Lightship

by Stephan Besik

  There were now three lightway stations at nearly equidistant points around the Sun near Earth orbit, each one pumping concentrated energy into space to power lightships on their way to the outer Solar System and back. Three more were being built to provide more capacity, easier transitions from one lightway to another, and greater flexibility in scheduling. It took a little power to keep them in orbit, but the amount was miniscule compared to what the stations were able to capture. There were also plans to build light stations near the orbit of Venus, to pick up more power from the Sun for faster trips to the outer system. As for Venus itself, there were now factories in orbit around the planet. They were breaking down the carbon dioxide that made up almost all of the atmosphere into carbon-oxygen products, with transportation to and from Earth provided by lightships that took their power directly from the Sun rather than relying on a lightway. There was no need for a lightway with the energy density of sunlight between the Earth and the second planet.

  After his year-long study he had made his own decision. He started to apply for jobs in outer space. It turned out that there were slots that made sense for him everywhere from Venus all the way out to the Kuiper belt. People with his experience in large-scale construction and environmental development were rare, and his problem became one of picking the places he wanted to see rather than whether someone would take him. No one cared what he looked like as long as he could do the job. He did have to complete six months of training in vacuum and low-gravity living and survival. That had not been as hard as he had anticipated. Even at his apparent age of seventy he was in better health than he had been before the treatments. His mind was still sharp. After his training he was ready to go.

  A medical crewmember stopped at his cocoon. Bob suppressed the embarrassment he felt at the situation. Here he was lying naked, waiting for an attractive young lady (she looked young, anyhow) to give him the pill that would put him to sleep. Of course at the moment every other passenger was naked in his or her cocoon too. Not like he was the only one feeling embarrassed.

  The pretty lady wasn’t wearing much, either. Her uniform was a rather tiny little bikini-like thing, just enough coverage to provide a place for her crew insignia and provide a little modesty. Much more would have been more annoyance than meaningful. After all, she was going too. The crew monitored things for a few hours, and then handed the flight over to the ship’s AIs. In a few hours, she would be naked in a cocoon too. His hormones still worked, and the thought of this little lady lying naked on her personal bed actually got things rather stirred up. Nowadays that didn’t happen to him very often.

  Once he was down she would close up the cocoon and the cold sleep cycle would start. It was about a week to get to the nearest lightway station along Earth’s orbit and a three-month trip to Callisto, the outermost of the large Galilean satellites of Jupiter. It was a lot more efficient to put everyone in cold sleep than to maintain a waking environment for the passengers and crew.

  Even the (human) crew would be down unless there was a dire emergency. The ship’s AIs would be running the show for nearly all of the trip. For the human crew there wasn’t going to be much to do. Why sit around with nothing but games and simulations to occupy the mind and body?

  Once he reached Callisto, he had choices to make. The four Galilean satellites of Jupiter each had opportunities for an engineering specialist, as did Titan and some of the other satellites of Saturn. His tentative plan was to spend time on the satellites of Jupiter and Saturn, and then make a decision about next steps. He could come back to the inner Solar System to see what was happening on Venus, go asteroid mining in the Belt, stay where he was near Jupiter or Saturn, or head further out from the Sun. Most of the inhabited spots around Uranus and Neptune, as well as locations in the Kuiper Belt, were small research stations at the moment. He didn’t think he would want to go out that far, but who knew? Maybe something important would happen out there that would make the year-long trip worthwhile.

  “Are you ready, sir?” she asked.

  Bob nodded. “Ready to go.” She handed him a little cup with the magic pill and a small glass of water. He took the pill and washed it down. “Have a good trip, sir.”

  He smiled and lay back. “See you on the other side.”

  Damage Report

  “I’m afraid we have rather limited choices for a landing, Chief.

  “There are some large clearings, perhaps old parkland, about midway into the ring of ruins. I’ve found one that is near a large highway. It should be an easy walk from the lander into the ruins in the direction of the crater, but I think any attempt to make it through the rubble to the blast center on foot will be long and hard. I suggest that you return to the lander after your initial exploration of the ruins and take the hopper in to the crater’s edge. There doesn’t seem to be a better way to get to the central blast area.”

  “Very well, Pilot. Do the best you can.”

  The Chief of Research looked at the “window” on her side of the lander. The window was actually a projection screen for a small lens mounted on the outer shell of the craft. The lens attached to a small processor block and was designed to withstand any heat resulting from the lander’s entry into the atmosphere, while still providing a passenger with a view similar to what would be seen from an actual viewport. The camera also had advantages over an ordinary port; there was a small ball below the screen that could be rolled to change the viewing angle and the magnification could be changed.

  The pilot flew the transport in a shallow descending arc over the ruins, giving her team a good view of the place.

  There had been some chatter in the transport’s cabin during the flight down from the Ship. Now, as the city came into view, the cabin was completely silent.

  The ruins appeared to be in much better condition than anything she had seen in the training sims. According to the preliminary analysis, the extinction event had occurred fairly recently. At most of the planets and moons her race had visited, evidence of an extinct civilization was composed of corroded metal artifacts and traces of artificial materials in rubble, buried amid foundations barely visible after thousands of years of erosion. From the air it was fairly easy to make out structure outlines, but that was about it.

  Here the condition of the ruins made it relatively easy to visualize how the city might have looked. She thought that her people could build a fairly accurate three-dimensional representation of the original city once the research teams got started.

  As they circled in for a landing, she noticed a rather odd thing about the site. There was the crater, then a large ring of flattened terrain that seemed to contain nothing but rubble, then a relatively thin ring of ruins of increasing height, presumably caused by the diminishing force of the blast with distance from the probably detonation point. Then, oddly, there was a return to rugged terrain covered with rubble of varying height. She wondered what had caused the concentric rings.

  She turned to her second in command, the senior military analyst of her Group. Once the preliminary analysis concluded that the primary cause of the extinction was a nuclear war, it made sense for the principal military analyst to be her executive. Her organizational hierarchy had been modified to fit the likely research effort to come.

  “Number One, do we have an explanation for the second ring of rubble? It looks quite wide. Shouldn’t the destruction have faded out as the weapon’s force was spent?”

  “One moment Chief.”

  She had to be patient; everything in this scenario was new and it was not surprising that her exec had to do some consultation with the Intelligence coordinating the data analytics.

  “Apparently the outer areas of many cities on this continent were made of structures with wooden frameworks. There are large forests of treelike vegetation that appear to be suitable for that form of exploitation.

  “The first ring of ruins is a result of blast pressures in an area where structures were large and composed primarily of iron-based alloys and nat
ural and artificial stone. These structures were destroyed or damaged by the blast but were relatively immune from destruction by fire. As the blast overpressure faded, more of the structures survived.

  “While the detonation’s force would have declined with distance from the center the temperature of the blast would still be high enough to ignite wood and other forms of vegetation, especially if the outer layers of buildings were partially stripped away by the shock wave. The preliminary assessment of the macro structure of the ruins is that the second ring was relatively intact after the blast pressure wave, but a firestorm burned most of the outer ring of ruins, leaving little but stone foundations and any metal frameworks. The edge of this last ring will be quite a distance from the center of the blast, given our current understanding of the force and temperature of the detonation. The analysis at this stage cautions, however, that the data are quite fragmentary at this time, and conclusions are subject to change.”

  “Thank you. An interesting result. Are most sites like this, with differing effects at different ranges from the center of a detonation?”

  Her exec appeared to shake his head. It was hard to tell through his helmet visor.

  “No, Chief, but there is still quite a bit of variation. This is sort of a right-sized site. From what we can tell, cities of smaller area are now just craters and rubble. It’s hard to tell whether forest and grassland around the craters were burned out, but it’s likely the local flora returned some years after the blast firestorms. I have an exploration scheduled of a number of smaller sites later in this ten-day. Larger sites than this one tend to have multiple blast centers, with varying types of destruction intermixed. Patterns are complicated by the existence of multiple craters. This one is big enough to show the effects of a single weapon, but apparently it was small enough that only one detonation occurred.”

  Their pilot set the lander down in a flat area overgrown with various types of vegetation. Fortunately most of the vegetation was low, a variety of ground covers reaching from their landing point out to ruins on all four sides.

  There was a short wait after the landing to allow the shell of the transport to complete its cool-down from the entry into the atmosphere. Her team used the time to seal their hazard suits, give everything a last check and squeeze into the airlock that took up a good portion of the rear of the craft. Then the door out of the airlock opened and the Chief led her team down the side ramp of the lander. There were a variety of noises emanating from the airlock once the outer door closed. She knew it was being sanitized and evacuated of the planetary atmosphere. She wasn’t looking forward to the sterilization protocol on their return.

  She noted that the doors in the nose of the transport were opening as they walked past. The craft’s crew was quite efficient. They were already debarking the hopper that her team would use to get to the blast crater. The hopper glided down the nose ramp under internal control. The crew of the lander wasn’t going to be exposed to the atmosphere, and the storage space would also be sterilized when they returned.

  It was a short walk from the clearing to the edge of the ruins that stood between the team and the blast crater. There was a circle road around their landing site, suggesting that the clearing had been some sort of park or other meeting ground for the ones who had lived here. The highway that the pilot had mentioned ended at the circle road and then continued on the other side of the park. The team crossed the circle onto what had once been a wide highway leading toward the center of the city.

  As her team walked in to the ruins it confirmed their original impressions- there was little left beyond walls. Things like doors and windows were gone, and floors of levels above the ground were gone as well. Some of the ruins were tall enough to suggest that the original buildings had included a number of levels. Now there was nothing but rubble and empty shells.

  The Chief stared at the ruins. Her team stood silently, looking at the shells of buildings around them. They all knew that the scene here was unlike anything her race had seen before- ruins of a recent extinction. Touring scenes of five- or ten thousand year-old devastation in the sims was one thing; the reality of a recent extinction quite another.

  The data from the initial Ship and microdrone surveys suggested that the death of the native species had occurred about a thousand orbits of the planet’s sun in the past- close to a thousand years on Homeworld. From the perspective of a planetary archeologist, the ruins were quite “fresh”. Perhaps that was what made the sight so appalling. There had been some weathering and breakdown of the structures, but substantial portions of many were still standing. Empty and ruined, but still standing. Not like the piles of rubble left after five thousand years or so.

  “I hate these awful hazard suits. Do we have an estimate for mitigation of the viral infestation yet?”

  The Chief had been thoroughly checked out in the gear and had done the required time in orientation and actual use of the suits, but all that had done was help her to understand the limitations of the gear. Her vision was restricted, movement in the suit was awkward, and it seemed that even in a new hazard suit the atmosphere was a little stale. Of course, the suits were completely self-contained and could withstand a hard vacuum, six atmospheres of pressure, intense heat, and cold down to the temperature of dark space. That knowledge didn’t make them any more comfortable.

  There were a few moments of silence before her second in command spoke up. “The preliminary estimate of our team is two to three standard years from this date. Our epidemiologists have conjectured that the airborne microbiologicals that our microdrones found were likely to have contributed to the demise of the intelligent species on this planet. The biologicals are highly active and appear to mutate rapidly. The genetic structure of life on this planet is close to ours and the epidemiologists required the hazard suits out of an abundance of caution. The mere fact that these biologicals still exist suggests that they are quite robust and virulent.

  “There is a small probability that our people could be infected with one or more of the airborne biologicals in the atmosphere. The experts say that microforms that are parasitic on intelligent species often become quite dangerous in the continuing struggle to survive hosts who fight back with sophisticated medical resources, so no chances are being taken with a virulent life form that might be able to infect us. Furthermore, it is possible that the viruses may have been products of biological warfare development. Nuclear weapons may not have been the only form of attack here. Their survival without hosts for all this time is a definite sign that they may be highly dangerous, even to our species.”

  The microdrones were small, mere specks floating in the wind or clinging to a plant. The Ship’s cloaked satellites dropped billions of them contained in small spheres large and heavy enough to make the fall through the upper atmosphere but small enough that they would be unlikely to be detected, even by their own technology. Once in to the lower atmosphere of a planet or moon a sphere would break apart into hundreds of thousands of the little specks that would then begin their work.

  Microdrones were the first line of reconnaissance for the expedition, clandestinely checking things that the Ship couldn’t easily test for itself without the possibility of detection. Even the cloaked satellites were not as critical to the mission of the Ship.

  The most critical role of the little drones was to determine whether an intelligent species resided on a planet without being detected. Visits of the Chief’s species to numerous planets and moons suggested that even on an inhabited celestial object detection would be unlikely. So far the problem had been theoretical, though, since no active intelligent species had ever been encountered. No chances were taken, however.

  In the event that an intelligent species was discovered, the entire expedition would be affected. The Ship would leave only an automated observation station behind, and would proceed to an alternate star system. Settlement of any planet on which a new intelligent species was discovered was banned by Community protocols.

/>   While the primary function of the drones was to ensure that no intelligent life existed on a planet, they had a number of other tasks. Their other functions were to acquire detailed information for weather forecasting, assist the Ship in the creation of highly detailed three-dimensional maps and do some ground- and water-based chemical analysis. Lastly, they did what they had recently done on Planet Three- they checked for inimical biologicals in the atmosphere or on the surface of the planet.

  The search for intelligent life had never been successful, but here on Planet Three the check for potentially dangerous organisms had finally been justified.

  So far in the starfaring history of the People no other technological species had been found as anything other than remains. After ten thousand years, even hazardous biologicals were not likely to survive. On this planet, however, a number of potentially dangerous microforms had been discovered. The people of the Ship had not become a starfaring race and hadn’t survived as long as they had by being casual about unexpected hazards. In this case, their preparation and care for detail had paid off.

  The Chief kicked herself mentally. She should have asked more about the hazard suit requirement before her team even left the Ship. She had no idea what precautions had been taken to protect her teams on the surface, a terrible oversight. This was a sign that the extensive simulation training her Group had been through before their departure wasn’t going to protect them from their inexperience and from the realities of planetary exploration. As a rule, the biochemistry of the Chief’s species would be different enough from any extinct race that biological infections could not happen. On her first planet, though, that turned out not to be true. A serious error all around.

  She modulated her voice to keep anger out of her tone. “I think we need a meeting to make sure we are all properly informed and up to date on findings.”

  There was another moment of silence on the command channel. Her second spoke again. “Sorry, Chief. Number Four was informed of the requirement by the Group’s epidemiologists and immediately took steps to implement the appropriate Atmospheric Contamination plan. Apparently she recognized her responsibility but had not yet arranged to alert her superiors concerning the requirement. She took steps to see the plan was implemented and has verified that all necessary steps have been taken to ensure the safety of the first surface teams.” He hesitated. “She was just completing the last steps of the relevant protocol and had not yet transmitted the alert.”