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

by Alastair Mayer

  Finally. “Roger ground. Sophie is cleared to two-zero and for departure. Will report clear. Thank you.”

  Two minutes after that, the Sophie lifted from the runway, climbing for the sky. As she passed through a thousand meters, five kilometers from the spaceport, Roberts called back.

  “Harp City spaceport, this is the Sophie reporting clear, southwest at one thousand meters and climbing, turning to heading niner-five.” They would expect the turn if she was going to go for an orbit.

  “Thank you, Sophie. Safe trip. Harp City out.”

  Roberts continued her climb until reaching an altitude of ten thousand meters, where she leveled off. By this point, on the heading she’d been following, they were out over the ocean east of the continent where Harp City had been established. She began a gradual turn back toward the mainland, to a point well south of the city. Her charts showed a broad area of savannah where it would be clear to land . . . just so long as nobody had decided to set up a homestead there since the chart database was last updated. She set the autopilot and went back to talk with the others.

  “Well, we’re clear. Heading southwest at ten K, keeping it subsonic. There’s a nice deserted savannah forty minutes away where we can set down. Then what?”

  “Then Tevnar guides us to her ship, we retrieve the artifact, and go on our way, Burnside said.

  “Why do I get the feeling it’s not going to be that simple?” Jackie said.

  “Because it’s not,” Carson said.

  Burnside and Roberts looked at him questioningly.

  “I want to know where she found that artifact, if there was anything else nearby, and just how she came to find it. If the site is within range, I’d like to visit it. I’d also like to be sure it wasn’t looted from a known site, although I don’t think she’d have been so worried about it if it were. Nobody has found high tech artifacts at known sites, except the talismans, and they don’t look high tech.”

  “Nobody that you know of,” Burnside pointed out. “The Velkaryans got something from somewhere. Maybe a site unknown to professional archeologists, but not necessarily. I wouldn’t be surprised if they had sponsored a few digs of their own, and may well have a few archeologists in their pockets.”

  “But . . . .” Carson began, then trailed off. “No, okay. Fair enough, that’s not impossible. I don’t like the idea, but human nature being what it is, I can’t rule it out.”

  “But as far as what we’re looking for, we won’t know until we ask her. How is she?”

  Carson went over to check the traumapod display. “She’s in light sleep,” he said. “Looks like she’s mending well, she should be up and about in a couple of days.” Timoans healed quickly, and the humans’ rapid action had made a significant difference.

  “Let’s open the pod,” Burnside said. “But let her wake up on her own.”

  Carson looked at the display again. “No reason why not.” He looked over at Jackie. “Captain?”

  “Go ahead,” she said. She was as curious as the others as to what exactly was going on, and she didn’t see any harm.

  She watched as Carson activated the controls to open the pod door and slide the bed part way out, but left it at that. Tevnar’s eyes flickered. Probably the motion of the bed had roused her. Her eyes opened, and she tilted her head left and right, looking around.

  “We’re airborne?” she asked. “Too noisy for space.”

  “That’s right. Well clear of Harp City,” Jackie answered. “How are you feeling?”

  “I’ve been better. Things still hurt. But I can function. Let me get up.”

  “You’re better off to stay lying down for a bit longer,” Jackie said, “but we’d like to talk if you’re up to it.”

  “Sure.” Tevnar was obviously familiar with traumapod controls, quickly locating the buttons near her hand that elevated the head rest. She raised it about twenty degrees. “That’s better. So, are we going to the Razgon? To my ship?”

  “We can, if you tell us where it is.”

  “About five hundred kilometers west-south-west of Harp City.” She gave Roberts a set of coordinates. “It’s an S-class, a Sandquist—” her accent made it sound more like “sandvich”, but Jackie knew what she meant “—not a Sapphire like this. Does the job. Parked it five kilometers from my sister’s, in a place not easily visible from above, away from passersby. Last time I checked he was fine.”

  “He?” asked Jackie.

  “Timoans refer to their ships and boats as he,” Carson said, “and usually give them male names. Although I don’t know what Razgon means, if anything.”

  “A kind of animal, a bit like your flying squirrels,” Tevnar said. “You spoke timoan, back there. Badly, but still. You study at Kangara?”

  “I have a colleague there. Marten, professor of archeology.”

  “Ah, I know Marten. Mostly a good boy. Bit of a renegade, but smart, him. My second cousin’s kit, precocious. Adolescent boys often run away, but he did it younger and farther.”

  “He’s why we have gear for timoans,” Jackie said. “I dropped him off on Taprobane two stops back, before coming here.”

  “That explains why this place smells familiar.”

  Carson and Jackie looked at each other. “Smell?” she asked.

  “You humans have dead noses. Don’t worry, you don’t offend. But even with your cleaning and your air scrubbers, I thought there had been a timoan on recently. Family, at that.”

  “Well, you do tend to large families,” Carson said.

  “By your standards, I suppose.” She looked at Jackie meaningfully.

  Jackie wondered if that was intended as something about family, and felt her cheeks warming. Then she remembered how they had gotten onto the subject. “I’ll be right back,” she said. “I have a new course to set.” She started forward to the control cabin.

  “So,” Carson said, “about this artifact. Where did it come from?”

  Jackie paused at the cockpit door to hear the answer.

  “That, friend, is a long story.”

  “I think we have time.” He called forward, “Jackie, how long till we land?”

  “An hour,” she said. “And Tevnar, don’t you dare start that story until I’m done here. I want to hear it too.”

  CHAPTER 38: TEVNAR'S STORY

  Aboard the Sophie

  “ALL RIGHT. CAN I get some water? This pod may be keeping me hydrated but my mouth is dry.”

  “Sure,” Carson said, and he unfolded a drinking tube from its stowage area in the interior side of the pod. “Here.”

  Tevnar took a sip, then a long drink. “Ah, better. Thank you. Now, where shall I begin?”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  “I was headed out from Epsilon Eridani toward Zeta Tucanae. It’s my ship but I do some flying for Kangara University. I had just dropped a team of geologists—mixed human and timoan, a field trip—on Spitzer, and heard that there was a team on Zeta Tucanae that might need a pick-up around the time I could get there.”

  “I hope they found another ride,” Roberts said. “That would have been some time ago, given when we heard about the artifact.”

  “Hush, I’m telling this. And I haven’t been here all that time; I gave them their ride, then came back here.”

  “That explains the delay getting hold of you,” Burnside said. “But why didn’t you drop the artifact off when you got back to Taprobane after your pick up?”

  “It was here the whole time, in safe keeping. I didn’t want it aboard with a shipload of scientists. Now, do you want to hear this or not?”

  “Sorry. Please, continue.”

  “Anyway, I went via Kapteyn’s Star, a red dwarf, with known planets. Red dwarfs never have terraformed planets, I guess the original Terraformers didn’t think them suitable, so these probably hadn’t been explored much if at all. I decided to do a bit of sightseeing as well as refueling.”

  “So, six-and-a-half boring days later, I came out of warp near Kapteyn’s, and did the
usual scan to locate myself and the planets. Kapteyn’s has two large rocky planets, what you call super-Earths, and a few smaller ones and miscellaneous debris. A lot of junk for a red dwarf.

  “The larger one—I don’t know if any of them have names, but they don’t in my data base, just code designations—is beyond the habitable zone and covered with ice, but it’s also seven Earth or Taprobane masses, so on top of the fun of mining the ice, landing, moving around, and taking off would be no treat. I’m not even sure the latter would be possible.

  “The inner one, now. The inner super-Earth is much more interesting. It’s actually in the habitable zone, and has liquid water. Not a lot, the oceans are small and shallow, but it has it all the same. It also has weather, and rain, and fresh water lakes. Perfect, except for the high gravity. It’s roughly five Taprobane masses, a bit less than that in Earth masses, but still much bigger than Skead, say. The crazy planet has a low average density, too, so a big diameter. The escape velocity is high. But it was within my parameters. It doesn’t have much of a spin, seems to be in some kind of five-to-two resonance between its sun and the outer planet, so not much equatorial boost, but I’d take what I could get.

  “But wanted to find the best place to land to take on fuel, so I spent more than a day scanning it from orbit. I must own the best set of images of the place, at least within fifteen degrees of the equator.”

  “I take it you spotted something?” Carson said. “What was it.”

  “Hold your prag . . . ah, horses, boy, I’m getting there.”

  “Sorry.”

  Tevnar took another sip from her drinking tube, then continued. “As I was saying, I was looking for a good place to land and take off. I found a large lake bed, flat, with a small lake off to one side of the middle of it. Now that might be a lake with a salt flat around it, so a salt lake. If needs be I can refuel with salt water; I’ve got the filters. But fresh is preferable.” She looked up at Roberts. “Right, Captain?”

  “Exactly right. And you can call me Jackie.”

  “Right. Anyway, I noticed a stream bed leading down from mountains a few kilometers away to the north, then draining the lake to the east before turning south. Wasn’t much of a stream, its bed was mostly dry too, probably seasonal. But it was probably good enough to keep the lake fresh. The surrounding lake-bed was flat enough to make a good long runway for landing and takeoff, so I decided to give it a try.

  “Turned out I wasn’t the only one who had thought that.”

  “There was another ship?” Carson blurted.

  “If you’re going to keep interrupting, boy, we’ll never get through this.”

  Carson shut up.

  “Anyway, I did my de-orbit burn and began entry. Pretty routine. The atmosphere was thinner than I expected for a planet that size, must have blown off over time. Mostly nitrogen. Anyway, I landed well clear of the lake itself. You can never tell with lake beds; sometimes it’s just a thin layer of dry clay over soft mud, and I didn’t want to get stuck.

  “Turned out to not be a problem. Ground was pretty solid, something between sandstone and clay. Solid enough that even when dry it didn’t blow around like sand. Pretty solid where I landed, got a little softer near the water, but not so I’d get stuck in it, even with the higher gravity. One-point-seven gees, approximately; my ship has the exact number. I taxied to twenty-five or thirty meters from the waterline. Not a huge lake, a couple of kilometers across, and there wasn’t much wind when I landed. Just a few modest waves, looking kind of strange with the gravity. One-point-seven gee doesn’t sound like much, but after a while I felt like I’d been carrying a couple of grown kits around all day. Breathing gear didn’t help.

  “The atmosphere won’t hurt your skin, but you can’t breathe it. Partial pressure of oxygen is too low, and carbon-dioxide is too high. Surprised there’s not more greenhouse effect. Or maybe there is, and the hab-zone is actually farther in than the planet. Whatever.” Tevnar paused, as if collecting her thoughts, then continued.

  “I ran my refueling hoses out into the lake and got them set up, then went back inside to lie down for a while.”

  She took another sip of water.

  “How are you doing?” Roberts asked. “Do you need to take a break?”

  Carson gave her a look like she was crazy, but he didn’t say anything. No doubt he was dying to hear the rest of the story, although he surely understood that Tevnar needed rest too.

  “I’m fine. Your boy here looks like he’ll pop if I don’t keep going. I understand. Marten’s like that too, as I recall. Always curious, that one. That’s what got him in trouble.”

  Carson cleared his throat, noisily.

  “All right, all right. A while later I woke up from my nap and went out to check on the hoses. My tanks were filling nicely, and nothing was plugging the intakes. There’s life on that planet. Nothing fancy, some algae and the like. Probably just enough to keep the oxygen levels where they are. Anyway, I had spotted something odd when landing, so after I checked the hoses, I took a look with binoculars. It was something sticking up out of the ground a half-kilometer away. Didn’t look much like a rock. It could have been the remains of a dead tree, but not out in the middle of nowhere like that. At that distance though the thick air it was hard to tell. It was sure out of place on the flat lake-bed. I decided when the refueling was done I would go take a closer look.

  “I got the hoses put away, my tanks were topped up. Time to go check out the whatever it was. I wasn’t going to walk, not in that gravity.

  “Jackie, are you familiar with Sandvich class ships?”

  “Only a little. I’ve never flown one, although I did some research before I bought this ship.”

  “Okay. Then you might know that they have a nice feature; the landing gear wheels are motorized. Means you can taxi around without firing up the thrusters. Saves a bit of fuel, and they’re quieter on the ground. Spaceports like them because they don’t need a tow vehicle.”

  “It seemed like an extra complication to me,” said Roberts. “Something else that could go wrong.”

  “There is that, but I never had a problem with them, and the weight isn’t worth worrying about.

  “Anyway, I just taxied around to where I’d seen the whatever-it-was sticking out of the ground. It was covered in dirt and dried sediment, and worn. Might have been underwater part of the time, when the lake level was high. It had obviously been there a long time. But it was no stone or tree. It was a ship.”

  “What kind?” Roberts asked.

  “Like I said, it had been there a long time. It was considerably damaged, but there was enough there to tell what it was, and what it wasn’t. No human built that ship, and for damn sure no timoan did either. I’m no geologist, but it could have been there a thousand years.”

  Burnside had been listening quietly up until now. He was the first to break the silence that followed Tevnar’s revelation. “You are joking with us, right?”

  “Where do you think I got the artifact?”

  Jackie looked at Carson and raised her eyebrow. Carson nodded. “I take it,” she said to Burnside, “you haven’t heard about Belize?”

  “What about Belize? Some place in Central America, right?”

  “Recent news,” Carson said, “and I guess it hasn’t made it here yet. It’s one reason Ducayne sent me. Some divers found old wreckage off the coast of Belize. It’s still being kept quiet, but it looks like the remains of an alien spaceship. There’s writing on what might be parts of an instrument panel. Ducayne has somebody working on that. It resembles markings on the artifact in the pictures you sent him.”

  “Well, well. What are the odds? Seems a bit of a coincidence.”

  “They happen,” Carson said. “We’re beginning to think that there was a lot of interstellar traffic in the neighborhood up until a century or two ago, maybe even since then. We—Jackie and I—have met one of the civilizations involved. Humans, and timoans, are pushing farther out, and the core of ou
r bubble called T-Space is getting pretty busy. People are bound to start finding things. Ducayne can’t keep a lid on it forever.”

  “Well, it’s not just Ducayne, but I see your point. This is going to make our jobs a lot harder.”

  “How so?”

  “People can ignore the Terraformers. However powerful they were, they’ve been gone for millions of years. High-tech aliens who might still be around? That’s something else. What do you think knowledge of that would do to Velkaryan recruiting? A little xenophobia goes a long way.”

  “The damned Velkaryans again. And they may not even be the biggest problem.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Roberts wondered if Carson would bring up what the Kesh had said about the degkhidesh. She caught his eye and shook her head; Burnside had no need to know.

  Carson had either already decided that himself or took her hint. “Ah, not for me to say. Ask Ducayne.”

  Burnside’s eyes narrowed as he looked intently at Carson, then he turned to Roberts with a questioning look. She shrugged.

  “Okay, fair enough,” Burnside said. “Not your call as to whether I need to know, so I guess I don’t right now. I will ask him, though.”

  “I can neither confirm nor deny that there’s anything worth asking about,” Carson said, his straight face breaking into a slight wry smile at the end.

  “Got it.”

  “But I would like to ask Tevnar about something, and you’ll be interested too.”

  “What’s on your mind, Carson?” the timoan said. At least it wasn’t “boy” this time.

  “I’ve got pictures of some of the debris we found on Earth. I’m wondering if anything looks similar to what you may have found. I take it, since you brought something back, you found a way inside?”

  “Part way inside. A lot of it was clogged with sediment and crash damage. But let’s see what you’ve got. Wait,” she turned her head toward Roberts. “Jackie, how long until we reach my ship?”

  Roberts checked a nearby display. “Twenty minutes. How are you holding up?”