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

by Alastair Mayer

  “No hammer? It was practically glued to your hand on our training field trip. Where is it?”

  That was true enough, he never went on a field trip without it. He was surprised she had noticed, though. “I left it with my gear when I dropped off Elizabeth. This was just supposed to be a taxi run, I didn’t expect to be making any other stops.”

  “Ah. I am sorry about that. Thor shouldn’t be without his Mjölnir.”

  “Ha, I’m no Thor. I’m not even sore much anymore,” he said. She giggled at that. “Anyway, not your fault, and no harm done. When the storm passes I can come back here and land on the lake with the floats.” He turned to look downstream. “Let’s find a place to cross, we should get going.”

  They came to a spot a few dozen meters later, where the stream widened and shallowed, leaving its bed littered with large rocks they used as stepping stones.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  “Tyrell, this is Centauri Station.”

  “Go ahead Centauri,” Tyrell answered.

  “What’s your status? We show you as seventy-five kilometers south of the Chandra, nearing the coast.”

  “We’re doing all right, Centauri.”

  “Do you think you can make it to Chandra by tomorrow afternoon?”

  If he were uninjured, a seventy-five kilometer hike in that time wouldn’t be, well, not easy, but not too hard. When Alpha Centauri A rose, there would be enough light to hike by if they wanted to push into the night. But that eighty klicks was as the crow—or whatever passed for crows here—flew, and he wasn’t in his best shape. “That would be pushing it. What’s the rush?”

  “There’s a storm coming in from the ocean, it looks like a big one.”

  “So I guess we’re going to get wet.” Their pace would definitely slow if they hit rain, and the clouds would cut their light. “How bad is it going to be? Hurricane?”

  “Not that bad, but it would be nice to have everyone at the Chandra in case they have to launch.”

  “What about the rest of the Krechet crew? And won’t the weather exceed launch parameters before the storm hits?”

  “Both valid points. Just trying to keep options open.”

  “Okay we’ll keep that in mind. Is there any chance of the other plane doing a pickup from the lake we passed, or the coast ahead, if it still has its floats?”

  “Negative, sorry. The winds are already getting too high on the coast to make it safe, and the waves are rising ahead of it. You’re more sheltered being inland, but you’ll be getting some gusts before long.”

  “Just thought I’d ask. Okay, we’ll keep hiking.”

  “Also, when you get to the coast, you’ll want to stay well clear of the beach. There’ll be a surge ahead of the storm.”

  “Roger that. Any suggestions on heading north before that?”

  “Sorry, no, the clouds are obscuring our view. We’ll check the photomaps we already have, but without a good visual on you we won’t be able to guide you.”

  “Okay.” That figured. “We’ll make sure we’re on high ground when we stop for the night.”

  “Good idea. We’re about to go out of range, anything else?”

  “Thanks Centauri. We’ll be fine. Talk to you later.”

  “Roger that. Centauri out.”

  Chapter 24: The Storm

  South of Landing Site One

  Klaar and Tyrell had paralleled the stream on its north side until they neared the beach. From the higher ground overlooking the ocean, they could almost feel the heavy pounding of the surf as the huge waves, choppier than usual, crashed down on the beach. Offshore the sky was dark and brooding, although it was still a good two hours until sunset. Windblown spray gusted up at them periodically.

  “Let’s get on the lee side of this hill, then hike north for another hour before setting up tent for the night.” Tyrell had to raise his voice to be heard of the roar of the waves. “Sorry, no campfire tonight.”

  “And I was so looking forward to marshmallows,” Klaar said.

  “I thought we didn’t have any.”

  “We don’t. I can still look forward to them.”

  Tyrell doubted there were even any at the ship, and Ulrika probably knew it. He smiled and said: “That would be nice.”

  They hiked back over the hill and down the eastern side until they were out of the worst of the wind, then headed north again, staying below the ridgeline.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Landing Site One - Chandrasekhar

  The first rain had come at dusk, a sprinkling at first. Now it pelted down harder, the incessant drumming on the ship muted only slightly by the layers of insulation and equipment within the hull. Finley, somewhat bored, watched the view on the monitors; the light amplification built into the cameras helped. Through the torrents he could barely see the river, let alone the hills surrounding the valley. Periodically a flash of lightning would momentarily dazzle the cameras, then he’d hear the boom of thunder.

  “What’s the speed of sound in the atmosphere here?” he asked, not addressing the question to anyone in particular.

  “About the same as Earth,” said Darwin, “about 350 meters per second. I can find you an exact number. Why?”

  “Just timing the thunder. The lightning’s three kilometers away then.”

  There was another flash, followed a few seconds later by the CRACK-BOOM of the thunderclap, and a prolonged rumbling roar.

  “That was different,” he said.

  “What was?”

  “The rumbling afterward. Probably just echoing off the hills.” Finley cycled the monitor through the exterior cameras. Dark and rainy on all of them. He flipped the screen back to the river view in time to see a wave, about a foot high and the full width of the river, surge upstream. “What the hell?”

  “What?”

  “Look at this.” Finley punched a control. Everything the cameras saw was continually recorded, they had plenty of data storage, and he rewound the image to a minute previous. He played it again. “Watch the river.” On the screen, the wave surged upriver again. “What was that, a tidal bore?”

  “I don’t think so, we’d have seen one before. And it’s the wrong time of day. Run it again?”

  Finley touched the control. On the screen, the wave again advanced up river until it was lost in the falling rain.

  “Do we have any other cameras on the river?”

  “A distant view.” Finley selected the camera. “There.” The view was dim, showing mostly just the torrential rain and the wet ground, the river was indistinct in the distance.

  “Back it up to the wave.”

  “Okay.” Pause. “Here we go.”

  The dim image of the distant river changed subtly. It could have been an advancing wave but impossible to say for sure.

  “Okay, yet another strange phenomenon. Go back to the other camera and we’ll see if it happens again.”

  Finley flipped back to the original camera. The river looked different. “Does that river look different to you?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean. You’re the one who’s been watching it.”

  “I’m not sure either. Hang on.” He rewound the image to the time when the wave had passed. “That’s a few minutes ago.” He flipped the monitor to the live feed. “And that’s now.” The distance from the top of the riverbank to the water was noticeably less than a few minutes before. “Damn.”

  “The river is rising.”

  It was. In the few minutes since the wave had passed upstream, the river was already nearly a foot up its bank. Finley flipped the monitor back and forth between the recorded image and the live feed, then left the recorded image, paused at just after the wave passed, on the monitor and switched an adjacent monitor to the live feed. “It wasn’t the wave, the water level is about the same right after that, but that’s when it started rising. What the hell?”

  “Was it rising before that?”

  “Not so you’d notice. A little, sure with this rain, but not a foot in fi
ve minutes. Flash flood? Wouldn’t the wave go the other way?”

  Sawyer had been following the conversation. “Yeah,” she said, “if there’d been a sudden surge of rain higher in the watershed we might get a flash flood. But Finley is right, the wave would go the other way. And it’s been raining for hours. That wave came from downstream, not upstream.”

  “So what could—” Finley started to ask.

  “Landslide!” Sawyer said.

  “What?”

  “That rumbling. If there was a landslide in the hills downstream it could have sent a wave upstream—”

  “—and now it’s damming the river.” Finley said, catching on.

  “What? Damming the river?” Patel had been reviewing something on his control console, but now they had his attention. If the river had no outflow from the valley they were in, it would continue to rise.

  “Don’t panic,” said Sawyer.

  “I am not panicking,” Patel said, “but why shouldn’t I?”

  “The river will find a way around or over the blockage. It’s likely to be loose material—sand, mud, small boulders—the river will start to wash it away,” she explained.

  They all turned to look at the two monitors. The water level visible on the live feed was higher now, just topping the banks in places.

  “The question is, when?” asked Darwin. “This rain isn’t going to let up for several more hours, and that river is getting higher. What are our options?”

  “We need more information,” Finley said. “If we know the rate of rainfall we can calculate how fast the river will rise. We have a rough idea of the total watershed.”

  “Emphasis on ‘rough’, and we don’t know if the rain is constant across the whole basin, but it’ll do for a first approximation. What else?”

  “Somebody needs to take the boat downriver and check the slide area,” Sawyer said, “to see how much it will rise before cresting it, and see how fast it’s eroding.”

  “That’s probably going to have to be you, you’re the geologist.”

  “Yeah, I was afraid you were going to say that. All right.” Sawyer turned to Finley “Can you handle the rainfall calculations?”

  “Sure thing.”

  “Okay, I could use someone with me to help with the boat.”

  “Sure,” Darwin said. “I’ll come along.”

  Singh spoke up. “No, I will go. You guys need to stay here and evaluate our options if the water level is going to be a problem. I cannot help with that, but I can with the boat.”

  Darwin hesitated. She had a point. “All right.”

  “Good,” she said. “I think the BIGs would make good rain gear.”

  “Yep,” Sawyer agreed. “Let’s go suit up.”

  “Thanks people,” said Darwin, “stay in touch and stay safe, that water’s rough out there.”

  “You’ve got it.”

  Chapter 25: Singing in the Rain

  South of Landing Site One

  The rain came in torrents. Inside the tent it drummed on the roof, making conversation all but impossible. They had managed to get it up before with worst of the rain hit, thanks to its self-erecting design, but the showers had begun while they were still looking for a good spot to set up.

  “I hope this tent is waterproof!” Klaar said.

  “That shouldn’t be a problem. I just hope it doesn’t float away.”

  “Heinlein said it was going to be worse to the north. I wonder how the folks at the Chandra are managing.”

  “Heh. Probably watching something from the video library. I’m sure they’re staying warm and dry.”

  “Maybe we should huddle together for warmth.” Klaar pushed her sleeping bag closer to his.

  “Are you cold?” asked Tyrell. They were both still a bit damp from earlier, but it didn’t seem that bad to him.

  “Stop being stupid.”

  “Huh? Oh. Oh.”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  On the river, near the Chandrasekhar

  The rain came harder as Singh and Sawyer splashed through the puddles and mud down the river. It was already cresting its banks and nearly up to where the inflatable boat was beached by the time they got there.

  “Any longer and we might have lost the boat,” Singh said. “It’s really coming down.”

  The roar of the rain made normal speech impractical, they were communicating via headset.

  “Yeah. That’s going to make it tricky to navigate; we can’t tell where the banks are.” Sawyer began wrestling the boat toward where she thought the bank was.

  Singh pointed downstream. “The vegetation helps, we steer between. But we have a shallow draft, it won’t matter.”

  “You’re right. Okay, climb in.”

  Singh clambered into the boat and sat on the deck while Sawyer leaned on the inflated side tube and pushed the boat forward over the rain-slick ground until she felt the water take its weight. She swung a leg onto the side and pushed off with the other, then climbed the rest of the way in as the boat glided out into the current. The flow grabbed it and they were already moving at a good clip by the time Sawyer got herself seated and switched on the motor. “This is going to be fun on the way back, with this current.”

  At the bow, Singh had the spotlights set up. The rain cut the range of the lights, but they still helped. Sawyer twisted the control on the motor and Singh sat back down with a bump as the boat surged forward into the darkness.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Back on the Chandra Finley had finished his calculations. “It looks like we have an hour, hour and a half before the water starts lapping at the footpads.”

  “Okay. Ganesh, what depth of water can we take before it’s a problem?”

  “Ideally, none at all. But it won’t hurt the landing gear. I would be more worried about a tree or something drifting downstream and hitting us, but by the time it is deep enough for that it will be up over the bottom of the heat shield. That is a concern. A little water won’t hurt it but the shield was not meant to be submerged. We have about a half a meter clearance before that starts.”

  “Okay, so a minimum of three hours.”

  “Probably more like four or five,” Finley said. “As the water rises it has more area of this floodplain to cover, so it will rise slower.”

  “Okay, that’s good, but we can’t count on it.”

  “Could we dam it off, use sandbags? We have plenty of large specimen bags.”

  “Enough? And what would we fill them with, there’s no sand.”

  “Dirt, the soil here. We have shovels.”

  “That’d be tough going, I don’t know that there’s time.”

  “We could fill them with water.”

  “I’m not sure that would work, wouldn’t they need to be heavier than water to keep from drifting away?”

  “We don’t have enough anyway,” Patel said, looking up from a computer screen. “I just analyzed the numbers. We would need to stack them at least six high, and the perimeter is over thirty meters, that’s over six hundred bags if the wall is only one layer thick. It has to be wider than it is high; we would need about four thousand bags. We don’t have anywhere near enough. Plus, we would have to fill a bag every two seconds or less.”

  “That’s for the whole ship, if we just surrounded the heat shield—”

  “We’d still need to fill a bag every five seconds, and we still don’t have enough. We need a different plan.”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  “Turn the boat! Rocks ahead! Turn left!” Singh saw it first, a wall of soil, boulders and broken vegetation looming ahead of them as the river rushed toward it, raising waves around outlying boulders as the river curved to find a way around the blockage.

  Sawyer steered the boat hard to port and threw the motor into reverse to slow them. “Jenn, get the lights, let’s see what we’ve got.”

  Singh scrambled over to the spotlight at the bow, slipping on the rain slick deck. She caught herself on the gunnel and knelt down. With the pelting rain, wat
er was pooling in the bottom of the boat. She took the handle of the spotlight and aimed it toward the pile of rubble ahead. They were about a hundred meters into where the broad plain had narrowed into the V-shaped valley through the hills. The rubble slope extended upward to her right, the broken trees and vegetation had fallen mostly with their roots in that direction. That was the slope which had collapsed. “It’s a landslide all right. Nothing’s going to get around that way.” She swept the light back to the left. The mound of rock, mud and branches extended that way as far as they could see through the rain, about ten meters. Muddy water surged and splashed around them, and the mound was slick with runnels of mud and water as the rain beat down on it. “Let’s check that way,” she said, gesturing to the left with the light.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Sawyer edged the boat back away from the debris. There were scattered boulders and trees lying out from the main pile, it wouldn’t do to hit something. She moved the boat slowly parallel to the barrier. “There’s a lot of soil mixed in with this, the rain and water should wear it down before long.”

  “What does ‘before long’ mean to a geologist?” Singh asked pointedly.

  “Just a few years. Okay, I see your point.” They followed the natural dam across the valley, the sprawl of dirt and rocks thankfully getting lower toward the water as they went. Singh played the light alternately over the muddy hill on their right and the path ahead, picking out any tree branches or large boulders in the water.

  “Tree ahead, clear to the right.” The crest of the landslide was about a meter above the water now, as best Singh could tell. It might rise again beyond that, they could only see a few meters in that direction from where they were. She turned the light forward again. Trees and bushes loomed before her, they’d reached the other side of the narrow valley. “Hold it, that’s as far as we can go!”

  “Okay, so the valley is choked. I’m going to have to get out and check the slide, see how wide it is and if it gets any higher.”