The Eridani Convergence (Carson & Roberts Archeological Adventures in T-Space Book 3)

by Alastair Mayer

  DR. HANNIBAL CARSON glanced out the window of the autocab. Just over seven weeks had passed since his meeting with Ketzshanass, a spacefaring alien of a species previously unknown to humans, in the Zeta Reticuli system. Now he had just learned of an encounter with a similar alien on this planet fifty years earlier. Lost in thought about the significance of what he had just heard, the absence of other traffic or buildings took a while to creep into his consciousness. The surroundings were unfamiliar. This wasn’t the way back to the university.

  “Cab, destination Drake University, Archeology Building.”

  “Acknowledged,” the cab responded, but made no indication it was about to change course.

  “Cab, specify destination.” Stupid robot, Carson thought, annoyed.

  “Acknowledged.”

  That wasn’t right. Carson scanned the car’s interior. Like other in-city autocabs, this had no manual controls for off-road use, nor even any display panel. Carson tapped a sequence on his omni to link it to the cab. That was a standard interface; it let a passenger interact with the cab using keypad and screen.

  Nothing. As far as his omni was concerned, the cab didn’t exist.

  “Cab, stop here please,” Carson said, raising his voice.

  “Acknowledged.” The cab sped up.

  What the hell? Am I being kidnapped by an autocab? Carson wondered, scarcely believing it. Could this have anything to do with the meeting he had just left?

  Carson switched his omni to map mode; maybe he could figure out where the cab was taking him. His first glance at the map told him he couldn’t. It showed him in the middle of Lake Victoria, a large lake thousands of kilometers from Sawyer City. At least, I don’t think it’s the one in Africa, Carson thought, his temper rising. Something was screwing with the signals from the positioning satellites. Hacked or not, the autocab shouldn’t have had anything capable of such spoofing. Someone had made modifications. What about the brakes? Then Carson realized it wouldn’t matter if the brakes had been tampered with, since they were under the cab computer’s control anyway.

  He tried the door. The cab’s speed was higher than anyone in their right mind would jump from, but he was getting desperate. But the door was locked and the unlock button didn’t do anything.

  “Cab, slow down!”

  “Acknowledged,” it responded, but made no change in speed. By now they were well away from the city—his meeting had been on the outskirts of town to begin with—hurtling down a narrow gravel road amid open fields.

  Carson’s gaze darted frantically around the interior of the cab. The door and window switches were inoperative. There was an interior light, for all the good that was. There were no obvious switches or indicators on the dashboard. Wait, the light . . . maybe?

  He had a multi-purpose folding knife in his pocket. He pulled it out, opened it, and pried the plastic housing off the light. The fixture contained a switch and a small array of LEDs. He stabbed the blade into the ceiling at the edge of the light assembly and pried. The blade began to bend, but the light tore loose before it broke.

  Carson ripped the wires from the back and scraped the insulation off, then twisted them all together. Sparks flew, and the wires heated up almost instantly, burning his fingers. The insulation began to melt and smoke. The whine of the car’s motor faltered. Yes, it was working!

  Then he heard a click as a circuit breaker tripped, and the car resumed speed. The wires stopped smoldering. Damn. Carson knew it had been a long shot. Now what?

  CHAPTER 2: A RUDE AWAKENING

  Vaughan

  Seven weeks ago: Starship Carcharodon, near Zeta Reticuli

  KLAUS VAUGHAN WOKE up in the owner’s seat, behind the captain’s. What the hell? How had he dozed off in the middle of pursuing Hannibal Carson’s ship? He had been anything but tired. The forward window showed black, with the occasional sparkle confirming that it wasn’t switched off, but rather that they were in warp. When did that happen?

  “Captain, give me a status report,” he said.

  There was no reply. The captain’s head was slumped forward. Vaughan reached forward and shook his shoulder. “Captain Stinson!”

  Stinson’s head snapped up and he shook it. “Wha . . . ?” He stared at the screens for a moment. “What the hell? When did we go to warp?”

  “I had hoped you could tell me that.”

  “Crap.” Stinson’s hands touched a sequence of controls, running status checks. “I’m going to drop us out of warp, to get a position check.”

  “Do it.”

  “All hands,” the captain announced over the PA. “Prepare for zero-gee. Dropping out of warp in ten seconds.”

  Vaughan felt the familiar, half-imagined tingle of the warp bubble collapsing. Gravity went away. The forward viewscreen remained black, but now with a scattering of fixed stars. “Give me a rear view.” he said. Someone switched the screen to an aft-pointing camera. A bright star was centered in the view, with another some distance from it.

  “Position?” Vaughan demanded.

  “Assuming those stars are Zeta 1 and Zeta 2 Reticuli—” Stinson checked an instrument “—and they are, then we’re point-two-four light years from Zeta 1. On a path toward Earth, which we’d never reach with the fuel on board.”

  “What happened?”

  “I’m still trying to figure that out,” Stinson said as he continued his scan of the status screens. “What’s the last thing you remember?”

  Vaughan thought back. They had grabbed Carson from the ruins of an alien city, then soon after take-off there had been a power surge and an impact on the ship, like they’d been attacked. They had landed to check damage and Carson had managed to get loose, create a distraction, and escape. “Carson’s ship came in and picked him up. There were shots fired but I don’t think anyone got hit,” Vaughan said. “We took off in pursuit, and then . . . I’m not sure. How long ago was that?”

  “That’s what I remember. Ship’s clock says about six hours ago, my omni agrees.”

  Vaughan checked his own omniphone. He hadn’t noted the time when the whole attack and Carson’s escape had happened, but six hours ago seemed about right. “You say we’re about a quarter of a light-year from Reticuli? That’s four hours. What about the rest?”

  “Could have been travel time to get somewhere clear enough to go to warp. As for why we don’t remember . . . I don’t know.”

  “There was a power surge earlier. Could that have done something to the warp drive? Maybe we had a weird side effect of going into warp?” Inducing unconsciousness and amnesia? Really?

  “I’d think it would either work normally or not at all. And I wouldn’t have lined us up on Sol. We’d need to stop somewhere closer to refuel.”

  “Anything in the logs?”

  “No, that’s the weird thing. The two hours prior to our going into warp are clean, like they’ve been erased.”

  That should have been impossible, but Vaughan was well aware that Carcharodon had a few modifications to allow such—strictly illegal—log modification. “Something we did?”

  “No,” Stinson said. “Our code would substitute something benign, not leave a gap.”

  “Okay. Run full diagnostics. We’re not going anywhere until we figure out what happened. I’ll question the rest of the crew.”

  “Got it.”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Nobody else remembered anything either. They had all awakened about the same time, although some of them had woken in response to the captain’s warning about dropping out of warp. The last memories were something about another ship rescuing Carson, and the Carcharodon taking off in pursuit.

  Vaughan racked his brain for an answer. A high-gee maneuver might have caused everyone to black out, but would have resulted in injuries or at least some bruises. And it didn’t explain the missing log data, nor how they had gone into warp. What the hell had happened? Something tickled the edge of his memory. Something about a . . . no, it was gone again. Was it something about Car
son’s ship? It was, but not the ship itself. Then he had it. The pyramid! From orbit, they’d seen a flying pyramid glide over the landed ship and, apparently, take it aboard. Somehow Carson’s crew had managed to retrieve it. But . . . a pyramid? Was he remembering that right?

  “Captain, go back in the logs to before we picked up Carson. Let’s take another look at that pyramid.”

  “Pyramid? I don’t . . . oh, wait, there was a pyramid.” Captain Stinson shook his head as though to clear it, then grabbed at a handhold. Vaughan noticed that, and recognized why—shaking one’s head in zero-gee could cause momentary dizziness. Stinson touched a control, and one of the screens cut to an overhead view of a grassy area, like a park, in the middle of a ruined city. A delta-shaped ship, Sapphire class, sat in the middle of it. “There’s Carson’s ship. Let me fast forward.”

  The perspective shifted due to the Carcharodon’s earlier orbital motion while recording. There was a blur and the ship was gone, leaving a bare field.

  “What? Slow that down.”

  Stinson backed up the video until the ship appeared again and re-ran the video more slowly. The image blurred on the left, the blur spread across the screen, then faded again to the right. The ship was gone.

  Vaughan swore. “I remember that as being crystal clear before. A pyramid floated over, and took Carson’s ship with it. Why is it a blur?”

  “Do you suppose someone didn’t want a record of that?” Stinson asked.

  “Obviously, but who? And how did they change the recordings? For that matter, how did Carson get his ship back?”

  “If that blur was a pyramid-shaped ship, then it I don’t think it was crewed by humans. Them?”

  “Freaking aliens? Shit.” Not that aliens were unknown in T-space, but the mostly iron-age timoans of Taprobane, around Epsilon Indi, were the most advanced that humans had met so-far. There were a few stone age species and ruins, and there were the enigmatic tree squids of Kakuloa at Alpha Centauri B. Vaughan may have been a Velkaryan, but he wasn’t committed to the dogma they peddled about the terraformed planets of T-space having been created by God just for humans. He agreed that humans deserved them, but he didn’t have any particular belief in God. On the other hand, whoever had terraformed those planets, possibly including the one orbiting Zeta 1 Reticuli which they’d just left, had done it some 65 million years ago and were surely long gone.

  The remaining possibility left Vaughan decidedly unsettled. Vaughan’s organization, and independently the archaeologist Hannibal Carson, had discovered evidence of a technological spacefaring species which flourished about 15,000 years ago, one which had built pyramids—unrelated to those on Earth—on several different planets. At least two of the pyramids had housed samples of advanced technology. Carson had picked up on the coincidences between primitive alien architectures on those different planets and, from the reports Vaughan had heard, gone on to discover some high-tech artifacts of his own. Hence the Velkaryan interest in him.

  But, so far as Vaughan knew, there had been no signs that those more-recent spacefaring aliens were still around. If they were, they’d had another fifteen millennia to advance their technology beyond a level that humans still hadn’t quite reached. Never mind what that might do to Velkaryan dogma, the thought of what their current capabilities might be was, well, perhaps “unsettling” wasn’t a strong enough word. If that’s what they had encountered at Zeta Reticuli, then the Velkaryan council needed to know.

  Going by what they’d done to the Carcharodon, the aliens didn’t have any compunctions about interfering with human affairs. Not that Velkaryans had any when it came to alien affairs either, of course, but if aliens were involved there could be problems.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  “Shall I make course back to Zeta Reticuli?” the captain asked Vaughan.

  Stinson’s lack of enthusiasm for that idea was obvious in his voice, and Vaughan sympathized. “That’s probably not a good idea,” he said, “without knowing just what happened to us. Whoever—or whatever—wiped our records and knocked us out might be a little more forceful next time. No, I think we need to go back and report. We should also have some techs go over this ship with the proverbial fine-toothed comb to see what they find.”

  “So, back to Verdigris then? We can refuel at Ransom’s Planet like we did on the way out. Zeta Tucanae—” the sun Ransom’s Planet orbited “—is almost in line between here and Delta Pavonis.”

  Vaughan considered that. They had the FTL communicator at Delta Pavonis, a piece of ancient alien technology whose only mate—so far as Vaughan knew—was on a Velkaryan base in Neptune orbit around Sol. But even though it communicated faster than a ship could travel, it wasn’t instant and its bandwidth was low. Discussion would take time, and this was something he should discuss with, or at least report to, his higher-ups. They’d be better able to analyze what might have been done to the ship with the facilities available on or near Earth, too.

  “Can we make a direct run to the Sol system? Land at our base on Luna?”

  “Negative,” Stinson said. “Not in one hop. We’ll need a refueling stop about half-way. Zeta Tucanae isn’t close enough to Sol; we’ll need to go another route or make another stop.”

  Vaughan wasn’t sure he wanted to back that way anyway. They had come out here from Verdigris—in the Delta Pavonis system—via Ransom’s Planet, which orbited Zeta Tucanae. Anyone there who had known they were headed to Zeta Reticuli would be curious about what they’d found. He’d just as soon keep people guessing about that. “Is there a way back to Verdigris, or to Earth, with only one stop which avoids Zeta Tucanae?” he asked.

  “Most likely. Let me see.” The captain turned to his console and worked with the navigation system for a few moments. “Ah, thought so. If you want to steer clear of civilization there are a couple of red dwarfs with bodies we can get ice from.”

  “I don’t see a particular need to avoid people in general, just Ransom’s Planet. What else have you got?”

  “The most direct route would either be via Alpha Mensae, or P-Eridani. The latter at least has a small outpost. We could refuel, but they wouldn’t have the facilities to do repairs or run enhanced diagnostics. I’d like to do that at our first opportunity. Tanith would be a better bet, although the whole trip would take longer. It’s just within our range.”

  Vaughan knew Tanith, he’d been there before. It had a fair-sized settlement and a regular commercial run to Earth.

  “That’s perfect. We’ll send a report back when we arrive. As soon as you’re happy that the ship’s systems are up to the trip, let’s go.”

  “Already ahead of you. Carcharodon has been running diagnostics the whole time we were talking. There is some secondary damage, but nothing to prevent us going to warp.”

  Since they had been in warp when they woke up, that made sense. They could take care of further repairs on Tanith. “And?” Vaughan asked.

  “And we’re good to go.” With that, he tapped a control on his panel and Vaughan felt the thrusters fire to rotate the ship, lining it up on Tanith’s parent star, Eighty-Two Eridani.

  “All hands,” the captain announced over the PA, “secure for warp.”

  CHAPTER 3: MARTEN'S HOMECOMING

  Roberts

  Ten days ago: Epsilon Indi system, planet Taprobane

  CAPTAIN JACQUELINE “Jackie” Roberts guided her small starship into a low orbit over Taprobane and opened a circuit to spaceport control.

  “Clarkeville Spaceport, this is Captain Roberts of the Sophie, a registered courier, requesting landing permission. We’ve been here before, and I have a timoan native aboard.”

  “Roger, Sophie. Please squawk your information and identify your passenger.”

  Taprobane was a restricted world. Clarkeville, on the large island of Borealia, was the sole human settlement on the planet. It was primarily an academic facility, with a mixed human and timoan population. Most native timoans, on the mainland, were at an iron age cultural level
and Earth’s Union de Terre wanted to limit human contact with them.

  “Squawking,” Jackie replied, touching a control on her console. “My passenger is Doctor Marten, a professor of archeology at the university.”

  “Thank you, Sophie. Identity confirmed, and we have you on radar. You are cleared to de-orbit on an approach trajectory. Nothing else inbound. Outgoing traffic left a half-hour ago; you’re well clear. The port is wide open. Welcome back.”

  Outgoing ships would head out of the orbital plane to give them a clear path to warp, so well clear indeed. “Cleared on approach, no traffic. Thank you, Clarkeville.”

  She turned to Marten, who had strapped himself tightly into the copilot’s seat. He gripped the armrests tightly. To say that he wasn’t fond of zero-gee would be an understatement.

  “Cheer up,” Jackie said, “We’ll be on the ground in a half-hour, and we’ll have gravity back as soon as we hit atmosphere. Won’t be long now.”

  “Thank you, Jackie. I’m looking forward to it.”

  She turned back to the console and maneuvered the ship for its entry burn.

  Five minutes later, the burn complete and the spacecraft flipped over to take the entry belly first, the ship began to slow as the thin outer atmosphere began to glow gently with the speed of their passing. As the ship slowed, Jackie felt herself settling into the seat cushion. Beside her, Marten breathed a sigh of relief.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Clarkeville Spaceport

  Roberts secured her ship at a temporary parking area on the edge of the field. She didn’t plan to stay more than a day. After helping Marten with his gear, and arranging to meet him later at the Kangara University campus for a meal, she gathered up a small bundle of packages and headed for the port office.

  “Hi,” she said to the human at the counter. Many of the jobs in Clarkeville were held by native timoans, but the Universal Postal Union, of which the Interstellar Courier Service was formally a part, was the domain of the UdT, and personnel rotated around. “I’m Roberts from the Sophie. Packages from Alpha Centauri.” She held up the bundle. “Not much I’m afraid.” On this trip, it would be the network data updates and Marten’s passage—billed to Ducayne—that paid her expenses. Still, everything helped, and it was required to maintain her courier’s permits.