Alpha Centauri: Sawyer's World (T-Space: Alpha Centauri Book 2) Read online

  About Alpha Centauri: Sawyer's World

  When the crew of the USS Poul Anderson opted to land on the second habitable planet in the Alpha Centauri system with no way to return to orbit, they expected the USS Heinlein to be back within weeks to pick them up. It didn’t work out that way.

  ALPHA CENTAURI: SAWYER’S WORLD

  (Book II of the Alpha Centauri Series)

  a novel of early T-SpaceTM

  Alastair Mayer

  Mabash Books

  Alpha Centauri: Sawyer’s World

  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 © 2017 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.

  Cover © 2017 by Mabash Books

  Image credits:

  View of the Earth from space, courtesy NASA

  USS Anderson Leaving Orbit © Alastair Mayer

  Images used by permission.

  T-Space is a trademark of Alastair Mayer

  For announcements about other T-Space books and special offers, sign up for Alastair Mayer’s mailing list at

  http://www.alastairmayer.net/

  A Mabash Books original.

  Second print, minor corrections, June 2017

  First printing, May 2017

  Mabash Books, Centennial, Colorado

  Amazon Kindle edition

  For the explorers and pioneers.

  Acknowledgments

  Inspiration for this story came in part from Jules Verne, for his The Mysterious Island, and Robert A. Heinlein, for his The Tunnel in the Sky. If you enjoyed this book, you will more than enjoy those.

  Thanks to several Codexians (they know who they are) for advice on the medical scenes in this book. Any creative reinterpretation of their suggestions is on me.

  The Sawyer of Sawyer’s World is not, as some may think, named for author Robert Sawyer, much as I enjoy his work. Rather, she is named for a person in my college astrophysics class. Any other resemblances are entirely coincidental, and would be surprising.

  To the readers who enjoyed Volume 1, First Landing, especially those who left reviews, thank you!

  As always, thanks to my kids, Arthur, Robert and Selena (in alphabetical order). And a second thanks to Robert for his first-reader input and suggestions regarding paleobiology, some of which, alas, I couldn’t work into the plot. But there are more books to come.

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Synopsis

  Part I

  1: Touchdown

  2: Three days earlier

  3: Landing zone

  4: Grass

  5: Priorities

  6: Farmsteading

  7: Field Trip

  8: Going Flying

  9: Long Term Planning

  10: An Unexpected Find

  Part II

  11: Status Report, Week One

  12: T-Bird

  13: Westward

  14: A Bird in the bush

  15: Engineering Problems

  16: The Hill

  17: Status Report, Week Six

  18: Observation

  19: Questions

  20: Status Report, Week Fourteen

  Part III

  21: They’re Not Coming

  22: To The Dome

  23: Surprise!

  24: On the Dome

  25: Walk in the Park

  26: To the Pyramid

  27: Making Plans

  28: Pete’s Peak

  29: Sawmill

  30: Ceremony

  31: Status Report, Week Twenty-Six

  32: Birth

  33: Emergency

  34: Firstborn

  Part IV

  35: Status Report, Much Later

  36: A Sound of Thunder

  37: Recovery

  38: Aftermath

  39: Unidentified Objects

  40: Visitors

  Epilog

  The Story So Far

  (Synopsis of Book I, First Landing)

  When a five-ship, international fleet led by USS Heinlein, headed by Commodore Franklin Drake and his second in command and lead geologist, Elizabeth Sawyer, set out on the first warp trip to nearby Alpha Centauri, the original mission plan was that USS Anderson would be held in reserve, in case a landing team needed rescue. No landing would be attempted unless a previously landed refueling pod was operational. When the Xīng Huā disappeared, presumed lost, when entering the system, along with its pod, mission parameters changed, and the Krechet, originally intended to land on Alpha Centauri A II (planet Able) joined the Chandrasekhar on Alpha Centauri B III (Baker) instead.

  Then they discovered that the lifeforms on Baker (renamed Kakuloa) were more than just Earth-like, they might be Earth descended. Without the DNA analyzer, lost with the Xīng Huā, they couldn’t be certain, but the biochemical and anatomical similarities were too strong for coincidence. The geologists thought the crust had gone a major upheaval at about the same time the local lifeforms apparently diverged—or were imported—from Earth. In other words, it looked suspiciously, terrifyingly, like the planet had been terraformed. Sixty or seventy million years ago.

  Orbital surveys and drone landings on Able, the other Earth-like planet in the Alpha Centauri system, suggested that it too might have been terraformed and could support human life. Sawyer argued that the question was important enough to risk landing—“marooning” was the term that Drake had used—a team to investigate further. If there were Terraformers abroad in the galaxy that long ago, they could be capable of anything now, and Earth needed all the information it could get. They also hoped that by leaving themselves in a position where they needed rescue, Earth would be hard pressed to not just turn its collective back and ignore what had been found out here. New ships would be built to rescue them, and to explore further.

  Chapter 1: Touchdown

  Aboard USS Poul Anderson, orbiting Alpha Centauri A II

  “USS Heinlein, this is Sawyer on the Anderson. Do we have a GO for deorbit?”

  “Affirmative, Anderson, this is Drake. That’s a GO. Safe travels.”

  “And to you. Commencing deorbit burn in thirty seconds.”

  Captain Elizabeth Sawyer watched the countdown clock and verified that the Anderson was lined up for the burn. The time ticked back.

  “All hands, deceleration in ten seconds,” she announced.

  This was it. With no way to refuel or return to orbit, this burn would strand them on the planet below until the Heinlein could return from Earth with either another ship or a refueling pod. Sawyer, and her team, believed that what they’d found was worth the risk.

  Five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . ignition!

  She felt herself pushed back into her seat as the burn kicked in, slowing the ship to begin entry into the atmosphere of the second Earth-like planet they had found in the Alpha Centauri system. They were committed now. They weren’t going anywhere but down unless and until a return expedition came to pick them up.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Entering atmosphere, Alpha Centauri A II

  “Retrofire complete,” Sawyer said through the small ship’s address system, but the sudden muting of the engines’ roar and the change in acceleration had told everyone that. She scanned the console as her sh
ip began its plunge through the atmosphere. The black sky out the window lightened to a deep indigo blue as the air grew thicker, then brightened with pink and orange streaks as the energy of the ship’s near-orbital speed heated the air to plasma.

  Sawyer felt herself pushed further into her seat with the increasing gee force. She scanned the instruments and reported back to the USS Heinlein, still in orbit. “On descent track, everything looks nominal.”

  “Roger that. You are GO for landing.”

  “Like we have a choice?” Sawyer replied, amused. They didn’t have enough fuel to abort now. “Roger GO.”

  The orange glow faded to blue sky as they descended through the stratosphere, the ship shuddering at odd intervals as the upper winds buffeted them.

  “I’ve got visual on the landing zone,” Peter Finley, flying copilot, said. “Looks like we’re tracking a kilometer too far east and increasing. We’ve got cross-winds.”

  That wasn’t good. The target zone was a broad, flat area between an ocean to the east and higher ground, rising into hills and low mountains to the west. They had several kilometers to play with, but Sawyer didn’t want to be too near the sea; the ground could be wetlands, or the area might flood during high seas from storm surge. With the extra crew and supplies, they were running heavier than their expected landing weight, and she didn’t want to use landing fuel for adjusting their trajectory unless she had to. But the computer agreed with Finley. It looked like she had to.

  “Roger that. Compensating.” Sawyer tapped a control to let the ship do what it wanted to do. The thrusters fired to adjust the attitude, and she felt a burst of acceleration as the engines fired again, bringing them back onto track. She wanted to put the Anderson down close to the edge of a broad plain—no shallow river valleys after what had almost happened to the Chandra—but she was concerned enough about herds of large animals that she didn’t want to land in the middle of it.

  As the ship descended through ten thousand meters, it was suddenly gripped by strong shaking, rattling them like an aircraft in heavy turbulence. Sawyer heard the whine of the grid-fin motors, and the attitude thrusters fired again as the autopilot tried to compensate. “What the...?”

  “Wind shear,” Finley said, confirming Sawyer’s thoughts.

  And then as quickly as it had begun, the shuddering stopped, and the ship continued a smooth descent toward the surface. Sawyer checked the trajectory and remaining delta-vee. As long as there were no more surprises, they should be fine.

  “Jet stream?” she wondered aloud about the cause of the wind shear.

  “This far south?” Finley said. “Beats me.” He checked his panel and added “Coming through three thousand meters. Stand by for landing gear deploy.”

  Sawyer scanned her display. Their altitude was rapidly unwinding as their vertical speed increased. A third number showed how much delta-vee they could get out of the remaining fuel. The last pair of numbers were converging alarmingly. There wouldn’t be any reserve to hover.

  “Brace yourselves, landing’s going to be a little rough,” she announced.

  There was a ker-chunk of the landing legs extending, and then the gee force suddenly increased as the engines went to full-throttle in a hover-slam maneuver. Their vertical velocity dropped abruptly to zero just as their altitude did. With a thump, they were down.

  Somewhat redundant now, the sensors in the Anderson’s landing gear lit a panel light indicating they had touched the ground.

  “Contact light,” said Finley, wryly.

  “Okay, engines off, pumps off, auxiliary to detent.”

  “Check.”

  Sawyer keyed her microphone. “Heinlein, Sawyer here. The Anderson has landed.”

  “Good to hear from you.”

  “Touchdown was real smooth. A little bit of crosswind at altitude but nothing to worry about.”

  Finley just looked at her and raised his eyebrows. She grinned back at him. She also suspected strongly that Heinlein had been monitoring their descent.

  “Ah, roger that. Very good, Anderson.” Commodore Drake’s voice from Heinlein grew more serious. “Obviously, there’s no immediate return option, but you still need to follow protocol.”

  “Copy that, Heinlein.” She heard the rest of the team moving around behind her and on the lower deck. “The biologists are already checking the atmosphere. They’ll be doing the bio survey shortly.” That involved exposing a “canary”—actually an immune-deficient lab mouse—to unfiltered atmosphere and then monitoring it for ill effects. “We’ll be in BIGs”—biological isolation garments—“ for the next forty-eight hours. Check that, fifty-two hours, we’ll have longer days here.”

  “Roger that, Anderson. Give us a status update when you have something or in two hours, whichever is first.”

  Sawyer checked the mission clock and keyed in a reminder. “You’ve got it, Heinlein. Anderson is listening out.” Sawyer clicked off the microphone and turned to the rest of the crew.

  “All right, people. I want preliminary atmosphere readings, chemical and biological, in a half-hour. We want to confirm the data we got from orbit. If it all checks out, Doctors Klaar and Dejois,” the zoologist and the ecologist, both with broad ranges of experience, “will suit up in BIGs for initial survey. Finley, get a drone up to do a preliminary reconnaissance of the landing area. Let’s see how much we can give Heinlein in two hours.”

  Chapter 2: Three Days Earlier

  Three days earlier, near Alpha Centauri B

  With the return of the landing party from Kakuloa—the informal name they’d given to the Earth-like planet orbiting Alpha Centauri B because their landing area had been reminiscent of Hawaii—there was little left to do but return to Earth. The original mission of objective of exploring both Earth-like planets in the system, one orbiting each sun-like star, had been scrubbed when the Chinese ship Xīng Huā had disappeared shortly before arriving. A gamma ray pulse and expanding debris cloud suggested it had hit something large while still in warp. Whatever the cause, the second refueling module had gone with it. Without the nuclear-powered module to manufacture fuel, a lander couldn’t return to orbit, and warping from the surface of a planet was likely to result in a gamma flash and an expanding debris cloud of its own. That, not to mention their sheer weight, was why the warp pods with their fusion reactor power source remained in orbit, undocked from their lander.

  But exploration of Kakuloa had returned disturbing results. Commodore Drake had been presented with the evidence: the massive but relatively recent geologic changes; the lifeforms too Earth-like to be anything but transplanted from Earth itself, right down to recognizable plants and mammals with correct anatomy, albeit not of any known species. The evidence suggested the planet had been aggressively terraformed, some sixty or seventy million years ago.

  The question was, what next? Earth had already undergone a “limited” nuclear war, the “Unholy War”, three decades earlier. Could humanity take a second massive shock? The findings clearly implied that an advanced spacefaring species had been around millions of years ago. Were they still, and if so, were they a threat? The real question was, would humanity retreat from space and cower in its cradle until some event, natural or man-made, brought extinction? Or would humanity venture out, taking advantage of this terraformed but apparently unoccupied world to start putting its eggs into more than one basket?

  Elizabeth Sawyer had put forth a bold proposal to help force the latter choice. They had a backup functional lander, the USS Poul Anderson. She and an all-volunteer survey team would take it down to the second Earth-like planet and there remain until Earth sent a return expedition to get them. That could be in as little as a month. During that time they could determine whether or not it too had been terraformed. From orbit, and a few remote landing probes, the answer seemed to be yes, but landing was the only way to be sure. And, they hoped, it would help to put pressure on Earth’s governments to launch that next mission
. It was a gamble, but none of them would have been on the Centauri mission in the first place if they weren’t willing to take risks. There had been plenty of volunteers.

  There was no way to check with Earth first. A radio message would take eight and a half years to make the round trip; travel by starship was the fastest way to get a message anywhere. To his credit, Commodore Franklin Drake, sure he would face at least a pro forma court-martial on return for exceeding his authority, authorized the additional landing.

  While the small fleet had made its way from Alpha Centauri B to Alpha Centauri A, only a little of that time in warp, Sawyer and her team had put the revised mission plan together.

  Chapter 3: Landing Zone

  Aboard the Anderson

  They’d chosen a landing area at latitude thirty-four degrees north, near a coast. The climate there, as best they could determine from orbit without spending a year orbiting, was subtropical, from humid to highland, what Simms, the mission climatologist, referred to “Köppen Cfa or Cfb,” depending on elevation. Simms would be returning to Earth on the Heinlein, but Sawyer had asked for his help to plan the landing.

  Orbital dynamics suggested they land close to the equator, so when they were retrieved, returning to space would be easier. Also, if their stay was prolonged, they wouldn’t have to worry about cold winters.