Secrets in the Stars (Family Law)

by Mackey Chandler

When his brother went on a long complicated rant about how his success or failure followed the small moon twenty day cycle or the four hundred day solar cycle, or some multiple or division of them, he just flickered a faint mauve show of interest. Believers saw patterns everywhere whether there really were any or not. There was never any shortage of numbers to apply, after all.

  The crucible was packed with an interesting green mineral and life stuff. He'd recently been experimenting with adding the salt extracted from the water of life. It would be a tenth-day before his assistants got the generators all hooked up and up to temperature. So he left the electrodes unhooked and went off for a midday meal before the day's burn. There had been some red stripe swimmers in the lunch pen yesterday. He hoped maybe a few were left.

  * * *

  "Gordon everybody wants to see this thing splash down. I suggest you put it on the fleet net and allow anybody to watch who won't compromise safety by doing so," Lee said.

  "I don't get it," Gordon said, "but if that's how they feel, fine. Put it up live."

  "You didn't want it dropped while you were off shift sleeping," Thor pointed out.

  "Yeah, but we helped plan and design it," Gordon said. " I understand Engineering wanting to see it. They built it. I guess I should be happy everybody is taking such an interest. Chances are it will go – splash – sit for a few minutes and radio us some data. It's hardly going to be a classic like the moon landing. Then everybody can go back to work or their poker game. How long until the shuttle drops it and then it gets to the water?"

  "We're eleven minutes out from the drop," Brownie said. "You told the shuttle crew absolutely no going under twenty thousand meters. That means the package will free fall for quite a ways. They are planning on a drogue chute at five thousand meters and the balloon joining it at two thousand meters. The chute will be manually cut loose when the balloon shows some lift. We'll be controlling the inflation and sink rate to try to drop it near those three bumps. Call it a ten minute descent."

  "Fine, put it on net-wide broadcast, but I don't want to hear of environmental dropping out of specs or the biscuits being burned again, because somebody was staring at the screen," Gordon snipped.

  "The biscuits were, uh, interesting, but edible," Captain Fenton responded. "For some reason the ship's company likes to harass the cook. Damned if I know why, it seems dangerous to me to mess with the fellow who makes your meals. The firm biscuits made us appreciate what long sea voyages with hard bread out of a barrel must have been like."

  "OK, the lander is streaming to general net access. It will be a black screen until the cover blows off," Brownie told them. "We have three wide angle cams looking across the top of the lander. The rectangular boxes sticking up near the very edge of the view in each channel are the other cams. We also have a cam looking straight up and one looking straight down. That will be illuminated."

  There wasn't any conversation after that, just quiet anticipation.

  "Shuttle has braked subsonic at twenty one thousand meters. Engines at minimum idle. On a clean glide to release point upwind of the triangle," Brownie reported. "Clean separation. Engines coming off idle fine. Shuttle climbing back out. They expect to be back docking in about two hours."

  After a few minutes the view suddenly was bright, with the sections of the hard cover blown off fluttering off above the lander, quickly left behind. There was a few lines of high altitude ice clouds above. The view rocked a little and then stabilized. It was just starting to get boring when the drogue chute was explosively ejected. It filled perfectly and jerked the lander around. You could see sky through the open form of it. It was a web more than a canopy. Then the balloon popped up behind it pretty quickly and the chute drooped around the line running up to the balloon. The balloon wasn't very full. It looked more like a ball in a sock than a child's party balloon.

  "We're going to get quite close to those domes or bumps," Brownie said. "We had good Doppler data on the wind and we should hit within a kilometer."

  The lander swung back and forth a little under the balloon. You could see the hydrogen tube running up to it on one of the support lines. There was a dark shape at the end of the hose that was a vent valve. The cameras looking across the top of the lander showed the support lines and hose in the middle of each view. The lander tipped far enough they caught a glimpse of the horizon a few times. The three domes were in the view of the bottom cam coming closer swiftly. You could see a bit of texture to the water now, but it really wasn't rough.

  "Crud... we wanted to get close," Brownie said. "But I'm afraid we might hit that nearest dome. I'm giving it a bit more gas. Better to come down between them than to land on one."

  The rush to the surface slowed a little. The dome they were in danger of hitting slid off the edge of the camera view first, then the other two also. There were dark shapes in the water which provoked a murmur of interest on the bridge. With the zooming action it was hard to focus on the details. When the lander was a mere two meters from the water, the connector parted and dropped it.

  The top camera showed the balloon, suddenly unburdened, race away, pretty much straight up. The view also had a halo of droplets from the splash of the lander hitting. When it was fifty or so meters overhead there was a bright spark of an igniter, and the balloon disappeared in a ball of flame. The hydrogen burned almost invisibly, but the film of the balloon had accelerants added and gave an orange flash as it burned. It was gone and a few sooty wisps were all that remained almost before the splash had finished falling.

  The three cams looking across the top were splashed with water. The lander went below the surface briefly, foam racing in from the edges, but bobbed back. The lenses repelled water so they cleared quickly of all but a few pinpoints of water. The one dome was prominent in one cam view, the other two more distant in the other direction. A mixed cheer of hoots and laughter erupted on com. Gordon didn't reprove them.

  * * *

  Pretty Purple was thinking about lunch and what the new mineral might yield when there was an ungodly splash and something bizarre crashed through the sky into his world in a shower of bubbles. It bobbed back up to the surface quickly, as buoyant as his work cells. His world had dangers. Credit had to be given that he rushed forward into the unknown instead of fleeing. The bottom of this surprise had cylindrical shapes that shouted intelligent fabrication. There was a light shining down with a greenish cast to it and the curved circle of clear material next to it that had to be an eye of some sort. It was as rigid and as round as any shelled mud dweller. But bigger than any he'd ever seen. It was still much smaller than his own width and not streamlined at all. He instantly rejected it as a living creature. Now that it was in the water it didn't try to move at all. He reached it and started an examination.

  * * *

  The cheer cut off abruptly to shocked silence. There was a huge eye looking straight in the camera and it moved in until it filled the whole view, with barely the edges showing. Then a delicate tentacle tip explored the surface of the lens, too close to be in focus so it was blurred.

  Another tentacle slid over the edge of the lander above the water and felt tentatively around one of the cameras. It wrapped around it, a good solid double-wrap grip, and tested the lander for stability, rocking it back and forth. It was strong. Another tentacle threaded across the center of the lander and kept playing out, thicker as it kept coming wrapping around the entire lander. When the section across the middle was near a half meter thick it tightened and the cameras showed the water closing over the topside. When the water closed over the antenna it cut off the data transfer.

  "Sir, did you see? The rings on that tentacle!" Jon Burris their com tech said. He looked shocked.

  "Yeah I noticed those too," Gordon said. "They looked like gold. So they have metal working." He frowned and thought about it a bit. "I saw double rows of suckers, I guess they fit between and the suckers keep the ring from slipping off."

  "I'm really, really glad we don't have an oc
ean capable lander," Lee said. "I'd have pestered you to be on it. That thing is big. It might decide to snatch a lander and take it home to investigate too."

  "Yep, I'm looking at the shapes in the water just before it landed," Brownie said. "Some of those long shapes with a fan behind then must be what we just saw. They're longer than our landing shuttles."

  "You're wrong, Gordon. This is going to be a classic video for the ages," Thor informed him.

  "Did we get any data for the salts?" Gordon asked. "It didn't have time to boil off, did it?"

  "No, but Lee's hydrophone got almost a minute of data before it was pulled under," Burris said.

  "Let's hear it," Gordon asked.

  It was chaos. The hiss of bubbles dissipating from the splashdown and then a cacophony of clicks, whistles, moans and almost musical tones all overlapping and out of time with each other.

  "Well that's an unholy racket," Thor said.

  "I'm a city boy," Ames in engineering said on the command circuit. "If you are walking down the street in Chicago you can hear the traffic going by, the distant sounds of a helicopter and maybe music from a store. There may be a police siren in the distance or the rattle of the commuter train going along. You get noise from construction work and airplanes. But if you live there it all filters out. If you ask a native what he heard on the walk over he won't remember hearing anything."

  "What are we going to do?" Thor asked, looking at Gordon.

  "We could waste months here and accomplish nothing significant," Gordon said. "We'll send a team back equipped to deal with this environment. They will be sure to have some sort of lander that is big enough to be safe, and the right sort of equipment, like some underwater drones."

  "Maybe some dolphins," Jon Burris speculated. "It would be a real project to haul them, but it's their sort of environment. If it isn't toxic to them," he added on reflection.

  "Our Caterpillar friends have finally joined us, although they're keeping their distance," Brownie said. "I wonder what they make of us stopping? We have no idea if they value water worlds."

  "Send them the video off the probe," Gordon ordered. "If they haven't decoded it they will eventually, and we know they can extract some still shots. They may find the natives interesting. They are as different from them as we are."

  "Perhaps I can make a tutorial," Jon Burris said. "We might show them a very simple screen. Say four pixels, and an object beside it. Then keep increasing the definition until it is obvious how the pixels build an image."

  "You'd send an actual screen over to them?" Gordon asked.

  "Yeah. They've had a ship inside," Jon reminded them. "I doubt a slow approach would upset them. I can't believe their brains are so different at processing images they can't view a screen. They don't have faceted eyes like a bug or anything that weird. I don't know what the problem is."

  "Work it up," Gordon decided. "We may not be able to take it across in this system. Once the Sharp Claws and Dart get done with their survey we're going to set out for the next system. If they keep tagging along we'll send it over when you have it working."

  After that, the rest of their shift was anticlimactic. Nothing interesting happened. A few people watched the landing again on their screens. Since nothing got neglected Gordon ignored it.

  Chapter 6

  "The Sharp Claws and Dart report they have sufficient reserves and don't need to refuel," Brownie told Gordon. "Einstein on the Sharp Claws reported a star on our general vector which is unusually dim, but it is well within jump range. Ernie Goddard, our amateur astrophysicist, got excited about it too because it has an odd spectrum. Is that suitable as a jump target?"

  "Sure, anything different might be valuable. Work the numbers up and get everybody coordinated. Time jump so we're back in the seat after the next shift," Gordon ordered.

  "Oh, and Mr. Hadak decided on a name for the world," Brownie informed him. "He wishes it to be known as Ocean."

  Gordon shrugged. "Seems sort of trite, but it's accurate. At least it will tell future travelers what to expect. Log it and inform him, please."

  "Whatever it is on the registry the inhabitants probably have a name for it that can be used too," Thor predicted. "Unless they just call it the World. At least he didn't pick Hadak's World."

  * * *

  Pretty Purple held on to the strange hard device and called to his assistants. "Something else smaller fell from above after this," he told One Dot Red. "Go straight down and look for something hard about a tenth of a standard across. It may be embedded in the muck but not so deep you can't get an echo off it." It was the vent valve but he didn't know that. The device was warmer now and the light on the bottom went out quickly when he pulled it under.

  "Deep Yellow, the old work cell built on top of the floating collar can have the floor removed with a little work. Get it emptied out and the equipment in it moved to the cell I was using today. Use whoever you need to help. Keep the floor handy though. This thing will fit up through the collar and we can replace the floor under it. If we allow a little water inside it floats and won't weigh the floor down and rip it."

  "It floats?" Deep Yellow asked. Pretty Purple was holding it about a standard length under the heavens. Close to a meter oddly enough.

  "If I let go of it. It's hard enough to hold down now. I don't want to take it deeper. I suspect if it was made to float it may be damaged at any real depth."

  "Made... " Deep Yellow said in wonder, staring at it. He was pretty bright. Pretty Purple was sure his mind was racing with all the implications of such a complex made thing.

  "I found it. I claim ownership by right of finding," Pretty Purple said formally. "I do not abandon ownership if I leave it behind in my work cell. I shall inform everyone I meet of this for the customary full three days. Unless One Dot Red contests it, I claim the piece he is hunting. I directed him to it, so I have at least shares by the Law of the Hunt."

  "I witness that," Deep Yellow agreed.

  "Go ahead," Pretty Purple ordered. "I'll follow as fast as I can holding this. Then we'll examine it a bit when it is safely housed."

  Lunch was forgotten.

  * * *

  The star did have an odd spectrum. Gordon had seen the report, but it wasn't obvious to the eye. It was whiter than Earth or Derfhome's stars, but not so hot it was into the blue. It did however have interesting spectral lines. It showed metals when they should not be so prominent.

  If you had to describe the system the best word might be cluttered. There were three huge gas giants well spaced from each other and nothing visible near the star where they were used to finding at least one or two rocky planets. The main bridge crew lingered an extra half hour before yielding the comm to the beta crew, fascinated by the system. The bridge was double crewed for a bit with two waiting in the mess because there wasn't room to even stand.

  One gas giant had at least forty-seven moons they could see with their small telescope and a couple of those had their own satellites. There did not appear to be anything you would call an asteroid belt anywhere in the system. It was all swept clean and concentrated around the three giants.

  "How can so many objects be stable?" Brownie objected.

  "I suspect if you looked back a couple billion years it wasn't stable," Ernie Goddard said. "I'd bet anything there were a lot more objects, and they took that long to sort out, combine and stabilize. It may not be as stable as you think. In another billion years I bet you'll see further consolidation."

  "I'm shocked it's stable on a much shorter time frame," Brownie admitted.

  "Count me suspicious," Jon Burris said. "But I bet these three gas giants would add up to the mass of a brown dwarf if they had formed a little differently as one object. I'd like to know if this system is on a line or arc with the previous brown dwarfs we found."

  Ernie fixed Jon with a piercing gaze. "If you say it's obvious I'm going to flush myself out the airlock as a waste of space, damn it. Why didn't you become an astrophysicist?"

/>   "I'd never fit in the academic life," Jon said, apparently serious. "You notice we have no real trained astrophysicists along? They are too busy writing for grants and publishing their fantasies to come along and see the real stuff. We'd have asked them to wash dishes or change filters between observations. You know – get their dainty hands dirty. When we go back they will all contradict any observations we have made and call us uneducated dilettantes. But they'll offer to go set things right if only the government will drop two or three trillion on a proper expedition that includes conveying them in comfort. Besides, I look silly in tweeds and a bow tie."

  Gordon wondered what had turned him against the ivory tower crowd so strongly, but right now was probably not the right time to try to coax it out.

  "As interesting as this is, it will all still be here when we are rested and switch bridge crews again. Meanwhile, enjoy the survey," Gordon said. "I'd like The Champion William sent to the far gas giant, and the Sharp Claws to the other. We'll examine the closer one. Send the Dart for a sweep through the far end of the system.” The Dart was a fast courier but flew along with them and jumped independently. The Badgers built fast couriers bigger than humans so it wasn't carried grappled.

  * * *

  The huge alien ship shadowing them returned not long after the main bridge crew went to bed. It was on a course to rendezvous with the fleet, but when the Dart took off to do a far loop of the system it changed course and was obviously going to accompany it. Captain Fussy decided to test the alien; they knew it could out-accelerate them, but they'd never shown it a fleet acceleration over two G. He took off for a loop around the star at five G.

  It burned a little extra fuel and seemed to not surprise the alien at all. They didn't lag or send out another of their incomprehensible transmissions. It kept up with no problem. It was bizarre that it has to out-mass their entire fleet and was faster than the fast courier. After three hours Fussy decided the stress on the crew was enough and cut back to a G. The alien adjusted to that too.