Been There, Done That (April Book 10)

by Mackey Chandler

  “I rather like it,” Jeff said.

  “You would. When you run out of gods and their toys it wouldn’t surprise me to see you name a ship after an entire poem,” April said.

  “The Chinese come near doing that,” Jeff said in his defense.

  “You said it went into orbit,” April said, “but where did it declare as a destination when they asked traffic control for clearance?”

  Chen looked down and consulted something. “They asked for clearance to orbit and uncontrolled space,” he reported. “One other thing, it’s a lot bigger ship than before.”

  Jeff looked astonished with a realization. “They aren’t going to do any shake-down flights at all. They’re going straight for a system exit.”

  “Well isn’t that interesting?” April asked. “And we have nothing in place to have a good look at it leaving.”

  “You said they’d avoid publicity this time,” Heather said. “But this is almost secretive,” she said in an accusing tone.

  “I guess they have been studying how you folks do it,” Chen said, smiling.

  What could they say? It was true.

  * * *

  Herman Bellinger thought his heart would burst from his chest when he keyed the command and the star speckled heavens changed in an instant to show him an alien sun dead ahead. This was everything he’d dreamed about since he was about eight years old. Outwardly he gave no sign it was anything more unusual than if they were approaching an everyday docking at the Turnip. The autopilot cut the drive as planned, until they observed things.

  “Well, we’ve certainly arrived somewhere,” he informed his backup pilot and navigator. “Mr. Baudin, would you confirm that is Alpha Centauri please?”

  “Working,” Baudin said, because if he didn’t Bellinger would ask if he’d heard him in just a few seconds. He regarded his captain as a bit of a pain in the butt and a very cold fish, unaware of his internal passions.

  “Spectroscopic analysis confirms Alpha,” Baudin said, less than a minute later. “Our distance from the star is two hundred forty million kilometers by the image it subtends and astronomical data. We aren’t too deep in the star’s gravity well to climb back out.” That had been a real concern.

  “Starting our search for planetary bodies. I’m taking wide sky images and will be ready to roll over in three minutes.” He let the machine work and when it showed done he informed Bellinger.

  Immediately the captain had the ship do an auto rotate, smoother than a human pilot could do and less time consuming. When it was pointed back the way they’d entered he captured one more wide angle image before they started a new burn. That only took a half minute before he released Bellinger to resume acceleration. There would have been enough motion and vibration under thrust to spoil the finer details of a sky survey.

  When the drive came back on it ramped up as a concession to human comfort, and for safety in case anything was floating loose so that it didn’t become an internal projectile.

  Still, it kept building until it ran steadily at a little more than three and a half Gs. That was where it needed to operate for efficiency so they had sufficient fuel to return, with a safety margin. It was brutal after awhile, but they’d endured it before to get here.

  “What is that bright object near dead ahead?” Bellinger asked, voice distorted by the heavy acceleration. “There wasn’t a star of that magnitude listed in what our return sky would look like. It has to be a local object.”

  “Checking my sky shots,” Baudin said. He didn’t appreciate being made to talk. It was extra effort on top of an already exhausting ordeal. Both of them tended to abbreviated statements “The object was not large enough to show a disk from our start point. It has to be local and must have a very high albedo. It’s two degrees off our course and diverging slightly already, so it’s not a collision hazard. No range estimate possible.”

  “Thanks,” Bellinger grunted.

  Chapter 28

  Waiting for the French ship to come back was nerve racking. April understood now, better than the first time when the Pedro Escobar vanished, that if they didn’t come back, finding them by going to the Centauri system was unlikely to be successful. They just didn’t have the needed equipment to search and communicate across the scale of a star system. The success of the French mission wouldn’t be any benefit for them, but April couldn’t find it in her heart to wish them ill, and see another ship lost.

  They all three kept busy, but there was no casual chatter and everyone’s thoughts returned to the ship frequently.

  “Jeff, they can’t jump around inside a system like us, so what kind of a mission profile do you think they will follow?” April asked.

  “Jump in, take a couple pix to prove they were there, turn around and come back home as soon as possible,” he said.

  “They won’t leave markers?” April asked.

  “Anything you could find again would be too big and heavy. I hadn’t thought before, but you could leave a big radar corner reflector. One made of metalized plastic film on a memory wire frame wouldn’t weigh all that much, but it would be a huge light sail and slowly accelerate out of the system on its own.

  “You really need to leave something attached to an object or in orbit around it if you ever want to find it again. They won’t have the extra margin of fuel yet to maneuver around the Centauri system and examine objects close up. They also aren’t likely to have all the extra equipment besides a suit to do any EV and literally plant the flag somewhere.

  “Now, when they get a big enough ship, they can do a loop around the star and never lose their entry velocity. That means they can use a smaller amount of fuel to vector around the star so they don’t come closer than they can deal with the heat and radiation. But they’d have some leeway to vector closer to planets and examine them. But they will need a lot more He3 to fly a big ship.”

  “Why do they need a big ship to do that?” April wanted to know.

  “Even with a respectable entry velocity, it would take months to do a loop of the star. You do speed up falling in, but we also don’t know yet how far away from the star you have to be to safely jump back out. That’s another one of those things I’d rather test with a robotic device. You slow down coasting back out and that eats up more time. That means you better have redundant environmental systems and lots of ham sandwiches. For that long of a trip you should even have some kind of medical capacity,” Jeff said.

  “Do you think it can ever be reduced to days to transit a system?” April asked.

  “Using their tech? I’d never bet against anything,” Jeff said.

  “I’ve been thinking of them successfully jumping out and back as a big pivotal event,” April admitted. “It may be, psychologically, but it’s really more of a start point for them isn’t it? They’ll have to do a lot more development to actually do more than turn around and come back.”

  “Yes, unless for some crazy reason they deny they were ever there, it should open the floodgates for funding. But, who knows? The longer we go along, the less I think I can predict what Earthies will do,” Jeff said.

  * * *

  “Radio scanner just indicated it had a weak signal, but then it lost it,” Baudin told his captain.

  “I’d say it was noise from a gas giant, but there weren’t any in the optic scan were there?” Bellinger asked.

  “No sir, nowhere near us, and they tend to be a spread of static over a wide range of frequencies like lightning discharges. Our computer rejects that sort of noise anyway. This was right on the international ship and suit frequency.”

  “Surely not Weir,” Bellinger objected. “Even with them dead it would be far too long for any of their equipment to still be transmitting even if they left it putting out a distress call.”

  “I totally agree, but I have no explanation,” Baudin said.

  They said no more. It took too much effort to repeat the same idea a couple ways when it felt like a horse was sitting on your chest. Fifteen minutes
later there was something worth discussing.

  “Signal again sir,” Baudin said. “I’ll put it on audio channel three. It’s garbled, but to me it has the cadence of speech.”

  “Do you have a directional fix?” Bellinger asked.

  “Not a good one, but what I have centers on the bright object. I’ll be surprise if that doesn’t tighten… and it’s gone again.”

  Bellinger knew, he had the feed from it now.

  “Whaou!” Bellinger exclaimed when the radio started up again, so Baudin said nothing. They were both straining to hear.

  It repeated and ended again just as before.

  “I think it is English,” Baudin said. “It doesn’t growl like German.”

  “Indeed, I thought I heard ‘national centaur’ and something about clams.”

  “It seems to be getting clearer. I hope it repeats again.”

  The next time it was very clear. So much so they had nothing to say to each other. Both were silent in the turmoil of their own thoughts. They didn’t say anything until it repeated again.

  This is Captain Delores Wrigley of the Central survey ship Hringhorni. We are marking this planetoid with our claims transmitter and radar reflector. Be advised we are naming it ‘Bright’. We lay claim to it as her Word and Hand to mine and exploit in its entirety for the Sovereign of Central. Any equipment on its surface or near orbit is in use and not abandoned for salvage. Stand clear and respect our claim. This message will repeat.

  “Cette salope!” Bellinger bellowed too loud, and carelessly swallowed his own spit the wrong way. Choking at three and a half Gs is no laughing matter. Baudin was starting to think he might have to cut the drive to allow the captain to recover. When he finally settled down and stopped coughing Baudin was glad. He’d decided he’d declare an emergency first if he had to cut acceleration. No matter how he went about it he was sure somebody would find fault with it if he interrupted the planned return. He wasn’t sure if Bellinger was cursing the captain who made the recording or her queen, but the captain didn’t have breath or energy to continue now.

  “Turn it off, I don’t want to hear the damn thing again,” Bellinger ordered.

  “Yes Sir,” Baudin said, and kept his thoughts to himself.

  Bellinger was destroyed. This was like the quest to reach the North Pole on Earth. He could easily predict it would be forever disputed and a subject of argument who first piloted a ship to another star, since it hadn’t been properly documented. He’d thought his place in the history books was assured and that was lost. Worse, he was honest man. His backers and politicians might claim it anyway, but it was ruined for him since he knew somebody had beaten him to it. What was left to accomplish? Nothing of significance in his lifetime he was sure. Did anybody remember the second man to step on the Moon? What was beyond his understanding was why the victor hadn’t trumpeted it to the heavens?

  There wasn’t a lot of conversation after that. When Baudin informed him the ship had reached their previous successful velocity to initiate a jump, Bellinger asked what their margin was on fuel.

  “We should be able to come to rest in the Solar System with a seven percent reserve to vector back to the Moon,” Baudin said.

  “No reason to cut into that,” Bellinger said, “initiating jump right now.”

  When he pressed the button Bellinger didn’t really care if he would see the Sun ahead or nothing ever again or slip into unending darkness. Baudin on the other hand had a huge grin, and was delighted to see his home star again.

  * * *

  It was unusual for everybody’s phones and the house come to all go nuts with both private and bot notices.

  “He’s back,” Jeff said.

  April almost asked how he could possibly know that, then reconsidered. There wasn’t much of anything that could trigger multiple news alerts and messages from the own intelligence people. Still it spoke well of their connections that their pads all chimed almost a full minute before the wall screen turned on and displayed the public casts in eight windows.

  “I’ll answer Chen,” April

  “I have Papa-san,” Heather said.

  Jeff looked and was surprised he had a call from Dave. He rarely called about anything but business so he answered.

  “The French ship had to be intercepted and refueled before it could do a lunar landing,” Dave informed him. “They had margin enough to make high lunar orbit after a swing around Earth, but they came back in the Solar System in trailing the Earth-Moon system from where they left. It was a longer slower chase than they would have liked if they had more Delta V, but hey, they made it.”

  That was sort of business, but Jeff was glad of the heads up. “Very interesting. What kind of source do you have?”Jeff asked.

  “Somebody in Armstrong traffic control,” Dave said. “I’m on the shop floor and just got the call a half minute ago. Do you see it on the regular news yet?”

  “I’m looking at our screen, and I see a couple local space reports and some general news sites, but nothing from Earth. We had some of our own people call just now, just like you, but April and Heather are talking to them and I have no idea if they know anything more yet.”

  “Let me know if you hear anything that doesn’t hit the public streams,” Dave asked. “Otherwise, I’m back to work.”

  “I will, Dave. Thanks for telling me.”

  April and Heather both looked at him.

  “They had enough fuel to get to a high lunar orbit, but they needed re-fueling before they could make a landing. Dave’s got a guy in traffic.” He looked at the screen again. “And the Earthies don’t seem too excited.”

  “Maybe they don’t believe it,” Heather guessed.

  “Somebody believes it. Why aren’t they announcing parades?” Jeff asked.

  Heather’s pad suddenly chimed long after the first wave, and she pecked at it.

  “Sure Dakota, forward him to me. I suppose I should have given Monsieur Poincaré a priority ring, but he’s always gone through channels and almost always used underlings rather than contact me directly. I can understand why he feels slighted. I’ll try to smooth his ruffled feathers.”

  “The President of Marseilles has been trying to call me and I never gave him a priority code,” Heather said. “He’s never been all that eager to chat before. I’m going to put him on the wall screen to talk to all three of us. Be nice if possible and maybe we can sooth his feelings.”

  Poincaré looked distressed. He didn’t object when he saw Heather’s partners.

  “What have you done?” was not an encouraging opening statement, but despite the accusing words the tone was more dismayed.

  “You’ll have to be a lot more specific than that if this conversation is going to go anywhere useful,” Heather told him.

  Poincaré nodded, and seemed to take a moment to compose himself. Heather seemed patient, but April thought he should have done that before calling.

  “I’m not calling merely for myself,” Poincaré said. “I’ve been asked to call on behalf of the Prime Minister of France. We have a close relationship still, even though we sought our independence. Now we find you have not been honest, and it puts our joint efforts in jeopardy and leaves us in a quandary over what to say publicly. Why didn’t you tell us you’ve been to the stars? Why let us keep pursuing a goal you’d already attained?”

  “Is that all you were chasing? Bragging rights for being first as a propaganda prize and you are upset over losing that? Go ahead and claim it for all we care,” Heather said with a dismissive wave. “We’re after much longer term goals and really don’t give a damn what your electorate thinks of us. You’ve got them trained to eat up your lies so well it shouldn’t be hard to convince them. We won’t contradict you. Surely you’ve noticed we aren’t actively trying to convince your people or the rest of the Earthies that we aren’t what you paint us.

  “We’re not honest? You have no idea what the word encompasses. You may play those games with other Earth states
of winking and nodding at each other’s lies, but being honest does not mean going beyond ignoring your misinformation and supporting you in dispensing it. You sir, are not independent at all. Why isn’t Joel Durand speaking to me himself, instead of his lackey? He did the same thing a few weeks ago and sent his foreign minister to talk to us, carefully avoiding telling the man anything useful so he couldn’t reveal it. Are you entirely sure you aren’t just another ill informed buffer between us?”

  It occurred to April that Heather might have forgotten her goal of placating the man once she started talking and became indignant.

  “More lying has been accomplished by silence than by ever speaking falsehoods,” Poincaré claimed. “Common decency demands something of this stupendous nature be published rather than hidden from the rest of humanity.”

  “Ah, that didn’t take long to invoke our common humanity,” Heather said. “Do you want to tell me it’s for the children too, so that’s out of the way?”

  “Did Columbus hide he’d discovered the Americas or de Gama the way to India?” Poincaré asked.

  “I doubt they could have,” Heather said. “There were too many involved to keep a secret, and drunk sailors back in port are notorious talkers. But if they could have exploited either of those discoveries without competition it would have been the smart thing to do. Since you have this sudden love of absolute truth and openness, does that mean you will advise Joel they should stop the public media from intimating we were responsible for the last big flu epidemic? Are they going to stop painting spacers as evil profiteers and hedonists? Doesn’t some of that rub off on you on the Moon as well as us?

  “It’s impossible to talk with you. Diplomacy can’t work when every word back and forth is adversarial. How can we accomplish anything?”

  “What do you want to accomplish?” Heather asked.

  Poincaré gaped at her like she was a mad woman.