Alpha Centauri: Sawyer's World (T-Space: Alpha Centauri Book 2)

by Alastair Mayer

  “As I recall,” Simms had said, “trying to survive a freezing winter with inadequate supplies is what wiped out a lot of the early colonies in the Americas. Even for those nominally equipped for it like the Vikings. So, a tropical or sub-tropical clime would be best.”

  But Jennifer Singh, the mission botanist, had argued with that. “No,” she said strenuously. “I disagree.”

  “What, do you like snow?”

  “Not especially. But there is an advantage to a temperate climate. When it drops below freezing occasionally, it helps to control the insect population. We won’t have as many crawling creatures to deal with. If we do end up growing our own crops, it will be easier to do that if the bugs hibernate or die off for a while each year.”

  “Would they eat Earth crops?”

  “That’s a moot point; we don’t have any Earth crops to grow.” Jennifer shrugged. “Why would we bring any? But we’ll have to look for native vegetation that would be suitable at least as feedstock for our processors, and that will have native predators. On the plus side, it will also have native pollinators, which Earth crops are unlikely to have.”

  “Good points. So, a subtropical or subtropical highland climate, then,” Simms said. “Something near but not too far north of the snowline.”

  “Or south, in the southern hemisphere,” added Sawyer, a planetologist as well as the landing team lead.

  “Right, mate,” said Naomi Maclaren. She was part of the American team, but the engineer originally hailed from Australia.

  “Finley, how tricky is that to figure out? The snow line, I mean.” asked Sawyer. She had her own ideas, but Finley, as a Canadian, might have more insight.

  “We can look at the local landforms. Freeze-thaw cycles tend to weather rock fairly quickly. Jennifer here can look at the flora and give us some good guesses too,” Finley said. “I wouldn’t expect something like a palm tree or tropical vegetation, although my preference would be to land not too far from that kind of thing. I’m not a big snow fan myself, despite being a Canuck.” He looked around, grinning. “But broad deciduous leaves rather than pine needles.”

  “If they have deciduous trees here,” said Fred Tyrell.

  “It is most likely,” Singh said. “There is axial tilt, and so seasons. It would make sense. Also, keep in mind that the seasons will be longer, the year here is almost as long as Mars’s.”

  The chose site, longer year aside, gave them a climate similar to that of North Carolina or New Zealand. Relatively warm winters but with just enough chance of frost and snow to keep Jennifer Singh happy, and not too dry.

  They exact spot was a hundred kilometers inland, where a coastal plain began a gentle rise toward a low mountain range further inland. “I don’t know if there’ll be hurricanes or typhoons, but you’re better to put some distance between you and the coast just in case,” Simms had explained.

  Sawyer wanted a wide area of level ground to land on, they wouldn’t have the benefit of an already-landed refueling pod to broadcast a locator beacon and local wind conditions this time. The trick was finding an area clear enough and flat enough to make a good landing spot. Much of the terrain was covered by forest, and although to the north and inland there were rolling plains and grasslands—if it was grass—the problem was with the “rolling” part.

  But, “a little bit of crosswind” aside, they had landed in one piece.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  The Biological Isolation Garments where colored a bright magenta, for visibility. Ulrika Klaar and Roger Dejois suited up on the lower deck of the Anderson while observing their lab mouse “canary” running in its exercise wheel in a chamber connected to the outside air. So far, it seemed fine, which confirmed all the atmosphere testing they’d already done.

  “The mouse looks happy,” Dejois said.

  “It does, but we’re still not going out without these ridiculous suits on.” Nobody liked the BIGs. As if the color wasn’t bad enough, they were big, balloony and plastic, without even the dignity that real space suits would lend. But with normal temperatures and pressures, and nominally breathable air, the BIGs were only to keep alien germs out, and Earth germs in, until they were sure that neither side would be stricken by a horrible plague caught from the other. Kakuloa hadn’t turned up anything that couldn’t be dealt with by known antibiotics, thanks to its common biological heritage with Earth, and they suspected the same would prove true here. They also agreed that it was better to be safe than sorry.

  “Oui, I know that.” Dejois stood and adjusted his seals. “Check me please.”

  Klaar inspected his suit seals, then turned while he checked hers. “Très bien,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  They stepped into the airlock and closed the inner door. The ship’s inside pressure was very slightly more than that outside, by intent. The Anderson was designed to hold air in, not out. Dejois equalized the pressure and opened the outer door. He swept out his left arm, gesturing. “Ladies first? Après vous.”

  “Thank you.” Klaar clipped a safety cable to her harness and turned to descend the ladder. The airlock door was several meters off the ground, the ladder extended down the side then continued on the landing leg to the ground. She paused on the ladder to look around. A half-kilometer away, down a slope, a river flowed south and east toward the distant ocean, just visible near the horizon. Immediately below the ship, the vegetation was blasted and scorched from their landing rockets, but further away it was a bright green. It looked grassy. Klaar supposed it might even be grass, of a sort. She’d bring samples back for Singh to examine.

  She reached the foot of the ladder and realized that with her next steps, she’d be the first person to set foot on this planet. She should probably say something profound, but was at a loss. George Darwin, first off the Chandrasekhar on Kakuloa, had said something about life from Earth taking its first step into the galaxy, which was not only corny but had turned out to be horribly wrong. Sure, why not?

  “I am stepping off the ladder now. We may be the first humans here, but the question of whether we’re the first life from Earth is what we’re going to find out.”

  Chapter 4: Grass

  Biology lab, aboard USS Anderson

  “This is interesting!” Jennifer Singh said, looking up from her microscope.

  “What is?” Doctor Pavel Krysansky asked. “These plants Klaar and Dejois collected. These plants are grasses!”

  He shrugged. “So it’s like grass. What else would it be?” Krysansky was a medical doctor, so non-human biology, whether plant or animal, wasn’t really his field. “You had grass on planet Baker, nyet?”

  “Kakuloa,” Singh said, using the informal name they had given it. “Actually no, we didn’t find any. There were plants that filled the ecological niches of grasses, and some of them were related to each other, but they weren’t descended from a common ancestor with grass. That confused us at first, it didn’t seem to agree with the Terraform hypothesis. But there is still some disagreement about when grasses evolved on Earth.”

  “So that means . . . what?”

  “We know for sure that different forms of grass—and that includes your cereal grains, bamboo, lawn turf, all kinds of grass—really started diverging in the early Neogene Period, about twenty-three million years ago, when the climate began to cool because of the Himalayan uplift. Are you following me?”

  “Da. But if they evolved twenty-three million years ago, there shouldn’t be any here, yes? Kakuloa is maybe sixty-five million years old, why would this place be different?”

  “Exactly. But that’s modern grasses. There is some fossil evidence that pushes the origin of grass back much further, into the Paleogene. Still post-Cretaceous, though.”

  “So why do you say this stuff is grass?” Krysansky held up a few blades from one of the sample containers to look at it more close
ly.

  “A lot of the detailed structure matches. We actually have fossilized grass pollen grains that we know are grass from the mid-Paleocene, fifty-five to sixty million years ago, found in Africa and South America.”

  “Okay, sixty million. You are almost within the error bar in our age estimate.”

  “That is correct, but we also have what is very likely to be grass pollen—although it’s harder to tell—from seventy million years ago, again from Africa and South America.”

  “Ah, so you are neatly straddling the age range for the planets in this system. They could have imported grass ancestors from Earth, but with just a few types—”

  “They might not have survived on Kakuloa. Or maybe they have and we just missed it in our surveys. We barely scratched the surface of that planet. They certainly lost out in the area where we landed.”

  “Well, very good. You have helped pin the age down.”

  “Age?” Jennifer looked at him wide-eyed. Didn’t he see the implications? “There are grasses here. Somewhere there’s going to be something like cereals, grains. They may be as different from what we’re familiar with as corn is from rice, or even bamboo, but—”

  “Corn must be closer to bamboo than to rice, I have seen it grow. Fast.”

  Singh ignored that. “But you get my point. If we find something we can eat.... Collectively humans know a lot about growing different kinds of cereals and grasses.”

  “So I can have cornflakes for breakfast?” Krysansky grinned, the twinkle in his eye suggested he was joking.

  “Someday, perhaps. Although we’ll need to find some kind of docile and productive large mammal if you want milk or cream on that.”

  “Boze moi.” Krysansky did a half stagger.

  “Are you all right?” Singh asked.

  “Da. It just struck me again how strange is all this. Here we are 4.3 light years from Earth. I could understand finding local edible plants, but the thought of getting milk from some alien cow equivalent....”

  “If it’s like Kakuloa, the local cow equivalents may in fact be distant cousins of terrestrial cows. Or goats or camels or horses, humans on Earth have used milk from all those.”

  “Jennifer, this wasn’t how it was supposed to be. Everyone said it would be totally alien or empty, not transplanted Earth life.”

  Singh shook her head. “I know. It’s kind of creepy sometimes. I try not to think about how it got here, just that it got here, and try to figure out when, and what differences sixty-five million years of evolution has made.” She gazed out the window at the surrounding plain, lost in thought. Deep space was certainly turning out to be stranger than anyone had imagined, ironically because it was so familiar. She shook it off. “I have to get these findings up to George Darwin on the Heinlein before they leave the system. It’s further evidence for terraforming. It will have to do until we can find something mammal-like to examine the ears and count the neck vertebrae.”

  Chapter 5: Priorities

  Aboard the Anderson, two days later

  “Heinlein and Chandra have left the system,” Sawyer said. “I just got the message that they were about to go to warp. George Darwin”—the overall mission’s lead exobiologist, who on Drake’s insistence, was returning to Earth to explain their findings—“has confirmed the initial biology results and given us a GO to ditch the biosuits.” That drew a small round of cheers.

  “But that means we have work to do” she continued. “Our top two priorities are: One, researching the planet and its life in general, to determine if, as seems likely, this planet was also terraformed. If so, then also anything we can about the Terraformers.

  “Two, making sure we can survive here indefinitely, and setting up whatever we need to do that. I’d give that latter our highest priority but researching this planet also feeds directly into that. Everyone with me so far?”

  There were general nods and mumbles of agreement.

  “Okay. Dr. Singh, you’re the botanist, I want you to do a survey with an eye to both plants that we can eat and of those, which could be easily cultivated.”

  “Cultivated?” Naomi Maclaren, the engineer, interrupted, “You think we’ll be here long enough that we have to become farmers?”

  “Would you rather have it the other way? What if we’re still here come winter with no food left? Better to be prepared.”

  “Plants are a lot more likely to contain toxins than animals,” Jennifer Singh said. “Most mammals and birds on Earth are edible. If life here is descended from that, the way life on Kakuloa seems to be, shouldn’t we focus on finding food animals?”

  “We’ll do both, of course. If life here isn’t Earth-descended, although your grass suggests otherwise, then plants may be a better option.” Sawyer was reasonably sure that even in the worst case, they could rig up a system of fermenters and digesters to process plant material down to basic sugars, oils and amino acids, but they already knew from spectrographic analysis and the data returned by the drones that the vegetation was biochemically almost identical to Earth’s, and to Kakuloa’s.

  “Right,” said Singh.

  “Dr. Klaar, start on an animal survey to similar ends. Including bugs, if it comes to that.” Sawyer ignored the wrinkled noses of a couple of team members.

  “Sure. I also want to check for any venomous or stinging animals or insects.”

  “Good point. Folks, assume any animal is poisonous—”

  “Venomous!” Ulrika Klaar said.

  Sawyer glared at her. She knew the difference. “—poisonous or venomous until further notice. Don’t eat it, and don’t let it bite or sting you.” She looked around the cabin. Klaar had the decency to lower her eyes slightly and blush.

  “Okay,” Sawyer continued. “so much for food. Next, shelter. We’ve got a roll of solar film we can use for power. We do want the aircraft running and we’ll want to keep some of the film in reserve, but we can set up enough to run instruments and communications. Sometime soon, I’d like to move the cooking to regular fire. We can shelter in the ship for now, but we’re going to want more space before long. We have tents like we used for additional working space on Kakuloa, but we might want something more secure if we’re sleeping there. Also, I’d rather not wear out the ship’s plumbing.” She looked around. “Finley.”

  “Yes?”

  “You have extensive field experience, you’re in charge of setting up a field latrine. Check with the biologists about concerns that any of our intestinal bacteria don’t set off a plague that kills everything else on the planet. And no,” she said, holding up a hand, “I know that’s extremely unlikely.”

  “Anyone else with camping experience, help Finley or investigate what we can use to set up shelters other than the ship. Coordinate with me. The rest of you—think about everything you’ve ever read about surviving in the wilderness, any wilderness, fact or fiction. If you’ve read Swiss Family Robinson, or Mysterious Island, or Tunnel in the Sky, then write down everything you remember about survival techniques. If it’s something we have in the ship’s database or library, that’s great, make a note.” Sawyer was sure that all that and more was in the ships computers. The required storage would be tiny, and survival manuals of all kinds would be a logical inclusion. What she really wanted was the team to focus on what might be important to survival if they weren’t picked up within a few months. Best to plan for the worst. Sawyer thought for a moment. What else? “Finley?”

  “Yes?”

  “When you’re done with the latrines and are ready to start your geology surveys, think about potentially useful mineral deposits. We can come up with plastics for the fabber from organic matter, and maybe some ceramics that will work, but our supply of metals is limited.”

  “Right. Tyrell can get started on that from the orbital survey data, that should point us at interesting places t
o look.”

  “Good. But let’s focus on what’s nearby. We don’t want to have to mount a major expedition to find a bit of copper, and I’m sure Tyrell doesn’t want to face another hundred-kilometer hike if the plane crashes.”

  Tyrell blushed, and then said “Well, maybe if Ulrika was along.” She and Tyrell had faced just such a hike when a double bird strike had broken their prop back on Kakuloa. Tyrell had been the pilot.

  “Okay. That’s all I have for the moment. Anyone else? Questions? Comments? Rude remarks?”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  “This is your lucky day, Dejois,” said Finley. “I’m going to show you how to dig a latrine.”

  “Très drôle. You know there was a reason I never joined the Scouts or the Armed Forces. I have an allergy to digging latrines.”

  “Oh, come on, at this stage it’s just a trench. It’s covering them up later that’s the fun part.”

  “Strange sense of fun. But where are we going to dig? The landing area is a pretty thin layer of soil over solid rock. I don’t want to be hiking a kilometer or two just to go to the bathroom.”

  “Heh, you haven’t seen how I dig. Here, hold this.” Finley handed a bulky piece of equipment to Dejois, then opened another storage locker and began pulling out metal tubes.

  “Okay, this is the drill, n’est-ce pas? What are you going to do, just drill a series of adjacent holes?”

  “We, what are we going to do. And no, we only need a few holes. Now we need one of the charcoal filter canisters. There should be a used one.”

  “From the life support system?”

  “Yeah. I’ll also need something to carry liquid oxygen. A Dewar if the biology lab has one, or just any kind of well-insulated bucket or container, so long as it’s not flammable. It won’t need to stay cold for very long.”

  “Charcoal and LOX? You’re going to dig a latrine with explosives?”

  “A time-honored tradition in the military. The seismic charges would be easier but I want to hold onto those. The little bit of LOX left in the fuel tanks will evaporate in a couple of weeks anyway, so we might as well get some use out of it.”