Oyataiyō: Oyataiyō, #1

By Vincent Lahorta

In the distant future, humanity's reach extends across neighboring stars, yet struggles persist as connections fade into the void. From the Ross System, the exploration vessel Oyataiyō embarks on a mission to reestablish contact with Earth, lost to them for centuries, and forge diplomatic ties.

 

As the crew emerges from hypersleep, they confront unforeseen challenges. The hypersleep changed them more than they expected and they must grapple with the repercussions

 

Guiding them is Captain Gudrún Gunnarsdottir, whose haunted past shadows every decision of her. Determined to unravel the mysteries of their journey and safeguard her crew, she delves into the enigma surrounding their arrival in the Earth's solar system.

 

As tensions rise and dangers loom, Captain Gunnarsdottir navigates a precarious balance between uncovering the truth and ensuring her crew's safety. Along the way, she confronts personal demons and unearths buried secrets, testing her resilience and resolve to their limits.

 

Oyataiyō: Echoes of the Stars is a gripping tale of interstellar exploration, redemption, and the enduring bonds of humanity. Join Captain Gunnarsdottir and her crew as they carve a path through the unknown, forging a new destiny amidst the echoes of distan t stars.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vincent Lahorta
• Release date: Feb 28, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224570768

Book preview

Oyataiyō

written by:

Vincent Lahorta

The Milky Way. What a strange name for a galaxy. Its spiraling arms enmesh billions of stars, its center a dense, shining star city swirling around a supermassive black hole. Full of incomprehensible energy and mass. And yet, among so many galaxies, it's no different. In fact, it's not even in the main body of the universe’s chain of galaxies and superclusters. A sort of rural village. And this secluded spiral galaxy has a secluded star, from whose planet the galaxy appears as a blurry white band of mist in the nightsky, and whose inhabitants, at some time, perhaps before even fire was known, named it the Milky Way.

What a name for a Galaxy! And this strange beings, unique on their planet, were very interested in stars. They used it as a guide, when they could only wander the vast wilderness, with its many stars to navigate on the way. The constellations were then filled with shapes, stories, became the world of the gods, and believed it’s a reserved place to those who passed and ascended into the afterlife. They never imagined that the starry realm of the night sky would eventually be physically travelled by their distant descendants.

They didn’t expect either that from another star, on another planet, their descendants, who come from different nations, would form one unified tribe. For them, the Sun would become just another star in the night sky, and the Earth would become history. A memory. A distant place to discover.

1

Class G star. It stood out more and more as the expedition spacecraft Oyataiyō approached. It had a huge, jellyfish shape as it glided towards the Solar System. As it crossed the border of the Solar System, its hull was bathed in a blue glow of St. Elmo's fire, which only ceased when the ship crossed the Heliopause. As the fire left the ship's hull, it became a black blur lost in space’s lightless void.

Then the ship’s lights came on. First the exterior lights, then the blue lights in the interior of the vessel began to flicker. In the empty corridors, the engine room, the various operating rooms and the bridge. After a loud, booming sound, a continuous humming sound indicated that the life support system had been switched on and was filling the hull with heat and atmosphere. While the process was taking place, the crew of the Woodpecker - one of the Oyataiyō’s „modules" - were waking up in the solitarization chamber. The captain, the first officer, the engineering and navigation team. The chamber in which they were in, life support was on all the time, although everyone slept in separate life support pods for safety. They slept, yes. One of the sine qua non of space travel was the invention of the perfect anti-ageing device. Hibernation was not a viable option due to slow cellular level damage, so interstellar travellers were forced to either live out their lives on the ship with no more than their great-grandchildren arriving, or become biologically immortal.

In the first case, the crew of the ships have, within a generation or two, transformed and adapted their way of being entirely to space and the ship, often to the point of alienation from other humans, and with a couple of patched-up, time-altered ships may still be nomadic, roaming the vastness of space. On the other approach, as it turns out, most of them cannot endure the long journey in their right minds. Several crews have gone mad, crashing their ships into planets, stars or falling silent after horrendous events as their systems shut down one by one. The newer crews were therefore in an artificial coma, where artificial intelligence monitored and kept the crew intact. both mentally and physically. So most of them felt fitter and healthier than when they went to sleep.

This is how Captain Gudrún Gunnarsdottir felt as she was the first to wake and watched the ship re-energise and awake her crew. Though she woke barely a little before the others, her long, raven black hair was already braided into a bun, as well tensed as her white tanktop and grey military fatigue trousers on her body.

Good morning sleepers! – she called out soldierily as she he looked around the group. – The systems are stable, fortunately nothing unexpected happened during our journey. Everybody undergo a medical check-up and a briefing in the mess hall in half an hour! – then Gudrún left as the others tried to wake up from over a hundred years of sleep.

Among them was navigation officer Kianda, who was still learning the ropes. She sat on the steel crate next to her sleeping pod like the others, staring at the floor and her feet as she tried to recall the post-awakening medical protocol. As she started to remember, breathing exercises, meditation, checking movement coordination... she kept staring at the floor, and wondered how, even though she was tired, she felt stronger and healthier. Prior to the mission, she had been pushed hard in training, both physically and mentally. And yet, she felt as light as a feather, but strong as steel. Her dark brown skin which had a beautiful shade, was also smoother, firmer, reflecting the blue light of the chamber in an iridescent manner.

Get dressed! - Pavlov said vigorously with a half smile. Kianda suddenly became wide awake. The environment that had been echoing in her mind was now reached her full focus.

The others were almost ready while she sat still, born naked and dreamy. She pulled out a drawer of her steel crate, from which she took underwear, socks, a tank top, and a jumpsuit, then quickly dressed and pulled on her boots. While the crew was in the medical examination room, the captain was on the bridge, reviewing the telemetry data. The devil never sleeps, as they say, and after 127 years of travel it's really strange to wake up in a spotless spaceship, artificial intelligence, maintenance robots or not. True, the distance wasn't great, or the route particularly dangerous. But still, she needed something for her mind to cling to, to make her feel the journey happenned. So much time had passed and yet, it was almost yesterday that she lay in the sleeping pod. And though she had been prepared for it, the thought, the acknowledgement , was still different from the instinct, the feeling. She noted to herself that she would have to talk to the medical team about this, and to Celeste, the ship's artificial intelligence. Perhaps it would be better if they had a few days of rest and exercise to get used to being awake and the time lapse, and prepare for the mission. With that, her wristwatch buzzed that it was time to head for the mess hall.

- All right, All right! - Dr. Rodrigues, the ship's doctor who was out with the first team, urged patience. Out of his white coat emerged the head of a striking grey haired man in his fifties, with a steely but worn face. He was one of those who, although accepting the technology of life extension as a necessity for space travel, rejected the rejuvenation procedure for religious/philosophical reasons, and thus, apart from the time spent sleeping in deep space, aged normally. The captain specifically sought a few such people for the ship, believing that such people, by their appearance, especially when coupled with wisdom, would be good for the morale and comfort of the team. Most of them looked about 25-30 years old and, if you don't count the time spent sleeping, that's about their life experience.

- First Officer Toshida! - the doctor turned to his patient, a robust Asian man - You're fine, you can go! - Toshida stood up, looked around at the people waiting in line. About twenty people, the first brigade of ship's officers and engineers. He decided to ask the captain for another half hour for the medical examination. After Gudrún agreed, Toshida sat down in the examination room and waited for everyone to finish. The captain was obviously going through the ship's records, the voyage logs, maintenance logs, logistical logs, so maybe she'd better have an extra half hour, even if she wouldn't admit it, until then he'd supervise the team.

Gudrún raised his head above a large table with the layout of the ship on its desk-screen. It was 3 kilometres long and shaped like a jellyfish. The head of the jellyfish was a huge parabola, 4 kilometres diameter, which served as a shield during the voyage.  The spacecraft's tentacles were three gigantic outward-facing engines, their ends enclosed in an isosceles triangle, and in the middle was an even longer, robust steel structure that was the ship's transmitting tower, with various transceivers and sensors. in the Parabola shield’s protected nest, there were the different moduls; smaller ships, among them the Woodpecker Naval Corvette which they were on deck at the moment. The Oyataiyō was also called a superstructure, as it was able to rearrange itself to function as a space station when stationary, and the rearranging was also necessary to switch to interplanetary engines from interstellar engines. The ship was designed so that the modules were small ships in their own right, with life support systems and propulsion for travel within the solar system, and if the situation required, the modules could be used to form a colony of their own on the surface of a celestial object. For a crew of 300, the Oyataiyō was decidedly oversized and over-secured. It also had a reserve of backup systems.

As Gudrún zoomed in on different elements, she found everything in order. The ship was structurally sound, except for a few small craters on the shield. However, the telemetry data showed that there had been no contact between the ship and the home planet for thirty years.

The 'connection' is nothing but pinging. Since time dilation during the journey