon of a neighboring planet, knocked out of an unstable elliptical orbit by a mega asteroid. Having found Earth, however, Rion and Sena now were on a path to an ocean grave.
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