The Centauri Surprise

by Alastair Mayer

  The UDT Homeworld Security office where he was headed was located somewhere under the spaceport, built as part of the original infrastructure and accessed through an aging hangar building. At least, that was the entrance Carson knew about, but he suspected there were others. Having the cab drop him at the main building was just simple cover; it was a short walk from there to the hangar.

  He wasn’t going there to see Ducayne this time. Doctor Malcom Brown — Carson knew Brown wasn’t his real name, but that’s how they’d been introduced, and it sufficed — had called to let Carson know that he had “some interesting results regarding the paleography of two recent artifacts.” To anyone overhearing the call, that would have sounded like just the sort of discussion of written languages that might interest Carson but would bore any non-archeologist. Carson, however, happened to know that the artifacts in question represented advanced technology and were found many light years apart.

  One artifact had been pulled from the remains of a crashed ship on a non-terraformed planet orbiting Kapteyn’s Star. The other, actually a group of artifacts, was millennia-old debris recently discovered on the seafloor off the coast of Belize, on Earth. Any comparison of the writing found on both would be very interesting indeed, archeologist or not.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Sawyers World, UDT Homeworld Security

  Carson found Brown in one of the conference rooms in the underground facility at the spaceport. The room, originally a simple briefing room with a large table, a dozen chairs and a wall-mounted combination display and sketchboard, had been converted to an archeology lab. The conference table now served as a lab bench, sporting several microscopes, cleaning tools, a camera stand, and other paraphernalia. Against one wall was another, smaller table on which sat chemical and spectrographic analysis machines. There was also a large locked cabinet that probably secured the artifacts when not being examined. Carson felt sure that this use of the room was something the original builders had never remotely anticipated.

  “So, what have you found so far?” he asked Brown.

  “Quite a bit, actually,” Brown said, looking pleased. “Take a look at this.” On a desktop monitor, he brought up a pair of side-by-side images. Each showed a grid, the cells of which held close-up images of parts of the artifact and wreckage which showed what they believed was writing. Each cell displayed a different glyph, arranged so that matching glyphs from each source occupied the equivalent location in either grid. There were many gaps, but the common subset was obvious.

  “So the writing matches?” There were minor differences, but Carson guessed they could be attributed to the equivalent of font differences, or perhaps stylistic changes over the years between the two. “And have you determined an age for the Kapteyn’s artifact?”

  “I’d say the writing was a close enough match to say both objects were built by the same culture. Best guess on the Kapteyn’s age is about seven-hundred years, considerably younger than what was pulled out of Belize. But there’s more.” He put another image up on the screen, showing side-by-side comparisons of two spectrographs, and of two mass-chromatograph readouts. They were remarkably similar.

  “Again, the left side is Belize, the right side Kapteyn’s. We analyzed samples taken from bits of metal tubing. The metallurgy is almost identical.”

  “That’s surprising,” Carson said. “Even if the tubing served identical functions in both ships, over a span of—what, twelve-hundred years or so?—you’d expect some differences in manufacturing processes.”

  “That’s what I thought too. So either the composition is the absolute optimum choice for the function, or—”

  “Or the culture made little technological progress over that time. I’m not sure which interpretation I like better.”

  “But it does definitively prove they were made by the same culture,” Brown said.

  “It proves the tubing was,” Carson said, “but there could have been two cultures and one bought the tubing from the other in trade. Arguably the stylistic differences in the glyphs are due to cultural differences, but with similarities that indicate strong influences—such as trade—between the two.”

  Brown frowned. “All right. I’ll grant that academic rigor means raising that as a hypothesis, but Occam’s Razor says the opposite. There’s still the difference in age. For that matter, the later device could have reused tubing salvaged from something older.”

  Carson shook his head slowly, more in bewilderment than negation. “My gut says no, but I can’t point to any proof. We need a lot more data before we can start reconstructing the history of the civilization, or civilizations, that made these.”

  “And that’s not what our focus is. That’s the archeologist in you talking, which is fine, but it doesn’t help us figure out what the Kapteyn’s artifact actually did.” Brown paused, then grinned and said, “And if you give me some archeologist crap about ritual objects or religious icons, I’ll belt you one.”

  Carson chuckled. “Maybe if these were from a pre-technological society, I would. But no, I’m sure it was primarily functional. Where have you gotten with analyzing the internals? Any obvious functional subsystems or components?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes. The electrical power distribution was pretty obvious. A conductive path is a conductive path; there are only so many variations on wires, circuit traces, or grounding you can make. Of course, that doesn’t help when the circuit leads in and out of some featureless block which may or may not have other leads from it. And we’ve discovered all kinds of interconnection methods. Obvious electrical connections, of course. Also optical, with both fiber optic and some kind of integrated optical path.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like the metal traces on a circuit board, but transparent and acting as a light conduit. Our opto-electronics guys say it’s highly transparent and internally reflective. I’m still waiting on definitive chemical analysis, but they think it might be modified diamond or a lossless fluoride glass. The advantage over fiber is that it allows sharp corners where the signal is reflected around with low loss. Try that with fiber and you’d get a lot of leakage, assuming the fiber didn’t just snap first.”

  Carson took a moment to digest that. He understood the words, but not the implications. “So, technology we don’t have yet?”

  Brown hesitated. “Not exactly. The guys think it could be reproduced at laboratory scale—probably they’re working on that now—but nothing like that in mass production.”

  “What was the tubing for?” Carson asked.

  “Some of it seems to have been for signal paths, like microwave conduits. Some of it seems to have been for cooling. Not all the tubing was the same composition, though. What I was referring to earlier was just certain samples that matched between the two artifacts; there was other tubing and conduit that didn’t.”

  “Oh, okay.” Carson had been wondering about that.

  “There are some other pipes or tubes that we have no idea what they were for. Heck, most of what’s in there we have no idea about. Take the blocks on the circuit boards. They range in size from rice-grain to a couple of centimeters on a side, so in some ways similar to something you’d find in any piece of human equipment, although with enough differences in sizes, shapes and layout as to look strange.”

  “How do boards between the two sources compare?”

  “Well, we haven’t found much in the way of intact boards from the Belize wreckage. It looks like whatever the pieces came from was pretty thoroughly destroyed even before sitting on the bottom of the ocean for twelve hundred years. We found some shock patterns suggestive of a forceful explosion. But a few large pieces were recovered.”

  “And?” Carson prompted.

  “Like the tubing. There are some similarities, in fact externally they’re virtually identical, but other parts are unique. Of course, we won’t know how similar the identical-looking parts are without microscopic analysis. Could you even tell a millimeter-sized resistor from a capaci
tor from a diode just by looking at them? And the unique pieces may have totally different functions, rather than being different designs for the same thing.”

  “So still not answering the question of different cultures,” Carson said.

  “Quite. But it does tell us one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Some of the artifacts were, well, not one-offs, but probably low production volume items. They’re not hand-crafted. Actually, even with our gear, very little is hand-crafted, we’d use a fabber. Anyway, one of my tech guys said that, even without knowing what they did, there were details that suggested they weren’t designed for mass manufacture. For example, there was lot of the circuitry that could probably be reduced to a single integrated chip.”

  Carson understood. Devices produced in high volume—like the omniphone on his wrist, for example—had almost all their functionality in a single large chip, and the rest integrated into the smart materials that made up the display, morphable case, and any added unique gadgetry. Even something as complicated as a fusion unit or warp module, from what Carson had understood from talking with Jackie, was largely built up as a massively three-dimensional integrated device. By comparison, the first warp modules, of the sort used by Finley’s first expedition, had been considerably larger and at least partly hand-assembled.

  “So these were, if not prototypes, something not widely used, then?” Carson said.

  “Very likely. Now, the Kapteyn’s artifact is like that throughout. The pieces from Belize are a mix of parts that look mass-produced and things that look more like prototypes. We have fewer of the latter, and the pieces are smaller. But it’s curious. How did we luck out on finding these instead of something more common, more mass-produced?”

  That was a good question. Odds of randomly finding something rare were low. The more common something was, the more likely to find a discarded or broken version of it. Unless . . . .

  “These were both found in crashed spacecraft, assuming that’s what the Belize find is,” Carson said. “Perhaps the more common version—later versions—were in spacecraft that didn’t crash? Could these be related to why the spaceships crashed in the first place?”

  Brown frowned. “That . . . sounds reasonable. But two different spacecraft a thousand years different in age? That doesn’t make sense.”

  Carson had to agree. There was some factor they were missing. Did the Kesh just have phenomenally bad luck with developing new starship technology? The only actual flying Kesh ships Carson had seen had both been large, pyramid-shaped vehicles. There had been the wreckage that was spotted on an asteroid in the Epsilon Eridani system; it might have been the remains of a pyramid ship. Too bad it had been cleaned up before Ducayne’s team had returned to recover the debris. What game were the Kesh playing?

  His musings were interrupted by the room’s intercom.

  “Malcolm, this is Ducayne. If Carson is there with you, have him stop by my main office when you’re done.”

  CHAPTER 5: VELKARYANS

  Church of Divine Stellar Providence Headquarters, Earth

  THE EXECUTIVE PROJECTS DIRECTOR of the Velkaryans, a man named Hubble, looked at Reid across the elaborate, fossil-embedded surface of the conference table.

  “We have a new assignment for you, Reid,” said Hubble.

  “Oh? What now?”

  “You’re going back to Sawyers World.”

  “Ah. I see.” Reid had been transferred back to Earth several months ago, and his first assignment, to intercept certain files that Homeland Security seemed interested in, had gone badly wrong. “Is this by way of punishment?”

  “No, not at all,” Hubble said reassuringly. “Of course, we all wish the Blue Book exercise had gone better, but it wouldn’t have happened at all if you hadn’t recognized Rico aboard ship. Anyway, this assignment may be connected.”

  “Oh? How so?”

  “The system that we had the Carcharodon follow Carson and Roberts to, Zeta Reticuli, is mentioned in one of the more infamous Blue Book UFO incidents. Anyway, since he returned, Hannibal Carson has been talking to members of the Original Eight. Elizabeth Sawyer herself several weeks ago, and more recently we’ve heard that he’s trying to arrange a meeting with Peter Finley.”

  “They’re still around?” Reid knew the names, of course, but as historical figures. They were part of the crew of the USS Poul Anderson, the first ship to land on the planet, stranded there for four years until the return mission. Still, they couldn’t be much past their mid-eighties now, so there was no reason for them not to be still alive. They just stayed out of the news. “Carson, he’s the archeologist, right? I take it you don’t think he’s just asking them to fund an expedition.”

  “If he is, we’d like to know just what expedition. But one of our analysts had a thought. Both Sawyer and Finley were geologists. We think there’s a connection.”

  “Go on.”

  “There’s a structure on Sawyers World near the Anderson landing site that Finley visited. It’s called Pete’s Peak, an ancient volcanic plug. The thing is, the original mission reports on it are scarce, likewise any investigation since. It’s hard even to find good pictures of it online.”

  “I think I’ve heard of it. What’s special about it?”

  “We had some pictures taken from orbit. It’s remarkably square for a volcanic neck.”

  “You think it might be a pyramid? Sawyers World doesn’t have natives.” Reid said. As far as he knew, any other worlds with pyramids had, or had in the past, alien primitives.

  “Not now, as far as anyone knows, but old arrowheads and spearpoints have been found. They’re probably at least a hundred thousand years old. But we think Carson is planning to investigate this peak. He must think there’s something interesting there.”

  “I take it that you want me to go and see what he’s up to.”

  “Exactly. If it is a pyramid, then we need to get whatever’s inside it before anyone else does. Especially if there’s the chance to get our hands on another communicator.”

  “That doesn’t sound too hard. The Anderson landing area is a long way from any civilization, aside from the local museum and visitors site. How far is this peak from that?”

  “About sixty-five kilometers, but there’s an added complication. The pyramid, or peak, is smack in the middle of the Anderson Wildlife Preserve. It’s the only known habitat of Finley’s leopard.”

  “What kind of bullshit is that? A wildlife preserve? For a leopard? Sawyers World is still mostly wild areas. Do they even know if it’s endangered?”

  “Probably not, and it’s the only such preserve on Sawyers World. Oh, there are designated wilderness areas, but that’s different. It’s more likely that this preserve is a cover story.”

  Reid didn’t like the implications. “That would mean the Sawyers World government knows about the pyramid, wouldn’t it? That does complicate things.”

  “The official story is that they were worried about the leopard being hunted for its fur. The furs did fetch a very high price during the first few years of interstellar trade. And we’ve seen nothing that would indicate the government overall is aware of the alien pyramid-builders. It is possible that a small inner circle does. That kind of information would be kept quite secret.”

  Reid nodded. Nobody—not the UDT government, not the Velkaryans, and probably not the Sawyers World government—wanted the general populace being aware that there were space-faring aliens out there whose technology seemed to exceed, by far, that of humans. The Terraformers were so long ago that the man-on-the-street could easily write them off as semi-mythical, or a bizarre hypothesis dreamt up by planetologists who couldn’t otherwise explain how the planets got the way they did. The official Velkaryan position was that God created them that way for humans to occupy. Space-travelling aliens were something out of science fiction, or were otherwise primitive species who had been given technology by misguided humans. Traitors to their own species, Reid thought, disgusted.


  “But if it’s a wildlife preserve, surely they’re not going to let Carson or anyone else do any digging.”

  “Ordinarily, no. But Carson seems to have some influential friends and can be very persuasive. Maybe nothing will come of it, but Carson seems to have crossed our path a few times in the past year. It’s worth keeping an eye on him; he might be working with Homeworld Security, at least part-time.”

  “Those bastards. I owe them one.” Reid had been wounded in a shoot-out with what were probably UDT agents at the Denver Spaceport. They’d managed to get away with the files he’d been after, but they’d had to leave one of their own, Rico, behind, riddled with bullets.

  “Regardless. Anyway, take the next ship out and report in to local headquarters.”

  “That would be Maynard, right?” Reid had come here to Earth from Sawyers World, but that hadn’t been his main base, just his last stop.

  “Not anymore. He and his ship, the Star Wind, disappeared a year ago. Carson may have been involved, but we’re not certain. You might ask him if the opportunity arises. Anyway, the man in charge now is Deitrich. The details will all be in your orders. Pick them up on your way out.”

  “Deitrich. Got it.” Reid rose to leave, already thinking about the mission. It should be interesting.

  CHAPTER 6: MEETING ARRANGED

  Ducayne’s office, UDT Homeworld Security

  CARSON REPORTED TO Ducayne’s office, the one hidden below ground rather than the public one in the hangar, and found Jackie Roberts there too. “You wanted to see me? What’s up?” he asked, looking from one to the other, wondering if Roberts had said anything about the new talisman.

  She may have guessed his thoughts, because she shook her head slightly and said, “Don’t mind me.” She began to rise from her seat, “I was just on my way out.”

  “You can stay,” said Ducayne. “This isn’t anything you don’t already know about.” He turned to Carson. “I wanted to let you know that your meeting with Peter Finley has been arranged.”