The Centauri Surprise

by Alastair Mayer

  “Of course, of course,” Carson said, wondering just who Boutelle’s client was. Would the Velkaryans try something so obvious? “I think there was a survey paper on that a couple of years ago in The Journal of Exoarcheology. Or maybe it was in the proceedings from a conference. I can dig up a copy, but you’ll have to give me a day or so. How much of a hurry are you, or your client, in? Who did you say they were?”

  “I didn’t. They like to keep things confidential because of potential competitive interests.”

  “Competitive interests?” Carson wondered what sort of legitimate business could have competition for a list of pyramids. “All right, fair enough, I suppose we have those in academia, too.”

  Avril nodded again. “Yes. You wouldn’t think so in fields like anthropology or archeology, but there it is. Anyway, a day or so is fine if you think you can find that paper. Or just send me a link to it. That would be really helpful.” She smiled at him. He could see how that smile might get people eager to do favors for her, but he’d had enough pretty female—and the occasional male—students try that on him that he’d built up some resistance to it. In this case, he already knew where to find that paper, but he wanted to talk to Ducayne first.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  UDT Headquarters, Sawyer City

  “You wanted to see me?” Ducayne said to him when Carson arrived. “Was it something about the pyramid?”

  Carson grinned wryly. “You could say that. I had an interesting request this morning, from a grad student working in xenoanthropology. Not one of my current students, but she has been in a couple of my classes. She does some freelance reports for clients outside the university. Nothing wrong with that, we encourage it, so long as there’s no academic dishonesty.”

  “Fair enough,” Ducayne said. Was that a slight smirk on his face? “And what does this have to do with me, or us?”

  “She’s doing a report on all known pyramids in T-Space. Well, that’s not the way she phrased it, she said on planets with known present or previous intelligent life, but that amounts to the same thing. She asked me if I had any convenient references.”

  Ducayne was definitely grinning now. “I guess she went to the right person.”

  “But that’s not the point. Or maybe it is. She wouldn’t tell me who her client was, but I was wondering if it was some Velkaryan front operation. Or worse, if she’s a Velkaryan agent herself.”

  The grin went away. “Do you have any other reason to think so?”

  Carson thought about it. “No, not really. It just seems too coincidental.”

  Ducayne nodded, and the grin came back. “You have good instincts, Carson. It is too coincidental. This student, you didn’t mention her name. Was it Avril Boutelle?”

  Carson’s surprise was brief. He should have known Ducayne would be keeping tabs on that sort of thing. “You’re watching her?”

  “You could say that. She works for me.”

  “She what?”

  “I asked her to pull that report together. She has done other reports for us. ‘Intelligence briefings’ is the formal name. Nothing particularly sinister about it, it’s just compiling data from available sources. I was going to ask you to do it, but I decided that wasn’t the best use of your time. It was resourceful of her to ask, although I might have a word with her about being more subtle next time.”

  “Oh,” said Carson, not knowing what else to say.

  “Anyway,” Ducayne continued, “if you do have something you could give her to get started, that’s great. But don’t mention Pete’s Peak or the Chara pyramid to her. Need to know and all that, and I want to see if she’s resourceful enough to include those in her report. Especially the Chara pyramid, which nobody outside this office should know about.”

  “All right. I’ll do that. But about the Chara pyramid, Finley knows about it, and the Velkaryans probably at least suspect.”

  “You’re right, but I wouldn’t expect either of those to make it public knowledge either. I can’t say I’m thrilled that Finley knows, but you had your reasons for telling him.”

  “And he knows how to keep a secret,” Carson said.

  “He does. Anyway, thanks for coming to me with your suspicions about Ms. Boutelle. As I said, you have good instincts. Trust them. We’ll talk again later.”

  As Carson left, he thought about his mixed feelings. He was glad that Boutelle wasn’t working for the Velkaryans, knowingly or otherwise, but he was also annoyed that Ducayne hadn’t told him. He finally shrugged the annoyance off, recognizing that there was no good reason Ducayne should have told him. Compartmentalization was more important than social niceties where security was concerned.

  CHAPTER 20: PROXIMA-B

  Starship Sophie, nearing Proxima Centauri

  JACKIE ROBERTS HADN’T quite finished analyzing the pattern on Carson’s talisman. The stellar database that came with the omniphone was in a different format from what was in Sophie’s navigation computer. Nobody was going to be using an omniphone to pilot a starship, after all. The information was adequate for her immediate need, she just had to revise her original program for the new data format.

  She didn’t believe the results from the first run of the program against Carson’s talisman. She was just setting it up to run against her copies of the older talisman data when the Sophie reached Proxima. She stowed it all away for now.

  She dropped the Sophie out of warp and hailed the station. “Grainger Station, this is the S-class Sophie out of Sawyers World on a courier run. Requesting landing info.”

  “Sophie? A courier run? What happened to the Lark? We’re not expecting you.”

  “The Lark is undergoing an overhaul. I was asked to take over the run. Transmitting authorization, stand by.” Jackie tapped the control to send the coded signal. It was a little unusual, but she had encountered similar reactions before when making deliveries to certain off-world bases. However, her courier clearance was great for easing the way in. Everyone wants to get their mail.

  “Authorization received. Thanks, Sophie, and welcome to Proxima-b. You can land at the pad near the base, transmitting details now.”

  Jackie saw the approach plate, a diagram with detailed landing information, flash up on her navigation console. “Copy that, Grainger. Got it.”

  “Roger. Zone extends to twenty kilometers, report entering. Proxima out.”

  Well, that was curt, Jackie thought. On the other hand, she realized, she didn’t know what time zone they were in. Maybe she had caught someone at a bad time. It wasn’t like they got a lot of traffic.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Proxima-b, to give it its original designation, was a heavy planet, with nearly twice the mass of most terraformed worlds, although less than that of Skead, Jackie’s adopted home at Tau Ceti. Its atmosphere had been thinned by a constant bombardment from the stellar wind from the red dwarf star it orbited every eleven-and-a-bit standard days. Its own day was twice that, being locked in a 3:2 orbital spin resonance like Mercury. Jackie imagined it would be like living on Earth’s moon, only with a much higher gravity and a thin atmosphere. That thin atmosphere and high gravity would make landing a challenge, but that just made it interesting. Contrary to what she sometimes told Carson, she didn’t always prefer boring.

  Approaching the planet, the size of the sun—Proxima Centauri—was uncomfortable. Because the star was much smaller than the G- or F-type stars that terraformed planets orbited, its habitable zone was that much closer. Compared to the fingernail-sized disk that their respective suns seemed from Earth or Sawyers World, Proxima was the size of a golf ball, or larger. It just felt a bit unnatural. She had felt the same way approaching Kapteyn’s Star to land on the planet where Tevnar discovered the wrecked Kesh ship. Not that she’d said anything to Carson, of course.

  She came straight in, killing much of her approach speed with thrusters before entering the cool, thin, air up-range from the base. The ground below her was largely rocky, with patches of ice and meltwater, and scatt
ered vegetation. It reminded Jackie of arctic tundra, except that the sky glow was more like candle-light and whatever was growing down there was more black or purple than green.

  She called in as she approached the base’s control zone, and, cleared to land, swept over the pad with a mix of aerodynamic and thruster lift, setting down a hundred meters from the domes of the base. She had already transmitted the electronic mail and other digital updates, but there was cargo and a handful of packages to deliver.

  She called up the station again. “Proxima Base, do you have a docking tunnel, or do I need to suit up?” With the addition of a helmet, or at least a respirator, her ship coveralls would double as a temporary space suit, but it would be easier if they had a tunnel.

  “Give us a few minutes, Sophie, we’ll send the bus. You’re a standard Sapphire, correct?”

  “That’s affirmative.” She watched on a viewscreen as a four-wheeled vehicle, not unlike a bus, trundled out from a docking bay at the side of one of the domes and across the pad toward her. As it reached her ship, the main cab of the bus began to rise on scissor jacks above the wheeled frame, coming to a stop level with the Sophie’s airlock door. A smaller portion of the cab then telescoped out to the ship’s hull. Jackie felt a slight bump as a flexible, inflatable seal made snug contact around the hatch. The whole procedure was not unlike a mobile jet-way used with some commercial airliners and starships.

  There came a knock on the outer airlock door, and another voice over the radio. “We have a seal. You can open up.”

  Jackie, by now waiting in the airlock, checked the outside pressure and, finding it good, opened up the hatch.

  “Hi, I’m Jackie Roberts, captain of the Sophie,” she greeted the man standing there. “Welcome aboard.”

  “Well,” the man said, “I must say you’re a nice change from old Joe Riley on the Lark. I’m Antonio Mazzone. Call me Tony. Welcome to Grainger Station.”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  A second bus, this one a cargo vehicle, pulled up and docked with the aft cargo door. Jackie supervised as two men and a woman made quick work of unloading the various packages and, more importantly, food, water and other supplies. The base of course had life-support systems that recycled the air and water, but such systems tended to be lossy unless deliberately—and expensively—designed otherwise. Supplies to stock the autochefs and some highly prized “real” food and drink topped off the necessities. Lab equipment and supplies, data updates, and personal items rounded out the shipment.

  “All right,” Tony said. “That’s done.” The cargo bus sealed its hatch and detached from the cargo lock, and began rolling back to the base.

  Tony turned to Jackie. “I assume you’re staying for a while, not turning around immediately?”

  “That’s right,” Jackie replied. “I was planning to lift in the morning. I can stay aboard ship, though, if space is a problem.”

  “Oh, no problem at all, we have a guest room. Riley likes to stay over, and we have the occasional visiting scientist. Besides, it’s nice to see a new face, someone else to discuss things with over the evening meal.”

  “Evening?” Proxima was still high in the sky. “What time zone do you keep?” Of course they wouldn’t go by local time, not with a day lasting three weeks.

  “Sawyer City time. I assume you’re on that?”

  “At the moment, yes. Normally I try to adjust to my destination anyway.”

  “But you didn’t need to this trip. That’s why we keep Sawyer time. Anyway, we have a couple of hours until dinner. While the crew gets these supplies squared away, how about a tour of the base?”

  “Sure, I’d like that. Just give me a moment to secure my ship.”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  As the passenger bus rolled back to the base, Jackie watched out the window. The area had mostly been cleared, and except for the coloring could as easily have been on the Moon or, she supposed, Mars. Or that planet at Kapteyn’s Star, she thought, although the gravity was lighter here than on that last one. There were a few scattered patches of dark purple vegetation around the edges of the compound, where unevenness in the rock provided shelter and, probably, a place for water to collect.

  “What kind of plants are those?” she asked, pointing to them. “They don’t look like anything I’ve seen on terrestrial worlds.”

  “Indeed, they’re not. Arguably they’re not even plants, at least not as we know them. They do perform photosynthesis, and extract nutrients from the soil and are made up of cells with cell walls, but all that is just analogs of anything descended from Earth life. These are not; the biochemistry is different.”

  “Really? How different?” Jackie was no biologist, but she knew the basics.

  “Well, it is built on the same RNA and DNA bases as Earth life, but, other than that, most of the biochemical pathways are different. The cell walls aren’t cellulose; they’re a different polysaccharide, and they don’t use chlorophyll.”

  “That would explain why they’re not green.” Jackie said.

  “Exactly.”

  “Life must have evolved here quite differently from Earth.” On all the terraformed planets, life had been transplanted from Earth when those planets were reshaped. This one clearly hadn’t been.

  Tony hesitated a moment, then said, “You could say that, I suppose. But we think it didn’t evolve here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The biology here happens to match some we’ve found on planets around other red dwarf stars.”

  “Maybe red dwarfs just favor a different kind of biogenesis?”

  “A good thought, but we haven’t found any fossil traces old enough to suggest life arose here by itself. And before you ask, no, the age is not consistent with it having been transplanted by the Terraformers. Best guess is just over a hundred million standard years, give or take.”

  “Wait,” Jackie said, not sure she was understanding what he seemed to be saying. “Are you implying that there were two waves of, for lack of a better term, Terraformers? One terraforming—or whatever the word would be—worlds around red dwarf stars, and another, forty million years later, doing the same with yellow star planets?”

  “I’m not implying that at all. It could have been natural panspermia, primitive life hitchhiking on debris kicked up by an impact. None of the life here is very complicated.” The words came almost as if by rote. There was no enthusiasm behind them.

  Jackie was about to ask who he was trying to convince, her or himself, but the bus had arrived at the base and Tony was busy with the docking sequence. He seemed almost relieved.

  How curious, Jackie said to herself.

  CHAPTER 21: TRAINING EXERCISE

  Ducayne’s Office

  REGINA ELLIOT WAS in Ducayne’s underground office, discussing some administrative items, when the comm on Ducayne’s desk warbled.

  He glared at it for a moment. Elliot knew that there were only a few people who could call him on that circuit. She rose to leave, but Ducayne waved to her to stay seated. He did, however, pick up the handset so she wouldn’t hear the other end of the conversation.

  “Good afternoon, Mister Ambassador,” Ducayne said into the phone. Regina grinned to herself, Ducayne’s facial expression belied his pleasant tone of voice.

  “Yes, of course I’ve seen it,” he said after a moment. “No, it wasn’t my idea.” Ducayne looked at her and rolled his eyes. She put her hand up to her mouth to cover her smirk.

  Ducayne listened a moment more, then said, “It shouldn’t be a problem. We have a good working relationship with the Sawyers government. Uh, we do, don’t we?”

  A brief pause, and then he continued.

  “No, it will just be a training exercise. A dozen UDT Space Force ships warp into the system, halfway between here and Kakuloa I imagine. Then they run a simulated assault on Kakuloa.”

  They had run this kind of exercise before, she knew, but not in a few years. The exercises had begun following an attempt to hijack an antim
atter shipment back in the 2090s. After that, the Space Force had run major drills every few months for a couple of years. Then they’d petered out, with one every few years. As Elliot thought about it, she realized that the last such exercise had been before the current UDT ambassador to Sawyers World had been appointed. No wonder he was antsy.

  “Yes, the Southern Continent,” Ducayne was saying. “I’m sure they’ll stay away from the squid reservation, it’s a big continent. Or maybe they’ll land in the desert across the mountains from Kakuloa City. I don’t know.”

  Another pause as Ducayne listened to the phone.

  Ducayne said, “Sir, you know as well as I do that Kakuloa is UDT territory.”

  She wondered if the ambassador really knew that; the appointment was likely as much a political favor as anything based on merit.

  “No,” Ducayne said patiently, “it’s under joint jurisdiction, not just Sawyer’s World. As per the treaty.”

  It was Regina’s turn to roll her eyes. The ambassador really should know this.

  “Yes, you’ll have to break it to them. It’s not my place to, although I can feed my counterpart some information through the usual back channels. That’s just common courtesy.”

  Another pause.

  “It’s not up to me, but if they want to involve Space Guard in a joint exercise, that might be a good idea. That will have to be coordinated, though. The Space Force should know that their participation is part of the exercise.”

  Well now, Regina said to herself, where did that come from? A joint exercise with the Sawyers World Space Guard and the UDT Space Force could be interesting, especially if Space Guard were acting as the Red Team.

  “No, of course we wouldn’t want anyone to get the wrong idea.”

  No, Regina agreed, and it had better not be a live fire exercise either.

  “A few weeks. Plenty of time to get messages back and forth.”

  Ducayne had begun to tap impatiently on his desk. That wasn’t a good sign.