by Ralph Kern
“Ms. Langdon—” I tried to say.
“Mrs. Langdon! And I have heard something very disturbing from the ship that’s assigned to watch over the gates. Apparently you have dispatched a warship to hover there.”
“It’s not a warship—” I tried to say.
“Does it not have guns? Does it not have missiles? In my book, that makes it a goddamn warship!”
“Mrs. Langdon, allow me to interject a moment and start from the start,” I finally managed to say.
Langdon carried on glaring at me with steely grey eyes and a hard line to her clenched jaw. Suddenly, she gave a sigh. It was like the anger was deflating out of her. She leaned back in her creaking faux-leather office chair and opened her hands. “Go on, then. Dazzle me.”
I paused for a moment, gazing out of the window at the tiny village square beyond. Talk about rustic; I could even see a damn goat chewing on the grass out there. “A lot of this you’re going to find out on the next scheduled update from Sol.” I leaned forward. “But not all. I am going to tell you things that haven’t even been released on the news nets back home yet—I mean by the time we left, that is.
“But first, Twilight Control showed Erebus in system, several AU out. She briefly dropped out of A-drive, and less than an hour later, about the shortest time her A-drive could cycle, she was gone again. Didn’t she speak to you at all? Launch any landers? Records show that she didn’t, but I want to be sure...”
“No, they did not,” Langdon said. “They were frankly even more discourteous than Gagarin has been. Not a single transmission nor a single lander launch.”
I exchange a glance with Sihota. “You’re right; that is rude.”
“Very,” Langdon glared at me.
“And no one tried to communicate with Erebus?”
“Of course we did. When an unscheduled starship appears in system, we aren’t going to just sit here and do nothing.”
“But no response?”
“Nothing. Now, I’ve answered enough of your questions. Are you going to tell me just what the hell is going on?”
I took a deep breath and told her the story, starting with Magellan through to Io and Concorde before finishing with Frain’s run through the gate. The only thing I left out was the alien artifact. Langdon’s face moved from anger to shock to fear in equal measures. She was still not a happy woman, but she was beginning to understand our reticence.
“So this Xander Frain or whoever he—”
“We don’t know who he actually is. As disrespectful as it is to the real Frain, we need to call him something, and that’s as good a name as any at the moment.”
“Regardless,” she waved dismissively before continuing, “this Frain and Sonia Drayton, why did they destroy Io? And more importantly to me, what do they want with us?”
“We don’t know,” Sihota said from where he was seated cross-legged, the picture of calm. Despite the fact we had kept the artifact on the down low, it was an honest answer. “Maybe they came here for someone or maybe something. Either way, it’s not a logical place for them to hide. There must be something that has brought them here.”
“No, it’s not.” Langdon stood up and walked to the window. She appeared to be regarding the village beyond before giving a deep sigh and turning back to us. “A logical place to hide, that is. There are five thousand people in this system, only two thousand of them involved with the actual research that goes on here. The rest are families and support services. Take me, for example. I’m just a former head teacher who found a job helping to run this village. My husband is the one who is actually the reason we’re here. Bottom line—we are a small community and not one overly given to conflict. Yes, we may all have been sponsored by various corporations, but their machinations are far from here.”
“Mrs. Langdon, I have access to the public records, but perhaps you can tell us what research actually goes on here?” I asked. The Hypernet connection here was slow. For someone who was used to Sol’s superfast universal link connections, it was like being hamstrung, and I was running out of patience running the kind of casual queries I could have done quickly at home.
“Stellar research,” she said. “There are two stars in this system: one is the picture of health, one is a corpse. There is a lot of science that can be done in relation to that, but nothing that can be weaponized or used to obtain any kind of financial advantage in the short term. Everything here is about deep-future research. That’s why there is so little investment in the place. No one wants to bother with that kind of thing beyond the absolute minimum.”
“Why did Sirius B die?” I asked, the word weaponized prompting a thought.
“The star was destined to upon formation. There is nothing nefarious in that, if that’s what you’re thinking. There are many examples out there of similar stars.” She gestured vaguely upward. “It will continue shining for a billion years yet. In fact, my husband is more interested in one of its other properties for his research: the fact that it’s one of the densest objects in local space. Originally it was around five times the mass of our sun. While it has shed a lot of that matter, it’s still managed to pack itself into an object the size of Earth. To say it’s massive is an understatement. He’s conducting research into this, something called gravitational red shift.”
“And what is…never mind.” I filed it away. I didn’t think I was onto any kind of winner with that line of questioning, and frankly, it would have probably given me a headache. “So have you found anything out here that’s out of the ordinary?”
“What do you mean by out of the ordinary, Mr. Trent? We are in a star system far from home; not much is ordinary here.”
“I mean anything not from Sol, if you follow.”
“Alien, you mean?” She laughed like she couldn’t believe I’d asked such a stupid question. At least she wasn’t hopping mad anymore. “Please tell me you’re not one of those damn Dogonites or whatever they call themselves.”
“I don’t think so,” I said hesitantly, glancing at Sihota, who just shrugged. “And just who, or what, is a Dogonite?”
“Some kind of cult. They’re mostly screened out prior to coming here, but the odd one slips through. And by odd, I mean very odd.” She pursed her lips in distaste. “They believe that aliens from Sirius C visited an African tribe, the Dogons, thousands of years ago and told them they had come from here.”
“I didn’t think there was a Sirius C.” All the Sirius stars were starting to get jumbled up for me. I was used to one star in the middle of a star system, where it damn well should be.
“No, there’s not. Don’t get me wrong; we don’t preclude the possibility there might be a brown dwarf out there somewhere that has somehow managed to escape detection. They’re still discovering Pluto-sized planetoids around Sol, after all. But nothing that would be or has ever been home to any of these Dogons. Anyway, when these cultists manage to sneak in, they want to start looking for it.”
“And I’m guessing they don’t exactly get a warm reception.”
“No, they don’t. Anyway, in relation to your question about anyone finding anything alien? No. There are always rumors, of course, but never anything substantiated.”
“Any particularly sticky rumors? Ones that just won’t go away?”
“Oh, please.” The feisty lady rolled her eyes. She was getting on my nerves now with her constant attitude. “What do you want to hear? People who go EVA claim to see strange lights every now and again. They probably messed up the air mixes for their spacesuits.
“A probe jockey claims to have come across a floating chunk of gold but could never find it again. Probably a spectrometer malfunction. One of our support pilots began harping on about some alien pagoda he’d found on an asteroid a few years ago. Probably dodgy hooch. None of it is particularly compelling or convincing stuff.”
“Yes, you’re right.” I managed not to change my facial expression. “Well, Mrs. Langdon, we need to report back to our ship. I can only apolo
gize for our reticence in speaking to you frankly when we first arrived. As you can probably imagine, we were hoping to get this all done with the minimum of fuss, and we still hope to.”
“One thing we agree on, but I’m sure you will appreciate that we don’t do secrets here. Everything we’ve discussed, I will be putting into the public sphere.”
“Mrs. Langdon,” I stood and smiled at her, “I would expect nothing less.”
CHAPTER 42
TWILIGHT GARDEN
“I know you’re the police man here, but I just don’t see the value in not bringing her in on it,” Sihota said, sipping a pint of whatever the hell the bartender had given us.
“There are a couple of reasons. One: she would think we were just as mad as those Dogonites or whatever. Two: we gain nothing by doing that when she doesn’t even believe it.”
We were nestled into an alcove of the pub. It was quite fetchingly laid out. Someone had gone to a lot of effort to make it look like something you would find in any village in England. Even the gravity on Twilight Garden wasn’t too far off from Earth’s.
“It just strikes me that we could have cut through a lot of chaff.”
“Let’s see what we can open-source before we start giving the game away.” I took a pull of my own pint and then winced. I’d never liked real ales, and this one tasted like it had been fermented in a sewer. Still, needs must…
I brought up some old newsfeeds on my HUD, playing around with various search queries about pilots and pagodas. Twilight Garden’s Hypernet had more on it than I might have expected in such an isolated place, but the slow system meant I still had a lot of digging to do before I found an old forum dated nearly forty years ago. It seemed pilots on long-range missions, where they were subject to the limitations of light speed communication, had still preferred to use the old text format. So, like in Sol, a lot of rubbish filled the local Hypernet.
“Here—got something.” I opened up a link to Sihota and sent it across to him.
Lonerider, 21:34, 20th June—Found something out past Akarga, guys. Something big. Watch this space.
Flyingmissy, 23:40, 20th June—What? One of those gold asteroids you were chattering about?
Lonerider, 01:03, 21st June—LOL, you mock me. This is finally my ticket to the big time, baby. I’ll be slurping champagne off the bodies of naked supermodels with what I’ll earn from this.
I must admit, I liked this fellow’s ambition.
Flyingmissy, 02:04, 21st June—So come on, share. What do you have?
Wannaberockstar, 02:12, 21st June—He’s got jack shit!!! LR is always talking about the next big thing.
Lonerider, 02:47, 21st June—I’m going to have to get back to you guys. Gonna be going EVA shortly.
“And that’s it?” Sihota frowned.
“That’s it,” I said.
“I must say, Layton, it’s very thin.”
“Maybe so, but bear in mind that this fellow posted prodigiously before this. I mean, you couldn’t shut him up.” I scrolled through his previous and rather boring posts. They covered every topic from the latest VRs to moaning about his salary.
“Well, that’s not uncommon for pilots and crew far out in a system. It’s not as if they can easily have a two-way chat with someone. A lot of the pilots here are shipping around scientists and servicing satellites and probes light-minutes or -hours away from the nearest company. They don’t have A-drives, so they’re out for weeks at a time on their own with not a lot to do.
“But after this conversation thread, our friend Lonerider here hasn’t had a single post.”
“Now, that is a bit more interesting.” Sihota took a sip on his beer, wincing at the taste. “Nothing at all?”
“Nope,” I said, feeling a little self-satisfied.
“Got an ID on Lonerider?”
“No.” I had checked. The forum profiles were all anonymized. A tech forensic expert (or hacker, for that matter) could get his personal details, but that was beyond my skills. However…“The general thrust of conversation suggests he was actually on a flight at this time, yes?”
“Yes. And we have a date and time stamp and a rough location. There should be records,” Sihota nodded.
“See? You would make a better cop than I would make a pilot.” I grinned at my new apprentice. “Shall we pop over to Twilight Control? See if we can dig anything up? You might have to be the one to ask the questions; you know all the right lingo, after all.”
***
“Give them what they’re after,” Mrs. Langdon said in her typical pissed-off manner.
“Er, sure,” the harassed-looking controller said. “Flight records from February 2156. That’s a hell of a long time ago.”
“Indeed it is. I presume that you didn’t have deep-space tracking back then either?” Sihota said.
“No, our records go off of filed flight plans and then are updated with the actual flight data when the ship does an upload during flight and upon its return. It’s not the most accurate when on mission, but most pilots don’t deviate too much from their flight plans. After all, they don’t want to be lost out there if something goes wrong.”
“Can you pull the data for us?”
“Okay, here we go.”
A list of five missions appeared on the old-fashioned display in the controller’s small office. Each entry contained an outline of what the pilots were doing out there. Mostly, as Langdon had said, it was things like servicing science platforms or shipping around scientists.
“Are any of those going out beyond Akarga?” Sihota squinted at the screen.
“No, none of them are over that way,” the controller answered. “That’s a fair way out.”
“Interesting. We have some information suggesting some kind of flight out there around that time,” I said.
“You can see for yourself.” The controller gave a helpless wave of his hands. “None of them are.”
“Could this information be wrong?” I asked.
“No. Pilots’ lives depend on this information. We’re very accurate with it, even back then.”
Maybe the forum was just the work of some mischievous arsehole. Lord knows, the Hypernet was awash with them back home, and I could see no reason to suspect any differently out here.
“Just another thing I want to try. Can you show the launch records and cross-reference them with landings? That should show just what was up in space at that time,” Sihota said. Now that’s why I wanted him in on this.
“Give me a moment. I’ll have to compile the lists,” the controller said.
“Take your time,” Sihota said and wandered over to the water cooler in the corner. He drew some cups, offering them around.
“Got it. Now, that is interesting,” the controller said thoughtfully.
“We have six ships in the air, not counting the three deep-system science cutters that were in Sirius at the time. The Longhorn was out in the big black but isn’t showing a flight record. Someone would have been in serious trouble had this omission been discovered.”
“What type of ship was the Longhorn?” Sihota asked.
“She’s a Cuttlefish-class, single-crewed, long-range service tender. Her job was to refit or replace any science platforms. She’s still in service, actually. They built those old Cuttlefish to last.”
“So if she’s a service tender, I’m guessing she was servicing something,” Sihota mused. “Pull the maintenance schedules of anything you have that, at the time, was out past Akarga.”
“Checking.” He tapped away at the old-fashioned console in front of him—it actually had physical buttons. I tried not to shake my head. “There were three science and observation platforms out there in need of minor repair or servicing around that time. Chances are they would have done them in one flight rather than send three separate sorties out. Just a second.” This fellow was really getting into the groove, doing the lateral thinking for us. “Yeah, the schedules are all reset at around the same time. Whatever repairs wer
e undertaken were done on that one flight.”
So someone had redacted the data on the flight of the Longhorn—and pretty badly. It stank of an amateur flushing the data rather than a pro doing a proper whitewash. Whoever had done it had left verifiable trails.
“So who was flying the Longhorn then?” I asked.
“Checking,” the controller said. “A Jerry Mitchell.”
“I don’t suppose we’re lucky enough that he’s still around?”
“No, he rotated back to Earth in November of that year. That was actually before his contract was up. Most pilots do five-year stints or so. He seems to have cut his short at four years.”
All totaled, a four-year stint here translated into twenty years away from friends and family. “So I’m guessing most of the pilots are Skippers?”
“Yeah, and the tech staff. There’s no reason on record for Jerry skipping. Could be anything—family problems, financial worries, or maybe he just was one of those that wanted to see the future,” the controller said with a shrug.
“Fair enough. What about any of his peers? Any of them still around?”
“Checking.” I couldn’t help but roll my eyes at the turn of phrase the controller used at every given opportunity. “Yes, there’s one who decided to stay, Ronnie Heaton. Another deep-system tender pilot.”
“Would they have known each other?”
“Probably. The flying fraternity was even smaller back then than it is now. Some of them even came through on the original Sirius expedition and stayed behind. The pilots were and still are pretty tight.”
“Just one more thing,” Sihota said. “You say ships do a data dump at the end of the flight? Can you access the Longhorn’s flight recorder?”
“Checking,” the controller said, prompting me to grind my teeth. “Dammit, this is such bad practice!”
“What is?” Sihota said as he sipped on his water.
