Alpha Centauri: First Landing (T-Space: Alpha Centauri Book 1)

by Alastair Mayer

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Sawyer scanned the navigation data. The ship’s sensors quickly identified distant reference stars. Alpha Centauri hadn’t moved at all, and Sirius and Canopus were within a fraction of an arc-second of their previous positions. The Sun was still too big a target for an accurate fix, but it gave a ballpark which was refined by locating Earth, Jupiter and Saturn. She tapped out a sequence on her keypad.

  “Got the fix, sir. We went 71,501,000 kilometers, that puts our speed at 238.5 cee.”

  “Thank you. Less than optimal but within tolerance. How’s our angle?”

  “Dead on, as best I can tell. No more than a twentieth of an arc-second off, perhaps less.”

  “Excellent.”

  An indicator on her panel lit up and she heard another voice on her headphones. “The hail from Xīng Huā is coming in now.”

  “Okay, get their position and stand by for Krechet.”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  All ships completed the first jump without a hitch, confirming the results of the shake down flights. A one percent speed difference between the fastest and slowest ships would mean a ninety minute difference over the trip’s six-and-a-half days in warp, but they wouldn’t be doing it in a single leap. After tweaking the navigation and control systems to compensate for differences, they’d enter warp for a few hours and then regroup. Drake knew they would end up spending hours travelling on the plasma thrusters at the rendezvous points, to join up after each hop in warp, but that was better than ending up at the Centauri system spread over a distance equivalent to that from Earth to Venus.

  Drake led the fleet in progressively longer jumps. A light-hour, taking them further from the Sun than Jupiter, in fifteen seconds. Ten light-hours, over twice as far from the sun as Neptune and well outside the “edge” of the Solar System, took two-and-a-half minutes. The longer jumps also gave them a feel for travelling while in warp. The windows and viewscreens showed nothing at all but for the occasional sparkle of energy as a dust grain disintegrated under the tidal stress at the edge of the warp bubble. There would be some minor radiation exposure from that, but not as bad as what they’d get from cosmic rays in normal space. It would take something big to cause a problem, and their path took them well away from the asteroid belt or any cometary debris streams. In short, warp travel was boring, which is just how Drake and the other ships’ captains wanted it.

  A twenty-minute jump took them a hundred light-hours, further than the old Voyager probes, and now that the robotic Alpha Centauri probe was back in Earth orbit, further out than anything made by man.

  Finally. . . .

  “All right,” Drake announced. “We’ve spent enough time paddling in the shallows. At this rate we’ll run out of life support before we get there.” That was an exaggeration. “Next jump is one quarter light-year; four hours and twenty minutes. We’ll rendezvous again for a full systems check. If everything is in order, we’ll take the rest of the trip in half light-year hops. I like to look out the window and actually see something once in a while.”

  That got a polite chuckle. But there was also a practical reason: the ships couldn’t communicate with each other in warp. Even if a radio signal could penetrate the warp bubble without being scrambled to mere noise, it would be like the pilots of two supersonic jets trying to shout at each other.

  The stops would also let them recalibrate their aim points. Alpha Centauri A and B were in almost eighty-year elliptical orbits around each other; in the four-and-a-quarter years it took light from them to reach Earth, they would have moved over twenty degrees around their orbits.

  They would likely be giving Alpha Centauri C, better known as Proxima Centauri, a miss on this trip. While a tenth light-year closer to Earth, it was at a considerable distance from the more interesting, apparently life-bearing worlds orbiting A and B. Proxima did have a planet, but it orbited so close to its red-dwarf primary that life was unlikely. Certainly none had been detected. It was considered a “target of opportunity” in the mission profile if they had time and consumables to spare before returning to Earth.

  Chapter 6: Approaching Centauri

  Interstellar Space, aboard the USS Heinlein

  “All ships,” Drake broadcast, “This is the last big jump into the Alpha Centauri system. We want to arrive one AU from the system center of gravity, toward B, then we’ll take it from there.” One AU, astronomical unit, was the average distance from the Sun to Earth, about 500 light-seconds. The system center of gravity was, at this point in their mutual orbit, about nineteen AU from B and sixteen AU from the slightly more massive A. The planned jump would place them in a clear middle ground, too far from either star for objects to be in a stable orbit around one or the other, and close enough to the system center to be clear of anything orbiting both.

  Drake gave the specific coordinates and then waited the several minutes for all ships to confirm their alignment on the target. “Usual jump sequence, starting thirty seconds from my mark. . .. Mark.”

  Again, at ten second intervals, the five ships winked out.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Drake checked the clock on his screen. Sawyer had secured from warp a full two minutes ago, everyone should have checked in by now. They’d heard from two of the other ships, but were still waiting to hear from the Anderson and Xīng Huā. A slight variation in the warp direction or timing could make a difference of a million kilometers or more, but even the Anderson, last ship to jump, was a full twenty seconds late calling in. Xīng Huā should have checked in already, it was first in the sequence after Heinlein itself.

  The communicator chirped and Drake looked at the speaker. “Calling Heinlein, this is the Anderson checking in.” Twenty seconds late, they were almost six million kilometers away if that was all radio lag. Where the hell was the Xīng Huā?

  “Sawyer, acknowledge that and broadcast this to all ships. Please close up formation on the Heinlein, and if anyone has had contact with the Xīng Huā, let me know at once.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said and began relaying the messages.

  The remaining ships cruised to close with the Heinlein. The Anderson was not as far away as their radio delay had indicated, it had just been a minor delay in making their jump, nothing serious. They’d rendezvous in an hour.

  Drake considered the alternatives. The Xīng Huā had entered warp, the other ships in sequence had seen her go. Did they miss-time the jump and end up several light minutes short or long? If so, it might take them a while to determine their position and then warp again to the rendezvous. That was unlikely, the Xīng Huā’s crew knew what they were doing, but that was more probable than anything else. However: “I want all sensors aft and periodic scans in a full sphere,” he said. “If the Xīng Huā makes a peep I want to hear it. And keep an eye out for anything unusual.”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  It was the gamma ray pulse, three hours later, which let them locate the Xīng Huā, or rather, what was left of her. Each ship detected a short spike of radiation, and by correlating the times at which the ships detected the pulse, they triangulated back to a spot some twenty AU behind them. A review of the logs of the aft-pointing telescopes—normally locked onto the Sun—revealed a short, intense bright flash at the same time as the gamma pulse, followed a moment later by a slower and dimmer flash and a glowing dot that quickly faded. It was too far away to get clear details, but it was enough.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  This is a lousy way to start the mission, Frank Drake thought. Four crew missing and almost certainly dead, their ship missing and presumed destroyed. Damn. Drake opened the conference circuit to the other ships.

  “As you all know by now, the Xīng Huā has not reported in and we’ve detected a probable explosion on her course. At this point we must assume the worst. The loss of the Xīng Huā’s crew, of our friends and team-mates, is of course tragic, but my continued responsibility is the safety of the other ships and crew on this mission. To that end, we need to establish precisely what
happened, at least well enough to determine if there is an ongoing threat to ourselves, or if this was an isolated incident.” He looked at the screens relaying images from the rest of the small fleet. The crew were subdued and somber, understandable given the circumstances.

  “So,” Drake said, “what happened? Any ideas?”

  One of the Poul Anderson’s crew signaled for attention.

  “Yes, go ahead.”

  “This is Vukovich on the Anderson.” The primary astrophysicist. “Our best guess is that the Xīng Huā encountered a large chunk of rock or ice while still in warp. The flash originated inside the radius of Alpha Centauri’s Kuiper belt, if in fact it has one—”

  “If?”

  “This is a multiple-star system, so orbits are either close-in or further out. The gravity of the two main stars would interfere with anything like our Solar System’s Kuiper belt. Besides, we’re well away from the plane of rotation. There should be almost nothing in the way of cometary debris on this track, but it only takes one piece in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  Drake waved his hand in negation; head-shaking wasn’t something you wanted to do much in zero gee. “What are the odds on that? They must be infinitesimal.”

  “Yes, very small. A ship in warp passes through a given volume of space in picoseconds. The odds of anything bigger than a grain of sand being in the path, out here away from the main Oort cloud, are vanishingly small.” Vukovich shrugged. “However, it fits the facts. From the pattern of flashes the ship clearly dropped out of warp before exploding. We—the physics team—think the explosion pattern would have been different if it had been the explosion itself that collapsed the warp field.”

  “So it wasn’t an internal problem, some flaw in the ship design or construction, then.”

  “We can’t know for sure, but I doubt it. An internal explosion would have had a different signature.”

  “Explain.” Drake thought he understood, but this was also for the benefit of everyone else.

  “Well, if the ship, or rather the warp field, had hit something fist-sized or larger, the energy release would have been intense. The tide at the edge of the warp bubble would tear the atoms apart and the energy release would be like a small fission bomb. That would explain the gamma pulse we saw, and that first flash.”

  “Excuse me,” said Dmitri Tsibliev, commander and pilot of the Krechet, “but we hit matter all time in warp. We get sparkles and little bit of radiation, but is not shutting down warp field.”

  “Yes, but that’s from tiny dust particles, pretty mild stuff. In this case the radiation surge would have been big enough to damage the circuits and that would collapse the warp field. Between the energy surging through the electronics, and through the deuterium tanks, the fusion reactors would overload and the tanks rupture. If the hull or the life-support oxygen tanks were breached you’d get a chemical explosion. That was most likely what caused the second flash.”

  “And the crew?” asked Drake.

  “Already dead from the prompt radiation of the initial impact. Even if not, they wouldn’t have survived the secondary explosion or the damage to the ship. That was hours ago, there was never anything we could have done. It was just incredibly bad luck.”

  “How bad? What was the probability?” asked Sawyer.

  “Ballpark is a quadrillion to one. About the same as being hit by lightning the same day your lottery ticket won the jackpot.”

  Drake thought on that. “I don’t like it. Shit does happen but the odds are off-scale.”

  “If there’d been an internal problem, the explosion signature would be different,” said Vukovich. “I think it hit something. No other explanation fits.”

  Sawyer turned her head to look at Drake. “If that was the cause there’s no risk to the other ships.”

  “No, probably not. Wait one.” Drake muted the audio pick-up and froze the video. He wanted to discuss this with his own team for a moment.

  “Damn it,” he said, “this causes all kinds of problems. The mission plan was based on five ships and twenty crew members, and that’s after cutting back because the Verne wasn’t ready. The Chinese will have a fit. They might accuse us of sabotage.”

  “That’s ridiculous!” said Sawyer. “Anyway, we have the sensor data.”

  “There is that. But we may have to abort the mission.”

  “You can’t do that,” said Darwin. “We just got here!”

  “And we’re already down four crew members, one ship and all the gear it carried.” Drake reviewed the possibilities. They still had two good landers—three counting the Anderson—and most of the other gear was duplicated or could be substituted for. The loss of the Xīng Huā’s crew was tragic, but their tasks could be covered by the remaining crew. On the other hand, the safest course might well be to return immediately. That would also minimize any political repercussions with the Chinese. He couldn’t just bump the question back to mission control and get an answer within minutes. He was riding in the fastest way to get a message back to Earth. He felt a sudden kinship with the pre-radio, age-of-sail sea captains of old. Out here, he was mission control.

  He turned the audio and video feed back on.

  “All right, team,” he said, “we’re down four crew, one ship and its gear. We could scrub the mission and return to Earth immediately, although remaining here doesn’t seem to impose any additional dangers beyond what we already expected. However, we still have landers and equipment with which to fulfill at least part of the mission.” Drake had been watching the monitors for the reactions of the crew. They seemed to favor the latter.

  “I propose we adjourn for a half-hour. I want each team to evaluate the impact on their individual mission objectives and the mission plan overall. Consider both the exploration mission and the return voyage. We’re low on the profile for fuel consumption with our extended maneuvering here. When we reconvene I want a go or no-go recommendation on continuing the mission, and a list of mission plan amendments if it’s a go. Either way the final decision will be mine. Any questions?”

  “Are we going to try to retrieve the bodies?”

  Drake had hoped that question wouldn’t come. “No.” He held up his hand to still the murmuring. “For one, there wouldn’t be much left after the double explosion. Two, it’s too far away to travel in normal space. It would take days to get there at maximum thrust, and we don’t have the fuel to spare.”

  “We could warp there.”

  “Not into an expanding debris field. We don’t want to warp anywhere near it or we might end up like they did. If we had a precise fix—but we don’t—we might warp to a few million kilometers away and move in with the plasma drive, but there are too many variables both in their position and the accuracy of our warp navigation, and again, we don’t have the fuel to do that and complete the mission. If the consensus is that the mission is a no-go, I’ll re-evaluate, but the concerns about warp accuracy still hold. So no, much as it pains me, we’re not going to try to retrieve anything. We’ll note the location and orbital parameters as best we can; hopefully somebody else can retrieve them at some time in the future.

  “Any other questions?” There were none. “All right, reconvene in thirty minutes. Carry on.”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  “Okay, so what did we lose on the Xīng Huā?” Darwin asked. As head of the biology team he was getting a consensus on the go or no-go decision.

  “You mean, besides four colleagues?” Xiaojing Wu asked bitterly. She would have been on the Xīng Huā if it hadn’t been for the late crew shuffle because of the Verne.

  “I’m sorry, Xiaojing, I know this must be hard on you. But yes. I think we would honor their memory best by proceeding, but we need to be sure we have the equipment to do our jobs.”

  Wu nodded. “You’re right. This is just such a shock.” She brought up the Xīng Huā’s manifest on her computer screen and studied it. “A lot of this gear is duplicated; we were planning on parallel landings on the two pla
nets.” She kept scanning the list. “Damn, the DNA sequencer. We were only bringing one of those; we don’t even know if Alpha Centauri life is based on DNA. That’s gone.”

  “Okay, that would be a nice-to-have but not essential. And as you say, it’s moot if the life isn’t DNA based.” Personally Darwin thought it most likely that it was; the conditions for early biogenesis almost certainly favored ribose and nucleic acids similar to Earth’s, with perhaps some specific variation in the nucleotides. Since early in the century, biochemists had managed to create synthetic RNA and DNA strands using different nucleotides, and the DNA analyzer aboard Xīng Huā had been modified to work with the entire range. Whether or not the specific enzymes it used would work on alien DNA was another question, and didn’t matter now. Besides, now wasn’t the time to bring up old arguments.

  “Didn’t I hear that you built a DNA sequencer for a high-school science project?” Ulrika Klaar asked Darwin.

  “I did. But I used a lot of off-the-shelf components and enzymes from lab supply companies. If we decide we need one I can see what we might cobble together by cannibalizing other equipment, but that was pretty crude. Anyway,” Darwin said, bringing the meeting back on point, “that’s irrelevant. We don’t need a DNA analyzer to continue the mission. What else might be a show stopper?”

  “The Xīng Huā carried one of the refueling modules. They weren’t designed to return to space after they landed. Now we’ve just got one left, so that means only one landing.”

  “Damn, that’s right.” Technically that was something the flight team would address, but it affected everyone. “So we’ll have to choose which planet we’re landing on.”

  “But we could take both landers down to the same planet,” said Klaar. “Maybe we could load the refueling module back aboard one of the landers, and still do both planets?”