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

by Alastair Mayer

  “Da, I see it.”

  Tsibliev brought the Krechet in high, coming to a hover about five hundred meters directly above the designated landing spot. He throttled back and the ship dropped quickly, leaving a trail of cloud above it. It slowed abruptly about thirty meters above the ground and descended the rest of the way at a more sedate pace, the exhaust plume searing the ground beneath. Dust, smoke and steam kicked up around it and for a moment the Krechet was lost in the cloud, then the roar of the engines stopped. The cloud drifted away on the slight breeze, to reveal the Krechet sitting solidly on its landing gear. It was down.

  “Nice job. I’ll bring the plane in now.”

  Sawyer landed the plane and then taxied it to within twenty meters of the lander. A few small plants were still smoldering but the ground around the lander was clear, and had already cooled enough to walk on. As Sawyer and Darwin approached, the side hatch opened and a ladder dropped down. A figure started climbing down it.

  Darwin remembered the accident which had made him the mission’s lead exobiologist. “Why a ladder anyway?” he asked. “Why isn’t the side of the ship made of smart materials that can just extrude a ladder?”

  “Actually they were going to make more use of smart materials,” Sawyer said, “but the hull of the ship is a high radiation environment. Even in normal space there’s cosmic rays, and when the warp is turned on we get a constant stream of radiation from matter intersecting the warp bubble.”

  “Yeah but that’s pretty mild, it doesn’t bother us.”

  “And you a biologist.” There was a hint of good-natured derision in her voice. “Our living cells can generally repair what damage it does cause. The nanocells in the smart material aren’t self-repairing, just redundant. Damage enough of them and they’ll stop doing what you need them to do.”

  They reached the foot of the ladder just as Dmitrii stepped off.

  “Welcome to Kakuloa,” Darwin said, extending a hand to shake. “Did you bring the required landing fee?”

  “Forgive me, I could not find anyone to exchange rubles for Centauri currency. I will have to owe you.”

  “That’s okay, we’ll take it in vodka.”

  “Ah, now that, that I can do. Strasvoytye!” And with that he stepped over and grabbed Darwin in a bear hug, then turned and did the same to Sawyer. “It is good to be in open air, even if does smell like someone is burning leaves.” He looked around at the barren plateau. “You know, you could have marked closer to trees. I am doing precision landing, not looking for place to build shopping center.” He grinned again and slapped Sawyer on the shoulder. “Come, let us get everyone else off ship.”

  Dmitri turned back to the Krechet, stopped, and turned back to Darwin. “By the way, what is Kakuloa?”

  “Ah, it’s my working name for this planet. I got tired of calling it Baker or Alpha Centauri B II. Elizabeth said the waves near Landing Site One reminded her of Hawaii, so I picked something Hawaiian.”

  “You do know that there’s no such word as kakuloa in Hawaiian, right?” Sawyer said pointedly to Darwin. “And the beach at Kahakuloa”—she emphasized the extra syllable—“looks nothing like the one at the landing site. I looked it up.”

  “So you keep insisting. And yet here we are standing on a lava flow by the beach. Sounds like Hawaii.”

  Sawyer rolled her eyes. “Flood basalt, not lava flow,” she muttered. She turned to Dmitri. “Anyway, let’s help you all get unloaded. At least you don’t have to spend the next few days in BIGs.”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  The crew set up a base camp about fifty meters from the ship, to give them room to spread their gear and more living space. Much of the gear was stowed in externally accessible compartments, and they were midway through unloading it, when they all heard a sharp, loud, crack! followed by a muffled rumble.

  “What was that?” asked Klaar of nobody in particular.

  “Was that earthquake?” said Dmitri. “It felt like ground shook.”

  “That was damned odd,” said Sawyer. “Everybody spread out, stay clear of the lander.” Contrary to her own advice, she herself started back toward the lander, scanning the ground intently like she was looking for something.

  “What is it? What are you looking for?” Darwin called over to her.

  “Something I hope I don’t find.” She checked out the ground around one landing pad and walked over to the other, still scanning the ground. She looked back at Darwin. “This plain is flood basalt, there shouldn’t be any—”

  CRACK!

  “Shit!” Sawyer managed to yell as the ground fell away beneath her.

  Chapter 15: Underground

  Krechet landing site

  Her voice faded as Sawyer disappeared from view. The lander lurched and tilted sideways, the leg that Sawyer had been standing near seeming to drop into the ground. Again Drake heard a rumbling, less muffled this time, as of rocks falling.

  “Elizabeth!” Darwin and Tsibliev began to run toward where they’d last seen her.

  “Stay back!” Sawyer’s voice came, sounding distant and echoey. “I’m okay, but stay back!”

  “Where are you?”

  “In a lava cave, hanging on to the landing pad. Roof broke through. I don’t know how stable it is. Keep your distance!”

  “We’ve got to get you out of there.”

  “That would be nice, but right now I’m hanging above the cave floor, I don’t know how deep this is. I don’t want you stomping around and breaking the rest of the roof.”

  “All right, let me get ropes.” Darwin turned and called back to Dmitri and the others. “Somebody get rope from the gear we’ve unloaded. Stay clear of the ship. Dmitri, how stable is it like that, will it fall?”

  “Is good for now, but balance is delicate. If any more ground breaks, could tip over. We need to anchor opposite leg.”

  “Great, how do we do that.” There wasn’t much other than scrubby bushes to tie anything to, and he didn’t want to risk hammering pins into the ground until they knew how solid it was.

  “Sawyer, which way does the tube run?”

  “It’s fucking dark in here, how should I know? But my guess is more or less toward the ocean.”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  There was light coming in the hole around the landing gear, but Sawyer was hanging on to the leg for all she was worth, and the light was in her face. She couldn’t see into the gloom beyond. The rock where they’d broken through was about twenty centimeters thick—that might have been enough to support the landing leg, had been enough for a while, but for cracks in the rock that would have been aggravated by the landing jets. They were lucky it hadn’t collapsed immediately.

  The part of Sawyer’s brain that wasn’t focused on not falling wondered about that. Lava tubes, channels where molten lava kept flowing while the edges and top solidified, were not uncommon in lava flows, but in a flood basalt where the lava has just formed a big pool, the tubes usually stayed filled until the cooling lava solidified all the way through. It was only where there was enough slope to keep the liquid lava draining after the source had stopped that you got a hollow cave like this. Flood basalts never had lava caves. At least, not on Earth. Except, the thought came to her, that one place in Brazil. And near the Columbia River Basalts’ terminal margins. Or the Moon. Damn it!

  She tried to pull herself up. If she could hook her leg around the foot-pad, she should be able to shift her weight and get herself up to where she was sitting on the pad, straddling the landing leg. From there she could stand up, reach up and get herself out of the hole, if no more of the ceiling collapsed. She heaved and swung her right leg. Almost. Heave, swing. Nope. The muscles in her forearms were starting to cramp from holding her weight on the landing strut, and every time she tried to haul herself up her biceps protested. Damn, she used to be able to do this. All that time in zero gee hadn’t helped.

  She called out again. “What’s happening up there?” A face appeared over the edge of the hole. “Oh, h
i.” It was Darwin’s. Idiot. “I told you to stay clear of the hole, what if it collapses more?”

  “And I’m pleased to see you too,” Darwin said. “I’m on a rope, I’ve got three people belaying me. Let me get some more light down there and see how we’re going to get you out.”

  “Take your time, I’ll just hang out here.” Sawyer’s panting breath and the strain in her voice belied the casual words.

  The head disappeared for a moment, then reappeared with a hand holding a large flashlight next to it. Sawyer was momentarily blinded as Darwin flicked the light on. Then she heard laughing. Darwin was pointing the flashlight down beneath her, shaking as he laughed.

  “What’s so fucking funny?”

  “Ah ha, hoo.” He caught his breath. “Sorry. Look down.”

  “I did, it’s pitch black.”

  “No, look where I’m shining the light.”

  Sawyer twisted around so that she could look past her upraised shoulder, still keeping a death grip on the landing leg. The light beam picked up the dark gray basalt, but she still couldn’t see much. She’d been staring up at the sky through the hole, her night vision was shot. Slowly the black faded and she picked out the shape of the cave walls, the small pile of rubble on the floor of the cave.

  “Oh,” she said, and let go of the landing leg.

  The ground had been a half meter beneath her toes, the lava tube wasn’t even three meters high.

  She stood flexing and shaking her shoulders and arms to loosen the knotted muscles, looking around to see what she could by the light coming in from above. “Toss me the flashlight, I want to check out the cave roof.”

  Darwin did so and Sawyer winced at the pain in her arms as she reached to grab the light. She shone it around. Loose rock littered the floor of the cave. Shining the light up at the ceiling, she saw the inverted step pattern of broken rock layers. The hole was near the apex of the slightly curved roof, roughly centered on an irregular area where a large slab had fallen, leaving a thinner layer above it. Sawyer played the light over the rockfall on the floor. There was a layer of wet, dirty rock below the recent fall from the just-opened hole. “Just our luck, he must have landed on one of the thinnest parts of the cave roof.”

  She shone the light up and down the tunnel, which seemed to peter out after a dozen meters in each direction, although it was hard to tell in the dim light. It didn’t look like rockfall had closed it, which explained why they hadn’t seen any indication from the surface, but rather the lava had just solidified.

  “I think this is more a huge vug than tube drainage, although I don’t see any crystallization. A gas pocket perhaps.” She looked up at the landing leg and tried to gauge the location of the ship relative to the tunnel. “It looks like the ship is over solid ground, but the roof here is weakened, it might not take much to open it up more.”

  “Any suggestions?”

  “If we’ve got something we could use as a two-and-a-half to three meter jack, we can prop the leg up off the cave floor. Other than that maybe lay something down to spread out the weight. Floor plates or tree trunks or something.”

  “Are we okay to drive anchors? Tie down the opposite leg?”

  Sawyer looked around the cave walls and ceiling. “Yeah, this doesn’t go anywhere near that. As long as there are no other vugs we should be good. Hammer on the ground to see if it sounds hollow first.”

  “Aren’t you coming up?”

  “You’d better get that tied down first. If us climbing around this hole loosens any more rock, we don’t want the ship to tip any further.”

  “Right you are.” Darwin’s head disappeared, then popped back. “Don’t go away.”

  Funny man, said Sawyer to herself, then sat down on a boulder away from the loose rock overhead to wait. She massaged her arms and shoulders. All that for a drop of one lousy foot.

  Part III: Survival

  Chapter 16: Doing Geology

  Field Geology Site III, a week later

  Sawyer leaned into the drill, feeling it vibrate and hearing it whine as it bit its way into the sandstone at her feet. The drill reached the sixty centimeter mark and she stopped it, then flipped the motor-reverse switch and ran it again briefly to back the drill out. She paused and wiped the sweat from her brow, then heaved the drill up and out, laying it carefully down on the rock parallel to the line formed by the three holes she’d just drilled. A fourth hole, off the line, was perhaps a meter further away.

  “Hey Elizabeth, how’s it going?” Fred Tyrell, thirty meters away, had finished collecting mineral specimens from the outcrop near the edge of the clearing and was strolling back.

  “Almost done here. Just need to drop in the geophones and wire them to the transmitter mast.” She picked up a small plastic-wrapped package and ran a finger down one edge, unsealing it. The bag contained a small squat cylinder the size of a coffee mug. A loose coil of cable was wired internally to the cylinder at one end, with a connector at the other. She set the cylinder sideways in the hole, lining its axis north-south by comparing it with the compass rose displayed on her omni. The loop of cable trailed up out of the hole, with most of the loop lying on the ground. That done, she filled in the hole with loose dirt then squirted a binding agent from a spray can onto the dirt to mix with and solidify it.

  “Need a hand?” Tyrell asked as he walked up to where Sawyer was working.

  “Sure, take one of these,” she handed him a plastic-wrapped geophone, “and put it in that hole vertically. There’s a bubble level on one end. That obviously goes on top, and center the bubble. Make sure it stays centered until you get it packed in. I’ll do the east-west axis.”

  “What about the cable?”

  “I’ll plug them into the transmitter mast as soon as I get it up.”

  At wasn’t long before the seismic station was complete, with the three geophones hooked into circuitry within the mast which mounted the communications antenna. That mast was a tube resembling a fence post, ten centimeters in diameter and two-and-a-half meters long. Sawyer buried the base of this in the fourth hole and similarly fixed it in place. “All set.”

  “What now?”

  “Now’s the fun part, I get to test these.” She held up a pair of blue plastic-coated cylinders.

  “Ah, the seismic charges?”

  “Exactly, the seismic charges. Come on, let’s go for a walk.”

  They hiked to the other end of the clearing, a thin layer of soil over a flat bed of sandstone, with a few small scrubby bushes growing around it. Sawyer set up the drill again and bored out the hole for the charge.

  “So how big a bang do these make?” Tyrell asked.

  “It depends how many you screw together.” The ends of each charge were threaded to permit just that. “But these guys are equivalent to a stick of dynamite. In this sandstone they’ll break it up a bit and kick about fifty liters out. In softer ground they could excavate a nice hole, maybe a half-meter deep and a meter across, about 200 liters. Maybe more, depending on the soil condition. Wet ground transmits the shock better, dry sand just soaks it up.”

  “Yeah, I know the theory, I just haven’t done this in a while.”

  “Oh, right.” She stopped the drill and set it aside. “Okay, that’s done.”

  She pulled a smaller plastic piece, like a bottle’s screw-top with attached wires, from a package and threaded it on to the seismic explosive stick. “Okay, that’s our detonator. Now we just lower it into the hole and cover it up,” she said, doing just that.

  “Okay, lets get to a safe distance.” Sawyer picked up a spool of wire, connected one end to the detonator wires, and began walking back across the clearing, trailing the wires as she went.

  “This should be more than enough,” she said when they were a hundred meters away. She knelt down and began connecting the wires to the detonator block. “Fred, can you check the comms with the sensors?” She unfolded her omni and keyed in a sequence, bringing up a series of graphs on the display. She handed
it to him. “Here’s the app, it’s already set to the right frequency.”

  “Sure,” said Tyrell, taking it. Sawyer continued connecting the detonator wire. “It shows these are set to sensitive,” he said. “Do you want me to desensitize them for the test?”

  “Yeah, dial it back or we’ll swamp the sensors.”

  “Okay, done.” He handed the omniphone back to her. She finished the detblock and checked the display. “Okay, great. We’re good to go.” She set the omni down and knelt beside the detblock. “Stand by!” she yelled to the empty field.

  “Who are you yelling at?”

  “Standard safety precaution. Just a habit.”

  Sawyer flipped open the cover and flipped a toggle switch, and turned rotary switch a quarter-turn. “Armed!” she shouted.

  She turned to Tyrell. “You might want to cover your ears, this is a shallow blast.” He put his hands over his ears. His eyes were bright with excitement.

  “All right, in five,” Sawyer said loudly. “Four. Three. Two. One. Fire in the hole! Fire in the hole! Fire in the hole!” Her thumb flipped up another clear plastic cover and mashed down on a big red button. The ground shook.

  BANG! A plume of dust, gravel and smoke shot up out of the borehole and they felt the shock ripple through the ground, then everything grew silent as the echoes of the blast faded away.

  Sawyer safed the detblock and set it down, then picked up her omni and reviewed the data. “Perfect, everything looks good. Now, with the stations at the two landing sites, we have three seismic stations and can pinpoint any quakes much more reliably. Let’s pack up and get out of here.”

  They walked back to the smoking hole where they’d placed the charge. It was surrounded by a ring of debris, like the rays around an impact crater. In place of the borehole was a crater roughly twice as wide as it was deep. “Cool,” was all Tyrell could say.

  ∞ ∞ ∞