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    The Pandora Legacy
    The Pandora Legacy
    The Pandora Legacy
    Ebook76 pages59 minutes

    The Pandora Legacy

    By William Bumgarner

    ()

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    About this ebook

    The discovery of an ancient starship in the Oort Cloud draws a group of explorers from Earth into a startling revelation of Humanity's distant past.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWilliam Bumgarner
    Release dateApr 15, 2012
    ISBN9781476299112
    The Pandora Legacy

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      Book preview

      The Pandora Legacy - William Bumgarner

      The Pandora Legacy

      by

      William Bumgarner

      The Pandora Legacy

      Copyright 2012 by William Bumgarner

      Smashwords Edition

      All rights reserved.

      No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author, with the exception of a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

      This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of the characters to any actual persons, alive or dead, is purely coincidental.

      Cover design by William Bumgarner

      PART ONE

      CHAPTER ONE

      Deep Space, 2046 A.D.

      Her name was Pandora and she was a little over seventy years old. To the casual observer, she would have appeared cold and dead. But within her titanium-aluminum, steel and fiberglass body, a small nuclear reactor still functioned at a minimal level; providing just enough energy to operate a simple computer connected to a tiny, but powerful, radar imaging unit.

      Once every one hundred twenty days, Pandora would awaken long enough to scan the void ahead of her and, if she found nothing, go back to sleep.

      Seven decades earlier, in the mid nineteen-seventies, she had left the Earth of her creators to embark on a looping, exploratory mission through the Solar System, briefly visiting each of the outer planets as she went. During that initial portion of her voyage, she had been active and alert continuously, gathering countless gigabytes of data which she faithfully transmitted back to her planet-bound masters.

      Once she had passed the tiny orb of Pluto and its even tinier moon, Pandora received instructions to begin the second phase of her ambitious task: To search the Oort Cloud for the leftover, primordial building blocks of the Solar System. Little was known of these mysterious fragments other than what had been learned or supposed by observing the relative few which had managed to fall toward the faraway Sun to become comets.

      Pandora was an attempt to change that.

      When her radar detected an object lying in her path, she would alter course to intercept; passing the target within a few hundred yards and scanning it with a variety of sensors. The probe would then compress the data and send it back to Earth in a series of three microbursts; each preceded by a signal warning of the coming transmission.

      As she neared her next search cycle, Pandora began to stir. Precisely on schedule, she awoke and activated her radar. An internal thermocouple told her when the radar transducer had warmed to operating temperature and she began to emit microwaves in rapid pulses, sniffing out the way ahead. After thirty minutes without a contact, she was about to shut down when her receiver picked up a faint signal; the echo of her own transmissions reflected off an object at extreme range. Immediately the robot space explorer came to life. Her main computer came on line and a host of primary, secondary and tertiary systems began energizing. The reactor was brought up to full power and within minutes Pandora was ready for action.

      Data streams flowed between her computers as she calculated the object's distance, trajectory and velocity. Her navigation computer fired the thrusters and she altered her own trajectory to match.

      Pandora was going to work.

      Chapter Two

      Green Bank, West Virginia.

      Radio tech Martha Patterson sipped cold coffee from a chipped, ceramic mug and winced as the bitter liquid flowed over her tongue. Bleary-eyed, she studied the bank of computer monitors around her. On those monitors were displayed graphs and myriad sine waves depicting the millions of radio signals collected by the giant dish antennas outside. The knowledge that her work was important to the field of radio astronomy did not help to relieve the boredom of working twelve-hour shifts six nights a week.

      Perhaps, she thought, if I actually had something to do, it might not be so bad. But everything here is automatic. All I'm here for is to watch for malfunctions or in case something unusual comes in. Fat chance of that, though. I've worked here for two years and nothing has ever happened.

      It was just at that precise moment, of course, that something happened.

      One of the screens began flashing red and black and the words INCOMING SIGNAL appeared. As she had been instructed when she had started working at the National Radio Observatory, she hurriedly switched on a pair of old-fashioned reel-to-reel tape recorders tied to that particular receiver and frequency. When the message had repeated itself three times, she waited a few minutes to be certain of getting the entire transmission before again turning everything off.

      She rewound the tapes and pulled the spools from the machines. One of the tapes she stored in a gray metal cabinet. The other she fed into a computer

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