Captain Keller

Maury Keller was the Captain of the Ark II mission to Tau Ceti. Along with Pilot Abu Fayed and Co-pilot Mitch Alexander, these three men were frozen along with all the other crew members but their sarcophagi were stored in the front of the Ark, in the command module.

At the beginning of Part 2 of Rome's Revolution, MINIMCOM is inching his way through the inner Oort Cloud because of its extremely high density.



If the Oort Cloud had been of regular density, they may have never discovered Captain Keller's sarcophagus floating at the edge of the Tau Ceti system.

     “The object is to your left approximately one hundred and fifty thousand kilometers.”
     The central section of the large flat-panel monitor built into the front console lit up and but it only showed the cold, clear darkness of interplanetary space.
     “Where is it, MINIMCOM?” Rome asked. “I do not see anything.” She squinted flipping between regular vision and her telescopic vision but nothing resolved itself.
     A set of sequentially widening circles appeared on the center of the screen, reminiscent of a radar sweep or an air traffic controller’s screen. If the purpose of the circles was to locate the object, there was nothing there.
     “I don’t see anything either. Can you switch to infrared?” Rei asked.
     “The object is sitting at ambient. That would not help you.”
     “So how can you detect it?” Rei asked.
     “MIDAR.”
     “So show us the MIDAR screen,” Rei said exhaustedly.
     The screen switched to a set of fixed concentric circles and within the circles, a bright line appeared as it swept clockwise. When it hit the 11 o’clock position, a tiny dot flashed. It was easy to see that the object lay below the plane of their current trajectory.
     “Can you magnify it?” Rei asked.
     “Of course,” replied MINIMCOM. The concentric circles slid off the screen zooming into just segments of arc. The object that they were tracking became centered. MINIMCOM suppressed the reflections of the extraneous mass surrounding the object but there was no legend to gauge its overall size.
     “What are its dimensions?” Rei asked.
     “The object is roughly two meters long by one and a half meters tall by one meter deep.”
     “Oh my god,” Rei said.
     “What?” Rome asked. “What do you think it is?”
     “You’re not going to believe this,” Rei said. “But I think it is a sarcophagus. That’s the exact right dimensions.”
     “What is it doing out here?” Rome asked.

Well, we know exactly what it is doing out here. We learned in Part 1 that the Ark II hit something as it was passing through the Tau Ceti system. The collision sheared the command module and SSTO booster off and the Ark II careened into space, lost until it was found by the Vuduri in the Tabit system 13 centuries later. We can only assume that somehow Captain Keller's sarcophagus got flung free without too much damage. We never did find out what happened to the other command crew members. In a day or so, we'll cover Rei and Rome's moral decision about what to do with the recovered captain.