The Reticuli Deception (Adventures of Hannibal Carson Book 2)

by Alastair Mayer

  “But perhaps not to the casual observer.”

  “It would be detectable, but they wouldn’t necessarily recognize it for what it is, if that’s what you mean,” Jackie said. “But Carson, anyone—any species—with warp drive is going to know what they’re looking at, and if they don’t have warp drive, they’re not your Spacefarers, are they?”

  That was a good point. Unless there was some other easy method of interstellar travel, and as far as Carson knew there weren’t even theoretical possibilities, the Spacefarers must have had warp drive. Indeed, the disintegrator tool they’d found in the pyramid on Chara III had been, as best they could determine, based on warp technology. “No, probably not.”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Twelve hours later, having heard nothing more beyond a few faint noise bursts which, despite Roberts’ protests, Carson felt inclined to discount as emissions from the gas giant, they were approaching ZR III—Zirth—from the far side of its moon.

  “Anything?” asked Carson. A bleak landscape filled one of the screens.

  “Just cratered terrain,” said Jackie. “We could be missing something small but there are certainly no major installations on this moon. If this is an inhabited system the locals are primitive. I think this system is a washout, just like Alpha Mensae.”

  Marten was awake now and watching the screen with the others. “Some of those craters seem awfully bright, like they’re fresh.”

  “Fresh?”

  “Relatively speaking. They could be a million years old, hard to say without knowing more about the impact rates and solar wind effects in this system. But fresher than everything else.”

  “Is that unusual?” Carson wasn’t sure of the significance, but it wasn’t his field.

  “It is for a terraformed system,” said Roberts. “The Terraformers left their systems in better shape, with most of the debris in safe orbits. Accidents happen over a few tens of millions of years, though. Perhaps a large comet broke up passing one of the gas giants and the fragments happened to hit the moon. Some probably hit the planet at the same time, if that were the case. But Marten’s right, they do look fresh. Without more data there’s no easy way to tell from here if they’re a couple of weeks or a couple of million years old.”

  “Craters on the planet would give us more information,” Marten said.

  “Sure.” Terrestrial geology was something Carson knew more about. Determining precise erosion rates would take ground surveys, but they could guess to within an order of magnitude from the terrain type. “So, let’s go take a look.”

  34: Analysis

  Sawyer City, Alpha Centauri

  “How is the analysis coming, Brown?” Ducayne was out of his usual office, now down in the secret offices under the aging hangar at Sawyer Spaceport. With the augmented Blue Book data in hand, Brown was reviewing all the reports in light of current knowledge. It had been unfortunate about Rico. Ducayne had lost agents before, ones he’d known a lot longer than Rico, but it was never easy.

  “Tediously. Even with the data all re-scanned and the AI parsing out the relevant details, the sheer volume of reports is amazing: 56,323 pages’ worth, not counting photos and some other documents which were not originally scanned.”

  “But surely you can eliminate most of those?”

  “Oh, certainly. Most of them are either the planet Venus or advanced-for-the-time military aircraft being kept secret. Many just don’t have enough detail to even try analyzing. I mean, ‘I saw a light in the sky’ is hardly a report. Makes you wonder why they even made a record of it.”

  Ducayne understood bureaucracies well enough—more than he liked—to be able to explain that. “The more reports they filed, the more important the project looked, so the bigger the budget next year.”

  “Didn’t anyone look at the quality of the reports?”

  Ducayne didn’t think Brown was really that naïve. Of course that had been back almost before automated systems even existed, let alone were capable of a degree of contextual analysis and evaluation. “What do you think?”

  Brown shook his head. “No, probably not.”

  “So you haven’t turned up anything interesting?”

  “Oh, I didn’t say that. There are a few cases which aren’t obviously Venus or weather balloons or aircraft, and which are internally self-consistent enough that they’re not obvious fabrications,” Brown said. “That’s where it gets interesting. When those are analyzed in light of what we know, some of the reported behavior makes sense.”

  “Such as?”

  “There are reports of craft settling near bodies of water, or hovering above lakes or ponds and siphoning up water.”

  “That is interesting,” said Ducayne. Most current starships used water as a convenient and dense store for their hydrogen fusion fuel. It held fifty percent more hydrogen by volume than pure liquid hydrogen, and warp ships cared more about volume than mass. Scout ships in particular were typically equipped to refuel in the wild, as it were. “Do the shapes of the craft make sense too?”

  “Some do. There are egg shapes and cigar shapes, they’d both work well in a warp field, although less well for in-atmosphere flight requiring lifting surfaces.”

  “No pyramids?” Carson and his team had seen, or thought they’d seen, a flying pyramid on Chara III. His own people had found debris that could have been from a pyramidal ship, although someone or something had removed it all before they’d had a chance to recover it.

  “Not so far. But that’s an interesting point. A pyramid isn’t a good aerodynamic shape either. Did Carson report seeing an exhaust?”

  “No. It might have been too far away, but Roberts suspected some kind of antigravity.” It wasn’t Ducayne’s field, but Roberts, and some of the other experts Ducayne had talked to, had explained that antigravity was a theoretical possibility given the same space-bending technology that allowed for warp drives. So far nobody had figured out exactly how to do that. Algernon Brenke was the acknowledged expert in the field—he’d almost single-handedly invented the warp drive—but he had died in an unfortunate and rather messy field test accident before he could explore all the possibilities.

  “Antigravity would explain those shapes. It’s not needed for the classic flying saucer, of course. A saucer is a lifting body, just not a very stable one,” Brown said, then paused as if reconsidering. “Well, not unless it’s spinning, like a Frisbee.”

  “Oh, that would be a fun ride.” Ducayne shook his head, then leveled his gaze at Brown again. “So what’s the bottom line? Were any of them really alien or not?”

  Brown sat back and put his hands together, steepling his fingers. “The official conclusion of Project Blue Book was that UFOs were not a threat to national security. In hindsight, since Earth has never been invaded by aliens, that was clearly true. They took no position on whether any of the sightings represented actual alien contact.”

  “I want to know what you think, not what Blue Book thought.”

  “I’m getting to that. So far I haven’t found anything that clearly and unambiguously indicates any contact with aliens, or observation of a craft that couldn’t have been built with twentieth-century technology. But, on the other hand, there’s a significant number—a small fraction, but out of the thousands still a significant number—of reports which could more easily be explained by some kind of vehicle built with twenty-second century technology, or perhaps the alien equivalent, especially if we consider the possibility of antigravity. So by Occam’s Razor, we’re talking either time travel or aliens, and I think I’d give aliens the edge on that.”

  “Please let it be aliens. I don’t even want to think about the trouble time travel could cause.” Ducayne shuddered at the thought. “What about actual contact?”

  “Nothing definitive. There are too many conflicting descriptions or inexplicable behavior. Sure, some of that might be reconciled as embellishment of something actual, so I couldn’t give you a flat ‘no’, but I think it unlikely. Either tha
t or twentieth-century America was a crossroads for more intelligent species than we’ve encountered so far in T-space, even counting primitive and extinct ones.”

  “Okay. Let’s assume that’s a no. The odds that a score of different species of spacefaring alien all decided to abandon T-space when humans first set foot on the Moon is pretty slim. We can’t be that scary.” The thought amused Ducayne. It might make his job easier if humans really were that scary. On the other hand, he considered, there’s a fine line between fear and aggression. He wasn’t sure that he wanted technologically advanced aliens thinking of humans as a threat.

  “Let’s see if I’ve got this, then.” Ducayne wanted to be clear. “No actual contact but a high likelihood of sightings of one or more actual alien spacecraft?”

  Brown frowned and looked like he had discovered half a worm in a piece of fruit he’d just taken a bite of. “‘High likelihood’, yes, I think that’s the best way to put it.”

  “All right.” He considered his options. “I’d really like to dispatch another ship to Zeta Reticuli.”

  “Another? I thought you told Carson to stay away from there?”

  “Carson wouldn’t be half as useful to us as he is, if he always did what he was told,” said Ducayne. “Anyway, it’s a moot point. If Carson’s not there already he will be in a few days. We don't have anything worth sending.” Even a fast courier ship, with antimatter drives and twice the speed of Roberts’ Sapphire, would take almost two weeks to get there . . . if it weren’t for the fact that such ships had only one-third the needed range.

  Brown nodded. “I suppose a message torpedo is out of the question?” It wouldn’t be much faster than a courier ship, but would have the range. But Carson and Roberts wouldn't be expecting one.

  “Right. I'm not about to send a message torpedo blindly into an unknown and possibly inhabited system.”

  Brown gestured at his analysis of the Blue Book data. “So, shall I continue with this?”

  “Please do. And something else. For the incidents where an alien spacecraft might be an explanation, see what you can pull together in terms of capabilities of said craft. Size, speed, maneuverability, and so on. ”

  “So treat it like a technology evaluation based on limited surveillance data, then?”

  Ducayne knew Brown had experience with that sort of thing. “Exactly.”

  “And the sooner the better, of course?”

  “Yesterday, if possible.”

  “I thought you didn’t want to think about time travel,” Brown said, and grinned.

  Good, Brown was getting past his survivor guilt. There really was nothing else he could have done. “Touché. Just get it finished.”

  35: Exploring

  Aboard Sophie

  As they rounded the moon, Z1R III—Zirth—looked like any Earthlike planet—perhaps except Verdigris. Blues and whites—oceans, cloud and ice—dominated, with browns and greens, and much more of the former, dominating the continents.

  “Looks like a lot of desert on this world. Take us into a high inclination orbit,” Carson said as they approached. “Let’s do a survey first.”

  “Not a polar orbit?” Marten said, and grinned.

  “No. We don’t need really, really detailed maps of the poles. And I don’t think you want to spend a couple of weeks in zero gee.”

  Marten winced. “Ouch. You got me.”

  Jackie made the necessary course adjustments and put a magnified image of the planet up on the central screen. “We’re still kind of far out, but I’m not seeing any lights on the night side. No cities, anyway.”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  The reason for this became obvious a few hours later as they orbited the planet.

  There were craters, not everywhere, but scattered around coasts and rivers. They were all of a range, no more than two or three kilometers in diameter. The absence of small ones could be explained by erosion or the filtering effect of an atmosphere on small meteorites, but there were no huge impact structures either; no Chixulubs or Sudburys or Vredevoort Rings.

  Some of the desert areas showed signs of earlier forestation, with significant deadfall or burn damage. But Jackie had been wrong. There were cities, or ruins of cities. And they were all dead.

  “What happened here?”

  “A comet?” Jackie said. “If it had broken up you’d get a few big fragments and lot of small ones. Ice chunks would probably explode before reaching the ground, like Tunguska back on Earth. Rocks would dig craters. That would also explain the moon’s impacts.”

  “It’s curious that it would wipe out every single city.”

  “It could have been a massive bombardment.”

  “Then the rest of the continent should show more impacts.”

  “What if . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Consider Earth prior to the Unholy War. What if this place was like that, with nuclear-armed nations. A meteorite bombardment could set off a nuclear war, if they didn’t realize what it was.”

  “Or even if they did, if they were crazy enough.” Some nations on Earth had been that crazy. “That could explain the destruction of all the cities, although even Earth never went that far. Are you detecting any nuclear debris?”

  “Only trace amounts of fission debris, not what you’d expect from a conventional nuclear exchange. Maybe they used pure fusion bombs. Or . . .”

  “Or what?”

  “Spacefarer disintegrators. Create a warp field in atmosphere—or worse, up against something solid—and you get a big bang.”

  Carson well remembered that from Chara III. Such an explosion had helped their escape from attackers intent on stealing the artifact they’d recovered. “But that big? I thought there was a limit to how big you can make a warp bubble, and the interaction would only be at the surface.”

  “You’re right. That’s why I hesitated to mention it. You could do a lot of damage but that’s not a city buster.”

  “Let’s keep looking, maybe we’ll find more clues.”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  “How long ago did this happen, do you think?”

  “Hard to say. Depends on how bad the initial damage was. A minimum of a hundred years; there’s new growth in amongst the treefall in some of the crater blast zones, as well as in some areas of the cities. A maximum? It depends on growing conditions both now and after the event.” He paused, feeling as if a cold, lonely wind were blowing over him. “Perhaps a thousand years, surely no more than two.”

  “You know, Carson,” said Marten, “looking at the planet, it’s almost as if there were two separate bombardments.”

  “Oh?”

  “Well, some of the craters look a lot more eroded than others. Likewise in some places the re-growth is a lot more dense than other places. Now, sure,” Marten held up a hand to forestall Carson’s obvious objection, “some of that can be explained just by different climate in the different regions, but look at this.” He flipped through a series of images, finally bringing one up on the screen. It showed two circular scars in the landscape, surrounded at some distance by the vague rectilinear outlines of what could well have been city blocks, and beyond that, the brown-green of scrubby vegetation. The vegetation grew somewhat closer to the eastern crater than the western, and the gullies in the walls of the eastern crater seemed deeper.

  “Son of a gun,” Carson said. “That eastern crater is easily a century older than the other, probably more.”

  “Yes. I would say more; the local vegetation suggests a semi-arid climate, so erosion rates would be low.”

  It could be coincidence, of course. This might be the one city which had been hit by a meteorite or suffered some other massive explosion years before the rest of the bombardment. The odds on that were tiny, and Carson had a feeling that if they examined the data, they’d find more examples like this. Apparently Marten had already seen some. “I don’t like it. What happened here?”

  Nobody had an answer.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

&n
bsp; “I can understand the rumors about this system being haunted,” Jackie said as they completed another orbit. They’d seen ruined city after ruined city, and signs of agricultural land long-abandoned. “The place is a graveyard.”

  “But how did that rumor get started without tales of these bombed out cities making their way back to settled T-space? This is big news.”

  “I suppose artifact smugglers might want to keep the place quiet.”

  “Anything from here would be completely different from the neolithic artifacts from elsewhere. For a collector to be interested they’d have to know about this place.”

  “A well-kept secret?”

  “I don’t think so. Not that well kept. We’d hear rumors, some trace of unusual artifacts. Marten, ever hear of anything that might be related?”

  “No, not me. Sure, we get rumors and crazy emails, same as any archeology department, but nothing that I can recall that would correlate.”

  “Well, I think we’re accumulating more questions than answers up here in orbit. Captain,” he said, turning to address Jackie, “let’s find a city that isn’t completely flattened and land.”

  “Land? I’m thinking we should just get out of the system and report back. This place is starting to give me the creeps.”

  “It’s not haunted, Jackie.”

  “That’s not what I meant. Besides, how many millions are dead down there? If anywhere was haunted it would be this place. But no, there’s too much unexplained, including the weird signals we saw from out-system. Call it my pilot instincts. If something bad has happened and you don’t understand it, then don’t proceed.”

  “Nothing bad has happened to us.”

  “And I want to keep it that way.”

  “Don’t we need to refuel anyway?” Carson knew that they did.

  “I can do that out-system. The gas giant will have ice moons.”

  “The gas giant has something at its L5 point, it may also have something in orbit.”

  Roberts scowled. “We don’t know there was anything at its L5.” She looked at the images of the planet below, then at her instruments.