The First Exoplanet

by T. J. Sedgwick

  The constellation of twelve microprobes had already been sent through the FTL gate, which sat suspended in the Alliance Citadel’s Assembly Module ready to take the two-person Viper to the same far-off place. One second they were gently floating towards the black sphere, with the beauty of planet Earth as the surrounding backdrop, the next it was replaced by Gaia. Not quite a twin, but close enough in form and colour to be described as a sister planet to Earth.

  Jen felt like she’d descended into an unconscious state for several seconds during the jump. It was as if she’d just awoken after a nap with a new back-drop from the Viper’s front external camera filling her contact lens display—that of planet Gaia below her hidden craft’s low-level orbit.

  “All systems normal,” reported Jonah with seeming relief, showing no adverse reaction to the faster-than-light transit.

  “And placed more or less where we need to be,” Jen replied.

  “Microprobes are reporting in—seven of twelve so far,” he said as the probes, now distributed in orbit around the planet, sent microbursts straight to their battlesuit comms gear. The probes were modified microprobes of the type the full-sized exploration probes Santa Maria and Pinta had transmitted back with the first reports from the Avendano system five weeks before. They were so small as to be virtually undetectable, had only a single camera but could detect radio and gravimetric.

  “That’s all twelve,” he said a short time later. “They’re surveying the locale of the base now. Should have the first pictures in the next few minutes.”

  The Viper continued to orbit the planet revealing the immense number of space assets around the alien world.

  “I can see why they were so keen on getting the FTL drive out of alien hands,” Jen commented, amazed at the structures that had come into visual range. The fast-moving twinkles of light, which could have only been spacecraft engine plumes, powered about in seemingly random directions like tiny sunlit insects at the end of a warm summer’s day.

  “Yeah I know. And what have we got around Earth? The Citadel, a few tin-can space stations and some shuttles. That’s about it... Oh, and the Vipers,” said Jonah.

  “Well, there’re a few more things than that around Earth, but not a lot compared to this,” she replied.

  “We’ve got incoming data… Stills from the base...” His voice trailed off, clearly shocked at what the microprobe’s first image had revealed.

  “Err, what’s left of it anyway. What the hell happened there?”

  “Looks like they survived long enough to nuke the base. Not sure if that’s a plus or minus,” she said.

  The satellite image showed a two-and-a-half kilometre wide subsidence crater and a now-diminished plume of smoke rising from the apparent centre of it. Only in the top-right of the crater was anything recognisable as being an alien facility with some ruined buildings and cracked surfaces there. The forest was virtually intact and covered part of the circular locus of the crater’s edge, although many trees had been denuded of their foliage.

  “This pic tells us a lot,” Jen started.

  “It does? Like what?” asked Jonah, not having been on the same nuclear warfare specialist training that Jen had.

  “Okay, for starters the detonation must have gone off only several hours after they arrived—the plume tells us that and the way the smoke and dust has already drifted across the continent. See, take a look at this zoomed out pic,” she continued.

  “Yeah, I see,” Jonah replied in fascination, as if listening to a great detective explaining a crime scene.

  “It won’t have hit the stratosphere, even if it detonated on the surface—too small at twenty kilotons. But it didn’t go off on the surface. It was an underburied explosion that went off underground. If it was deeper we wouldn’t be seeing the plume right now as it would have been contained. If it was on the surface we wouldn’t be seeing a subsidence crater of the type shown. We’d also be looking at the result of a surface blast wave. The forest would’ve been flattened for miles around.”

  “So you’re saying A-Patrol went to an underground facility and detonated the nuke?”

  “Yep, that’s exactly what I’m saying, Jonah. And I can tell you one thing: the aliens will be swarming all over that destroyed base trying to work out what happened, which is not going to make our job any easier.”

  “Are you sure we still want to use the planned LZ?” asked Jonah.

  “Since you mentioned it, no, I think that’d be a bad idea. I’d much rather we trek to near the base from a more distant LZ. Coming in on the ground we’re better concealed and more able to shoot back than if we parachute in, even with a UHALO jump. I’m mostly worried about any flyers they might have patrolling in the vicinity. Setting a new LZ now,” she said, placing the landing zone twenty kilometres to the east of the base—the direction farthest from any known roads or facilities so far surveyed.

  “Agreed. Good call. Waiting on local nightfall in three hours, seventeen minutes. Time for a few more orbits and to get lined up for the new location.”

  They orbited Gaia several more times before their Viper was lined up for planetary entry. Subsequent reconnaissance from the microprobes showed over fifty ground vehicles and aircraft in the vicinity of the destroyed base. No aircraft seemed to overfly the new intended LZ and it was not possible to determine what ground vehicles may be there; although there was no logical reason that there’d be any in the middle of the vast, continental forest. The indecipherable radio chatter coming from the area was consistent with the alien asset presence. If only the FTL tech could be made accurate enough to transit them directly onto the surface, thought Jen, it would save a lot of time, risk and burnt-up Viper drones.

  They approached the final waypoint in orbit around the alien world and prepared for entry.

  “We’re lined up. Ejection sequence initiated. Separation of manpod from Viper in five, four, three, two, one...” reported Jonah, before the Viper shot off to its imminent, fiery death. The manpod, which contained his Captain and him, catapulted away on an entry trajectory of its own. The heat shield flowered into life, preserving the human cargo on its way through the night sky. Just another meteor being eaten up by the frictional heat.

  “All systems reporting normal, descending towards the revised LZ. All within tolerance, separation from manpod and initiation of UHALO jump in five, four, three two, one...” said Jonah.

  “Good luck. See you shortly, Jonah,” Jen said over her battlesuit headset as she plunged towards the planet.

  “You too. I’ll keep close so we don’t spend all night looking for each other,” he replied.

  The thrusters made sticking together through the freefall part of the UHALO jump a lot easier than it otherwise would be. Their night vision was already on and they could see an extensive bank of broken cloud cover below. There was something deeply unnerving – even for veterans like these – about falling towards an unknown environment so far away. Jen mused that A-Patrol probably had similar feelings themselves just two days before as they hurtled towards the exoplanet.

  ***

  “Good call on shifting the LZ, Jen,” said Jonah after landing only a couple of hundred metres away from her on the windy, flat, forest canopy elevated far above the ground.

  “Yeah, as we suspected, a lot of alien air activity around ground zero and along certain air corridors,” she replied, blissfully unaware of how perilous the entry had been for A-Patrol and how lucky they’d been.

  They’d already gone through their wonder-stage – the giant trees, the eerie bioluminescent glow, the strange mushroom-like fungi – and had scanned the area for threats and found none. This was a remote and uninhabited part of the forest that seemed to cover a large proportion of the tropics on this planet. Jen couldn’t help thinking about how this forest seemed to be intact despite the advanced technological level of the dominant alien species. On Earth, conversely, most of the tropical forests had long since been destroyed to make way for development, palm plantat
ions and logging. There were at least a few different kinds of trees here, all of them enormous, but morphologically different. This lack of monoculture, absence of infrastructure and the irregularly spaced trunks told her this was a natural forest. Whether it was primary or not was another matter. She thanked the makers of the battlesuit for providing her not only with breathable air that would avoid oxygen toxicity, but also for the cooling technology that kept them comfortable in the hot, humid conditions.

  They removed their backpacks and sat next to each other leaning against the trunk of a tree, relaxed, but always with an eye open for danger. The fact that their shoulder pods were continuously scanning for threats gave them at least some degree of comfort in this strange new world.

  “Let’s run through the plan, Jonah,” she said. “Protocol is for them to broadcast at least once a day using their medium range antenna.” The battlesuits were programmed to alert the wearer if they picked up any such radio microbursts. She continued, “They had a pre-planned rally point called Aberdeen and we’ll dispatch a Hummingbird there to take a look; it’s a lot quicker than hiking there in this heavy gravity. We’re going to stay here until we have some evidence of where they are. If this location turns out to be suitable we may stick around here and dig in for the long haul.”

  “So, assuming there’s anyone to find,” said Jonah, reminding Jen that her optimism may be misplaced, “are we going to them or are they going to come to us?”

  “That depends on where they are and their condition. It could be either way. We’ll also take advice from them on potential hide locations for the recon mission. As long as we can get a clear signal to the microprobes in orbit then we’re free to choose,” she said.

  Jonah removed the case containing the Hummingbird surveillance drones from his backpack and removed one. After bringing it online and finishing pre-flight checks, the tiny drone was hand-launched into the night towards rally point Aberdeen some thirty-five kilometres away. The Hummingbird case was returned to his backpack, rendering it invisible once more while they waited for a sign of their missing comrades.

  The computer-generated LIDAR image from the Hummingbird was fed to the two soldiers’ contact lens displays as it sped through the forest at its top speed of forty-kilometres per hour. The highly directional compressed data signal sent back to the battlesuits from the Hummingbird didn’t stray far from the ground already surveyed, so was unlikely to be intercepted. Flight time to rally point Aberdeen was fifty-five minutes. No alien activity was detected on the way there, or in the vicinity of point Aberdeen. Jonah sent the Hummingbird into a search pattern, scanning the forest floor with LIDAR for human footprints and other signs that an experienced tracker was trained to spot. The battlesuits did such a good job of hiding the visible image and heat signature of the wearer that they couldn’t be seen directly except by sonic or gravimetric sensing. The Hummingbird had neither sonic nor gravimetric detection so was unable to find battlesuit-clad men that way. He knew the search was a long shot as there was no mission protocol that told A-Patrol to stay at point Aberdeen. Nevertheless, it was worth looking before sending the microburst from the Hummingbird and potentially giving away its location.

  After an hour of searching the locale, no sign of the lost patrol was found. Jonah thought that the lack of footprints was probably due to the firmness of the forest floor around point Aberdeen if the ground was anything like their current location. He was in two minds about the lack of detectable signs. It either meant that A-Patrol had done their job very well or that they didn’t make it to point Aberdeen. There was just no way to know at present.

  “Go ahead and broadcast the microburst, Jonah,” instructed Jen, comforted by the fact that if the omni-directional signal was detected, the alien wrath would hone in on the Hummingbird, not them.

  “Copy that, sending the command to Hummingbird One...” responded Jonah.

  They waited only two minutes for the reply, which came as a text message relayed via microburst.

  *** BEGIN ***

  Cpt Buick and Sgt Hart present, fit and well.

  Cpl Simon Whitman KIA, Cpl Ben Hunt KIA.

  Santa Maria probe sighted and confirmed destroyed. FTL drive and fusion reactor both not sighted, both assumed destroyed.

  Nuke detonated in underground research / military base.

  Successfully evaded enemy search parties. Last contact fourteen hours ago.

  EQP transceiver and FTL gate lost.

  Both battledroids lost.

  Current Coordinates 805487.52556N, 2641021.25487E

  Respond with instructions.

  *** END ***

  “They’re ten kliks from here,” Jonah said.

  “Okay, let me respond. Recall the Hummingbird and let’s get them here—they know the enemy, so they’ll evade better than we will if they come across them,” Jen said.

  She sent the message, manipulating her fingers to type on the virtual keyboard displayed on her contact lens HUD. The message relayed their coordinates down to the nearest metre. The reply came minutes later.

  *** BEGIN ***

  Instructions confirmed – making our way to you.

  ETA in two hours approx.

  *** END ***

  ***

  At the two-hour mark, Jonah and Jen made themselves visible, ready to receive Motor and Chip. They arrived eight minutes later to hearty greetings and hugs.

  “You don’t know how good it is to see you guys,” beamed Motor, bear hugging Jonah then Jen, Chip doing the same.

  “Glad you two made it. What happened to Crier and Fuzz?” asked Jen sombrely.

  The two A-Patrol men were exhausted, having had little sleep since their dramatic escape and evasion. They spent the next hour detailing Operation Rapid Denial, including how it denied their two friends their lives. Jonah diligently transcribed the salient points into a text message and connected his suit to the EQP Transceiver to report in. The Entangled Quantum Particle transceiver would communicate instantaneously with its counterpart at SSS command in Hereford. There was no way known to science that its messages could be intercepted. It was also true to say that no one yet understood how it worked, but work it did—albeit at a very limited bit rate. Low-res pictures could be sent, but this was a slow process and reserved only for when plain text wouldn’t do.

  “All done—contact established, message sent and received,” reported Jonah with a small sense of achievement that the kit had actually performed the seeming miracle it had.

  After the debrief, they quickly got on to the supplementary mission now at hand.

  “Staying here is on a voluntary basis. No one will hold it against you if you return back to Earth. Before you tell me your decision, I’ll let my feelings be known: I think only one of you should stay and one should go,” explained Jen.

  “We’ve already discussed this and we concur that is the best plan,” agreed Motor, with Chip nodding as he said so.

  They all understood that there was the real possibility of the patrol being wiped out, but if neither A-Patrol member remained, they’d lose the vital insight they so far gained of the aliens and their world. It was also critical that they monitor the aliens for their next move, especially concerning the FTL drive and whether A-Patrol had been successful in stopping their reverse-engineering efforts. Having one of the A-Patrol men on Gaia with them would increase their chances of mission success. And survival.

  “I’ll be staying, Jen. Chip’s going home to his family. They need him, his boys are still so little,” Motor said, putting his arm around his brother-in-arms. “He’s also a much better bullshitter than me, so the stories will be far more exciting!” he joked, receiving a playful push from Chip who was starting to feel ecstatic at the prospect of going home to his family and Earth.

  Wasting no time, Jen unpacked the FTL gate from her pack and set it up on its base on the forest floor. She adjusted the ring so that it sat forty-five degrees from vertical, allowing Chip to literally dive through. She entere
d the authorisation code that only she and Jonah knew to activate the FTL gate. The gate was tamper-resistant and set to allow only three code input attempts. Any tampering or after three wrong entries the gate would be destroyed by the thousands of tiny pellets of high explosives embedded in the matrix of every component part. There would be very little left to reverse engineer. Jen thought this was a very sensible precaution given the whole reason A-Patrol had been sent there was to destroy an FTL drive. She thought it a pity no one had been able to do the same on the Santa Maria probe. She set the coordinates for the vicinity of the Alliance Citadel. Jonah sent a message with the EQP transceiver back to base notifying them of Chip’s return. The message would be relayed to the space station and Chip would picked up by shuttle and taken there for debrief before returning to Earth. The battlesuit was capable of sustaining Chip in space for at least a day before the built-in air supply ran out, even with the advanced carbon dioxide scrubbers at work.

  An infinitely black sphere grew from a tiny point at the centre of the gate’s ring, filling the space inside. Leaving his pack behind, Chip said his final farewells, wondering if they would be as fortunate as he was. He walked ten metres from the FTL gate, turned and lined himself up for the fateful dive. They’d practiced this at base many times and the gate was large enough to get through as long as he kept his arms and legs tucked in. Gravity would pull him through after that. Nobody knew for sure what would happen if he clipped it and the thing fell over; he didn't want to find out. Motor and Jonah stood either side of the FTL gate and steadied the ring. As Chip built up speed, he saw Jen’s wave and her smiling eyes. Running faster now, he prepared to dive and took one last look at Motor, his leader and friend, wishing him Godspeed, saluting with his free hand. Chip dived into the sphere and vanished into the blackness beyond.