The First Exoplanet

by T. J. Sedgwick

  Four hours later, it was not the Gemstone Onyx that had returned, but Pinta herself.

  Trantham was enjoying his cob salad at the staff restaurant. The high-ceilinged steel and glass eatery looking out on to manicured gardens put to shame the refectories of previous generations of workplaces. With its white surfaces and natural light, it was more like an airport really. The water feature with its own artificial waterfall was a nice touch. He sat with Sarah Townsley and her husband of eight years, Jason, who worked in contracts management in another part of the complex. Mission Control Director Trantham’s smartwatch flashed a short message: ‘Pinta jumped back at 1243 hours local. Please report to Mission Control Room.’ Less than a second later, Townsley’s watch pinged with the same message. Trantham looked up from his watch. “You get that, Sarah? Pinta’s back!” he said with surprise.

  “Yeah, I got it too. That’s not right, should have been Onyx,” she said, referring to the messenger Gemstone that Pinta should have sent back to Earth while she continued her mission. If things had gone well Pinta should have initiated a dialog or at least exchanged simple broadcasts with the aliens.

  “Sorry, Jason, we’re gonna have to get going and find out what the hell is going on,” said Trantham, wiping his mouth with a napkin and taking a quick swig of water before departing with his colleague Townsley in tow.

  “Pinta’s just been picked up by an SS4 and is en route back to Citadel in her cargo bay,” reported the young mission specialist, referring to the SS4 unmanned shuttle. He continued his report to Trantham and Townsley, a worried look on his face as he looked up at them from his seated position behind the display. ”Seems Pinta suffered some kind of damage, sir. One moment … while I get the feeds from the shuttle’s cargo bay cameras … there.”

  The Pinta probe took up most of the space in the shuttle’s sole cargo bay. The space was well-lit, white and ultra-clean. Trantham surveyed the four-camera split screen. The front camera, facing the rear of the shuttle bay, and the starboard side camera showed the probe just as they had sent it; as intact as the day it was built. As his eyes scanned to the bottom two cameras, something was very wrong with what he saw. The portside camera showed that the aft-port section had been melted and bore the signs of scorch marks and pitting. The first linear grazes in the metallic body started about half a metre from the rear and got worse the closer to the aft Trantham looked. It was as if there’d been a glancing impact, slightly off-parallel to the side of Pinta. The rear camera showed why she could not make her own way to the Citadel space station. Two portside manoeuvring thruster nozzles had been completely removed with just some melted metallic remnants remaining. Part of the chemical rocket nozzle on that side had been scorched and melted too. It looked like the ear of twentieth century boxer, Evander Holyfield, after opponent, Mike Tyson, had bitten off a piece of it.

  “Any ideas on what this is?” asked the young mission specialist, alternating his searching eyes between Trantham and Townsley, looking for answers.

  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking, Will?” asked Townsley.

  “It could be the aliens, but let’s not jump to conclusions. We’ll let Hartmann have a look at it when it arrives in the Assembly Module on Citadel. He’s up there looking at equipment upgrades,” Trantham said. “We’ll get a feed from there and see what he thinks. His team built the thing and he knows it better than anyone. We’ll get one of our materials scientists and Jake Holloway from Weapons Research on the call too and let them have a look.”

  “Did the data download initiate ok?” Trantham asked the young specialist.

  “Negative, sir. We’ll need to take a look and have a try back at Citadel,” he replied.

  ***

  The internal manipulator arm inside the shuttle’s cargo bay eased the Pinta probe out and into the Assembly Module. The cavernous Assembly Module on board Citadel had swallowed up the entire shuttle while it circled the Earth for the ninth time that day. Two of the insect-like assembly bots took hold of the wounded Pinta. The SS4 shuttle retracted its arm, closed its cargo bay doors and manoeuvred slowly out of the open end of the Assembly Module, the sunlit coast of the Gulf of Mexico and Yucatan Peninsula framed below.

  Robert Hartmann floated into the Assembly Hall in his blue standard issue coveralls and activated the video conference link wearing his headset with integral camera, mic and viewscreen.

  “Well, we definitely didn't build her like that,” chuckled Hartmann, smiling through even this most serious of situations. It wasn't that he was being flippant, he was just compulsively upbeat and jokey. He got the job done nevertheless and was a popular guy.

  “Could it be the supposed particle beam weapon that Pinta identified?” asked Trantham over the headset videoconference, his question mainly directed at Holloway from weapons research.

  “We were testing a concept a decade or so ago but could never get the particle accelerators miniaturized enough or powerful enough to be useful. Rate of fire was another problem. But it’s possible. Say, Rob, can you move or zoom a little closer to the leading edge of the damage where there’s a bunch of pitting by the looks of it?” asked Holloway.

  Hartmann floated himself in zero-g towards the area Holloway had indicated and used a headset-mounted camera to zoom into some of the detail. The leading edge of the melted titanium alloy had dozens of pits and hundreds of pinholes, some of them partially exposed along parts of their length. “Is this okay, Jake?” asked Hartmann.

  “Yeah, that’s good. Well, ladies and gentlemen, I am unhappy to tell you that this does indeed look like a particle beam strike. I’ve seen similar on test pieces. Even though we didn't get it operationalized, a particle beam weapon is just a meaner version of a particle accelerator. They’ve used them in particle physics experiments for years. CERN’s Large Hadron Collider and the Tevatron at Fermilab, are two of the better known examples,” explained Holloway.

  “What are they firing exactly?” asked Townsley.

  “Probably subatomic particles—electrons, positrons, protons et cetera. If you fire enough of them at high enough energies they could’ve caused this damage for sure,” said Holloway.

  “Could anything else have caused this, do we think?” asked Trantham, keen to ensure that a more benign explanation hadn’t been overlooked.

  “Pretty tell-tale signs, Will,” said Holloway.

  “Anyone else?” Trantham prompted. No one spoke.

  “Okay, so from the silence we’re concluding the aliens did this? Is that what we’re saying?” asked Trantham reluctantly, finding the truth a bitter pill to swallow.

  “We’ve still got to access the stored data, remember Will,” reminded Townsley.

  “Yes, course, I’m jumping ahead of myself here,” admitted Trantham, a little embarrassed at getting carried away, but humble enough to admit it.

  “Won't be long I don't think,” said Hartmann. “Pinta looks intact except for the body and nozzle damage. Could be a stray particle or two interfered with the comms system, but the memory chips are pretty robust and have triple redundancy. Let me just use the old-fashioned method and plug her in.” He floated down the tube to the maintenance module to fetch the requisite cable. After plugging Pinta into the network, they waited as Townsley tried to initiate the download.

  “Without this download we’re guessing what happened,” commented Trantham.

  “No need to guess, Will, we’ve got it. Four, three, two, one... There, done,” said Townsley.

  “See, we built her to last, guys,” smiled Hartmann, proud of his ‘baby’ he’d built and felt personally invested in.

  “Right team, for those of you who want to watch, I’ll start playing the video and data show in five minutes to give you time to suit up with your Ocular VR headset and have a breather. This could be a long one,” advised Trantham.

  Everyone who was online stayed online. Trantham used the time to call General Fred McIver still over at the Pentagon, who joined them along with half of his Space Force
Command Council. Colonel Smith, Major-General Guardini and General Kline came online and checked in. If it was true what Trantham feared – that Pinta had been fired on – then this was fast becoming a military matter and they needed to bring the Space Force leadership up to speed.

  “Let’s see what she’s got for us,” said Trantham, firing up the VR playback, which was sent over the network and simulcast to all of their headsets.

  After jumping into the Avendano system the now familiar site – to the Mission team at least – of planet Gaia panned into view. Pinta’s cloaking field was on, so unless the aliens had gotten sharper on their gravimetric tracking, she was as good as invisible to them. She spent an hour searching for signals or visuals on the lost Santa Maria probe, but to no avail. This was not surprising to any of the mission team. Their take was that she’d been hidden away in an underground facility or at least a building that shielded her radio emissions based on when they tracked her into a suspected forest base.

  Pinta’s mission status display changed from ‘Current Objective: Locate [Santa Maria Probe]’ to ‘Current Objective: Send First Contact Package’. Shortly after she disengaged her cloaking field her camera suddenly switched view and zoomed in, tracking a fast-moving spacecraft firing some sort of energy weapon. The bluish-white flashes lasted milliseconds but came at a prodigious rate of fire. The star field could be seen flashing past in the background. The ship was eighteen metres long, gunmetal grey and in profile looked a little like a shark’s body without the fins. The top and bottom followed this profile but were totally flat. The weapons fire seemed to be coming from a pod on the leading edge of the craft. The glow of its twin engines looked white hot as she jinked about as if pursuing prey. The yellow box around the ship was accompanied by a label, ‘Fighter Type 1’.

  The camera zoomed out, still tracking the fighter to the right of the frame. Now the ship was small, with little detail visible. To the left of the frame, just before it broke up into a thousand pieces tumbling through space with leftover momentum, was a smaller craft. It had been pursuing the fighter but was now no more. The fighter stopped firing, broke off the trajectory and seemed to move away from Pinta’s viewpoint and towards the planet. Pinta zoomed into the debris field, but there was nothing recognisable by the probe’s AI or the humans watching on their headsets.

  “Would you look at that!” said General Kline. “We need to get us one those!” he exclaimed, referring to the energy weapon that Pinta had latterly advised was a particle beam.

  “This is not looking good, people…” said General McIver. “Particle beam discharged in the vicinity of our probe, which is also bearing damage from that weapon type.”

  The probe proceeded with the first contact radio broadcasts. The info capsule was propelled at low speed on an intercept course with a small toroidal space station some fifty kilometres away. Pinta repeated the broadcast again and again as she just sat there, uncloaked and vulnerable. There was no response.

  “You see that?” said Townsley, “The aliens just did a radar sweep and pinged her.”

  “Yeah. Can you find the source?” asked McIver.

  “Should be able to,” said Trantham as he selected another option on his touchscreen. “There. She’s highlighted the space station... Oh no, hang on a minute, the box isn't centred on that and it’s moving away from the station.”

  They all watched with the dawning realisation that it was the fighter growing in detail that was emitting the radar sweep. This time it was head on to Pinta’s viewpoint. As if the probe’s AI sensed the danger, she engaged her manoeuvring thrusters and the camera angle changed slightly so that the fighter was now no longer head on. But the fighter quickly adjusted and this time opened fire on the still moving probe, lighting up the viewscreen in a blast of blue-white fire. The probe reported damage from her thousands of embedded sensors, which acted like the nerve-ending in a human’s skin. Pinta changed course and simultaneously engaged her cloaking shield avoiding the, now much closer, follow-up volley of fire. She randomised her course away from the prowling fighter. The fighter circled, sweeping the area and was joined by another hunter and multiple radar sweeps, one of them planet-based. A few second later, she engaged her FTL drive and jumped back to Earth orbit and safety.

  After the thrill of witnessing the action had died down and there had been time for it to sink in, Trantham started to get a sinking feeling at what this confirmed. There could be no doubt now that these Aliens were hostile. They’d fired on an unarmed probe that was emitting the first contact package. He had to admit that the unannounced entry into Gaia’s atmosphere and subsequent splashdown of Santa Maria may have set them off on the wrong foot, but there was no attempt to observe or communicate back with Pinta except through the barrel of a particle beam gun.

  “I suppose it could be a misunderstanding still, couldn't it?” asked Townsley, clinging on to the hope of a peaceful relationship with the aliens.

  “Still possible, but I think our working assumption from now on has to be that we’re facing a hostile alien threat,” said General Kline, ever the hawk, forceful in his delivery.

  He continued, “If these guys get that old FTL drive working they've stolen from us then who knows where that will lead. Invasion? Exposing us to diseases we’ve no immunity to?”

  “Okay, General, I understand your views, but let’s keep this in perspective,” argued the intellectual powerhouse, Major-General Guardini, as he was cut off by Kline.

  “Did they or did they not fire on an unarmed half-trillion dollar probe that was trying to extend the hand of friendship?” challenged the thundering Kline.

  “Let me step in here, gentlemen,” said General McIver. “This is hostile intent and we do need to do something about the FTL drive. We simply cannot live with such a powerful potential foe being able to come here, even if it was a misunderstanding. The stakes are too high and they’d wipe the floor with us militarily. We’ve got to take the precautionary stance and try to get that FTL drive on Santa Maria out of alien hands. We’ve worked on the plan and I believe now is the time to enact that plan. Or soon as we can anyway.”

  Shortly afterwards the military men clicked off, leaving Trantham, Townsley and the mission team to contemplate the weeks of study ahead of them as their probe mission was curtailed.

  Guardini genuinely accepted that they needed to deprive the aliens of FTL technology, but challenged the suggestion of a need to go in sooner rather than later. He wanted to give peace one more chance and send back Pinta. There was no way McIver wanted this to happen. It was the only probe left, but, more importantly, the longer they left the aliens alone with Santa Maria’s FTL drive the higher the chance they’d unlock the secret to faster-than-light travel. That would then put Earth, and whatever other planets were in the galactic neighbourhood, within range. The hostile alien force spreading like cancer throughout the galaxy was, in some ways, an even bigger threat in the long-term than them coming to Earth. Once the alien diaspora got a foothold in other places they’d be exponentially harder to eradicate or tame.

  The probe mission was now suspended but Townsley was, in many ways, relieved that she’d get to spend more time with her husband Jason and their two young children. She’d felt guilty at the amount of time she'd spent away with them and vowed to take some time off while she could. The initiative was now in the hands of the Space Force arm of WESTFOR and they had a plan to mature.

  Chapter Fourteen

  During late September and early October of 2061, information and findings propagated through the myriad organisational structures of the Western Global Alliance: first, technical teams, then civil servants and finally the decision makers. The truth as yet was unknown to the public, but with the growing number of officials learning of events in the Avendano system it would be only a matter of time. The junior partners in the exploration mission – the Chinese and Russians – could not be kept in the dark any longer and were brought on-board with almost the whole story. It was a balanc
e between the need to maintain operational security and maximise the benefit to the WGA with standing united against the theoretical alien threat. No one in the WGA leadership had any illusions about the potential consequences of the so-far hostile, uncommunicative aliens unlocking the FTL drive’s secrets.

  The Russians and Chinese had already been notified about the loss of Santa Maria due to, officially at least, a software malfunction. The fact the Russian virus was suspected in its downfall was glossed over for the time being until a water-tight case could be made by the FBI and NSA. It would be a useful bargaining chip later should the junior partner prove troublesome. The Chinese and Russians also knew about the aliens acquiring the lost probe, and after they’d seen the attack on Pinta had quickly been convinced that the aliens were hostile. For once, there was little disagreement between the major space-faring powers. Perhaps, as some had hoped, the prospect of an alien enemy would unite humanity in a common cause after all.