The Wanderer

"Captain?  Captain?"

My eyes twitched, but I didn't let them open.  If Ang thought I was deep in sleep, perhaps she would leave me alone.

"Captain?  I can sense that your brainwaves have not relaxed into REM sleep, so I know that you are awake."

I groaned and opened my eyes, greeted by a sparse field of stars before me.  I'd been clenching the arms of my chair the entire time, making my knuckles tense.  I massaged one hand with the other.  "Sorry, Ang.  I thought I could get a few more minutes."

"I have suggested that you balance your diet to provide more energy for the long voyage."  Her voice was behind me but also everywhere.  The ship had been installed with enough speakers to rip the fabric of space and time if I cranked the volume high enough.  "We are also running low on sleep aids if you continue using them."

"I know.  Is there a problem with the ship?"

"No, Captain.  Earlier you instructed me to guide us home automatically, taking the shortest route possible while you drifted in and out of sleep."

"Yes, that's what I said."

"This route has taken us through a previously unexplored part of interstellar space.  My judgement in taking this path was logical, but I have just received a distress signal."

"From where?"

"It is directly in front of you, sir."

"Ang, I don't see anything."

"Allow me to turn on the infrared filter, Captain."

I blinked once, and then the window before me did the same.  Now among the sparse field of stars, glowing green through the filter, was a planet.

I leaned as far back in my chair as I could, hoping it would go away if I strained my eyes, but it didn't.  "It's really there, isn't it?"

"Rogue planets are probably numerous in the cosmos, Captain.  This one has likely been wandering between galaxies for some time, and was ejected from its parent star a long time before that.  Many are not discovered because they are difficult to detect without a star nearby.  Astrophysicists usually do not discover them unless they are looking for them."

I'd heard stories of crews stumbling upon dark lonely worlds between stars in the Milky Way, but never thought I'd find one on the long trip home from Pavo-Indus.  The many voids between the galaxies and their clusters had been deceivingly relaxing to me.  I would either sleep for days or be awake for weeks.

How many others had I passed by?

"You said there was distress signal coming from this planet?" I asked.

"That is exactly what I said, Captain," Ang replied.  "This planet is approximately the same size as you home world, and behind it hides two satellites that continue to be in orbit.  The tidal forces of the satellites have kept the planet's core heated, and though it is very cold on the surface, there appears to be a thin atmosphere."

"Rogue planets aren't inhabited."

"I cannot detect life forms from this distance, but all known rogue planets in the cosmos do not harbour life, Captain."

"Then why is there a distress signal?"

"I cannot confirm why, but I can speculate if you'd like me to."

"Proceed."

"It is possible that a traveller like yourself crashed on the surface or became stranded, and sought shelter on the nearest solid surface.  Their A.N.G. unit would have detected the planet if it was within 1000 AU of their location."

"I'll be honest, Ang, I don't really want to stop and see what's happening down there.  I've been flying through space for six months and we have another six to go."  Stasis had been an option, but I'd tried travelling that way before, and still had a bum leg from the rookie lab tech who didn't thaw me correctly.

"While I understand your opinion, the message has been coded to include a recording."

There was a click, followed by a quick burst of static.  I jumped and tried to cover my ears, but Ang turned up the volume as the voice on the recording spoke through the noise.
"Mayday...mayday...sent...can't be like this...do something...Federation...help...send us help...can't keep...mayday..."

The recording ended.

"A Federation ship," I sighed.

"You are aware that it is illegal to ignore a fellow Federal or Federals in distress, Captain?"

"Aye, Ang.  Where is the signal coming from on the planet?"

"The mid-latitudes of the planet's northern hemisphere."

"Prepare the dropship while I get into my suit.  I want to be in and out of there as fast as I can."

...

I needed to keep infrared viewing on the entire time, to make sure I wasn't walking in pure blackness.  The rogue planet remained green to me on the way down.  Ang continued to monitor the planet from the main ship as well as the dropship, though most of the equipment wasn't made for taking remote readings of solid planets.  I'd been after other things in Pavo-Indus.

"Oxygen is prominent in the atmosphere," she told me through the earpiece in my suit, "but at far too cold of a temperature to venture without a suit.  I am also detecting pockets of methane and sulfur gas that are erupting from fissures in the south.  The satellites still fuel the tectonic forces of the planet."

I could see one of them then, peeking around the horizon, though it was the same glowing green as its mother.

"You will be landing within one kilometre of the signal's source in five minutes, Captain."

"Aye, Ang."

As I descended, I heard the familiar strain of an atmosphere through my helmet.  The few rogue planets in the Milky Way were free of any atmosphere, though also free of satellites.  Perhaps that was what made this one able to cling on.

I wasn't a planetary scientist.  I much preferred the void.

...

We landed with a thud.

"Proceed to exit, Captain.  Surface is solid but slippery, so be cautious."

My suit was only made for rare cases like this, but the Federation lab techs hadn't thought of an icy rogue planet when they were putting grips on the boots.  I still almost took a face plant when I stepped outside, but steadied myself on the ship and took small steps away.  The surface was very icy, but I could see the rocks below it with my infrared vision.

The ice had been draped over the original surface when the planet had been ejected, leaving every bump and lump in my way.  Everything that wasn't within a fifty-foot radius was nothing but a green mess to me, but Ang pointed the way to the signal.

"Do you see what I'm seeing?" I asked her, when I was close enough.

"I see everything you see, Captain."

"Then what am I seeing?"

"Ruins."

That was what lay beneath the ice before me.  The jagged lines of buildings, the posts jutting from the ground, and the lumps that were too smooth to be rocks.  Some appeared to be eroded hunks of metal and rubber, according to Ang, but others were corpses mummified beneath ice.

"All appear to be human," Ang said, and I didn't have anything to say about that.

"Where is the signal source?"

"A few yards away."

It was a building, and the door was guarded by a veil of icicles that were fairly easily to shatter.  There were still chairs and tables in the rooms, untouched by the ice that covered everything outside, but I was more interested in the weapons that hung on the walls.  I didn't recognize any of the makes of the guns and the knives were nothing like the standard-issue blades from the Federation.  Ang tried running a serial number through the database, but came up with nothing.

"What is this place?"  I asked, though it wasn't exactly for Ang.  "It's like some kind of outdated outpost that went wrong."

"That is a logical hypothesis, Captain."

"You said on the ship that this part of space hasn't been explored before."

"Yes, Captain.  While it appears on my maps, it is part of the interstellar void that no ship has ever crossed.  No flight paths were ever charted through here, except for us."

"Then why are there people here?"

"I cannot come up with a logical guess at this time, Captain."

The source of the signal was in one of the frosty rooms at the back of the building, its only window covered with a thick layer of ice.  On a table sat a machine in the back, and Ang detected that it was wired to a system farther north, where there was likely an array of telescopes and radio towers that broadcast the signal into space.  She wouldn't know for sure until we saw it, but the signal was sent there from the machine before me.   It was some kind of radio that continued to loop the same message.

"It's possible to patch into such a system this way," she explained, "though it is very unlikely that the signal could survive long like this.  The ice should have ruined it, but the array could be powered by geothermal energy that's still active due to the satellites."

"How old are the bodies here?" I asked.

"It is difficult to compute, but if we hypothesize that this planet was ejected from a Federation galaxy, it would have been adrift for a very long time, possibly longer than the Cosmic Federation has existed."

The Federation had ruled the cosmos for as long as the far reaches cosmos had been known, but I didn't feel like crunching the numbers in my head.  Those people could have been thousands of years old, at the least, and even if it had been a hundred thousand years, that would have been in the early days of our governing body, when the collective had only controlled the Milky Way.

"The signal had some interference when we listened to it on the ship," I said.  "Is there a way that you could clear it up from here?"

"If you allow me to land your ship to the array this is relaying to, I could theoretically patch myself into the system.  Though this is the source, I am unfamiliar with this system.  It is rudimentary compared to what I am used to, and I fear that I am not compatible."

"Do whatever will get you in."

Several minutes passed before I heard from her again.

"I'm in."

I had been exploring the building while I was waiting, and had found an ice-free corpse on the second floor.  It was a man, his skin paper-thin as it clung to the frozen bones of his body.  His clothing was as stiff as he was, and he clung to a weapon that was as long as he was tall.

"Can you do it?" I asked Ang.

"I am clearing the static in the recording right now."

I found equipment to make bombs in the next room, and I knew it because of the wires and switches in different pile driftis and the frozen plastic explosive that I wasn't going to touch.  Whoever those people were beneath the ice, they were preparing for war.

Ang played the cleared up message without introduction.

"Mayday!  I repeat, this is a mayday signal!  We've been sent away.  I don't know how, but it can't be like this, they're moving us!  Whoever is listening, you have to do something to save us.  The Federation knew what we were planning, they knew that we were ready to take them down by whatever means necessary.  They had the same means, and worse means.  We need help.  There's no food, and the water is already freezing.  Send us help!  We can't keep drifting away.  This is a mayday signal!  Whatever rebels hear this, send us help and destroy the Federation!  They threw us from our sun and we can't stop drifting away from everything."

I peered back into the room with the corpse.  "Of course."