The samplebot stopped a metre from the waxy trunk, and gingerly extended an electromuscle arm. Every kernel on that half of the tree popped simultaneously. A torrent of liquid showered down over the surrounding ground and the sample-bot. Its casing began to dissolve immediately. Acid started to leak through and the telemetry ended.
Oscar put his head in his hands and groaned. ‘Shit!’
*
By twenty-one hundred hours, they’d confirmed the planet’s plants shared a common biochemistry. Oscar had moved the wormhole exit eight times to different regions, each one had subtle variants in the grass-equivalent, and no variance in their biochemical makeup.
He ordered the exit to be closed, and the gateway mechanism to be powered down to level two. It disheartened everyone, especially for a mission which had started so promisingly. Then there was the administration crap to deal with; the ground crew which was scheduled to take over exploration from prime had to be switched to a prep crew; everybody faced a mountain of reports to file.
The door of control centre closed behind Oscar. ‘Another day, another star,’ he murmured to himself. He was tired, disappointed, hungry. No way was he going to start in on the administration tonight. He told his e-butler to have the maid-bots start a decent meal and open some wine to breathe. By the time he got home it should be ready.
Just as he started walking down the corridor, a number of people came out of the observation gallery door ahead of him. Dermet Shalar was there, the CST Merredin station director, and the last person Oscar wanted to see right now. He hesitated, putting his head down, hoping Dermet wouldn’t notice.
‘Oscar.’
‘Ah, good evening, sir. Not a good day, I’m afraid.’
‘No, indeed not. Still, astronomy has a huge list of possible targets. It’s not as if we’re short of new worlds.’
Oscar stopped listening to his boss; he’d just recognized the young-looking man in the expensive suit standing beside him. ‘Have you been watching today’s operation?’
‘Yes,’ Wilson Kime said. ‘I remember that kind of disappointment myself.’
‘I’m sure you do.’
‘But I was impressed by the way you ran things in there.’
‘I see.’ Which was a dumb thing to say, but Oscar knew there were very few reasons for Kime to be here today. His fatigue suddenly vanished under a deluge of adrenaline. To be head-hunted for this CST exploration mission was the ultimate compliment.
As if he was mind-reading, Wilson smiled. ‘I need some-body like you as my executive officer. Interested?’
Oscar glanced at Dermet Shalar, who kept his face carefully neutral. ‘Of course.’
‘Good. It’s yours if you want it.’
‘I want it.’
*
Two days later Oscar arrived at the Anshun starship project complex. He was given an office next to Wilson on the top floor in one of the three central glass towers, complete with a staff of three. Starting with their first official meeting that morning, he and Wilson had to put the crew selection problem at the top of the agenda. It was a hint of what was to come. Nigel Sheldon hadn’t been joking about the number of requests to join the mission. Tens of millions of people from all over the Commonwealth, endorsed by their government or some venerable respected institution, were hammering against CST’s filter programs for a berth on the starship. Right from the beginning, they decided on a policy of filling the science posts from the CST exploratory division wherever possible. The general crew would also be assigned on a similar basis. Exceptions would be made for outstanding achievers. Both of them acknowledged that would work out as geniuses with political clout.
‘Anybody you owe a big favour?’ Wilson asked. ‘We might as well get that out of the way to start with.’
‘I’m sure there’ll be a whole bunch of people from this life and my first are suddenly going to remember that five dollars they lent me. Just about everyone at the Merredin station managed to bump into me before I left to tell me how terrific they are. All I can say is, McClain Gilbert is the best forward crew leader I’ve worked with.’
‘You want him for that duty on the Second Chance?’
Oscar took a moment. ‘It’s that easy?’
‘We have to start somewhere, and we have to have some rationale for selection. After all, it’s how I chose you. I asked Sheldon who his best Operations Director was.’
Oscar had guessed it had been something like that: but who didn’t like hearing it first hand? ‘Okay then, I’d like Mac. What about you? Do you have any preferences for the crew?’
‘There’re fifty management types from Farndale I’d like to bring onto the construction side of the project to smooth out the current schedule, and I’ll probably do that. But as for anyone familiar with this kind of mission, no, not any more.’ They’d managed to track down two others from Ulysses. Nancy Kressmire, who had never left Earth again, nor had she abandoned public service; she was now the Ecological Commissioner for North-West Asia, and hugely committed to the job – after all, she’d held it for a hundred and fifty-eight years. She’d said: ‘No,’ as soon as he placed a call, not even waiting to say hello, or ask why he was calling after all these centuries.
‘Are you sure?’ Wilson had inquired.
‘I can’t leave, Wilson. There’s so much here on this good Earth we still have to put right. How can we face aliens before we’ve cured the ills which beset our own people? Our moral obligation is clear.’
He didn’t argue, though there was much he wanted to say to her, and all her crusading kind for that matter. The Earth which the ultra-conservative Greens wanted had never existed in the past, it was an idealized dream of what Eden might be. Something not too dissimilar to York5, he thought to himself.
The only other old crew member Sheldon’s staff had located was Jane Orchiston. Wilson took one look at her file, and didn’t even bother placing that call. Call it prejudice or intuition – he didn’t really care which. He just knew it would be a waste of time. Two centuries ago, Orchiston had moved to Felicity, the women-only planet. Since then she’d been enthusiastically giving birth to daughters at the rate of almost one every three years.
All in all, he reflected, it wasn’t an outstanding record for a crew that was supposed to represent the best of humanity at that time. Three known survivors out of thirty-eight; one plutocrat, one bureaucrat, and one earth-mother.
The second half of the meeting was scheduled as a unisphere conference with James Timothy Halgarth, the director of the Research Institute on Far Away. ‘I’ll be interested in your opinion on what he has to say about the Marie Celeste and its crew,’ Wilson told Oscar. ‘Tracking down alien know-ledge is an aspect of our mission which I’m going to delegate to you.’
‘You think it’s that important?’
‘Yeah, we need to know what they know. Or don’t know. I’m determined that we cover every angle of approach on the Dyson Pair envelopment, not just the physical voyage. I was in training for the Mars mission for damn near a decade. I wound up knowing more than any college professor about its geology, its features, the geography, and even the books people had written on it – fact and fiction. Everything. I knew the myths as well as the truths. Just in case. We were ready for anything, any eventuality. And a fat lot of good that did us in the end.’
‘Sheldon and Ozzie weren’t anything to do with Mars.’
Wilson grinned. ‘My point exactly. So . . . after this, fix up to see the Commonwealth xenocultural experts talking to the Silfen. Get out to the High Angel. Interview a Raiel. I simply don’t believe that all of our so-called allies know nothing about the Dyson Pair. Most of them have been around for a hell of a lot longer than us, certainly they all had starflight when it happened.’
‘Why would they hold out on us?’
‘God knows. But then there’s a great deal about this which doesn’t seem logical.’
‘All right, I’ll add it to my list.’
Wilson’s e-butler
announced that the wormhole connecting Half Way to Far Away had begun the ten-hour active phase of its cycle. The unisphere established a link to the small data-network in Armstrong City. From there, a solitary landline carried the call to the Institute.
The big portal at the far end of Wilson’s study fizzed with multicoloured static, which cleared to show Director James Timothy Halgarth sitting behind his desk, a fourth-generation member of the family which founded EdenBurg, which gave him a reasonable level of seniority within the dynasty.
He wore a simple pale blue suit of semi-organic fabric which stretched and contracted around his limbs whenever he moved, giving him unrestricted movement. His apparent age was mid-thirties, though he was completely bald, an unusual style in the Commonwealth. Small OCtattoos shimmered platinum and emerald on his cheeks.
‘Captain Kime, finally,’ the Director said with obvious enthusiasm. ‘I apologize for the delay in enabling this conference. The Guardians of Selfhood are annoyingly tenacious in their attacks on our landline. The current repairs were only completed three hours ago. No doubt we shall suffer our next cut within a few days.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Wilson said. ‘Wouldn’t you be better off with a satellite relay?’
‘We used to have one. The Guardians shot it down, and its three replacements. It’s actually more cost-effective to have a landline and keep a repair crew permanently on the payroll. Fibre optic cable is very cheap.’
‘I didn’t realize the civil situation was quite so bad on Far Away.’
‘Generally, it’s not. We’re the only ones suffering from assaults by the Guardians. They are deplorably xenophobic, not to mention violent.’
‘I’m not too well briefed on their objectives; I never did pay much attention to conspiracy theories before. They think you’re helping an alien survivor from the arkship, don’t they?’
‘Actually, they believe we transported the Starflyer into the Commonwealth. But that’s the general thrust of their argument, yes.’
‘I see. They have been releasing a great deal of propaganda about how the Starflyer arranged for the whole Second Chance mission. What I really need to know, from the horse’s mouth as it were, is if it is in any way possible the Marie Celeste did come from the Dyson Pair. Does it have that kind of flight range?’
‘In theory, yes. Once the ship accelerates to its flight velocity of decimal seven two lightspeed, its range is limited only by the amount of fuel it carries to power the force field generators, and indeed the lifetime of the generators themselves. However, our research determined that the actual flight time was five hundred and twenty years. The arkship didn’t come from, or even pass by the Dyson Pair. It came from somewhere closer.’
‘That could be a planet which didn’t have the kind of protective barrier the Dyson Pair possessed,’ Oscar said. ‘They couldn’t defend themselves against whatever was threatening the Dyson aliens, so they left?’
‘We can speculate on its origin and the reason for the flight as much as you like,’ the Director said. ‘As we don’t yet know which star the arkship came from, we can hardly determine the reason for the flight. It could have originated from inside Commonwealth space for all we know.’
‘What about if the Marie Celeste species was the reason for the enclosure?’ Wilson asked.
‘I’m sorry,’ the Director said. ‘I don’t follow your reasoning.’
‘If more than one arkship set off from its origin star, the civilization at the Dyson Pair could be defending themselves from the arkship aliens. After all, look what the Marie Celeste did to Far Away’s star when they arrived there.’
‘Ah, the mega-flare. Yes, I suppose that’s a valid argument, although I don’t see why the barriers would remain on for such a long time. But we do believe that the sterilization of Far Away was an unfortunate side effect. The flare was only triggered to act as the power-source for the message.’
‘That’s one hell of a side effect.’
‘You have to take the alien viewpoint, and presumably ethics. They triggered the flare to communicate across the entire galaxy. Whatever machine manipulated the star into flaring then went on to modify the emission into a coherent radio signal powerful enough to be detected out at the Magellanic Clouds. We humans certainly picked it up easily enough, you barely needed a dish when the signal reached Damaran, let alone the SETI scanners they were using back then.’
‘But nobody knows what they were saying,’ Wilson observed. ‘We’ve had a hundred and eighty years to decode the signal, and I’m not aware of any breakthrough yet. They must have been broadcasting back to their own home planet.’
‘That’s certainly one theory proposed by the Institute, Captain. We have a hundred more if you have the time to listen. All we can do is work through the wreckage and try to put together as many pieces of the puzzle as possible. One day we shall have our answers. Regrettably, it won’t be in the near future.’
‘You must have some idea where they came from,’ Oscar said. ‘If they travelled at point seven lightspeed for five hundred years that gives you an origin point roughly three hundred and fifty light-years from Far Away. Surely you can match a star to the light spectrum in the ship’s life support section?’
‘That would be difficult, Mr Monroe, the tanks had a multispectrum illumination source. They weren’t trying to match their home star’s emission.’
‘Tanks?’
The Director’s face displayed mild disappointment. ‘There was no planetary surface environment replicated inside the Marie Celeste. The starship carried tanks. As far as we can tell from the residue, they were filled with water and a type of monocellular algae.’
‘It was an aquatic species?’ Oscar was fascinated. He’d never done any research into the arkship. Far Away had been on the list of worlds he wanted to visit in his sabbatical life.
‘Again, that is one theory,’ James Halgarth said. ‘There were no remnants of advanced creatures in the tanks, and we have never identified any such species in Far Away’s ocean. Another theory is that the Marie Celeste is actually an automated seedship. It was programmed to sterilize whatever habitable world it found, and seed it with genetic samples from its own world ready for its builders to colonize once the alienforming was complete.’
‘Another good reason to throw up a barrier,’ Wilson said.
‘I doubt it, Captain. Firstly, if you have the technology to erect the kind of barrier found at the Dyson Pair, then you certainly have the capability to deactivate a robot ship before it begins its in-system mission. Secondly, it is a dreadfully flawed method of interstellar colonization. The resources spent on constructing such a ship are enormous; and it didn’t work. The flare killed off most but not all of Far Away’s native life. Yet no trace has been found of any non-native life. And if this is one of a fleet, then where are all the other flares which have announced sterilization has begun by the rest of the ships? Thirdly, if you are a space-faring civilization intent on spreading out of your own solar system, then you will be constantly improving your technology. Whether you will develop faster-than-light travel is questionable. But certainly better ships than the Marie Celeste can be built, and the second wave would overtake the first and travel further. Why haven’t we seen any other ships from the species which launched the Marie Celeste? I’m afraid, gentlemen, that we are presented with a unique puzzle with Far Away and its landing site. It is as the saying goes: a mystery wrapped in an enigma. But I must conclude, it has nothing to do with the Dyson Pair.’
‘I’m sure this is in your reports,’ Oscar said. ‘But what about the on-board electronics? You must have salvaged some programs, surely?’
‘No. The processors left installed are fairly standard, using a basic gate principle like ours, though some of the chemistry involved is different from anything we employ. However the core control array is missing, salvaged or removed.’
‘Before or after the crash landing?’
‘After. It wasn’t so much a crash l
anding as a heavy landing. The arkship’s systems were working at the time, otherwise it would have been a true crash and all we’d have to examine would be a very deep crater. The official Institute history is that the flare was successful in calling another ship and a rescue mission picked up the survivors. That certainly fits all the known facts. Anything else is pure conspiracy theory.’
‘You mentioned technology levels,’ Wilson said. ‘Is the Marie Celeste a product of a technology more advanced than ours?’
‘By definition, we are more advanced because we have wormhole generators. However that is now. By our best estimate, the Marie Celeste was launched around AD 1300, at that time we had barely begun the Renaissance.’
‘I see what you mean. Even if they only had half of our technological progression rate, they should have the same kind of pathways the Silfen use by now.’
‘Exactly.’
‘What about now, though? Is what we have now equivalent to the Marie Celeste?’
‘The easiest answer is equivalent but different. We could undoubtedly build a more sophisticated slower-than-light star-ship. Obviously they didn’t have our wormhole capability, but then we don’t know how they flared the star.’
Wilson remembered several meetings he’d had with Commonwealth security chiefs, so senior the general public didn’t even know their Directorates existed. They’d been very eager to examine the possibility of the Marie Celeste’s ‘flare bomb’. Farndale’s military researchers thought it might be some kind of unstable quantum field effect that disrupted the star’s surface, like dropping a depth charge into the ocean. Aside from theoretical studies, nothing had ever been done, certainly not at a hardware level. Of course, he didn’t know what other companies might have developed. It might be worth a quiet word with Nigel Sheldon. ‘Aren’t you even looking into it?’
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