Alpha Centauri: Sawyer's World (T-Space: Alpha Centauri Book 2)
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While I was walking up the stair.
I met a man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today,
I wish that man would go away.
Or at least, she thought, tell us what he wants.
∞ ∞ ∞
Later that afternoon, Naomi Maclaren and Pavel Krysansky were catching a late lunch, alone in the mess area.
“How is your engineering going, Naomi?” the doctor asked. “You probably don’t have as much to keep you busy as the research scientists. Kind of like me.”
“Oh, I’m busy enough. Routine maintenance on the systems, monitoring the comms, that sort thing. And people are always coming up with things they’re hoping I can have the fabber make for them.”
“So, you’re not bored?”
“Why would you ask that?”
“No reason. I thought perhaps you were a little down a while back. You do seem to take more interest in things now.”
Maclaren had to admit the truth to that, both parts. “Probably just thinking about some engineering problem or other. No worries.” On the other hand . . . maybe she shouldn’t bring it up, but Krysansky was their medical doctor. “By the way, have you noticed anything, um, odd about Sawyer lately?” she asked.
“Odd? What do you mean? If it is medical, that would be between her and me.”
“Just wondering if she was particularly stressed out lately. We rely on her.”
Krysansky nodded. “I am sure she is stressed about the mission. The rest of us have other work to do, her job is to worry about keeping it all together. But I think it is nothing she cannot handle.” Krysansky looked at her curiously. “Why are you asking this?”
“You’re right, that could be part of it.” Maclaren paused, wondering if she should continue. Yeah, probably nothing, but it was a data point. “Earlier today she asked me some odd questions about invisibility, and whether I thought the Terraformers could still be around, cloaked, watching us.”
“She said that?”
Maclaren thought for a moment and shook her head. “No. Not exactly. She did ask about invisibility tech, then made some comment about not worrying about the Terraformers still being here and observing us. She said she was just speculating.”
“So do you? Think that Terraformers could still be around, I mean.”
Maclaren hadn’t really thought about it from that angle. In her discussion with the captain, Sawyer had been thinking about the technology. “No. Not after sixty-five million years. Why wait around that long just to see what happens when travellers from a neighboring star discover you’ve duplicated their ecosystems here? That’s an awful long time to wait for the payoff of a joke.”
“That is what you think this is?” he said, gesturing around them. “A joke?” It was difficult to read Krysansky’s expression. He didn’t seem annoyed, nor did he seem particularly amused.
“That’s what I’m going with,” Maclaren said, not sure that she meant it, “because frankly anything else scares the crap out of me. My only consolation is that, from what I’ve heard, most species only last a few million years before going extinct. I’m hoping the Terraformers are long gone.”
Krysansky let out a muffled snort, as if stifling a comment.
“What?”
“Sharks and alligators and coelacanths.”
“Oh my.” Maclaren deadpanned that, she’d been half expecting it. “So what do you think about the Terraformers?” she turned the question back on him.
“Me? I try not to. I find it relaxing not to worry about things I cannot affect. Certainly Terraformers fall into this category.”
“You know, in a few hundred years, we could have the technology to do what the Terraformers did. I think the planetologists and biologists are getting a good handle on the what, the how is just a matter of engineering and enough energy.”
“Well, you are the expert on that. I am more skeptical. But that isn’t really the point, Naomi. The Terraformers did it sixty or seventy million years ago. If they didn’t go extinct, what are they capable of now?”
Maclaren thought about the implications of that. Then she remembered something about classifying civilizations by their technology level and how much energy they could control. “One thing they’re not,” she said, “is a Kardashev Type III civilization.” She looked at Krysansky. “You know the Kardashev Scale?”
“Da, I am aware of it. Not all the details though.”
“Good enough. With a Type III, we would see evidence of that all over the sky, they would dominate the galaxy, controlling all its energy. They could be a Type II, harnessing all the energy of a star. Maybe they gave up terraforming after they figured out how to build a Dyson Sphere. Maybe the terraforming was a practice run.”
“So. Have we seen Dyson Spheres?”
“Maybe. They would show up as cool dim stars, hard to see. Nothing we could positively identify as one, although I will grant you that we almost certainly haven’t seen any within a hundred parsecs of here. If this was a practice run, why here?” Naomi shrugged. “Enough speculation. If I think about this too much, I’ll start seeing invisible men.” She smiled at the thought, then rose from the table and took her plate. “I have work to do. Nice chatting with you, doc.”
“And with you, Naomi.”
∞ ∞ ∞
“So Doctor Singh,” Sawyer began, “now that you’ve had chance to look at all the local flora, what’s the final verdict? All Earth-descended?”
“Well, again without a DNA sequencer, or some of the other high tech gear we don’t have, I can’t prove anything,” the botanist said. “I will say that so far after all the plants, animals and bacteria we’ve looked at, there’s nothing we can point to and say, ‘this is alien’. Just like Kakuloa, except for the day and year length, this could be a long-lost continent on Earth. The gravity is even closer than Kakuloa's.”
Sawyer might have had a reservation about the lack of something that could be pointed to and called alien, but that surely wasn’t anything that had grown up here. Then she had another thought and cringed. What if the alien came from yet another Terraformed planet? Could it, she, be descended from Earth life too? Dinosaurs, perhaps?
“Something wrong, Elizabeth?” Singh had noticed her brief pained expression.
“No,” she said, patting her abdomen. “Just something that didn’t digest well, I think. Or cramps. Maybe my contraceptive implant is wearing off. You?”
“No, not at all. Surely it is too soon.”
“You’re right. Whatever.”
“Are you eating the local food yet? It hasn’t bothered anyone else, but maybe you’re sensitive to something the rest of us aren’t?”
Sawyer shook her head and waved away her concern. “No, Jennifer, I don’t think it’s that. It’s gone now, don’t worry about it. You were saying about the lifeforms?”
“All are descended from ancient Earth stock, as far as we can tell. Same anatomical features on the mammals, the grasses, and so on.”
“Well, that confirms what we expected. Useful information.”
“So what do we do now?”
“Essentially, we wait for pickup. Since we have no idea how that will be, we’d best focus on preparing for a long stay.”
“There’s been enough time for Heinlein to get back to Earth and return here, if not to actually pick us up then at least to give us an ETA for that. Any thoughts on why we haven’t heard?”
Sawyer shook her head. “Oh, plenty of thoughts, but no way of knowing which might be correct. They haven’t had much more than a month back at Earth, they may still be in quarantine. I’m sure things are also pretty hectic with the news of what we’ve found, and the welcome-back ceremonies. It will take a while to overhaul the Heinlein and re-provision it for the return. That’s if they even figure it’s worth a
return just so they can radio us when to expect pickup. They might wait until there’s a refueling pod ready to bring with them.”
“Yes,” Singh said, hesitating a little. “I suppose you’re right.”
“Sure, not to worry.” Sawyer wondered if Singh was having second thoughts about her decision to stay, and wondered how many others might be having similar thoughts. Not that there was anything any of them could do about it now. “But we ought to be prepared just in case.”
“Yes,” Singh said, straightening up. She seemed to recognize the futility of wishing otherwise. “Of course you are right about that. In any case, when Earth decides to send settlers here—”
“Settlers?”
“Doctor Darwin made a good case for it back on Kakuloa. If and when Earth starts building starships in quantity, we are only two weeks away. Early European settlers of the Americas put up with worse. Isn’t that why you wanted to land here in the first place?”
That had been part of Sawyer’s idea, but she didn’t think it had been that transparent. “I wasn’t planning for us to be the settlers, if that’s what you mean. Just get Earth thinking in that direction.”
“Of course. Regardless, it would be helpful to have begun work on what local plants might make good food crops. Bringing them from Earth could be bad.”
“Bad? Exotic species running wild, that sort of thing?”
“Yes, that, and it might take them a while to adapt to the local day and year length.”
“Genetic engineering? Once they bring the equipment.”
“Yes, but it would as easy to modify local crops for better yield as to modify Earth crops to a twenty-six hour day and a much longer year. We have been doing the former the old fashioned way since agriculture began. I suppose my gardens are already a start on that. It would help prepare us if we do have a long stay.”
Sawyer grinned. Singh didn’t seem too worried by the possibility. “That sounds like a good idea. Let me know if you need anything.”
“Of course.”
Chapter 20: Status Report, Week Fourteen
Status Report, Week 14
“This is Sawyer of the Anderson mission, Alpha Centauri, planet Able. Status update.
“Not a lot to report in terms of new exploration results. We have been concentrating on building out camp infrastructure around the landing site. That’s slow going, we’re working with hand tools to cut and trim trees for lumber. Singh has several fields fenced off now. Not that the fences do much, there are too many gaps to keep out small animals, and larger ones, like the local deer equivalents that might eat the crops, have become more wary of approaching humans. The girannos would barely notice the fences, but they’re not interested in our puny crops and rarely come within twenty kilometers of here anyway.
“We have had a few random and transient failures of our electronics. That seems limited to the observation cameras. Maclaren suspects a possible design flaw or manufacturing problem. On a related note, I observed an unusual phenomenon related to one of the camera outages. I won’t go into detail here because I have no supporting evidence, but I’ll note it in the mission logs that we’ll bring with us when picked up.
“Regarding that last, some team members seem to be becoming increasingly restless at the delay in a return mission from Earth. It has been over three months now. Nobody has said anything specific, but I suspect there is a growing feeling that we have been abandoned. I’m sure that isn’t the case, most likely it is just a matter of final completion and inspection of the additional gear, like the refueling module and a backup lander, that is taking longer than expected.
“The biology team has identified several local plants and animals that are edible with minimal special processing, mostly just cooking, so supplies aren’t an issue. Doctor Krysansky has expressed a concern about the possibility of vitamin or micronutrient deficiencies, but we seem to have over a year’s supply on hand—I suspect somebody slipped a decimal place in the original requisition—that won’t be a problem. Anyway, assays of what we’re eating show adequate vitamin C concentrations. Nobody’s going to get scurvy.
“There’s still exploration to do. We have geological sensing gear we haven’t had an opportunity to deploy yet. Maybe we’ll have something more interesting for the next report.
“Sawyer report ends, Anderson out.”
Part III
Chapter 21: They’re Not Coming
Anderson Base, Sawyer’s office
“It’s been nearly four months, Sawyer. They’re not coming,” Naomi Maclaren said, the frustration in her voice rising to the point of anger as she paced restlessly.
Sawyer had been expecting something like this. She didn’t know who’d come out and say it first, but tensions had been running high of late. Cabin fever, and the stress of not knowing when they might be contacted for return, were taking their toll. “They could show up tomorrow. Why are you jumping to conclusions? Besides, it took over a year to put this mission together. Give them time.”
“That was from almost scratch—”
“And amazingly fast at that,” she said. “The command ships were custom, and the landers were highly modified—”
“From commercial space transports,” Maclaren said. “They pulled ours off the assembly line, they could refit a standard SSTO to take a warp donut, collar, whatever you want to call it—”
“IPM, Interstellar Propulsion Module.” That was another sign of Maclaren’s frustration. She knew all the terms, but she usually went with the most irreverent.
“Right, that. They could fit one to a near-standard SSTO in less than a month, surely.”
“It’s more complicated than that. And you’re assuming they have the module just lying around.”
“What about the one that went back with the Chandrasekhar? For that matter, why not just send Chandra back?”
“A historic artifact? And one we stripped pretty thoroughly to get off Kakuloa with a double passenger load besides. But what if they did, then what? We still need a propellant module to get off this planet.” This wasn’t going the way Sawyer wanted. Getting into an argument wouldn’t help, and pulling rank over something like this would be asking for even more trouble down the road.
Maclaren thumped her fist on the desk, agitated. “Well, yeah. How long does it take to put that together? There were spares.”
“For all we know the spares ended up in the Smithsonian as soon as we left. But there weren’t any complete units; it takes lead time to put something like that together. The reactors were custom.”
“Custom? Crikey, didn’t that kind of thinking go out decades ago? What was wrong with an off the shelf design—and for that matter why couldn’t they use that for the next one?”
Sawyer took a breath and let it out slowly. Maclaren of all people would know the answer to that, she was an engineer. This was not going well. “You know as well as I do that anything off the shelf is designed for a standard operating environment and easily serviceable or replaceable conditions. It’d be a shame to get all the way out here and find that the reactor that’s going to process propellant to get you off planet won’t work quite right because the air density and composition doesn’t cool it properly, or some such problem.”
“Yeah, but they know the conditions now, they could modify a commercial reactor.”
“And maybe that’s what they’re doing. What do you want me to tell you?” Sawyer took another deep breath and lowered her voice. “Okay, they’re overdue. You want to call and complain?”
“Shit. They could at least have sent the Heinlein back to tell us what’s going on. Or even a Nessus probe, with a programmed message.” Nessus had been the robotic probe, fission-powered with a slower warp drive, that had first surveyed the Alpha Centauri system and returned with the surprising news that it held two life-bearing planets.
“But they wouldn’t just leave us here.”
“No. At least, I would hope not, but you knew there was a chance of that when you volunteered to stay behind. Sooner or later they will be back—unless they collectively do something even more stupid than the Unholy War, in which case we’re better off here—but we don’t know when sooner or later might be. Right now, I’ll admit that it looks like it’s going to be later. I know that’s not what you want to hear, but it just means we need to dig in and get comfortable, not give up.”
“Yeah, I know that,” Maclaren said, her outburst subsiding. She slumped down into the chair across the desk from Sawyer. “I’m just getting bloody bored with this place. I mean, everybody is bright and all, but there’s nobody to talk engineering with. I even miss the bloody internet. Worse, I’m even starting to miss internet trolls.”
“Wow, that bad?” Sawyer saw her point. Maclaren was a technophile, and while she was sociable enough to get along with a ship crew for a while, it would be a little different when much of the rest of the crew were also tech types, and they were focusing on keeping the systems running smoothly. That gave Sawyer an idea.
“How’s your flying?”
“What?”
“We’re all rated to fly the electroplane, but you weren’t on Kakuloa, and I don’t think you’ve done much here, have you?”
“Hardly any as pilot, more in the right seat, but only locally. What has that got to do with anything?”
“I’m wondering if a change of scenery would help. I’ve been wanting to get some magnetotelluric surveys done, this area was volcanic in the past and I’m curious about hot spots, among the other things such a survey could tell us. It would mean travelling a fair distance away from the camp, likely an overnight trip. Interested?”