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

by Alastair Mayer

  “I’ve been going over some data and I found something you should be aware of.” He sounded nervous, almost furtive.

  “Is this urgent, is there some danger?” Drake wondered what the astronomical data might turn up that was so worrisome.

  “I’m not certain. I can explain it better in person, may I come over?”

  Except for the Chandrasekhar, all the ships were currently docked to the central hub module, so that wouldn’t be a problem. Drake checked his schedule for the next few hours. There was nothing critical scheduled. “Sure, I can give you a few minutes now.”

  With the ships docked, they had increased their living space with an off-the-shelf inflatable habitation module. Drake now had a cabin area to himself. When Vukovich arrived there a few moments later, Drake waved him to a set of foot loops. In the freefall conditions aboard the station, desks and chairs didn’t make a lot of sense, instead there were soft loops on the floors and walls, for hand or foot holds, at places convenient for somebody working with the computer console.

  “So what’s this about?” asked Drake.

  “I’ve been reviewing the data from the Xīng Huā explosion. The astronomical instruments on the Anderson were automatically recording whenever we were out of warp.”

  “The Xīng Huā?” Drake had been expecting something completely different, an impending stellar flare, or a too-close approach to the debris stream from a comet. “What about it?”

  “I was trying to get a better idea of what could have happened. I analyzed what we have on the radiation pulse and the secondary explosion. I’ve also examined the spectra of stars in line with where it took place.”

  “Stars? What for?”

  “Oh. By comparing the spectra that we see now, through the debris field, with spectrographs on record for the stars as seen from near Earth, we can see how the absorption lines change. That gives me some idea of the composition and density of any gas cloud from the explosion,” Vukovich said.

  “Very clever.”

  “Of course that doesn’t account for any solid debris.”

  “No, of course not.” Drake didn’t quite get the point yet, but checking that way hadn’t occurred to him. “So what did you find?”

  “Well, not as much as I was expecting. I ran several simulations of a ship hitting a large object while in warp. The results of course depend on what it hit and how big, but. . . .” Vukovich’s voice trailed off, as though he were unsure how to continue.

  “But?” Drake prompted.

  “Well, for one thing the model puts a lower bound on the size of whatever it hit to cause an explosion. On the upper end we have a maximum size constraint by what we could have observed before entering the system, and from the Nessus data. Since we didn’t see anything there before, whatever it was had to be smaller than what we could detect.”

  “Okay, fair enough,” Drake said, “but that could be pretty large.”

  “Right. So they had to hit something smaller than that, but bigger than about twenty kilograms.” Vukovich gestured with his hands not quite shoulder-width apart to give an approximate size. “Now, assuming a normal distribution of sizes—”

  “Slow down. What?” Drake was losing the direction of this discussion.

  “There tend to be more small rocks or chunks of ice than big ones, and how many of each depends on size. And I just meant a usual distribution, not a ‘normal distribution’ in the statistical sense. It would actually be log—”

  “Okay,” Drake said, raising a hand and trying to get Vukovich to re-focus. “I get you. Go on.”

  “Well, from that we can calculate what size object the Xīng Huā most likely hit. The thing is, the debris cloud is too small. If it hit an object big enough to destroy the Xīng Huā, the object would be big enough to contaminate the debris field. But it doesn’t. It would have to be at the lower end of the size scale to account for what we see.”

  “Okay, so it was a small chunk of rock or ice. I don’t see your point.” Drake wondered if Vukovich even had one.

  “My point is, there’s not even enough debris to account for the Xīng Huā.”

  “What?” That couldn’t be possible.

  “Between the life support reserves, the propellant tanks, and the fusion fuel tanks, I should be seeing a lot more oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, water and deuterium than I’m seeing. The emission spectrum from the initial gamma pulse didn’t match my computer simulation for an object torn apart by a warp bubble. I ran the sim with ice, rock, a mixture of ice and rock, anything we’re likely to run into out here.” Vukovich suddenly paled. “Oh, sorry, that was in bad taste. The pun was unintentional.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” The pun didn’t concern Drake, but the implication that the Chinese starship hadn’t exploded did. “So, before I leap to conclusions here, are you suggesting what I think you’re suggesting?”

  “I don’t think the Xīng Huā hit an iceberg, sir.”

  “Then what. . . .” Drake stopped himself, changing his mind about what he was going to say. “Could the gamma flash be faked?”

  Vukovich nodded. “With access to nuclear material, pretty easily. Less easily but still possible with high current particle accelerator.”

  And the builders of Xīng Huā had all kinds of access to nuclear material and particle accelerators. “Could you tell the difference between a fake and a real warp impact?”

  “With more data on this and real warp impacts, yes, but we weren’t looking for the pulse so what we recorded doesn’t have enough detail to say for sure.” Vukovich shrugged. “But it doesn’t match my simulations.”

  It occurred to Drake that with FTL travel, they could outrun the wavefront of that pulse and measure it again—except by now it was a couple of light weeks away and so too faint to detect. He dismissed the thought.

  “So it’s possible that the Xīng Huā faked the explosion?” asked Drake, then added “Hypothetically speaking, of course.”

  “Yes. I can’t rule it out, and it would explain some anomalies.”

  “Damn. Those wily sons of. . . .” Drake muttered to himself.

  “Commodore? If they did—hypothetically—fake it, why would they do that? Why jeopardize the whole mission?”

  “They’d know we had enough redundancy to go ahead if we chose to—which is what we’re doing after all. As to why—perhaps to give them leisurely access to a working warp drive. The Chinese have been trying to develop one ever since those first papers on induced space bending. As has almost everybody else, we just happened to get to it first, thanks to Brenke. But they were running close second.”

  “Can they figure it out from a working unit? I understand that there’s pretty complex nanostructure involved.” Vukovich would know the theory, of course, but not the implementation.

  “There is.” Franklin was privy to more engineering detail than the rest of the crew, although most of the theory was lost on him. Heck, Dr. Algernon Brenke was probably the only person who really understood both. “However, I’m sure they have labs capable of reverse engineering a warp module. It won’t tell them how to build it, but they’re probably close to that already, they may just need a few hints on how we solved the stability problems. And then they’ll have the warp drive and the fusion reactor to power it.”

  “So, what do we do about it, Sir?”

  “Do? You keep this quiet, for starters. This is all hypothetical, we have no real proof, and we don’t need peoples’ emotions flying off in all directions. As far as we all know, the Xīng Huā was destroyed and her crew all killed. People are used to that idea now, let’s let it rest.”

  “But—”

  “Oh, I’ll report the possibility. Somebody will probably want to question you about it when we get back to Earth. But there’s not really much we can do about it in the meantime, is there?”

  “No. I see your point.”

  “I want to thank you for bringing this to me, Greg. That was some clever analysis. What made you think of it?”
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br />   “I’m not really sure, I was just following the data. I did wonder a bit at the unlikeliness of it all, since our paths were well off the ecliptic and the space is pretty empty. It could have been an accident, of course, but it just felt too, well, random.”

  “Ah. Well, let’s not say any more about it for now. Thanks again, Vukovich.” Drake gestured toward the door. As Vukovich unhooked from the foot loops and turned to leave, Drake stopped him. “Oh, and Greg?”

  “Yes?”

  “Would you make a secure backup of those files for me and restrict access to that data for now? I don’t imagine anyone else is likely to be accessing it anyway, but just to be sure.”

  “Uh, of course. Can do.”

  After Vukovich left, Drake considered the situation. What he’d told Vukovich had been the truth, raising these suspicions now would be rough on the crew, either because of the level of mistrust it would raise and the hope—possibly false—that their colleagues on the Xīng Huā were still alive. That would be mixed with disgust at the Xīng Huā’s crew for taking a lot of essential gear with them, including the second refueling pod and the DNA sequencer.

  Drake shook his head. From the list of equipment that people complained had been lost with the Xīng Huā, that ship must have been a lot bigger on the inside than it was on the outside. Perhaps it should have been painted police box blue.

  The other thing he’d told Vukovich was also true. There wasn’t anything they could do about it now. They’d be back home years before any radio or laser signal they sent could get there, and the Xīng Huā itself, if it really had faked its own destruction, had nearly two weeks head start. By know it could have landed at the Chinese base on the Moon, or perhaps rendezvoused at some deep space location Drake was unaware of. The best he could do was to transmit an encrypted data dump as soon as they were back in the Solar system. He didn’t see any particular need to let other members of the coalition know about it, he’d leave that decision to the higher-ups.

  Chapter 12: Exploration

  Chandrasekhar landing site

  “Frank, I want to get the plane set up. We’ve sampled everything withing walking distance of the lander.” Darwin said over the radio to Commander Drake.

  “Everything? Why do I doubt that? You’re not even cleared to go out without the BIGs yet.”

  “I don’t want to go far, just see which directions might be worth taking a longer hike to.” Well, that and he was getting bored. The local life so far just didn’t seem very alien, although mostly they’d just seen plants, Jennifer Singh’s specialty. Any large animals must have been scared off by their landing, and while he’d collected a few insect specimens, entomology was never his strong suit. Even on Earth, one bug looked as alien to him as any other.

  “Admit it, you’re just getting bored silly watching bacteria grow.”

  Ouch. “They’ll grow fine, or not, without me watching them. We’re wasting exploration time down here.”

  “No, George,” Drake said, “you can’t go flying off until the next stage of the protocol. You know that, you helped put the exploration protocol together.”

  “That’s right, damn it, and now I’m saying the protocol is too conservative. I didn’t know what to expect then, we’ve had plenty of time to investigate hazards now.”

  “But if you’re forced down, if your BIG rips. . . .”

  “So what? We’re going to take them off in a day or two anyway. It’s alien life, even if there are similarities.” Darwin was sitting under the tarp of the portable lab they’d set up some meters from the ship, talking via relay through the ship’s comms. He looked around at their landing field. Nope, nothing obviously hostile. “It doesn’t seem to want to eat Earth biochemistry.” Not at a high level, anyway. It didn’t object to basic sugars and starches. Singh was still investigating.

  “Sorry George. Anyway you don’t have a second pilot; I need Sawyer there at the landing site for at least one more day working on the fueling setup, and then a good part of another day to assemble the aircraft.”

  “I can assemble it, or Ganesh can finish the fueling setup. And I can fly it, Sawyer doesn’t need to come along.”

  “No, that’s right out, no solo forays until we know more about the planet. Come on doctor, patience.”

  “What about Ganesh?” Even as he said it, Darwin knew the objections.

  “He’s needed at the landing site no less than Sawyer. You know that.”

  Darwin kicked at a clod of dirt. “Yes. All right, two more days.”

  “Nice try. At least three by my calculations. And Darwin?”

  Not George. Uh oh. “Yes?”

  “Sawyer’s still first pilot for the plane. Got it?”

  Darwin bit back his first thought. He sighed and said “Roger that.”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Three days later, Chandra landing site

  Sawyer finished her assembly work and stepped back to look the vehicle over. The aircraft resembled its original commercial brethren, a fixed-wing ultralight with an electric propeller drive and solar film on the wings to provide power and keep the reserve battery charged. The flight control software had been modified so it could be tailored to the exact gravity and atmosphere of the new planet, and the navigation system had been replaced. No GPS here, but the landing craft and the ships in orbit would triangulate on the plane’s tracking beacon and relay the position to them.

  The plane had an open cockpit, with the two seats side by side, and big balloon tires to make it easy to land or take off from unpaved fields. In a pinch, it was light enough that the two crew could foot launch it, but the scramble to climb aboard at flying speed would make for an exciting ride. Besides, any terrain too rough for the wheels would be difficult to run on. Sawyer wondered whether such an aircraft could be fitted with robotic legs like the refueler, but decided that it would make the thing’s takeoff, um, run make it look like a gooney bird, or perhaps some kind of crazed stork. No, the wheels would do.

  The plane had of course been disassembled and repacked into the smallest possible volume for the voyage to Alpha Centauri, but the reassembly went quickly. Many of the joints and connectors were smart materials, the connectors self-aligned and then linked with each other at a microscopic scale to form a bond as strong as if they’d been expertly welded.

  Sawyer, and for that matter Darwin, as he’d pointed out earlier, was well checked out on the little electroplane, having flown over fifty hours on it from various rough fields back on Earth, in different weather conditions. They’d also practiced in simulator mode back on the Heinlein.

  The vegetation in the Chandrasekhar’s landing area was short and sparse enough that they hadn’t needed to cut or clear it for a runway. Sawyer had rigged a windsock from the sleeve of a biological isolation garment, and the electroplane’s flight system also received weather data from the Chandra’s sensors.

  She noted the direction of the windsock, which mostly hung limp, and paced out the hundred or so meters of “runway”, checking the ground for any hidden rocks, potholes, branches or animal warrens that might snag a wheel on her takeoff or landing roll. It was all clear.

  She walked back to the plane and strapped herself into the lightweight seat. This was a test flight, not a foray. She would keep the landing area in sight at all times, so the “no solo” rule didn’t come into play. Sawyer flipped on the master switch and reviewed the computerized checklist on the panel. Everything looked good, and the instruments had been reconfigured for the local gravity and air density. She slipped her headset on and keyed the mike. “This is Sawyer, comms check.”

  “Loud and clear. Whenever you’re ready.”

  Sawyer slid the power control forward and the propeller spun to life with a whine. She eased off the toe brakes and the plane started to roll out, bumping gently over the occasional plant or irregularity in the ground. “Okay, rolling.”

  After taxiing the plane from one end of her runway to the other, she satisfied herself that the pl
ane would hold together and could handle the take-off and landing rolls.

  Sawyer pushed the power lever all the way forward and felt the plane surge in response. The vibration from the bumpy ground grew faster and more violent, then lessened as she came up to flight speed and the wings started to take the weight. She gave it plenty of take-off roll, bringing the speed up high to compensate for the higher gravity on this planet, then pulled back on the stick. The nose lifted as the aircraft rotated, then the main wheels left the ground. She was flying. She climbed out straight forward, reaching an altitude of a hundred meters before she was a kilometer from her starting point. She waggled the stick and rudder pedals experimentally. The plane responded well.

  By now she was level with the tops of the hills surrounding the valley they’d landed in. She pulled up higher. At two hundred meters she had a clear view over the hills. To the west their little river snaked through a notch, the line of hills paralleling the coast north and south as far as she could see. To the west . . . ah, to the west, beyond a thin strip of what looked like sandy beach and the whitecaps of low rolling breakers, lay the ocean, the light of Alpha Centauri B glistening off the deep blue water.

  Sawyer was tempted to turn and fly out there now, it would only take five minutes, but no, it wasn’t part of the mission plan. Reluctantly she banked the plane back toward the Chandrasekhar.

  The wind sock was still hanging limp and as she passed the ship she set up for her turn to final. She glided in to a smooth landing, bumping just a bit on the roll out, then braked to a stop and killed the master switch. She unbuckled and hopped out, a huge grin on her face.

  “So, how does it fly?” asked Darwin, who’d been waiting on the ground.

  “Fantastic! And the view is tremendous. We’ll need to fly over to be sure, but it looks like there’s plenty of beach to land on, and it extends as far as I could see. Perhaps we can fly an extended foray and follow the coast.”

  “Whoa, slow down. I thought I was the anxious one,” said Darwin. That’s great. But first let’s you and me do a few circuits to get comfortable with the plane.”