The Reticuli Deception (Adventures of Hannibal Carson Book 2)

by Alastair Mayer

  “Sol.”

  He couldn’t have heard her correctly. “Say again?”

  “Sol. It points to Sol, Hannibal. Earth’s sun.”

  “I know where Sol is! There’s no way there’s anything connected with spacefarers on Earth.”

  “Are you sure about that? Pyramids, rumors of ancient astronauts—”

  “Nothing that’s old enough to fit the chronology. I spent years looking. The oldest Egyptian pyramids are nothing like what we found on Chara, and only a third as old. Half at most.”

  “Something that’s been overlooked? Maybe still buried, or sunken, or under the ice?” asked Brown.

  “Heck, maybe something buried on the Moon,” put in Roberts.

  Carson glared at her. She grinned back.

  “All right,” growled Ducayne, “that’s enough. Carson, is it at all possible there’s something on Earth?”

  “We can’t rule out an unproven negative. But I wouldn’t know where to begin looking on Earth, nor am I sure I’d want to.”

  “Egypt?” asked Roberts. “I hear that’s hardly radioactive at all anymore.”

  “That doesn’t worry me. I’ve visited the pyramids. They have been so thoroughly explored, probed, investigated, neutrino-graphed, and probably dowsed that there can’t be anything significant there we haven’t found yet. No. Forget Earth for now.”

  Ducayne and Brown looked at each other but didn’t say anything. Carson wondered if there was some agenda he was missing, but he was convinced the real answers would be out in, or more likely beyond, T-space. “What else do you have?” he asked.

  “Several tentative locations,” Ducayne said, “but we don’t have the actual talismans to confirm them yet.”

  “What about commonalities?” Carson said. “Are these all the same size, same age, what? Or have you looked at that yet?”

  Brown sat up. “From the information we have, these are all the same size to within a couple of millimeters. The two genuine talismans we have, and your Chara talisman, match to within a tenth millimeter, and that difference may be due to wear. As far as age—”

  “Oh my gosh!” Roberts had been sitting staring at the images. Her sudden interruption caught everyone’s attention.

  “What is it?”

  “I just realized something. Or maybe nothing. Wait one.” Roberts’ fingers hammered on a keypad as she retrieved data. “Ducayne, how do I access Sophie from here, or tie into an astrophysical database?”

  “Are Sophie’s computers on?” Ducayne asked.

  “It’s running diagnostics, but she’ll let me in.”

  Ducayne rose and stepped over to her console. He pressed his thumb against a scan-pad for a moment then tapped several keys. “Okay, you have a link to Sophie. You know her systems, that’ll be faster. Does this have something to do with the patterns?”

  “Yes.” Roberts logged in to Sophie’s computers and kept working the console.

  Carson was mystified. “What’s going on, Jackie?”

  “I don't know why it didn't hit me before, I've been working with these for a couple of weeks. Well, that and repairs.” Jackie looked up at the wall screen and flipped an image onto it, the array of all eight talismans. “We have all these stellar locations represented in 2.5-D coordinates.” The realization that the color of the gemstones encoded the distance, or “half” dimension beyond X and Y, had been the breakthrough in decoding the pattern on the original talisman.

  “Except for the bogus ones, yes.” Carson almost felt he knew where she was going this, but couldn’t quite pin it down. Something about the coordinates.

  “Right.” She dropped those from the display. “But the thing about a 2.5-D display, just like a simple two dimensional representation, is that it assumes a point of view.”

  “But with the Chara talisman, you said we didn’t know the point of view; that’s why we needed the third dimension.”

  “To match the first one, yes, or any given one without any other context. But now they give each other context.”

  “So you can figure out a point of view?” Carson had it now. His heart thudded in his chest. If they all had the same point of view . . .

  “More like a direction of view. But put several of these together—if they’re all drawn as viewed from the same place—and the directions of view will intersect. Perhaps at the—”

  “At the Spacefarer’s home system,” Carson cut her off.

  “As of fifteen thousand years ago, yes. I’m working that out now.”

  “Carson, you’re not suggesting we just go drop in on them, are you?” Ducayne asked. “That could be asking for more trouble than I care to imagine.”

  “How could we not go? If they’re hostile they could have done us any time since the last ice age.”

  “Maybe they’re only hostile to other spacefarers. Or maybe approaching their system will make them hostile. It’d sure make us nervous.”

  “Got it!” Jackie called out. “Near the edge of explored T-space, assuming fifteen thousand years. Looking for a current match . . . and we have it. Or rather, them.”

  “Them?”

  “I don’t know how precise those diagrams are, I’m allowing for a few parsecs of fudge.”

  “That’s a lot of fudge,” Carson said. “How many stars?”

  “A dozen, but mostly red dwarfs or variable stars we can eliminate.”

  “On the other hand they might have picked an unlikely star as the origin just because we’d probably ignore it,” pointed out Ducayne.

  “What are the likeliest stars?” said Carson.

  Roberts checked her screen. “The nearest to the center of the probable position is an orange-red dwarf, HD-40307. It’s a bit over twelve parsecs from here. It does have planets, at least three big ones in tight orbits. Not habitable, but there may be others, or habitable moons.”

  “Huh, that’d be unusual. What else?”

  “There are a couple of sun-like stars, type G, slightly smaller than Sol, about four parsecs each from the center—”

  “That is a big ball of fudge,” Carson objected. “That takes up about a third of T-space.”

  “Do you want to hear this or not?”

  “Go ahead. G-type stars.”

  “One is Alpha Mensae, ten parsecs from here. I don’t seem to have much data on it. The other is Zeta Reticuli, at just under twelve parsecs away. That’s actually a double star, but it’s a well-separated binary, over a light-month apart. Both stars are G-type.”

  “Excuse me, did you say Zeta Reticuli?” Brown, who’d been sitting so still and quiet that Carson had thought he’d dozed off, sat up and leaned forward. “That reminds me of something.” He sat back and closed his eyes.

  “What?” Carson and Roberts said simultaneously.

  “Shush, give him a moment,” Ducayne said.

  Brown opened his eyes again and leaned forward. “Yes, Zeta Reticuli. About a hundred and fifty, no, a hundred and sixty years ago—1961, I think—an American couple named Betty and Barney Hill claimed to have encountered a UFO, an alien spacecraft, although the details didn’t come out until later, under hypnosis. Bizarre details, and everyone but the UFO cultists discounted it. They claimed to have been taken aboard a spacecraft. One that came from Zeta Reticuli.”

  “What?”

  2: Change of Plans

  Velkaryan HQ, Earth

  The main conference room in the headquarters of the Church of Divine Stellar Providence, the Velkaryans, was the opposite of the deliberately nondescript briefing room of Ducayne’s offices. Like the rest of the building, it was nothing if not opulent. The wood paneling comprised slabs taken from trees of a dozen different planets, although all from types which closely resembled their respective distant terrestrial cousin species, framed by gleaming slices of petrified woods of Earth. The polished stone tabletop and room accents were of a type of marble in which swarmed hundreds of small fossils, mostly the spiral shells of ammonites. The fossils were more than just decorative; ammo
nites had gone extinct at the same time as the dinosaurs, at the same time—give or take a few millennia—as various planets around some of the nearer stars were being re-formed in Earth’s image; terraformed. Velkaryan tenets held that this was done to make way for God’s Chosen: humans. Fossils had been found on other planets, but nothing so old. The carefully quarried, shaped and polished pieces here were a way of affirming that Earth was special, and therefore so must be humans.

  The middle-aged man sitting at the head of the table, Hubble, the Church’s Executive Projects Director, touched his console. “Next item of business,” he said, “the Chara project.”

  He looked around at the leaders of his projects teams who were seated at the table. “What news of Maynard, or even Hopkins?” Maynard was one of their key men in the Alpha Centauri system. He had departed Sawyers World for a rendezvous with Hopkins, a big-time tomb raider who had a lead on an alien yet high-tech artifact. That was over three months ago; he was long overdue.

  One of the team leaders cleared his throat and made his report. “Still no word of either of them, sir. We’ve had no reports of any ships matching either Star Wind”—that was a Velkaryan ship, Maynard had been in command—“or of Hopkins’ ship Hawk. It’s a good bet that both of them are lost.”

  “Damn it. But Carson made it back, right?” Hopkins had been following Carson, an archeologist who seemed intent on proving a connection between primitive cultures on different worlds, something only possible with space travel.

  “Yes sir, he’s back at Drake University on Sawyer’s World. It’s possible that he never went to Chara, the data could be unreliable.”

  “What about the ship he was on? Sophia, Starfire, something like that?”

  “The Sophie. It’s a charter ship and business owned and captained by a Jacqueline Roberts. Records show she returned Carson to Sawyer’s but there are no flight plans showing that either the ship or Roberts has moved on from there. Now, they could have left without filing a flight plan—”

  “Unusual for a charter operator, especially if she’s also got her courier’s papers.” Couriering small packages and, especially, data and network updates between stars was a valuable revenue supplement for such operators.

  “She does. However, the Homeworld Defense operation at Sawyer Spaceport has a new cover, QD Shipping, and they’ve been overhauling a Sapphire-class ship in their hangar. Roberts’ ship is Sapphire-class.”

  “You think she’s working for Ducayne?”

  “That doesn’t really match what we have of her personality profile, she’s too independent. But he might have hired her on as an independent contractor.”

  “Hmm.” Hubble considered this. It would be a change in the way Homeworld Defense normally did things, as though Ducayne was taking a more proactive role rather than passive information gathering. That could be trouble. It would be good to know more about this Roberts, and Carson. On the other, that didn’t answer the original question.

  “That doesn’t tell us what happened to Maynard or Hopkins,” Hubble said. “What about their crews? If somebody turned they should be somewhere in inhabited T-space.”

  “That’s a good point. I’ll see what we have in the way of personnel data and pass the word to be on the look out for them.”

  “Make it a priority. Maynard was valuable. If someone did turn, I want them killed. Slowly. But make sure we wring any information out of them first.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Hubble touched his screen to bring up the next item.

  “Right, moving on. Political demonstrations . . .”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Briefing room, Sawyer City

  “What?” Jackie exclaimed. “And, a hundred and sixty years . . . how do you even know that?”

  “No, I think he’s right,” Carson said. He had dug through scores of old UFO contact stories looking for hints of the real spacefarers, but there’d been too many inconsistencies between them. “Wasn’t there something about a map?”

  “I was getting to that. The aliens didn’t really say where they were from, but Betty Hill reported seeing some kind of 3-D star map on the ship, and when prompted she drew a rough approximation of it. It had what she called ‘trade routes’ on it. Some years later the main stars were identified as Zeta Reticuli, or perhaps the map was drawn from the viewpoint of Zeta Reticuli, the reports don’t all agree.”

  “Well,” said Roberts, “if she was drawing it from memory of a 3-D map, the viewpoint would be from wherever her head happened to be relative to that display. Zeta Reticuli would be just a coincidence. That’s if there’s anything to the story at all.”

  “You don’t think there is?” asked Carson.

  “Trade routes imply a lot of traffic running through known T-space as recently as a hundred and sixty years ago. We’ve been out here nearly fifty of those. I think we’d have noticed some evidence of that by now.”

  “But we are finding evidence,” Carson said.

  Jackie shook her head. “Not that recent.”

  “What about the wreckage in the Epsilon Eridani system?” Ducayne put in. “Or the pyramid you saw in flight at Chara III?”

  “Okay, perhaps,” Roberts said, although she still looked doubtful. “But why are they being so damned sneaky about it? If they were here first, why run and hide the moment we get star travel?”

  “I don’t know. It might be that they’re observing us until they decide on a course of action—”

  “For fifty years?”

  “More like thirty since we really got started. Another possibility is that something else spooked them, and the timing is coincidental.” Ducayne paused and rubbed his chin. “Although I hate coincidences. My worst nightmare is that we have somehow stirred up something else, something we don’t know about yet, that spooked them. I don’t want to meet anything that spooks someone who has had star travel for fifteen thousand years.”

  “If they have had star travel for that long,” Carson muttered.

  “Ducayne darted a look at him. “What do you mean?”

  Carson shook his head. “Nothing. Flying pyramids, pyramidal technology museums . . . who else would it be? It just doesn’t quite meet the level of scientific proof.”

  “And I thought I was the professional paranoid here,” said Ducayne.

  “Wouldn’t we know about it by now if we had stirred up something?” Roberts asked.

  “Would we? I don’t know. I can imagine scenarios where we wouldn’t, and those scare the crap out of me. I’ll tell you, a good imagination is both a blessing and a curse for a security agent.”

  There was a moment of silence as Carson and the others considered the possible implications of Ducayne’s suggestion. Carson broke it. “Be that as it may, the only way we’re going to find out what the situation is, is to go out there and look. But hasn’t anyone been out that way before? It’s not that far.”

  “Alpha Mensae is nearly ten parsecs from here, Zeta Reticuli more than eleven,” Roberts pointed out. “That’s far enough.”

  “Chara is almost nine parsecs away. It has a colony on it.”

  “A tiny one, but point taken,” Roberts said, nodding her head. “Ducayne, I’m sure you have the most complete records on this sort of thing.”

  “We’d better.”

  “Can we get a rundown of all flight plans filed to anywhere in this area, settlement efforts, that sort of thing?”

  “Certainly.” Ducayne turned to Brown. “Can you take care of that? Filter out the details of any classified trips, but leave their dates and destinations. Also flag any ships that went out and were never heard from again. There’ll be a lot of noise in that data but we might find something odd.”

  “Yes sir, no problem.”

  “Okay. Now, Carson and Roberts. No haring off on your own on this one. We have no idea what’s out there, and the Velkaryans are still around.”

  “But Maynard blew up with his ship.”

  “He was important but not the whole org
anization. From what we can tell the local office has been shaken up, but is still operating. There's a much larger following on Earth. They probably don’t know for sure, but they may suspect you had something to do with it, Carson.”

  Any survivors of Hopkins’ and Maynard’s operation—they wouldn’t all have been aboard ship—would probably know that it had been Carson they’d pursued to the Chara system and not returned from. The connection was obvious. “I suppose they want revenge?” he asked.

  “That wouldn’t surprise me. I’ve got people on it, but watch yourself.”

  “Of course.”

  Ducayne turned to Jackie. “Captain Roberts, I want you to continue to refine the probable location from the talisman diagrams and any other information we come up with.”

  She nodded and Ducayne turned back. “Brown or Carson, is that Betty Hill map available anywhere? The original or a photograph of it, not someone else’s reinterpretation.”

  Carson thought about it. He was sure he hadn’t come across it in his research, but then he hadn’t been looking for it. He looked at Brown and raised an eyebrow. “The Blue Book files?”

  Brown shrugged. “That would be the logical place to look, given the timing of the incident, but who knows what happened to the original records. Some of the documentation went to the US National Archives, but original records might not have.”

  “What’s Blue Book?” Jackie asked.

  “A project to investigate UFOs,” Carson said, “undertaken by the United States Air Force from circa 1950 to 1970. Some other countries had similar projects, but Blue Book was the biggest and best known. The Hill encounter would have been right in the middle of that.”

  “Huh. What did they find?”

  “The official conclusion was about what you’d expect,” he answered. “Not a threat to national security, so not worth worrying about, and not extraterrestrial vehicles.”

  “The point is that tracking down records from 150 years ago might not be easy.” Brown turned towards Roberts; he’d know that Carson already knew all this. “Paper records might well still exist but a lot of computer data from that era, including indexes saying where records like that were physically stored, has been lost due both EMP effects during the war and just general bit rot. Backup systems were much more ad hoc in those days, not everything was preserved, and some of that was in proprietary formats whose details are lost.”