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

by Alastair Mayer

  “Sure. Let’s head toward that part of the ridge, it looked a little easier to descend there.”

  “We’ll want to be careful,” Tyrell said, “there’s loose shale on the slope.”

  “Yeah, we might want a rope.”

  “One would hope.”

  “What, that you packed one . . . with the soap?”

  “I packed one. But not with any soap, and let’s not do that rhyming thing again. That was weird.”

  “I’ll stop.” Finley paused, then couldn’t help adding, “I’m no dope.”

  “I’ll make you walk back,” Tyrell warned.

  Finley chuckled. “Actually, even if we don’t need it going down, we may not be able to get back up here without a rope, so good thinking.”

  They found a convenient tree and tied off the rope, then lowered themselves over the side, with Finley taking the lead.

  The slope was uneven. It averaged about forty-five degrees but had stretches as steep as sixty or so. The stream had dug a V-shaped ravine down through layers of sedimentary rock, mostly shales with several softer sandy layers between them. Rapid erosion of the softer layers had undermined the shale and slate, leaving many thin slabs littering the side of the valley. These tended to slip over each other whenever Tyrell or Finley set foot on them, making the descent treacherous. Finley was right, it would be near impossible to climb back up this slope without some kind of line to cling to.

  There came a sudden clatter of stones and Finley heard Tyrell’s yell from above him. “Rocks!”

  There was a series of curses and grunts as Tyrell came sliding past Finley, no longer holding onto the rope. Finley turned to watch him slide another ten or fifteen meters downslope, finally coming to rest on a broad ledge where harder rock had resisted erosion.

  “Are you all right?” Finley called as he quickly descended hand over hand on the rope.

  Tyrell, lying face down on the ground, looked up and grinned weakly. “Yeah, I figured this would be faster. I think I still have most of my skin.” There were some rips in his shirt that Finley could see, and a scrape on his cheek.

  “Just hold on, don’t move. Almost there.”

  Tyrell had started to get to his hands and knees. He froze, his attention caught by something on the rocks.

  “Fred?” Finley was at the ledge, walking toward Tyrell with one hand still firmly on the rope.

  “This is . . . odd.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing, I’m fine. Well, mostly. Come here and look at this.” He picked something up off the ground.

  Tyrell held up a thin slab of rock, triangular in outline. Finley recognized it as quite different from the shale most of the hillside was littered with. Aside from mud splatters and dust, it was dark and glassy. Obsidian? Its surface was roughened with shallow scalloped pits, its edge with similar but smaller pits. It was the kind of stone that Finley had seen a few times before, in the southwestern United States, and something similar in several museums. Sometimes in obsidian, others in chert or flint. It had no right to be here, 4.3 light years away from Earth.

  “That looks like a spear point,” Finley said, doubting the words even as he spoke them.

  “It does, doesn’t it?” Tyrell looked back up the slope. “I don’t know what level it came from. We should look for more.”

  “This is crazy. Let me see it.” Tyrell handed the spear point over to Finley who looked at it closely, searching for a clue that might indicate a natural origin. Part of one edge had broken off, but there were clear signs of knapping, with smaller flakes being taken off at the edge—which was too straight to be natural, not in this kind of rock—for finer control of the shape. “Damn. This is not natural.”

  “If you’d found it on Earth you wouldn’t question what it was.”

  “I might if it showed up in Antarctica or some such place, but you’re right. That would just be taken as evidence that somehow early man made it to Antarctica. Care to explain to me how early man made it to Alpha Centauri?”

  “Kidnapped by aliens?” Tyrell gave a weak smile, he didn’t believe that either.

  “More likely aliens themselves. With all the Earth-descended life forms we’ve seen, some of them surprisingly parallel to Earth species of one sort or another, why not something that evolved to be similar to primates and humans? Tool making by human ancestors started on Earth for what, two, two-and-a-half million years ago?”

  “At least. The question is, how long has this been here, and are the maker’s descendants still around?”

  At this they both straightened and turned to scan their surroundings, as if suddenly wary of somebody sneaking up behind them.

  Finley shook off the eerie feeling of being watched. “Long gone from this location, anyway. We’d have seen more evidence.”

  “Huh, of course you’re right.” Tyrell looked up-slope again. “We really should try to determine where this came from, try to get a date on the strata. Maybe we’ll find some others.”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  With the scattering of broken shale and other rock it was difficult in places to make out the layers. There were sandy layers intermixed with the shale.

  “It looks like they had a period of alternating wet and dry spells, some kind of climate oscillation perhaps,” Finley said.

  “You think this was windblown sand?”

  “Yeah, periods where this was a lake laying down mud layers that formed the shales, and periods where it dried up and got covered in windblown sand. It’s surprisingly soft for sandstone. If this were near the edge of the lake there might have been a periodic tilting which sloshed it slowly back and forth over decades.”

  “Tilting? A magma dome underneath flexing the crust, you think? Or glacial ice buildup?”

  “I’d want to explore further, but either is possible.”

  They climbed a little higher up slope, and came to a thick layer of fine-grained, light gray material.

  “And there’s the cause of your tilting. A nearby volcano. That’s a thick tephra layer.”

  “That would do it. You know if the tool makers were below this, that might explain why they’re no longer around. If the population was not widespread an event like what this represents could have wiped them out.”

  “A layer this thick, the damage could have extended hundreds of kilometers. Thousands, if the winds were right or it was a super-volcano. But if whatever species made this was more spread out, they might actually be still around.”

  “Okay, well let’s look around a bit more for any evidence of worked stone. The stratigraphy on this piece is useless, no way of knowing what layer it was from. I’m curious as to how old it is.”

  “I think there’s a way to date obsidian tools. Hydration of the chipped surfaces.”

  “Okay, we can research that back at camp. There should be something in the computers. Damn, the last thing anybody thought we’d need on this expedition was an archeologist.”

  “I think we’re going to find that there are a lot of skills we wish we’d brought someone with.”

  Finley agreed. Hopefully it wouldn’t include anything their lives depended on.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Anderson Base

  “You found what?” Sawyer said, not quite sure she had heard correctly.

  Tyrell didn’t say anything, he just reached into the thick cloth satchel slung across his shoulder, took out a plastic specimen bag, then the specimen with in it, and carefully unwrapped the multiple layers protecting it. He held it up. “This.”

  Sawyer knew a hand-shaped obsidian tool when she saw one. It could have been a knife blade or a spear point, but it was certainly no random piece of obsidian. This was . . . she didn’t have words to do it justice.

  “Anything else? Tools, that is?”

  “We found a couple of other pieces that might be br
oken points. Things were scattered along the slope, it’s heavily eroded. The remains of the original settlement could have long since washed downstream, or they could still be under a couple of meters of tephra and topsoil. It might have been kilometers away, and these points were lost on a hunt. Like Peter said, we never thought we’d need an archeologist.”

  “I think I’m adding that to the task list. Somebody needs to come up to speed on archeology. And we’re going to have to refine our dating.”

  “Is it that important? Surely the locals who made this are long-gone, or we would have seen signs of them from orbit. It can wait until the next expeditions.”

  “We may learn something relevant to our survival. What did they eat? Why are they no longer around? The answers to questions like that could be important. Not as important as some of our other tasks, but think of it, this is proof that intelligent species evolved beyond Earth.”

  “I would have thought two terraformed planets with Earth-descended life was proof of that.”

  Tyrell was right. But the Terraformers were a complete unknown and some sixty-five million years ago, too abstract to really grasp. “Yeah, but this makes it more real, more of a direct connection to us. This is where we were less than a million years ago. Heck, maybe less than ten-thousand years ago.”

  She picked up the blade again, examining it. It was a deep, dark brown, almost black. “Obsidian,” she said aloud. “And you found this near a tephra layer?”

  “Not associated with it. It was on the ravine slope, we couldn’t tell where it came from. Not the tephra, obviously. It was shales and sandstones below the tephra.”

  “So it could have come from any level.” Obsidian and the ash that formed tephra were both volcanic, but from very different kinds of event. She turned it idly in her hands. “I’m going to want to check this out. We should do a couple of wide ranging surveys. I want to know where that volcano was, and the extent. And if the magma chamber might still be active.”

  “We have the gear, we can do a magnetotelluric survey. And we have seismometers and charges, of course. But do you really think it might still be active? We would have seen signs from orbit.”

  “No, you’re probably right. I am curious though. Besides, obsidian could be useful, and there might be sulphur springs or metallic ores.”

  “Obsidian useful? Do you think we’re going to be resorting to stone age tools? It’ll be a long while before our gear wears out.”

  “Just thinking out loud. And we might find more signs of your spear point makers. Tell you what, let’s you and I go flying tomorrow. Finley and Dejois can do a ground survey to the north, should be a nice day for a hike. Let me see who else is doing what, if somebody else wants to go with them. Just so long as we have at least three back in camp.”

  “Okay, I’ll pass the word. Then I need to go secure the plane. If you let me know what gear you want to take, I’ll get that checked out.”

  “Thanks.” She handed back the obsidian spear point. “And tag and record that. First ever alien artifact. Take care of it, it’s priceless.”

  He looked at it with new-found respect. “You’re right. Not quite what I would have imagined from that phrase.” He wrapped it back up and then said, “But wait. Given that Kakuloa was terraformed, wouldn’t that have been our first ever alien artifact? And this planet our second?” He grinned and left the tent.

  Sawyer felt an almost physical jolt at that. He was right, of course. A planet as an artifact. She felt a chill run up her spine.

  Part II

  Chapter 11: Status Report, Week One

  Status Report, Week 1

  “This is Elizabeth Sawyer of the USS Anderson mission to Alpha Centauri A II, planet Able. We’ll be doing routine updates to the Interstellar Propulsion Module in orbit, which the Heinlein crew have fitted with a radio dish. If you’re getting this, and I hope I’m not wasting my breath here, then obviously it works. Data is rigged to retransmit every two hours until a fresh upload, so there should be a radio telescope in range for one of those.

  “So, our first week on the planet. This should be old news. The Heinlein and Chandrasekhar left four days ago, so by our time they should be arriving back at Sol in a few days. When you get this, of course, it will have been over four years. With any luck this will all be moot, we’ll be bringing all the reports and data back with us when we’re picked up.”

  “Heinlein will have confirmed that the life-forms here are Earth-descended. Doctor Singh positively identified several species of what are unquestionably grasses before they left. So far we have found nothing that contradicts that. George Darwin will be happy to know that Doctor Klaar caught and examined a small furry animal, and confirmed it as a placental mammal, right down to the ossicles and seven cervical vertebrae. We’ve also found what could well be a distant cousin to paraceratherium, a large creature two or three times the size of an elephant. We won’t be doing detailed anatomical studies on those any time soon. A full report on the flora and fauna so far discovered is in the attached files.

  The biologists have noticed a few detail differences mostly in the local plant life. They conjecture that these are due to the slightly longer day and much longer year here. It may be different closer to the equator, where there’s not so much seasonal variation.

  “Biggest news saved for last. While on a geological survey west of here, Doctors Tyrell and Finley discovered what is unquestionably a primitive artifact, an obsidian knife or spear point. See the attached data files for a full report. They found a few other, similar fragments. Since they were below a volcanic ash layer, in a ravine, it is entirely possible that the makers of these went extinct when the volcano erupted. We didn’t see any signs of intelligent life from orbit, even of neolithic civilization, although it is possible that there still survive some intelligent but primitive beings on the planet. We haven’t seen any other signs of them in the areas we’ve explored near the landing site, so perhaps not. If we should happen to find any, and in the absence of any standing orders concerning contact with extra-terrestrials, we’ll try to follow the Star Trek Prime Directive and not interfere.

  “Of course, as Tyrell has pointed out, we’re sitting on one of the two biggest alien artifacts in this star system, those being the terraformed planets. It certainly wasn’t done by any locals.

  “We are looking at building some infrastructure here using local trees for lumber, it should be more comfortable than the cramped quarters on the Anderson and our field tents. Maclaren has plans for an aqueduct so we don’t have to keep trekking to the river for fresh water, that will be a help.

  “Overall morale is high. There are plenty of things to do and discover, and this planet, while clearly terraformed, is different enough from Kakuloa, that is Baker, to be interesting.

  “I’ll try to do these updates weekly, but that may taper off if there is less to report.

  “Elizabeth Sawyer, Acting-Captain USS Anderson, ending report.”

  Chapter 12: T-Bird

  Anderson Landing Site, next day

  “So, are we going flying today?” Tyrell asked Sawyer.

  “Actually, Tyrell, change of plans. I want to take Finley with me to do some seismic work, he’s got the experience.”

  “Hey, if you don’t trust my flying, just say so,” Tyrell joked.

  “Who said I would have let you do the flying anyway?” Sawyer was just as good a pilot as Tyrell, perhaps better. “Anyway, can you swap with him and you and Dejois go check out the area to the north?”

  “Sure. Okay if Klaar comes with? She’s been wanting to check out the fauna.”

  Sawyer suspected other motives than that, but it was a task that needed doing. Dejois was an ecologist, he would have a different eye for the zoology than Klaar, and he’d help keep them focused. “Sure. Stay clear of the girannos”—it hadn’t taken long for
the name giraffe-rhino to be shortened to this—“but we’d like to get an idea of what else is there.”

  She hesitated a moment, then added “And take Dejois too, I want the ecologist. I want to know the predator-prey relationships, and what’s eating the grass if the girannos are browsing the trees, and what happens to giranno turds?”

  “I thought you said to stay away from them?”

  “I did. Especially since if they have a predator species, I expect don’t want to meet it.”

  Tyrell considered that. It took several fully-grown lions to take down even a small elephant. If anything did prey on the giraffe-rhinos, it would be bigger and nastier than a lion, and might well consider him a nice appetizer.

  “You’ve got that right.” And maybe it would be better if Ulrika stayed behind, worrying about her might be a dangerous distraction. On the other hand, he’d never hear the end of it if they went without her. “Any progress on defensive weaponry?”

  For whatever reason, the expedition hadn’t included hunting rifles in the inventory, although against something that might try to take down a giranno Tyrell would rather have something with a higher rate-of-fire. Or perhaps a rocket-grenade. The snare guns they had for capturing small animals would just be an annoyance.

  “Maclaren thinks she can fab up something like a cross between the netguns and a taser, but that’s a ways off. Cross-bows are another possibility. For now, though, stay away from tall grass and low branches.”

  “Branches?”

  “Leopards.”

  “Oh. Oh.” Or snakes, come to that, Tyrell realized. “You know, I’ll bet Finley would enjoy another trip, how about he goes with Dejois, and Klaar and I will find something else to do.” He was half smiling as he said this. He didn’t mind going, and an edge of fear would help keep him more alert.

  Sawyer grinned back. “Knock it off, Romeo. He’ll get his chance. But seriously, watch yourself and don’t take chances. I want you all back.”