by Ron Collins
“Ten seconds to engage,” a recorded voice echoed the readout that hung on the wall.
The room fell to an awkward silence.
The electric essence of tension wrapped itself around him, and his spine tingled with the idea that his entire life was tied up in these twelve wormhole pods. Without realizing why, Torrance wondered about his mother and father. With the time it took message traffic to travel from Earth to Everguard, it was possible they were no longer even alive.
The digital readout showed 00:07.
Power coils whined as they sucked energy from the collider.
Torrance recalled years at the academy, his first posting under Captain Jao. Torrance had worked through the ranks, receiving solid commendations at every posting. But opportunities for advancement at LC were limited, and Romanov was by-the-book.
Five seconds.
Everguard traveled at nearly six-tenths the speed of light, which including acceleration and braking, translated into what was roughly a fifteen-local-year round-trip. By the time they returned home, the effects of time dilation meant the rest of the world would have aged an additional three years beyond that. Eighteen years, total for them. For the first time in a long while, he thought of Adrienne.
Three seconds.
Software controllers ran on optical processors.
He would be forty-one standard years old when he arrived home.
Two.
His investments would likely have doubled twice—not that there had been much left after the divorce, but it should be enough to get by on for a while. At least that was something.
One.
“Launch initiated, sir.”
The compartment held its breath. Silence echoed where there should have been thunder.
“What’s wrong?” the admiral asked.
“I have no idea, sir,” Torrance replied, his heart growing cold. “But the pods are not away.”
CHAPTER 3
UGIS Everguard
Ship Local Date: May 6, 2204
Ship Local Time: 0125
“We’re not getting anywhere, sir,” the technician said.
“And your point would be?” Torrance snapped back.
The tech just sat there, stammering while nothing came out.
The glass boards flickered with displays of the launch system’s microcircuitry and software execution paths.
The air in Pod Engineering was warm and stale, a feeling that reminded Torrance of late nights in the electronics laboratory back in his college days, but not in a good way. He didn’t like the omnipresent blanket of maudlin disappointment that pressed over him whenever he looked back to times when the future was still the future, but, like it or not, he had been doing just that all day.
It made him brain-dead.
Everything about today made him brain-dead.
The staff was tired, too. Their mission-day whites hung from their bodies like whipped flags in dead wind. Every nook and corner of the place smelled of day-old sweat.
“I’m sorry,” Torrance said. He rubbed cheeks that were plastic with fatigue. “I’m just like you folks, though—really frustrated, and heading toward mad as hell. Romanov wants a personal report at 0600, and I’ll admit I don’t have a clue about what to tell him. I apologize for snapping, all right?”
The staff all nodded.
Lieutenant Malloy spoke up with a grin. “Maybe Romanov would like to come down and check it out personally. Maybe take a little ride in the tube.” His eyebrow raised in mock anticipation, his left hand rose in a flying motion, and he made a whooshing sound. “We could probably arrange a close-up inspection.”
The team chuckled, and the room loosened noticeably.
Malloy had a knack for saying the right thing at the right time.
The image of Romanov drifting out into space from a derelict launch tube made everyone smile.
Torrance took a deep breath.
“We’ve been over everything three times. If the problem was on board, we’d have found it by now.”
“What do you mean, LC?”
“Maybe the answer isn’t here. Maybe it’s something outside.”
“Like what?”
Torrance scratched the stubble on his cheek. “I don’t know. How about we run the full spectrum of sensor scans again, okay?”
“Did that hours ago, sir,” Malloy replied.
Torrance shrugged. “Maybe we missed something.”
Malloy nodded. “Okay, LC. We’ll do it.”
The crew stood to get to work.
“When you finish the scan,” Torrance said, “I want everyone to turn in for the night, all right?”
An hour later, Torrance was at External Sensor Command. The scan had completed fifteen minutes ago, and now he was discussing the results with Silvio Nivead, one of the ship’s several signal processing specialists.
“You’re kidding me, right?” Torrance said.
Nivead looked up at Torrance with his dark eyes ringed in folds of sepia skin, and his balding head gleaming in the lab’s bright light. “You know I don’t kid about these kinds of things,” he replied in a clipped accent that was at least part Portuguese despite having grown up primarily in Lunar province.
Torrance knew no such thing.
Nivead had been with the service since the days of optical processors and multidimensional atomic storage systems. At one point or another he had probably worked on every important galactic surveying team that had been put together in the twenty years prior to Everguard’s flight. As bright and experienced as he was, however, there was a reason Nivead was still working second shift—and that reason was an attitude as thick as mayonnaise.
Silvio expected people to think like him, only less quickly. He had no patience when they didn’t conform to his frame of mind, and a hair trigger when it came to letting them know about it. He was legendary for making it known he came from an old-school family, multilingual and rigid in their adherence to a doctrine that was equal parts perfection and self-reliance. When you worked with Silvio Nivead you knew two things: the product would be good, and you would not escape unscathed.
So, yes, it was actually just like Silvio Nivead to kid about such a thing.
“The pattern is all over the place,” Nivead said. “But the signal itself is cohesive at just under seven hundred kilohertz.”
“Microwave radio?”
“On the low end, but yessiree, Lieutenant Commander, I can report to you with great certainty that these are most definitely radio wavelengths.”
Torrance absorbed Silvio’s sarcasm without comment.
“Where’s it coming from?” Torrance asked.
“Got me, boss-man.”
“Would that signal be enough to interfere with the launch?”
“They could pitch a bit of crosstalk if the traces get close enough.” Silvio pursed his thick lips, the bottom one protruding in a way that reminded Torrance of his grandfather. “It would take a lucky strike, but odder things have happened. Science is like that, you know, LC?”
“Yes,” Torrance snapped. “I know a little about science.”
Nivead looked like a cat in sunshine, and Torrance was immediately mad at himself.
He ran his hand through close-cropped hair, then down along the roughness of his chin. All business, he thought. That’s how you had to deal with guys like Silvio Nivead. He was usually better about keeping Silvio from getting the better of him, but he was so tired now. He should have followed his own orders and hit the rack, but his mind was running loops he couldn’t stop.
Given the way the last twenty-four standard hours had gone, it would be just his luck that stray emissions from a randomly emitting interstellar radio source would crap on his launch.
“What could have caused signals like that?" Torrance finally said.
The whites of Silvio’s eyes grew wide enough that he looked like a cartoon character. “You’re gonna have to tell me, boss-man. I’m just a data hack.”
“Has the star
been active?” Torrance replied.
Silvio looked like he was going to say something, but instead the tech just punched up the star system’s frequency spectrum and let it run on a twenty-four-hour compression.
Yes, Torrance thought.
All business.
Silvio stared at the display as he paged through density images.
The three stars—Centauri A, Centauri B, and Proxima (which the crew had taken to calling the little red dwarf)—collected together to make the boot of the Earth’s constellation Centaurus. A, also known as Rigel Kent, was the biggest, and brightest. Torrance stared at the same data Silvio did, noting the readout of the star’s power density and rotational speed, 22.62 days. The star was nearing the portion of its orbit that took it farthest away from its closest sibling, Centauri B.
“We’ve got a little something something going on here,” Silvio said, pointing to a holo display of the star. “But its density in the seven hundred K range is flat as a board. Can’t see the star had much to do with anything.”
“What else is out there?”
Silvio leaned back and laced his hands behind his head. “Gee, I don’t know, boss. Standard background radiation from Centauri B. Proxima. The planets. Then there’s the fun stuff from deep space. And if we hit the rotor-scan system we’ll get all those beautiful pictures from the galaxies.”
“Proxima is too far away to worry about.”
Silvio’s grin faded a nano-lumen.
“Eyeballing that signal strength,” he said, “I would bet my left pinky that B’s too far away, too.”
“Can you run a frequency scan, just to be sure?”
“It's technically possible.”
Torrance tilted his head at the analyst to say his official patience was almost gone.
“What?" Silvio said. "You don’t trust me?”
“Your word is good as gold, Sil. But Romanov is on my ass right now and I can’t afford to miss this.”
“Always a bigger fish, eh, LC?” Silvio gave a sage grin.
“Can you run the scan?”
“Your wish is my command, Squanto.” He turned to his station and issued the proper commands to carry out Torrance’s request.
“Squanto?” Torrance said, hoping his annoyance wasn’t showing.
Nivead’s grin grew deeper, but he just shrugged.
“Why Squanto?”
“I don’t know. It just sounds right on you.”
Torrance turned back to his own station.
Oh, to have that kind of courage, he thought. There were advantages to being more like Silvio. Just do your job, do it very well, and let whatever happens flow by like so much river flotsam. He wondered if Silvio had been born this way or if he had just crossed a “don’t give a shit” line somewhere along the way of his career.
If so, maybe someday Torrance could cross that line, too.
In the meantime, he needed to look at the radio data coming from the planets.
“Abke,” he said, “I need access to data file A-Planet-1.”
“File available.”
The holographic image of a brown-and-black planet rotated slowly over the desktop. Data defining its mass, density, orbit, and ecliptic tilt displayed beside the image.
It was the innermost of the system’s planets, and carried the official handle of Apple, named in the days after the second planet had been dubbed Eden. But while the computer labeled it by that formal title (as well as the usual stream of alphanumeric gibberish the scientific world worked under), everyone aboard knew the rock as Alpha-Alpha, the first planet in the Alpha Centauri A system. It was immediately shortened to “Alfalfa.”
All total the Centauri A system included five planets: Alpha, Eden, Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon (which the crew has also dubbed as “Mata Hari,” because its orbit was large enough that some thought it was likely to jump ship and become a satellite in the Centauri B system).
“Please map infrared data, Abke,” Torrance said.
The image of the surface changed to swirling patterns—orange, white, and yellow on the side closest to the star, cooling to darker shades of blue on the far side. Alfalfa had an eight-hour day and no atmosphere, resulting in a surface that passed thermal radiation straight through to deep space. A jagged blue-and-black network indicated the topography of the planet. It was highly cratered, and at this resolution its deep crevasses and heavily ridged scars were clearly visible, but nothing there seemed relevant to his problem.
“Infrared data is fifty-eight percent actual, forty-two percent derived,” Abke said. “Would you like to see raw data only?”
Everguard wasn’t in the best position to pick up data from the planet, so Abke was extrapolating.
“No. Give me radar, please. Multiple scans from five hundred to nine hundred kilohertz. Focus on seven hundred. Twenty-four-hour repeating loop.”
He scanned the result, but still didn’t see anything relevant.
Story of his life, really.
Despite skills that were always solid and respected, nothing seemed to ever quite work out for him. At the end of the day, he had always been just a talented grunt. Which is the message Alfalfa’s display seemed to be whispering to him. Nothing here for you, it said. Go back to your basic engineering and leave the important findings to the anointed guys, like Kip Levitt.
He remembered a night with his dad—a man who had always worked hard, but was happy making a simple living that consisted of things like fixing plumbing or installing air quality systems in Mrs. Krespah’s ventilation ducts. Torrance was a third-year student on that night, and was studying the differential calculus needed to understand the lab simulations of planetary origins, but things hadn’t been working out right. It was late, like it was now, and Torrance was feeling drained and quite a bit less than competent.
“You don’t got to work like that,” his dad had said. “They won’t let you win, anyway.”
“It’s not like that,” Torrance had replied.
His dad had shrugged.
Torrance remembered every nuance of that shrug now.
It would have been fine if he had just left it there, but his dad never was the kind to leave such a thing lay, and he was a man who had even less patience for theorists than he did for managers.
“You’re no Einstein, you know?” he said in his sleepy Midwestern tone.
The phrase, and all that it carried, echoed in Torrance’s mind as he looked at the readout. You’re no Einstein. Of course he wasn’t. But, there had to be something more to him than this. There should be more to life than fixing toilets and replacing sound systems, and…
And, you know, guys like Kip Levitt aren’t exactly Albert Einstein, either.
He cleared his head.
He had work to do, and the fact that he was letting the memory of his father and the aura of Kip Levitt keep him from doing it just pissed him off that much more.
“Let’s do the same for file A-Planet-2, please.”
The projection flickered, and a model of Eden replaced Alfalfa.
It was larger than the first planet.
Eden was nearly the size of Earth, with a five-degree tilt and a weak magnetic field offset seven degrees from its polar rotation. The image provided was in the optical spectrum, hence showed nothing beyond the striated but gauzy ball of orange-yellow haze that was the planet’s sulfuric ionosphere.
“Infrared, please, Abke.”
The planet turned a pinkish orange, almost uniform in aspect, bleeding to purple at the outer edge of its circumference. Eden was similar to Venus in that its dense cloud cover served to distribute heat globally, resulting in a temperature that probably didn’t vary by more than a few degrees between night and day or even up through its atmospheric altitude.
Right now the graph showed 52.7 degrees on the Celsius scale, 127 degrees Fahrenheit. Quite balmy.
“Radar, please. Same parameters as with A-1.”
The image changed to reveal the lower hemisphere as a cracked and crevass
ed wasteland, not as cratered as Apple, presumably because the dense atmosphere ate up smaller meteors that would normally have impacted the surface otherwise. In an odd way the digitized landscape reminded Torrance of his training camp on Europa—Eden’s surface could be the hellish twin to Europa’s icy badlands. Eden’s northern hemisphere was also desolate, but scarred with a massive ring of raised ridges tall enough to register green on the topographical image.
The entire surface was covered in flows that told the geologists that the surface had been constantly reconfiguring itself as a result of the planet’s volcanism and rapid geological activity. He tried to gauge the size of one massive area of the roughed-up land. It was maybe the size of Olympus Mons—say six hundred kilometers across—and the fact that this feature was so prominent in the light of the rest of the planet’s relatively flat surface suggested to some that it had been created by a single huge impact that threw material into the atmosphere and dumped it there as if it was one big shovelful.
The idea made Torrance grin. He loved those kinds of analogies. They were silly, but powerful enough that he could create the image of HErcules or some kind of Greek god with a shovel bent over the planet.
Suddenly a white flare rose and fell from just outside that raised zone.
Torrance blinked. Had he imagined that?
“Can you back up, please?”
“Beginning now, sir,” Abke replied.
A blurry flare flashed again at an edge of the mountainous rim.
“Forward,” he said.
The flare came again. It was large—as big as his thumb on the model, which would translate to a hundred kilometers on Eden’s surface. Torrance watched further. More flares burst, all originating from roughly the same place.
“I need more detail around those flashes, please, Abke.”
“None available.”
“Looks like you got a helluva storm there, LC,” Nivead said as he guided his chair over to take a closer look.
“Yeah,” Torrance replied. The file showed another flash, this time flickering before fading. “Abke, please cut the frequency band to a fifty-kilohertz range centered at seven hundred. Put it on a time loop from hour twelve to hour sixteen.”