The Centauri Surprise

by Alastair Mayer

  “Finally,” Carson said. He had been waiting for this for a couple of weeks now. “When?”

  “He’s invited you out to his estate tomorrow. I know that’s short notice but—”

  “But tomorrow is Thursday, a day I don’t have any classes to teach,” Carson said, wondering if Ducayne had access to his personal calendar. It wouldn’t have surprised him.

  “Exactly.”

  “Have you made any progress on tracking down who hacked the autocab that tried to kidnap me?”

  Ducayne shook his head. “That’s more of a Sawyers World matter. I’ve referred it to the local authorities, and they’ll keep me posted. We have an understanding.”

  Carson looked over at Jackie. “Does your offer of giving me a ride out there still stand? I think I’d prefer even your bike to an autocab.” The kidnap attempt had been immediately after his meeting with another of the legendary first landing team on Sawyers World, Elizabeth Sawyer herself. He had managed to escape from the moving cab, but with some loss of skin and a cracked rib.

  Jackie smiled back at him. “Of course it does. Do you think I’d miss a chance to meet one of the First Landers?”

  Carson shrugged. “You’ve been a first lander yourself on a number of planets.”

  “Mostly when I was a kid,” she said, “and none of them humanity’s first venture out of the Solar System.”

  “Be that as it may,” Ducayne said, “there’s no need to take Jackie’s bike. You can use one of our aircars.”

  Carson and Roberts looked at each other, then back at Ducayne. “Sure,” they both said.

  “Is there a catch?” Carson asked.

  “Probably,” Roberts said before Ducayne could answer. “I’m still paying him back for the work on the Sophie.”

  Ducayne frowned. “Your ship repairs and upgrades were the result of a fair agreement, Captain Roberts,” he said, “not ‘a catch’.” His expression softened, and he added, “Anyway, all I want from Carson is a post-meeting debriefing.”

  “That, I can do.” Carson said.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Jackie Roberts and Carson left the office. As Ducayne’s door closed behind them, Carson asked her, “Were you trying to piss him off? What was that all about?”

  “What?” Where did that come from? she wondered. “He wasn’t pissed off, just playing along. Believe it or not, Quentin Ducayne does have a sense of humor.”

  “Really? I’ve never known him to crack a joke, as such. But I suppose you’re right. I’ve seen him angry, and he wasn’t anywhere close to that.”

  “He doesn’t joke often, but I’ve seen it. Maybe I know him better than you do.”

  “Just how well do you know him?”

  That wasn’t just asking for information. To her, it felt like there was something accusatory about the question. Was Carson jealous? Of Ducayne? Her incipient anger turned to amusement. “Carson, while you’re off at your university teaching, I’ve been here either supervising repairs and upgrades to the Sophie or helping them understand the alien technology we’ve encountered. And half my off-planet runs are couriering for Ducayne. Of course I know him.”

  “You’re helping with alien technology? Since when are you an archeologist?”

  Jackie stopped and wheeled on Carson. “Archeologist? Is that what you think it takes to understand this stuff? You and Marten would still be in that pyramid on Chara III if I hadn’t figured out their language from that periodic table of the elements.” That wasn’t quite how it had happened, but it got her point across. “That stuff is high tech, not stone relics. Let me remind you that I grew up around starships, my mother is an astrophysicist, and I pilot a starship of my own. I just might know a bit more about alien technology than you do.”

  Carson stepped back, his hands raised. “Whoa, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean anything by it. You’re right. I think of those things as archeological artifacts. Ducayne wants to know what they’re supposed to do and how they work.”

  “Exactly,” she said, calming down. “Look, Ducayne and I work together, sometimes. Technically he’s one of my clients. I’m on a retainer for the work he had done on Sophie, and I’ll be happy when I’m free of that.” With a smirk, she added, “You have nothing to be jealous about.”

  “Jealous!” Carson sputtered. “Who said anything about—” He saw her smirk broaden into a grin. “Ha, ha. Very funny,” he said.

  But Jackie heard a hint of protesting too much in his tone.

  CHAPTER 7: FINLEY

  Outside Sawyer City

  HANNIBAL CARSON WAS unreasonably nervous about this meeting. Peter Finley was almost as legendary as Elizabeth Sawyer. Like her, Finley had been aboard the Chandrasekhar—the original, Anderson-class ship, not the Drake University Sapphire of the same name—for the first landing on Kakuloa, and of course was one of the Original Eight who landed on this planet in the USS Poul Anderson, over fifty years ago. He ranked up there with the Apollo moon-walkers, and that was aside from the not-inconsiderable influence over affairs on Sawyers World that he and his family had. He was an original signer of the Treaty of Alpha Centauri, after all.

  Carson and Jacqueline Roberts were in Ducayne’s aircar, cruising toward Finley’s estate outside of town. Roberts was at the controls, focused on her flying, while Carson looked out the window. As he gazed out over the terrain, a dark spot against the sky caught his eye. He looked away, scanning the horizon, and then looked back. It was still there.

  “Not to make you nervous,” he said to Jackie, “but there’s another aircar that’s been at our five-o’clock position for the last few minutes.”

  Roberts glanced back over her shoulder. “I’m not seeing it. How far away?”

  “About two kilometers,” Carson estimated, eyeing the tiny speck. A quick glance would have missed it. “It’s been keeping a constant distance for as long as I’ve been watching. Do you suppose it’s following us?”

  She glanced back again. “Okay, I’ve got it now. There’s not much else in this direction,” she said. “So it’s unlikely to be a coincidence. Want me to find out?”

  He knew Roberts was a good space pilot, but he’d never flown with her in an aircar. Since they were usually as self-contained as autocabs, he wasn’t even sure what she could do. But he trusted her flying skills, and this was one of Ducayne’s cars. This could be interesting. He cinched his seat belt tighter. “Go for it,” he said.

  “Hold on.” She reached under the dash and flicked a concealed switch, then immediately tilted the aircar thirty-degrees to the left while bumping up the throttle. The car took off sideways at high speed, the rotors now both lifting and pushing them laterally. Carson felt himself partly hanging sideways in his seat, trying not to crowd Jackie, who wore a huge grin on her face. He looked back again, to see the speck now moving closer and turning to intercept.

  “Yeah,” Carson said, “I’d say they were following us.”

  “All right then, let’s get them lost, shall we?”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Jackie settled in for some serious flying. The previous maneuver had just been to confirm that they were being followed. She checked the instruments and looked out, around, up and down. Plenty of room.

  “How are we going to lose them?” Carson asked. “There’s not exactly anywhere to hide out here.”

  “Wrong,” she said, and pointed upward. They had been flying at about a thousand meters above ground level, with visibility an easy twenty kilometers before ground haze obscured it. Two thousand meters above them, the sky was half-obscured by a broken cloud layer.

  Carson leaned forward and looked up through the forward window. “Seriously?”

  “Have you ever known me to joke about flying?” That should shut him up. She had to concentrate. She increased thrust, the rotor whine building to a scream, and the car rose like a fast elevator.

  She looked back and glanced at the mirrors, but couldn’t make out the other car from that angle. “Carson, where are they?”


  He managed to look back and down out the side window. “They’re trying to follow, but you’ve got an edge on speed,” he said.

  “Copy that.”

  They were almost at the cloud layer. The view out the window disappeared into a foggy whiteness, and she cut power to maintain level flight.

  “We’re going to stay in this?” Carson asked. “I thought you were going to climb above it.”

  “It’s the only way to stay hidden,” she said, turning the aircar to a new vector.

  “What about radar?”

  Aircars were equipped with collision-avoidance radar, Carson must be thinking they could track her with it. Fat chance.

  “If theirs is standard, it will have limited range,” she said. “But just in case. . . .” She reached under the dash for another of Ducayne’s hidden switches, and flipped it. There were advantages to aircraft that belonged to an intelligence agency. “There. Scrambled.”

  Carson was looking out the window, although there was nothing to see beyond the car but milky white. “So how long do we stay in this stuff?” he asked.

  Jackie scanned the instruments. The navigation system was perfectly happy listening to satellites and its own internal inertial sensors, it didn’t need to see to know where they were going. “I can stay here until Finley’s place. The only concern is. . .” she touched a screen on the dash, and the display changed to show the outside temperature. Hmm, that could be a problem.

  “Is what?”

  “Icing conditions. That cloud out there is like heavy fog. Condensation will just blow off, but if it starts to freeze. . . .” She didn’t finish the thought.

  “But the car has heaters for the rotors, right?”

  That was the problem. A little ice on the body was no big deal, the car had plenty of reserve lift. But ice on the rotors would change their shape and disrupt the airflow, and they’d lose lift quickly.

  “No, too much drain on the batteries,” she said. “These things aren’t designed to fly into icing conditions. One of these days we’ll get fusion units that will fit in an aircar, but not yet.” She kept the concern out her voice, thanks to long practice with not upsetting the passengers. The one compensating factor was that the high RPMs of the rotors would tend to fling any water off before it froze, at least until they got so cold that they didn’t. She kept checking the temperature display. She became aware that Carson was watching her do so.

  “We’ve probably lost them,” he said, his voice tense. “Besides, what can they do? So they follow us to Finley’s, that doesn’t tell them anything. Whoever they are.”

  “You’re right,” she said, and immediately dropped the throttle back. The aircar plummeted, but she kept it horizontal. She saw some thin flakes of ice flutter upward in the slipstream, but Jackie was pretty sure they were from the body, not the rotors. She would have felt the difference.

  Carson had seen them too. She was impressed that he relaxed back in his seat as though nothing untoward had happened. A few moments later they fell clear of the clouds and she stopped their descent, proceeding on course. At least he appreciated her flying skills.

  Ten minutes later, Jackie cleared the landing with the estate’s security system and settled the aircar onto a broad parking area adjacent to the driveway of the Maclaren-Finley estate, in front of the residence. The building was large but hardly palatial. It wasn’t the mansion she had been half expecting, but it was big enough. As the aircar’s rotors wound down to a stop, Carson popped open his door.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Carson climbed out of the car while Roberts double-checked the shutdown sequence. He stood and took a deep breath. Relax, he told himself, just think of him as a professor of geology, and not as one of the Original Eight. He took another breath and started toward the front door. It opened as he was halfway to the front porch. A man stood at the entrance. He looked to be in his fifties, but if this was Peter Finley—and he certainly resembled the pictures Carson had seen—he would be in his late eighties. No doubt Finley was a beneficiary of the anti-aging drugs that had triggered Kakuloa’s original economic boom. The man wore casual clothing, jeans and a worn khaki field shirt. His eyes were bright and alert.

  “Doctor Carson, I presume?” the man said, holding out his hand.

  “Uh, yes,” Carson said, taking the offered hand to shake. “Doctor Peter Finley?” The man’s grip was firm.

  “The same. Call me Pete.” He looked toward the aircar. “You brought a pilot?”

  “I recently had trouble with an autocab. And she’s a friend of mine.” Carson didn’t see any point in mentioning their little side excursion on the way here.

  “Well, she doesn’t have to wait out here.” He called to Roberts and beckoned her towards the house. “Come on in, both of you,” he said, waving Carson and Roberts inside.

  “Thank you, sir, uh, Pete. Thank you for agreeing to see me. It’s an honor to meet you. Call me Carson, or Hannibal. This is Jackie Roberts, she’s a pilot and the owner of the starship Sophie.” Carson felt himself reddening. Had he really just gushed like a schoolgirl?

  Finley turned to Roberts. “Jackie Roberts? Would that be Jacqueline Roberts? Born on the Eta Carinae Expedition? You look about the right age.”

  Roberts blushed, surprising Carson. “That would be me. Although I can’t say I remember much about it, I was four when we got back. I’m flattered you’ve heard of me.”

  “One pioneer to another, eh? Besides, I read all the Carinae planetology reports. Fascinating stuff.” Finley turned to Carson, who stood awkwardly, looking from one to the other.

  “Relax, Carson,” Finley said. “We’re both field scientists. I don’t bite, despite what you may have heard.”

  “Well, the Original Eight do have bit of a reputation,” Carson said, following as Finley continued inside.

  “Yeah, we do, and that term is part of the damn problem. ‘Original Eight’ indeed. We were a bunch of eager kids stupid enough to volunteer for what we knew could be a one-way trip and lucky enough to hang in for four years until Drake came back in the Endeavour. Much less organized than the Carinae Expedition. But you know our story, I’m sure.”

  Carson did. He hesitated, then said, “They teach it in school. Part of the required history courses here, although not on Earth when I was growing up.”

  “History courses,” Finley shook his head. “Lord, I shudder to think. But you’re not here to talk about that,” the latter was almost an order rather than a statement or question. “Have a seat.” They had entered a living room off the main entrance foyer, and Finley gestured to chairs. “Want a beer? I’m going to have one.”

  “A beer would be nice, thanks.”

  Finley looked at Roberts. “Jackie? A beer, or something else?”

  “I’m flying. Just water is fine.”

  Finley nodded approvingly. “Smart lass.” He whistled sharply, then said in a raised voice: “Robot, bring us a couple of beers and a water!”

  That Finley had a house robot shouldn’t have surprised Carson, since they weren’t much more complex than the aircar he’d ridden here in, but nobody he knew owned one. They were expensive; most general-purpose robots were used in construction and manufacturing, where their productivity made it worth the cost. Even there they were scarce. Between the continuous influx of immigrants from Earth and the high local birthrate, human labor was readily available, and robots were still just beyond local manufacturing capability. Parts had to be imported from Earth, or time-consumingly built up in a general purpose fabber. Before Carson could stop himself, he blurted out, “You have a house robot?”

  “Um, yes,” Finley said, as though somewhat embarrassed. “It was a gift.”

  Just then a machine came gliding in, carrying a tray with the bottles of beer and water on it. It was like no robot Carson had ever seen, except perhaps in ancient low-budget sci-fi vids. A squat grey cylindrical torso with rounded edges was mounted on corrugated tubular legs, also grey. The legs in turn attached to a tr
apezoidal base, which rolled on flexible treads. The head, for lack of a better term, was a clear plastic flattened spheroid with some kind of machinery and lights inside. The torso also had a panel with lights and switches, and attached to the torso were flexible, corrugated arms that ended in red, claw-like grippers. The whole thing was easily two meters tall.

  Holding the tray in one gripper—Carson couldn’t quite fathom how that would be stable—it picked up a bottle of water in the other and handed it to Roberts, then did likewise with a bottle of beer to Carson, finally it turned to Finley and repeated the action, handing him a beer. It lowered the tray and then in a very mechanical voice asked, “Will that be all, Doctor Finley?”

  “Yes, Robot. Thank you.”

  The robot turned and glided out of the room on its tracked feet, or foot. Carson noticed Roberts watching the robot, then looking at him and Finley. She looked like she was trying to keep from laughing.

  “That, uh, that’s not a standard robot.” Carson said, half asking.

  “Hah. No. Naomi built that for me. Something of a joke. There was an ancient TV show, pre-Apollo even, about the first trip to Alpha Centauri. The ship goes wildly off course. Lost In Space, it was called. The original had a robot like that, although it was different in the remakes. This one’s more capable than it looks, though.” Finley shook his head, then added almost apologetically: “My wife has a strange sense of humor.”

  “How did you, or she, even know about a TV series that old? I mean, I’ve heard of Star Trek of course, but. . . ?”

  “Four years of no entertainment other than what was in the Anderson’s library. There was some pretty surprising stuff in there. Some joker must have included the original Lost in Space because of the Alpha Centauri connection. We all thought it was hysterical.” Finley paused a moment, then shook his head. “Well, maybe not Krysansky. I’m not sure he ever quite got American humor.”