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

by Alastair Mayer

  “No, but it’s worth a look.” She checked the time. “We can’t dawdle here, we still need to set up another seismic post. One more circuit and I’m heading back to clearer ground.”

  “Okay, hang on.” Finley keyed the aircraft’s radio. “EP03 to Anderson. Anyone listening?” He paused for a moment, then tried again. “EP03 to Anderson, come in?”

  “This is Anderson, EP03. Maclaren here. What’s up?”

  “Take a bearing on my signal. We found something interesting and I’ll want to take a look at the satellite photos.”

  “Roger that. Standby.” No doubt Maclaren was doing whatever it was she needed to do with the ships comm systems to take a bearing.

  “Good thinking,” Sawyer said.

  “EP03, Anderson. Okay, go ahead and transmit for a bit so I can get a lock.”

  “Roger that. Uh, what should I say? Oh, how about ‘Mary had a little lamb, it’s fleece was white as snow, and everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go. Over.”

  “Classic Edison, I like it. Got the fix, three-one-two true. So your back bearing if you need it is one-three-two”

  “Sounds right. Ah, roger that, three-twelve out, one-thirty-two back. Thanks Naomi.”

  “What’s your ETA back here?”

  “We still have one more station to set up, we’ll keep you posted.”

  “Roger. Later then.”

  “Affirmative. EP03 out.”

  Sawyer had already brought the little plane around to a heading of one-three-two, back toward the Anderson. “All right,” she said, as they cruised southeastward, “Keep an eye out for a place to land and set up the seismometers.”

  “Roger that.”

  The rest of the trip back was relatively uneventful.

  Chapter 17: Status Report, Week Six

  Status Report, Week 6

  “This is Sawyer of the Anderson mission, Alpha Centauri A II, planet Able. Sixth weekly update.

  “Everything has settled in to a routine now. Geological and biological expeditions have expanded to a radius of about a hundred kilometers from the landing site, give or take, although there is still much territory within that to be explored.

  “We’ve found a few more species of terror bird like that reported previously, as well as a variety of smaller birds and beasts, as outlined in the attached report. We’ve had several forays up and down stream in the nearby river, again see attached for Doctor Klaar’s report on the marine life found. Essentially, nothing startling.

  “A few more scattered finds of obsidian spearpoints, or rather fragments. We think this may have once been a hunting area, perhaps several tens of thousands of years ago. Between the seismographic readings and the neutrino tomography we did in orbit, we have a pretty good idea of the deep structure of the planet, but the details of the top hundred meters or so of the crust have proved elusive, so we don’t have good stratigraphy.

  “In spite of that, the finds have helped keep morale up, but I’m seeing isolated signs that it is slipping. We all know that a rapid turnaround of the Heinlein would have put them back here at least two weeks ago. Intellectually, though, we understand that it was unlikely, but a psychological milestone has passed. I may be overstating it. Everyone is healthy, there are no signs that anyone is depressed, and interaction between team members is as genial as ever. In short, we’re still doing fine.

  “Sawyer for the Anderson team, report ends.”

  Chapter 18: Observation

  Anderson Base

  “Captain, we have a camera out in the southwest sector, number forty-seven.” Maclaren said.

  “Out?” Just as they had on Kakuloa, they had placed small video transmitters around the landing area, and especially in a wide perimeter around the camp and Jennifer Singh’s agricultural areas. They served to both document animal movements and serve as an early warning should anything large be approaching the camp. They had modest power requirements, and were pretty rugged. They shouldn’t be failing. “Offline? Did an animal brush up against it?”

  “That’s the weird thing, it still pings as online, but I’m getting no video or audio from it. I checked the recordings back from where it failed, and there isn’t any indication of animals, wind in the branches, anything.”

  “Huh. Maybe something fell over the lens?”

  “Doesn’t look like that. Anyway, we have spares, it should probably be replaced.”

  “How long ago did it fail?”

  “Just a couple of hours ago, I have a monitor that alerted when there’d been no change in the image for a half-hour.” Even on a windless day with no animals in the scene, there would be some movement from the changing sun shadow angles if nothing else.

  “Okay, I’ll go check it out. Get me a spare.”

  “Oh, you don’t have to go. I had planned on doing it after finishing up some fabber work.”

  “I could use the exercise, and I’d feel better without a gap in the perimeter.”

  “Well, if you don’t mind . . . ”

  “Not at all. We ought to be patrolling the perimeter every couple of days anyway.”

  “You’re going alone?”

  “There’s nothing big this close to camp, and I’ll take a thumper” This last referred to a defensive weapon Maclaren had come up with, essentially a compressed-air bean-bag gun.

  “Okay, you’re the boss.”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  It was a nice day for a hike. The sun wasn’t too hot yet, and a breeze from the north kept the humidity down. It didn’t take Sawyer long to reach the tree to which camera forty-seven was attached. There didn’t seem to be anything obviously wrong with it. Sawyer detached it and put it in her sample bag, Maclaren could figure it out. She took out the replacement camera, put it back in place, and powered it up.

  “Sawyer to Maclaren, the new camera’s in place, number ninety-three. Can you check the feed?”

  “Half a mo’, Captain. In the middle of something right now.”

  “No rush, it’s a nice day.”

  “Roger that.”

  Sawyer looked around. There was a low ridge to the south, the terrain open. She was just turning to sit and wait for Maclaren to call back when a movement near the ridge caught her eye.

  She looked again, but whatever it was had been on the other side of the rise and was now out of site. There hadn’t been any terror-bird sightings this close to camp, but she was curious as to what it was. She picked up the thumper and, crouching, moved quietly toward the top of the rise. Again, she thought she saw something—or someone—in the middle distance. None of the crew was out this way, as far as she knew. Some new animal? Best not to spook it.

  Sawyer crept up to the crest of the ridge on her belly. She pulled her hat off, then plucked a handful grass stems and matted them into her hair. Slowly, cautiously, she lifted her head until she could see over the ridge-line, and scanned the clearing beyond.

  Yes, a figure. About fifty meters away. It was hard to tell scale, but she guessed it to be standing—on two legs—about a meter and a half tall. A bit shorter than an average human, and she knew where the rest of her crew were. This was no crew member. A descendent of Tyrell’s toolmakers? Its back end was hard to make out. Was that a tail? The creature appeared greyish brown, but that didn’t look like fur covering it. Skin, or perhaps even scales. It stopped whatever it was doing and turned its head toward her. A frill or crest rose up on its head. Feathers!

  Sawyer lowered her head. Feathers? Was this creature a bird of some kind? A young terror bird? She was sure the forelimbs had been arms, with hands and fingers, not wings, and no raptor-like beak. A dinosaur? Had whoever terraformed these planets and imported Earth life done it before the Cretaceous extinction? The timing was about right, but the biologists had so far not seen signs of anything descended from things that went extinct at
or before that event.

  Maybe they just hadn’t noticed them yet.

  Sawyer slid her omni off her wrist and straightened it out. I wonder how much longer we’ll be able to use these, she thought. On Earth they were disposable, cranked out by the millions, every year incorporating a little more nanotech. There was no way they could be repaired here if they broke or wore out.

  She stretched the omni out to a third of a meter, then programmed the camera optics for telephoto. The screen was on the flip side at the opposite end. She now had a combination telescope and periscope.

  Sawyer raised her head briefly again. The creature was still in the field, apparently intent on something it held in its hands. Yes, they were hands. She ducked down and raised the peri-telescope in her place, turning it to center the image of the creature. She zoomed in. Yes, that was a crest of feathers on its brow. The skin had a fine pebbly texture. Scales? And it wore clothing.

  At that moment, the creature, the alien, looked up from what it held and turned its head to look directly at Sawyer, as though it could see her. It looked back down and suddenly the image on Sawyer’s screen blanked out. If she didn’t know better she’d swear that the alien had just jammed her omni. For that matter, Sawyer realized, she didn’t know any better. Something had interfered with the camera she’d come out here to replace. She raised her head for another look. The creature was gone.

  Damn!

  Sawyer rolled over onto her back and sat up, holding her arms around her knees. She looked at her omni, still in its periscope combination. The screen now showed a detailed image of the grass blade the lens was pointed at. She muttered, restored it to its usual configuration and slapped it onto her wrist. At least the alien didn’t permanently blind it.

  The alien. Sawyer considered that for a while. It was certainly intelligent, it had been clothed and manipulating something, a tool or instrument. It—he?—had known the moment the camera lens pointed at him. Well, that was possible. Back on Earth, gadgets to scan for and jam unwanted cameras were common. Although Sawyer was surprised that he—she?—something else?—possessed a tool that just happened to work with Earth technology. Unless he or his kind had been watching humans for a while. Sawyer suppressed a shudder at that thought. But clearly, it hadn’t wanted to be observed, or at least, not recorded.

  One thing it almost certainly wasn’t was indigenous. The stone tools Finley and Tyrell had discovered had to be tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of years old. The volcano that had buried them was long gone, and the tool makers apparently with it. The expedition had scanned all the planets in this system from orbit, run sensor sweeps and neutrino scans. If there was a civilization in this system capable of producing the technology she’d just seen demonstrated, they would have spotted it. That meant that it came from somewhere else. Sawyer picked a stalk of grass and tugged at it between her hands. The grass was strong, it didn’t break. She started to tie it in knots, reflecting her mood. Which was worse, she wondered, a planet capable of concealing its entire civilization, or another species capable of interstellar travel? And no doubt better at it than humans, considering this was our first trip out. What else are we going to find out here? And what did “worse” mean in this context, anyway?

  Sawyer drew herself up and slapped the dust and grass off her belly and the seat of her pants. She’d keep this quiet for now. She needed time to consider the implications. If the aliens—there had to be more than just one—were only observing the humans, or even just exploring the planet themselves and ignoring us, there was nothing to worry about. No, thought Sawyer after a moment’s reflection, odds are that if they’re this close to us it’s because of us, not just coincidence.

  She turned to take one more look over the ridge, but as she’d expected there was no further sign of any such creature.

  Just then her omni beeped, and Maclaren came on.

  “Okay, I’m looking at the feed for ninety-three now. Are you sure you turned it on?”

  “Yes, I—”

  “Oh, there’s the signal. Never mind. Just took a while to connect I guess. I see you up on a slope. Is that grass in your hair?”

  “Uh, might be.” Sawyer reached up to brush it out. “I was just laying here waiting for you to call back.”

  “Um, right. Anyway, the feed is good. Bring the other camera back in and I’ll take a look at it.”

  “Roger that.” Sawyer suspected that she wouldn’t find anything wrong with it. She sighed and turned back toward the landing site.

  Chapter 19: Questions

  Anderson Base

  Back at the camp, Sawyer cornered Maclaren to ask a question that had been bothering her ever since she’d realized the alien was technologically advanced.

  “Naomi, what’s the current status of stealth or active camouflage technology?”

  “What? Like cloaking? What brings that up?”

  “Oh, just a wild thought. If the Terraformers are still around, or left observation devices behind, I just wondered if that’s why we haven’t seen them.” Sawyer wanted to keep this at a hypothetical level, at least as far as everybody else was concerned.

  “Heck, they could have a full-fledged observation complex on some small asteroid in this system and we might have missed it. Eventually I think they’d show up on a scan, from infrared emission if nothing else, but we’d have to be looking for them hard if they were hiding.”

  “So, what about invisibility or sci-fi cloaking devices?”

  “If they could terraform planets sixty-five million years ago, I wouldn’t like to say anything would be impossible for them, although I’m skeptical that true invisibility is possible.”

  “Don’t we already have it on a limited scale? I thought they were saying that the real thing was maybe twenty years away.”

  “Hah, they said that about hot fusion for what, eighty to a hundred years? And it’s still big and clunky, or we’d have brought our fusion generator down with us.”

  “It was integrated with the warp modules. We might have with a redesign. But what about invisibility?”

  “Same thing. When they first started experimenting with metamaterials back at the turn of the century, things looked promising. And we do have materials that can steer radio waves down to about the microwave level around an object, invisibility in a sense at the microwave level. All the rage in missiles and combat vehicles, of course, although there are ways to get around it.”

  “But infrared or optical wavelengths?”

  “Much harder. The meta-material—at least, what I’m aware of—needs components that are smaller than the wavelengths they’re trying to screen, and that’s nanoscale for light. Atomic and molecular forces start coming into play at that scale, the atoms keep wanting to do things, move into positions you don’t want them to, if you try to make them into cloaks of invisibility. At least three-D cloaks. There is some stuff that will hide small, flat objects.”

  “And you don’t see this being overcome anytime soon?”

  “I could be wrong. Our hypothetical Terraformers might have worked it out, but to be honest I don’t see humans developing it for a long time yet, if ever. So that also rules out any hypothetical descendants of Tyrell’s toolmakers, which we haven’t seen any of anyway. My gut says full cloaking is fundamentally unsolvable, but then they said that about generating the kind of Higgs field for a warp drive with less than stellar energy inputs, and yet here we are.”

  “Okay, so we don’t have to worry about invisible Terraformers among us.”

  Maclaren gave her a quizzical look. “Were you worried about that? Are you perhaps working a bit too hard?”

  Sawyer forced a grin and shook her head. “No, just speculating. I don’t know what got me started on that.”

  “Right. Mind, there are things you can do with active camouflage that for a sin
gle observer or a fixed location will be pretty effective. Like this.” Maclaren held up her forearm to show the omni wrapped around her wrist. It was gray, about the same color as her shirt. She swiped a finger across it then tapped it, and the color changed to a tan that matched the skin on her wrist. Against her forearm, the omni had become almost invisible. “Smart-skin programmed to mimic what it’s near, like a chameleon, except I can lock the pattern. It chews up more power if I leave it active, and makes the omni bloody hard to find if I put it down.”

  “That’s pretty impressive. I didn’t know that was available.”

  “Latest gadget when we left Earth. It’s not really as good as it looks, they take shortcuts to make it easier to manufacture. It’s mainly so you can color-coordinate your omniphone with your clothing. It’s basically e-ink with a lot of built in photo-sensors wired across the thickness, like a bionic flounder.”

  “Hah.” Sawyer was struck by the image of wrapping a flatfish around her wrist. “So what if you built a suit out of that stuff?”

  “It’d be heavy and power hungry. There’s a lot more processing involved trying to scene-match across the diameter of a person’s body, so you’d have to build that in. Plus you get parallax effects and so on. At best, you’d look something like a person made of glass or plastic—see-through but distorting the image. And with the extra processing and power needed you’d be broadcasting in the microwave and infrared. Good for some things, bad for others. And again, I don’t think we’re quite there yet with the technology.”

  “Huh.” Sawyer wondered if the alien she’d seen had possessed something like that. Its head had been uncovered, but it had disappeared awfully quickly when it realized it had been spotted. She’d have to give that more thought, but later. “Well,” she said, “I guess that’s not something we have to worry about here anyway. And right now, I have more important things to do. Thanks.”

  “Oh, sure.”

  As Sawyer walked away, a rhyme from her childhood came unbidden: