Tehom: The Tehom Legacy Book One

by S. Abel de Valcourt

  According to the data Eta Cassiopeiae was stellar massive by Earth standards, fully five times the size of the Sol system. The dual stars orbited one another in a way which caused them both to wobble slightly, but in a predictable way. A Sun like star dominated the system, with a smaller orange dwarf as a secondary.

  The known makeup and star frequency of Eta Cassiopeiae had long been a subject of theory and fiction. Gerald shifted in his chair.

  “Three planetary bodies of note… No, four.” Gerald mumbled to himself in his usual manner.

  “Subject one, Eta A, Gas giant… Helium, Multiple rings… seven moons. Far outside the circumstellar habitable zone. Subject two, Eta B, blue water planet, within the goldilocks zone, very high gravity, two moons. Wow that is close to Eta B, gravity has to be insane! Readings say liquid water, interesting but not what I am looking for Eta.” Gerald spoke to the various solar systems he explored more often than he spoke to his coworkers.

  “Subject three, Eta B, dead iron.” Barren rocky iron based planets were the most common type cataloged by the team. The nickname ‘dead iron’ had come to be the unofficial term for such worlds and made up a full sixty percent of all worlds surveyed, another thirty percent were gas giants. Only a very rare ten percent warranted a second look, and most of the time the interesting worlds were moons surrounding gas giants.

  “Subject four, Eta A, middle of the CHZ, single moon, dead iron. High ice content… makes sense; Eta A is brighter and cooler than the sun. Nitrogen oxygen reflectivity, what do you look like?” Gerald peered into his monitor as the extra solar observatory focused on the area. The process would take the better part of half an hour, but a planet worth such an extra look remained a rarity. Gerald alone had the clearance to command the observatories.

  Too early to get excited Gerald, we have seen this before. Not in months, but we were fooled before. Confirm the data.

  Gerald stood up and made his way to the bathroom, made a stop at a vending machine for lunch and stopped for a few minutes to see the Chinese raising the Chinese Communist Flag above the headquarters longhouse on Mars.

  The picture that awaited Gerald Baker when he returned to his workstation made him drop his candy bar on the floor and forget about eating. The orb that filled the screen brought tears to his eyes and shortened his breath.

  The planet had large icy polar regions which capped both the north and south hemispheres and covered nearly seventy percent of the planet. Between the two ice sheets a band of blue, grey and most important green ran the entire band around the equator.

  Green.

  In years of looking at data, pictures and charts, one color was always absent. Green. Gerald had been fooled by a planet deemed hostile nearly two years ago, the planet had been red but still had traces of nitrogen and oxygen. He had fought a losing battle to have it explored more thoroughly; it was not what Simon Tehom was looking for.

  This planet was very much cooler than the Earth; data had an average heat temperature of 21°C at the equator. It looked nothing like the modern earth of the last 10,000 years, however seemed to be in the middle of an ice age. The image was still very blurry but the colors were all there. Eta Cassiopeiae A stood a staggering twenty two light years from the Earth.

  Confirm the results Gerald. Did you miss something?

  For the next two hours he ignored the shift change and the smells of microwaved dinners from the break room. He ignored the heated debates over the wisdom of the colonization of Mars. He ignored the pangs of hunger and the fatigue in his eyes. Every single reading matched that of the Earth well within the reasonable tolerances, this was no mistake. Gerald and the Company had finally made the greatest discovery in the history of the mankind. A sister planet to the Earth.

  Gerald hit the print key on the keyboard and a full glossy photo quality print of the planet and its location printed out down the hall. Gerald wrote two words at the top in green permanent marker, ‘Tehom Prime’.

  Calm and collected Gerald walked across the company campus, made his way to the elevator with a black metallic envelope under his arm containing the picture and a few pages of data. The envelope was a security measure enacted by the information security teams as a safeguard from multiple threats. All sensitive interoffice communication moved around the Company campus in these faraday cage laced envelopes, this one held the future of everyone at the Tehom Consortium.

  “I am here to see Mr. Tehom.” Gerald said as he approached the secretary desk facing the elevator.

  “Simon is in a meeting, is that for him? I’ll take it.” Liberty Tehom, Simon’s newlywed wife and personal secretary held out her hand.

  “I… I’m sorry Mrs. Tehom. I need to talk to him. Right now, this cannot wait.” Gerald stammered.

  Liberty knew of Gerald’s role in the company, Simon had long railed that Gerald and his team were the headlights on the vehicle that was the company, his confidence in Gerald was the main reason the board of directors and department heads ignored Gerald’s declining physical appearance and some said his sanity.

  “Gerald Baker right?” Liberty knew who he was for certain, but wanted to set him in a more focused stance, she could see the wave of obsession in his wild eyes.

  “Yes, I…”

  “Did you find something Gerald?” Liberty whispered even though the office was totally secure.

  “Green.”

  She instantly turned around and walked into the Consortium Board Room. Several seconds later she lead a confused and slightly upset group of junior executives and department heads out of the office who were still struggling to shift their strewn papers neatly back into their briefcases. The bewildered group had been briefing Simon on the current status of their various areas of research, a monthly routine that had never been interrupted before.

  “Mr. Tehom will see you now Gerald.” Liberty said after the elevator closed behind the bewildered group.

  Gerald entered the Board Room and found himself alone with Simon Tehom a man he hadn’t seen in weeks.

  “You look like shit Gerald.” Simon smiled.

  “Maybe, but we found it.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure!”

  “All the data…”

  “Yes yes, but not just the data. Look at this!” Gerald pulled the photograph out of the envelope and let it slide along the table toward Simon. “Green.”

  “It looks like Earth, at least like Earth used to. That is a lot of ice.” Simon peered at the photograph.

  “The equator shows an average temperature of 21° Celsius. The Green is unlike anything I have ever seen outside of our own solar system. This is it, this has to be it.” Gerald knocked his fist into the table.

  “Gerald, I want you to go home, get some rest. Take a shower, shave, put on a clean shirt and show up here at 7am. I’ll assemble the troops.”

  “Yes Mr. Tehom.”

  “Gerald, good work.” Simon beamed with excitement.

  The next month was a series of meetings, a steady flow of environmental theorists, astro-geologists, politicians, ambassadors, political appointees, economic advisors, metallurgists, genetic scientists, and a hoard of other nameless faces streamed on in closed door meeting after closed door meeting. No sleep, no rest, just faces, words, arguments, agreements, and debate.

  When the time to make the announcements finally came, Simon could barely stand. Exhaustion lost the battle with adrenalin, which is all he seemed to run on that September.

  ***

  “Sixty two years ago, my grandfather gathered the board of Tehom Acquisitions to a meeting. In that meeting he informed the board of directors that he would be changing the course of the entire company and that he planned on embarking on a mission that many thought would drive the company and every single one of its employees into bankruptcy. Yet, sixty two years later… here we are.” Simon held his arms out to the amphitheatre of gathered employees and was greeted with a friendly chuckle from the crowd.

  “
There have been many rumors over the past few weeks about what exactly Gerald Baker found out there.” Simon pointed up. “Some said he found a spaceship, others a wall of dark matter, my favorite is the one about a giant ball of cheese floating near Orion.” Simon pointed toward the third row, “I know that one was you Walt!” Simon grinned and the crowd laughed again.

  “When Gerald approached me with this find of his, I struggled with it. What to do with the information. So instead of me telling all of you what to do lets come together as we have learned to do, and discuss the issue at hand.” Simon stepped to his left and backed away from the center of the stage and the lights dimmed. On a large digital screen a digitally enhanced version of the Eta Cassiopeia solar system appeared and then zoomed in on the single planet. The effect was met with a predictable series of oohs and aahs from the crowd.

  “This is Tehom Prime, an earthlike planet in orbit around Eta Cassiopeia A. We believe that the planet is in the middle of a long term ice age much like that of our own planet near the beginning of the Quaternary Glaciation. There is speculation among the climatologists and atmospheric scientists that due to the lower temperature of Eta A compared with our Sun, that this is simply the normal state for this planet. The important thing to note is that in the polar regions we are detecting negative 140° Celsius but in the equatorial regions it is a sunny and comfortable 21° Celsius. There are positive readings of an oxygen and nitrogen atmosphere as well as an oxygen-carbon dioxide cycle and active photosynthesis. For all intents and purposes, we believe this to be a second earth.”

  “A second earth?!” A voice shouted from the crowd.

  “It is smaller than we are used to, about 65% of the planetary mass of the Earth, and a bit colder. But the gravity is almost the same according to the math; the atmosphere seems to be a very close match based on the observable data. I am being told it would be similar to the environment of Iceland, only on a global scale.” Simon continued. “The question isn’t if Tehom Prime is the right place, every piece of science and data tells us that it is. The question is how do we proceed?”

  “Colonization before the Chinese find it!”

  “Speaking of which, I would like to introduce Ambassador Xiang from the Chinese consulate in Austin.”

  Ambassador Xiang stood and approached the microphone in a hushed room of over ten thousand totally and deathly silent members of the Tehom Consortium.

  “The Chinese government was made aware of this planetary system by Mr. Tehom roughly two months ago in the same briefing that your President Starkey attended. We agree with both Mr. Tehom and Mr. Starkey that this planet you are calling Tehom Prime is of vast scientific and human importance. Even the Chinese, Russian and Brazilian communist nations have agreed that while the wealth and importance of this planet cannot be ignored, we have no collective interest or gain in pursuing it ourselves. The Tehom Consortium and the Republic of Texas acted with both honor and integrity in our own pursuit of Mars. We will not stand in your way as you pursue this endeavor.” Xiang spoke with perfect English and only a very slight accent that hovered over his pronunciation of the letter W. His words were met with rounds of applause. Then he continued.

  “This message could have been delivered in writing, but the reason I come here is not to tell you this. It is to provide you with the offer we suggested to both Mr. Tehom and Mr. Starkey…” Xiang looked over to Simon and stopped.

  “The Chinese have offered us a very difficult… choice.” Simon paused at the word choice for a moment then continued. “Our mining and our scientific efforts could accomplish a small manned survey mission, however the trip would take nearly a hundred years to make using the propulsion technologies we currently have available to us. We do not lack in science, we do not lack in materials or knowledge. Where we lack is in labor and numbers. Ship building on this scale will be monumental, we will be building an office building, a technical university, and a cruise ship simultaneously all surrounding an experimental engine in space. Not impossible, but certainly a monumental task.” Simon paused again to allow the gravity of the issues to evaporate into the crowd.

  “We all know that the political and philosophical debate over government and rights have long been waged on both friendly and not-so friendly terms. Thousands of years of war and distrust, predating even the Roman Republic. China and Russia together have managed to come close to settling that debate on a global scale, I have come to believe that the fall of the Republic of Texas is not only a possibility, but is imminent. On our current track, neither the Republic nor the Consortium will exist in their current autonomous form within fifty years.” Simon took a deep breath and the shock and disbelief of his words gripped the audience. “It is difficult to think about, difficult to hear, and even more difficult to say out loud. We simply cannot stand against a global wave; I believe that humanity as a whole has gotten lazy and apathetic to oppression…” Simon stopped and looked to Ambassador Xiang, then cut short the political editorial.

  “The Chinese have offered to assist us in whatever project we come together to mount. We have not agreed to anything yet, but here is what we have planned so far. Many of you will recognize some of this, we have had much of this in the works for decades in its various pieces and parts.” As he spoke the picture of Tehom Prime Faded and a large diagram of a spaceship filled the large screen.

  “This is the ship we are currently designing. As I said earlier, the journey is close to a century long. That is three or four generations, so it is a generational ship. We are not looking at a science or exploratory vessel. This ship’s only cargo is people. As currently designed, we have a crew of five hundred, and a population of twenty thousand. Fully filled, an overall population of military, crew, and civilian you are looking at 20,500 souls. That is roughly double the number of people in this room.” Simon looked up at the slowly rotating ship model. It looked much like a twisted microphone or ice cream cone due to the large round water asteroid which made up the bow of the ship and acted as both a forward plow and shield as well as an ample source of fresh water.

  “Were we to try and build this alone, it would take well over a century to build and it would always be outdated, every system we would install would be obsolete once we installed the next one. With the help of the Chinese we believe that together we can do it in under a decade using our own knowledge and technology, as well as the labor and experience of the Chinese. It is possible.” Simon paused once more before he got to the crux of the matter. “In return, the Chinese want everything, and I do mean everything. The peaceful dissolution of the Republic of Texas incrementally over the next twenty years, and once the ship launches toward Tehom Prime and safely leaves the Solar System, a total surrender… no, surrender is not the right word. A total handing over of all lands, peoples and technology to the Californians and the Chinese so that they can unite the world under a single flag.”

  “We cannot doom millions of people to oppression and only take twenty thousand people!” Right on cue a visibly pregnant Liberty Tehom stood.

  Perfect Timing Elle.

  “My dear wife everyone.” Simon motioned to his wife. “Elle you know as well as anyone that Austin has no fight left in it, even President Starkey has grown tired of stemming the tide, his own senate has begun to turn away from freedom and democracy, just as America did. The communist party in the Republic of Texas is gaining a foothold, the only thing currently in the way is us here. Humanity has made its decision; we cannot change the mind of billions of people of how they want to live.” Simon nodded to his wife and the point was made.

  Glad we planned that ahead of time, nicely done, very nicely done.

  “We have been offered a way out, not only that, we have been offered help. Honest and sure help. I believe the Ambassador when he says that we have no need to fear of betrayal, we are offering so much more than we are taking. Do I believe in Freedom, Liberty and the Rights of Man? Of course I do, I believe that the legacy of the United States of America is the set
of ideals now engrained in humanity. But I also agree with my grandfather, in order for people to be free they have to love freedom more than their cell phone.”

  The room was totally silent, the silence was marked by an overwhelming sense of betrayal and many felt sick to their stomach.

  You are losing them Simon.

  “We cannot save the planet, we cannot force our own ideals onto people that do not want them. Our role is to protect ourselves, our own way of life. We have been givin this planet, so very far away, but we can get there. We can colonize this world; we just have to want to.”

  “Who goes?” Wendy Jacobs, Simon’s retired secretary and dear friend stood up from the seated crowd.

  “We are a long time from that detail; I will say that we have well into a decade before we even need to be thinking about such a thing. I imagine some sort of an education based lottery, accompanied by a health screen.” Simon passed on to the next question.

  “You said the Chinese want everything, what exactly do you mean by everything?”

  “Quite simply, they can already reach out and grab the remaining republics quite easily, including Texas. What they cannot simply take is the technology, information and knowledge of nearly a century of human advancement well beyond anything they have. The Chinese know of our security measures and if Tehom were ever to be taken by force it would result in the worst loss of human knowledge since the destruction of the Library of Alexandretta. We are at a stalemate, what we want to do is split the game so that there are no losers, or winners.”

  “You mean cut and run!” an angry voice called from the crowd.

  “I understand this idea may not be popular, I know it feels like defeat, I know this is a bitter pill to swallow. Trust in that I feel the same way. But look at this!” Simon pressed a button on the podium and the image of Tehom Prime returned to the screen. “Do we as members of the human race unite and embrace this wondrous gift? Or do we stay here, and fight over our petty differences and allow it to slip through our fingers? We cannot do this alone, and they cannot do it at all. This is what the Company was created for, we finally have a goal, we finally have a destination, we are just able to reach up and grab THIS the birthright of humanity, what do we do?”