The Tale of The Noah continues....

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get my story of the Noah completed in time to enter it in the science fiction contest I had planned on.  Real life reared its ugly head and interrupted my writing time too much.  The story itself also took on a life of its own that would not allow itself to be ended quickly.

I did go back and do a little editing to my previous entries in order to clarify a few things and correct a couple of mistakes.  I will update the previous posts with these edits by this time next week.  Word of these updates will be posted on my Facebook page.  In the meantime, here is a continuation of the story itself that I did manage to make despite interruptions, interferences, and power outages.

The majority of the crew of the Noah battleship waited patiently for a communication from Earth. Those that would be directly involved in the evacuation maintained their systems in a state of readiness. Others waited until their duties maintaining the environmental systems for the humans were required. While the environmental systems could be maintained automatically, the upkeep of a dry environment by a ship built for those that normally resided in oceans wasn't to be trusted to computers alone.

Darryl studied the interference patterns his cousin had emailed him. Without realizing how long he had been staring at the graphs and listening to the audio recordings, he finally got a grasp on what was before him. He rubbed his tired eyes, printed out a few key files and made a couple of notes, and carried everything to the dining hall. There he searched for one scientist in particular. This researcher had a hobby that involved numbers and multiple possible permutations and sequences. If anyone could figure out the details of what Darryl's cousin had sent him, it was a long-time D&D player and Game Master.

Darryl saw Alistair sitting alone eating with one hand and making notes on graph paper with the other. He approached the lone scientist with pages in hand. After a few minutes of discussion, Alistair looked away from his notes to the ones Darryl had presented. Looking over them briefly he stated, “It's simple. It's a base 12 encoding. Just different enough to our own base 10 to seem random unless someone is used to looking over numerical possibilities. I'm due to be back in the lab shortly. Once my shift is over, I will look over your notes and this signal and let you know if anything rises from the mists of confusion.”

Darryl thanked Alistair and grabbed a quick snack for himself from the buffet tables. He was due to start a work shift himself soon. As he was getting ready for the last few hours of his work shift, two pieces of news came to Darryl's attention almost simultaneously. Alistair had started to decode the information Darryl had given him earlier. While an exact translation was impossible, there were data components that could be easily interpreted. Alistair would meet with Darryl later with the information.

The second piece of news impacted the camp at large. The politicians had finally come up with a message to be broadcast to the Noah. The message accepted the help of the Noah in evacuating the planet, should they provide enough evidence that said evacuation was necessary. They also wanted to know the specifics of the plans for the evacuation so priorities could be made for getting more valued members of humanity safe first. There was no mention of how it would be determined which members of humanity were more valuable than others. The people that worked around the base were nearly unanimous in guessing that the politicians would form the head of the line. There was little to no mention of rescuing the non-human residents of the planet Earth. This came as no surprise to anyone that had worked with the politicians for more than five minutes.

The Noah received the message and excitement and activity both increased significantly as the crew prepared themselves for the evacuation plan. There was some confusion regarding the possibility of prioritizing the evacuation. The Noah felt that all life was equally important, regardless of how obvious or subtle their contribution to society may be. Because of this, their evacuation plan treated all the residents of Earth as equals and would evacuate them all at once. They were already scanning less intelligent lifeforms and comparing the results with their original scans when they originally transported everything to Earth. They looked for variations in DNA sequences that had crept in over numerous generations. This would allow them to simply update their files for reconstitution instead of collecting completely new DNA scans. There were a few new species that were descended closely enough to previously known species that an adjustment was all that would be required.

The Drag'kun battle fleet was primed for their attack. Designated crafts were starting to alter their course in order to intercept and attack the Noah battleship. The rest of the fleet would quickly enter Earth's atmosphere and begin razing major population centers. Panicking citizens would later be collected for enslavement. They would then be forced to extract usable materials from the wreckage of their own former homes and places of industry. Some would be given the ardous task of gathering raw minerals from the planet itself. There were no plans for stocking food or supplies for these slaves since they weren't expected to survive their duties.

Please leave a comment saying what you do or don't like about the story and where you think the story may go.