The Eridani Convergence (Carson & Roberts Archeological Adventures in T-Space Book 3) Read online

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Riding in the autocab on the way back to the spaceport, Jackie pondered the conversation again. She didn’t see how it could be anything but coincidence that they’d met at the restaurant, or that the Cerulean Cloud had recently visited 82 Eridani. They’d surely done a couple of other trips since then, and back before Andrei left the Sophie they’d eaten at Sherwood’s together before. A cut above spaceport fare but still reasonable.

  Still, there had been something about their reaction when she’d mentioned her destination. Was there something going on there that she should know about? If Quentin Ducayne was involved, then the answer was almost certainly, emphatically, yes. And equally certainly, she wouldn’t find out what until she got there.

  And as annoying as Hannibal Carson could sometimes be, Jackie found herself wishing that he were coming along on this trip. Stop that! she told herself. He’s just as likely to get you into trouble as out of it. That was certainly true so far. But despite the fact that, as she’d once told him, spaceflight is supposed to be boring, the trips with him had been fun . . . once you got past the sheer terror of almost getting killed or being abducted by spacefaring aliens.

  The thought sobered her. Be careful what you wish for, she told herself, you might get it.

  CHAPTER 17: HOMEWORLD SECURITY

  Carson

  Homeworld Security HQ, Sawyers World

  “YOU LOOK LIKE hell,” Ducayne said.

  “I feel like road-kill.” Carson said. He lay in an infirmary bed at Homeworld Security headquarters, thoroughly bandaged, with an IV tube in his arm.

  “I’m not surprised. Your right leg has the worst case of road rash I’ve ever seen—fortunately just skin, you didn’t lose any muscle—bruised ribs, a broken finger, and assorted other scrapes and contusions. And a concussion, they tell me. Poul Tyrell said it gave him flashbacks to a giranno stampede.

  “Tyrell! This was his doing!”

  “No, actually, I don’t think it was. He was horrified. He was the one who got to you first, and had a copter with an autodoc there in minutes. It flew you here.”

  “How?”

  “How did he find you? Smart omniphone you’ve got there. Between the gee-loads and the physiological changes it sensed in you—good thing you had it on your wrist and not in a pocket—it figured something was seriously wrong and started calling for help.”

  “Uh, yeah. Useful on field trips, if there’s anyone nearby to help.”

  “So, what happened?”

  “What did Tyrell say?”

  “He found you by the side of the road, looking like you’d been thrown from a car, although there was no car around. That was maybe ten or fifteen minutes after you left the office. He didn’t go himself, it was one of his drones that followed your beacon.”

  “Oh. Handy.”

  “The founders like their toys. So, what do you remember?”

  “Damned autocab tried to kidnap me. I managed to get out.”

  “What? The same cab that picked you up from Sawyer’s?”

  Carson nodded.

  “No wonder you thought it was Tyrell. Okay, we’ll track that cab down, although I imagine Tyrell or Sawyer already has someone working on that.”

  “If not him, who did this?”

  “The most obvious guess is the Velkaryans; you’ve managed to upset them a couple of times now. But the timing of the attack is suspicious. Did you tell anyone you were going to visit Sawyer?”

  “No. But if they’re watching me, or hacked into the autocab dispatch system . . . .”

  “Then they’d know. And the most logical reason for you to visit her—or for her to agree to a visit—would be what? Nothing they could know about.”

  “Her report?”

  “I guess there could be other sources, second hand. But maybe the timing was just coincidence, and they want you for something else.”

  “What?”

  “You tell me. If Vaughan has reported back, they know something about Zeta Reticuli. They certainly know you were on Verdigris, and probably that you checked out the pyramid.”

  “Oh, right. Sorry, not thinking clearly. By the way, Sawyer said I should talk to Peter Finley about Pete’s Peak. It might actually be a pyramid.”

  “Really? That’s interesting. I’ll pass along a warning to the local government about potential poachers on the wildlife preserve, and some more details to Finley. Is it a pyramid?”

  “I haven’t looked into it. I’d want to talk to Finley, he’s the one who found and climbed it. Sawyer seemed to think that he thought so.”

  Ducayne nodded. “I’ll want a full debriefing on your discussion, as best you remember, of course. But not right now. Make a few notes while it’s fresh in your mind and we can go over it later.”

  He looked thoughtful for a minute, then added “I don’t have anything else for you right now. There are some possibilities in the works. If the Velkaryans are after you, maybe we should get you off-planet. I’ll let you know when I have something. Contact me if anything comes up on your end.”

  “Fair enough.”

  Ducayne rose and left.

  CHAPTER 18: DEPARTURE

  Roberts

  Starship Sophie, Skead Spaceport

  JACKIE SET SOPHIE’S computer to do one more diagnostics check while she did her walk-around. In theory, there wasn’t much that she could find on a walk-around that the computer wouldn’t also detect, but that assumed all the sensors were working correctly and assumptions could lead to problems. She idly wondered how many aircraft pilots had run into trouble because they’d believed the fuel gauges without eyeballing the tanks.

  This would be a long trip, nine days to 82 Eridani and then fourteen more back to Sawyers World, with only short stops between. The night before she had considered making a trip out to her storage facility to swap out some of her personal effects on the Sophie with what was in storage—in particular, she’d considered grabbing the leather-bound volumes of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin sea-faring series which her father had given her, and from where she’d got her ship’s name. She’d finally decided it wasn’t worth the time; those books and tens of thousands of others were in Sophie’s memory anyway.

  David Tefera had showed up early that morning, riding a flat-bed with several crates of his family’s coffee, Mount Sharon Premiere Roast.

  “I, uh, I checked with the office and saw you didn’t have a cargo, and were headed for Tanith. Um, Eighty-Two Eridani.”

  They both knew where Tanith was. There was a nervous edge to David’s chatter.

  “So I figured I’d bring a consignment by, just in case. Save you some time. Since you’re a courier too, we trust you. I checked with my folks.”

  “Uh . . . .” Roberts had decided to pass on the coffee cargo primarily because Ducayne was in a hurry and she didn’t want to take the extra time out of today before lifting. But there was David being helpful again. He was certainly a go-getter, she had to give him that. “Wow. All right, help me get it aboard and stowed. You have the documentation for this? Is it raw or roasted?” Aside from the usual contracts and invoices, organic cargo like coffee was subject to quarantine regulations, to reduce the chance of organisms from one planet contaminating another. As if that ship hadn’t sailed sixty-five million years ago, she thought, but recognized that evolution since then had produced some surprising differences between the terraformed planets, as well as the similarities.

  “The coffee’s roasted. We do it ourselves to ensure consistent quality.”

  “Okay, good.” That should let her skip the quarantine process and she could go straight to finding a broker.

  “So,” she said, making conversation as they finished stowing the cargo, “do you do much business in small lots like this?”

  “My dad says he likes to help out the small independent ship operators, so actually, yes, we do. Did a bigger shipment out to Tanith a month or two back, but I’m sure you’ll find a buyer for these.”

>   “A month or two? That wouldn’t have been the Cerulean Cloud, would it?”

  David looked thoughtful. “Might have been, yes, the name sounds right. A C-class. You know it?”

  “Old shipmate of mine is one of the partners. I ran into him last night.”

  “Ah, okay. Yeah, they’re headed out soon with another load. To Verdigris, I think.”

  “Verdigris? Don’t they grow their own coffee there?”

  David shook his head. “I don’t think so. Growing conditions are weird on that planet. Or maybe the local stuff just isn’t as good as ours.”

  “There is that,” Roberts agreed as they finished stowing the last of the crates.

  Roberts sealed the cargo hatch, and David reluctantly departed. Had he hoped to ride along with the crates?

  She made her way around the Sophie’s hull, checking that access port covers were secure, that exhaust ports were clear, and finally under the hull to check that nothing had decided to nest in the landing gear wells, and to disconnect the shore-side umbilicals. It all looked good.

  Back aboard, she secured the hatch then strapped in to the command chair. The diagnostics looked good. She initiated the pre-launch sequence and got on the comm.

  “Skead Ground, this is the Sophie at pad three-seven requesting clearance to the active for departure to space.”

  “Roger Sophie, cleared to Runway two-three, hold short and contact Departure on one-one-eight.”

  “Twenty-three and hold, departure on one-one-eight. Roger and thank you.”

  Sophie’s landing gear was configured for wheels down; with the weight of full tanks and a long trip ahead, Roberts didn’t want to waste fuel on hover taxi or vertical takeoff, not in this gravity. Skead Spaceport had nice runways, she might as well take advantage of them. She released the wheel brakes, eased in the horizontal thrusters and began taxiing to the active runway.

  Holding short at the threshold of runway twenty-three, she brought up the vertical thrusters until they took half the weight off the Sophie’s landing gear, enough to verify they were functioning properly, then eased them back.

  “Skead Tower, this is the Sophie holding at two-three requesting permission to takeoff for space.”

  “Roger Sophie, cleared at your discretion for straight out departure, call clear of the zone.” Unlike some of the busier planets, there was no air or space traffic control as such, as soon as she cleared 5000 meters from the field she was on her own.

  “Thank you, straight out and call when clear.”

  Jackie let the Sophie roll forward onto the runway, turning to line up with it. She held it in place with the toe brakes while she ran up the throttle enough to ensure response—the brakes wouldn’t hold Sophie’s full thrust—then released the brakes and pushed the throttle to 20%—0.8 gees—as the Sophie rolled down the runway. As the thrust built it felt to Jackie like the Sophie was tilting back at a sharp angle. The airspeed built quickly, and she rotated the ship to lift off halfway down the field. Within a minute she was at 5000 meters altitude and nearly ten kilometers from the spaceport. She signaled control that she was clear of the zone and pitched the Sophie into a higher angle, increasing to 80% thrust as she did so. She’d be too high for any useful aerodynamic lift in a few moments more. The acceleration pushed her back in her seat until it felt like the Sophie was pointed straight up. The sky above her darkened rapidly.

  This was what it was all about, the rush of adrenaline as her ship leapt for space and for freedom. Jackie wasn’t headed for an orbit, she was on a ballistic path that took her nearly straight up. She’d kill the engines shortly after clearing atmosphere and the Sophie would coast up another few hundred kilometers, plenty of time to get her lined up on 82 Eridani and engage the warp drive.

  The ship’s computer helpfully announced, “Ten seconds to MECO, mark”, and displayed a countdown in one corner of the screen. Jackie grinned. This wasn’t a rendezvous; the timing wasn’t so critical that it would matter if the main engines cut off a little early or late. She reached to cut the throttle just as the timer hit zero.

  The thrusters went suddenly quiet and there came a feeling of falling. In fact the Sophie was falling, pulled back by Skead’s gravitational field at nearly 14.3 meters per second every second—but at ten percent of escape velocity, the Sophie was already rising so fast it would take a good several minutes before she stopped moving away from the planet and began falling toward it. She’d be in warp before that. Roberts was already orienting the ship toward their destination, the RCS thrusters firing in a series of short bursts. Zero gee didn’t bother her at all, she rather enjoyed it.

  She had planned her takeoff well enough that within two minutes she had 82 Eridani lined up in the Sophie’s guide-scope and had run the spectrum check to confirm that the point of light the ship was aiming at was indeed the G2-type star she wanted to go to and not some other random star, close in angle but parsecs off in distance. With passengers she might have entered orbit and taken a bit more time to let them enjoy the view, but this was a bit of a game for her. Besides, by not accelerating to orbital velocity she’d save fuel, and of course Ducayne was in a hurry for his package.

  Satisfied that everything was secure for warp and the ship was pointed in the right direction, she hit the “engage warp” button. The windows went black and gravity—in this case a subtle and deliberate bias in the warp field—came back. Jackie sat at the controls for another minute, enough time to get well clear of the Tau Ceti system, then unbuckled and headed back to the galley to fix herself breakfast. With any luck the next nine days would be of the “space travel is boring” class, although there were plenty of minor routine maintenance tasks to keep her from getting too bored.

  CHAPTER 19: DUCAYNE HAS NEWS

  Carson

  Homeworld Security HQ, Sawyers World

  HANNIBAL CARSON HAD been out of the infirmary for a day when Ducayne called him into his office. He was standing, glaring at the displays on his wall, when Carson entered.

  “You’ve heard the news from Earth?” Ducayne growled the words out. The last time Hannibal Carson had seen that look on his face, Ducayne had just lost an agent.

  “Is this about the Belize find?”

  “No, I wanted to talk to you and Brown about something else.” Ducayne glanced at the time. “Where is he? Anyway, the news I meant is about the elections in Venezuela. The Velkaryan party won. They’ve given extra-terrestrials ten days to leave the country or be put in internment camps.”

  Carson considered that. It fit the Velkaryans’ agenda; they were xenophobic, felt that the long-ago terraformed planets were rightfully the property of mankind, and he knew from his own experience that they occasionally adopted Nazi tactics. But . . . “I didn’t know there were any aliens in Venezuela. There can’t be that many on Earth at all, surely?”

  “That’s not exactly the point, but yes, there are a few. Just because none of them have native high-tech cultures doesn’t mean they can’t adapt quickly to ours. You of all people should know that.”

  “No, of course.” Marten, Carson’s principal colleague on expeditions, was a timoan. “I just didn’t think there’d been much influx to Earth. But that’s not what you wanted to talk about.”

  “No. The Velkaryan hold on Venezuela gives them an air of legitimacy they didn’t have before, not to mention access to resources we’d rather they didn’t have.”

  “Their Church of Divine Stellar Providence already gave them a fair bit of legitimacy in some circles. What kind of resources?”

  “More access to the inner workings of the Union de Terre for one, although they’ve had moles or sympathizers in there for a while.”

  “And Homeworld Security reports to the UdT.”

  Ducayne grinned. The expression was almost as scary as his growl, but it seemed to calm him down. “Nothing quite that straightforward, and certainly not for my little piece of it.”

  “Are the Velkaryans setting themselves up for a theocracy?”
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  Ducayne turned from his map display and sat down, gesturing for Carson to do the same. “Unlikely. They’ve always been more political than religious. Oh, sure, there’s a big overlap with the CDSP, and probably many of the rank and file believe their myths. We see it as more of a recruiting tool. The UdT puts a lot of restrictions on theocracies.”

  “True, but would they fall under the Technology Rule? They were founded after the first landings.”

  “It’s not quite that simple,” Ducayne said.

  The so-called Technology Rule was part of the fundamental charter of the Union de Terre, in no small part a reaction to the events that had triggered the nuclear Unholy War nearly a century earlier.

  Theocracies, and indeed any large religious organization, were, even before the war and certainly after, seen by many as a repulsive token of humanity’s primitive past. Conversely, the modern Catholic Church, for one, had been held up as a counter-example, but a nuclear weapon—presumed to have been Islamic but in the post-war confusion that couldn’t be proven—had taken out much of Rome and Vatican City with it.

  The rule allowed theocratically-governed countries to join the UdT, but only under strict limitations on the technology they were allowed access to. It made the restrictions that the Treaty of Versailles imposed on post-World War I Germany look like a mere time-out. Humanitarian technologies for medicine and education were allowed, but others like communications were limited and restricted to unencrypted channels. Weapons technology was strictly limited to what was current at the time the religion was founded. The latter was later amended to “available to the founder” when it had been pointed out that Scientology, for one, was post-nuclear. Not that anyone had seriously suggested they might want nukes, of course, but the point was made that L. Ron Hubbard himself had had no access to them.

  Unlike with Germany during the rise of the Nazi party, however, the restrictions were strictly enforced. Although the world had suffered greatly during the “limited” nuclear war, the most powerful nations hadn’t suffered as much, and were in better shape than Europe and America had been during the Great Depression. This time, there were no concessions. UdT “peace enforcers” could make surprise inspections at any time on a suspected weapons facility in the banned countries. This wasn’t just a few guys with suits and briefcases showing up and asking to look at a site, this was an airborne drop of well-trained and well-armed troops who would secure the area and make sure the inspectors had full access to anything they wished.