She was tired, and her stomach would not stop gurgling. Every time it did, the surrounding students would snicker. 'You all are the reason I am hungry,' Christiana thought as she did her best to focus on the lecture.

Lunchtime had been a nightmare for Haruhi-nee and her. It was as if the entire class descended on the Sisters like vultures did corpses back on Old Earth. After sitting down in the cafeteria with their trays of food, everyone bombarded the duo with questions about the girls' heritage. It was so bad that neither of them could eat a quarter of their meal. When the surrounding gaggle of children ran out of queries and she was able to ingest a few bites of her salad, the bell chimes rang, marking the end of lunch period.

Somehow Haruhi-nee had eaten more than Christiana, but over half her provisions remained when the two had to stop dining. In a moment of inspiration, the dark-haired girl wrapped up her fish sandwich in a napkin and then motioned for her to do the same. Then, while the younger sibling was still wrapping her meal, her oneechan took both of their trays up to the lunch lady at the washing station.

Returning just as Christiana was putting her freshly wrapped sandoitchi in her pocket, Haruhi-nee flashed her sister a smile. Then she grabbed her hand and said, "Let's go before we're late."

So, thanks to the older sibling's quick thinking, the two girls had some food that they can eat once the school day finally ended.

'Thank goodness that it's last period,' Christiana thought as her stomach rumbled once again. Doing her best to ignore the snickers of her classmates, she looked over at her Sister's desk.

Haruhi-nee was peering at the teacher, appearing calm and collected. 'She has to be even more tired than I am,' she worried as she glanced away. While not as introverted as Sophie-oneechan, the dark-haired girl did not do well at being the center of so many people's scrutiny. Therefore, if their lunchtime ordeal drained the more extroverted womb-mate, then it had to have exhausted her oneechan. 'She always puts up a good front, though,' she realized, impressed by her sibling's strength.

While stifling a yawn, she turned her attention to what their sensei was saying. Last period was Mrs. Parker's science class. Both Sisters liked science, so they focused on her lectures. Today, however, Mrs. Parker seemed a bit distracted, and the teacher kept looking away whenever Christiana met her gaze.

'Wow, Jessica and the rest of security work fast,' she speculated. 'Well, either that or word has already spread about what happened earlier in history class.'

She could not help but feel bad about the situation. Unlike Mrs. Dyke, Mrs. Parker was nice to her pupils. She would always answer her students' questions and even provided free tutoring sessions to underprivileged schoolgirls. That was part of the reason Christiana had hesitated to inform her Okaa-sama about the issues caused by the well-liked instructor.

'However, if it had been Mrs. Dyke...' she muttered under her breath. The normally nice girl knew deep in her heart that she would have turned the harsh teacher in to her Mother with no hesitation.

Realizing that she was getting lost in her thoughts once again, Christiana slapped her own cheeks. 'Wake up!' she thought, while looking around to see if anyone had noticed her uncharacteristic behavior. 'Looks like I'm okay,' she realized as she turned her attention back to the teacher who had short, curly hair.

"So when the ships arrived carrying the Founders in the First Wave, they found a planet that differed greatly from what they expected," Mrs. Parker was saying. "They could spot some differences even before they crossed the circum-binary asteroid belt. Can anyone tell me how they might have done this?"

As soon as she asked, a few hands went up. Christiana did not bother to raise hers, since she believed that the middle-aged instructor would not call on her.

After a few incorrect answers from the students, the chocolate-skinned sensei continued her lecture. "If you remember from last week, we discussed how telescopes can measure the reflectivity of an object from a very long distance away. Scientists on both Hope and Destiny measured the albedo of Cooper's World, and they could see that it had significantly increased."

Christiana immediately became interested upon hearing this. 'I remember reading about this in a history book, but it mainly talked about the person who made the breakthrough. It didn't go into any detail about the actual discovery,' she thought. That was the problem with some historical accounts. Historians spent so much time explaining who did what when that sometimes they did not explain why that event was so important.

"It wasn't until almost a Year later that they could figure out why the albedo increased," the teacher explained. "Because the ships were slowing down in relation to both a-cent-b and Cooper's World itself, the brightness created by the fusion thrust overwhelmed the light from the far away globe. When the vessels finally came to a relative stop, inserted themselves into orbit around the star, and powered off their thrusters, the scientists got another unobstructed view of the planet. That was when they discovered that the size of Cooper's World's ice caps had quadrupled when compared to the planet's initial discovery."

She became so engrossed by what she had just learned that Christiana momentarily forgot that she was in class, and she blurted out, "How could that happen?" It was only when she heard the laughter of her classmates that she realized where she was. In moments, her face blushed a bright crimson.

Ignoring the girl's outburst and her resulting embarrassment, Mrs. Parker continued. "It wasn't until the ships were in orbit of Cooper's World that the scientists pieced together what had happened. It took a long time because the growth of the ice caps had caused an enormous amount of snow and ice to pile up at the poles. Since all that water had to come from somewhere, it made the ocean levels sink. Then, because of the drop in sea level, a lot of lands that had been under the oceans emerged and changed the continents' shorelines. To put it bluntly, the experts had to redraw most of the maps of the planet."

By this point, stillness had settled over the classroom. All the normal squirming, shuffling, and fidgeting that is usually present in a room of children had quieted. Christiana subconsciously sensed the strange atmosphere, glancing around the lecture hall only to see that everyone was giving Mrs. Parker their undivided attention. 'Well, this is really interesting,' she thought as she returned to listening, forgetting both her hunger and fatigue.

"Geologists eventually discovered a series of three new medium-sized impact craters. They detected the craters by carefully comparing more recent photos of the planet's surface with those from its initial discovery. Because the impacts weren't in the old photographs, it meant that those collisions had happened after they created the first pictures. Since they took those pictures forty-five Earth years apart, those meteor strikes couldn't have taken place naturally," Mrs. Parker explained.

"Another strange thing was that all the craters were within five degrees of the equator," the teacher continued. "Even if a single asteroid or comet were to break up in the atmosphere, the chances of the pieces making an almost perfect line was impossible. Of course, since the impacts were thousands of kay-emms apart, there was no way that they could have been an individual object."

"One astronomer acted on a hunch after learning about the craters. He calculated the current position of ten water-rich bodies that scientists had discovered during the first voyage of Hope to the Alpha Centauri star system. By the time that the scientist learned that all the objects were missing, he realized the answer to the mystery," the teacher explained.

"During the discovery mission, astronomers aboard the starship did a sweep of the a-cent-b planetary system for small icy bodies. It surprised them to discover that, unlike the Sol system, this star system had very few asteroids. Icy targets were even harder to find," Mrs. Parker said. "This was a major problem for Hope. In order to return to Earth, the ship needed a lot of aech-too-ohh. This is because the ship used super-heated steam to propel itself through space like the air escaping a balloon makes it fly around the room."

"The ice-rich asteroids were spread out throughout the system and traveling to each of them would use up most of the water that they were trying to collect. Of course, the alternative was to travel to the circum-binary belt and mine the bodies there. However, the deep cold and lack of light that far away from both stars would cause the mining to go slowly. It was also much more dangerous for the crew," the instructor revealed to the silent class.

"Luckily, the ship carried ten automated mining rigs. Admiral Duflot commanded the drones to be sent to the ten innermost water-rich asteroids. He then ordered Hope to explore the area around a-cent-a while the tugs got to work," the science teacher reported.

"They designed automated ships to travel to bodies about fifteen kay-emms in diameter, land on them, and mine the ice found there. After it mined enough aech-too-ohh, the rig super-heated it with its on-board fusion reactor. Then it funneled the resulting steam through the rig's main thruster as reaction mass. By doing this over and over, the drone would slowly change the asteroid's orbit. Duflot planned to nudge the asteroids until they gathered at a rendezvous point. However, this method would use up a lot of the water that they hoped to mine. It would also take years to complete," Mrs. Parker explained. "Even with these drawbacks, the Admiral felt this plan posed the least threat to Hope and its crew."

"There was a major problem with his plan. All the mining rigs successfully traveled to their destinations and stopped the asteroids from spinning. However, not a single drone fired their main thrusters when ordered to nudge their targets towards the rendezvous point." the teacher said.

"None of them?" one girl in the back of the class exclaimed.

"I can't believe it either," Christiana announced. "The chances of all ten rigs breaking at the same time had to have been very low."

Unlike before, her classmates did not protest her interruption. 'Everyone else must think the same thing,' she concluded under her breath.

Mrs. Parker acknowledged Christiana's statement. She responded by saying, "It was later concluded that the design of the mining rigs had to have been defective. That was the only reasonable explanation that the crew could come up with."