“Not merely terrestrial. Terran. Furry animals with all the features of mammals, right down to the seven cervical vertebrae and three ossicles in the inner ear. Birds. Insects and arachnids. No identifiable Earth species as such, but some scary-close relatives. It would be interesting to compare the fossil records of the two planets.”
“Do you have fossils?” Grainger asked.
“Not much, I’m afraid, and no vertebrates. The geology at the landing site was wrong. But everything seemed to have close Earthly relatives. The plants, the fungi, and as far as we could tell, bacteria and archaea. Certainly, the bacteria responded to our antibiotic tests, and were quite happy eating the various nutrient agars we tried growing them on.”
“So, we need to be serious about this quarantine. Regarding that, some more lab techs and graduate students came up in the ship with me. Would you be able to give them a bit of a welcome and pep talk about what we’re doing here? They’ve had the standard briefings, of course, but it would be nice for them to hear something from you.”
Darwin wasn’t totally surprised by Grainger’s request. He’d known there were new people coming. They had the space, and someone had to back-fill the work of the scientists they’d left at Alpha Centauri. “Yes,” he said, “I can do that. After dinner tonight?”
“I think that will work. Your findings so far, do they mean you expect this quarantine to stretch out?”
Darwin waggled his hand in a comme ci, comme ça gesture. “Maybe yes, but probably no. There was nothing that seemed immediately hazardous to any of our test species, just as diseases generally don’t cross to dissimilar species.”
Grainger nodded. “Except in cases of prolonged mutual contact.”
“Exactly. I have no doubt that given the chance they could mutate to something we might need to worry about, but so far antibiotics and immune response seems to handle it. We may even find some useful biochemicals.”
“But how is that even possible?” Grainger shook his head. “I mean, mammals? Are you serious?”
“The working hypothesis is that the planets were terraformed, and seeded with life from Earth, sometime around or just after the end-Cretaceous extinction. I would love to see data which disproves that hypothesis, but then I can’t imagine what else would explain it. That would also account for the dearth of fossils, at least older ones.”
“Terraformed. Wow.”
“And that’s why we’ve been keeping it fairly quiet. I can’t image who or what could do that. Or rather, what I can imagine scares hell out of me.”
“Intelligent dinosaurs?” Grainger tossed the suggestion out, but he clearly knew it was like grasping at the proverbial straw.
“Oh, sure. And aside from the total lack of evidence for same anywhere on Earth and anywhere else we’ve explored in the Solar System, there’s the minor question of why intelligent dinosaurs with the ability to terraform two planets, four light years from here, would have let themselves be wiped out by the Chicxulub asteroid. Or why they didn’t fix the planet back to their liking after it did hit.”
“Yeah, it sounded silly when I said it.” Grainger looked around at the lab, processing what he’d just been told. “So, the first task is to run DNA analysis on everything, then run cladistics against your samples’ nearest Earth analogs and see what makes sense. Maybe we can pin down a common divergence time.”
Darwin wasn’t as optimistic about that as Grainger seemed to be. The idea was theoretically sound, but Earth’s own fossil record was too spotty. Species could have arisen hundreds of thousands, even millions, of years before a member had left behind a fossil which had since been discovered. And few fossils left enough original material behind for DNA analysis, not even in mosquitoes trapped in amber. Still, it was a step. If his runny babbit and Earth rabbits had a lot of DNA in common, that would help prove that the anatomical similarities weren’t just fantastically coincidental convergent evolution. At this point, Darwin would be more surprised if the DNA did differ significantly, despite sixty-some million years of evolution on a completely different planet. And speaking of which....
“That’s certainly a question that needs answering,” Darwin said. “But on a more pragmatic point, there’s also the question of what interesting biochemicals millions of years of divergence might have produced.”
Grainger nodded. “Yeah. The bio-pharmaceutical companies are going to have a field day. Even if there’s nothing medically interesting, industrial enzymes are big business these days, and some of this stuff will have evolved down pathways nobody and no computer has even thought of.”
“There might even be something worth sending another expedition for.” As he said that, Darwin remembered Elizabeth and the crew they’d left behind in the system, and felt a pang of guilt over what he’d just said. He hastily added, “Aside from the Anderson team, of course. You may get your trip to Alpha Centauri yet.”
∞ ∞ ∞
Lunar Quarantine Lab
“Commodore Drake, please report to the Director’s office.” the voice came over the lab’s PA system.
Drake sighed. His omni had been confiscated when he was placed under “house arrest” pending investigation, but then so had every other piece of gear brought back by the Centauri crew. Everything was considered “possibly contaminated” by virulent alien organisms until proven otherwise. Never mind that none of the crew had even developed so much as a case of the sniffles since returning. And they were all confined to base for the duration of the quarantine, so his house arrest was pro forma. He wasn’t going anywhere anyway.
He made his way to the office. After the first two weeks, they’d dropped the isolation between the returning crew and the base staff. The staff weren’t going anywhere either, and since the base was on the Moon, there wasn’t exactly anywhere to go. That was the reason the facility had been built there in the first place.
Drake wasn’t entirely surprised to see the security officer, Keating, in the office with Director Kemmerer.
“Commodore Drake, have a seat. You know the major.”
Major Keating had risen from his seat as Drake entered. Both he and Drake were dressed in the casual outfits common in the facility, so there was no need for ritual salutes.
Keating nodded at him, and when Drake sat, so did he.
“I do.” Drake figured that this either had something to do with the ships and crew he’d left behind, or the disappearance of the Chinese. Maybe they had turned up. “What’s up?”
Keating spoke up. “First, I should probably be in uniform for this, so my apologies.”
That didn’t sound good. “No need,” Drake said. “Go on.”
“Commodore Drake, I have to officially inform you that court-martial proceedings are, uh, proceeding. There will be a preliminary hearing into the failure to return of the Xīng Huā, the Krechet, and in particular, the USS Poul Anderson. There are potential charges including disobeying orders, misappropriation of government property, abandonment, reckless endangerment, and probably fishing without a license.”
“What?” The laundry list hadn’t surprised Drake, but the last item had.
“Sorry, just an attempt at humor. They like to throw anything they think might stick and few things they know won’t, then bargain down from there. But seriously, sir, from what I’m hearing everyone thinks you did the right thing. Oh sure, there’s some second guessing, but that’s the consensus. They still have to go through this because it’s legally required, and so politicians can cover their asses if the press or their constituents ask about it. Ditto for our foreign partners.
“Fortunately,” Keating continued, “Tsibliev put in a good word with his government about the Krechet, and they’re making a big deal about the fact that there’s a Russian spaceship sitting on the surface of a planet around another star. Which is another reason folks aren’t
so upset about the Anderson. We have one there too, and ours has people.”
“What about the Chinese?”
“They’ve raised a bit of a ruckus of the loss of the Xīng Huā and her crew, but not nearly what we might have expected. It tends to confirm that they faked the loss so they could steal warp drive technology. We half expect them to any day announce that they’ve developed it independently.” He paused, then added in a lower voice, “We’re getting some hints that they’ve already launched. We don’t know where to.”
“Huh. What about this hearing? Surely, they’re not going to ship me back to Earth yet, and I can’t imagine them all coming up here.”
“Please. It will be done by teleconference, of course. Especially since you’re the only commodore in the service, so everyone of equal or higher rank is an admiral.” Tradition held that officers could only face a court-martial judged by someone their rank or above. “The two-second communication lag will be annoying, but mostly that just makes it harder to interrupt, which could be a blessing. Anyway, you’ll have a lawyer appointed and present, and you can discuss things with him or her over an encrypted channel.”
“A lawyer? Do I need one?”
“Probably not, I don’t expect this to be adversarial, but better to have one just in case. And they’ll want you to have one anyway so you can’t complain later you were denied counsel.”
“Fricking bureaucrats.”
“Amen. Anyway, scheduling....”
The conversation continued in that vein for a while longer, with Drake only half paying attention. It was nothing he hadn’t expected, and had played over in his mind repeatedly since leaving Alpha Centauri.
∞ ∞ ∞
That evening, as promised, George Darwin addressed the assembled newcomers to the facility, along with a few others who had come to hear what he had to say. There wasn’t a lot in the way of night life in the lab.
“As I see it,” George Darwin said, “we have two goals here. First and foremost, which is why this facility was built on the Moon in the first place, is to make sure that nothing we brought back is going to prove hazardous to Earth. History is full of the results of exotic species being introduced, intentionally or accidentally, into ecosystems which have not evolved defense mechanisms. Either predators were introduced—”
“Why would anyone do that?” one of the graduate students asked.
“Often it was accidental. Rats from a sailing ship that ate the eggs of flightless birds in the Polynesian islands, for example,” Drake said. “Sometimes it was the opposite. A lack of local predators for introduced prey species, like rabbits in Australia, which overran the local environment. Even plants can take over, like kudzu in the American south.
“But what we’re really worried about,” he continued, “are less obvious. Microorganisms that local immune systems haven’t evolved to cope with, or which out-compete native beneficial species.”
“Of course, hence Lunar Quarantine Lab,” the student said, as if to ask, “what’s your point?”
“The second goal,” Darwin continued, ignoring the unstated question, “is twofold: to determine as well as possible, whether Alpha Centauri life really is descended from Earth life, by determining if there is any trace of non-terrestrial life. If it is so descended, then two: to narrow down the time-frame in which that happened. We know it was roughly sixty-five million years ago, but it would be nice to pin down which side of the end-Cretaceous extinction that was.”
“To what purpose?” another student—Hayashi, from what Drake could make out on her name tag—asked.
“That might help us figure out how those planets came to be terraformed, and what and where to look here on Earth. If it can be shown that all life on Kakuloa likely originated in a specific geographic area on Earth, it would be interesting to look more closely at that area.”
Director Kemmerer had been watching from the sidelines, happy to let Darwin do his thing, but spoke up now. “Depending on what the geologists figure out,” he said, “it would also be interesting to see how long after the physical terraforming took place that it was seeded with life. The geologists’ report suggested a,” he paused, as if trying to recall the specific wording, “‘planet sterilizing event’ I believe the term was?”
“Yes,” Darwin said. “Massive crustal re-melting and possibly spin changes. The amount of energy required to change a planet from not-quite suitable for life to one where one could land an interstellar ark full of Earth life-forms and just have it grow is staggering.”
“They’d have to stage the biosphere, surely?” asked Hayashi. “Start with simple lifeforms, and so on?”
“Sure, basically duplicate biogenesis but on a vastly more rapid timescale. That’s another interesting question—how long does it take to convert a sterile but potentially hospitable planet to an Earth-like one? We have an idea from the small scale, aftermath of volcanic eruptions and the like, and even a vague idea from how long it took large fauna to recover from the Cretaceous impact, but that wasn’t anywhere near planet-sterilizing.”
“Although,” someone sitting further back said, “if we find that there are signs of non-terrestrial life in the Kakuloa samples, we know it wasn’t quite sterilizing.”
“Good point. Which raises the question of the Terraformers. Would they feel any moral inhibition about almost sterilizing a planet to make way for transplanted life or not? Or at what level? Prokaryotes, eukaryotes, multi-cellular organisms?”
“At least we don’t have to worry about that here, we’re already the right kind of life.” The comment drew a few chuckles from the audience.
“I hope so,” said Darwin seriously. “What if we’re a Petri dish gone bad?”
That earned a few minutes of silence as people considered the implications. There were a few other, more general questions about procedures, and what it had been like to explore an alien planet. Kemmerer answered most of the former, and Darwin put off the latter, telling the group that there’d be time for that in the weeks to come. “Besides,” he said, “there are three other people here who also landed on Kakuloa, and four more who explored the system from space.”
Chapter 5: Eridani Landing
Xinglong Huā, Epsilon Eridani II
Entry was smooth, helped by the somewhat lower gravity and thinner atmosphere. They descended perfectly on track, riding the beam from the drone lander at the target site. The crosswinds were negligible, and its beacon sounded clearly. If it hadn’t been for the programmed-in offset, the Xinglong would have landed right on top of it. And then, with a short roar of braking thrust and a mild thump, they were down.
“Secure the ship!” Lee ordered over the ship’s comm circuits. “Tianlong, this is Xinglong, we have landed.”
The first order of business, after shutting down the landing systems and running a status check, was to sample this planet’s atmosphere and biology. They could explore in suits if they had to, but Lee hoped the air would be breathable and that there were no airborne organisms that could infect them. The earlier probe drones they had deployed from orbit had returned data indicating just that, but the instruments in the ship’s laboratories were more sensitive.
“Wang Wei, prepare the sample drones for deployment.” The small multi-rotor aircraft could be equipped with a variety of instruments, and even a cage carrying lab mice. They’d let the machines check things out before descending the ladder themselves. As captain, Lee himself would be taking the first footsteps.
∞ ∞ ∞
Their mission profile was a little different from that established for the Centauri expedition’s landers. With the robotic sample drones doing the initial biological and air quality surveys, the Xinglong’s crew focused on preparing the ship to return to orbit. Unlike the Centauri landers which needed a separately landed reactor to create fuel, they had an on-board fus
ion reactor providing power to synthesize propellants. The background whine of the intake turbines, sucking in the local air, wasn’t much more irritating than the sounds inside a passenger jet. Less, considering the absence of screaming kids. Water and carbon dioxide would be extracted from that air, then processed into methane, oxygen and hydrogen for their chemical rocket engines. To fully refuel would take a couple of weeks, so there was no immediate return, but they needed time to explore anyway.
It was a full day before Lee was ready to unbutton the ship and step out onto the surface. The air was clear and slightly cool, but with adequate oxygen and no dangerous levels of toxic gases. The exposed lab mice were still happy, and the only bacteria that had grown in the culture dishes had been easily killed by simple antibiotics.
There was certainly a risk that they had missed something slower acting, but Lee took a philosophical view of that. Sooner or later something would kill him, and if it was later, it didn’t really matter what.
Still, he wore a respirator and gloves when he opened the airlock and looked out on the plain where they’d landed. Beyond the circle of scorched vegetation at the base of the ship, the plants looked as much like tall grass as anything else, but he was no biologist. The scientists would make their own determination. In the distance, a few kilometers away, he could just make out a small herd of animals moving through the grass, or whatever it was. To be visible that far away they were probably the elephants or mammoths, or whatever they were, they had seen from orbit.
The area around the ship was clear, even beyond the burn from their landing rockets. Lee extended the ladder then turned to climb down it.
He reached the bottom rung. He didn’t have any words prepared. His superiors would dub in whatever they felt appropriate, so there really wasn’t any point. “It is hard to say what the vegetation looks like here; the immediate area is burned off.” Still standing on the lower rung, he gently lifted the respirator away from his face. Nothing burned his eyes. He took a cautious sniff, then a deeper breath. “The predominant smell is of burnt grass, but otherwise the air smells fresh. Not like in a city. Some odor of vegetation, but faint. Not so neutral as aboard the ship. I have no problem breathing. The air may be thin here, but it is still thicker than Tibet’s. Although almost as cold. I am going to step off the ladder now.”
Alpha Centauri: The Return (T-Space Alpha Centauri Book 3) Page 3
