Alpha Centauri: First Landing (T-Space: Alpha Centauri Book 1)

by Alastair Mayer

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  “Remind me again,” Sawyer said, struggling with the bright pink suit she was donning. “The air tested out, the mouse didn’t die, so why do we have to wear these stupid quarantine suits?”

  The official name for them was BIG, Biological Isolation Garment, an echo of the same-named suits worn by returning Apollo astronauts to ensure that any germs they’d picked up on the Moon didn’t contaminate Earth. They were plasticized fabric, a bright fuchsia color for visibility, with self-contained breathing gear. One advantage they had over the old Level-A biosafety suits that they resembled was that large panels of the fabric were a smart material, with nanopores just big enough to let individual water molecules through but block anything else. At least the wearers wouldn’t dissolve in their own sweat.

  “Just because the mouse didn’t die right away,” Darwin said as he fastened his boots, “it doesn’t mean it hasn’t picked up some disease that will kill it horribly in a week.”

  Sawyer paused with her seal half closed. “Do you really think that’s possible?”

  “I’d be extremely surprised, but I can’t rule it out. We also don’t want to expose the Centauri life to us until we have a better idea of how it will react. It would be a shame if our common cold virus goes through the native life like the Black Death. Of course, that’s unlikely too.”

  Sawyer finished fastening her torso seal and reached up to flip down the hood. “At least it’s not space suits.”

  Darwin and Sawyer finished sealing themselves up and inspected each other’s suits.

  “Okay, let’s do it,” Sawyer said. “One small step for a person and all that.”

  Darwin shook his head, a motion barely visible through the hood of his suit. “You had to bring that up, didn’t you. I still have no clue what my famous first words should be.”

  “Just don’t claim the place in the name of Queen Isabella.”

  “Thanks.”

  They opened the outer hatch and Darwin turned to descend the ladder, Sawyer helping him to find his footing in the bulky quarantine suit. “I wish they’d chosen some other color for these suits.”

  “It’s for the visibility.”

  “I know, but there’s a ‘famous first footstep’ coming up, and I’m going to be recorded forever in that picture looking like some kind of purple dinosaur.”

  “It’s more pink than purple. But come on back, I’ll go first.” Sawyer smiled when she said that, she didn’t really care.

  “Never mind. Okay, I’m at the bottom of the ladder now. The ground cover near the base of the lander is scorched, of course. There don’t seem to be any insects, but again, our landing exhaust probably took care of that. We’ll see what we find farther out.

  “Okay, I’m going to step off the ladder now.” He reached down and out with his foot, and stepped down. “And so life from Earth takes its first step out into the galaxy.”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  “‘Life from Earth?’ Well, it’s no ‘giant leap for mankind’,” Sawyer said after she’d joined Darwin on the surface.

  “Give me a break. I was going to say ‘mankind’ or ‘people from Earth’ but I was there on the bottom of the ladder, looking out at the stuff growing in the landing field, and remembering what we’d just discussed about cold viruses, and it just came out. You know, it’s not like the video feed is going back to Earth live, we could edit it out and do over.”

  “No, no. It was great. Here, let me give you a hand with that.”

  They had begun unloading gear from one of the external equipment lockers. The first order of business was to sample everything in the vicinity and analyze it for toxicity and biological activity. One key test would be growing—or trying to grow—whatever passed for the native equivalent of bacteria in culture dishes, and then see if they could stop it from growing using common antibiotics. That would give them some confidence that if they did pick up a local infection, they could stop it.

  Working in the BIGs turned out to be easier than Darwin had thought it might be. The suits were thicker and heavier than the biosafety garments he’d worn when called in to help inspect a suspected biohazard site. That had been rather gruesome. A road crew had uncovered a mass grave which appeared to date from the war. Everybody had worried about biological warfare agents, since there was no record of a nuclear detonation in that area. It had turned out to be the aftermath of a nasty chemical spill, a too-hasty cleanup and misfiled data rather than a biological agent, but there were a couple of tense days before it had been sorted out.

  Heavier though the suits were, the thicker fabric with tougher gloves and built-in knee pads meant that he didn’t have to worry about tearing the suit on a sharp rock every time he knelt down, or about puncturing a glove, and perhaps himself, on a thorn while taking plant samples.

  With the preliminary samples gathered and returned to the airlock to be disinfected and conveyed to Doctors Singh and Finley—Singh had won out over Xiajoing Wu for the extra biology slot since the Chandrasekhar was an Indian ship—for further analysis, Sawyer and Darwin began the next phase of the landing; connecting up the refueling system.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  They had landed half a kilometer away from the refueling package. From orbit they had been no sign of large animals on the plain, but they kept a wary eye out. Chances were that the noise and exhaust from their landing had scared off everything that could move.

  “Hiking on a planet around another sun,” Sawyer said. “Did you ever think you’d see the day?”

  “It is pretty amazing. But you know, it just doesn’t feel alien enough. Mars felt more different. Here we’ve got a blue sky, a yellow sun . . .” Darwin said. “I know mentally that it’s bigger and brighter than Sol but it just doesn’t look much different.”

  “It’s orange, and smaller. You’re thinking of Alpha Centauri A. It looks the same size because we’re a little closer to balance the temperature, and it’s so bright you couldn’t tell the difference with the naked eye anyway.”

  “Oh, right. See, it looks so similar I forgot the difference. Anyway the gravity doesn’t feel much different, especially after two weeks in microgravity, and while this field we’re walking through isn’t grass or any plant I recognize, it could still be an Earth plant. It’s got green leaves, not blue or pink.”

  Sawyer found herself agreeing. The ground cover they were walking through wasn’t anything like grass. Most of the plants were ankle to knee-high, a single main stem, greenish-brown, with leaves in opposing pairs projecting horizontally every centimeter or so. In fact it reminded her of some ornamental plant she’d seen in flower arrangements on Earth, but had never learned the name of.

  The refueler was just a few meters ahead of them now, the surrounding vegetation flattened and charred from the lander’s exhaust. It stood comfortably on its four landing legs, a squat platform with odd geometric shapes of the machinery housings upon it, a mast extending upward with various sensors.

  She checked her computer pad and tapped out a command. On the lander, a panel dropped open to reveal a screen and some controls. She walked over to it and entered a sequence, putting the lander through a diagnostic routine. Theoretically that was redundant. The lander had been thoroughly checked out from orbit; had been anything wrong, their landing would have been scrubbed. Still, it was good to know that nothing had changed between then and now.

  “Okay, it looks like we’re good to go,” she said. “Now we just walk it back to the lander.”

  She meant that quite literally. One of the thorny issues of the mission plan was the fact that the refueling system had to be reasonably close to the lander so that it could pump liquefied hydrogen into the lander’s tanks without running inordinately long lengths of cryogenic hoses, and yet the refueling lander had to be far enough away when the Chandra or Krechet landed that it would neither pose a hazard to the lander nor be damaged by the lander’s exhaust. The solution was rather clever. The landing legs were mounted with joints and pi
vots, and several key struts made of a shape-memory alloy. The motors which had deployed the landing gear could also—with a minor gear change that Sawyer and Darwin were now performing—be used to manipulate the main leg joints in a different direction. Reconfiguration complete, Sawyer stood to one side and tapped another command on her computer pad.

  The lander flexed all four legs, lowering itself slightly, then straightened them. Then it raised each leg in sequence, lifting it up, pivoting it, setting it back down.

  “Can you make it dance, too?” Darwin asked.

  “Sorry, this thing has two left feet,” Sawyer replied. “Fortunately it also has two right feet. Okay, off we go.”

  Slowly, with stiff jerky motions more reminiscent of a twentieth century child’s toy than the fluid motion one normally saw in robots, the lander began lurching off with its peculiar four-legged gait toward the Chandrasekhar.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  They set up the refueling module twenty meters from the Chandra. Sawyer and Darwin laboriously unrolled the water hoses from their spools and dragged them the seventy five meters to the river.

  “Wouldn’t it have been easier to walk the pod down to the river first and have it unroll the hoses as it walked back to the lander?” Darwin asked.

  “The soil might be softer near the river, we couldn’t risk the module getting mired down or having a leg slip out and it taking a spill.”

  “Come on, we’d already checked out the river, the banks are solid. And we could have at least had it come a lot closer. Dragging these hoses is a real pain. Admit it, you just didn’t think of it.”

  “I didn’t hear you making any suggestions.” Sawyer said. She was angry enough at herself for not thinking of it, Darwin didn’t have to make an issue of it. He was right, though, dragging the hoses was a pain in the butt, especially in their pink suits.

  They reached the edge of the waterway and paused.

  “Now what?”

  “Now we need to extend the intake hose out from the shore and keep it up off the bottom so that it doesn’t suck too much mud.”

  “That’s what the float is for, right?”

  “Right, but we don’t want the hose to float downstream. We’ll need to rig up a mooring line of some kind, maybe anchor it with some poles.”

  They assembled the end of the intake hose to the self-inflating float mechanism, fastening screens over the opening to keep out anything too big for the downstream filters to handle.

  Sawyer looked over the setup. It seemed a bit ad hoc. “We really need to anchor some of these poles further out, or run a rope across the river.”

  “We’re not going wading in there until we’ve checked out the local wildlife.”

  “No, we’ll do something temporary for now. But we want to get the water flowing so we can bring more power on line.” The refueling pod had a nuclear reactor to power the electrolysis units, pumps, and cryogenic refrigeration gear. It also had surplus power that the Chandrasekhar could tap into. However, the reactor couldn’t be fully powered up until sufficient water flowed through the cooling system. The water was also the raw material for Chandrasekhar’s propellants.

  “Speaking of wildlife, I think we should set up a camera to keep an eye on the hoses and this section of the river while we’re back at the ship,” Darwin said.

  “Good idea. We have plenty. Let’s rig them with motion sensors too.”

  A few minutes later the camera and motion sensor were rigged, and the water platform ready to test.

  Sawyer hailed the Chandrasekhar.

  “Chandra this is Sawyer.”

  “Go ahead,” Patel responded over the radio.

  “We’re done here. We’ve also set up a camera.” She read a number off the housing. “Number one three seven. Please tap in and make sure you’re getting it.”

  “Roger, wait one.” Then, a moment later: “Very good, we have a picture. A couple of bipeds in purple suits near a river with some hoses. Looks like something out of a cheesy sci-fi vid.”

  Sawyer raised a middle finger at the camera.

  “Hey, be nice.”

  “That’s the Alpha Centauran gesture for ‘we come in peace’,” she said.

  “Of course it is.”

  “Are you ready to run the pumps?”

  “Let me switch the power.” They would power the pumps from the Chandrasekhar until they were sure the water was flowing properly, then start up the reactor/generator system and switch the power source back to it. “Okay, we are go.”

  Sawyer gave the system a last look-over, and looked over to Darwin who gave a thumbs-up. “Okay, let her rip.”

  After a moment the intake hose began to twitch and vibrate, and Sawyer heard a muffled splashing and gurgling from within it. “Seems like it’s flowing at this end,” she said.

  “Nothing here yet,” Patel came back on the radio. “Wait, okay, we are seeing a flow now. It should be returning back down the discharge tube.”

  The twitching of the inlet hose smoothed out, and the outlet hose started doing a little wormy dance of its own. The river surged with bubbles at the hose outlet, then smoothed out again. Sawyer knelt down and put a hand on each hose in turn. They felt cool, and they both vibrated gently with the flow of water in them.

  “We have water from end to end. Thanks Chandra, I’ll be back there in a minute.”

  Sawyer turned to Darwin. “Okay, I’m going to follow the hoses back to the refueler and check for leaks, then I’ll start up the reactor. Stay here and keep an eye on things until I give you a shout.”

  “Will do.”

  The hike back to the refueling pod only took a few minutes. As she got closer, Sawyer saw that the ground under the hose looked damp, and on closer inspection the surface of the hose was wet. Damn, is it leaking? She knelt down and ran her hand along the hose surface. It was covered with fine water droplets. They gave us a hose that isn’t waterproof? Then she realized her mistake. The hose was cold, pulling in cool river water from below the surface. Did rivers have thermoclines? What she was looking at was condensation.

  She arrived at the refueling pod and accessed the console. Everything checked out.

  “Okay. Ganesh, I’m going to start up the reactor. Everything set?”

  “Affirmative, you are good to start reactor.”

  She pushed a series of controls that retracted the safety interlocks from the fuel rods, then activated the motor that slid the rods into the reactor assembly. She confirmed their positioning and then activated another sequence that began withdrawing the control rods, allowing the nuclear reaction to start building. The core temperature started to rise.

  “Reactor is live, Chandra, how are your readings?”

  The Chandrasekhar had a full set of controls for the reactor hard-wired via the umbilical they’d connected earlier. “It is looking good, please ramp it up.”

  She adjusted the controls to crank up the reactor power and switched on the generator, hearing the whine as it spooled up over the low thrum of the pumps. She gave it a minute to make sure that everything was stable.

  “Okay Chandra, we have power, go ahead and take the batteries off line.”

  “Roger that, Sawyer.” There was a short pause, then: “We are good to go.”

  The Chandrasekhar now ran on external power, and their stay time was no longer limited to the life of the on-board batteries. The next step was to process enough fuel so the whole ship could return to space.

  Sawyer didn’t want to start that in earnest until they had done a better job of securing the water hoses. Besides, even with the cryogenic refrigeration system and the super-insulated propellant tanks on the Chandrasekhar, there was no point filling the tanks just to have the propellant sitting there boiling off. However, she did need to at least run a check that the cryogenic gear and electrolytic separator was working, so that they would have time to fix anything if they needed to.

  She checked the intake water filter system, then routed power to the electrolysis uni
t. After a minute the gauges for H2 and O2 production showed a build up of gas. So far, so good. She flipped a switch to turn on the ultra-Peltier pre-chiller as the compressor began cycling to squeeze the gas into the storage cylinders. With gas now to work on, Sawyer started the refrigeration pumps to ensure that they worked. The storage Dewars in the refueling pod quickly began to cool down.

  “How do the tank temperatures look?” she asked Patel. The system had its own gauges, but she wanted to confirm the data relay to the Chandrasekhar.

  “They are dropping as expected. Everything is nominal.”

  Sawyer strode around the pod and opened a panel on that side, revealing a nest of plumbing. The test valve on this side ended in a simple spigot on a narrow insulated pipe. She activated the valve then turned the spigot, resulting in a thin stream of pale blue liquid which left a cloudy trail of condensing water vapor as it went. Good, the oxygen feed was working.

  She shut that off and moved to another panel, with another snake’s nest of tubing. Here there was no manual spigot at all, just a more complicated sequence of push-buttons to control the valve electrically. She pushed one briefly and a small jet of vapor-sheathed liquid squirted from an opening beneath the panel. Excellent, the cryogenic gear was working just as the instruments said it was.

  She checked the tank readouts to confirm pressure and temperature were holding, confirmed those readings with Patel, and then shut the fueling system down and closed the panels.

  “I’ve buttoned up the fueling system. Is external power still good?”

  “External power is good,” Patel responded. “I think we are go for an extended stay.”

  Sawyer smiled. Darwin, standing nearby, gave her a thumbs up. “Roger that,” she said.

  Chapter 11: Suspicion

  Centauri Station, in orbit

  “Commodore Drake, this is Greg Vukovich aboard the Poul Anderson.”

  “Vukovich?” The astrophysicist. “What can I do for you?”