Alpha Centauri: The Return (T-Space Alpha Centauri Book 3) Read online

  ALPHA CENTAURI: THE RETURN

  (Book III of the Alpha Centauri Series)

  a novel of early T-SpaceTM

  Alastair Mayer

  Mabash Books

  Alpha Centauri: The Return

  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

  V-Class Starships in 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.

  First printing, July 2017

  Mabash Books, Centennial, Colorado

  Amazon Kindle edition

  Acknowledgments

  This book, and the entire Alpha Centauri series, arose from two sources. First, I wanted to explain how Sawyer’s World (later, just Sawyers World, no apostrophe) got its name. Second, my son Robert had asked, in response to an almost throw-away line in an earlier book, “what are squidberries anyway?”

  Other inspiration for this story, as with any novel, came from a number of places. Astute readers may recognize some echoes of themes from Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park and John Wyndham’s The Trouble With Lichen.

  I met Marko Kloos at the 2017 Launchpad astronomy workshop for writers, and subsequently fell into his Frontlines series. While his and my universes are quite different, his helped me get into the right mindset for writing the Chinese encounters at Epsilon Eridani; it’s been a long time since my army days.

  To the readers who enjoyed the first and second volumes, First Landing and Sawyer’s World, and especially those who left reviews, thank you! You make it worth while.

  A big thank you to RGW and Jill for their comments on early drafts of this book. As always, thanks to my kids, Arthur, Robert, and Selena (in alphabetical order), for inspiration.

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Synopsis

  Part I: Earth and Eridani

  1: Voyage Home

  2: Tianyuansi (Epsilon Eridani)

  3: Preparing for Landing

  4: Grainger

  5: Eridani landing 32

  6: To Seek Out New Life

  7: Inquiry

  8: Mission Delayed

  9: Elephants

  10: Court Martial

  11: Wolves

  12: Resolution

  13: Departure

  Part II: Setbacks

  14: Decision to not return

  15: An Unpleasant surprise

  16: Meet Sid Ryden

  17: The Chinese Return

  18: Ryden gets an assignment

  19: Lab work

  20: Leverage

  21: Leverage Supplied

  22: Leverage Applied

  23: Good News, Bad News

  Part III: Construction

  24: The New Design

  25: Warp Test

  26: Final Countdown

  27: Old Friends

  Part IV: Return

  28: Arrival at Alpha Centauri

  29: Send in the Drones

  30: Contact

  31: Endeavour Landing

  32: Reunion Dinner

  33: Sawyer’s World

  Epilog

  The Story So Far

  (Synopsis of Book I, First Landing)

  When the five-ship, international team led by USS Heinlein 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 team needed rescuing. No landing would be attempted unless a previously landed refueling pod were operational. When the Xīng Huā was accidentally destroyed entering the system, along with its pod, mission parameters changed. The Krechet, originally intended to land on Alpha Centauri A II (AA2 for short), joined the Chandrasekhar on Alpha Centauri B III (AB3) instead.

  Then they discovered that the lifeforms on AB3—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 undergone 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 AA2, Able, the other Earth-like planet in the Alpha Centauri system, suggested that it too might have been terraformed and could support human life. Some of the expedition crew argued that the question was important enough to risk landing—“marooning” was the term that Mission Commander Franklin Drake had used—a team, led by Elizabeth Sawyer, 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 pressured to avoid turning its collective back and ignoring what had been found out here.

  The plan was for the Anderson to land on Able while the Heinlein and Chandrasekhar returned to the Solar System with what they had discovered so far, with the intent to return as soon as possible with a refueling pod to recover the Anderson crew.

  The story of Sawyer’s team is told in the previous book, Alpha Centauri: Sawyer’s World. This book picks up where the first, Alpha Centauri: First Landing, left off. The rest of the expedition is returning to the quarantine facility on Earth’s Moon, and the Chinese are up to something mysterious.

  Chapter 1: The Voyage Home

  Entering the Solar System

  The journey back from Alpha Centauri had been interesting, but thankfully uneventful. With four captains amongst the two remaining ships, the crew situation felt a little awkward, but they were all professionals. The scientists, of course, worked on their reports.

  With two ships to coordinate instead of the five they had left with, they spent less time between dashes in warp, and the dashes were longer. It took little over a week to reach the Solar System, pausing at the outer reaches to calibrate their exact position, and to broadcast news of their return.

  Understandably, the news that only two of the original five ships had made it back raised considerable consternation. Commodore Drake sent a brief synopsis of the situation, with the promise that he’d give full details and data dumps after they landed on the Moon.

  “We’re going to be in quarantine for at least a month. It will give us something to talk about,” he said. Of course, not all of that talk would be public. At least not yet.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Quarantine Facility, Luna

  With the starships Chandrasekhar and Heinlein settled onto their landing pads on the Moon, the crews and their precious samples were transferred to the adjacent Interstellar Quarantine Facility.

  To avoid any risk of back-contamination by alien organisms, the crews
would be virtual prisoners there for the next month. The samples would remain there indefinitely under study, until cleared as safe. There was lab space for the scientists to work, and with only half the expected mission team returning, plenty of living space for the scientists and other crew members.

  Drake made sure his crews were settled in while the medics checked them over. Then he sought out the base security office.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  “You’ve been rather restrained with the data you downloaded, sir,” Major Keating, the security officer, said. “Keeping secrets?”

  “Actually yes. We had some disturbing surprises in the Centauri system. Bottom line is that we’re probably not alone; it looks like those planets were deliberately engineered.”

  Keating’s eyes widened. “What? Engineered? Do you mean terraformed? By who?”

  “Of that, we have no idea. We saw no signs, other than the planet and the life on it. But that isn’t what I came to talk about right now.”

  “Oh? There’s something else?”

  “Two things, actually. First, since I exceeded my orders by leaving the Anderson and half the crew at Alpha Centauri, I should probably turn myself in to await court-martial.”

  Keating shrugged. He had known about the Anderson and crew from the Heinlein’s transmissions when they arrived in the system. They had stayed behind to investigate the second of two Earth-like planets in the double-star system. “Fair enough. Consider yourself confined to base, sir,” he said, and grinned. Nobody was going anywhere for a while anyway. “Besides, if the place was terraformed, it sounds like you did the right thing. They all volunteered, right?”

  “Of course!”

  “Then any court-martial will probably exonerate you. So, what’s the second thing? You mentioned two.”

  Drake paused, then said: “We have reason to suspect that the Xīng Huā wasn’t really destroyed in a collision. The data didn’t add up. If it wasn’t destroyed, they probably hightailed it back here and have been reverse-engineering the warp drive. Any signs of that?”

  “No, but space is big. If they weren’t in near-Earth orbit we might not notice them. For all we know they could be fifty kilometers from here on the Moon. If we weren’t looking for them we might not notice.”

  Drake understood. Near-Earth orbit was constantly scanned by ground based radars, watching both active spacecraft and space debris. Deep space, beyond geosynchronous orbit, was another matter. “You might want to start looking.”

  “Indeed.” Keating ran a hand through his hair and let out a low whistle. “I get reports. It would explain a few anomalies, and some of the orders that Chinese companies have been placing, or refusing.”

  “We’ll have to bring them into line. What we found is just too big and, frankly, too scary for Earth not to face with a united front.”

  “United front? Yeah, good luck with that. I’m not sure the Union de Terre is going to be any more effective than the old United Nations.”

  “It’s what we have. It got us to Alpha Centauri. I guess it depends on what we find at the next star we visit,” said Drake.

  “Let’s just hope we don’t find the Chinese there first.”

  Chapter 2: Tiānyuànsì

  Near 天苑四 or Tiānyuànsì (Fourth Star of Celestial Meadows, aka Epsilon Eridani)

  “Radiation alert!” the helmsman of the Xinglong Huā called out, simultaneously with an alarm sounding.

  “Cease warp,” Captain Lee Shing ordered, although the automatic systems had done just that. The lights flickered as the power circuits switched, but they felt nothing as the ship’s warp bubble collapsed.

  “Readings?”

  “Sir, readings are now normal. Reactor is operating correctly; the radiation came from the hull.”

  Lee wondered if the same thing had affected their sister ship, the Tianlong Huā. Unless they had dropped out of warp at virtually the same instant, there was no way to communicate the situation. They would just have to catch up at the planned rendezvous. But the radiation had come from outside.

  Lee considered this. Matter impinging on the edge of a warp bubble would disintegrate and throw off radiation, and some would leak through into the ship. Enough of it would destroy the ship completely. Lee himself had used that fact to fake his own destruction as part of the American-led convoy heading into the Alpha Centauri system four months previously. “What radiation level?”

  “Approximately one hundred ten millisieverts, sir.”

  High for a single dose, so not surprising the automatics had triggered. But it was tolerable, about the equivalent of eight months in low Earth orbit, or two to three months in deep space. The question was, what was ahead of them? “Navigation, pinpoint our position and scan for objects. Helmsman, what is the matter density outside our hull? Also, send a hail to the Tianlong. If they encountered the same, they may also have dropped out of warp.”

  “Yes, sir, but they could be several light minutes away.”

  “Are you in a hurry?”

  “No sir, but the signal would be very weak.”

  “Then boost it. And the receivers.”

  “Yes sir.” He bent to work his instrument panel.

  “Sir,” the navigator, Chen Jingyun, said. “We are approximately ninety-seven light-hours from Tiānyuànsì. I believe we encountered a dust cloud.”

  “Is there anything bigger than dust ahead of us? And how large is this cloud?”

  “Nothing solid shows on radar or imaging. Best estimate is this dust cloud is about twenty million kilometers across; it is difficult to say how long. It may be the tail remnant of an old comet.”

  Lee thought they were too far out for that, but remained silent. It didn’t matter. They could cross that distance in less than a second in warp. If the automatics hadn’t cut in, they would already be past it.

  “Very well. Wait ten minutes for any response from Tianlong. If we hear nothing, we will proceed.”

  “The radiation, sir?”

  “We’ll be out of the cloud before we get more than two hundred fifty millisieverts, a trip to Mars. You’d get worse than that standing downwind from Pyonyang, even after all this time.” Lee referred to the Unholy War, the nuclear exchange some thirty years ago that had leveled most of the Middle East and a few other scattered cities, including Pyongyang. But he was exaggerating the current radiation hazard there. Slightly. The damned fool Koreans should never have launched toward Hawaii. Their missiles hadn’t even made it halfway before being intercepted.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  They caught up with the Tianlong Huā at the expected rendezvous, beyond the orbit of the star’s outermost asteroid belt and well above, or north, of the plane of that disk. The Tianlong Huā had been waiting for them, as per standard orders.

  By taking a series of images of the system, warping for fractions of a second–a light-minute–between pictures, they built up a three-dimensional view of the planets and visible asteroids, allowing them to move carefully deeper into the system towards the bluish planet in the habitable zone.

  En route, they stopped at two of the asteroids along their path. Outwardly they appeared like almost any asteroid back in the solar system; irregular rounded gray lumps of rock surfaced with layers of dust and scattered craters. What was initially surprising was that they were warmer than expected, given their distance from their star, and more radioactive than typical solar system asteroids. The latter explained the former and the radioactivity also confirmed the young age of this system. In the billion years since it had formed from the debris cloud of a supernova, short-lived isotopes still radiated.

  “That is odd,” complained Fang, their astrophysicist. “The star has a lower metallicity than our sun; I would expect heavy elements to be scarcer.”

  “Maybe they are still falling into the star,” Lee said, no
t being serious.

  “It doesn’t work li—” Fang started, then stopped himself at Lee’s glare.

  If the system was younger, minerals like natural uranium would have a higher percentage of fissionable U-235. Even on Earth, 2.2 billion years ago that had led to a natural reactor forming in an African mineral deposit. It could prove useful. Fusion reactors were fine for power, but a fission implosion was still the easiest way to trigger a high-yield explosion.

  Higher than Earth’s though it might be, the natural radiation wasn’t a concern. It wasn’t that high. They had anti-radiation drugs, and they wouldn’t be here more than a month. Still, Lee noted, if the transportation cost could be made reasonable, this system could be a worthwhile source of isotopes that would otherwise have to be manufactured in a reactor back home.

  But the real question was what kinds of life the planet ahead of them held. He wondered idly what the Centauri mission had found. Since they hadn’t immediately returned to Earth–at least, they hadn’t as of when his mission had departed–they must have pressed on into the system. Lee approved. It was what he would have done.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Near Epsilon Eridani, 10.5 light years from Earth

  From Earth, telescopic observation of the star had shown strong evidence of planets, with hints that one might be life-bearing, but the crowded system made it difficult to be certain from ten light years away. This mission would find out. The odds were long. Epsilon Eridani was less than a billion years old, and in Earth’s history, life had barely gotten started by that point. But something showed a hint of blue and a surprising oxygen line in its spectrum. If the planet were at all habitable, China could leapfrog the international mission to Alpha Centauri and claim the entire Epsilon Eridani system for itself, the outdated Outer Space Treaty notwithstanding.