by PP Corcoran
The Drake Equation Book 1: Discovery of the Saiph
PP Corcoran
Copyright 2014 PP Corcoran
Published by PP Corcoran Ltd
License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your enjoyment only, then please return to your favourite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Table of Contents
Chapter One: Doorway to the Galaxy
Chapter Two: First Flight
Chapter Three: Crossing the Rubicon
Chapter Four: Our Rosetta Stone
Chapter Five: Operation Minerva
Chapter Six: The Journey Begins
Chapter Seven: First Encounter
Chapter Eight: Fifty Thousand Light Years
Chapter Nine: Life No More
Chapter Ten: Trip Wire
Chapter Eleven: Letters Unwritten
Chapter Twelve: Full Disclosure
Chapter Thirteen: Enemy
Chapter Fourteen: Changes
Chapter Fifteen: A New Beginning
Chapter Sixteen: Into the Fire
Chapter Seventeen: Boarding Action
Chapter Eighteen:First Contact
Chapter Nineteen: Friend or Foe?
Chapter Twenty: Massacre
Chapter Twenty-One: Pars
Chapter Twenty-Three: Return to Messier FiftyFour
Chapter Twenty-Four: Stealth Attack
Chapter Twenty-Five: Unexpected Guests
Chapter Twenty-Six: They're Coming
Search for the Saiph - Chapter One: The Happy Wanderer
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CHAPTER ONE
Doorway to the Galaxy
Senate of the Terran Republic - Geneva - Earth
Senator Gillian Rae, representing the Boreland habitats on Titan, listened to the grey-haired scientist who was concluding his testimony before the Senate’s Science and Technology Committee.
“The ion drive is our most advanced light-speed technology,” the scientist said. “It is capable of speeds of up to one quarter the speed of light, which means it will reach the closest stars within twenty-five years, a vast improvement on previous attempts. The probe can gather images and data from the stars’ planetary systems and send those images and data back to Earth by radio. My peers and I agree that this is our best hope of identifying other worlds suitable for human habitation, thus ensuring our continued survival. Thank you.”
As the scientist took his seat, Gillian looked around at her fellow senators. Many were nodding their heads in approval. She waited a beat, and then another, and then rose from her seat and got the attention of the President.
“Does Senator Rae wish to be recognised?” Bartholomew McMullen asked.
“I do, Mr President.”
“Very well. You have five minutes.”
Gillian took a breath and began. “Mr President and fellow Senators, I need not remind you of the consequences of fully autonomous machines that have insufficient programming and little or no human override. Many of you know that I was fortunate to have survived an incident involving one such machine.”
Gillian paused to let that sink in. As most of her colleagues knew, she had been one of the few survivors of the ‘Boreland Blasts’, a disaster triggered by a prototype of a fully autonomous mining machine undergoing trials on Titan. The machine mistook a fuel line for a mineral vein and used a laser cutter on it. The resulting chain of explosions and rapid decompression of living quarters killed 104 men, women and children.
Gillian heard murmurs of recognition and saw nods from many of her peers.
“Who knows what these probes will discover when they reach their destinations?” she continued. “Who knows how they will react to their findings in the face of unknown variables, which may be beyond their programming? Such autonomy may result in the loss of vital data, missed opportunities, or worse, the loss of life.”
Gillian paused again. She saw more nods but also some puzzled faces. Behind her, she heard whispers.
“I propose that we send out manned probes. I understand that this increases development difficulty a hundredfold. It will require the expansion of our deep space environment technology program, and it will delay the probe deployments. Nevertheless, the benefits of having a human on the spot to make critical decisions will be worth the added time and expense. I hope my colleagues will agree that the risks to our people are too great to ignore. Thank you.”
Bartholomew McMullen, the twenty-third President of the Terran Republic, stood to address the Senate. “Thank you, Senator Rae. Senators, we are all aware of Senator Rae’s personal and professional experience in this field. She is a devoted member of the Science and Technology Committee, where she has put her engineering degrees to good use, and I know she speaks with knowledge and expertise in this field.”
The president paused and glanced around the chamber before continuing. “I call for a vote on Senator Rae’s motion – that deployment of the unmanned probes suggested by our learned senior scientists be delayed at least until the feasibility and practicalities of sending a human crew are investigated.”
The holo cube in front of Bartholomew flashed as the senators’ votes were recorded and counted. A few minutes later, a bell signalled the end of the voting. Bartholomew studied his screen before rising to announce the results. “Senator Rae’s motion is carried.”
Unbeknown to the president and the Senate, Gillian Rae, the former engineer from Titan, had just ensured the continued existence of the human race.
#
Haslett Research Station - Asteroid Belt
Dr Jeff Moore was having another bad day. He had decided that his state-of-the-art computer enjoyed driving him mad, and he was seconds away from reducing it to a heap of rubble when an incoming call tone sounded. Jeff turned away from the offending machine and answered the call, immediately regretting it when the smirking face of Valerie Hayes, Director of the Vega Star Probe team, appeared.
“That bad computer laughing at you again, Jeff?”
“What can I do for you, Valerie?”
“I was going to offer you breakfast in the staff canteen.”
“The thought of breakfast in the staff canteen just made me lose my appetite.”
“How about a cup of coffee instead?”
“What’s the occasion?” Jeff asked.
“One of my engineers, Danny Dunlewey, pulled an all-nighter studying the data from the last Improved Ion Engine test, and he’s come up with a few anomalies the computer seems to have disregarded.”
The Improved Ion Engine was the reason Jeff had been having a spate of bad days. He had theorised that a field of gravity waves projected in front of a steadily accelerating spacecraft would act like the bow wave of a pre-war oceangoing ship and allow greater speed and less resistance. It was a great theory, but it seemed to work only at limited velocities. Whenever the test probes accelerated to two-thirds the speed of light, they exploded. At least he assumed they exploded. The last anyone saw of them was a flash of light, and then they were gone, obliterated into particles too small to be picked up by optical or electrical equipment – or so he surmised.
Adding to his frustration, the cryogenics team at Caulfield Research Station in New South Wales had made rapid advances in techniques to ensure the sa
fety of the Vega probes’ human crews. Meanwhile, his efforts to reduce the probes’ travel time to Vega had stalled.
“Is it real coffee?” Jeff asked.
“As real as the recycled air you’re breathing,” Valerie said. “See you in five.”
Jeff left his office and took the lift two floors up to Valerie’s office. He wondered what Danny Dunlewey had found—perhaps a way to track the larger pieces of his exploded drive.
Twenty minutes and a second cup of coffee later, Jeff Moore felt as if his world had turned upside down. The data on the holo cube in front of him seemed to prove the impossible. Yet there it was, evidence of faster-than-light speed travel, a way to fulfil man’s quest to travel to the stars.
Jeff looked from the screen to Valerie. “Where’s Danny?”
“He’s outside.”
“Would you please get him?”
Valerie frowned. “Look, Jeff, I hope he hasn’t led you on a wild goose chase. I know he hasn’t been here long, but he does show a lot of……”
“Ask him to go to Conference Room One and set it up to present his data to the heads of departments, will you?”
“Oh. Okay. Sure.”
Jeff stood up. “I’m off to the Communications Room. I need to make a few calls to Earth.”
#
Office of the Chairman of the Science and Technology Committee - Canberra - Earth
Gillian Rae looked out through the glass wall of her office, which towered 160 floors above the sprawling city of Canberra.
Humanity had worked hard to reclaim the nearly destroyed Earth after the wars. Australia had escaped the worst of it and recovered more quickly than Europe or North America. As a result, it had served as the capital and base of the fledgling Terran Republic until Geneva became habitable again. But the Science and Technology Bureau had sunk its roots deep in Canberra, and when the rest of the apparatus of government moved to Europe a decade earlier, Sci-Tech stayed behind.
Gillian had come to appreciate Canberra as a second home, so different from her original home on Titan, and now that she had been promoted to chair of the Science and Technology Committee, she felt even more at home. Australia provided another advantage, one that Gillian had just begun to appreciate: with the president and the rest of the Senate tucked up in their beds half a world away, she would have an extra few hours to get a grip on what the scientist and engineer perched on the couch in her office were trying to explain to her.
Gillian turned from the view of Canberra and faced Jeff Moore and Valerie Hayes. Jeff looked even younger than his eighteen years as he sat alongside Valerie in one of the comfortable chairs. Valerie was chosen as the Director of the Vega Star Probe Team not only for her exceptional mind but for her political savvy, both proved to be invaluable assets when you push for, and get, authority from those in the corridors of power to employ young, fertile minds straight from university rather than choosing scientists and engineers with more… experience.
When Gillian had received the urgent request for a face-to-face meeting, she had immediately queried the necessity for the five day inter-system shuttle trip by Valerie and Jeff, instead of the usual holo cube communications, but Valerie had refused any explanation and insisted on the in person meeting. Now Gillian knew why.
“Explain this to me again in simple terms, please. I’m only a humble politician.” That wasn’t entirely true, but her double first in Spatial Engineering from Cambridge hadn’t quite prepared her to understand completely what Danny Dunlewey had discovered.
Valerie took a deep breath and began. “As you know, Senator, we at Haslett Station are trying to develop an improved ion drive for the Vega Star Probe mission. Since Vega is more than twenty-five light years from Earth, our current best estimate is thirty-eight years travelling time, minimum. Accounting for the time required to survey the system and radio the data to Earth, it would be some sixty-six years before we heard back from the Vega mission.”
Jeff continued. “The effort expended to get our probe there as near the speed of light would save at least thirteen years, well worth it we all thought. And so, for the past five years we,” as he indicated Valerie, “have been out in the asteroid belt building and testing the best engine ideas that humankind can think up, but we had reached some kind of wall, a hurdle we couldn’t clear. We have been unsuccessful at getting beyond two-thirds the speed of light before our probes all exploded. Or so we thought.” Jeff took a breath. “Our practical engineers put a failsafe on the engines. If, for whatever reason, the engine test beds lose continuous communication with Haslett base for two seconds or more, a cut-off switch is engaged, the engine is powered down and they begin transmitting a recovery beacon. We had, as it turns out, wrongly assumed that the previous four test engines had been destroyed; thus the computer was told to ignore any transmission on their recovery beacon frequency. Dunlewey was analysing the data from the fifth test engine before it too was destroyed when he noticed an anomaly. Remember the computer had been told to ignore, not delete, the recovery beacons from the destroyed test beds, and Danny found beacons from three of the five probes. They hadn’t been destroyed at all.”
“But why was their signal not detected before?”
“Because it’s taken the first signal two and a half years to get back to us,”
“Hang on, are you saying that our test engines are all in one piece somewhere out there?” Gillian gave Jeff an incredulous look.
“No, Senator. So far we’ve only identified the beacons from engines two and three,” Valerie interjected. “If engines four and five have survived then we would’ve expected to hear from engine four in another year and five seven months after that.”
Gillian took her seat and looked across the low coffee table at Jeff as Valerie continued. “All telemetry received via the beacons indicates that the engine shut down at the planned two seconds after the lost contact marker.”
“But if the signal took two and a half years to reach us travelling at, er…” Gillian tried to drag the figure for the speed of light up from memory.
“290,792,458 metres per second,” Jeff added helpfully.
“Thank you, Dr Moore. So you’re telling me that your engines are sitting two and a half light years from here and covered that distance in two seconds?”
“Those’re the facts as we read them, Senator,” answered Jeff with a nervous laugh. “Our engines are half way to Proxima Centauri and if we can figure out what we did right we could have the manned Vega Star Probe to Vega in under seventeen seconds.”
Gillian sat stunned for a few moments then looked squarely at Jeff and Valerie. “But how? Short answer please, I may have to explain this to the public.”
Jeff looked at Valerie. “Would you like to demonstrate?”
“Okay,” said Valerie moving into tutorial mode. “I need a piece of paper,” she said, looking round about the ultra-modern office.
Senator Rae rummaged in a nearby drawer and pulled out a battered little diary, promptly ripping out a blank sheet and handing it to Valerie. “Sometimes it is useful to keep some old tech to hand.” She smiled.
Valerie continued with her demo and looking down she scribbled on the page. “A good way to imagine this is to look at this piece of paper. You will see I have marked one end A and the other B.” Valerie looked up and placed the paper on the coffee table in front of her. Senator Rae nodded in acknowledgement.
“Now imagine an ant crawling across the paper from A to B. If you leave the paper flat on the table, that might take a little while. Now…” Valerie picked up the paper and began to fold it while she narrated. “If I pick up the paper and fold it so that A and B are right next to each other, just so…” She demonstrated this to Gillian. “Imagine the ant moving from A to B.”
“Of course, Dr Hayes.” Gillian nodded her head, slowly as realisation dawned. “Fold space theory…”
“Exactly, Senator.” Valerie continued. “Travel time is exponentially reduced. Essentially, this is what Dr
Moore’s Gravity Drive has done. Completely by chance it has given us the means to explore the galaxy in our lifetime and at our leisure.”
“This may change things slightly,” said Gillian wryly. “Now my next question. How soon can we have a practicable vessel ready?”
Jeff eagerly looked at Valerie and back to Gillian before replying. “Well with the ability to travel, for all intents and purposes, instantly, I would think that the current research at Caulfield could be scaled back. Give us their environment researchers and engineers and we could probably produce a test bed within a year. We would be ready for a full scale launch within three.”
“Make plans, Doctors. I think you will get everything you might ever need. And good luck.” Gillian smiled and stood. She held out her hand. The two doctors, taking this as their cue, also stood before shaking the Senator’s hand. They made their way out of the Senator’s office.
As they left, Gillian placed a call to the President’s private residence. The last Jeff and Valerie heard was Senator Rae’s charming, playful, voice saying to a presidential aide “Well, wake him up gently then. But wake him up!”
CHAPTER TWO
First Flight
TDF Marco Polo - Deimos Dry Docks
TDF Marco Polo gracefully released the mooring clamps that secured it to the dry docks orbiting Deimos. The Terran Republic’s first interstellar manned ship lit off its reaction drive and slowly pulled away heading for the freedom of open space.
Its captain, David Catney contemplated the past five years. Jeff Moore had thought it would take three years to produce a ship ready to go to Vega but that proved to be a little optimistic. Figuring how to build the automated recovery probes which made it half way to Proxima Centauri to recover the original engine test beds had taken eighteen months alone. Analysing their data fully and beginning to design the Marco Polo had taken a further two years, all the while sending out more and more unmanned probes ensuring that the jump to such phenomenal speed wouldn’t turn the crew into paste on the rear bulkhead.
