Stars

Part III (continued) - Olympia

It happened fast. So fast it couldn't have been timed had someone been there to try. Still, no one would ever know how long Captain Purdy, his crew and cargo, hung in the black absence of jumpspace. It may have seemed to Purdy that he was listening to the death knell of the Olympia II for eons, but the jump was actually completed in a fraction of a milli-second. Although the conclusion of this jump meant the death of the entire compliment of the Ark, for Purdy it meant release.

The problem originated in the Navigational Processor. Since the Olympia team had been headed to a completely different system than the Cranes, the star charts in that system were not the most up to date at the time of their departure. 1400 years later their accuracy had not improved. It was a small miscalculation that caused their arrival to be so unfortunate. As it was, they tore through the fabric of Space/Time in just the right spot, at just the right time to place them in the same location as the fourth planet of the Sol system as it made it's way around the sun.

The sudden advent of the extra mass of the Ark simply could not be accommodated by the planet. The resulting detonation was extraordinary. The orb shattered instantly. One moment a planet, nearly the size of Terriana, spun silently in the void. The next instant there was nothing but a cloud of swift, deadly projectiles, expanding in every conceivable direction. In particular, a rather large number of these projectiles were headed in the general direction of the newly established colony on the third planet.