The Centauri Surprise

by Alastair Mayer

  Something she knew well. “Right. Warp drives aside, where’s the noisiest place you can think of to put it?”

  “Somewhere there’s a lot of mass moving around at high speed.” Black paused, realizing what he had just said, and shook his head. “Like near a spaceport,” he said.

  Jackie nodded. “Any primitive civilization where the Spacefarers set up pyramids would have been well below the capability of moving multi-ton objects around at any speed.”

  “What about girannos?” Ducayne said, referring to the giraffe-sized rhinos native to Sawyers World, and known to occasionally stampede.

  “It would take a herd to equal the mass of even a small starship, and their top speed is what, forty kilometers per hour?” Jackie said. “It might add some noise, but probably not much, and at a very low frequency.” As she said this, Jackie remembered the artifact Tevnar had pulled from the alien wreck at Kapteyn’s Star. Whatever it was, it was unlikely to be a communicator. While the receiver side might be designed to filter out the ship’s own emissions, there would be no way to transmit anything over the high-energy gravitational roar of the warp drive.

  “You know,” she added, “I’d bet that the Velkaryan transceivers aren’t on Earth or Verdigris, but elsewhere in their systems.”

  Ducayne looked thoughtful. “There is a Velkaryan outpost orbiting Neptune in the Solar system,” he said. “Officially it’s an independent research facility, studying that planet’s unusual system of moons. They think we don’t know about their connection to it.”

  Jackie thought for a moment, then nodded slowly. “That could be a good place. Ships entering Sol space usually come out of warp a lot deeper in-system, between Saturn and Jupiter orbit, above or below the plane. Any effects from Triton or the other moons would be predictable.”

  “What about in the Delta Pavonis system?” Ducayne asked her.

  She thought for a moment. The system was not too unlike the Sol system, with rocky inner planets, a large gas giant and smaller Neptune-like ice giants, plus the usual collection of tiny, irregular bodies. “Yes, the system is clear enough that ships come in pretty deep. They could have a remote station almost anywhere.”

  “Would a ship passing nearby cause a problem?”

  Jackie grinned and shook her head. “No pilot would willingly set their course within five AU of the orbital plane until they’ve paused to check, and even if they did, nothing in warp is going to be within a million kilometers of a given point for more than about ten milliseconds. A glitch in the signal at most.”

  “It sounds like we might need to take this out to deep space to test it, then,” Black said. “Where?”

  “The system barycenter?” Jackie said. “The center of mass of the Alpha Centauri A and B stars,” she added, not knowing if Ducayne was familiar with the term.

  “That’s as good a place as any, I guess,” Black said. “If that doesn’t work, there’s halfway to Proxima.”

  “Do you need to worry about traffic between here and Kakuloa?” Ducayne asked.

  “No. The usual route is to jump a couple of AU clear of the orbital plane first,” Jackie said. “North of it for the Sawyers to Kakuloa leg, south for the reverse. The odds are infinitesimally small of a collision even if the ships didn’t do that, but it’s a hold-over from atmospheric traffic.”

  “We’ll need some kind of remote set-up,” Black said. “I’d like to have the ship back off a reasonable distance to minimize any interference at all.”

  Ducayne nodded. “Requisition what you need. Jackie, are you and the Sophie available for this, or shall I put one of our system boats on it?”

  “Are you kidding? I wouldn’t miss it,” she said. “Besides, Carson will be out at his dig. His approval came through.”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Starship Sophie, Alpha Centauri system barycenter

  The alien apparatus that Black had brought back from Chara III was bolted to the table in the Sophie’s galley. Jackie hadn’t considered this complication when she volunteered her ship for testing, but it was temporary; they would only be out here for another day, two at most. It was also necessary; with the warp drive shut down, the Sophie was in zero gee.

  Walter Black and his team had managed to reverse-engineer enough of the gizmo to tap into its outputs, which is how they’d been able to test it in the first place. That interface now tied in to the galley’s monitor screen. The display reminded Jackie of what it had shown when they first entered the Zeta Reticuli system all those months ago.

  There was a schematic of the Alpha Centauri system and its planets, although it omitted Proxima. That was too far away to matter. The device was clearly detecting high-frequency gravity waves. The emissions from the warp traffic between Sawyers World and Kakuloa were obvious, if not very localized. The fuzzy blobs representing ships were, on that scale, nearly a billion kilometers across. With current human technology, it took an array of sensors dispersed over thousands of kilometers to both detect and localize such warp signatures. This device was detecting them, but Black hadn’t figured out yet how to get it to display their position, or even if it could.

  “Well,” Jackie said, “as a detector, it beats our current gravity sensors. But why put it in a pyramid?”

  “Protection?” Black suggested. “Fixed reference point? I don’t know. The builders obviously intended for their pyramids to endure a long time unattended, maybe they had less confidence that orbital sensors would endure.”

  “But why a detector in the first place, unless they were expecting warp-capable visitors from elsewhere?”

  “Which brings us back to the possibility that this is actually a communication device. But know that we know it’s working aboard ship, we can go to the next step of the test.” Black tapped out a command on the interface’s pad, and the monitor display split, with the left half still showing the system diagram. On the right side was a series of traces like an oscilloscope, showing multiple tracks, each with its own noisy signal trace.

  “Let me guess,” Jackie said. “Each one of those traces is a different signal source?”

  “Exactly. Now we just filter out the ships.” He tapped out more commands, and, one by one, a warp source on the left side of the screen disappeared. As each did so, a trace on the right, or oscilloscope, side of the screen also disappeared. Eventually, with all the ships on the left gone, there were just three traces remaining. All were of lower amplitude and noisier than the ship traces had been, with one almost a flat line.

  “Wow,” Black said. “We weren’t able to get it anywhere near that clean when testing before. You were right, Jackie, we had too much background noise.”

  “What are these traces that are left? Ships that are further away?”

  “That’s most likely. We have no idea what the detection range of this thing is.”

  “That will depend on signal strength.” Jackie said, stating what was, to her, obvious. “That will have an upper bound, there’s a maximum size to a warp bubble. If I had to guess, those might be big cargo or passenger ships travelling between here and Earth. If we look at the shipping schedules we can figure out which ships are where, that would give us an idea of the range.”

  “That’s brilliant. Do you have that data?”

  “Sure, give me a minute.” Jackie pushed off and glided forward to the cockpit, where she strapped herself into her seat. It would be easier to pull that information up from the ship’s main control panel. While the computer ran the schedule search and correlated it with expected current distance from the Alpha Centauri system, Jackie dug into the kind of math problem she hadn’t had to do since pilot school: for a warp bubble of a given size, what is the optimum drive frequency? With the search and calculations complete, she downloaded the information to her datapad, unstrapped, and headed back to the galley.

  “Got it,” she said. She handed the datapad to Black.

  “What’s this?”

  “The five nearest IL- and IC-class ships. There are no X-
class within two lightyears, at least none scheduled.” These were all large ship classes, several times the size of S-class ships like the Sophie. “The other number on each entry is their drive frequency, or at least what it should be.”

  “Excellent! Let me punch in these numbers and see what we get.” He tapped out the first drive frequency, for the IL-class starship Southern Sky, and the biggest remaining trace on the scope disappeared. He looked at the datapad again. “So by the schedule, that ship will drop out of warp in a bit over two hours. We’re detecting it nearly a tenth of a lightyear away. That’s great!”

  Jackie was dumbfounded. “We shouldn’t have been able to detect it at all.”

  “Exactly, this detector must be really sensitive.”

  “You’re not getting it. Gravity waves travel at the speed of light. We shouldn’t be picking up that signature, from where it is now, for another five weeks.”

  Black turned to stare at her, his jaw hanging slack. “I. . . You’re right.” He shook his head. “It must be a signal from a previous trip.”

  “No,” Jackie said. “We’d be seeing a lot more traces if that were the case. Think of how many ships come and go in a month. That signal has to be travelling through a compacted dimension.”

  “But we can’t detect gravity waves in the hidden dimensions,” Black said, although he didn’t sound entirely convinced.

  Jackie just pointed to the device bolted to her galley table. “But we didn’t build that, did we?”

  Black said nothing for a moment, just looking from Jackie to the alien device, and back. “Good point, but let’s test that. If you’re right, the next signal should be the next ship on your list. That’s five hours out, a bit over a quarter light year.”

  He entered the data into his interface device, and looked up expectantly at the monitor. The trace was still there. “Huh, that’s odd.”

  He looked at the interface, then at Jackie’s datapad, then back at the interface. “Oh, I missed a digit.” He tapped furiously at the keypad on the interface again, and this time the trace disappeared.

  Jackie felt a mixture of disbelief and smugness. She wasn’t sure she wanted to believe this alien device could do what it clearly seemed to be doing, but if it was doing it, she had been right about how it did it. At least, how it did it at a theoretical level; the actual mechanics were still a mystery.

  “Try the third one,” she said to Black.

  “Already on it,” he said as he began entering the numbers for the third ship on the list. There was only one, faint signal remaining.

  It still remained after he’d entered the data, checked it, re-entered it, and checked it again. “That’s not it. Maybe that ship is behind schedule. Let me try the next.”

  They went through all the remaining ships on Jackie’s list, and then Jackie pulled up a few more and they tried those. The last trace still persistently remained.

  “There’s no way all those other ships are behind schedule, so I think we’ve established that the range on this thing, at least for detecting ships in warp, is about a quarter lightyear,” Jackie said at last.

  “I’ll go along with that,” said Black.

  “So, what’s that last signal? And where is it coming from?”

  Black grinned. “I think,” he said, pausing for effect, “that is exactly the signal we’re looking for. And my guess is that it’s coming from somewhere in the vicinity of Neptune.”

  “The Velkaryan FTL communicator signal?”

  Black nodded. “Either that or we’ve discovered some new phenomenon, but that’s not the way I’d bet.”

  “From over four lightyears away?” Jackie doubted it. “When we can only detect ships at one-sixteenth that? That’s a powerful signal.” As she said it, it occurred to Jackie that distances in whatever compact dimension this signal travelled might not correlate to distances in the more familiar dimensions. She felt a headache coming on.

  “Or it’s being generated more efficiently,” countered Black. “It would be designed for communication, not just the side effect of a warp drive.”

  Jackie had to agree. That was logical. She’d let someone else worry about the dimensional issues.

  “What now?” she said. “There’s still not much of a signal there, and it’s sure to be encrypted.”

  “Oh, certainly it is. As for what now, I want to record as much of the raw signal as I can. We’ll analyze the data back in the lab. Once we pull out the fundamental carrier frequencies we can improve the sensitivity, reject starship noise and the like, which will give us more data to try cracking the encryption.”

  “Fair enough,” Jackie said. “I’ll radio Ducayne and let him know.”

  “Yes, please do. He’ll almost certainly recall us, but with the radio lag that should still give me a couple of hours to collect data.”

  Black was right. Ducayne’s reply was simply: “Wonderful. Return to base. New assignment. QD.”

  CHAPTER 44: PYRAMID REVISITED

  Pyramid site, Anderson Wildlife Preserve

  CARSON DIDN’T KNOW the details, but he was sure that Pete Finley or perhaps even Elizabeth Sawyer herself had wielded some influence to get the small backhoe and an excavation team airlifted out to the pyramid site in such short order. Notwithstanding their claims of being apolitical and having no official role in Sawyers World government, the Original Eight had all managed to amass considerable wealth, holdings, and influence. Not necessarily in that order.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  “Just how many of these trenches do you need dug, anyway?” Hector Collins, the operator of the compact backhoe, asked. “This is the fourth one, do you even know what you’re doing?”

  To deliberately confuse the issue, Carson and Alex Finley had arranged for several trenches to be dug, on different sides of the peak and at various locations. Finley intercepted the question before Carson could.

  “As I told you before,” Finley said, “it’s so we can emplace geophones and seismometers to evaluate any disturbance of the magma chamber.”

  “I still think you’re nuts. This thing hasn’t erupted in thousands of years, and I don’t think it’s going to start now. I may not be a geologist, but—”

  “Exactly. You’re not geologist. Anyway, it isn’t about it erupting, it’s about what ground movements can tell us about the whole area,” Finley said. “But cheer up, your part is almost done. Finish up this trench and you can head back to civilization.”

  “And not a moment too soon, as far as I’m concerned,” Collins said. “It will be nice to sleep in my own bed instead of that tent.”

  Finley and Carson just nodded agreement, not wanting to argue the point. Carson was certainly no stranger to putting up with much worse field accommodation than this, and while he didn’t know all of Alex Finley’s history, he was sure that his grandfather had told him a few stories of how rough the first landing team had had it, stranded without knowing when or even if they’d be picked up again.

  Carson had made sure the trenches didn’t come too close to the sides of the pyramid. He didn’t think it would be easily damaged even by the heavy machinery—whatever the pyramid was made of seemed much more durable than ordinary stone—but it wouldn’t do for this construction worker to discover what the peak really was. When the work crew had cleared out, Carson and the few others remaining at the site would finish the excavation, at first with the backhoe and then with shovels. He estimated about another half-day of digging. By tomorrow afternoon, they’d be ready to enter the pyramid.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Next day

  The trench was now excavated down to the door level. Yes, they had found the door. The pit reminded Carson of the pyramid on Verdigris, which had also been partially buried.

  The excavation team had been kept small for security reasons. With the door uncovered and opened, it would soon become obvious that the pyramid builders had advanced technology.

  The small group—Carson, Dundee, and Alex Finley, the same team as e
arlier—gathered around the still-sealed entrance to the pyramid. Carson examined the engravings surrounding the doorway. Almost out of habit, he took a few pictures with the omni on his wrist.

  “Now what?” Finley asked.

  “The carvings form a kind of astronomical puzzle. Solve the puzzle and the door should open.”

  “You mean we have to know astronomy?”

  “The idea was that the natives had to have achieved some level of scientific insight to get in. But I have a key.” Carson reached into his pocket and withdrew a small sample case. He opened it and extracted a rounded-square stone.

  He held it up. It was the new talisman he had been sent by the anonymous inheritor. He just hoped it worked as well as the first. “I just need to find the keyhole.” He scanned the engravings around the opening again, looking for a recess that matched the outline of the talisman. There, on the right side, about shoulder height. He looked back over his shoulder at the others and grinned. “Open sesame!” he started to say as he raised the stone, but his words were drowned out by a short burst of automatic gunfire.

  Startled, he almost dropped the talisman as he turned toward the sound. As he fumbled and recovered it, he tapped a quick sequence on his wrist omni.

  “Thank you, Doctor Carson. We’ll take it from here.” Above them, around the edges of the trench leading to the entrance, stood a half-dozen armed men, their weapons trained on the dig crew.

  “Who the hell are you?” Carson demanded. He didn’t believe these guys were artifact smugglers, they looked far too organized, and they were in uniform. It was not a uniform that Carson recognized.

  “Anderson Territorial Police. This is an illegal excavation, you’re all under arrest.”

  “That’s bullshit. This is authorized through the Office of Land Management.”

  “We have no record of that. Come up out of there with your hands up.”