The Eridani Convergence

by Alastair Mayer

  The one thing he hadn’t made any progress on was that artifact he’d heard rumors of shortly after they’d arrived. Supposedly it was something high tech, found off-planet, although it wasn’t clear if it was from elsewhere in the 82 Eridani system or somewhere else. Maybe there’d been nothing to it.

  Vaughan raised his coffee mug to his lips, then grimaced. It was cold. As he put the mug down again, there was a knock at the door.

  “Yes?”

  “Boss, it’s me, Mignon.”

  “Enter.” As the man did so, Vaughan asked, “What is it?”

  “It’s about that Homeworld Security guy, John Smith.”

  They didn’t have proof that Smith, or whatever his real name was, was a Homeworld Security agent, but Vaughan strongly suspected it. The Velkaryan office in the local Church had hacked into a number of public cameras around the city, and as a matter of routine ran the feeds through facial recognition against their database of known or suspected Homeworld Security personnel. They’d hit a match on John Smith. It was a loose one—the Velkaryans weren’t going for forensic-level accuracy—but enough to warrant keeping an eye on Smith.

  “What about him?” Vaughan asked.

  “Garcia says that a cluster analysis on his network traffic, what we could pick up, shows a lot of connections with an account linked to where we heard about that artifact you’re interested in.”

  Garcia was their local signals analyst and general systems hacker. If his analysis was correct, and Vaughan had no reason to doubt it, it meant that Smith was interested in this mysterious artifact too. Interesting. “When was the latest message in that cluster?”

  Mignon checked his omniphone. “Day before yesterday. They go back about four weeks. I guess he’s getting the runaround too.”

  “You’d think that somebody who wanted to sell something would respond a little faster,” Vaughan said. “But maybe there is something to it. Have a closer watch kept on Smith, and notify me if there are any more messages between him and whoever this is.” They couldn’t crack the encryption on the messages themselves, of course, but sooner or later one of them would be about setting up the exchange. Any message exchanged would be a trigger to watch Smith even more closely.

  CHAPTER 12: DUCAYNE'S MESSAGE

  Roberts

  A few hours ago: Tau Ceti III-1

  JACKIE OPENED DUCAYNE’S message—it was his, she’d verified the signature key—and skimmed it.

  “Captain Roberts,” it read, “if this message catches up with you at Tau Ceti, Epsilon Eridani, or that general vicinity within three weeks of the send date, I have a courier job for you.” There were still eight days left in the window; he must have sent it a week after she left Sawyers World for Taprobane.

  “I need a package picked up from 82 Eridani and delivered here as soon as possible. It should be a straightforward pickup and delivery; the package should be considerably less than a cubic meter in volume and less than 50kg mass. Contact information—” was just a name and care-of the Tanith cargo office.

  That shouldn’t be too difficult. Jackie wondered what the rush was. That he wanted to engage a courier wasn’t that surprising. Eighty-Two Eridani’s habitable world, Tanith, was lightly inhabited and the system didn’t see much traffic from Sawyers World, despite being only two weeks away from there. There were scheduled emigration runs from Earth, but Ducayne would want a private delivery.

  She didn’t for a moment consider refusing the job. She owed Ducayne for repairs and enhancements to the Sophie, and a readiness to perform special jobs was part of that deal. Until now, though, they’d generally involved ferrying Hannibal Carson to places where he usually managed to find trouble, or trouble found him. A pick up and delivery might turn out to be simple after all. It was, though, a little odd that the package hadn’t just accompanied the message that had informed Ducayne of it in the first place.

  Maybe the package hadn’t been ready or available to ship when Ducayne first heard of it. Or, she realized, the message could have been sent by torpedo, a small self-guided warp ship powered by antimatter and with no room for any cargo but the data stored in its memory. Either way, she realized, this probably wasn’t going to be simple.

  Jackie had been to 82 Eridani before, back when she was an executive officer, before she acquired the Sophie. Tanith, the terraformed planet, had a town and some small settlements. A G8 star with three “super-Earths,” rocky planets ranging from two to four times Earth’s diameter, bigger even than Skead, that were in relatively tight orbits, with the outermost being almost as close to its sun as Mercury to Sol. Tanith, a near Earth-sized world, was farther out in the habitable zone, where it had managed to ignore perturbations from the inner planets for at least sixty-five million years. Beyond that there was a Saturn-sized gas giant, a Neptune-like ice giant, and a number of dwarf planets. Oh yes, and a dust disk that meant a safe approach would be well above or below the ecliptic.

  There was something else about it that she’d learned recently, but couldn’t remember quite what. Something to do with the spaceport? Never mind, anything important would be in the database.

  “As soon as possible,” Ducayne’s message had read. So much for catching up with old acquaintances. But she was damned if she was leaving before having a meal that didn’t come from her ship’s autochef.

  She checked the local web. Her favorite restaurant—Sherwood’s Chophouse, locals pronounced it Shophouse—was still thriving, so she made a reservation for one. Her plans to depart at first light conflicted with having company; she’d be pressured to make an evening of it, catch up on old times, that sort of thing. It was simpler just to enjoy dinner by herself and then get back to the Sophie for pre-departure prep.

  She drafted a reply to Ducayne, letting him know she’d got the message and had taken the job, estimating arrival at 82 Eridani some nine days from now. Then she contacted the port cargo office—fortunately the over-eager David Tefera wasn’t the one answering the comm—and notified them of a light cargo opportunity going to 82 Eridani in the morning. Ducayne hadn’t said anything about her deadheading there, and if she could pick some credit with a little freight, so much the better. Either way, she’d be taking a network data dump. The mail must go through.

  CHAPTER 13: SAWYER

  Carson

  A few hours ago: Anderson Office Park, outskirts of Sawyer City

  ELIZABETH SAWYER’S OFFICE was in a small suite in a rather generic-looking building, part of a small office park on what was still the outskirts of Sawyer City. Judging from the construction, though, the city would soon expand past it. A half-kilometer away a large construction fabber was busily extruding the walls of yet another building.

  The autocab stopped outside the main entrance to the building and opened its door. Carson got out, double checked the address, and entered the lobby. “Hannibal Carson visiting Sawyer Enterprises,” he announced to the air.

  “Confirmed,” announced a pleasant female-sounding voice, almost certainly robotic. “Third floor.” An elevator door slid open. He entered, and noted that the third floor had already been selected. Points for efficiency, he thought as the door closed and the elevator rose.

  Hannibal Carson hadn’t felt this nervous about meeting someone since his first date back in high school. He knew it was silly; the worst that could happen was that Sawyer or her office staff, if any, could just tell him to go away; but Captain Elizabeth Sawyer was a legendary figure. The planet was named for her, after all. She had been second-in-command of the first expedition to the Alpha Centauri system, one of a handful of people to have been on the first landings on two terraformed planets, and the leader of the expedition which first landed on this one. Among her other accomplishments.

  The elevator stopped and the opened. There was a single office door of the foyer, with a sign bearing a simple SE logo. He straightened his clothes, ran a hand through his hair, took a breath and opened the office door.

  Unlike the building’s lobby, Sawyer
Enterprise’s office had a human receptionist, a very fit-looking blond man who could have been, given modern antagathic drugs, anywhere from his early-thirties to mid-fifties. He had an air of confidence which suggested more the latter, and idly Carson wondered if “bodyguard” was included in his job description. He looked vaguely familiar, but Carson couldn’t place him.

  The man looked up from his desk as Carson entered. “Can I help you?”

  “I’m Doctor Hannibal Carson. I have an appointment.”

  The man looked him up and down, like a sergeant inspecting a grunt, then touched a comm-panel on his desk. “He’s here.”

  “Thanks, Poul. Show him in.”

  Poul? Carson wondered. “Are you—”

  “This way, please,” Poul said, cutting him off, and steered him toward the inner doorway which had opened in the wall behind the desk.

  A woman, gray-haired and tall, surprisingly fit for someone ninety and looking more like sixty, rose to meet him, extending her hand. “Doctor Carson, I take it?”

  “Yes Ma’am, uh, Captain.”

  “I retired from that a long time ago. You can call me Elizabeth, or Doctor Sawyer if you prefer.” She sat back down in her chair, wincing slightly as she did so.

  “Elizabeth . . . .” the blond man began.

  “Hush Poul, I’m fine. Run along now.”

  The man frowned at Carson, but turned and left.

  Carson couldn’t help himself. “Was that . . . ?”

  “Poul Tyrell? Yes. You’ll have to excuse him; he’s very protective of me. Pain in the ass sometimes, to tell the truth. He insisted on being here today.”

  No wonder he’d looked familiar. Poul Tyrell had been born on this planet, back in the days of the Anderson expedition. His story was part of the legend. Carson realized that Sawyer was looking at him expectantly. “Sorry, I . . .” Carson gathered himself together. “Doctor Sawyer, first, thank you for your time. I’m honored to—”

  “Thanks son, but stow it. Several people persuaded me I should see you, and that I was the only one who could answer some important questions, but they were kind of cagey about just what. So, what does an archeologist want with me? Surely not permission to excavate the Anderson, right? It’s not even buried.”

  “What? No, nothing like that. Here,” he said, pulling out his data-pad and bringing up the sketch Williams had done of Ketzshanass. It was a pretty good likeness. “I understand you may have once seen something like this.” He turned the pad and placed it on Sawyer’s desk, facing her.

  She paled slightly, then looked at him intently. “What is this, and why would you think that?”

  “This is a sketch of an alien I encountered some parsecs from here. It’s a sketch because my camera wouldn’t record. And I read a recently declassified report that you had a similar experience shortly after you first landed.”

  “Declassified?”

  “Well, classification lowered.”

  “They probably thought I’d be dead by now. Bureaucrats.”

  He wasn’t sure how to respond to that. “It’s still secret,” he said. “So, is this what you saw?”

  Sawyer sat back in her chair and put her hands together, steepling her fingers. “That was a long time ago. I never saw it up close. But yes, it could have been the same species. Who are they?”

  “Unfortunately, they’re not ready to make contact, so the one I met wasn’t prepared to go into detail. He did imply that they have been observing us for a while. Can you tell me anything else about that siting, or any others?”

  “It should all have been in the report. I never saw it again, in fact it disappeared almost as I watched. I asked Naomi later about stealth or camouflage technology. Other than data dropouts on our recording devices—like your camera I imagine—there was nothing.”

  “Okay.” Carson was reminded of something. “Camouflage, you said?”

  “Well, here one minute, gone the next, with no obvious places to hide. Why?”

  “Back on . . . well, the first time I saw their ship, it seemed to disappear soon after. Stealth or camouflage could explain that.”

  “Their ship? What was it like?”

  “That was the crazy thing. It looked like a flying pyramid.” He probably shouldn’t have said that, but there wasn’t much anyone could do with that information. Just another UFO report.

  “A pyramid? Have you talked to Finley?”

  Finley? The name clicked. He was also on the original Anderson team. “Do you mean Peter Finley, the geologist? No, why?”

  “Yes, him. What do you know about Pete’s Peak, or whatever they’re calling it these days?

  Carson wondered where that question had come from.

  “Near your original landing site?” Carson said. “Not much. An old volcanic neck, isn’t it?”

  “That’s what our reports said, yes. It hasn’t been explored since, as far as I know.”

  “And you would likely know.”

  Sawyer and the other original crew weren’t officially part of the Sawyers World government, but from what Carson had heard, very little escaped them. “It’s off-limits, isn’t it? Part of the range of the Finley’s leopard, or something.”

  “It is, yes.”

  “Then why the question? You don’t think it’s a volcanic neck? You’re a geologist, you would know.”

  “I would. There’s a lot that the write-up on that peak carefully doesn’t say. When we first saw it, Pete said it reminded him of pyramids in the Yucatan jungle, poking up above the tree tops.”

  “What?”

  “It’s dirt and vegetation covered, and I can’t imagine that it’s a spaceship, but from the air it had a squarish outline. But then sometimes so do volcanic remains, especially if there are radiating dikes.”

  Carson took a minute to digest this. He’d seen similar tree-covered pyramids himself, once, back on Earth. He’d never paid much attention to Pete’s Peak; extinct volcanoes weren’t his passion. He knew there had been intelligent natives here on Sawyers World at one point, since ancient paleolithic sites had been found. But they were far from the Anderson site, except for a few, even older, scattered stone knives and spear-points. It had probably been a hunting area, tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago. The pyramid-building Spacefarers, from what Carson had deduced about them, had preferred to build near early agricultural societies. He had to admit, though, that his hypothesis was based on extremely limited evidence.

  “So, you think it might be a pyramid? That there’s a connection?”

  “I have no idea. I never went near it after our first flyover. But Pete and Naomi climbed it. He’s the one you should ask, especially if you’ve seen one of those, too.”

  Carson thought her tone suggested she knew more than she was letting on. “Just how much do you know about what I’ve seen?”

  “Officially? Just what you’ve told me. But we have our sources.” She smiled at him.

  Carson could imagine. The common saying that the Families owned half the planet was of course a complete exaggeration. It wasn’t even technically correct to call them the Founding Families. Most of the team members of the Anderson expedition, who had spent nearly four Earth-years voluntarily marooned on this planet until the return expedition, had indeed formed families and even, as in the case of Maclaren Arms, thriving companies. But the founders of Sawyer City had been part of the second wave of colonization. The Original Eight had parlayed their valuable experience settling the planet into considerable holdings, but none of them had particularly aspired to political or economic power beyond that necessary to be left the hell alone when they wanted to be.

  And therein was the problem. From what Carson knew—although he rarely followed even local politics, except where it interacted with his university or possible expedition funding—Peter Finley liked to be left the hell alone.

  “You think I should talk to Doctor Finley.”

  “Didn’t I just say that? But you’ll have to set up the meeting yourself. I�
��ll mention it to him, but you go through your own channels, and leave my name out of it.”

  “I . . . all right. I’ll do that.” Carson rose to leave. “Thank you so much for your time.”

  “Not at all. It’s nice to have some confirmation that I did see something. Sometimes I wondered. Oh, before you go . . . .”

  “Yes?” Carson said, turning back to her.

  “The alien you met. What do they call themselves?”

  “Ketzshanass. The individual was named Ketzshanass. He said to refer to them as Kesh.” He paused as a realization struck him, then added, “I’ve been assuming that refers to their homeworld rather than a species name, but I could be wrong. In fact, given how little he was willing to reveal about their homeworld, it could have been made up on the spot and they call themselves something else entirely.”

  “Oh? One name is as good as another, I suppose. Thank you, Doctor Carson.”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  As Carson left the office, he signaled for an autocab to take him back to campus. It pulled up just as he exited the building. Its promptness surprised Carson; the building was toward the edge of town, and he wouldn’t have expected much demand. The mysteries of autocab optimization were something Carson occasionally wondered about, but never for long enough to actually look into.

  He climbed into the cab. “Drake University,” he told it.

  “Acknowledged,” the cab responded, and pulled away from the office building.

  CHAPTER 14: DINNER

  Roberts

  Now: Aboard the Sophie

  WITH SOME FREE time before dinner, Jackie Roberts sat cross-legged on the bunk in her cabin, working with the celestial navigation program on her tablet. Eighty-Two Eridani was a pretty easy straight run from Tau Ceti, just under nine days in warp, but it had been long enough since the last time she’d been there that a refresher was in order.