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

by Alastair Mayer

  “Okay. What about Krechet’s plane? Will they be able to pick up Fred and Ulrika, or at least drop supplies?”

  “We’ll check with Krechet, but it looks like they may be already getting some strong wind gusts. I’m not sure that’s going to be an option by the time they get it ready to fly.”

  The lightly-built planes couldn’t handle much in the way of a crosswind. It might actually be easier with floats if the wind was lengthwise on a lake, but then they’d have whitecaps to worry about. “Yeah, it’s blowing pretty hard here too,” Sawyer said. “How bad is it going to get? We can’t return to orbit with part of the crew still at Krechet and Fred and Ulrika out in the wild.”

  “That’s your call; if Chandra is damaged then you’re all stranded.” That wasn’t absolutely true, the Anderson could do a rescue so long as the fuel processor on the surface remained intact, and it was built low and tough. “But it doesn’t look like tornado weather, just heavy rain and high winds, some lightning. You’d better decide soon, you’re going to get winds ahead of the storm that will exceed your launch parameters.”

  “And we’d have to scramble to be ready to go in that time. Let me take it up with the team here, but we’ll probably choose to ride it out.”

  “Okay, give us a call when you decide. If you are staying we recommend venting the hydrogen and methane tanks, you might want to keep the LOX for ballast.”

  “Sounds good. Anything else?”

  “Not for now. I need to call Krechet and give them the heads up on the storm.”

  “Roger that. Chandrasekhar out.”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  “It will take us six to eight hours to secure another set of tie-downs and get the lightning mast up,” Darwin said after conferring with Patel. “It’s going to take at least that long to ferry everyone from the Krechet if we decide to leave, and that’s if they have everything packed and ready to go. How ready are we?”

  “Hardly at all. We’ve got equipment and specimens to get properly stowed, we’d need a few hours to undo the tie-downs already in place and clear gear from the take-off area.”

  “If necessary we would omit that last step,” Patel said. “So long as there is nothing which could explode or be thrown up against the ship, it doesn’t matter what happens to the gear we are leaving behind.”

  “But what about Fred and Ulrika?”

  “They’re making good progress,” Sawyer said. “They may be back. If not then they may have reached an area where Krechet can do a pick-up. Worst case—and only if we think Chandra is in danger—we’ll have to leave them and hope that the fuel processor survives so that we or the Anderson can do a pick up after the storm passes.

  “And if we do have to leave, don’t forget that we’ll need to offload equipment to allow for the weight of the Krechet team.”

  “That too. And I’m not ready to leave, there are still specimens I want to collect and examine. If this is a storm we can ride out, I say we stay here.”

  “Well, it’s no hurricane, or we wouldn’t have the choice. Any other considerations?” asked Darwin.

  “What about flooding?” Patel said. “We are parked here in a river valley.”

  “Good point. Sawyer?”

  “There’s no evidence of recent significant flooding,” she said. “With a hundred-year flood we might have to worry, but we’re above the river banks and the river itself is down a half meter. This plain is well-drained, the valley through the mountains to the west is about three times wider than the stream bed, it’s not a canyon. I’d almost be more concerned with storm surge pushing the tide upriver, but we’re a good 15 kilometers from the ocean as the river flows.”

  “So we’re good?”

  “Yeah. We’ll get some pooling just from the rain, but I can’t imagine anything more serious than that. Like you said, with a hurricane I’d be worried, but if that’s what was coming we wouldn’t stick around. And I still have more geology to do.”

  “Okay. Anyone else got anything?” Darwin looked around the table at the team members. “No? Okay, then let’s get things battened down for the storm.”

  Chapter 23: Continuing Adventures of Fred and Ulrika

  About 90 km southeast of Chandrasekhar

  “There’s the lake!” Klaar called as she reached the top of the last low ridge. “Come on, let’s go.”

  Tyrell, trailing a few meters behind, reached the crest a moment later. Before them in the broad valley between where they stood and the next line of low hills lay a long narrow lake. It looked like it might have been formed by some natural damming of a river, but the outlet of the lake was hidden from view by the curve of the hill they were on.

  It was perhaps a kilometer wide and several kilometers long. The water was for the most part glassy smooth, but for a few ripples offshore. It was still early in the morning and there was little wind. He’d half expected to see a layer of mist above the water’s surface, but the air must be too warm for that.

  “Want to go for a swim?” Tyrell asked.

  “I’m tempted, but it’s not really hot enough. Anyway, we have no idea what might be in the water. I have no desire to be nibbled to death by space piranha.”

  Tyrell chuckled. “Good point. Okay, let’s go, we still need to refill our water bottles.”

  The reached the shore about fifteen minutes later. There wasn’t much of a beach, the hill sloped right down to the waterline and kept going, with just a strip of gravel where the ground was apparently too waterlogged for the land plants to grow, or perhaps worn by wave action, although now the lake was still calm.

  “This is kind of awkward here to fill the bottles, I don’t think I can reach out without falling in.” Klaar said.

  “I can grab hold of a bush and hold you,” said Tyrell, “but let’s just keep walking for now, maybe there’s easier access ahead. We need to get around this lake anyway.”

  “Left or right?”

  Tyrell consulted the aerial photograph on his omni. “Left, I think. We need to head more in that direction anyway.”

  “Okay.” They started off, keeping parallel to the shoreline, following a game trail. The vegetation was thicker here than it had been earlier, with low scrubby bushes that made going a little harder.

  “You know,” said Tyrell as they hiked their way around the lake, “I was thinking about what you said about what life might be in the lake. There’s probably nothing big; freshwater lakes tend not to have large predator species. Maybe there’s not enough other life to support them.”

  “Ever hear of Nile crocodiles? Or hippopotamus?”

  “In rivers, yeah, but this is a lake,” Tyrell said.

  “The water comes and goes somewhere. Anyway, that’s on Earth. Who knows what aquatic life at Alpha Centauri is like?”

  “Okay, fair enough.”

  “Besides, piranha aren’t large,” she said. “Nor are lampreys or toothpick fish.”

  “Right, point taken. Wait, toothpick fish?”

  “You’ve never heard of them? Also called candiru, they live in the Amazon. You’d remember if you’d heard of them.”

  “Oh? Why?” Tyrell was genuinely puzzled, Klaar’s tone of voice implied that toothpick fish were worse than piranha.

  “Okay, you asked. A candiru, or toothpick fish, is a small fish that’s about the size and shape of a toothpick. It’s a parasite and lives in the muddy water near the river bottom.”

  “That small, it doesn’t sound so dangerous.”

  “Wait for it. In the dark it detects its prey by the scent of urea and ammonia from the gills of prey fish. When it detects the water stream from an exhaling fish, it quickly swims into the open gill and anchors itself there with an array of backward-pointing barbs. There it bites a hole in an artery and drinks the blood. The host fish usually dies of the injuries.”

  “Okay, bad for the host fish, but we don’t have gills.”

  “Here’s where it gets nasty. If you’re wading or swimming in the river and decide to pee, t
o the candiru the urine stream smells like gill outflow, only more so. It quickly swims up the stream and into the urethra.”

  Tyrell winced at the thought.

  “Then the spines lodge into place and there’s no way to get it out short of surgery. Even when the candiru is done eating, it can’t back out because now it’s too swollen. Apparently the native Indians, before access to emergency surgery, would choose castration rather than suffer the slow agonizing death that the lodged parasite caused. At least the men did, women didn’t have that choice.”

  Tyrell fought the urge to curl up in a ball with his hands over his crotch. The mental image profoundly disturbed him. “I am really sorry I asked. Note to self, never pee in the Amazon.”

  “Or any river here until we know what’s in it,” Klaar added.

  “So how do you know about this, you’re not a marine biologist too, are you?”

  “Some courses in it, but no, that’s not how I learned about it. When I knew I was a candidate for the Centauri Expedition I read many different accounts by travellers and explorers in different Earth biomes, to get a feel for what to expect. I thought it might also help with the selection process, although a lot of the accounts were irrelevant in light of the technology available. Anyway, most of the accounts by Amazon explorers mentioned candiru. At first I thought they were making it up, that it was a native legend that got repeated because of the, uh, high squick factor, but apparently there are documented medical cases.”

  “‘High squick factor.’ Yeah, that about sums it up.” Tyrell suppressed a shudder. “Can we talk about something else?”

  “Sure, what do you want to talk about?”

  “I don’t know. What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?”

  Klaar stopped and turned to look at him. “Seriously?”

  Tyrell brought himself abruptly. He’d almost walked into her when she stopped suddenly. He’d asked the question lightly, but as he thought about it he realized that he was curious. He didn’t know much about Klaar’s background. “Sure. Most people have no interest in any exploration that involves more effort than watching it on a three-vee screen. What brings you out here?”

  “That’s a good question.” Klaar turned and started down the trail again, but kept talking. “I’ve always been the curious type, and three-vee shows never seem to get beyond the most obvious answers. Just as things get interesting they change the subject, never going into much detail. My interests are as broad as the next person’s, but I also always want to keep asking the next question.”

  “That explains why you went into science, and even fieldwork. But why the Alpha Cee expedition?”

  “Are you joking? The chance to see things that nobody else ever has before, the chance to learn things that nobody else knows?”

  “The chance to die horribly on an alien planet four light years from home.” Tyrell tried to put a light note on that, but it fell flat.

  Klaar stopped and turned again. “We’re not going to die horribly, we are going to walk until we get to the Chandra or we find a place where the plane can pick us up. What’s wrong with you?”

  “Sorry,” he said, “that was a joke. That was supposed to be funny.”

  Klaar looked intently at his face, shifting her gaze from his left eye to his right. “No. You’re worried, aren’t you. Why?”

  Was he? “I could have been killed in that plane crash. Worse, I could have got you killed. I don’t know what was wrong with the prop, it should never have broken from a couple of lousy bird strikes, but I should have kept us out of that altogether. And who knows what we still might run into. This isn’t a walk in the park, this is an unexplored planet. The wildlife here isn’t afraid of humans, it has no idea what we are. Or we just slip on a rock and break a leg, or fall in the lake and drown, or—”

  Klaar’s method of shutting him up was as effective as it was unexpected. She threw her arms around his neck, drew him close, and kissed him, hard. It took a moment for Tyrell to stop resisting, he was that surprised, both at the kiss and her strength. Then he got into it, kissing her back, putting his arms around her and pulling her close. Then she broke it off, and he let her go.

  “Wow,” he said, catching his breath. “Obviously I’m not complaining, but what was that for?”

  “To shut you up, you idiot. Of course we’re going to get back. I had to snap you out of it.” She took a step back, then another. The look of confusion on her face conflicted with her words.

  “And that’s all?” Tyrell wasn’t sure how he felt, either.

  “Well,” her expression softened. “And perhaps a little bit for worrying about me.” She smiled, then grew stern again. “But you’re the injured one, I’m just fine. And we’re going to get out of here. So snap out of it.”

  “I’m snapped, I’m snapped,” he protested. “But we’ll need to keep going, we can’t stand around here all day talking.” He smiled at her.

  “Well, all right then,” she huffed and folded her arms. “Let’s go.” With that she turned on her heel and started off down the trail at a brisk walk.

  Tyrell stood there a moment, thinking about what had just happened, remembering the kiss, and wondering where things stood. Women were as alien as Alpha Centaurans, as far as he was concerned, but he wasn’t complaining. He shrugged and continued down the trail after her.

  A little while later they found a spot where the slope of the bank lessened, and there was a stretch of gravel beach that extended into the water at a shallow angle.

  “Let’s take a break here for a bit and refill the water bottles,” Tyrell said, and set his backpack down.

  While he attached the filtration system to the first water bottle, Klaar dug through the pack and pulled out the stove and a pan.

  “Do we need to boil the water? The filters should take care of any microorganisms,” Tyrell said.

  “Emphasis on your word ‘should’. I was also hoping I might find some coffee I might have missed earlier.” She rifled through the backpack. “Aha!” She held up a clear plastic bag containing several small pouches, took one out, and peered at the label.

  “Coffee?” asked Tyrell. He wouldn’t mind some himself.

  “It says ‘breakfast beverage’, whatever that means. Probably something almost completely unlike coffee, or tea, or even hot chocolate. It does, however, contain caffeine.”

  “Better than nothing, I suppose.”

  “That remains to be seen,” she said. “Or tasted. Now, please fetch some water while I get this stove set up.”

  “Right.” Tyrell walked to the water’s edge, keeping an eye out for anything that might be lurking in the shallows. Fortunately the water was clear and the gravel beach meant it unlikely that anything would be hiding in a burrow. Still, he stayed out of the lake itself, tossing one end of the short plastic hose into the water and then pumping it through the filter and into the bottle.

  He took the filled bottle back to Klaar, who poured the contents into the pot on the stove and handed the empty back to him. “Thank you, she said. “Your ‘breakfast beverage’ should be ready by the time you’ve got the bottles all filled.” He went back to the water to do just that.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  As promised, the coffee, or whatever it was, was ready when Tyrell brought the filled bottles back and stowed the filter in his pack. He took the offered cup and Klaar held up hers.

  “Cheers,” she said, and took a sip.

  Tyrell had just raised his cup to his own lips, and almost choked when he saw the face she made. Her eyes bugged, then her nose wrinkled and her brow furrowed. But she didn’t spit it out.

  “Revolting?” he asked, trying hard not to laugh.

  “Not quite. All those drinks I mentioned? Coffee, tea, hot chocolate?”

  He nodded. “Yes, what about them?”

  “This tastes like somebody tried to mix all three, and badly.”

  Tyrell cautiously took a sip himself. It was hot, bitter, and with a faint aftertas
te of both old chocolate and stale, burnt coffee. He took another sip to get rid of the aftertaste. In contrast the second sip wasn’t quite so bad. . .until the aftertaste took hold again. “I think the idea is to make those breakfast ration bars taste good by comparison.”

  Klaar took another sip of her own drink, grimaced, and nodded. “As I said earlier, deviously clever these survival planners. I think I would like to strand them on a desert island with nothing to drink but this stuff.” She took another drink and looked thoughtful for a moment. “Still,” she said, “it is just marginally better than nothing.”

  They finished their breakfast beverages in relative silence, then cleared the aftertaste with plain water. After clean up and restowing the gear, they were ready to go again.

  “So, we continue around the lake until we find the outflow?” Klaar asked.

  “Yes, we’ll cross as soon as we find a suitable place. After that we can either follow the stream to the coast and head north up the shore, or cut across country again if the terrain is suitable.”

  “Good. Let’s go.”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  They reached the end of the lake in less than an hour, Tyrell was feeling far better than he had yesterday. A low ridge extended roughly south-west to north-east, and it formed a natural dam at the end of the lake. A stream had cut a V-shaped gap in the ridge. Tyrell paused to examine the exposed rock. A vertical wedge of dark rock, probably basalt, split the roughly horizontal limestone layers, forming the center of the ridge. A few smaller veins paralleled it.

  “Something interesting?” Klaar asked him.

  “Magmatic dike,” he said. “Some ancient crack in the limestone that underlies this area let molten rock force its way up into it. The heat and pressure probably hardened the limestone enough to be more resistant to erosion. Wouldn’t surprise me if there’s a batholith beneath us which pushed up and caused the cracking in the first place. And me without my geologists hammer.”