The Eridani Convergence

by Alastair Mayer

  “Thanks.” The two of them went forward. On the way, Tevnar grabbed a head-set and handed it to Roberts. “Here. And the light-sabers are stowed in a rack by the hatch.”

  “Light-sabers?” said Roberts, sounding as mystified as Carson was.

  “Marshaling wands. Okay, they are a bit short for light-sabers, but you must admit—”

  “Oh, I agree.” The illuminated batons were designed to make hand-waving signals easily visible. “I’m just surprised you’re familiar with old Earth sci-fi.”

  “Just some of your classics. Keeps me entertained in deep space.”

  Roberts chuckled and headed for the airlock.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Jackie did a quick walk-around of the Razgon, not so much checking the starship as looking for branches, tree trunks or other potential obstacles, then headed to the aft end of the ship and walked back thirty meters, scanning the ground. The trees gave away quickly away from the edge of the cliff, and the ground was clear but for some low scrub.

  “Looks good,” she told Tevnar over the headset. She raised the wands. “Come on back.”

  “Moving back.”

  It was odd seeing the ship backing up under its own power without hearing the whine of air being ducted through the fans. One of the advantages of a Sandquist. As she slowly walked back, gesturing with the marshaling wands while scanning left and right for obstacles, she was reminded of her days as a ramp rat when she was a teenager. Many pilots she knew had done that early in their careers; it was useful experience.

  The starboard wingtip was nearing a tree branch. “Hold up,” she said while waving the wands. “Tree limb to starboard. Pivot to your right fifteen degrees if your nose is clear.” She made the appropriate signal with the wands.

  “Roger that. I have room.”

  The craft started to pivot clockwise, moving its nose closer to the trees and the cliff but swinging the wingtip away from the tree.

  “How am I doing?”

  “Another meter should do it.”

  There was a brief pause. “Tight squeeze, but okay.” The ship yawed a little more, then stopped.

  “Okay, that’s good. Straight back now.” Roberts waved the wands backward.

  The Razgon rolled a little farther, still turning but straightened up and backed out. Roberts waved it back another thirty meters.

  “How’s that? Clear forward?” Jackie could see the nose from her position.

  “Yep, and clear above. Thank you, much easier.”

  “No problem.” Jackie walked back toward Tevnar’s ship, turning off the wands and removing the headset as she went.

  “Been a while since I’ve done that,” she said as she reentered the ship and stowed the gear.

  “Doesn’t look like you’ve lost your touch. Is there enough clearance to the Sophie?” Neither pilot wanted the ships too close to avoid the other’s downwash.

  “No problem. Let’s help you get things stowed for take-off.”

  “That would be appreciated.”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  With both ships readied for space, Carson and Roberts lifted first in the Sophie, climbing vertically on her ventral thrusters until well clear of the top of the escarpment, then transitioning to horizontal flight before pitching up and heading for space. Two minutes later, the Razgon executed a similar maneuver and followed the Sophie a few tens of kilometers behind, increasing speed to catch up with her in orbit.

  CHAPTER 40: MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE RANCH

  Sawyers World, Homeworld Security

  “YOU LOOK WORRIED,” Malcolm Brown said to Ducayne as they arrived at Briefing Room Two, the one with the puke-green carpet. It was more of a dark greenish chartreuse, but somebody had once referred to it as “puke-green” and the term had stuck.

  “Disturbing reports about the Velkaryan political situation,” Ducayne said.

  “Trouble in Venezuela?”

  “Among other places. Verdigris too. It would seem they have a thing for place-names starting with the letter V.”

  “Velkaryans. But they’re also in plenty of other places.”

  “Sure. Just a random observation.” Ducayne said. “Anything new from the UFO files, or the Belize wreckage?”

  “Not much on the UFOs,” Brown said. “Very few sightings where the observer saw any markings, as in the Sirocco case. Of those, most of the descriptions aren’t detailed enough to know what they were describing. At least Zamora drew a diagram.”

  “Does the symbol match anything on the Belize debris?”

  “Not on anything they’ve recovered so far, at least that my sources are aware of.” Brown had a channel to one of the groups on Earth involved in the Belize investigation. Unfortunately, most of what they’d found had been small fragments; the consensus was that the ship had either blown up when it crash-landed or been deliberately scuttled. “That doesn’t prove anything, any markings I’ve found so far are worn and eroded, a lot of them are incomplete. But we’ve been able to get some detailed analysis done on parts of the debris. Some of the things that look like parts of a control panel, for example. Electron micrography and tomographic scans show evidence of lettering where it has worn down to invisibility to the naked eye. I’ve been compiling a database of all the symbols found so far, and a concordance of sequences that look like words. The language looks logographic rather than alphabetic. Another possible tie to Sumerian.”

  “Hmm. Deciphered any of it yet?”

  Brown wished they had. “We don’t exactly have a Rosetta Stone for it, but some symbols are likely numerals, and we have a few tentative words or word-symbols that appear on some of the controls. Possibly the equivalent of ‘OFF’ and ‘ON’, but I have no idea which might be which.”

  “Well, that’s something, anyway,” Ducayne said. “And it bears no relationship to the language in the Chara pyramid?”

  “Not so far. The Kesh—assuming it was them—probably had some written language of their own before discovering how to get into their pyramid, or far enough into it anyway.”

  “What about the artifact on Tanith? Does anything correlate with the pictures we got?”

  “Yes, some symbols appear on both.” It had been an exciting moment when he’d realized that, although there were slight stylistic differences. “Several of those that we think are numerals.”

  “Interesting. Now I really want to get my hands on that gadget.”

  “Oh? You didn’t before?”

  “Of course I did. But it’s sounding even more interesting. I could use some good news.”

  Ducayne had mentioned disturbing reports when he’d arrived. “So, what is happening with the Velkaryans?” Brown asked.

  “For one, I think they have a starship factory on Verdigris, probably at New Toronto.”

  Brown didn’t think Ducayne meant that quite the way it sounded. Yes, Verdigris had technical infrastructure approaching that of Sawyers World, but even Sawyers wasn’t quite up to producing starships without importing a lot of components. “Well, they might make hulls and such, but what about the engines?”

  “That’s just it,” Ducayne said. “I’ve been analyzing their import lists for the past couple of years—and that’s just the stuff we know about, we don’t know how much they’ve smuggled, although we know it must be some—and a lot of the equipment that companies there, especially New Toronto companies, have bought is potentially dual-use. Semiconductor fabrication systems, for example. That’s expensive equipment and it makes sense to have local places to get spare parts for computers, omnis, ship avionics and what-have-you. However, fabrication of the monolithic subsystems of a warp pod or a fusion engine uses very similar equipment. Not that Earth has many regulations, as such, regarding exporting that gear, except to religious settlements. Most worlds don’t have the economy to support it. This planet is one of the exceptions, Verdigris may be another.”

  Sawyers World did have a small starship industry, which mostly supplied parts to the Kiahuna Shipyards in orbit over Ka
kuloa, but also built specialty ships for customers who could afford it.

  Ducayne continued. “A fabrication line for one could be modified to the other, and in the case of some of the brands and models they imported, it wouldn’t be too hard for some skilled engineers to do so.”

  “And they have those skilled engineers?”

  “Yes. They have an active recruitment program, and a good local college. Since there’s not much call for arts majors on the frontier worlds, it specializes in technology and engineering.”

  “That might explain why Carson and Roberts were waved off from landing at New Toronto a few months back. If they are building ships, there would be a lot of them at the spaceport. Do we have reconnaissance photos?”

  “No. The damned skyweed season on Verdigris lasts most of the year. New Toronto is hidden under a green blanket most of the time. It’s not a problem for radar, but that also announces the transmitter’s presence.”

  The near-permanent layers of floating, almost microscopic, aerophytoplankton—skyweed—that had given Verdigris its name would of course make excellent cover for something wanting to hide from overhead observation without making it obvious that it was trying to. “Do we have assets on the ground?”

  “If I had any, I wouldn’t be griping so much. In Verdigris City, yes, but that’s half a world away from New Toronto, and with not a lot of travel between the two. The reports I am getting out of Verdigris City are a little unsettling. More Velkaryan presence in local government, and one of the big biochemical companies there was recently acquired by another with Velkaryan connections.

  “Couple that with the apparent missing device from the looted pyramid near New Toronto, and it’s pretty obvious that the Velkaryans have a strategic presence there.”

  “It does sound like it,” Brown said. “Speaking of pyramids, did your team find a corresponding room in the Chara pyramid, with a device?”

  Ducayne had sent a follow-up team to Chara III when Carson first reported back from there, but they didn’t know then about the hidden chamber in the upper part of the similar pyramid on Verdigris. Carson had discovered it during a stopover on Verdigris on the way to Zeta Reticuli, and neither Brown nor Ducayne heard about it until Carson and his team had returned, a few weeks ago.

  “I haven’t heard back yet.” Ducayne said. “Chara is twenty-nine light years away, so at least three weeks in warp each way, plus refueling stops, plus time on the planet. No message torpedo, but if they found something worth coming back with immediately, they could show up in the next week or so.”

  “Ah. Well, here’s hoping,” Brown said. He changed the subject. “What’s happening in Venezuela?” He had been too focused on UFOs and the Belize find to pay much attention.

  “Nothing good. There’s the expulsion of extraterrestrials, of course, but there weren’t more than a handful. The Venezuela delegation introduced a resolution at the UdT Council to grant more autonomy to the colony planets.”

  “That doesn’t sound so bad.”

  “Except that they’ve been infiltrating a lot of the local planetary governments. The phrasing of the resolution is subtle, but one take on it is that it would exempt the independent planets from various Union de Terre charters unless and until those planets joined the UdT as members, and maybe not even then. Which means that UdT protections would no longer apply to any local intelligent species—or anything else on the planet for that matter.”

  “Ugh. I can see where some people might like that. They still gripe about Kakuloa.”

  “Yeah. Ironically, though, it still wouldn’t do anything for the old squidberry plantation owners or the tree-squid reservations. Per the amendments to the Treaty of Alpha Centauri, Kakuloa falls under both UdT and Sawyers World protections. And yet they’re using that treaty as precedent for granting other worlds independence.”

  “That’s a bit of a stretch,” Brown said.

  “When has that stopped a lawyer or a diplomat?”

  “Point taken. But it’s just Venezuela; the resolution won’t pass.”

  Ducayne shook his head no. “There are a surprising number of other countries siding with that point of view, or with other parts of the resolution. Most of them are former colonies or invaded territories themselves, two or three centuries back.”

  “But the UdT is hardly imperial Britain, or France, or Spain, or Japan. It’s more like, oh, I don’t know,” Brown said, casting around for some innocuous trading empire of that era. “The Netherlands, say.”

  “Bad example. You need to refresh your history. The Dutch East India Company? Indonesia, Malacca, Ceylon, Surinam, Guyana, South Africa—”

  Brown raised a hand to interrupt. “You’ve made your point. You’re right; bad example. My point was that the Union de Terre is more like the old United Nations and areas under its protection were not under colonial rule.”

  “Most areas under its protection were either war zones or vast wastelands like Antarctica. Even the UdT, which this organization is nominally part of, carries that legacy. We’re Homeworld Security, not Humanity’s Security. What do you think UdT’s first reaction would be if hostile spacefaring aliens landed on, say, Skead? Or, better example, Taprobane? They’d pull in and start building defenses around the Solar System, that’s what.

  “No, I have nothing against the colony planets having a little more autonomy and certainly the ability to protect themselves. I just don’t want them thinking they need to protect themselves against other human or human-friendly planets, let alone accidentally starting a war with the Kesh or whoever else is out there. And with the Velkaryans, it might not even be accidentally. They are dangerous because they’re loose cannons.”

  “Do the Velkaryans know about the Kesh? Or the degkhidesh?”

  “I don’t know. They’re more likely to know about the Kesh, or at least their flying pyramid spaceships. They encountered one at Zeta Reticuli, according to Carson. We don’t know if they’ve reported that back yet, but I got word that the Carcharodon is on 82 Eridani.”

  “That’s where you sent Carson, isn’t it? And Jackie Roberts is there?”

  “Yes, on both counts. I didn’t get word until Roberts was on her way.”

  “But before Carson left?”

  Ducayne nodded. “That’s one reason I sent him.”

  “Does he know that?” Brown asked.

  “That may have slipped my mind. He can take care of himself.”

  Very little slipped Ducayne’s mind, Brown thought, wondering what Ducayne was up to. “Indeed. I just hope he doesn’t have to.”

  CHAPTER 41: CHANGE OF PLANS

  82 Eridani, near Anaid, Tanith’s moon

  “DOCKING COLLAR soft-docked,” Tevnar’s voice came over the radio.

  “Roger that, Razgon. Engaging latches.” Jackie Roberts touched a control and, from above and behind, the sound of docking latches locking into place conducted through the Sophie’s hull. She watched as the circle of indicator lights turned from red to green. “All secure. Hard dock.”

  “Confirmed, Sophie.”

  The Sophie and Razgon had met at the Tanith – Anaid L1 point, far enough away from either that the ships would go unnoticed, yet a convenient reference point for a rendezvous. Razgon had extended a docking tube between the two ships, connecting to the docking port above and behind the Sophie’s cockpit. The docking port in turn connected to overhead of Sophie’s airlock, through which Burnside and Tevnar now floated to join Roberts and Carson.

  “I want to propose a change of plans,” Burnside said. “I think we should split up. Much as I’m curious about what Tevnar found at Kapteyn’s star, Hannibal here is the one with archeological expertise and, if it is alien, more likely to recognize it for what it’s worth.”

  “What are you going to do?” Carson asked.

  “I need to find out what Vaughan is up to on Verdigris. I can’t imagine he would leave the system without checking that crate. Tevnar, how long would it take him to realize he had a fake on h
is hands?”

  “Five minutes, if that. It would pass a quick glance in a poorly lit warehouse, but not someone poking at it,” the timoan said.

  “If he didn’t come back, there must be some important reason for him to continue on to Delta Pavonis.”

  “If that’s really where he’s going,” Roberts said. “Just because he filed a flight plan . . . .”

  “Doesn’t mean he’s going there, right. What time was the flight plan filed?”

  “I don’t remember,” Roberts said. “Let me check.” She accessed the Sophie’s computer—it would have uploaded all the updated public information from the spaceport’s systems as a matter of course before departure, to sync with the network at her destination; otherwise there was little point in filing flight plans—and pulled up the record she had checked earlier.

  “Oh. They filed it yesterday, at 14:37. Early afternoon. Well before stealing the crate and shooting Tevnar.”

  “And after the Speedwell entered the system, so time enough to get any messages it was carrying,” Burnside said. “I think maybe Vaughan was recalled.”

  “He could still have lied on the flight plan, as a matter of course,” Carson said.

  “Probably not,” Roberts said. “The captain filed the plan, not Vaughan, and any ship which routinely filed false flight plans would eventually raise flags in the system. A ship that was reported missing and then showed up elsewhere would be investigated. Neither the captain nor Vaughan would want that. Easier to just not file in the first place.”

  “She’s right,” Tevnar said.

  Carson had noticed Tevnar’s apparent lack of discomfort in the now weightless environment. “Zero-gee doesn’t seem to bother you the way it does Marten,” he said. “I thought timoans didn’t like free-fall?”

  “I wouldn’t say that I liked it either, but I’d be a pretty poor pilot if it distressed me. The first few times were . . . uncomfortable . . . but I got used to it. Not all humans like it either, right?”