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

by Alastair Mayer

  “Darwin, this is Klaar. Are you making a joke? It is not very funny.”

  “No joke, Ulrika. I thought it was strange, but you’re the zoologist. Dr. Singh is here, she’ll tell you it’s real.”

  “It is.” Jennifer Singh’s voice came over the comm. Darwin must have it in speaker mode.

  “Damn. I would almost rather it be a joke. I don’t understand how, but this is a mammal.”’

  Singh’s voice came again. “Darwin did say it was fur-bearing and warm blooded. Does it give milk?”

  “That I don’t know. This one is male. I don’t even know if it lays eggs or is placental. But the skeletal structure is all wrong for an alien!”

  “And you know what is the right skeletal structure for an alien?” asked Singh.

  “No, no. It’s wrong for an alien because it is exactly right for a terrestrial mammal. Bring up your screen, I’ll show you.” Klaar touched a control to conference her screen to theirs. “Look at this.” She brought up an image of the animal’s skeleton, as determined from the CT scan Darwin had performed. “See here.” She moved the cursor to point at parts of the image in turn. “Skull, spine made up of vertebra, shoulder blades, ribs, pelvis, the limb bones—the anatomy screams ‘terrestrial vertebrate’.”

  “Convergent evolution?” Singh said, but her tone of voice suggested that she didn’t really believe it.

  “At this level of detail? But it gets worse.” She pointed at the hip joint. “Look, ball and socket, and that’s clearly a femur. Below that, two bones, fibia and tibia. Ankle bones. Five toes.”

  “I only see four.” Darwin said.

  “Look closer, see that small bone?” she zoomed the screen, expanding the view. “Vestigial fifth toe. The front paws are similar.”

  “Okay, that is weird.”

  “You could say that. I am not finished. Count the cervical vertebrae.” She panned the image to the animal’s neck area, focusing on the region between the skull and the first vertebra with attached ribs.

  She heard Singh counting, then a gasp. “Seven.”

  “Seven indeed. Every terrestrial mammal from a mouse to a giraffe, with only rare exceptions, has seven cervical vertebrae.”

  “I know, but that’s. . ..”

  “Impossible, yes. Which is why I was hoping for a joke.”

  “Have you checked the ears?” Darwin asked. Part of the very definition of mammalia was based on the specific structure of the jaw joint and bones of the middle ear.

  “The scan doesn’t resolve enough detail, but there was nothing to rule mammals out. I’d have to dissect to be sure. Damn I want to get down there.” Tsibliev had mentioned that might be possible, but arrangements were not yet final.

  “And look at this.” Klaar stabbed at another computer key and the skeleton’s thoracic cavity filled in with organs: a pair of lungs, a heart nestled between them, a liver tucked up under the lungs on the right, stomach sitting under and to the left of that, intestines, a pair of kidneys. . .. “The forbannet internal organs could be that of any terrestrial vertebrate.” Klaar’s frustration began to color her language. “How the frack does a terrestrial mammal get four light years from home?”

  “Uh, a stowaway?” suggested Singh tentatively. That would break all kinds of quarantine regulations and cause a furor if true. They had some lab animals, like the mouse used as a “canary”, but they were carefully managed.

  Klaar was about to reply when her omni chirped. It was Captain Tsibliev. “Da?” she said.

  “Crew meeting in five minutes. I have some news.”

  “I’ll be there.” Klaar felt her heart beat rise, would she be landing after all? She turned her attention back to her link to the surface. “I have to go, let me know if you find any more mammals.”

  “Roger that,” said Darwin.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Biology Lab, on the surface

  Singh turned to Darwin. “Could it be a stowaway?”

  Darwin scowled at her. “I only wish it were. But if it is, it’s a previously undiscovered species. Ulrika says it doesn’t match any terrestrial mammal—placental, marsupial or monotreme for that matter—alive or extinct. For that matter it doesn’t match any known reptile, amphibian or dinosaur. She knows; she checked the database.” He paused, staring a little wild-eyed. “It does, however, resemble many terrestrial placental mammals, marsupials and monotremes in the way that terrestrial placental mammals, marsupials and monotremes resemble each other. If this were found on Earth it would be classified as a new species of mammal, or perhaps marsupial.”

  Singh pointed at the screen. “Not a marsupial; no epipubic bone. That thing’s a placental.”

  Darwin pressed a key to make the internal organs disappear, and looked at the pelvis again. She was right, non-placental mammalia, the marsupials and egg-laying monotremes, had additional bones in the pelvis that would interfere with development and birth in a placental mammal. Klaar hadn’t mentioned it, perhaps that wasn’t definitive, but he hadn’t asked. “Huh, I missed that.”

  “You’re a male.”

  “And so is this guy. I don’t know what would disturb me more when we find a female: evidence that it was placental or that it laid eggs.”

  “Heh. Or something completely different.” She paused. “By the way, what I came here to ask in the first place, what is the status of the protein sequencer?”

  With the loss of the DNA sequencer on the Xīng Huā, the team had investigated possible substitutes. It turned out they could, in theory, adapt a mass-spectrometer to the job of sequencing the amino acids in proteins—assuming the local proteins were made from amino acids, which had proved to be the case—it just required a proper supply of reagents, a lot of software modifications, and some custom parts. “The new parts are in the fab queue. It’ll be another day before the parts are fabbed and the modified system assembled. And it will take another day, at least, to calibrate it and modify the peptide database for the new calibration. We won’t be able to look at this silly babbit’s proteins for a couple of days.” The results might not be quite as interesting as a DNA comparison, but he could at least find out if proteins which performed a given function in the babbit, or other Alpha Centauran life, were at all similar to proteins performing the same function in Earth life.

  She sighed. “That means I can’t sequence my plant specimens until then either. We are building up a backlog.”

  “Don’t I know it. Any surprises so far?”

  “No terrestrial carrots to go with your runny babbit, if that’s what you mean, but there are some parallels with terrestrial species. There is sufficient variety in Earth plants that a few parallels wouldn’t surprise me, but now you have me wondering. I’d been focusing on gross morphology and the ecological relationships, but I think I’ll start taking a closer look at the cellular level. I’m just so used to green plants having chloroplasts that it had not quite occurred to me that green plants here might not have them. But now that you’ve brought it up, why don’t they use some other mechanism for photosynthesis? Why similar organelles?”

  “Why does a babbit have two kidneys and seven cervical vertebra? I think that’s got to be the question of our mission. Not ‘how does alien life differ?’, but ‘why are there so many detailed similarities?’ That’s a more fundamental question about the origin of life. Differences are going to be important for settlers, but it’s the similarities that get to the fundamental question.”

  “You make a point,” Singh said. “But, ‘settlers’?”

  “We’re just over a week from Earth, that’s far less time than it took the post-Columbian colonists to cross the Atlantic. It’s about what a steamship took, and look at the immigration wave they set off. The air’s breathable, and even if the local life isn’t edible we can expect that Earth life will grow here. There’ll be settlers here in no time.”

  “But the cost?”

  “Three or so weeks for the round trip, operating cost for one of our starships? Not a lot. Sure
, they cost billions to build, but they’re the prototypes, the first ones. Ramp up a production line and the unit price will come down. I don’t know how hard it is to build a warp module or a fusion reactor, but it’s got to be comparable with any other complicated piece of equipment. Once the production engineers put their minds to it, the prices come down. You can bet the Chinese started planning settlement expeditions when the first results came back that there might be habitable planets.”

  “But they don’t have warp technology, the United States provided the warp drives.”

  “And you think that situation will hold for long? If they can’t just outright buy the technology they’ll find a way to get it. Look at history. And they’ve got practical fusion reactors, we’re still working on it. Do you think the U.S. government wouldn’t do a trade? Cheap power for the folks at home is more important to politicians than Chinese exploring the galaxy.”

  “That is rather short-sighted.”

  “Politicians, hello? Their event horizon is the next election.”

  Singh sighed. “You are right. I had hoped that finding all this,” she waved her arms to indicate the planet as a whole, “would encourage more global thinking, that we could all work together.”

  “You are an idealist.” Darwin was a little surprised at her naivete. He saw her shoulders slump, the expression of frustration on her face. “But it’s possible,” he continued, trying to cheer her up. “I’ve read that the first pictures of Earth taken from the Moon helped inspire environmental awareness and more international cooperation.”

  “And yet they still had the Unholy War.” She shook her head, then seemed to brighten. “At least now we know there are places we could live should that happen again.” Then she slumped. “Of course, that might make it even more likely that it does. Humans are such idiots.” She turned, to leave, turned back. “Present company excepted.”

  “No offense taken.” Darwin grinned.

  Singh smiled back. “I am returning to my plants. I will see you later.”

  As she left, the comm link chimed again. Darwin activated it. “This is Chandrasekhar, Darwin here. What’s up?”

  “This is Klaar. Good news, Commodore Drake has authorized a second landing. I’ll be coming down on the Krechet.”

  Chapter 14: Second Down

  Chandrasekhar, on the surface

  “Word from Centauri Station, the Krechet is scheduled to land tomorrow morning,” Ganesh Patel said. “They would greatly appreciate for somebody to fly the plane down to the designated landing area for a detailed check out and to set a beacon. I need to stay with the Chandrasekhar. Commander Sawyer, Doctor Darwin, can you do the needful?”

  Darwin leaped at the chance. “Sure, I’ve been looking forward to doing an aerial survey between here and there.”

  “I’m okay with it too,” said Sawyer. “Let me get the plane checked out tonight, we’ll leave at first light. George, it’s a long flight, we’ll want to take survival gear.”

  “Okay, I’ll pull the kit together.”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Alpha Centauri B was still just a red-orange glow over the hills to the east as Sawyer and Darwin began their take-off roll. Sawyer had put a full charge on the batteries overnight. They could fly almost the full three hundred kilometers to Second Landing on that alone, but in another hour Centauri B would be high enough in the sky to start recharging the batteries with the photofilm.

  She lifted the plane up over the hills and banked south, keeping the rising sun on her left. The moon had dropped below the horizon and the ocean was a broad dark patch to her right. Below them, the tips of the higher hills were just catching the morning light.

  “Any preferences on the flight plan? If it were me I’d just follow the beach” Sawyer asked.

  “That’s kind of boring, we won’t see anything new that way.”

  “But it’s easier to set down there than in the hills.”

  “Anyway, we have to cut across the peninsula,” said Darwin, “unless you were planning on taking the long way around.”

  “No, and I didn’t think you’d want to keep to the beach.” Sawyer touched a control and a satellite view opened on one of the dashboard screens. A yellow line traced a slightly zig-zag path over it. A small red airplane symbol marked their current location and heading, at least as best the navigation systems could determine it. “There, that’s the route I planned. It covers as many different-looking terrains as I could easily fit along the way. And I fitted belly and side cams that are relaying data back to the Chandra.”

  “That’s fantastic. Remind me to tip you.”

  “Thanks. Tell you what, you can take over the flying for a bit, I’m going to take a snooze. I was up late.”

  “Okay.” Darwin grasped the control stick at his knees and rested his feet on the rudder pedals. “Okay, I have control.”

  “You have control.” Sawyer released her own grip on the controls. “Wake me up if you see anything interesting. The nav system will beep at you if you get too far off the path, but keep an eye on it anyway.”

  “What about the autopilot?”

  “I don’t trust it that much. If we had GPS and a good digital terrain model maybe, but suprisingly I trust even your flying more than an autopilot designed for another planet.” She knew its software had been modified to take differences in gravity and air density into account, but that didn’t mean she trusted it.

  “Gee, thanks.”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Darwin had been flying for almost an hour when he noticed a dark smudge in the sky to the east. Smoke from a fire? he wondered. If so, it had to be a big fire, the cloud was kilometers away. It was moving, but it didn’t seem smoke-like. Birds?

  “Elizabeth, wake up,” he said, nudging her.

  She was instantly awake. “What?”

  “I see something interesting. Look to the east.”

  She turned to look. “That dark cloud? What is it?”

  “Good question. Take the controls while I grab binoculars.”

  She took the stick. “I have control.”

  Darwin reached down behind the seats and rummaged in the backpack. He pulled out a pair of binoculars and leaned forward to peer around Sawyer at the cloud. It was still so distant that he couldn’t make out much detail, but it was definitely made up of many small dark objects, flying in generally the same direction but with random individual shifts, like a large school of fish, or yes, a flock of birds.

  “Looks like birds, but there must be thousands of them, or more. The flock is huge.”

  “Let’s give them a wide berth.”

  “Sure, but they’re not headed this way. Nothing to worry about,” Darwin said. “I’d like to come out this way again to check them out.” He settled back in his seat. “Want me to take over flying again?”

  “No, I’ve got it. We’ll be there in another half-hour.”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Alpha Centauri B was well above the horizon when they reached the broad plateau which had been picked out as the second landing site.

  Sawyer could pick out tell-tale signs of an ancient volcanic outflow. The edges of the plateau had the characteristic columnar structure of flood basalt, below which broad talus slopes led down to the surrounding forest. At the western edge the cliffs dropped abruptly to the sea, which hammered at them with a pounding they could hear even over the whine of the propeller.

  She flew a lazy pattern over the plateau, several kilometers across. It was old enough that the surface was warn smooth and had collected a thin layer of topsoil, but the vegetation was thin. It would make an ideal landing site for the Krechet.

  Landing the plane might be more problematic. The Krechet would be coming straight down, landing vertically, so minor irregularities in the terrain wouldn’t bother it. The plane needed a relatively smooth area. In a pinch and with a modest headwind, the plane could be flared into an almost vertical landing itself, but it needed some runway for a takeoff roll. A fresh lava field—an
d here “fresh” could mean anything less than ten thousand years or so—was, depending on the lava type, a ropey or cindery mass of uneven rock and potential potholes.

  She pulled an orange sphere from a pocket. “I’m going to drop smoke to mark a landing area for us.” Keeping one hand on the stick, she held out the smoke pellet for Darwin to pull the tab off, then tossed it over the side, watching which direction the smoke blew. She brought the plane down to thirty meters off the ground and started to circle the area. “Keep your eyes peeled for uneven ground.”

  “Looks good so far.”

  “Okay, one more pass.” She brought the plane down to five meters, just in ground effect, and slowed it down further. There were hints of worn rock poking through the dirt, but it was mostly thin ground-cover plants with the occasional scrubby bush or wildflower. “Perfect.”

  She climbed out and came around again, this time setting up the approach for a proper landing. As she neared the ground a third of the way down her imaginary runway, she killed the motor, pulled back into a flare, and gently stalled out just as the main wheels touched the ground. They rolled about five meters.

  “Nice one,” Darwin said.

  “Anything you can walk away from,” Sawyer said deprecatingly, but she had a grin on her face. “Let’s get the beacon set up and give Krechet a call. She glanced at the omni on her wrist. “They’re going to want to do their de-orbit burn in forty-five minutes.”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  An hour later, Sawyer and Darwin flew their plane to a safe distance to watch the entry and landing of the Krechet. It came in like a slow meteor, leaving a condensation trail behind it. Its engines throttled up at ten thousand meters, slowing the descent, and as it came down into the thicker air, engines firing, they could hear the roar even over their prop noise.

  “Looks good from here, Krechet. I’ve got a spot marked for you about a kilometer from the cliff.”