Secrets in the Stars (Family Law)

by Mackey Chandler

  "Well, I never thought of that impact scenario," Gordon admitted. "There could have been artifacts on the mined asteroid we visited. One good collision with a decent sized rock and they'd have been knocked off above escape velocity. I just thought they were obsessively neat or paranoid about leaving clues to their nature."

  "The boot looks similar, but I'd say it is a different model," The attachment for the leg is a little different shape and the tread is quite different. Even if it is a boot for the same alien race, which I'd tend to believe, we still have no idea if the two were made by different manufacturers the same week or a thousand years apart."

  "But it does look like the miners are the plate makers," Lee insisted.

  "Call it ninety-nine hundredths probable," Thor agreed. "I mean you can argue some wildly unlikely event. Say the plate makers visited the site just like we are, and some clumsy oaf did something stupid out there and crushed the side of his boot. It's just not likely."

  "Yes, mining has to be much more dangerous than pawing through ancient junk," Lee agreed.

  "I don't anticipate having the Sharp Claws’ crew do anything differently," Gordon said. "But since they'll be there awhile, I'm going to wait our shift and the alternate before telling them that. If they have any more news or somebody thinks of something that will still be plenty of time to tell them."

  "We'll have more time around the gas giant fueling too," Thor pointed out. "Might as well have two recreation days and split them up to make it easier and give critical crew a break too."

  "Why not?" Gordon asked. "The Bills can polish their corridor walls or whatever makes them feel virtuous while we relax."

  * * *

  While the fleet relaxed and refueled the bridge crew was reduced to one experienced bridge crew member and a volunteer to share the watch. Choi Eun-Sook and Ernie Goddard were standing the watch and discussing Ernie's interest in astrophysics and stellar formation. He was an engineer but had an avid amateur interest. They usually worked opposite shifts, but both had recreation days and were off schedule a bit. For Ernie it was late, but for Choi early. They'd never said much to each other before.

  Since no real Astrophysicist had found the terms to join the Little Fleet acceptable, Ernie was the best they had. They had seen enough strange new things that he was writing papers for their return. The data was proprietary, much of it collected on his own time and not duplicated in the ship logs.

  There were no grants or government money laying claim to his observations, so the professional journals would have to either ignore his remarkable papers in a snit of professional protectionism, or outright steal the data from them. Like the rest of the crews he stood to be wealthy upon returning, so pirating his observations might have lengthy and expensive legal consequences.

  When the Dart finished its inspection of the two inner planets it came around the star in the rough plane of its planets, but from the other side. When they had a line of sight on the gas giant sufficient to avoid interference from the star they transmitted their findings.

  Like most amateurs, Ernie had no reason to hold himself to a narrow field of stellar formation. He wasn't competing in his field of work, or fighting for tenure, or scrambling for grant money. He was just honestly fascinated by everything remotely connected to the heavenly bodies, like a bright schoolchild.

  In his case reviewing the data was recreation. When the planetary information came in he started reviewing it immediately and exclaiming over interesting parts to Choi. Her interest level was higher than normal because she couldn't read or watch anything distracting while on watch; she had the command audio circuit open and watched for other traffic on her screen, but she could listen to Ernie. She's have listened even if he was obsessed with some other hobby, but it helped that what he was keen on was related to her job.

  "The inner planet is pretty much an airless rock. No magnetic field and a pretty flat surface characterized by overlapping impact craters. It's a bit on the low side for density compared to similar sized planets this distance from their star. I wouldn't give you five bucks Ceres for it, and nobody asked to name it.

  "The second planet is fairly far out. You make a chart of systems having a planet like the first one and the second is almost always closer than this. I only see two other similar systems surveyed. You could even make a case there should be a third planet there for it to be 'normal'. It has a bit of argon and such, but not enough you'd notice the difference between what passes for atmosphere and vacuum if you tried to breathe it. It's cratered pretty good too because that thin atmosphere hasn't stopped many of the meteors or eroded the craters away.

  "The interesting feature is this huge area, like a lunar mare, that covers half a hemisphere and is almost centered on the equator. It's elliptical, and the rotation of the planet is unusually slow. Also the tilt is extreme. The Badgers don't have any official planetary experts either, but the guy doing the mapping is cautious. He just said that 'some extraordinary event' might have been responsible for the unusual numbers.

  "Bah! It got whacked by a freaking big rock at an angle and retrograde to the rotation. Big enough not only to slow it down but to lean it over on its axis too."

  "Have you suggested that to them?" Choi asked.

  "Well sure, but they won't get the text until I am off shift in bed. I nailed down my opinion of the site formation, since they seemed too shy to advance a theory. It's good for another paper that will irritate the glorious ones. I look forward to hearing all the reasons why it wasn't that, but they don't know what caused it. Just not anything an unwashed engineer hypothesized. The Badgers also noted significant gravitational anomalies framed around the different area. When we get their high resolution images I have some things I want to look for on them."

  "What?" Choi was interested enough to ask.

  "Well, if the surface was stabilized by the time this hit, then outside the 'splash' zone where everything was liquefied and then a ring around that covered with debris. Well, debris would have been thrown all over the world, but I mean debris that buries everything deep. I'd expect to find concentric fissures and cracks from the crust flexing outside that. Also the quake from it would have been so severe that quite massive surface features would have come loose. I can picture large monolithic rocks gouging a furrow across the landscape. To the point their trail and resting place are still visible. So pretty much most of the way around the planet, but maybe not exactly opposite. Exactly opposite might have had some very different motions I'm still trying to figure out."

  "I wonder... " Choi said, but then said nothing more.

  "I'm no mind reader," Ernie said. "Wonder what?"

  "We're looking for reasons the miners left this system. If they had any operations on this planet I wondered if they might not have been driven off."

  "I can look for any artificial structures when I scan the surface images," Ernie volunteered. "It's easy enough to program the survey software to look for geometric shapes like intelligences use. I'll do that. You always get false hits but few enough to reject once a person puts eyeballs on them. The area that was struck and melted is much flatter and a more even color than the rest of the planet. If they built anything there it will be even easier to see than the rest of the planet."

  "You don't see my point," Choi said. "I shouldn't have said anything."

  "No, please. If I don't see it the fault is mine. Please explain," Ernie said.

  "I meant, if they had a presence it would be under the mare-like feature now. Because the rock would have targeted them, not just a random natural collision."

  Ernie looked at her goggle eyed and then recovered. "If this was very recent we'd still see a halo of debris that splashed so hard some of it went into orbit, or even escaped. On Earth they have found fragments they are pretty sure got knocked off of Mars ages ago."

  "But Mars doesn't still have a halo of debris from that does it?" Choi asked.

  "No, but it's had time to disperse and decay. A lot of it will have f
allen back to Mars and others got tugged back and forth by Jupiter and other bodies. Some undoubtedly fell into the Sun," Ernie said. "Most decayed pretty fast, but it took a long time to sweep up all of it. There are probably still odd bits and pieces of it in Solar orbit."

  Choi shrugged at the time problem. "We have no idea how old the miner sites are. Ten thousand years? A hundred thousand years?"

  "Yeah," Ernie had to agree, looking disturbed. "There's that."

  * * *

  "When the Sharp Claws returns do you want to show the Caterpillars the boot?" Lee asked.

  "I'm not sure," Gordon admitted. "It would be embarrassing if we went to their hatch and it didn't open. I'd hate to be told we aren't welcome anymore. Perhaps... give them a little time."

  "Time to do what?" Lee asked. Her face said she really didn't get it.

  Gordon looked perplexed to explain, but she looked expectant. It wasn't a rhetorical question.

  "If I may," Jon Burris offered. "I know you grew up in a small closed family group. That may have altered your perceptions on some social things. If you offend someone, it can be wisdom to allow them some time to cool off. The uh, intense emotion can be rekindled by seeing you too soon, but time will let them get over it, so when you next see them they aren't as upset. It may allow room for a reconciliation. I imagine it is the same with Derf?" he looked at Gordon for affirmation.

  "Exactly, and well said," Gordon agreed. He looked at Lee. Jon had given him time to think about a reply for a bit. "When your whole world is three people you look at them differently than a bigger group. You have to get along or it makes life unbearable. Now, even at home, a Derf holding has enough people you can afford to dislike someone. You can avoid them. If you happen to work with them you can refuse to work with them anymore and I've seen the Mothers accommodate that by giving a person new duties.

  “It's risky. I've seen them transfer a skilled metal worker to a menial job, and I've seen people leave the Keep and go to town over refusing to work with someone. I even saw the old First Mother you met solve the problem of a nasty boss in the sewing and weaving group who was making everybody mad by demoting him and promoting everybody in the group over him so he had no authority over them at all. But there are ways out. When you get to a really big society people can place no value at all on another person and get away with it."

  "You owe any stranger some courtesy, or society would be chaos," Lee objected.

  "A stranger yes," Gordon agreed. "But how fast can you get to know someone and dislike them intensely?"

  Lee looked uncertain, so he asked her: "How long did it take you to know how you felt about the man on Earth who tried to mug you for your necklace? And how would you feel to meet him now?"

  Lee's face took on an unseemly hard look for a young girl. "Perhaps a second, and if I meet him again he'll be a target," she said, drawing her hand up her leg for a holster she didn't wear on the bridge.

  "Ah, point made I can tell," Gordon said, satisfied.

  "Very well, I can see giving the Caterpillars time to settle down over the scare we gave them. It's sort of like grieving, isn't it?" Lee said with sudden insight.

  "Very much so," Gordon agreed.

  Chapter 15

  "Congratulations for your credit on the paper," Vigilant Botrel said, as he sat to breakfast.

  "I have no idea what you are talking about," Choi Eun-Sook told him.

  Vigilant raised an eyebrow. "In the ship's public net. Ernie lists all his papers for any unusual stars or planets we visit, and of course his theories about their formation or other aspects. It's fascinating really. He has a talent for describing things without all the dense jargon most papers use."

  Choi still looked at him blankly. Omelet poised on her fork uncertainly while she tried to think.

  "He named you as co-author on the latest," Vigilant clarified.

  "He did? About what?" Choi demanded.

  "I believe the title was, 'A major planet-altering asteroid impact. Rotation and inclination changes from a retrograde strike'. See what I mean? You can actually tell what the paper is about without a thesaurus or a brain transplant. It's just one of maybe twenty or so. He listed Jon Burris as co-author on the one he did about the spatial distribution of brown dwarves," Vigilant said. He seemed quite serious and not joking.

  "Oh, we talked about that on orbital watch," she admitted, wondering if he'd reprove her for inattention on duty.

  "That must be it," he agreed. "He found your hypothesis that it might have been a military action instead of a natural occurrence insightful. Given we have activity in the system that was inexplicably curtailed, there certainly may have been a conflict. He is very eager to know what dating of the mining artifacts shows, to know if the events could have occurred in the same time frame."

  "Uh, yeah." She didn't have near enough coffee in her to be following this.

  Vigilant smiled and gave attention to his own breakfast.

  Don't you have to give permission for your name to be on a publication? Choi wondered. Was she going to look like an idiot if the miners gave up on the deposit a few hundred years ago? Wait, they said the reflectors had a lot of micro-meteor erosion didn't they? At least on the ones they found outbound. That had to take awhile. Maybe she wouldn't look too bad. Even if she did, who would care for a ship’s officer? She wasn't a scientist for God's sake.

  "I guess I better read the thing if it has my name plastered on it," she told Vigilant.

  "Well sure," he said, looking surprised. "Take a look at the earlier ones too."

  * * *

  "Thank you for the credit on the paper," Choi said after she found Ernie in what they called the lounge. She'd decided being a co-author was acceptable after three different people had complimented her on it. The lounge was the small hold closest to the galley, formerly the food stage area, and was crowded with more than four people or two Derf, with two com consoles and a bigger screen than there was room to have in their bunk spaces. The cabins had been downsized to fit extra crew in a Deep Space Explorer to the point where staying in your bunk when not sleeping was oppressive. Ernie was using the big screen.

  "You're welcome. I'm afraid I didn't try to quote you, because I didn't trust my memory, and didn't record. I paraphrased what you said. If I got it wrong please tell me," Ernie said.

  "No, when I read it you had the right of it. If you'd asked the bridge audio is all recorded. Gordon would have probably OK'd a word search for research purposes. But I didn't think it was such a surprising thought you'd even take note of it. I wouldn't have been offended if you'd just used the concept without attribution."

  "You are too modest! It never occurred to me. I can assure you I get a lot of comments on the public postings and other people were surprised by the idea too," Ernie told her. "I'm going through the images the Dart made of the planet and will incorporate this information in the paper too. It's subject to revision until we get home. I've gotten good comment from people who asked for clarification or made suggestion that have improved it. I'll detail the important changes in the bibliography."

  "Are you finding the things you expected?" Choi asked.

  "Some, but not necessarily where I expected them, and in patterns I didn't anticipate. I'm looking at all the surface features the computer tagged as having regular forms that might mark them as artificial constructions rather than natural formations. I've eliminated sixteen already, and have that many to go that the computer assigned high values. After I've done them I'll go back and study the fissures and tracks when my mind has had a break from them. You understand?"

  "Sure," Choi nodded. "If you stare at something long enough it starts to look all the same, or worse your natural inclination to find patterns starts making you see things that aren't there."

  "Exactly." Choi still looked interested and wasn't sliding to the front of her seat and looking at the exit, so Ernie spoke further. "This for example looks like a pyramid, but it is obvious it isn't a constructed pyramid when
you examine it closely. The programming picks it if it is within certain parameters. If you set it too tightly it might not show you a constructed pyramid that was weathered or damaged. So one more eliminated. Next image," he told the ship's computer.

  The pointy hill disappeared and a flat almost featureless plain showed. There was an area with some dark dots bracketed by the computer and Ernie zoomed in on it. The lighting was oblique, and the dark dots resolved as shadows. He zoomed in closer.

  "Computer, can this image be reconstructed from overlapping shots show more detail?" he requested.

  "Processing. Heavy usage will delay the result for twenty seconds," the pleasant voice said. It took almost that long to inform him of that.

  The picture sharpened considerably. Neither of them said anything, just looked. The shapes beside the shadows resolved to polygons, but of such perfect form to preclude a natural origin. If there was any doubt they were spaced evenly around a common center.

  "Well... " Ernie said, stunned.

  "They missed," Choi said. It took Ernie a moment to understand what she meant.

  "Perhaps not. There may have been a bigger facility, base if you will. Especially if there were spacecraft there. This may have been an unimportant outpost not worth bombarding. Or they may have known there would be no rescue and the folks here doomed. Indeed if the quake was sufficiently severe from the strike they may have all been killed or injured beyond recovery even this far removed."

  "Maybe," Choi allowed. "We'll have to go see now."

  "Well of course. We'll tell Gordon. I can't imagine he won't send a ship back. Perhaps even take the entire fleet there. Ernie looked at the clock. "They have two hours still before their shift. I'm off until two shifts from now for my engineering duty as long as we are on a light orbital schedule. How fortuitous I wasn't on my usual schedule opposite you, and took a late turn sitting with you."