Travels of the Orphan (The Space Orphan Book 3)

by Laer Carroll

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  That weekend Jane spent time with Phil and her family. On Monday she was back in Colorado Springs to leave for her first voyage in Space Frigate USSS Constellation.

  Chapter 7 - Mars

  Constellation was performing well. So was her crew. Now Jane wanted to make sure that the combination of the two would also do so.

  She wanted her crew to be acquainted with all locales in which Constellation might work. So she visited the World Space Station and gave the crew three days to visit it. There they experienced zero gravity for hours at a time. Also one-sixth spin-induced artificial gravity that simulated the gravity of the Moon.

  Next she went to the Moon, had Constellation set down near Luna City and gave the crew five days experience living and working in one-sixth G.

  Jane then took Constellation up to Earth-Moon Lagrange Point One and delivered some passengers to the space station there who needed to return to Earth.

  A trip to Mars would be a little trickier than to the WSS and the Moon. The crew and Constellation had worked well so far, so Jane took the next step on Connie's first mission. She landed the spacecraft on Earth, took on a big load of supplies for Mars, and took on board a group of scientists bound for Mars.

  Then Jane ordered Constellation to proceed to the Red Planet.

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  Mars was behind Earth in its orbit around the sun by almost a third of its orbit. Constellation drove in an almost a straight line "behind" Earth's orbit toward it and outward from the sun.

  It took them a little less than two days at one-gravity constant acceleration to reach their midpoint. It took a similar time to decelerate to rest relative to Mars and at 20,000 miles distance.

  Jane and the bridge crew gazed at the orangish ball of Mars before them on the bridge view screen. Many of the crew in the rest of the ship paused in their duties to look at the image on their various view screens.

  It was about the size of one's fist held at arm's length against the black of space. A fourth of the ball was dark from their vantage point. Darker and lighter swatches of color showed surface features clearly; the atmosphere of Mars was very thin and dry and so blurred those features very little. The most notable features were numerous pock marks of craters. The atmosphere was not much deterrent to meteoroid strikes.

  "Not much to look at, is it Captain?" said Lopez beside Jane sitting in the Exec's chair.

  "Depends on your background I suppose. The astronomers are probably jubilant."

  She raised her voice slightly.

  "Good job, Navigator, Pilot.

  "Navigator, plot a course for Mars Base #1."

  "Aye, aye, Captain." After a brief pause she said, "Got it. It's on my screen if you want to mirror it on your console and examine it."

  "No, thanks, Navigator. I know if you did it that it's right.

  "Pilot, take us in."

  Constellation for the last hour had decelerated at a little over a third of a gravity to match the gravity of Mars. The artificial gravity had been adjusted to that value as well. Jane had felt the crew needed that hour to adjust from Earth gravity to Mars gravity. So now the spacecraft decelerated at that lower value to drop down toward the surface of the planet.

  The Red Planet swelled in their view screen until it took up most of the view, then swelled still more. "Forward" began to give way to "down."

  The spaceship looped once around the planet as it sank lower. Finally after most of an hour the craft was flying horizontally with Mars Base One just visible on the horizon. It was not very impressive, just a few white buildings projecting above the surface. As on the Moon most of the base was under a protective layer of dirt.

  "Hello, USSS Constellation. Welcome to Mars. Per your landing request, set down at Square Four."

  "Thank you, Mars Base Traffic Control. Hope you didn't mind getting up early to greet us."

  "Are you kidding? We've been salivating at the promise of the steaks and fresh greens you're bringing us. We'd get up at midnight much less early in the morning."

  The on-duty pilot that shift, a young Samoan woman who was the biggest person on the ship, had a delicate touch. The landing square, constructed of Mars dirt cemented into solid bricks by concentrated solar heat, came closer more and more slowly until it disappeared from the forward view screen. It slid into view on the bottom view screens, expanding as Constellation sank lower.

  In the last few seconds the pilot cut in the autopilot. Not even she could match the millimetric precision of that robot. Constellation settled so gently there was no hint of a bump, just a sensation of coming to absolute rest.

  "Mars Base Traffic Control, we've settled. Ready to connect to your interior."

  "Roger that, Constellation. Come on down."

  Jane directed that the personnel elevator, designed into Constellation for just this situation, be let down and inserted into Landing Square Four's entrance into the tunnels beneath the surface.

  On the bridge's view screens everyone could see a door open on the bottom of the ship and a tube emerge. It moved down into the artificial tunnel between the surface of Moon Base #1 and its interior. After a few minutes it reached the bottom of the shaft and stopped moving. A few more minutes passed while the ship and the base completed all connections.

  "Mars, we're connected."

  "That's what our instruments say too. May we send up someone to greet you?"

  "Absolutely. I'll meet you on our first floor."

  Jane turned command over to Major Lopez and got up from her seat. She left the bridge for a hall which led to an elevator from the top floor of Constellation to the lower floors. It ended in the bottom-most of nine floors of the craft, which held ship's stores, cargo, and an area for passenger boarding and off-loading.

  Then Jane had a short hike to the exterior personnel elevator. As she arrived a chime announced the arrival of the Martian personnel.

  The elevator door slid open. A tall woman and a short man emerged wearing big smiles.

  The woman, grey-haired but with an unlined face, was the first to shake Jane's hand.

  "Are we glad to meet you, Colonel! I'm Victoria Haskell, Administrator for this site. This is Dr. William Roderick, Associate Administrator."

  They shook hands as Jane said, "Jane Kuznetsov, Dr. Haskell, Dr. Roderick. Call me Captain. It's the labeling convention when I'm aboard my ship. We're very glad to be here. We were very interested to hear about your latest discovery."

  "We're eager to tell you about it and get your help. But first let's get your deliveries transferred."

  They repaired to the cargo hold of the first floor. It too had an elevator designed to connect to Mars Base, a big one. For the next several hours Constellation's load officer and his sergeant assistant directed the offloading of nearly a hundred standard containers. They were carried away by robots supervised by Martian personnel.

  It was nearly noon Mars time when it was all done. Jane and her officers were invited to have lunch with the leaders of the base.

  They sat at a big table in the base cafeteria. They included Administrator Haskell and Associate Administrator Roderick. Jane was accompanied by Major Lopez and several scientists who were to join the investigators on the ground. All of scientists and the onsite investigators and service personnel were from the European Union. That entity had bankrolled the Mars exploration effort.

  The food was of a few standard items but well prepared and cooked. The Europeans were lucky to have included a scientist who was a real foodie. She had enrolled a couple of assistants to her cause.

  "So," Jane said as the group was finishing their food and drink, "tell me about this recent discovery. You made it, what, about three weeks ago?"

  "One of our jobs is to examine the walls of craters. This lets us see the various layers of Martian dirt and understand some of the history of planet.

  "At the seventh crater we examined we found sticking out of one wall this."

  She slid a slate computer over to Jane and Lop
ez. Visible on the photo displayed on the slate was a flat golden triangle sticking out of a wall of dirt. Jane had seen it before so she moved it closer to Lopez.

  "It's some fifty feet on one side and thirty on the other. Very careful testing shows it to be ultra hard. Something we'd assumed since it had survived the heat and pressures exerted on it when a meteoroid struck and caused the crater. The crater is nearly a mile across, so both stresses were enormous.

  "We don't know how far it extends. Far enough to anchor it against gravity. It's been there for a long time and yet hasn't fallen so we guess it extends pretty far.

  "We asked our people back home to send us better equipment to look into the rock in which the artifact is embedded. Did you bring it? "

  "I brought Connie. When I was tasked to help with your investigations of the artifact I made some modifications to it. I'd already created a long-range form of radar using artificial gravity technology. Only minor mods were needed to turn that 'gravitar' into a matter-penetrating form."

  The tech was compatible with one of Robot's esoteric senses so Robot now could look millions of miles instead of its 25,000 foot limit when outside Constellation.

  One of the resident European scientists, a skinny grey-haired black man with a youthful face, chuckled.

  "Do you just invent things as a reflex? Like a cough?"

  Jane turned fully toward him and smiled. "Pretty much."

  She turned back to the Administrator.

  "What I'll need to do is bring Connie to the investigation site. We've plenty of room aboard, so I propose we bring all your investigators aboard and set up a temporary base inside it. I'll take us to the artifact. We'll overfly it a thousand feet up, record the data, then set down a mile away at a home site to analyze it."

  The grey-haired man had been introduced as John Johnson. He spoke again.

  "Do you have showers on that monster? With enough water for them?"

  Jane said, "Plenty of both. I designed Connie to be a comfortable habitat."

  "Great," said Johnson. "We're limited to sponge baths here."

  "Glad to oblige. Now I suggest we spend the rest of the day finishing the transfer of your new personnel and supplies and settle in for the night. Then tomorrow go out to the artifact site."

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  That evening after dinner Jane hosted a party aboard Constellation in a room which could double as a ballroom. Attending were all of her officers, several of her sergeants, a few enlisted personnel, and the top managers and scientists on Mars. There was a snack buffet and a bar serving soft drinks, wine, and beer.

  Jane and Lopez circulated, mostly separately, but at one point they ended up together with their Mars counterparts: the Admin and her exec, Dr. Roderick.

  "It's amazing to me," said Lopez, "that two sets of aliens have visited this solar system, the Cats and whoever made that artifact you discovered. We've always thought life was rare in the Galaxy since we've detected no radio communications from them. And had found no ancient artifacts on Earth that showed that we'd been visited by anyone."

  "Well," said Roderick. "Now we know why no radio comm was detected. Advanced aliens use hypercom or something even more advanced. Communication by radio waves to them must seem little more advanced than talking by smoke signals."

  The Admin added, "And nowadays we have two more sets of evidence that aliens visit us. There are the sentinel satellites out beyond the Belt. And the disturbances in Saturn's rings that are the wake of alien vessels traveling to and from subspace portals."

  Roderick said, "That's confirmed, I believe?"

  Jane said, "The sentinels confirm it. They say they came through one of the portals as cargo on an automated probe sent by the Human Interstellar Confederation. Apparently the Confed has routine automated exploration at the fringes of their empire. Or I suppose empire is the wrong word. The Confed is more a federation of independent systems."

  Roderick said they'd been lucky that the two older sets of aliens had focused on the asteroids and Mars. Lopez answered him.

  "We don't have a lot of data about the Saturn subspace portal system. The sentinels will answer any question but we have to be very clear and specific. They respond to general questions with 'I don't understand.' They do agree that the portals are overseen by some super-intelligent computer with enormous power. It won't let anyone in who might harm indigenous life forms."

  "Then why the sentinels? If the super computer will protect Earth life from predatory aliens?"

  "The sentinels are very clear that such predators exist. They can't come through the portals. But they can bypass Saturn. Then the sentinels yell for Confed cops to come protect us."

  "That might not do us any good if the cops are slow to get here. So maybe--" He turned to Jane. "--you should turn your genius to inventing some superweapons."

  Jane nodded but said nothing. Any such weapons would be useless if Earth did not have a good space travel capability able to deploy them. That is what she was focusing on.

  Roderick hadn't waited for an answer. He turned his attention to another topic: the fact reported by the sentinels that there were humans beyond the Solar System. With whom (the sentinels said) Earth humans could intermarry.

  "And yet the Confederation sentinels say every human native to a planet evolved separately as far as the evidence suggests. Seems to me there should be at least a few molecules difference in DNA from planet to planet making intermarriage impossible."

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  It took the next day to plan the artifact investigation from aboard Constellation. The next day a couple of dozen scientists boarded the spaceship and were settled into guest cabins. They were assigned a large room which would serve as an office.

  At 10:00 the head of the scientists left the office and joined Jane in the control room, at her invitation. She thought he looked like a slimmer younger version of Santa Claus. She put him in the seat to her left.

  Jane had Lopez start the trip. The woman did so by using the public address system to warn everyone aboard that they should prepare for acceleration.

  The pilot then retracted the two elevators connecting the spacecraft to the ground base and lifted off on the craft's floater field. She pulled its legs up into their slots, lifted straight up to a mile's height, and set off in a southeasterly direction to the location on the equator of the crater where the alien artifact had been discovered.

  At a leisurely 450 miles per hour it took only twenty minutes to go the 160-some miles to the crater. Jane had the pilot slow to a stop directly above the side of the crater where the artifact projected from the crater wall.

  Robot from several miles out had probed the location of the artifact so Jane saw what it did: what appeared to be a small city buried beneath Martian soil. The gravity radar of the ship, however, was very primitive compared to that of Robot, so the image of the hidden city slowly built up on a section of the control room's big vision screen.

  "Mein Gott!" said the scientist beside Jane as the image slowly built up. "It's huge!"

  The Observations Officer who was controlling the gravitar devices built into Constellation superimposed two rulers onto the rectangular city. They were at right angles to each other. The officer put lines over each of the image's edges closest of the rulers. They revealed that it was almost two miles on the edge which paralleled the equator. And almost a half mile in the north-south direction.

  "So," the head scientist said, more to himself than to Jane and Lopez in the chairs beside him. "It seems to straddle the equator in its longest dimension. Very orderly, the mind of whoever built the city."

  "IS it a city?" said Lopez, leaning forward a bit to look at him around Jane. "It looks like it to us, but maybe it's something very different."

  "Of course, dear Lady. But it's a convenient label until we can get a better idea of what the artifact is."

  Jane had to admit the image revealed by the ship's gravitar, and to Robot's more sophisticated senses, did look like a small city.

&n
bsp; There was a main street running the entire length of the artifact centered on Mars' equator. On each side were buildings, one-story ones at each extremity of the main street, two- and three-story ones toward the center.

  Behind the two lines of buildings, or whatever they were, were two other streets paralleling the main street. The scientists labeled them North Street and South Street. There were three more parallel streets further north and south.

  Crossways to the east-west streets were cross streets, which the scientists christened avenues. There were sixteen of those. They labeled the westernmost Avenue 1, the easternmost Avenue 16.

  Jane had Constellation slowly circle the "city" so that its gravitar could get a 3D view of the artifact. Then she had the craft settle a hundred feet beyond the easternmost end of the city. At this distance Constellation's innermost protective force field would not quite impinge on the edge of the city.

  Jane and Lopez began handling the routine tasks involving settling Constellation and its crew into its new base. Meanwhile the scientists in their office set up their several portable computers and the larger computer which would act as their project database.

  After lunch Jane said she would begin clearing the dirt away from the city. The head scientist, a Dr. Wolowitz, said, "How do you propose to do that? We didn't bring any of our earth movement equipment."

  "I did. As soon as I got my orders to come help you out I finalized an invention I've been working on. It uses a radical new way to cut earth rather than the old mechanical or heat technologies."

  "Is there any danger to the city? We don't want to damage it by accident."

  "None."

  "Well, I'll be very interested in seeing it work. I hope you won't mind if I protest its use if I suspect it will endanger the artifact."

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  An hour later a space-suited Jane and a space-suited Wolowitz and a couple of assistants similarly clad met in a section of Constellation's cargo hold. Jane turned on a video window into the section. Inside it could be seen a large yellow device which looked like an industrial-sized farm tractor.