(Please read Meta Leone .1 and Meta Leone .2 first if you want the story from the beginning.)


The instant Adam stepped through the door and into the light beam that emitted down from the unseen ceiling, he heard the familiar sound of his presence being acknowledged.

“Attention! Officer on deck!” The imperative decree was barked from a strong male voice, followed by the perception of movement, presumably made by soldiers standing to come to attention and salute.

The Captain could sense that there were many others in the room, though he could see none of them. The acknowledgement of an officer on scene triggered an obligatory response from him, so he returned the assumed salute, lowered his arm, and then marched to where the beam of light moved to illuminate a podium. “As you were.”

With that order came a faint rustling as, apparently, the soldiers resumed their seats. Elsewhere in the room, murmuring could be heard but no clear movement.

The by-now-familiar female voice personification of the computer finally spoke within the forum. “Welcome, to you all. I am Elsa. Electronic-Life-Synthetically-Articulated.” She paused after that greeting and self-introduction, seemingly to let the anticipation, manifesting itself in bated breath, be fully appreciated in the resulting silence. But when she continued, there was an obvious change in her voice. She sounded solemn instead of soothing and inviting as she had before, and the serious tone did not match her words. “It is my pleasure to introduce you to your commander, Captain Adam Faeroe.” Her pause this time was brief, as she no doubt anticipated that Adam would be expecting to have control over the assembly. Standard procedure was for the captain of the ship to be introduced and then for him to ask the computer for the status of all systems with the passengers present so that everyone would be brought up to date at the same time. But Elsa didn’t wait for Adam’s prompting. “There is a matter that I must bring to light immediately, Captain Faeroe. We experienced cryogenic failure during the voyage.”

Adam expected her to continue, and he was sure that everyone else did as well, but only a painful silence filled the hall. It suddenly dawned on Adam that the lights in the room might have been kept low to prevent visual confirmation of the extent of the failure. Decisively, he took control and probed the computer for an explanation. “Elsa, what kind of failure?”

“Terminal, Captain Faeroe,” came her reluctant reply.

Her answer confounded Captain Faeroe since he was alive, as well as at least one of the six other soldiers, and he was sure that there were others alive in the assembly beyond that. It seemed odd to him that the computer, that Elsa, was not more forthcoming, leaving him to conclude that she didn’t want to deliver the full brunt of the blow all at once. Shaking his head, Adam reminded himself that Elsa was a computer and that whatever feelings he imagined her to have were just that: his imagination. Being a logic-driven person and not prone to emotion himself, he wanted the facts, and he wanted them without further delay. “Terminal? As in fatal? Elsa, define the loss!”

As if she were a child who was being chastised, she responded so tentatively that Adam could just picture her in his mind with pouting lips and a quivering chin. “Significant, Captain Faeroe.”

In an attempt to avoid snapping at Elsa, Adam tried to think about the computer’s choice of words, hoping that there had been more of an answer in them than he may have grasped at first pass. ‘Significant’ was a relative term. One loss was tragic in and of itself, but the loss of a key entity could be devastating. Or was it that the number was so large that the mission was already a failure?

His mission was to deliver ninety-eight civilians, forty-nine of which were men with the remaining forty-nine being women, along with a very large payload of supplies and equipment, to the planet Leone in an attempt to colonize it. The operation was technically a military affair and consequently the reason for the presence of the captain and his six men, although they expected to be staying only long enough to deliver the cargo and establish a preliminary foothold at the landing site. Then the soldiers would launch a small spacecraft back into orbit and return home, leaving the battery of scientists and experts on Leone to establish the colony.

Whatever Elsa knew, whatever had happened during the hibernation stage, must be something that would have a dramatic effect on the outcome of the mission as a whole. It was certainly time to find out what it was. “Elsa! How many did we lose?” Frustrated with the evasive answers he was getting, the captain pushed the exchange onward, not waiting for her answer. Whatever the number, he wanted to have a grasp of it visually. “Raise the lights in the forum immediately, Elsa!”

Simultaneously, the very large screen mounted high on the wall behind Adam came to life displaying the image of Elsa’s head and shoulders, in 3D rendering of course, with tears streaming down her face, just as the lights in the hall raised to a level which allowed full view of the entire room, and she uttered one word. “Half.”

Raising his eyes from the podium and squinting to adjust to the light, Adam could now see that the room looked much like a contemporary version of the ancient Roman Senate forum, without the marble of course, but stark white all the same. His soldiers, dressed just as he was, sans beret, were sitting behind the balustrade in the middle section of seats. There were women seated in the three sections to the left, and the three sections to the right remained empty.

Hearing that half were lost was heart wrenching. Seeing that half the seats were empty was poignant. But when it sank in mentally which half had been lost, the survivors, with the exception of the soldiers who remained quiet as they were trained to do, gasped in unison. Forty-nine women began to cry, sob, ask questions, toss blame, express disbelief, and abandon hope.

Turning to the screen, Adam addressed Elsa as if the visage there actually represented her point of view, and asked the first of many questions that came to mind. “Elsa, how could this happen?” Her response would not solve the problem, and though it might offer help in the form of one less question begging for an answer, more than likely it would do little else. But it was surely on everyone’s mind. Then again, what kind of answer could a computer give to such a question? Adam didn’t want a technical description of the cryogenic failure. He wanted to know how the failure managed to achieve the particular result that it had, so he reworded his question. “Elsa… If I’m not mistaken, what I’m seeing here is that we have lost the civilian male members of the colony. How is it that the cryogenic failure managed to effect only those members?” Adam was trying not to sound as if he were placing blame onto Elsa, but who else’s duty was it to monitor the status of every soul on the ship while they were in hibernation? And why was he trying to spare her feelings? Perhaps it was a side effect of seeing the tear-streaked face on the monitor. Again, Adam had to remind himself that Elsa was just a computer program, and that she didn’t have feelings of her own. More than likely, she was programmed to show appropriate emotions based on trigger words or situations aboard the ship. But the failure needed to be explained to the captain’s satisfaction.

“Because of gender differences, males and females are monitored by separate computer systems. And since civilians consume half the calories of a soldier, even in hibernation, and demand less of the ship’s energy resources to maintain muscle tone, civilians and soldiers are also monitored separately. The computer that monitored and regulated the male civilians crashed, then rebooted, but never brought the cryogenic chambers back on-line. With nothing to monitor, it registered ‘all systems normal.’ I failed to detect the discrepancy. There was no redundancy safeguard because of the energy requirements of the ship, meaning that the ship could not support the added energy draw of a redundant system and still have enough resources to complete the trip.” Elsa’s explanation, though technical, did offer some sound reasoning. But, it didn’t bring the men back, nor did it comfort the women. Their situation was still the same.

While Elsa explained, most of the women sat and consoled each other, but a handful stood in an attempt to venture down to the forum floor and approached the captain. Seeing this, the soldiers stood but looked to their commanding officer for confirmation. A nod from Adam was all it took to launch them into motion. They spread out, each taking a place at one of the six openings in the balustrade that granted passage to the forum floor, facing the women and effectively serving to keep them in the amphitheater-style seats.

Adam sought to maintain control of the assembly by offering condolences. “I am very sorry for your loss of your husbands. I wish there was something that I could say or do to ease your grief. But if you would just…”

Before he could go on, one of the women interrupted. “Thank you, Captain Faeroe, for your sympathy, but they were our affianced, not our husbands. And I assume that this means the project will now be scrapped and we will be returning home?”

She was an attractive, raven-haired woman, in her early-twenties if the captain had to guess, and she spoke with a Spanish accent. Wearing the ‘uniform’ issued to her, which consisted of a lightweight, navy-blue, jersey-knit, warm-up-style set, she matched the other women except that she had left the jacket unzipped over the well-fitted t-shirt which she had tucked into the elastic waist of her pants.

The slight skew of Adam’s eyebrows was because he was surprised to find her dry-eyed and calm, but it might have appeared to her that he was deliberating over the answer to her question, since he didn’t answer her immediately. Glancing down at the podium, Adam could view the touch-screen monitor to the computer there, which displayed information that only he could see. He had already been prompting it to confirm his mission objectives. Looking back up to the women in the gallery, he answered her firmly. “Negative. My orders are to deliver you to the planet surface. I have no other options. Now, if you would please have a seat and remain calm…” but before he could finish, she again interrupted.

“What do you mean you have no other options? You are the captain, are you not?” Her slight smile was genuine but something in her tone hinted at a torrent building just under the surface.

Adam’s chiseled face didn’t change from its steady abstemiousness. “Yes, ma’am, I am, and as such, I am under orders.” Then he made another attempt to regain control of the floor. “I’m asking you again to…” but the fiery Latino dared to interrupt yet again.

This time, her tone was cutting. “I think you fail to understand what options are available to me… to all these women, Captain. So I’ll tell you. None. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Get the picture? It’s blank. Empty. Bee-aye-double-are-ee-en. BARREN! Are you oblivious to what OUR mission on planet Leone was?”

Still seeming to be calm, the commander tried to answer. “No, ma’am, I am not. I’m sure that another ship will be dispatched with…” This time, Adam paused hoping that she would interrupt because he had no idea what to call them. Replacements? Even he was not that insensitive.

She did not disappoint. “Another ship? Another ship! That’s your solution to this? It will take you a year to get back to Earth and another year for you or someone else to return to Leone with… with… AHHHGH!” Apparently, she didn’t know what to call them either.

“Ma’am, I’m sorry. There is nothing I can do.” Adam’s voice conveyed genuine sympathy, and authority at the same time.

“The hell there is not! You can turn this ship around. Or are you that callous to human emotions?” The insult was evident as she started to turn around and return to her seat, but she changed her mind and decided to rub salt in an open wound. “Oh, but of course you are. You are a soldier.”

Adam wasn’t the only one that might take offence to that comment.

The soldier in the isle to her left took a half step forward and snarled. He was only a few inches shorter than Adam but with a beefier build. The soldier to her right only glared but he was even taller than Adam and as thick and as mighty as an oak tree.

Adam had had enough of this. “SIT DOWN NOW, MA’AM!” The booming voice of the captain echoed off the walls of the semi-round room.

‘Ms. Latin Spice’ didn’t appear to be intimidated but she was the only woman left standing. At least she was until the women next to her grabbed her hand and pulled her into a sitting position.

Adam took a moment to collect himself while tapping the touch controlled computer in front of him.

She was right, in a way. Emotions were not his strong point and that would be true of any soldier these days. And there was no denying that he was a soldier. Born and bred. That was his lot in life and his class. Race no longer mattered. Not since Iran nearly succeeded in launching a nuclear strike on Israel. Everything changed after that… but not as much as it would have if they had succeeded. Now, only your class mattered. There was one ruling power, the Allied Republic, but three classes: the intellects, the laborers, and the soldiers. Babies were tested from day one for defects, abnormalities, and for being carriers of disease. If any were found, life ended there. For those that passed that phase, the tests never stopped. They were put through tests for aptitudes, allergies, and mental and physical dexterity. Anything that could be tested for was. By the age of five, the decision was made as to the class that individual would be for the rest of his or her life, and it was set in stone. It was a very Spartan existence. Procreation was strictly controlled. Classes bred with classes. Anyone that proved to be unworthy or infirm just seemed to disappear. It had been this way for the last century. Survival of the fittest had taken on a whole new meaning.

That was what this whole mission was about, survival of the species, and only the best of the species at that. Earth needed a backup plan and when Leone was discovered, things went into overdrive. It had been a fluke, a stroke of luck, to even find the planet at all. But then to find out that preliminary data gave every indication that the planet could sustain life, earth life, human life, was like a gift from God, a second chance at Eden. Probes sent to the planet’s surface collected data for a while, but always stopped after a few days. At first they were sent one at a time, each trip taking a year, but then after a pattern emerged of a few days of transmission, followed by a sudden and violent cessation, they were sent a month apart. All the while the planet’s discoverer kept it a well-guarded secret. Dr. Frederick Weston Leone had plans for the planet. He spent the rest of his life making those plans and gathering the resources needed to make his plans a reality. It was a pity that he died before seeing it come to fruition. But he had lived long enough to see the ship launched. He would turn over in his grave if he knew it was over before it started.

The only way that these women would accept Adam’s decision was to know what he knew, to see what he saw on the screen. With one more tap, Elsa’s image moved to the upper right corner of the large screen and green letters began to appear on the black background.

RESOURCES AVAILABLE FOR RETURN TRIP WITH 56 SOULS: INSUFFICIENT.

In a voice unbefitting the man, Adam spoke softly, repeating his earlier admission. “I’m sorry. There is nothing I can do.”

(To be continued…)

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