Morpheus resented clunky, verbal speech where every subtlety of language required an additional depth of interpretation that could have happened more subconsciously if we’d simply connected telepathically.
I wasn’t in the mood to lay all my emotions on the table, especially not when it came to Jess.
“I made contact with an officer on the other ship. He studied as a historian at the university prior to entering the prince’s service, and he might know what happened to Jess.”
“Don’t be coy, Morpheus.”
I was doing a poor job at disguising my irritation. It would benefit me to be patient with him. He was only trying to help. He could spit it out though, instead of burying his true meaning in slow labored phrasing.
“We need to scan the surface of the Terran moon. It’s possible she has crash landed there.”
“Human beings cannot breathe the exosphere on that rock.”
“They cannot. But there are beings that possibly can, or they could.”
“The planet is uninhabited.”
“That’s what I always believed. The historian appears to believe otherwise. There are some records that indicate anancient civilization of telepaths that moved underground when the moon lost its atmosphere.”
“You haven’t come to me today with rumor and hearsay of some ancient civilization?”
Morpheus was now fully aware of my irritation and doing his best not to let it rattle him. Beneath my annoyance with him was my worry and my fear that something horrible had happened to the mother of my child. She had vanished from my telepathic awareness.
“That isn’t it. There’s debris on the surface. Potential that she’s landed. We’ll need to contact her Highness’ ship but there’s a real chance that we can at least check for signs of life near the debris. There’s an odd energy field emanating from the moon preventing more detailed scans.”
Energy fields. Debris. Scans. Life signs. He thought she was dead and he was only humoring me, pleading with the princess on my behalf so that I would have a chance to postpone my grieving. I both appreciated and resented him. I wanted no part in grief. She had to be alive..
“Contact the princess. I want to go to the moon’s surface myself.”
“Yes.”
“Where did she crash?”
“On the dark side, a few hundred miles south of the magnetic South Pole.”
“The sun doesn’t touch that side at all.”
“We will need our environmental field generators interfaced with our neural implants.”
The devices would hijack our autonomous nervous system, changing our metabolism to suit the otherwise hostile environment of the Terran moon.
“We’ll leave in two hours. Contact the princess and meet me in my quarters. I’ll have the engineers prepare our generatorsand one for her as well. If she’s survived, we’ll need a way to get her out of there.”
“So you believe she’s alive beneath the surface?”
“I have no reason to believe that. But I have no reason to believe that she is dead. Until I have proof, I have to assume that she’s alive.”
“Yes, brother.”
Morpheus bowed his head and went off to contact the princess. I prepared for the mission, eager to search for Jessica myself. She’d know she wasn’t alone. She’d know that as I’d promised, I’d be there for her.
My brother met me in my quarters along with his second pick for the mission. Tisiphone.
“Should both the captain and the first officer be on this mission?”
Tisiphone insisted we could use her expertise. I was too eager to leave to argue with her. We had back up and there had been in lull in Taurean attacks. With our environmental field generators prepared, we arrived on the surface of the moon. The temperature was as cold as the ice mountains of Devor, -100°C. Those temperatures were far too cold for a human being to survive. Reason and logic began to creep in, doing away with my hope that Jessica could be rescued.
We arrived at the debris site after struggling through our run towards the precise coordinates. After five or so minutes, breathing became easier and the temperature lowered to a more natural Devoran environment, around -20°C. Helpful.
