The Centauri Surprise Read online

  THE CENTAURI SURPRISE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 by Alastair Mayer

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned or distributed in any printed, electronic or other form without permission. E-book editions of this book are available wherever fine e-books are sold.

  T-Space is a trademark of Alastair Mayer

  Cover © 2019 by Mabash Books

  Image credits:

  Spaceship © lurii - Depositphotos.com

  Glass House Mountains © Alex88xxx - Depositphotos.com

  Images used by permission.

  A Mabash Books Original

  First printing, August 2019

  Mabash Books, Centennial, Colorado

  Amazon Kindle Edition

  Acknowledgments

  Many people contributed to the creation of this book in one way or another, from the feedback and enthusiasm of readers of the earlier books, to the encouragement from fellow writers to keep at it through some major changes, for which I thank them all. As originally envisioned, the events of The Centauri Surprise and the next volume, The Pavonis Insurgence, were to be covered by a single book. It soon became clear that the result would be twice as long as originally planned, and far more complicated, so it warranted a split. It also meant this book took a lot longer to finish than I expected it would. The good news is that most of The Pavonis Insurgence is already written.

  The chapter “Pavonis-b”, and in particular the description of the alien vegetation Jackie sees, is partly inspired by David S. Stevenson’s Under A Crimson Sun (Prospects for Life in Red Dwarf Systems) (Springer, 2013). That book is well worth reading if you’re interesting in the scientific possibility of such life, or planetary development in general.

  Thanks also to my first readers/editors, Robert, Jill, and (the other) Robert, for their corrections and comments. Any remaining errors are mine, not theirs.

  -- Alastair Mayer, Colorado, Summer 2019

  Glossary

  Chara: G type star 27.5 light-years from Earth, also called Beta Canorum Venaticum.

  Delta Pavonis: G type star 19.9 light-years from Earth, approximately 16.5 light-years from Alpha Centauri. Home star of the planet Verdigris.

  Kakuloa: Alpha Centauri B II - terraformed planet orbiting the second largest star (B) in the Alpha Centauri system.

  Kapteyn’s Star: a red dwarf star about 12 light-years from Earth. It is known to have at least two planets, each larger than Earth, and orbiting in or near the habitable zone.

  Kesh: Aliens encountered by Carson, Roberts and Marten at Zeta Reticuli, possessing advanced technology. They neither confirmed nor denied that Zeta Reticuli was their home system, but it is currently (so far as Carson knows) uninhabited.

  omni: Short for omniphone - compares to today’s smartphones as smartphones compare to walky-talkies. (Look for “Nokia Morph” on YouTube for a nearly-there concept video.)

  omniphone: See omni.

  parsec: A distance of approximately 3.26 light-years.

  Proxima: Also called Alpha Centauri C, a red dwarf star which slowly orbits the two main stars of the system at a distance of roughly 0.2 light-years.

  Sapphire: A class of small interstellar ship (S-class), capable of sleeping about six if they’re close friends, with a range of just over 20 light-years on full tanks.

  Sawyers World: Alpha Centauri A II - second planet orbiting the largest star (A) in the Alpha Centauri system, the first extrasolar planet settled by humans. (See the Alpha Centauri trilogy.)

  Tanith: 82 Eridani IV - fourth (hypothetical) planet orbiting the star 82 Eridani. In real life, this star is known to have at least three planets, all larger than Earth.

  Taprobane: Epsilon Indi III - Third planet orbiting Epsilon Indi, home world of timoans.

  thruster: High-efficiency reaction drive, a kind of fusion-powered arc-jet.

  timoan: (Analogous to “human”) The sentient natives of Taprobane. Descended from the ancestral species of terrestrial mongoose and meerkats the way humans are descended from the ancestral species of monkeys or lemurs.

  T-space: Terraformed (or Terraform) space - Usual term for “known space,” a spheroid of stars centered on Earth and about 50 light-years in diameter. So-called because many of the sun-like stars within it were found to have planets that were not merely Earth-like, but deliberately terraformed.

  Unholy War: A nuclear war which took place in the first half of the 21st century, involving primarily the smaller nuclear powers, purportedly for religious reasons.

  Union de Terre: Union of Earth, the successor to the United Nations formed after the events of and immediately after the Unholy War. Typically abbreviated UDT, since the English “Terran Union” has an unfortunate acronym.

  Velkaryans: Church of Divine Stellar Providence. A group with both political and religious ambitions. A core belief is that God created the terraformed planets specifically for humans.

  Verdigris: Delta Pavonis III - third planet orbiting the star Delta Pavonis, so named for its greenish hue and the heavy jungle covering the habitable areas.

  warp bubble: The thin shell of highly-curved space surrounding a ship in FTL flight. Based on Van Den Broek’s lower-energy configuration of an Alcubierre warp metric.

  Zeta Reticuli: A pair of G type stars separated by about 0.1 light-year at a distance of 39.2 light-years from Earth. (Technically, Zeta 1 and Zeta 2 Reticuli)

  PREVIOUSLY . . .

  Spoiler Warning: the summaries below necessarily reveal some details of the prior books

  In The Chara Talisman:

  Archeologist Hannibal Carson finds the remains of a high-tech talisman in a primitive tomb on the planet Verdigris, in the Delta Pavonis system. A ruthless cult, the Velkaryans, believes it may be a clue to a lost cache of alien weapons. Homeworld Security enlists Carson, together with a starship pilot, Jacqueline “Jackie” Roberts, and Carson's timoan partner, Marten, to decipher the clue and find whatever it points to before the Velkaryans do.

  On a planet orbiting the star Chara, thirty light years on the far side of terraformed space, they find a mysterious pyramid and its high-tech contents. After several run-ins with the Velkaryans, gaining an ally named Rico, they manage to return, but some of what they found was destroyed.

  In The Reticuli Deception:

  Captain Jackie Roberts uses the star patterns inscribed on several similar talismans to discover that they were drawn from a common point-of-view, a point somewhere near the Zeta Reticuli star systems. Carson recalls a legendary UFO encounter, the Betty Hill Incident, after which Ms. Hill drew a star map she claimed to have seen while aboard the alien craft. That map showed “trade routes” from Zeta Reticuli to our sun and other nearby stars. But the records of the map are second and third hand, virtually illegible.

  Roberts, with Carson and Marten, takes her ship, Sophie, to Zeta Reticuli. Rico and another Homeworld Security man, Brown, go to Earth to try to retrieve the original UFO reports. Everyone runs into trouble. A Velkaryan team, led by a man named Reid, also wants those files. Rico is shot and left for dead, but Brown escapes. En route to Zeta Reticuli, Roberts and company are initially refused landing on Verdigris, but land anyway. They find another pyramid, this one already broken into.

  They continue on to Zeta Reticuli, where they have a close encounter of the third kind with a mysterious alien and another run-in with Velkaryans in the person of a man named Vaughan and his ship Carcharodon. The aliens temporarily isolate the Velkaryans, while our heroes return home empty-handed bu
t for their knowledge of the encounter.

  In The Eridani Convergence:

  A Timoan starship pilot, Tevnar, finds a wreck on a planet orbiting Kapteyn’s star, a red dwarf.

  Vaughan and the Carcharodon awake in deep space, leaving Zeta Reticuli. They set course to Tanith, orbiting 82 Eridani, to refuel and make minor repairs.

  Jackie Roberts has resumed her cargo and courier business, and at Tau Ceti gets a message from Ducayne of Homeworld Security that he needs something picked up on Tanith. There, she meets up with Ducayne’s agent, Jordan Burnside. He still hasn’t retrieved the package, a possible artifact. Worse, she sees the Carcharodon in port.

  Carson has a run-in on Sawyers World. Ducayne, to get him away and wanting someone to validate the artifact, sends him to 82 Eridani also.

  Tevnar found the artifact in the wreck at Kapteyn’s star. Vaughan wants it too, but is recalled to the planet Verdigris. He attempts to grab it before leaving, but after a gun battle, ultimately departs without it. Burnside wants to pursue him to Verdigris, at Delta Pavonis, to find out what was so urgent. He goes with Tevnar. Carson and Roberts take the Sophie to Kapteyn’s where they briefly examines the wreck Tevnar found, then head home. Later, Tevnar reports that Burnside chose to stay on Verdigris to investigate further.

  Contents

  Acknowlegments

  Glossary

  Previously . . .

  Chapter 1: The Sleeper Wakes

  Chapter 2: Talisman

  Chapter 3: Ricardo Questioned

  Chapter 4: Paleography

  Chapter 5: Velkaryans

  Chapter 6: Meeting Arranged

  Chapter 7: Finley

  Chapter 8: Report from Earth

  Chapter 9: The Chara Pyramid

  Chapter 10: Debriefing

  Chapter 11: Different Plans

  Chapter 12: Reid

  Chapter 13: Academia

  Chapter 14: Rico Relocated

  Chapter 15: Dinner

  Chapter 16: Rico's Room

  Chapter 17: Rick's Café

  Chapter 18: Proxima

  Chapter 19: Office Hours

  Chapter 20: Proxima-b

  Chapter 21: Training Exercise

  Chapter 22: Leaving Kakuloa

  Chapter 23: Leaving Proxima

  Chapter 24: Mandragore

  Chapter 25: Sophie's Return

  Chapter 26: The Chara Artifact

  Chapter 27: Finley Revisited

  Chapter 28: Reid's Return

  Chapter 29: Matthews

  Chapter 30: Ducayne

  Chapter 31: Expedition

  Chapter 32: Rico Revisited

  Chapter 33: Trek

  Chapter 34: Space Guard

  Chapter 35: Pete's Peak

  Chapter 36: Rico's Revelation

  Chapter 37: At the Pyramid

  Chapter 38: Rico's Reassignment

  Chapter 39: Pyramid concealed

  Chapter 40: Artifacts

  Chapter 41: Rico Retrained

  Chapter 42: Theorizing

  Chapter 43: Investigating the Object

  Chapter 44: Pyramid Revisited

  Chapter 45: Briefing Interrupted

  Chapter 46: Pyramid

  Chapter 47: Invasion

  Chapter 48: Pyramid Opened

  Chapter 49: Wrapping up

  Chapter 50: Dinner

  Epilogue

  Next

  CHAPTER 1: THE SLEEPER WAKES

  Elsewhere.

  RICO OPENED HIS eyes, or thought he did; it stayed dark. There was a faint smell, like a mix of medicinal and electronic odors, and he could hear the faint hum of machinery. Where was he? He tried to remember. There had been the firefight at the Denver Spaceport. Brown had already boarded the ship when Reid and the others showed up. Rico had been covering Brown’s escape with the files he’d retrieved. He remembered seeing the ship lift; Brown had gotten away. Then pain, and everything had gone dim. He’d been shot. Rico now knew where he was. In a traumapod. Again.

  Crap. Maybe the Velkaryans who’d been shooting at him had left him for the police to find, but it was more likely that it was the Velkaryans who had managed to get him to the traumapod. Their intentions wouldn’t be friendly. He’d almost rather be held by the police. Any third option was unlikely. He groped around the pod’s interior, surprised that he wasn’t restrained. He wondered if there were any way to get out of the pod, and then escape from wherever the pod was, without being caught. The release button should be about—

  “Ah, Mr. Lee. Or should I say Rico?” the voice came over the traumapod’s internal speaker. “I see you’re finally awake.”

  Well, so much for plan A, thought Rico.

  The head end of the traumapod opened up and Rico blinked against the bright light. The platform or cot on which he was lying slid out, and Rico saw his . . . captors? Rescuers? The two of them didn’t look like cops. One was garbed in something that looked like nurse’s scrubs, he must be the med-tech. The other wore plain civilian clothes, not too casual, like office wear. Both looked to be tough, no-nonsense types. Not uniformed cops, but the guy in civvies might be a detective, or an agent for some bureau. Or, they could be Velkaryan agents.

  “How are you feeling?” the plain-clothed man asked. The question was asking for data; there was no empathy in it.

  Rico took inventory. He remembered bruises down his left side from the car he’d deliberately crashed, and gunshot wounds to his right thigh and left shoulder. Had there been another one? He didn’t remember. All he felt now was the general weakness from spending time out cold in the pod, and some itching where he’d been shot. The rapid cell regrowth, no doubt.

  “I’ve been worse, especially considering,” he said. “How long?” Then he added, “And who is Rico?”

  “I’ll ask the questions. And nice try, but the government DNA tagging doesn’t hide who you really are, it just tells the ID scanners not to ask. What happened to Hopkins? We have reports that you were working for him.”

  Really? Interesting. Hopkins had been Rico’s boss before they had gotten involved with Carson and that disastrous trip to Chara III. The truth couldn’t hurt here. “No, he’s dead. Malfunction with one of his ship-to-ship missiles. I don’t know all the details. I was in the back of the Starhawk, Hopkin’s ship, flash-blinded from an earlier explosion, when something blew up. We must have crashed. I came to later with a massive concussion. A couple of folks had stumbled over the wreckage and got me into a traumapod. I don’t know if anyone else survived, but I’m pretty sure Hopkins didn’t.” Okay, so it wasn’t the whole truth.

  “What was with the shootout at Denver Spaceport?”

  Interesting. ‘Denver Spaceport’, not ‘the spaceport’. So they weren’t in Kansas, or Colorado, anymore. “Ask the other guys, they started it. Aaugh!” His abdomen cramped as something delivered a sharp shock to it.

  “That’s what you get for lying. It was actually you who fired the first shots. So, why?”

  Rico wondered if they had some kind of lie-detecting technology built into the traumapod, or if they already knew more than they were letting on. Possibly both. “If you know that much, you can guess why. He tried to run me down with his car, and then he was reaching for a gun.” Close enough to the truth. “Don’t I get a lawyer or something?”

  “A lawy—? Oh, no, we’re not the police.”

  He’d figured as much; his question had been a diversion. On the other hand, there was something vaguely cop-like about the guy, not what he’d expect from the Velkaryans or any of the thugs he’d been around when running illegal artifacts for Hopkins.

  “Then who—”

  “I’m the one asking questions. The people you were exchanging shots with, who were they?”

  That was a surprise. “You don’t know?” Maybe they weren’t Velkaryans either. Then who?

  The man just frowned at him, saying nothing.

  “Okay, one of the guys was named Reid.” Rico paused, considering how much to sa
y next. “Uh, you know my name, and about Hopkins. I think Reid was in the same line of business.” Well, sort of. Rico braced for a shock, but it didn’t come.

  “Artifact smuggling? You were shot in the parking lot of a courier outfit, but the only business they were doing that day was off the planet, not receiving anything. Was it something stolen from an Earth collection? What?”

  Rico chose his words carefully, not wanting to invite another shock. “As far as I know there were no alien artifacts, stolen or otherwise, being shipped out. Certainly I didn’t steal any. Maybe Reid did,” he said. It had been stolen files, not alien artifacts, and apparently nobody had yet made the connection to a missing shipment from the Steel Mesa storage facility. “Are you sure you’re not cops?” Because they definitely weren’t asking the kind of questions a Velkaryan might.

  The other ignored the question. “Where did you get your DNA tags?”

  That had been Quentin Ducayne’s doing, just before this little expedition to Earth. Ducayne was a very secretive guy, as was his organization, connected with Homeworld Security. “I don’t think I’m allowed to say.”

  The other glanced at a display and grunted. “Huh, well that seems true enough. Was it government?”

  Rico figured that lying about it would just take them down a pathway he didn’t want to follow. “Yes.”

  “All right, we’ll take that at face value for now.” He looked over at the med-tech. “How’s he doing?”

  The tech scanned a readout on the traumapod, which was obviously still monitoring the sensors stuck to Rico’s body. “Better than I’d have expected, but he should go back in the pod for a while longer.”

  “Okay Rico, back to bed. We’ll talk more later.”

  “Wait. You’re not a cop, and you’re not an, uh, associate of Reid. Who are you?”

  “I’ll get back to you on that.” With that he turned and left the room.