by Kumar L
Earth to Centauri
The First Journey
Captain Anara - Antariksh (Book 1)
By
Kumar L.
Copyright © 2017 Kumar L.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.
Table of Contents
Prologue - 2087 Somewhere beyond the solar system
April 23rd, 2117 - 2.2 LY from Earth
Jan 15th, 2095 - Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope, Pune
25th April 2117 - Complications
Jan 24th, 2110 - Plans
26th April 2117 - The Jump
Jan 25th, 2110 - Antariksh
15th May 2117 - Anomalies
30th August 2110 - The new Captain
18th May 2117 - Contact 3.2 LY
8th Feb 2111 - The team
20th May 2117 - The attack
15th Sep 2112 - VSSC Thiruvananthapuram
21st May 2117 - Repercussions
1st June 2114 - Secrets
21st May 2117 - Revelations
8th December 2114 - Assembly
21st May 2117 - Plans
15th August 2114 - First flight
18th June 2117 - Antariksh returns 3.5 LY
8th Sept 2115 - Preparations
21st June 2117 - Near the Tri-stars 3.8 LY
3rd March 2116 - Launch
21st June 2117 - Communications
21st June 2117 - Humans
21st June 2117 - Proxima B
21st June 2117 - Assessment
22nd June 2117 - The human settlement
22nd June 2117 - Configurations
23rd June 2117 - Deliberations
23rd June 2117 - Hostilities
23rd June 2117 - Contact
23rd June 2117 - The Asteroid
24th June 2117 - Captives
24th June 2117 - Strategy
25th June 2117 - Deceptions
26th June 2117 - Alliances
26th June 2117 - Stories
1st July 2117 - Twin Suns
4th July, 2117 - Homecoming
Epilogue
About the Author
Prologue
2087
Somewhere beyond the solar system
A 110 years had passed since it had been launched from Earth. Moving at 60000 km per hour it had crossed 60 billion kms through space. It had fulfilled its mission.
Its power source was exhausted and all instruments were powered down, it had been drifting aimlessly for more than 70 years. No longer able to send or receive signals, it was completely cut-off from its home. Deep in interstellar space, with only gases and comet forming icy particles for company, it was all alone in the black vastness.
But there was someone watching it, tracking its irregular movements, checking to see if it posed a threat. The finders were intrigued with this small object. To them it looked like a message in a bottle.
The object was taken on board and the ship turned back the way it had come…
April 23rd, 2117
2.2 LY from Earth
The lights in the dome came on and slowly brightened, encompassing the sleep capsules. Anara came awake quickly as always. It was never pleasant coming to after eight hours of forced sleep but after many weeks of following the jump cycles, she was getting accustomed to it.
All around her, the crew stirred within their capsules, opening transparent hatches and climbing out. There were some murmurs and small talk but generally people wandered off to their quarters to start preparations for their shifts.
Anara’s second in command walked across to her capsule. Commander Ryan looked as fresh as if he had just stepped out of his dressing room. But then he had never looked stressed, ever. A disciplined mind complemented his background in theoretical physics and military strategy.
‘Good morning, Captain! Hope you slept well.’ Those were his opening words after every jump, even though sleep was not an option but a forced condition in the dome.
‘Well enough, Ryan. Walk to the ops centre?’ asked Anara as they exited the dome. It was not a question really but a routine they followed. The hundred meters up one level to Ops took few minutes to navigate. They entered together to find Lieutenant Manisha at the control station. That was the only station left operational within its protective cocoon during the jump and mostly manned by the young Flight Lieutenant. It was her domain and her performance ensured she’d earned it. An engineering graduate all of 25 years, she had earned her rank in the Indian Air Force.
She looked up from the console as the Captain entered the Ops centre. ‘Good morning, Captain! Nothing major to report. The daily report is at your station.’
‘Thanks, Lieutenant. Location?’
‘We are 2.2 LY from Earth, Captain and the last jump carried us as expected. We are now in cruise phase - velocity 0.01 c. We will be holding this speed while the jump reactor recharges.’
Anara acknowledged the information. She and Ryan walked the few steps to their respective stations. Anara to the middle of the room and Ryan to her right. She called up the display which materialized in front of her. A complex set up numbers and charts immediately crowded the screen which then resolved into data programmed for her. The first chart showed the position of her ship Antariksh relative to Earth and to the destination. The second chart was the status of key on-board systems starting with the power plant. All glowed green this time and the stats were mostly in the optimum zone. The numbers on non-essential power use troubled her a bit. Even though the issues were not in a major system, she made a note to her engineering head to verify the same.
‘Hey Narada!’ - she next addressed the Artificial Intelligence on board. Its name was a legend on the ship, that just like the mythological Narada, the ship’s AI was connected to all systems and all communications. It literally knew everything and if not contained by its integrity program it could cause a whole lot of trouble for some people. After all the anxiety caused by the EU providing rights to artificial life forms back in the early 21st century, it had been deemed necessary to limit what Narada could do on the ship even while it was regarded as sentient. That was the design the ethics committee had approved and Anara was fine with it.
‘Hello, Captain Anara. An update on the crew’s health has been sent to you. There are no concerns. However, Doctor Khan would like to run some more tests on space radiation exposure on a sample of the crew. The list has been sent to you for approval.’
‘Thanks, Narada. Please compose a status message to Indian Space Command and transmit it. She took a last look at her displays and decided her ship could fly some more without her in the Captain’s seat. ‘All good, Ryan. Join me for a meal?’
‘Sure. Just let me confirm the fuel reserves’. His fingers hovered over the control pad and commands were input. ‘That’s done. The roster is set and on track. Manisha’s reliever will be here shortly as well. Let’s go, Captain.’
They exited the room together and went down the steps to the cafeteria on Level 2. It was good to be able to stretch their legs after being confined in the cylinders for so long. They passed other crewmen in the gangway now starting their own shifts. Antariksh was slowly coming alive with the sound of human voices.
The ship was 150 meters long and was laid out on three levels. Level 1 at the top was th
e control section with ops in the front. Medical bay, engineering, observation and navigation systems took most of the rear. Level 2 was crew quarters, communal areas, cafeteria and the dome. It could easily accommodate a hundred people though the current complement was fifty-five. Level 3 housed the power plant, standby generators, battery banks, solar power banks, anti-matter storage, utilities and the escape pods.
Antariksh was the second deep space exploration vessel after Akash. While Akash never made it past the heliopause, it’s design had helped make the next generation of space transports more robust, reliable and fast.
Launched on the year 2096, it had taken fifteen years to build and another five to test. Though Faster Than Light or FTL speeds had been made possible by 2060, sustaining the same for extended periods of time with humans on board had required scientists to come up with path breaking applications of quantum mechanics. Even then managing the power requirements had taken most of a decade until they had managed to overcome the same with a combination of fusion reactions and controlled anti-matter explosions. To keep people out of the time dilation experienced during FTL, the dome had been constructed which enabled a mix of suspended animation and isolation of the block from external references. It was almost akin to a cocoon or a bubble.
As they went down to the dining room, Anara could not help but feel pride in her role of commanding the first manned flight in interstellar space. This was strengthened by the fact that her country had entered the twenty second century full of power, hope and the beacon for the rest of the world. The international crew on board had been an added bonus. She smiled when she remembered the thousands of people who had applied for a role on the ship and she had hand-picked every member of the crew.
The weight of the responsibility for their mission sobered her up. She was responsible for the lives of Fifty-four people in deep space. They were here light years from Earth , the farthest mankind had ever gone before and their mission was to definitively prove that that mankind was not alone in the Universe.
Jan 15th, 2095
Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope, Pune
The anomalous signals had been coming through since the new year but had been completely ignored by most SETI listening sites just because the particular bandwidth was not being monitored by them. However, the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) near the megacity of Mumbai-Pune was incidentally on the correct frequency. But here again the signals were treated as routine interference. The search for extra-terrestrial signals was more than 150 years old and such signals were almost routine, getting ignored and stored for later study. Nothing concrete had been discovered till date despite numerous false alarms.
What was different this time was that the signals were getting repeated. It took one day for the signal to be downloaded, verified and catalogued. Then the night shift grad student sifting through the logs for the day noticed the pattern. She sat glued to her seat for 26 hours making sense of the numbers flowing on her screen before concluding this was the real deal.
It was late the next night that the guards found her running across the campus to the Director’s office right behind the middle-aged head of her own department.
They burst into the Director’s room just as he was packing up to head home and told him the news. His stature at GMRT did not afford him the luxury of being able to jump for joy at this piece of information and he had to be content by punching the air several times. All thought so going home forgotten, he pored over the data, faster than the grad student to his credit and decided He in turn flagged a message to the Director of Indian Space Command. While technically the GMRT was under the NCRA, in matters of such importance NCRA usually deferred to the ISC headed by Director Srinivas.
His reaction was a bit more staid. In his number of years at the Centre and coordinating with similar agencies worldwide, he had learnt to temper his enthusiasm, but in all fairness, this time the data looked different. He pulled out his best team of analysts and put them on the job with the team from GMRT.
The finding was immediately classified Top Secret the very first day and the bureaucracy notwithstanding the news was at the PMO within two days, and the Prime Minister was handed over a note at the President’s banquet in honour of the Princess of Wales. In his characteristic way, the Prime Minister had decided this was to be run by scientists and not civil servants and had personally made Srini in-charge of the whole project and put Dr. Aryan as his second in command.
Four days had passed since the signal had been received and it was time to bring everything together and what was to be done next.
The ISC team had taken over the entire signal analysis block at GMRT having unceremoniously evicted the inhabitants including the grad student who had made the discovery, her dreams of winning the Nobel Prize fading away as she watched the team move in.
‘Morning Director’, said Doctor Aryan. ‘We’ve completed our first cut analysis of the signal. Surprisingly, it was easy once we put together the repetitions in a sequence.’
‘So, what did you find?’
‘It’s in Morse code, dots and dashes’ replied Dr Aryan smiling inwardly. He knew what would come next.
‘You mean it’s a rogue.’ sighed Srini, his excitement suddenly wearing off. Rogue signals were those Earth generated signal sometimes captured by accident in the giant radio telescopes. There had been plenty of those too across the world.
‘No, Sir. I mean its Morse code but it’s definitely extra-terrestrial. The frequency it was on would never be caught by our telescopes if transmitted from Earth,’ stated Dr. Aryan.
‘You don’t say, Aryan! That’s sound promising. And what’s in the signal?’.
‘It’s an SOS.’
‘Are you serious Doctor? You are telling me that we finally have a signal from outer space and it’s in Morse which went out of use over a hundred years ago and it says S.O.S?’ exclaimed Srini.
‘Yes Director. I was as surprised as you are but my team is absolutely certain. It cannot be anything else.’
There was complete silence around the room as the six men and women digested this piece of information.
“Doctor’, started Srini again, trying to make sense.’ How is this possible? Even if some other intelligent life discovered the principle of Morse code, they would not use the same set of symbols. This is impossible. You’ve made a mistake and you must check again.’
‘There is no mistake Director. I’m certain of my findings. And to quote my favourite 19th century detective - if you’ve eliminated everything else, whatever remains must be the truth. I am forced to conclude this signal is a representation sent to us from someone who has managed to learn the code. It’s not an actual call for help but a signal in the simplest form to tell us that our message has been received, understood and sent back as confirmation. And it has not originated from anywhere in this solar system which has been the limit of our explorations so far.’
‘So what? Maybe one of our own Earth generated Morse code signal travelled across space, got reflected or refracted around one of the outer planets and is being repeated by one of our satellites?’
‘No Sir. That is not possible. The strength of our terrestrial signal would not exit the solar system. This is from some other origin. I must also point out, this is a signal directed at us and not a general transmission which has fallen in our laps by chance. The strength of it and the focussed band indicates it was specifically directed at Earth. Extrapolating all the data, the most likely permutation gives us a minimum distance of 5 light-years from source of the transmission. That being said, we do not know when the signal was sent it could take years to traverse that distance.’
‘Do we know anything more about the origin of the signal?’ asked the Director.
‘No Sir. But we are isolating some more signals from the back-ground noise. That may give us a clue. There do seem to be some more repetitions in the stream. I can let you know of the progress in 24 hours.’
‘Do so please. Thanks, and d
ismissed for now. We will meet again tomorrow.’
In the data lab, Doctor Aryan sat with his team and the results from the preliminary analysis. The question in his mind was how to identify the location and distance of the source of the message and if the answer was hidden in the data downloaded on the GMRT servers. His team had the most powerful computers at their disposal but some things just required scientists to interpret.
‘Dr. Aryan, we have identified two new streams of repetitions in the transmissions after isolating random noise,’ Doctor Sneha spoke up first.
‘And what do these new repetitions indicate?’
‘They seem to be some sort of coordinates Sir, but we have been unable to get a fix,’ said Doctor Morgan.
‘Tell me Morgan and Sneha, do you know when we sent the first probes into space from Earth, they contained a lot of information including the location of Earth in reference to galactic markers. So, let me ask you, if you were an alien intelligent civilization and thought somewhat similar to us, what would be the markers that you would use?’
‘Galactic centre for one and maybe the brightest star in our side of the galaxy,’ said Sneha.
‘Great, and so let’s run with this theory for a while. We take the galactic centre as a reference and assume that the signal is not more than a few years old thus discounting for galactic shift, we get our zero-zero coordinates. Now, let’s try and plot the numbers against this reference. I’m sure your computers can work on this. In the meantime, the thought about the first probes sent from Earth has given me something to think about. I need to refresh my history. Let’s meet back in 4 hours.’ said Aryan.
The team broke up with each member going to his specific task while Aryan headed to his office.
His first task was to connect to the AI for the facility. Most AI’s across the world, despite the physical border walls, were interconnected and free exchange of information was one major achievement of the 21st century. The flipside was the personalities each AI developed but you learnt to live with it.