“Looks like A19 is another bust,” Sparks reported.
“Right,” Cap acknowledged. “Let’s move on to A20.”
“Aye, Cap.”
Because there are so many sub-planetary objects in a star system, a simple naming scheme evolved to help spacers keep track of everything. A19 meant that this was the 19th asteroid we’d approached for a closer look. Each rock was tagged in the logs for future reference, along with its coordinates, whether we found anything of interest, and if so what it was. The mining ships use this information when commercial operations begin. The asteroids that we skipped were logged by position, so future ships would know what to watch out for, but not numbered.
Planets, of course, are simply designated by their positions relative to the sun, such as Richelieu-1, Richelieu-2, etc., but moons are a bit different. Because they’re associated with specific planets, it’s convenient to assign moons composite identifiers. For example, if the fourth planet from the sun has three moons, the third one would be called P4M3.
Sure, as the discoverers of those planets, moons, comets and asteroids, we had the right to name them, instead of merely assigning numbers. Sometimes we did give them names. However, after visiting dozens of star systems, each containing hundreds of significant objects, eventually everyone runs out of names to use and any interest in coming up with new ones. So then we go with numbers. Every once in a while one of us would see something that reminded us of a person or place or animal back home and we’d name it Elephant Rock or Ballerina or Lincoln’s Top Hat. Okay, so Lincoln wore a stovepipe hat; top hat sounded better—sue me. If we were all in a strange mood, it was just as likely to be Puppy Poopy, Dead Clown, Ice Cream Mondae, or Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious—Soupy for short. Mainly, though, we stuck with numbers. It’s easier on the brain.
Nineteen rocks down, twenty-eight to go, and those were just the ones within sensor range. By the time we left the system, the total would likely be in the hundreds. The farther we went, the more our sensors picked up. It would take us months to work our way around the belt, if our thruster fuel held out. (We were able to extend its duration by using the starflight drive to microjump from asteroid to asteroid, reserving the thruster fuel for maneuvering only.) And then we still had the thirteen moons to investigate—we’d detected two more small ones since the initial sensor sweep.
Moons are usually the last resort of an exploration team, because tesserene tends to form deep in the crust of a celestial body that has—or once had—tectonic activity. Most moons don’t qualify. Luna and Jupiter’s Ganymede and Io are unusual in that regard. Still, we always checked out the moons anyway, just to be thorough.
Tesserene had never been found on a planet, because the gravitic distortion and TB signatures tend to be masked both by the depth of the crust where the tesserene is buried, and by the planet’s magnetic field.
Asteroids, however, fall in the “sweet spot” of tesserene hunting. ‘Roids that started out as a planet consist of shattered pieces of that world. Some may be chunks of almost pure solidified nickel-iron metal from the molten core of the former planet; others are pieces of the crust. These latter types are the ones that tend to contain tesserene, as well as copper, iron, gold, emeralds and every other type of mineral mined on Earth.
Because of the asteroids’ relatively diminutive size, at least compared to the original planet, the tesserene tends to be at or near the surface of the ‘roid. This makes it possible for the tesserene to be detected—because there is no magnetic field or gravity to speak of and no thick layer of crust to mask the TB emissions. That’s why almost all of the tesserene had been found in asteroid belts, and why we always started there.
Not only is tesserene easier to locate in the asteroid belt, it’s also easier to mine. The big commercial mining ships can go clear through an asteroid if necessary. The small extractor we carried could dig less than a hundred meters into rock, but that was enough to get us near the center of most asteroids.
As a Type EXP-4 exploration ship, our cargo capacity was relatively small. Accordingly, we tried to maximize the return on the Company’s investment by concentrating on the more precious minerals, such as tesserene, plutonium, and gemstones. The extractor, refinery, and cargo bays were heavily shielded, so radiation wasn't a problem. And while tesserene and other minerals were crucially needed materials, there was always a ready market for luxury items like high-quality gems, which took up little room relative to their market value.
Still, some minerals are less valuable than others. Generally, we were better off charting the locations of those deposits, for reporting when we got home, and saving the space for more precious cargo. However, in the absence of more valuable minerals, we'd stock up on whatever we found. Missions cost the Company a small fortune whether we found anything or not. Even a ship full of boring old lead went a long way toward paying the cost of a mission. Naturally, a hold full of refined tesserene, and the coordinates to a source of tons more, was the Holy Grail of prospecting.
* * * *
After another three weeks of searching, we’d visited and mapped eighty-three asteroids. Nine had significant lodes of metal ores. We also found one with a small amount of gold and silver. It was worth extracting before we left the system, but there wasn’t enough to justify a visit by a big mining ship. And that was it for more than five weeks of exploring the belt. It was enough to pay for a goodly portion of our mission, yet hardly enough to make Saleya Intergalactic do cartwheels for joy.
This was the tedious part of exploration, though the monotony was tempered by the thrill of the hunt. We never knew whether the next asteroid might be “the big one.” It was that sense of what if? that kept us going, day after monotonous day.
Sparks and Tom spent almost every waking moment analyzing sensor readings for the telltales that might lead us to the Promised Land, while at the same time trying to filter out the red herrings. Cap stayed busy piloting. That left Guido and me to make any repairs that might be needed and perform the normal day-to-day chores of shipboard life. At least it gave us something to do to fill the time. After weeks of this, the ship was in as good a shape as it was going to get until we pulled into a repair facility back home.
* * * *
“Coming up on A109,” Cap reported, clearly bored.
“Roger. Scanning.” Sparks pored over his readouts. “This is going to take a while, Cap. Why don’t you get something to eat and put in some sack time? You look beat.”
“You’re right,” Cap said. He stretched and suppressed a yawn. “It’s always ‘hurry up and wait,’ isn’t it? I might as well be back in the military.” He headed for the main passageway, in the direction of the galley.
I called after him, “Do you want me to make you something, Cap?” I was on the bridge chatting with the others for want of anything better to do.
“Nah, just relax. I’ll fix myself something. Do we have any of that chicken left over from the other night?”
“Two or three pieces, last I checked.”
“Sounds good. ’Night all. Call me when you’re ready to move on to the next rock.”
Sparks and I responded together. “Will do.” “’Night, Cap. Have one for me.” The old joke.
* * * *
“A124. Fifth floor; ladies’ lingerie, swimsuits, garden supplies.”
“Cap, you’ve been at this wa-a-ay too long!” I said with a smile.
“Don’t I know it. Sometimes it feels like we’re going up and down a lift, jumping from floor to floor in these tiny hops and going nowhere.”
“Scanning,” Sparks interrupted. “I see strong theta-band emissions, relatively speaking. Narrowing the scan. Bingo! I have definite confirmation of tesserene ore.”
“Hallelujah, brother!” Cap exulted. “I was beginning to think there wasn’t any in this entire system. How much does it look like?”
I held my breath. Could this be The Big One?
“I estimate…almost nine tons of ore. Call it a few
dozen kilos of refined tesserene.”
I let my breath out.
“So it’s not a huge score—but, combined with the metal ores we’ve found, it’s enough to pay for the mission, and then some. It looks like we’ve earned our bonuses!” Sparks and I beamed. We heard Tom and Guido cheering through the intercom.
What Cap had left unsaid, because we all knew it, is that where there is one tesserene-laden rock, there were likely to be others. We just had to find them.
“Well, what are you waiting for, Swede? Get going on the extraction!”
“Aye, Cap!” I shouted, as I flew out the hatchway.
* * * *
Three hours later, we were nearly done setting up for the extraction. This time Tom and I were on the asteroid and Guido was manning the refinery. I’d set everything up for automatic operation before I left, so he only needed to trigger the refinery and monitor the operation until Tom and I got back onboard.
The extractor was in position and Tom was triple-checking the connections I had just double-checked—another of Cap’s precautions. I’d finished my portion of the setup, so I thought I’d kill a few minutes by looking around.
Every asteroid is unique, yet most have nothing especially interesting to hold one’s attention. Bare rock, exposed metal, a scattering of dust and pebbles from rock pulverized by impacts, that sort of thing. I let my eyes wander to a relatively flat expanse twenty meters from where I was standing. Something glittering in the dust caught my attention.
“Be right back, Tom,” I said as I pulled myself along a guide wire. The asteroid’s gravity was virtually nil, so we couldn’t walk or run for fear of launching ourselves into space. For this reason, we typically used anchored tethers, a network of guide wires, and magnetic boots (useful on asteroids with a heavy iron content) while working around a mining site. Still, it’s annoying and time-consuming, as well as embarrassing, to have to keep reeling oneself in from low orbit.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m just going to check something out over there,” I said, pointing.
“Okay. Don’t get lost,” he snickered.
“Right.” I bent over to pick up the shiny pebble—some sort of quartz, it looked like—then I froze. “Tom?”
“Yeah, Swede.”
“Have you been over here since we landed?”
“No, why?”
“Because there’s a bootprint here, and it isn’t mine.”
“What?” Tom turned his head in my direction.
“I’m serious. Get over here and take a look!”
“That’s impossible. No one from Earth has been to this system before.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“So it can’t be a boot print.”
“I never said it was human. Look for yourself.”
Tom arrived within seconds.
It couldn’t have been anything else but a boot print. The imprint was roughly human in shape, yet at least a third smaller than mine, with wavy ridges clearly defined in the dust. If that wasn’t convincing enough, there was a second, less clear boot print a half-meter in front of the first.
“Cap,” Tom radioed, “I think you’d better get down here.”
* * * *
“This is creepy, Cap,” Guido said, with a shudder. “There may be someone else out here watching us.”
We’d all gathered in the Commons to discuss what to do about our discovery. While we chatted, the refinery continued to process the ore the extractor was sending it from the asteroid.
“Oh, come on. What are the odds of that?” Sparks clearly wasn’t buying the idea. “If they’re human, they most likely returned home by now. Besides, no other outfit has ever filed a mission plan for this system.”
“And what if they’re not human? They could be hiding around the next asteroid, just waiting to pounce.” Guido was waving his arms, as he tends to do when he gets excited.
“Aliens? Come on. No one’s ever found any proof that other intelligent life exists besides mankind.”
“True,” I said, “but with billions of stars in our galaxy alone, the odds of Earth being the only home of intelligent life seem ridiculously small.”
“Maybe so,” Sparks countered, “but the galaxy is huge. What are the odds of alien life existing near enough for us to run into?”
I shrugged. “Maybe this is the proof everyone’s been looking for.”
Sparks shook his head. “It’s more likely a human boot print from some earlier mission, Swede.”
“But no one has ever been out here before.”
“That we know of. What about all of those ‘lost’ missions?”
“None of them went out this way.”
“That we know of. Maybe the reason they never came home was that their drives malfunctioned and sent them off in random directions,” Sparks argued. “If the drives were that messed up, they might have ended up anywhere.”
“Maybe, but come on—how likely is it that they ended up here?” I asked.
“A whole lot more likely than us running into aliens, I’d say.”
“What about the size of the boot print?” Tom chimed in. “It’s too small to be human.”
“Not necessarily,” countered Sparks. “A small man, or a woman, might have a foot that small.”
“I…don’t think so,” I said. “Not that small. It looks more like a child’s footprint. Last I checked, we weren’t sending kids out on prospecting missions.”
“This isn’t getting us anywhere,” Cap pointed out. “The reason for this meeting is to decide what we’re going to do about it. Do we head home to report this find, or do we continue the mission and report it when we’re done?”
“Report what,” Sparks asked, “a boot print? That’s hardly proof of alien life. I think we’d be wasting our time for nothing. If it turns out to be a human print, we’ll be a laughingstock. On the other hand, if anyone does believe us, there’ll be scientists swarming all over this system and we’ll never be able to mine anything for fear of destroying any ‘alien artifacts’ that might be out here. Either way we’re screwed. I say we keep going.”
“He’s got a point, Cap,” Guido said. “I’m not happy about the possibility of there being aliens around here, but let’s not blow our bonuses by coming home with nearly empty holds. We found some tesserene; there might be a lot more out here to find. If it’s really an alien boot print, it could have been here undisturbed for thousands of years. A few more weeks won’t matter. We’ve got everything recorded by helmet cam. The scientists back home can study the boot prints all they want when we get back.”
We all looked around at one another and nodded.
“So, we’re agreed,” Cap confirmed. “We finish the mission first and then report the boot print.” More nods.
“Right, then. I agree it’s unlikely anyone is out here waiting to ambush us, but let’s play it safe and keep an eye out for anything unusual—just in case.
“We’ve locked up fame. Now, let’s find some more tesserene and go home to fortune as well.”
CHAPTER 10
History of Space Exploration: Starflight Drive—A small, unmanned ship equipped with the first prototype starflight drive was launched with great fanfare fromODF NAUTILUS on 23 January 2091. It promptly vanished, never to be seen again. Although ostensibly a failure, the test proved that folds could be created and used to move matter. The scientists returned to the drawing board and corrected the problems revealed by the prototype.
The second test, on 19 October 2091, was an unqualified success, as were the manned flights that followed. Humanity was on the verge of reaching the stars at last. Distances that would have taken decades to traverse by conventional torch drive could now be traveled in days.
The final piece of the puzzle fell into place in 2093 with the invention of theGRAVITIC FIELD GENERATORby future Nobel LaureateJESSUP LYRNOS. The GFG—which evolved fromWarp Field Theory, a new branch of physics developed for the starflight drive—created locali
zed gravity wells—what the media popularly, but incorrectly, called “artificial gravity.” Finally, travelers could live and work in space for extended periods in relative comfort, without having to worry about the deleterious effects of weightlessness.
FARWALKER—the first production ship equipped with both starflight drive and GFG—rolled off the assembly line in 2096.
— Excerpt from Encyclopedia Solaris, 2194
* * * *
Asteroid A159. After the excitement of the previous week, we were all keyed up. At first, we expected to run into aliens waving—or shooting—at us on every rock. Failing that, perhaps the wreckage of the Canberra Express, the Jupiter 2, or another of the fourteen ships lost in the depths of space. However, when ‘roid after ‘roid turned up nothing, our tension eased and life went back to its normal humdrum pace. A159 was notable in that we found a nice deposit of beryl ore. Beryl meant metallic beryllium and possibly emeralds. That possibility was what made it worth going out of our way for. Beryllium itself is a valuable commodity, yet gram for gram, emeralds are thousands of times more precious. If we could extract a few thousand carats of high-quality gemstones, they would be worth more than an entire storage hold full of beryllium—but naturally we’d keep both. Whatever came out of the refinery as a finished product was worth bringing back with us. The only way we’d dump a hold full of beryllium was if we found an equal amount of tesserene, and that wasn’t bloody likely!
It was Sparks and Cap’s turn on the surface, and they were setting up the gear. Their helmet cams gave us a great view of what they were doing and what they saw—nothing remarkable, just some grayish-brown rock and the extractor. There was still another hour or so to go before they’d be ready to begin extraction. Guido was at the helm, not doing much of anything, to be honest. I was working Sparks’ CSO position, mainly monitoring EVA communications, but also keeping an eye on the sensors. Tom was at the refinery controls, awaiting word from Cap that setup was complete.
The Imperative Chronicles, Books One and Two: The Mars Imperative & The Tesserene Imperative Page 43
