Bernard's Dream: A Hayden's World Novel (Hayden's World Origins Book 8)

by S. D. Falchetti

  She looks past him at the time display. “Four a.m. Surprised we made it that long. Must be the gravity making us not want to get out of bed.”

  James smiles. “Or the company.”

  She sighs contently. “It was nice to sleep next to you. I missed that.”

  “Yeah, me too.” He turns towards her and kisses her, stroking her back. He pauses after the kiss for an instant, and she kisses him back, more than their friendly morning kiss, and as the warm, wet softness of her lips slides over his, he stops thinking and just lives in the moment. It’s like a weight has been set down, and there’s nothing else to think about than Ava. Her fingers brushing his cheek, his hand on the curve of her hip, her heel sliding along his calve. He’s rolling, her weight sliding onto his side, straddling his right hip. As she sets her hand on his chest, he opens his eyes and looks up. Ava looks down at him with her chestnut hair dangling, her lips parted, searching his expression. But beyond her is the cool steel of the ship and its screens, and the clock with its numb blue numerals ticking away the moments of slowtime.

  Ava watches him a moment and exhales, the tension in her posture relaxing. She gives him a kind smile and then catches a bit of his exposed stomach with her fingers, playfully tickling him. He jolts, chuckling. She laughs and pushes back a few strands of hair from her face, rotating off him to a seated position on her edge of the bed. She takes a deep breath, then turns back and looks over her shoulder at him. “So, do you want to make any bets about who is already on the bridge?”

  James slips back into work mode, the moment fading. He knows it’s a graceful escape that she just handed him. “Well, Beckman’s always up early, although, with full gravity, he’ll probably be tickled to have more treadmill time. How about you?”

  “Isaac, if anyone. I’ll bet the only reason he got any sleep last night is that the images wouldn’t be processed until now. There’s a good chance he slept on the bridge.”

  “Have to admit, I kind of feel like a kid on Christmas myself, wondering what’s under the tree.”

  She leans in conspiratorially. “Want to go take a peek?”

  He grins. “Absolutely.”

  They both stand, and Ava walks over to the dresser. The clothes she wore last evening are folded in a loose pile with her bra hanging from a chair back. She’d intended to return to her quarters before the crew awoke and hadn’t packed anything. With two hands, she strips off her pajama top, her back to James. “I suppose pajamas won’t do if we bump into anybody.” As she leans over to fetch her bra, the flash of a breast comes into view, and James glances away. He blinks, self-aware of his reaction this time, and glances back as she hooks her bra. As she pulls on her shirt, he pads over to his clothes from yesterday, strips, and puts on his pants and shirt.

  Ava gives him a curious look as she slips into her pants. “Are you, uh, showing some solidarity?”

  “At least we can keep ‘em guessing who slept in whose cabin,” James says. “I’ll grab a shower after breakfast.”

  She smiles. “Sounds like a plan.”

  “Well, let’s see what Santa brought us.”

  The two head out the door into the crew quarter’s hallway. It’s set for night, and the walls are a starry landscape overlooking a moonlit Earth field. Ambient floor lights mark the hall path, and they follow it, taking a detour to the pantry where James fetches a real mug of coffee for himself and Ava along with two cookies. They clink their cookies together as if toasting the day, and there’s something silly and fun about it, as if they’ve snuck off to raid the pantry before going on an adventure. They both laugh, trying to be quiet, and make their way along the hallway to the bridge.

  Isaac is on the bridge, wrapped in a sleeping bag at his navigation station, sleeping lightly. He’s wearing the same outfit as yesterday. Ananke’s screen swirls blue from the central console, pulsing brightly twice in silent acknowledgment as they see her.

  Ava grins and blows on the back of her fist, shining an imaginary medal on her chest. She won their bet.

  James gives her a humble nod and sets his hand behind her back. Lifting his coffee to take a sip, he scans across the wonders of the bridge screen.

  Last night, just before dinnertime, Promise came out of warp one AU from Luhman 16A. They’ve been decelerating at one gee all night to bleed off the Riggs boost and decrease their speed to orbital velocity. During that time, Promise’s imagers have been busy collecting data in different wavelengths and magnifications, processing it all together, and creating an initial map of the solar system. The result is the great ember of Luhman 16A at the screen’s center flanked by dozens of colorful marbles. There are irregular rocky minor planets, ice-covered dwarf planets with cracked blue veins and rusty red basins, and two full-fledged planets. All of this is around Luhman 16A. On the far right of the screen, Luhman 16B’s initial collection awaits. Luhman 16B is farther away at 3 AU, and Promise’s cameras can resolve the separate worlds but not their detail at this distance, so the spheres are fuzzy with dark and light patches. Although there are fewer worlds, there are three dozen minor planets and one full-sized planet. The software has question marks over a several blank spheres for each star, extrapolating the orbits to predict the worlds that are still out of sight behind both stars.

  “Wow…so many worlds,” Ava whispers. “And look at those stars. They’re unreal.”

  Luhman 16A looks like Jupiter had just been taken out of a celestial forge, the bulk of its interior aglow like molten steel with ashen cloud bands carving across its face and wreathing around its perimeter. Luhman 16A is about as bright as lava, and, unlike a typical star, James can look at it comfortably with unshielded eyes. All of Luhman’s worlds are illuminated like steelworkers standing around a furnace. Luhman 16B is twenty percent bigger than its sibling, but looks like it’s had longer to cool. The star’s core is a murky red, like twilight, fading to purple before being occulted by the charred black clouds of its atmosphere. Its worlds are illuminated like campers clustered around dying embers.

  “There’s got to be sixty, seventy worlds,” James says. “Did the Keller Array detect all of these?”

  Ava shakes her head. “No. It can’t see below Mars-size, but it did predict the larger planets and picked up some oxygen in the spectrum from 16A. Really curious about that.”

  Isaac stirs, mumbling. The way he’s cocooned has his back to the screen, so he’s half-facing them. He blinks his eyes awake, focusing on James and Ava. “Oh. Hey, guys. What time is it? Did I miss breakfast?”

  Ava smiles. “Morning, Isaac. Sorry to wake you. It’s four a.m.” She motions towards the bridge screen with her eyes. “I think you’ve been waiting for this.”

  Isaac rotates slowly in his chair, his mouth dropping open as he takes in the entire panorama of the worlds. “Ohhhhh…..wow. So cool!” He fumbles to escape from his sleeping bag before standing, walking in front of his workstation, and sets both his hands on his hips. “No one’s ever seen a brown dwarf up close before. Images of Luhman from Earth show light and dark splotches, but this…” He leans in, examining Luhman 16A more closely. “Those dark clouds are iron. It’s raining iron on 16A. Star weather, made of metal.”

  “Good morning, Isaac,” Ananke says. “I hope you don’t mind that I let you sleep. I still have some image processing to do, but I agree the initial images are remarkable.”

  Isaac gives an enthusiastic nod to Ananke.

  James walks over towards Isaac. “Are you surprised by the number of planets?”

  “No,” Isaac says, his eyes bright. “Excited. It confirms the models. Luhman A and B are both the size of Jupiter but thirty times as much mass. Not surprising that the planetary system resembles Jupiter’s model, but more mass means bigger worlds.” He points at the orbital diagram. Ellipses dotted with worlds encircle each star. “Orbits range from one hundred thousand to thirty million kilometers. Lots of minor planets — small, like moons. A few dwarf planets, and these two…oh, look at you two.” He walks over i
n front of the two full-fledged planets that orbit Luhman 16A. The first is the size of Mars and is three-quarters covered in snowy white ice with cracked blue veins. The one quarter that isn’t covered by ice is a blue ocean, directly facing Luhman 16A. With its disk of blue ocean centered on a white ice sphere, it looks like an eyeball. Thick clouds swirl in patterns around the planet’s midsection, betraying evidence of turbulent storms. The second planet, closer to the star, has a wide, white polar ice cap on the side facing away from Luhman 16A. Similar to its sibling, clouds wreath around its midsection north to south, but the entire hemisphere facing the star is a mix of blue ocean and brown continents. Wispy clouds swirl in curlicues on that side.

  Ava holds her hand up to her mouth. “Oxygen/Nitrogen atmosphere. Let’s see the thermals.”

  Isaac taps his workstation, and the image changes to a thermal spectrum of orange, green, and blue. “Tidally locked. Same side always faces the star, so hot on star side, cold on space side. Really cold at polar cap. Mars cold. But look at the equator temps on the star side. Twelve degrees Celsius. Like a fall day on Earth.”

  “There could be life there,” Ava says.

  Isaac scratches his chin. “Entire system is only eight hundred million years old. Not impossible, but would be much quicker than life evolved on Earth.”

  “But look at the oxygen percent in the atmosphere. Eighteen percent. The rest is nitrogen and trace gases. No methane, which is a biomarker for animals, but that doesn’t mean anything for alien life. What do you think the source of the oxygen is?”

  “Dunno. Way too much oxygen to be ultraviolet splitting of water vapor, plus not much UV from Luhman. Mostly IR.”

  Ava is intrigued. “A mystery.”

  “Yeah,” Isaac says. “This is so awesome.”

  Breakfast at the Canteen is particularly lively today. James and Ava have managed to sneak in a shower and a change of clothes, although Isaac is still in the same crumpled shirt from yesterday. Everyone is spread out between two adjacent tables talking, eating, joking, and there is a noticeable excitement in the air. After eighteen days of seeing the crew in primarily casual clothes, James thinks it’s nice to see that almost everyone has chosen their mission logo shirts. It’s not the formality of, say, full flight suits, but it’s almost like a uniform. Beckman is one of the only outliers wearing his standard Navy tee.

  Even Ananke is here, her hologram sitting at a table with a holographic slate in front of her instead of food. “Isaac,” she says, “I think because we’ve discovered these planets, we get to name them.”

  Isaac sets down his croissant and claps his hands. “Oh, yes! I’ve always wanted to name a planet. I made a list coming here.”

  Ananke leans in, curious. “Do you have seventy-eight names?”

  Isaac pauses. “Not yet.”

  “How did you choose them?”

  Isaac talks with his hands, animated. “Well, tradition is to choose from Greek or Roman mythology. Many rules and different rules for minor planets versus major. What’s fun is to match the name with some aspect of the planet. Quite different than how the planets back home were named. I mean, we named Venus after the Roman goddess of beauty, but the planet has acid rain and furnace temperatures. Vulcan would have been better. Roman god of fire.”

  Hitoshi blinks. “We could have had Vulcan as our neighbor. Thanks, Romans, for fumbling the ball.”

  “So,” Isaac adds, continuing, “the computer has already tagged the planets using the provisional exoplanet naming convention. Really simple. Closest planet to the star gets lowercase a, next gets b…so it goes Luhman 16Aa, Luhman 16Ab. We can just call them alphabet letters for now until we pick names.”

  “Oh, c’mon Isaac,” Lin says. “We can do better than ABCs. I know you’ve got a bunch of good ones. Lay ‘em on us.”

  Isaac seems a little bashful. “You know, it’s our discovery, and I didn’t want to pick the names for us, but there’s two I really like for the major planets around 16A.” Everyone waits a moment, egging him on. “Okay. So for the frozen ocean world, I like Ianthe. She’s one of the Oceanids, who are sea nymphs that are daughters of Oceanus. For the oxygen world that has land and sea, I like Neso. She’s one of the Nereids, and the name means island goddess.” He hesitates, looking everyone over. “So, uh…what do you think?”

  “Wow,” James says. “Those are really good. What’s everyone else think?”

  “I think Isaac should’ve named our planets instead of the Romans,” Hitoshi says. “And I’m not just saying that because we’d have Vulcan. But seriously, those rock. I vote we roll with them.”

  Everyone nods and claps.

  “Nice job, Isaac,” Willow says. “I think you just named your first planets.”

  Isaac’s grin is ear-to-ear. He looks a little shy from all of the attention, but he also looks like someone whose dream just came true.

  16

  Ianthe

  Hitoshi, Beckman, and Lin are in full EV suits floating near an octagonal satellite with a folded-up gold reflector dish. Around them, Promise’s cargo bay is a warehouse of racks and crates with a robotic crane hovering on overhead tracks. The bay doors are open, revealing star-speckled space. Promise is still 1 AU from Luhman and has rotated its orientation so that it is flying tangent along an orbital trajectory. During mission planning, there was a short discussion about the best location to launch the Earthlink satellite, with the Lagrange point between Luhman 16A and B being an early contender. The problem was that no one knew the composition of the rest of the system, so what appeared like a stable choice could result in their satellite later getting ejected if other planets tugged on it in the wrong way. The safest option was to place it in orbit around the more massive of the two stars, Luhman 16A. Even though it’s called the Earthlink satellite, the entire fleet is deploying identical satellites at their destination stars that will form a communications network between each star and Earth. It’s like they’re building an interstellar internet, one node at a time.

  As Lin taps a few checklist items on the satellite’s panel, she pauses, glancing over at Hitoshi. “You know, I just had a totally deep thought. Whatever adventure Aletheia had with the Mimic is long done, and she’s already back home, right? It all happened while we were in fasttime. Aletheia arrived there over two years ago.”

  “Trust me,” Hitoshi says. “You’re going to give yourself a headache.”

  She pokes at a few icons on her panel, continuing. “That means that they’ve already transmitted whatever they’re going to say to our satellite, and the radio waves are just zipping through space for the last two years, so they’ll get here, like, next year sometime.”

  “Uh…yeah, that sounds right. Space Internet is so slow.”

  She squints. “Dayspring went to Barnard’s Star, so they got there, like six, seven months ago. Probably the same deal. I think Barnard’s is ten light-years from here so that one will be a while.” She thinks. “Then we’re going to do the same slowtime/fasttime thing to Peregrine and Xuanzang because they haven’t got there yet.”

  “Isn’t it weird talking about things that happened two years ago when we all left together eighteen days ago? It’s like we have to invent a new tense to talk about this stuff. I’m going to call it the future-past tense.” He imitates a movie trailer voice. “In a world where Aletheia’s past is in Promise’s future, only one man—“ he looks over at Lin “—or woman…can save the universe.”

  “Correction,” Beckman says. “If you talk about this, it’s going to give me a headache.”

  Lin finishes her typing. “There’s probably some way we can get a time paradox out of this.”

  “Okay, new rule. Let’s try not to alter the space-time continuum on our mission,” Hitoshi says, disconnecting the restraining straps from the satellite. “If it requires Q to fix it, we probably shouldn’t do it.”

  Lin pushes off from the satellite, drifting back towards the walls. Hitoshi removes his last tether and mirrors her.
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  Beckman looks back and forth at Hitoshi and Lin. “I’ve just come to accept that I will never know what the two of you are ever talking about.”

  “Beckster,” Hitoshi says, “happy to share my vids with you.”

  “That’s okay,” Beckman replies. “Although Top Gun was pretty good.” He clips his suit’s tether into the wall. “Let’s get clear and ready to launch.”

  After everyone is secured, Beckman taps the crane controls, and the robotic arm glides along its tracks, reaching down and clamping onto the satellite’s lift points. Slowly, the satellite rises and floats forward, guided by the tug of the arm. When it reaches the exit, the arm releases it like a bowler tossing a ball, and the satellite drifts out into space. As it recedes into the starry landscape, its anti-collision strobes awaken, blinking white around its perimeter, and the giant gold dish unfurls like a blossoming flower. The last time they did this, it was in orbit around Alpha Centauri to replace an alien beacon they’d destroyed. Hopefully, Hitoshi thinks, this one will go better.

  Ianthe’s thick white ice is wrinkled as if the world were once larger. Sinuous chasms spider along the surface, with river-blue splashes decorating the ice along their routes. On the night side, the polar cap is centered right where the equator would typically be, bulging in thickness like an eye’s optic nerve. Craters dapple the polar cap. Cloud layers heavily cover the transition between night and day, with lightning bursts crackling through the atmosphere like an artillery bombardment. Where the planet faces Luhman 16A, the ice has completely melted, leaving nothing but ocean waves and wispy clouds reflecting the dull glow of the star’s orange light.

  On Promise’s bridge screen, an orbital diagram shows the ship circling Ianthe at an altitude of eight hundred kilometers. Three probes arc along de-orbital trajectories, streaking through Ianthe’s atmosphere like meteors. As their plasma cones sputter and fade, white contrails paint powdery lines in the sky.