Explorations: First Contact

by Isaac Hooke

  “I’ve got Alvin recalled,” Rice called.

  “Launch,” I said.

  The main door began to slide open, revealing the horizon of the world beyond.

  “Taking us out,” Tyler murmured. On the display, the open hangar doors approached our perspective. I glanced at the feed from the sphere, checking that Ranger was clearing correctly.

  The sleek Ranger emerged from the transit sphere, her arrowhead prow, the long shaft of her main body and finally the oversized boxes of her engines.

  I switched my attention back to the main screen. We angled over, the engines burning to bring us into a high equatorial orbit. Slowly, we crept into position, the ring system extending like a vast road in front us.

  “Leila.” I keyed my console. “What are you making of the ring?”

  “Sensor analysis is suggesting the area we’re sampling is made up of around 80% silicates. There’s a fair amount of ice as well, but—”

  “Silicates, you say?” I knew my tone was confused.

  “Yeah.” Leila’s voice was contemplative. “This is nothing like Saturn’s rings. They’re around 99.9% water ice, whereas this? This is mostly just super-fine sand.”

  I scratched my nose, pondering it. Whatever had made up the rings was clearly a different mechanism to those of Sol’s gas giants. “Could we be looking at a disintegrated moon?” Even as I asked the question, I knew it was likely wrong.

  “I’d expect a hell of a lot more metal. And,” her voice trailed off. On the display, icon boxes appeared, regularly spaced along the visible portion of the ring. In the center of each box, a small dark speck could be seen. “We’re getting the shepherd moons in for the ring now.”

  Shepherd moons for ring systems weren’t unusual. In fact, every ring system in Sol tended to have them. What was unusual was the fact that as far as we could see around this ring, they were regularly spaced, every twenty thousand kilometers, regular as clockwork.

  “I’m showing they all possess an albedo of around 0.1 to 0.2.” The image focused in on the closest. It snapped into sharp relief. “That would make it an M-class, a metal rich asteroid.”

  I leaned forwards. The asteroid was a relatively small example, a few kilometers across. Made smaller by the fact a huge bite had been taken out of it. And around the edges of that bite were what was undeniably mining equipment.

  A forest of derricks, piping and industry were barnacled onto the surface. All of it motionless, all of it lightless. Despite the pristine nature, of it, I felt as if it was old, abandoned.

  “Paydirt,” Rice’s voice sang out.

  “It is indeed,” I agreed. The view focused in on points of interest.

  “You know,” Leila murmured. She had stopped addressing the camera directly, instead simply allowing it to observe her work. “I have the sneaky impression these things might be the source of the ring system.”

  Now that was an ambitious thought. The glorious rings merely being the by-product of some vast mining endeavor.

  “But to what purpose?” Tyler asked.

  “Say what?” I responded.

  “If they’re mining, then they’re mining for raw materials for something. What were they using those raw materials for?”

  A fair point. Before I could respond, Leila picked up the thread. “Yes, and these are M-type asteroids, comprised of a significant quantity of metal. What we’re seeing with the ring system, I suspect, is simply a vast and rather pretty waste heap. They’ve had the useful stuff and simply cast aside anything they don’t need, which has formed this.”

  The question was obvious, just what were they using the billions, no trillions, of tons of metal for?

  ***

  Leila’s team had provided a more detailed analysis of the world below. It was dead, half the world scorched to a cinder; the other half must have been shielded by the bulk of the planet, yet the resultant storms, destruction to the atmosphere, and earthquakes had devastated the planet.

  Whatever had been down there had been washed away in a flood of fire, superstorms and radiation.

  There were some signs, Leila pointed out to me, of ancient quarries. Sensors showed high concentrations of metals in certain places over others, perhaps the remains of cities. But there were no visual signs left on the surface of the planet.

  No one to make first contact with, unless anything remained in orbit, where it might have been shielded from whatever had wrought such damage.

  Leila had come up to the bridge, to better establish the next course of action.

  “The space infrastructure is clearly a line of investigation. Many of the asteroid bulks have provided sufficient protection for the mining equipment from the flare damage.”

  That was all well and good, but I still wanted to know what the hell they had been building. “Tyler, I’m assuming there’s a damn big object out here somewhere. I want to know what it is. I need you to find it.”

  “There’s nothing, skip.” The frustration in his voice was evident. “The only place left for it to hide is either opposite us in orbit of this world, or in exact opposition in its orbit around Tau Sagittarii.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Let’s take the easy option first. We’ll raise our orbit and begin a full survey of the planet, ring system, and space.” I thought for a moment if there was anything else. “Leila, can you give me options on dating the extinction event which struck TS1?”

  “Possibly we could…” Leila thought for a moment. “Yes, let’s drop one of the bots on one of the asteroid-mines. It can begin exploring while we hunt whatever the big game is.”

  “You listening, Rice?”

  “Yes, skip. I’ve already got Theodore and a sled warming up. Tyler, if you can get me across to the nearest candidate mineroid, I’ll get the bot programmed and on its way.”

  “Mineroid?” I mouthed at Leila.

  She shrugged as if to say, “Sounds good to me.”

  ***

  The spider bot mounted itself on one of the long range propulsion sleds, basically a jet pack for the agile drone. It burned towards the closest mine as Ranger pulled away, continuing along the long road of the ring. Every few thousand kilometers, we left a recon sat, both to act as a relay for Theodore and to continue observations of the ring and world.

  Every twenty thousand kilometers, we passed another mineroid. Each was similar to the last. A huge wound in it where the complex equipment had eaten the way through the rock and metal.

  After a couple of hours, Theodore signaled it had arrived. The science team had been working through the telemetry as it had approached, but I trusted them to tell me if they’d discovered anything important.

  They hadn’t.

  I pulled up the feed, watching as the bot took one step in front of another, each of its legs gripping the rocky surface of the asteroid as it trundled towards a mining derrick.

  Without atmosphere to subtly distort perception, everything seemed crisp and clear. “Okay, I’m getting an estimate on the asteroid’s mass. As expected, it’s far lower than its size suggests. That fits in with if they’d extracted the metals and any other substances of interest,” Leila murmured.

  The bot passed the derrick and reached the scorched half of the asteroid. It situated itself on the terminator.

  “The rock is baked and fused, but it has been coated with a layer of the dust. We’re going to have to make some assumptions here, but this is as good as we’re going to get. Assumption one is that mining stopped following the extinction event.”

  With sensitive instruments, Theodore probed the dust which had settled on the blackened rock. The layer was thin, a few particles deep. But that was enough.

  “Estimates coming through, bearing in mind this is not exact, we’d ideally need to cross reference this with many data points on the other—”

  “Leila,” I interrupted. “We totally understand this is just a preliminary analysis. We’ll firm it up later.”

  “Okay,” Leila said, her distaste at giving
such early information evident. “Plus or minus twenty years, we’re looking at around 250 years ago.”

  250 years ago, around 1850 CE. So in an era when humans hadn’t even undertaken powered flight, something horrendous had happened to this world. Something which had killed everyone here.

  And what’s more, the date corresponded with something else.

  Tau Sagitarii was 122 light years from Sol. Ehman had detected his Wow! signal in 1977 at the Big Ear facility.

  122 years previous to 1977 was 1855. Near as damn it exactly when the extinction event happened.

  “I think we now know why they never picked up the Wow! signal again,” Tyler said.

  “Yes,” I replied. “There was no one to send it. They were all dead.”

  ***

  As Ranger continued creeping around the ring, we carried on surveying the planet. I hoped against hope that something survived down there. Some city which had somehow protected itself, some monument to show who had been there.

  There was nothing.

  Theodore explored the mining rig. As far as we could tell it was an automated system. It strip-mined, processed and then shot the refined material into a neighboring orbit. There was no hint of who the beings were who had created the equipment.

  Presumably, from there it was gathered and put to whatever the mysterious use was.

  “I have something anomalous,” Tyler called out.

  My reverie was broken and I looked up from reviewing the deluge of information. “What do you have?”

  “I’ve got four structures, clustered just over the ring. They’re big… damn big.”

  “Don’t keep me in suspense here.”

  The screen focused on them. I couldn’t help but stand up, shocked and awed. “How did we not see them earlier?”

  “What can I say, they were obscured by the planet,” Tyler said hopelessly.

  They were hovering over the ring. Three of the vast spherical structures were empty. They were a criss-cross grid work of girders and gantries. An entire hemisphere on each of them had hinged open. Whatever had been inside them had gone, leaving an empty space.

  But it was what was in the fourth which gave a clue as to what had been in the others. A half completed sphere, easily two hundred kilometers across, was visible. One side, like the planet and mineroids, had been blackened, clearly subject to the same intense heat of the extinction event a quarter of a millennium ago.

  The sphere had the appearance of something I’d seen in an old movie. A moon-sized space station.

  The spherical shape gave us a clue. This was a displacement drive ship, a huge one. One capable of containing millions, if not billions, if they were packed in tight.

  “Tyler, match our orbits. Get us nearer to the occupied…” I thought for a moment about what term to use. “The occupied construction facility. I want to take a closer look at this thing.”

  “I’m seeing the same power routing and distribution architecture as on our transit spheres,” Rice said quietly; she had swapped her systems schematics to show what we were looking at. Little notes appeared on electronic post-its. “Although on a much bigger scale than anything we’ve constructed, obviously.”

  “Obviously,” I muttered.

  Leila nodded in agreement. “This is spookily close. In fact, too close. I would say we’re looking at a common ancestry here.”

  “Are you saying this is the home of the Sphere builders?”

  “It could be, or another hypothesis: they gave the Taus the same knowledge as they gave us.”

  All hypothesis and conjecture. “Tyler, bring us in.”

  Even the gantries dwarfed our ship. We slipped between them, entering the hollow within. All around were warehouses containing refined blocks of metals. Huge storage tanks contained what I could only presume were the processed chemicals which would also be required.

  Facilities which were clearly factories hugged the girders, some of them open, half completed hull segments locked within. Others were closed, likely to engineer the more intricate internal components.

  The ship loomed within. Tyler pointed Ranger’s prow towards its hull and applied lateral thrust, occasionally raising or lowering us to avoid a huge robotic arm or piping as we drifted starboard. I knew Leila’s team would be probing the ship with every instrument they had, seeking to divine its secrets.

  “We could stay here a thousand years and only explore a part of this ship,” Rice said, her voice unusually sober and serious.

  We crossed the terminator, moving from the section which was almost complete to that being built. The relative smoothness of the main hull gave way to open corridors, chambers, storage facilities and tanks of the sections under construction.

  “At least we’re not going to struggle to find somewhere to board if we need to,” Tyler muttered.

  We drifted across the half completed hemisphere, and as we closed on the core of the ship, the chambers became bigger, yet more intricate.

  “Yeah,” Rice commented. “This definitely matches a massively scaled up version of our own displacement drive architecture.”

  We crossed the periphery of the core itself. A huge cylinder was lodged in the center. The drive itself.

  So it definitely was a ship, and designed for interstellar travel at that. I thought of the sheer size of the construction effort. This race hadn’t just wanted one, they’d wanted four of these things.

  And, I mused, if each had been capable of carrying millions or billions?

  “This, it’s an ark,” I murmured. The sheer ambition of what I was looking at was taking my breath away. I gestured vaguely in the direction of the planet. “They knew their world was going to die, so they built these ships to escape.”

  “Clearly they didn’t believe in leaving anyone behind,” Leila said. “At 200 km diameter, the internal volume of this thing must be…” She lowered her eyes for a moment and mumbled some numbers. “Around 4.2 million cubic kilometers.”

  I gave a low whistle.

  “I’d suggest usable volume would be a quarter of that or less, when we account for drive systems, power generation and the other infrastructure necessary for this to actually be a starship,” Leila continued.

  “Well, it’s a good job they had four of them then,” Rice retorted. “After all, we wouldn’t want them all cramped in there.”

  No, we didn’t. But something else bothered me, something which Carol Farris had told me about. Something I hadn’t shared with the crew.

  If what had happened to the Tau’s planet had been a solar flare, and they had demonstrated such knowledge of engineering that they could create these goliaths, then surely they could create a sun shield. Hell, they’d been on our drawing boards for decades in case of a particularly violent flare coming out of Sol.

  No, whatever they had feared was clearly something they felt they couldn’t beat or overcome.

  They had felt their only recourse was to run.

  I thought of the species Carol had told me about, and the information the original lobotomized Sphere ship had tried to communicate. There were things out there which could take out even a race capable of such magnificent works of engineering as what was before us.

  “Something’s just occurred,” Leila said. A holo flashed up, and I recognized it as Ehman’s original Wow! signal graph. I was well briefed on it; after all, we’d learned after the original Sphere ship that Tau Sagittarii was the first sign of intelligent life detected. “From the test flights, we learned that a ship going to displacement drive effectively acts as a point source of intense radio activity, yes?”

  “Yes,” I replied.

  “We know that at least three of these ships aren’t here anymore.”

  “Go on.”

  “Our drives are much smaller than these. Even so, their use would theoretically be detectable across interstellar distances.” She pursed her lips slightly. “But chances are they’d get lost in the background of myriad other naturally occurring radio sources out the
re.”

  I was starting to see where she was going with this. I gestured for her to continue, though.

  “I think Ehman’s Wow! signal was the activation of these ships’ drives. They’re much bigger, and there’d be no mistaking them as a ship going to displacement drive.”

  Three starships, each 200 kilometers in diameter, going into displacement drive. In 1850, when humans still viewed crossing an ocean as a colossal achievement. It was a humbling thought.

  If the Big Ear had detected this, how many other instances must have been recorded? An interesting question. We wouldn’t be moving much from our current position. I glanced across at Tyler. Yeah, I’d need to keep our pilot busy.

  “Tyler, we have decades of records in our archives from the Big Ear and SETI data in our archives. I want you to cross reference any unexplained peaks with the frequency a displacement drive gives when it activates. I’m curious as to how many of those radio sources could be a displacement drive.”

  “That could be a hell of a lot of work,” Tyler said glumly.

  “Yes, it will, but fear not. I suspect you’re going to have a hell of a lot of time to work on it.” I grinned at him. Right, back to what was before us. We needed to learn more about the Taus. A flight recorder would be good, something to tell us exactly what had happened to these people. Or maybe where they had gone. “Have we sighted anything which looks as if it could be a command and control center? A bridge? A data bank? Anything?”

  Leila shook her head.

  “Okay, Rice,” I said. “If you’d be so kind as to drop one of the bots. Let’s see what we can see.”

  “I’ll send Alvin down.”

  For some reason, I got the impression that Rice had a soft spot for that particular bot. Curious, as the three we had on board were all identical.

  We continued our lateral drift around the ship, still weaving around obstructions as the bot descended to the surface. Sooner or later we would go in and secure what samples and data we could, but the more patient, methodical bot would have to find us somewhere to start.