by David Smith
She finally understood what he meant and turned back to her console to pore over the images of the bizarre probability diagrams. The last one appeared to be reversible, but in truth she was only guessing. More pragmatically, she had no idea how to physically reset the machine. Would exposing Jonah to the quantum probability field reverse his luck, or reinforce it?
She handed him her Falandian Groat.
‘I’m not flipping a coin over this. I want you to change me back!’ grumbled Jonah.
‘I’m not asking you to flip for whether we do it, I want to check if your luck is still holding. The easiest way to check is give you the simplest test or your luck: flip the coin.’
He flipped the coin, and at her insistance he flipped it again, and again. On the seventh flip he called wrong.
She leaned back, satisfied. ‘It’s fading.’
Jonah looked at the coin uncertainly. ‘You mean I’ll go back to normal?’
She watched him, uncertain if this revelation had disappointed or relieved him. ‘It looks like the machine generates a blip in the field that controls probability vectors. I guess that as the effect spreads out through the field, the strength of the effect on probability decreases. We’ve chucked a stone in the probability pool and I would imagine the ripples are spreading out around us through both time and space, but getting smaller as they do. I think you just need to stay out of harm’s way for a while. But if you want to make any stupid bets, I’d do it sooner rather than later.’
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As Tiger pulled out of orbit, Cumbers was discussing her theory with Lieutenant-Commander O’Mara in a circumspect way. She never mentioned her attempt to use the machine or its effect on her guinea-pig, Jonah James.
They stared at the diagrams and the data for the bizarre machine, and O’Mara chewed on a strand of her hair. ‘I’ll get the linguists to go through everything we know about the Jevean and get to the bottom of these symbols. If you’re right, and I suspect you are, this could warrant a full scale scientific mission to this system.’
Cumbers blushed. If they did, they’d almost certainly spot that she’d already fiddled with the machine out of her own irrepressible and irresponsible curiosity.
‘I think we should discuss this with the Captain immediately’ suggest O’Mara.
Cumbers was horrified. ‘Oh I don’t think we should bother him now! I’m sure he’s very busy, what with us, um . . . moving and stuff.’
O’Mara shot her a questioning look, but before she could say anything, she received a call from the Bridge.
‘O’Mara, here. What’s up?’
The Captains voice came through the link. ‘We’ve just spotted a moonlet in a retrograde orbit. We think it’s on a collision course with the largest moon in the system.’
‘I’m on my way!’
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O’Mara reached the Bridge just as Crash manoeuvred the ship into a high orbit around the gas giant planet.
Chief Benoit was at the science console and had already brought Tiger’s sensors to bear on the moonlet as it sped through the gas giant’s sphere of influence.
It was small enough to be an irregular moon and O’Mara sat next to Benoit and began checking the data. ‘Mass around twenty million tonnes, mostly iron and silicates . . . and it’s definitely on a collision course with the beta moon.’
She put a tactical plot on the main view-screen which showed the broad ellipse of the system’s second largest moon and a broader arc where the target moonlet curved back through the system. Only Cumbers noticed that at the bottom of the screen the orbit of the largest moon in the system was also visible. All three bodies were converging.
O’Mara watched the moon and moonlet getting closer and closer together and murmured ‘They’ve been orbiting safely for billions of years and they choose to collide on a day we’re in the system. Now what are the odds of that?!’
The second largest moon was already in danger of breaking up due to the gravitational stress of its elliptical orbit. The closer it got to the gas giant the faster it moved and as the moonlet shot in from the opposite heading, the impact was catastrophic.
O’Mara switched back to a telescope view just as the moonlet impacted on the larger body.
There was a bright flare as millions of tonnes of rock were vaporised by the enormous impact, and the large moon immediately disintegrated.
It shattered into a billion pieces, flying in so many directions the ships navigational sensors couldn’t track them all, a vast cloud of debris spreading out at thousands of kilometres an hour.
Cumbers stared at a console rather than the main view-screen. She was the only one on the Bridge keeping an eye on the tactical display now only available of the screens at the consoles. She eased herself into a seat at the mission operations station and watched, fascinated, as with awful inevitability millions of tonnes of rock smashed into the surface of the moon they’d just left. The probability altering machine was destroyed and buried forever.
O’Mara turned and noticed that Cumbers had followed her to the Bridge. ‘You ok, Sarah?’
‘Yeah’ replied Sarah. ‘Probably.'
Chapter 11: ‘In Harm’s Way’
Environment and Ecology Officers Log: Lieutenant Skye L’Amour
Star Date 9540.4
It’s been a quiet few months for the E&E team. Whilst the Archaeologists have had a couple of ancient civilisations to investigate we’ve not really had that much to do.
We’d like to have at least tried to find out if anything survived the nuclear bombardment on Sigma Epsilon Theta Six Iota D, or Teegeeack as we’ve now named it, but the radiation was so bad we couldn’t have spent any useful time on the surface.
I did manage to get some time with a scout robot, but while they’re a great tool, there’s no substitute for getting your hands and feet dirty.
The Captain has moved on to another system originally charted by USS Magellan about twenty years ago. Her Science Officer, Lieutenant Zack James, noted that there were two systems in the Sigma Epsilon Kappa region that have nascent ecological systems.
We’re particularly interested in Sigma Epsilon Kappa Seven Iota, or SEKSI as the team call it. It’s a really strange planet as there’s a vast shallow ocean that covers virtually the entire planet. The only significant land mass is an island just two hundred kilometres across, but even on such a tiny foothold, USS Magellan discovered a terrestrial ecosystem with a variety of herbivores, omnivores and carnivores.
The numbers of each were tiny, making the ecosystem fragile and thus vulnerable. We think it’s worth studying purely to assist our understanding of the effect geographic restriction on ecological diversity.
We’re a bit concerned because scans from orbit aren’t reading any significant life signs at all. It’s possible the creatures found by Magellan might be underground in burrows, but that would be unusual for grazing herbivores.
If nothing else it’ll be a chance to get off the ship and stretch our legs a little.
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The away team beamed down, led by Lieutenant Skye L’Amour.
She’d picked three of her best people and they’d brought along two security personnel for protection: The only previous survey of the planet suggested that there might be dangerous animals to contend with.
Chief Mariam Obote was an oceanographer and biologist, Crewman Amanda Stephens was an ecologist and xeno-biologist and Crewman Derek Jarvis was a hugely knowledgeable xeno-botanist.
Chief Barbie Belle had decided to lead the security contingent herself and had brought Crewman Kareena Chowdhury as back up. A second team would arrive later with field equipment to set up a camp for the four day mission to examine the planet’s ecosystem.
They materialised close to the western shore of the planet’s main land mass. Skye looked around herself and revelled in the sensation of being one of only a half-dozen humans to have ever visited this world.
The sky was abso
lutely clear, with not a cloud in sight to spoil the deep blue of the sky. The sun looked smaller and slightly bluer than Earth’s sun, but she could have been standing near the shore of her native New Zealand.
A deep blue ocean rolled and thundered, large waves breaking on the pristine white sand that formed a gentle slope between land and sea.
Scrubby grasses sprouted in the sand, growing thicker as they grew further away from the shore before eventually giving way to clumps of tough looking shrubs and more verdant grasses inland.
The sea smelt much like the oceans on Earth and a cool onshore breeze felt wonderfully invigorating after being cooped up aboard the ship for so long. This is what she’d signed up for.
She scanned the area looking for the life-signs of any of the potentially dangerous predators they expected to find. To her surprise there were none anywhere nearby. She adjusted the tricorder and tried again.
Nothing. No predators and more worryingly no herbivores either. The only life-signs seemed to be plant and insect types. She shrugged to herself. Perhaps they were further inland? Either way, that made this a reasonable site for the camp and she called back to the ship to confirm that the second half of the away team should beam down to the same location.
As they arrived, the rest of the team were already going about their business, examining plants and taking soil and air samples.
Chief Obote had wandered down to the shoreline with Chief Belle and was taking samples of seawater and poking away at piles of seaweed and flotsam.
She turned her attention to the soil-sampling equipment they’d brought, but was distracted by a shout from Derek Jarvis.
She trotted inland a little and rising over a crest found Jarvis examining a large crater in the ground. The edges were ragged and the bottom deep. Near the bottom were worrying dark stains.
Skye recognised the ragged edges as the work of a large animal. Something very large and powerful had excavated this deep hole, but it seemed it had been after something quite small. There were signs of small tunnels in the ruins of the hole. It looked like something large had dug into the burrow of the local equivalent of a rodent.
She scanned the dark stains to confirm that these were indeed blood, but there were no other remains. A more in-depth scan revealed some DNA that she could analyse later, but also something more like a venom or toxin.
A visual scan also revealed a rock surface near the bottom of the excavation which showed three distinct claw marks. Skye eyed them warily. The spread of the claw-marks indicated a very large paw, and the fact that the claws had actually gouged a noticeable impression into hard rock suggested incredible power. A scan with her tricorder also revealed more traces of venom on the rock.
This was clearly a predatory animal at work, and clearly a very powerful, very dangerous one.
Dangerous or not, she desperately wanted to find the animal that had caused this carnage. It wasn’t every day you got to be the first person to set eyes on an unknown species.
Not far away she found Crewman Amanda Stephens examining some bones. ‘Hey you. What have you found?’
Stephens looked up. ‘Signs of predation. This creature looks like some kind of halfway stage between amphibian and lizard. Looking at the skull and teeth I’d say it was a herbivore, but I can’t tell much else because the skeleton in incomplete.’
She poked at the bare bones with a gloved finger. ‘The skull is more or less intact, and the majors bones of the fore-limbs too, but it looks like the bones in the thorax and the spine were eaten by the predator, or possibly scavenged at a later date. These bones are weathered so they’ve been out here a few years. I found the rear hips and legs about ten metres over that way, partially buried, but equally thoroughly gnawed.’
‘Wow. Savage’ nodded Skye.
‘Yeah’ agree Stephens ‘and whatever did this was big, relatively speaking. I figure the herbivore was probably only about a metre long excluding any tail, but looking at the incisions into the bone, I’d guess the predator must have been more than twice that size.’
Skye’s brow furrowed. ‘That’s odd. I wasn’t expecting such a large predator from the records Magellan left?’
Stephens shrugged ‘Me neither. But then, they only did a fly-past and scan: They never put bodies on the ground. If the predator really is that large, an island this small couldn’t support many such animals so I guess they just missed them.’
Skye nodded although she wasn’t convinced. In her experience, the herbivorous species within a given ecosystem tended to be larger than the predators in the system. They’d seen nothing so far to suggest the tiny ecosystem could support anything so big.
She put the matter to the back of her mind and got on with the business in hand. Returning to the site of the camp she found that the second half of the away team had arrived. Shruthi Kanesh, another of her biologists, was starting to erect the tents that would offer shelter overnight.
‘Hey Shruthi, we’re not having much luck with the local fauna. Do you reckon it’s worth scouting further inland? I’d really like to find the herbivores Magellan reported.’
Shruthi smiled broadly. Like all of the ecology and environment team she’d been looking forward to this field-trip. ‘Yeah, probably, boss. Magellan reported small numbers and herbivores tend to move as a herd, so they’ll probably all be in little clusters rather than spread out across the island. We’ll take the flyskees, cover more distance. Once we find a herd we’ll track and study it.’
Skye nodded. The flyskees were an invaluable tool for field trips. They resembled bicycles without wheels and folded up into a single man-portable frame when not in use. These lightweight compact grav-sleds allowed a crewman to cover much greater distances than were possible on foot.
‘Ok, I’ll send the drones out to map the terrain and see if they can spot a herd to give you starting point.’ Skye found a small case the second team had brought and opened it up. Activating the mapping drones, she pulled out the control PAD that was also in the box and selected the functions she required: topographic survey, visual record, bio-signature readings.
She defined boundaries for the operation from the grid co-ordinates for the island and pressed the execute button. The team of little drones whirred away and began mapping the island, feeding back live data that Kanesh could use to guide her quest to locate the herbivores that they’d expected to find.
They’d arrived around midday according to the planet’s rotation, but by the time they’d finished setting up camp and assembling the flyskees it was late afternoon.
Skye checked the predictions of day length and found that the rotation of the planet gave a thirty-one hour day, which left them about four hours of usable light.
It wasn’t enough to cover much of the island and Skye was happy to leave the scouting trip until the next morning, but Kanesh was itching to get started. Eventually Skye agreed. ‘Ok, Shruthi, you can go but keep it simple. Don’t go chasing shadows, it’ll be dark in four hours and I want you back in camp before then. Take one of the security bods with you.’
Kanesh bounded away and spoke to Chief Belle who assigned Kareena Chowdhury as her escort. Chowdhury checked her weapons and they mounted the flyskees.
The little silver machines looked like gym bikes sat on four flat round pads until the power circuit was activated. When they were turned on they lifted the rider a half-metre above ground and drove like old-fashioned motorcycles.
They weren’t particularly comfortable, especially when ridden fast, but the exhilaration of skimming low across the terrain at speeds up to a hundred kilometres per hour meant that few people could resist opening up the throttle.
In truth the poor machines were subject to the full weight of human stupidity. Many had been damaged (often beyond repair) in races organised by Chief money and more than a few lost when one crewman or other took on a particularly stupid stunt for a bet or just for the sheer hell of pushing the unfortunate machine to it’s absolute limit. Kanesh took some com
fort from the fact that her escort Kareena Chowdhury was Tiger’s reigning flyskee jousting champion, undefeated with lance or mace for two years now.
Kanesh mounted a tricorder and PAD on the handlebars of her flyskee then led the way, heading grid north into the interior plain of the island. The terrain was open and rolling, always rising slightly towards to centre of the island.
Small streams ran down the gentle slopes, agglomerating into the only sizeable river on the planet that ran from the very centre of the island to a small estuary a few klicks south of the camp.
Kanesh followed the streams to the river and then followed the river inland. They scanned the terrain as they went, but weren’t learning anything that the mapping drones hadn’t already discovered.
Worryingly, Kanesh noted a distinct lack of animal life. There didn’t seem to be anything much larger than the insects that seemed hell-bent on getting in her face.
They flew for over an hour. As the terrain rose towards the centre of the island, the shrubbery grew thicker and the grass less prevalent. Before long they caught sight of primitive trees and more common cycad-type plants, but still they failed to find any animal life.
Chowdhury pulled level with Kanesh and shouted across. ‘It’ll be dark in a couple of hours. We should think about turning back.’
Kanesh checked her clock, and realised that Chowdhury was right, but she couldn’t resist the urge to press on just a little further. She was just about to turn around and head back to camp when a light beeped on her tricorder. It had detected a larger life-sign.
Kanesh checked, but there was no significant data. A life-form was moving somewhere off to their left. She turned that way and used the tricorder to guide her towards the apparent life-form.
This wasn’t as easy as it sounded. They were now in the shadow of the high ground as the sun began to set, and in the fading light with one eye on the tricorder, Kanesh’s riding became erratic.
The signs of the life-form were weak and fleeting, but Kanesh didn’t know if this was because it was a poor signal or a small life-sign, or possibly even just a bad signal.