Part of USS Polaris: S2E1. Entropic Foliations of the Galactic Fabric and Bravo Fleet: Labyrinth

Ellipticals and Inclinations

Academy for Agrarian Studies, Vespara Prime
Mission Day 1 - 1000 Hours
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The sun rose in the west, as it did every morning. As Professor Imbalta walked the grounds of the Vesparan Academy for Agrarian Studies, he heard only the whisper of a light breeze and the sweet song of warblers as they sang wee-see wee-see wee-see.

The aged Bolian could not help but smile. Days like this reminded him why he’d given up his old life and moved to a paradise unadulterated by the industrial and digital machinations that had sucked the beauty from so many other worlds. Sure, he’d abandoned an illustrious career in warp field theory, but teaching agroscience to young farmers was its own sort of reward, and it came with the opportunity to live in a sanctuary free from the grunge of the rest of the galaxy. Vespara Prime had no factories and mines, nor replicators and synths, nor even the handheld PADDs and tricorders that everyone else spent their days staring down at. On Vespara, you were encouraged to look up, and to enjoy. It was a refuge where the six million who called it home enjoyed a simpler, more fulfilling form of living.

Or it was.

It was until this moment, a moment when, in an instant, everything changed.

Suddenly, it became cold. Very cold. And dark. Darker than it ever should have been on a midsummer morning.

Professor Imbalta looked to the sky as if expecting to see a storm. But there was not a cloud in the sky, not even a lonely wisp to occlude the direct sunlight. Instead, as he looked to the sky, he saw something he could not explain: the sun seemed dimmer, and it appeared to be flickering. K-Type main sequence star didn’t do that, he knew from his prior life. The orange dwarf at the system’s center had at least another five billion years of juice in it, and after that, it would grow into a red giant over another billion years. And that would come with an increase in luminosity, not a decrease. What, then, was going on? Why was it suddenly darkening?

Maybe he was just seeing things, he thought to himself. He closed his eyes and then opened them again. No, it was still flickering. He closed them again, and opened them again. Still, there was no change. As he squinted at the sun, he swore it almost seemed lower too. That didn’t make any sense. None of it did.

Around him, others were pointing at the sky and talking in hushed tones. Astrophysics wasn’t taught on Vespara – to worry about off-world matters was simply not their way – so for these young people, they had nothing to go on, but admittedly, even though he did have a past career to lean on, he didn’t really have anything to go on either. Stars didn’t do what theirs was doing.

The Bolian broke into a jog, making for his office as fast as his old legs could carry him. Vespara had no modern technical wizardry, no astrometrical scanners or neutrino telescopes to speak of, but buried somewhere in his desk, he still had a trinket from the before-times that might help. And right now, answers were more important than maintaining the ignorant harmony of their society.

“Professor! Professor!” came an out-of-breath voice from behind him. “Professor, what is going on?” It was one of his students, a young man named Malik, one of the curious ones who’d actually asked him a few questions over the years about the galaxy beyond Vespara.

“I’m really not sure,” Professor Imbalta admitted as they came upon his office. Quickly, he rummaged through his desk, and beneath a heap of papers, he found what he was looking for. “With this, I’m hoping we can figure it out.” The professor pulled out his old tricorder, a relic from a bygone era. He popped it open for the first time in years, but it chirped to life like not a day had passed. Its microfusion power cell would outlive them all. “Let’s go.” 

As Malik followed his mentor back outside, he looked curiously at the device. For those beyond Vespara, a tricorder was a near-constancy, a simple device used for even menial tasks, but for Malik, a boy who was born in the maize fields to the south, it was completely foreign. Even the beeps it made were alien. They simply didn’t have such things on Vespara.

“Umm, this is very strange…” Professor Imbalta mused as he pointed the device towards the sun. “It’s… it’s… it’s supposed to be the middle of summer, but our orbital inclination suggests we’re headed into the middle winter.” He hadn’t been seeing things earlier. The sun was lower in the sky.

“I’m sorry professor. I don’t understand. What do you mean by orbital inclination?” It was not their way, on Vespara, to study that which lay beyond. It was part of what made their life so idyllic, the way they very intentionally kept focus on the then and now. 

“The seasons we talk about,” Professor Imbalta explained. “In our culture, we focus on how our seasons impact the flora and fauna, but fundamentally, the seasons are an outcome of celestial movement. Our planet tilts as it rotates around the sun, and this inclination, relative to the equatorial plane, is what causes warmth in the summer and cold in the winter. Right now, our hemisphere should be tilted towards the sun, but according to my readings, we’re actually tilting away, as if heading into winter.” The frigid air outside certainly emphasized the point.

“How does that happen?”

“I’m not sure,” Professor Imbalta admitted. He didn’t want to worry the boy, and he tried to keep a straight face, but he was nervous. Something was wrong. Planets didn’t just change their tilt in an instant. As he continued to look at the readings, he noticed something else. “Also, we should be in the midst of our retreat towards the aphelion, but according to my readings, we’re actually moving back towards the perihelion.”

Again, his young student just looked at him with confusion on his face.

“Sorry, all gibberish to you,” Professor Imbalta apologized, acknowledging that these were not things they spoke of in pleasant conversation on Vespara. “Our planet rotates in an elliptical orbit, and this time of year, we should be moving further from the sun.” He moved his hands as if to illustrate the point. “This alignment between orbital movement and planetary tilt – we lean in while we move away – helps offset the impact of the summer’s inward orbital tilt for the southern hemisphere, which is why our summers are so mild in the south.”

“And that’s why we have so few villages in the north, huh?” Malik asked, starting to catch on. He hadn’t been taught these things, but he was a quick study. “If that’s how it works in the south, the opposite would be true in the north right? And that’s why they have squelching hot summers and freezing cold winters up there, isn’t it?” He had always wondered why the north was so inhospitable, but it wasn’t the Vesparan way to ask such questions. Now, though, he knew.

“Yes, exactly,” nodded Professor Imbalta. “Or that’s how it should be… except right now. Right now, according to these readings, we’re moving inward, not outward.”

“But why is it so cold then?” Malik asked as a gust of cold wind washed over them. “Didn’t you just say that, when we get closer to the sun, it gets warmer?”

“If all things were equal, that would be the case,” Professor Imbalta nodded. “But in geophysics, they have a saying: inclinations over ellipses.” 

Neither of them had any way to know that, in a mere six hours, the planetary tilt would flip again, and, in a coalescence of tilt and orbital distance, they’d experience a summer afternoon to rival the hottest the north had ever seen. And it would just get worse from there.

“And what’s going on with the sun?” Malik asked. It was still flickering.

“More questions to which I don’t have answers, my young friend,” Professor Imbalta frowned as he patted the boy comfortingly on the shoulder.

Without a gravimetric interferometer, the professor had no way of detecting the photon lensing occurring just beyond the corona of the Vesparan star, nor did he have access to a high resolution spectroscope that might have been able to see the new accretion lines trailing out from deep in the photosphere.

“Why is this all happening?” 

“I have not the slightest idea,” Professor Imbalta sighed as he closed his tricorder. “But I know what we need to do.” He began to walk quickly across the grounds. “Come with me. We need to get down to the main administration building.”

“Why?”

“It’s the only place with a subspace communicator,” Professor Imbalta explained. “We need to place a call… and quickly.” Whatever was going on, it went far beyond what they could explain on their own, and if things continued to worsen, they might need far more than an explanation. They might, in fact, need a lifeline.

“Who are we going to call?”

“Starfleet.”

Only then did Malik realize the gravity of the situation.

Comments

  • WOW! I've just learned more about planetary orbit, climate and how seasons work than I did in school. Or I have brain rot and forgot. Either way, that was amazing! I learned so much and yet, now I'm very intrigued! What the heck is going on with the planet and why is it doing that?! It wouldn't be related to the underspace apertures, would it? Could it really do that to a planet? Fact that they know calling Starfleet means they're in trouble, shows. Also liked the pun there at the end. That was intentional, right? Can't wait for the next one, I really want to know more about why the planet is having this problem!!

    June 15, 2024
  • What a fabulous way to start a story of this magnitude. I love that your story doesn't even mention your ship or crew yet. Who cares what Polaris is doing. What matters is this poor, young, innocent boy who is about to have his whole world, literally, flipped on its head. Imbalta would be a scientist any ship would be lucky to have on their crew, I am curious as to how he ended up here, on Vespara. Who ya gonna call? Starfleet! As always you do a stunning job of setting the scene and laying the foundations of your story, and I am hooked already. It nearly made me forget how annoyed I am at you for letting Lewis get off scot free. Almost. :D Haha!

    June 15, 2024
  • I'm a keen amateur astronomer and whenever a member weaves actual science with the ubiquitous "technobabble" of sci-fi into their writing - I perk up and start to keenly follow that story from Perigee to Apogee!!! I'm also always appreciative of writers who are confident enough to take the time to scene - set and explore their characters innermost thoughts, motivations, surroundings and reminiscence - hallmarks all of a confident hand on the tiller of creative - writing. I'm only going to put this story down for long enough to go rummaging for my own gravimetric interferometer, before hurrying back to witness the arc of this story rise from starting Nadir to final Zenith!!!

    June 15, 2024
  • You painted a picture with just enough detail to imagine how everything was on a typical day for the people of Vespara, before rapidly turning it into a far from normal day! A great piece of writing and I look forward to how this planetary chaos unfolds.

    June 15, 2024
  • I love how this almost had a horror movie quality. The writing was so deeply ingrained in Imbalta’s perspective, I got to experience that sense of dread as he began to lose his paradise, his sense of self. In the first chapter, there was already a sense of tragedy in Imbalta looking at an impossibility, desperate to believe there was something wrong with him, rather than something wrong with the universe. And I just met him! You were so affective in expanding that sense of unease as other people noticed the sun was wrong too, but were completely unprepared to even acknowledge Imbalta’s line of questioning. You set me up so well with the comfort in my favourite line: On Vespara, you were encouraged to look up.

    June 15, 2024
  • No disappointment in how specific you explain the geophysical gravity of the situation, I loved it. You showed that something bad is happening, teasing us by every corner of what really is going on. Vespara is in for some big problems with such great impact happening to its star. The cultural difference of how Vespara is explained also makes me curious in how they are able to know about Starfleet, they come off as ....pre-warp culture ro at least nto yet there. Malik curiosity is sweet to read about and for some reason when you said "Who are you going to call" I expected ghostbusters ;) Great post!

    June 16, 2024
  • I love how you used the knowledge to explain planetary orbit and I have to say you did an awesome job in it. After learning the need of Orbital Mechanic's as well as Astronomy the picture you painted was incredible and an awesome way to start the story. the beginning felt like that of a movie from the perspective of what should have been summer becoming winter. As always the picture you paint in vibrant and full of so much color. Can't wait to see what it to come.

    June 17, 2024