Willow says, “Communications link reestablished.”
James watches the path of the probes for the next minute as they shed their speed. The lead hydroprobe carves a path high over the oceans of Ianthe’s subsolar point. The middle, doomed storm probe glides towards the hurricanes of the planet’s midsection, and the trailing polar probe falls towards Ianthe’s ice caps.
“Velocity’s good,” Beckman says. “We’re stable. Deploying drogue chutes.”
“Video feed online,” Willow adds.
Three windows display probe cameras. The view looks straight up at small white chutes billowing against inky blue and pitch-black skies. Something jolts each view, and a mass of cables and fabric streaks out, violently catching air and expanding into larger white disks.
“Pilot chutes out,” Beckman says. “Deploying mains.”
The pilot chutes fall away from the camera view as an even larger red-and-white mass shoots up. As it catches air, three bullseye parachutes fill the view.
Beckman nods. “All three stable. On track.”
“Telemetry coming in,” Isaac says. “Atmosphere is ninety-two percent carbon dioxide, seven percent nitrogen, point eight argon, with trace elements. Wide temperature swing from day to night. Subsolar point is eight Celsius, with the polar cap at negative one hundred fifteen.”
“No oxygen?” Ava says.
“No. Not enough ultraviolet from Luhman to split water vapor.”
“Probably no photosynthesis, then. Doesn’t rule out life, though. Saturn’s Enceladus had life without oxygen. Any methane?”
“Yes,” Isaac says, “Zero-point-nine parts per million.”
Ava is intrigued. “Well, that’s interesting. Is there a magnetosphere?”
“Yes. Likely due to a molten iron core.” Isaac overlays the planet’s magnetic field lines, curving in graceful arcs.
Beneath the storm probe, a violent ring of intensely packed clouds billows up as if someone had surrounded the midsection of the planet in a jumble of dirty gray cotton. The spirals of hurricanes are scattered through the chaos, with lightning flickering in electric green pulses.
“What are the wind speeds?” James asks.
“In the storm area, currently ninety kph and increasing. Expecting two fifty kph as we get lower. Subsolar point and polar cap are quiet,” Isaac says. “Planet is like a big battery with a positive and negative end. Instead of electricity, it’s heat that flows. Hot and cold air clash at the center and make the storms.”
The hydroprobe’s belly camera shows endless roiling ocean waves highlighted in orange sunlight. It looks a bit like Earth’s Pacific Ocean at sunset. The polar probe sees nothing but darkness in visible light, but when Isaac switches it to the eerie blue of the camera’s low-light enhanced mode, a snowy, arctic landscape of chasms and ice shelves appear. Impact craters mar the pristine ice.
A warning alert dings from Isaac’s console as the storm probe descends into the clouds. The video feed is turbulent, the chutes flapping wildly with massive gray cumulonimbus clouds towering like angry sentinels. Blue, green, and purple lightning bursts chatter between the clouds.
“Two hundred kph,” Isaac says. “Clouds are water vapor.”
A hail of freezing rain bombards the probe, and the image takes on the blurred distortion of ice. The chute cables radiating upwards cake with a translucent sheen.
“We’re going to lose it,” Beckman says.
“Surprisingly warm here,” Isaac adds. “Minus one Celsius.”
The red-and-white chutes crumple like a crushed ball of paper, and the image transforms to a jumble of spinning sky, streaks of clouds, and flopping cables. The chaos lasts only thirty seconds before a brilliant flash knocks the video to darkness.
“Storm probe is gone,” Beckman says. “Lightning strike.” He looks over at Isaac. “Get anything good?”
Isaac nods. “Oh, yes. It’s all good! Got a taste of the clouds and the ice. Can’t wait to go through the data.”
On the bridge screen, the hydroprobe’s three bullseye parachutes drift down into Ianthe’s waves as it settles into its yellow inflatable ring. The ocean is in all directions, the water churning in foamy waves. Overhead, the sky is a purplish blue that brightens to a marine color in the gradient surrounding Luhman 16A. The star’s bright orange stripes are visible, with its black iron cloud bands blending into the sky’s haze. It’s otherworldly, as if some great beast had clawed the sun and left only illuminated tatters. Low on the east horizon, Luhman 16B is a red point barely bright enough to compete with the purple sky.
Ava taps at her console. “Submersible sensors online. Let’s see what we’ve got. pH seven point nine, salinity…thirty-one parts per thousand…oh, yeah! We’ve got a saltwater ocean. That means the ocean’s sitting on a rocky core. Minerals are building blocks for life, so here’s to hoping.” She smiles and recomposes herself. “Water temperature, four Celsius. Turning on the lights.”
A video feed pops up of two light cones refracting through the dark, shifting water. There’s audio, also, with sloshing sounds splashing against the microphone.
“Switching to microscopy,” Ava says.
The image zooms in once, then again, and again. Each time there is nothing but water and shifting light.
Ava presses her lips together. “I suppose a little alien zooplankton was a bit much to hope for. If there’s life, it’s not in the shallows. I think we should drop the probe.”
“Agreed,” Isaac says.
James nods. “Okay.”
When Ava taps an icon, the word decoupling appears above the probe’s feed, and swirling bubbles swish in the video. A diagram shows a dashed blue line mapping the falling hydroprobe’s trajectory. The depth indicator spins down slowly — 10 m, 12 m, 14 m.
“Okay, Isaac, it’s descending at five kph, so about three hours to hit bottom.”
In the other window, the polar probe has touched down in an icy expanse. The surface here looks a little like Earth’s Moon if it were covered in a few meters of snow and ice.
“I’m betting there’s plenty of topside things you want to check out,” Ava says,
“Oh, so many,” Isaac replies.
Ava smiles. “You’ve got the ball.”
Promise’s planetary science lab is brimming with test equipment, quarantine areas, and screens. Isaac floats in front of the giant wall display of the astrographics section while Ava tends to the astrobiology module. On the astrographics display, six drones glide along flight paths to the handful of minor planets located between Ianthe and Neso. With thirty-one minor planets orbiting Luhman 16A alone, they prioritize Promise to visit Neso and Ianthe while using the ship’s drones to map the smaller worlds. Isaac’s display already has imaging strips from the nearest minor planets, the first a mosaic of colorful basins and craters, like Jupiter’s volcanic Io.
A few hours ago, the polar probe unfurled to deploy a small six-wheeled autonomous drone that has been tasting the snow and capturing sensor data for anything remotely interesting. On the other side of the planet, the hydroprobe touched down on the ocean bottom, opened its propulsion doors, and began mapping its environment. Its thermal cameras very quickly found the distant three hundred degree plumes of the hydrothermal vents and plotted a course.
“Find anything good?” Ava asks.
Isaac glances over. “16Ax has a silicate crust with active volcanos and sulfur dioxide ejecta. Unusual at this distance from the star. Too far for tidal forces to cause volcanic activity. How about you?”
“Just coming up on the first vent now.”
On the screen, the hydroprobe’s white floodlights trace a path leading up to turbulent water. As they pan up, billowing black plumes roil from rocky cones.
“Oh, yeah!” Ava says. “Black smokers. I knew it.”
Isaac pushes away from his screen and floats over beside her. “Iron sulfide. Three fifty Celsius. What’s that color…wait…go back…”
“Oh! Let me tell the probe.”
Ava sends instructions to the ocean surface raft, which relays them via infrasonic pulses to the hydroprobe. After a few seconds, the camera view steers back, and the probe descends, investigating. Scalloped rocks are embedded in the vent’s rocky cone. A fine, red fuzz blankets the rocks. Ava gasps. “Are you seeing this, too?”
“Yeah. Let’s get closer!”
Ava doesn’t need to ask the probe. It’s already sending excited alerts to her and has gone into full forensic mode. The image zooms and magnifies the fuzz. Red filaments are tangled with some frayed ends undulating in the seawater. Milky-white disks pock the rock surface underneath the filaments. The water temperature here underneath the vent is over two hundred degrees Celsius, but the extreme pressure at this depth keeps it from boiling.
“Looks like a chemosynthetic mat,” Isaac says. “Extremophile. Like on Earth.”
“Yeah,” Ava says, her heart racing. “It’s alive.”
17
Badges
James sits at his desk, leaning into the camera. It’s just after breakfast, and his cabin lighting is set for early morning, glowing with the warm yellow tones of Earth sunlight. He’s just showered after his morning treadmill run and wears a gray mission shirt. “Hey, Will,” he starts the video recording. “It’s mission day twenty-two. If my math is right, you’ll get this message in 2109, which is fifteen years after we left. Not sure if you took the aging treatment and you’re twenty-five-year-old Will, or you passed on it, and now you’re in your mid-sixties enjoying settling down with Isla.” He pauses. He has no way of knowing if Will and Isla are still together. It’s like trying to have a one-way conversation with someone you haven’t seen since college. You just have to make assumptions and roll with it. “Either way, probably a lot has changed. I miss you, buddy. Wish there was an instant way to talk. I asked Hitoshi if there’s a way you can reply, but it’s just not going to work. Promise would have to sit here for thirteen years to receive it. Even if you beam it to where we’re going, we won’t be there at the same time it arrives. So, all I can do is toss these messages in a bottle to you.”
He taps his desk interface, and an image with eighteen minor planets overlays his video. “We’ve spent the past four days orbiting Ianthe. While we’ve been doing that, we’ve got a fleet of drones tackling the forty-three minor planets one-by-one. So far, they’ve mapped eighteen. By the end of the week, they should have them all. This is just the first star. The other star has just as many worlds.” He switches the overlay to an underwater video of red filaments swaying over rock. “Ava found life on Ianthe. It’s basic, a microbe weave stuck on a rock, with dozens of other microbe species living in and around it. If the little guys were on Earth, Ava says they’d be archaea. The leading theory for Earth is that this is how life started. These guys use CeNA instead of DNA. That’s, uh…hang on, let me read it…cyclohexene nucleic acid. Ianthe’s only been around for eight hundred million years, so not enough time for the vent life to evolve into anything complex, but still, a similar timeline to Earth’s start. Back in Centauri, the native life also used a DNA variant. So, this is awesome. Two stars near us that have life put together using the same rules that built us. If we find nothing else this trip, this would still be huge.”
James swipes up the Neso image. “So, we stayed at Ianthe the past few days until the hydroprobe ran out of juice. Right now, we’re slowtiming it to Neso and will make orbit by noon. Neso has a breathable atmosphere. We still don’t know where the oxygen is coming from, but we’re considering landing Promise after checking it out with a couple of probes. Can’t see any life, but you never know until you get up close and personal, and Isaac and Ava have a wish-list of samples that need the human touch. May walk on another Earth today, Will.” James raises his eyebrows, the grin escaping. “How awesome is that?” He closes the Neso image. “All right, I hope life’s treating you well. We’re in slowtime now, so every day that goes by for us is just one day for you, too, which means you’ll probably get another message in a bottle from me in a couple of days telling you what we found on Neso. Keep an eye on the sky for us, and talk to you soon.”
The day, like so many recently for Lin, felt like a dream. A 5:45 a.m. alarm with the blue text Mission Day 23 beckoning, her sleepsack beside Hitoshi’s, the luxury of sleeping together under gravity lost to the freefall of Neso’s orbit. The realization that today was the day that she earned her badge, that, like Hitoshi standing in the virtual recreation of Astris, her flight suit patch would glow gold because today she was going to land on another freaking world. What does one wear for such an occasion? She’d drifted in front of her closet, ping-ponging between outfits while Hitoshi followed her with his eyes, telling her it didn’t really matter because she’d just need to take it off anyway to put on her EV suit. She finally settled on the obvious choice of her flight suit. Hitoshi wore his, also, as a sign of support.
A jovial breakfast with everyone’s spirits high and a funny moment where a zero-gee accidental grapefruit squirt sent a few people chasing after undulating juice globules. Everyone crammed into the Planetary Science lab to review the night’s worth of data from the ocean and land probes. No signs of life, other than the oxygen. Isaac’s orbital photo montage. Neso, a little smaller than Earth, with sandy browns, dark seas and wispy clouds spiraling over the sunlit side, cloud cover thickening at the planet’s north-south midsection. Luhman 16A painting everything in dim sunset colors with the far side of the planet backlit by Luhman 16B’s faint red hues.
Promise slicing through Neso’s upper atmosphere as storms raged beneath it, cloud tops reaching up towards them like fingers, then the storms slipping behind them with the wind shaking the ship and rocking Lin where she sat at her bridge station. Purple sky marrying taupe mountains. Chasms and rivers snaking beneath them as James rattled off vectors, then the rock-strewn landscape streaking up with Promise’s thrusters firing. The floor rumbling beneath Lin. As the ship groaned into its landing struts, the pull in her seat did not subside. Planetary gravity, natural gravity, weighing her down.
So here she is now, standing in EV prep, unzipping her flight suit and shimmying it off, feeling a bit self-conscious about the community striptease unfolding around her. Like her, everyone has their EV undergarments on beneath their clothing, and although they aren’t much different than biking shorts and a spandex tee shirt, it’s still off-putting to see so much skin and contours from her co-workers. But, she thinks, they’re more like roommates than co-workers now, and she’s getting used to it. Hitoshi gives her a hand putting her suit on.
Julian gives the medical brief. “Point-nine gee means ten percent more of everything. You can jump ten percent higher and run ten percent faster because each stride will propel you further. I do not, however, recommend that you run. You still have the same inertia and must accommodate. In the event of a suit breach, don’t panic. The air is a bit cool, and the oxygen is lower than Earth’s, but you will not notice it without heavy exertion. If you must breathe the atmosphere, you will be able to breathe it just fine.”
When Lin wiggles into her EV suit top, Hitoshi clicks her seals shut and inspects her connections.
Ava steps forward. “Two teams. Blue team is Isaac, Lin, and Hitoshi, heading to the shoreline. There’s a short hike to get there, and they’ll be collecting water and beach samples. Red team is James, Willow, and me, heading to the river for freshwater and dirt samples. Beckman will monitor ops from the ship.”
Beckman approaches Lin and hands her a pulse pistol sheathed in a white holster. She accepts it, holding it out and staring at it.
“Magnetic holster,” Beckman says. “Goes on your hip.”
She blinks. “What’s this for?”
“Aggressive negotiation.” He produces a second pistol and hands it to Hitoshi. Hitoshi accepts and snaps it onto his hip.
Lin’s a bit frazzled now. “You really think we’re going to get in a gunfight?”
Beckman points a thumb at Hitoshi. “On our last trip, yo
ur boyfriend there went to pick some daisies and got in a firefight with the daisies.”
“Hey now,” Hitoshi says. “They were really, really mean daisies. Actually, they were more like green leaf hand thingies.”
“Remember your training,” Beckman says to Lin. “Follow Hitoshi’s lead, and you’ll be fine.” He sighs. “I can’t believe I just said that.”
Lin’s voice warbles. “Okay.” She clicks the gun onto her hip.
As Beckman walks away, Hitoshi hands Lin her helmet. “You’re on an away team. Pretty cool, huh?”
“Why do I feel like the red shirt?” Lin asks. She snaps her helmet on, and its lights flicker awake.
Hitoshi hands her a silver sample collection briefcase.
When everyone else is fully suited, the EV prep room lights toggle to ultraviolet with bits and pieces of people’s suits fluorescing while the sterilization sequence runs. A red beacon strobes before Neso’s air cycles in.
“All right, teams,” James says. “Here we go.”
Promise’s outer airlock door slides open with a whine of hydraulics, orange sunlight sweeping in a widening glow across the group. The airlock ramp is already deployed and angles down to tan rock. James leads.
As Lin emerges from the airlock, she stops, her mouth opening in awe. The ground is covered in fine clay-colored dirt with rocks ranging from pebbles to boulders. Massive stone slabs jut up with the terrain rising towards mountains at their west. The light is like a sunset after a rainstorm — diffuse, orange, and dim — but the analogy breaks down because the sun is directly overhead in the noon position. And what a sun! In Neso’s sky, Luhman 16A is twenty-six times the size of Earth’s Sun, the star a titanic sphere with angry orange vertical tiger stripes suspended over Lin’s head like a world about to crash down through the atmosphere. Neso’s sky is a gradient from deep purple at the horizon that brightens to marine blue where it touches the star. It’s a crazy, technicolor sky, the type that only existed on the soundstage of 1960s sci-fi shows. But here it is, larger than life, enveloping her.
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