∞ ∞ ∞
Ninety-some minutes later, Sawyer and Tyrell had the telescope set up where they would get the best view of the sky to the northeast. Roberta and the other youngest children were asleep, although young Poul Tyrell and Sarah Finley had sensed something was going on and pleaded to stay up. Naomi Maclaren had gone back to work on the radio. Sawyer looked toward the Anderson to see her climbing back down the makeshift ladder from the hatchway. She came over to where the others were gathered around the telescope.
“Any luck?” Finley asked her.
She scowled. “The good news is that I got the long range comm gear to power up and the audio circuits and signal processing all pass self-test. The bad news is that the RF side powers up but the antenna interfaces aren’t cooperating. Problem’s probably in the conduits between the signal conditioners and the actual antennas. Something must have shaken loose when the ship toppled.”
“So...?” asked Sawyer.
“We’re going to have to rip up parts of the ship that haven’t already been ripped up to get to it. Eight or ten hours.” She paused, then added “And that’s a real estimate, not a Star Trek Scotty one.”
“Dang,” Sawyer said, “and here I had hoped you meant you could do it in three.”
“Sorry, mate.” She looked up at the sky. “What’s our time?”
Tyrell checked. “Any minute now, unless they changed orbit.”
“I think I see something!” Klaar called. “Northwest, above that stand of trees. About twenty degrees up. Definitely moving.”
Sawyer, after a quick glance at where she pointed, was already swinging the telescope into position. “Naomi, how do I—”
“Let me,” she said, pushing past her to tap at the control pad on the telescope mount. There was a brief, variable-pitched whine as the stepper motors swung the scope to center it on the moving spot of light in its field of view, then the whine lowered as the motors slowed to track it across the sky. “Locked in.” She tapped another control. “And recording.”
Sawyer was sorely tempted to kneel down and hog the eyepiece, but her leg would have made that difficult anyway. She stepped back and opened her omni screen full. Already slaved to the ‘scope, its compensating algorithms showed a far clearer picture than what she’d see with her own eye anyway.
Not that the picture was particularly clear. The object was 300 kilometers away, a good part of that through atmosphere. The image shifted in and out of focus, optical halos appearing and disappearing around it. But it was clearly artificial.
“That’s not the Heinlein,” Finley said, looking over her shoulder. “Nor an Anderson class ship.”
“Why only one? We saw three earlier.”
Good question. Sawyer looked at the sky. Yes, there were the other two, diverging from the path of the one they were tracking. “They’ve split up. Naomi, can you quickly get a look at the other two? There and there,” she said, pointing.
Maclaren swung the scope by hand and let it lock in to one, then again with the other.
“Whatever they are, they’re similar-looking.” As best Sawyer could tell, the ships—they had to be ships—were triangular in cross section, longer than wide. Given the fuzzy image, not much bigger than a thumbnail on her screen, she couldn’t tell if they were cones, or flattish triangles like a lifting body, or what. They had what might be projections near the aft end, assuming the base of the triangle was the aft end, but it was at the edge of resolution. They could be optical artifacts, or a tail, or . . . warp pods? No sign of anything that looked like the toroidal fusion reactor of their own Interstellar Propulsion Module.
“That doesn’t look like anything I was aware of before we left,” Maclaren said.
“Four years isn’t much time to put three new-design starships together,” said Tyrell, “and they don’t look like the technology we used.”
“Our ships were built in less time,” Sawyer said.
“Right, but mostly based on off-the-shelf hulls.” Maclaren was the most familiar with their ships’ construction. “Even Heinlein and Xīng Huā were just highly modified from stock, not custom.”
“Some military project perhaps, under wraps but started before we left?” Tyrell asked.
“Yeah, that could be it. I don’t reckon they told any of us though. Whose, do you think?” Maclaren looked around at the others.
“I think only the US or China could afford to go it alone,” Finley put in. “A coalition between any two of Europe, Russia and or India maybe, although less likely. But only the US had working warp drives when we left.”
“That could have changed,” said Sawyer.
“Sure. It’s a long time to keep a secret.” Finley shrugged. “Not much we can do. If they’re looking for us, they’ve found us, or will as soon as they run pattern recognition on the images they’re undoubtedly recording. Might as well wave, well, next time they fly over.” They were below the south-east horizon now, with the two outliers more east and south, respectively.
“Why did they change orbits?” Tyrell asked.
Sawyer had been wondering about that. “No idea,” she said. “Either to cover more ground to find us faster, or they did see us and are splitting up to better explore the rest of the planet. Or even head to Kakuloa.”
“I reckon I’d better get the radio working, then,” Maclaren said. “I could use a hand.”
Finley and several of the others volunteered at once.
“Thanks Pete, but you need to get Sarah to bed.”
“But Mommy, I want to stay up. Poul is still up.”
Tyrell smiled at this. “Not for long. Come on young man, show’s over, it’s past your bedtime.” He scooped the lad up.
“You too, missy,” Finley said to Sarah. “Off we go.”
“Aaww, Daddy,” Poul objected. “Were those spaceships? Are they going to land? We won’t have to leave, will we?” Sawyer overheard and was surprised at the questions, apparently Poul understood more of what was going on than she’d thought. And the distress in his voice at the last question was clear. She realized that uprooting any kid from his home could be scary.
“Most likely they were,” Poul’s father said, “and I don’t know, and nobody said anything about leaving. We’ll see what happens if they land, and then we’ll talk about it, okay?” He looked over at the boy’s mother. “Rika? Stay with him and Susan for a while, okay? I’m going to go back and help with the radio antenna.”
“Of course.” She lowered her voice. “You know, I miss Earth, but I like it here, too, despite the difficulties. If we could get regular supplies, well....”
“Yeah, hon, I know. Me too. But it’s a moot point until we make contact. They won’t land at night, we can talk tomorrow. We should all talk tomorrow.”
∞ ∞ ∞
“Okay,” Sawyer said, “before tomorrow I want to have a little talk with the adults, or most of them. I’d like Maclaren and Finley, Tyrell, and Krysansky. Klaar and Singh are welcome but someone should stay with the kids.” She used her tone of voice to suggest that it was an order, not an invitation. She had already summoned Maclaren and Tyrell from working on the radio.
“What’s on your mind, Captain?” Tyrell at least had picked up on her tone. Not surprising, he’d known her the longest.
Sawyer looked around at her team. How much should she tell them? “We’re hoping and assuming that those are Earth ships up there. If they are, there’s a slight chance they’re not friendly.”
“What!? What do you mean?”
“Before we landed, Drake confided in me with some information that the astrophysicist, Vukovich, had discovered. Of course you remember the Xīng Huā?”
“How could we not? We lost four team-mates, and its explosion is why we’re still here with no refueling pod.”
“Right. Except it may not have exploded.”
“But we saw the gamma flash! The debris cloud! What are you talking about?”
“We saw a gamma flash. Vukovich estimated the mass of the debris cloud, and it was too small to account for the Xīng Huā. He re-analyzed the gamma data and it didn’t match what we’d expect from a large chunk of matter hitting the warp boundary. Now,” she held up her hand to forestall the inevitable objections, “we don’t completely know what that would look like, we’ve only seen the effects of dust impacts. But the alternate explanation is that the crew of the Xīng Huā faked the explosion with a small nuclear device then returned to Earth so they could reverse-engineer the warp engines.”
“What?” said Maclaren. “D’you mean we’ve spent four years here because they wanted to steal the goddam warp technology?”
“No, we’ve spent four years here because it was important that we study the planet to see what it might tell us about the Terraformers, and because for whatever reason nobody has come back to get us. Until now, possibly.”
“But we could have gone back earlier if we’d had a refueling pod,” Finley said.
“True. And I’d have a functional right leg still. And none of you would have the kids you have. Different ones, maybe, who knows? But not these. Are you sorry?” Sawyer knew that wasn’t a fair question, but she needed them to focus on the now, not the could have been.
“No, not when you put it that way,” he said. “I guess you have the biggest cause to gripe.”
“Okay then. Anyway, even if it is the Chinese, it could still be a rescue mission. We don’t know what’s happened in four and half years, but when we left, there was economic rivalry but not outright hostility.” Sawyer hesitated over whether to continue. She hadn’t talked about it in four years, but they should all know now, just in case. “But there’s another possibility.”
“What, you mean India? The Russians?” Maclaren asked.
“I don’t think she means from Earth,” Tyrell said.
“That’s right, I don’t.”
“But the odds—”
“The odds of an event that has happened are exactly one.” She heard someone gasp as they realized what she meant, but she couldn’t tell who. “Finley,” she looked at him, “remember the time you and Maclaren did the magnetotelluric survey on the dome, you thought the equipment had been disturbed? I know it was a few years ago but you spent quite a while reviewing the video from the camera feeds, didn’t you?”
“That was a long time ago. But yes, of course I remember.” He looked at Naomi and winked. “Why?”
“You never did see what disturbed the gear, did you?”
“No, there was data dropout on the recording. It happened sometime during that.”
“Maclaren, that wasn’t the first problem with the cameras, was it?”
“No, nor the last. We’ve had random dropouts on a lot of them from time to time. Wait, are you talking about the time you went out to replace one? Early on, a few months after we landed?”
“The very same. You never found anything wrong with that camera, did you?”
“No. I reckon it was the same kind of drop out as the others, I just happened to see it when it happened. Must be a design or manufacturing defect. What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Remember the conversation we had afterward?”
“Nah, not really,” Maclaren said, but looked thoughtful. “Hang on, yes, was that when we were talking about invisibility? I wondered about that. You did see something, didn’t you?”
“I’m glad you remembered, otherwise I’d have to chalk it up to the weird dreams I had after the roof fell on my head.” She reached up to rub the back of her skull. It was healed, although there’d be a permanently bald scar there, and the hair around it, although growing back now, was still short. “And mostly, it was what I didn’t see. Hence my questions.”
“Alright,” Tyrell said, “what didn’t you see?”
Sawyer quickly recounted how she had seen a humanoid figure, clothed, with some kind of headgear or possibly a frill, but when she tried to video it with her omni, the omni had jammed and when she looked up, the figure was nowhere to be seen.
“You saw an alien? The locals didn’t go extinct? Where have they been hiding, why didn’t we see them from orbit?”
“For the record,” she emphasized the last word, “I didn’t see any such thing. I certainly have no proof. And no, I don’t think they’re local.
“I decided at the time I wouldn’t say anything about it unless and until it presented a threat, or otherwise provided proof that it wasn’t just a figment of my overstressed imagination. And given what we all just witnessed,” she pointed overhead, “I guess that might be now.”
She paused and shook her head. “Of course if those are Earth ships, I’ll trust you all to say nothing more about it. If there is someone else out there observing us, it’s pretty clear they don’t want us to know, hence the camera dropouts, and they don’t seem to be interfering. Or maybe I did imagine it.”
“Then what about the cameras?”
“Like Naomi said, a manufacturing defect or design flaw. Don’t worry, I will be reporting what I saw up the chain of command, but I think it wise to keep this quiet, given a choice. Finding deliberately terraformed planets out here is shock enough, but sixty five mega-years is long enough ago that most people won’t have to think about it. Tell them that there are real extraterrestrials flying around out here and, well, that’s something else. Understood?”
There was acknowledgment all around, although some sounded more hesitant than others.
“Anyway, in the remote even that it is aliens, I don’t think they mean us any harm. We’ll just take it as it comes, nice and easy. But I really do think it more likely those ships are from Earth, and they’ve finally come back to check on us.”
“Well, we’re still here. It’s not like we could go anywhere,” said Maclaren.
“And thanks to you, we’re all still alive,” Tyrell added.
Sawyer scoffed. “Thanks to each other, you mean. And you saved my ass, too.” She grew serious. “But if it is a rescue, we need to discuss that now, not get into arguments in front of the kids. Do we want to be rescued?”
Chapter 40: Visitors
Camp Anderson
It was mid morning at the landing site, although none of them called it “the landing site” any more. After the previous night’s discussion, most of the team had slept late. The fields still needed to be tended, so the morning routine of checking them for weeds and pests had gone longer than usual. They still did a fair bit of gathering, but the fields yielded crops they could store during the cooler winter months.
Naomi Maclaren was watching the kids, the toddlers were chasing each other about at some game, while she nursed her own youngest, little Roberta. Her partner Peter—they’d never made it formal the way Ulrika and Fred had—was just coming up the hill from checking the pump by the river. Something, Maclaren assumed it was some kind of insect, whined in the background.
“Hey Peter!”
“Hi. How’s our little Bobbi doing?”
“Just fine. And I think she’s done nursing. Would you like to take her?” She bundled Roberta up and handed her to Finley.
“What’s that damn buzzing?” Finley said as he took the girl.
It was growing louder. “Beats me. I thought it was insects. Did someone get a drone flying?”
“I’d think you would have been first to know.” They both looked around for the source of the noise. Even the young ones had stopped their game and were looking about.
The buzzing grew in volume and raised in pitch, becoming almost a whine. Finley’s eyes widened. “It can’t be.”
Others from the field had come down to the main camp, apparently attracted by the noise. Still looking skyward, Maclaren and Finley spotted i
t at about the same time.
An insectile figure flew overhead. It was inorganic, clearly mechanical, but the wings seemed more flexible, curving and curling to control its movement, yet not flapping. Nor was there any obvious propeller. Ducted fan? Something else?
“Somebody get Sawyer!” Finley shouted. “Jennifer, here, take Bobbi and get the kids inside somewhere. Not to worry but I don’t want one darting out if that thing lands.”
He handed off the child to Singh, who took her and began rounding up the others. “Chantal, come to Mommy! Susan! Sarah! Poul! Come with Auntie Jennifer.”
Maclaren wondered about her best course of action. She wanted to look after her kids, but also to watch what was going on. She hadn’t seen tech quite like this before. Pete was scanning the area, checking the aircraft or whatever it was regularly.
“Naomi!” he called to her. “See if you can get the radio on-line. I think we have company.” That made sense. She’d put a hold on the work the previous night when Sawyer called her meeting. In a lower voice, he added “I sure hope it’s one of ours.”
Maclaren was already headed to what was left of the Anderson.
Singh fell into step beside her, the kids in tow. She too lowered her voice. “I heard what Pete said. What did he mean, ‘one of ours?’ Who else would it be? Chinese?”
“That’s one possibility.”
Something in her tone must have alerted Singh, who stopped her, studying her face.
Singh mouthed the word. Aliens?
Maclaren just shrugged. “Talk to Sawyer. I need to see about the radio.”
Epilog
Starship Endeavour, entering the Centauri system
“Any radio traffic?” Franklin Drake asked.
“No Sir. We’re still too far out to pick anything up from their omnis, but there’s nothing on the Anderson’s frequencies and we haven’t heard anything on their data transmission band—referring to Sawyer’s regular status reports—since three light-months back.” The expedition had dropped out of warp every light month for the past half light year, to pick up the Anderson’s relayed transmissions to Earth. Then they had stopped. “We have the locator beacon on the IPM you left here, but no other traffic. It seems to have stopped sending.”
Alpha Centauri: Sawyer's World (T-Space: Alpha Centauri Book 2) Page 19