Alpha Centauri: The Return (T-Space Alpha Centauri Book 3)

by Alastair Mayer

  Lee doubted that. One could almost as soon repair hamburger. It would take two weeks in warp to get back to the Solar System. Unless the medics on the Xinglong and Tianlong could fix it, Wang Wei would lose the leg. Or worse. Surgery in microgravity wouldn’t be easy, but remaining on the planet wasn’t a useful option. His own medic couldn’t do surgery that complicated alone.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  What the scientists had found was no less disturbing. Every single organism they had found bore a too-strong similarity to Earth biology. That couldn’t be coincidence.

  Add to that the fact that the entire system they were in seemed just too young to have a planet with the level of life it did, and it led to an inescapable conclusion. Someone, or for lack of a better word, something, had terraformed this world. If they were still around, or had left monitors, the prudent course of action would be to leave immediately.

  Which is just what Lee intended to do, just as soon as they rendezvoused with their warp cylinder.

  “Navigation status?” Lee demanded.

  “Rendezvous radar locked on, sir. Approach rate nominal. Range twenty-three kilometers.”

  They were still climbing and accelerating. The warp ring was approaching from their rear at the moment, but would overtake them as they reached apogee. A short final burn would let the match orbits at a safe distance. “Report at five kilometers.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Lee scanned the panel. The computers had control, and his first officer was focusing on the rendezvous system. As Lee watched, he saw a green indicator turn orange. Chen Jingyun immediately launched into a diagnostics routine on another screen.

  “Problem?” Lee asked before Chen had a chance to announce it.

  “Interference on the rendezvous radar. Like we’re getting a second signal. Not another object.”

  “Explain.”

  “Signal is wider beam, and higher powered. Like another radar on an overlapping frequency, not a reflection.”

  Lee signaled the Tianlong. “Tianlong, check your rendezvous radar. It is interfering with ours.”

  “This is Tianlong. We are not transmitting.”

  That was odd. Lee considered waving off the rendezvous until they resolved the issue.

  “Navigation, can you pinpoint the source?”

  “Negative, sir. Second signal is gone.”

  “Are you still tracking the warp ring?”

  “Affirmative, signal is clear. Range 12,532 meters and closing.”

  A ghost signal. Lee didn’t like that. Perhaps it was just a sensor glitch. Perhaps not.

  “Run diagnostics. Was that a glitch?”

  “Sir, original diagnostics suggested an actual signal. To run full diagnostics, we will have to deactivate rendezvous mode. Shall I do that?”

  Damn. “Negative, continue with rendezvous.” Lee didn’t like this at all. He wondered if this was what a submarine crew felt if they’d just heard a single external sonar ping. But it could have been just a glitch.

  Lee toggled the radio. “Tianlong, do a full radar scan, spherical sweep. Stay off the rendezvous frequency. Report immediately anything unidentified within 100,000 kilometers.” That would be a third of a light-second each way, the scan would be slow.

  “Acknowledged, Xinglong. Starting scan.”

  “Also, prepare for deep space. After we have docked with our warp ring, we will begin accelerating on thrusters out of the system. We will go to warp when clear. Stand by to make your course...” Lee paused. It was just a hunch, but he had an odd feeling. It was best not to head directly towards Earth, in case something was tracking them. They could meet up clear of the debris disk and do a zig-zag course of a couple of hops. Once they went to warp, the only information an observer would have would be which direction they went. They couldn’t be tracked beyond lightspeed. “Make course for Sirius. We will regroup eighty AU distance from Epsilon Eridani.”

  “Sirius, sir?”

  “We’re not going there, but I want clear of this system. I expect it might take ourselves a few hours to find each other. We’ll deploy a deuterium flare.” Deuterium was rare in interstellar space. A cloud of it would be detectable by the absorption lines of the light spectra of stars behind it.

  “Affirmative. Prepare for deep space. On your signal, clear the system then jump eighty AU towards Sirius and look for a deuterium signal.”

  “Correct. Xinglong out.”

  “Captain,” Chen Jingyun reported, “we are approaching warp ring. Range five thousand meters.”

  “Good. Close to one hundred and prepare for docking.”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  The approach went smoothly, and docking with the warp ring was textbook. There had been no further spurious radar signals. Maybe it had been a glitch.

  “Tianlong, this is Xinglong. Status of radar sweep?”

  “Full sweep completed. Nothing but you and the warp ring, and the planet.”

  Lee relaxed. Just a glitch. “Thank you. Continue sweep. Slight change of plans; we will rendezvous with you before going to warp. Xinglong will configure her systems while on the way to you.” The ring with the warp pods was now latched to the Xinglong, but they needed to confirm that the power couplings were secure and have the ship’s computers sync themselves up with those built into the warp pods.

  “Copy that. Continuing sweep and awaiting your arrival.”

  “Xinglong out.”

  Lee addressed his crew. “All right, as soon as hard dock is confirmed, set a rendezvous course with the Tianlong. After the warp systems check, configure for a jump eighty AU towards Sirius.” It still wouldn’t hurt to play it safe.

  A few minutes later, the combined ship and warp ring began to rotate into position for a short burn to match orbits with the Tianlong. Lee was beginning to think he had been overcautious, and had been jumping at shadows, when the Tianlong signaled.

  “Xinglong, this is Tianlong. Positive radar contact, just briefly. Range 87,000 kilometers and closing.”

  Damn. “Coordinates?”

  Tianlong sent the numbers. About 89,000 kilometers from the Xinglong. “It was just a momentary contact, like a flash. Not enough data to get a good closing rate, estimate 20 kilometers per second.”

  At that speed, it could be just an asteroid in a crossing orbit, but something irregular like an asteroid should be continuously bouncing back the radar signal. “Scan that area, Tianlong. See if you can track it.”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Navigation, radar sweep on the coordinates from Tianlong. Let’s see what we can pick up.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The Tianlong’s “like a flash” disturbed him. An object with flat sides is hard to see on radar unless a side happened to be perpendicular to the beam, reflecting it back to the detector rather than bouncing it off at an angle. It was a principle that had been used in designing stealth vehicles from time to time. But out here, there shouldn’t be any objects with flat sides. That wasn’t natural, not in anything bigger than a mineral crystal. At least with the two ships probing, the chances of detection increased. With beams at two angles, one ship might detect the other’s bounced signal, and they had twice the chance of seeing a direct reflection.

  If there was something not natural out there, what was it, and what were its intentions? His were exploration ships, they had no defenses to speak of.

  “Secure all airtight doors. Secure pressure suits.” They were wearing suits, it was standard for launch, but gloves and helmets were now unfastened and attached to nearby sticky-loop strips on whatever surface was handy.

  “Sir? Yes sir.”

  Lee signaled the Tianlong to do the same. “Just a precaution,” he said, to both ships’ crews. “If it is an asteroid there may be smaller debris near it.” Probably they didn’t believe that any more than he did, but it was a t
hought they could hold on to.

  “Sir, radar contact. 86,000 kilometers. Closing rate 21 kilometers per second, angle uncertain.” The object might not be moving directly towards them, but the radar contact had been too brief to be sure. Twenty-one kilometers per second was just the component of its velocity towards them, it might be moving faster at an angle.

  “Are warp systems synchronized?”

  “Yes sir, but the debris hazard....”

  “Understood.” This deep in the dusty Epsilon Eridani system, there was just too much cosmic litter floating around to risk warp. They couldn’t be sure space was clear. Except, Lee knew, for that volume they’d already been sweeping with radar.

  “Relay this to Tianlong. Both ships, emergency maneuver. Rotate toward system north. Ten millisecond warp jump at one hundred cee from that position. Execute.” One hundred times light-speed was the slowest their warp drives would go, there hadn’t seemed a need to go slower. But they couldn’t see far enough to be safe going more than a light second this deep in the system. But that should be enough to get out of the way of whatever was headed towards them.

  A series of muffled whumps heralded the reaction control system firing to move the ship into position. “Warping,” the first officer announced, and the planet which had been filling the port viewscreen disappeared, to be replaced by a small disk to aft.

  “Raise the Tianlong, and continue radar sweep.” The other ship should be nearby, but nearby was a very relative term even after a short hop in warp. If the unidentified object they’d left behind was looking for them, the radar would be like shouting “here I am!”, but Lee didn’t see any other way to determine what it was doing. They hadn’t picked it up visually.

  “Also, do an infrared scan aft.” That might work. “And prepare for warp.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The problem with the warp drives was that the warp bubble took more energy to create than to maintain. Their fusion reactor would happily power it until they ran out of fuel, giving them a range of several parsecs. What the reactor couldn’t do was put out enough instantaneous power to create the bubble. That surge was created by the high-power energy storage system charged by the reactor, but it took several minutes to recharge it between warp jumps. Lee wanted them to be able to go as soon as possible after checking that the immediate line of flight was clear. Yet again, he wished he were out of this damned system. This must be how a deep-water navy captain felt about the reefs and shallows near land.

  “Tianlong reporting, sir. Their position is 27,000 kilometers, bearing ninety-five by fifteen.” So, almost directly to starboard and a little forward of them.

  “Thank you. Anything behind?”

  “Nothing so far.”

  Which didn’t prove anything. If that other object had a stealth shape, they’d be lucky to get a radar hit. “What about infrared?”

  “Possible object, hard to say against the background clutter.”

  Lee clicked the radio transmit switch. “Tianlong, do infrared scan aft and transmit the image here.” He turned to Chen Jingyun. “Compare the two IR scans. Check for parallax.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  If there was something closer than the background stars, it would be in a different relative position as seen by the two ships. They could triangulate it.

  “Object confirmed, sir. Two hundred thousand kilometers.”

  It was closer now than it should be. That wasn’t a good sign.

  “Coordinate with Tianlong. Keep exchanging IR scans. Track it that way. And try radar on it again.”

  “Yes sir.”

  Turning to follow them showed intelligence, or at least some very sophisticated tracking system. Either indicated potentially hostile intent. You don’t chase something if you’re trying to be friendly with it. At least, you don’t if you’re intelligent.

  He switched one of his console screens to a diagram of the Epsilon Eridani system. The planet they’d landed on—now a disk behind them about the size of a ping-pong ball at arm’s length—orbited in the midst of a relatively clear area well within the inner of Eridani’s two asteroid belts. The outer edge of that belt was defined by the orbit of Aegir, the larger gas giant. Beyond that was another large gap, then the outer asteroid belt and another gas giant. On the schematic it looked easy, with huge gaps between the asteroid belts, the clearly defined planetary orbits, and the outermost cometary belt. But those gaps were also home to many small objects, too big to have yet been blown out like dust on the stellar wind, yet too small to be tugged out by the gravity of the gas giants.

  The best course would be straight out of the plane of the system, which is what he had originally intended. It would also leave them with no cover. In theory, nothing could track them in warp, but in theory, a century ago, warp drive itself couldn’t exist. If that object belonged to the Terraformers, then they had millions of years’ advantage. But they’d also know where Earth was; they had to have visited it. If it was some other space-going species—unlikely, but Lee had had his fill of the unlikely recently—then they could easily have a few hundred or more years’ technological lead.

  Briefly Lee considered ordering both ships to just warp straight into the nearest planet. There were two things wrong with that idea. Three, if you counted the instant deaths of him and his crews. First, it might not actually deprive whoever it was of any useful information. If it had observed them enter the system, it would have an idea of which direction they came from. And while Earth’s radio emissions weren’t what they’d been in the previous century, they were still detectable to somebody listening hard from this distance. Or—assuming the others had warp drive, which seemed a good bet—they could just visit the nearby stars. Earth wasn’t far away.

  The second disadvantage was that destroying themselves here meant China, and Earth, would never know what happened. He had valuable information, both about the terraforming and about whatever was out there, and he had to get it back.

  For a moment, he wondered about the Alpha Centauri expedition. What if they hadn’t continued on to complete their mission? What if the reason they hadn’t returned yet was because they too had run into some alien ship, and it had been hostile?

  Lee shook his head. Insufficient information, and he was starting to spin paranoid fantasies. Focus on the now. What the hell was that object doing?

  “Status?”

  “Object has been stationary so far, no change in position. No radar contact either.”

  “All right let—”

  “Sir, object is moving! Closing rate fifteen kilometers per second.”

  “What? Not possible. You said it was stationary.” If it had been, the current velocity implied an almost instantaneous acceleration. Nearly a thousand gees.

  “Confirmed, sir. Infrared signature indicates a rise in temperature.”

  Lee knew what he had to do. One more attempt to lose them in warp, and if that didn’t work it would get messy.

  “Rotate eighty-five degrees Y-axis. Prepare for warp jump of 1000 light-seconds. Copy that to Tianlong.”

  “Rotating.” The ship’s thrusters fired. “Sir, that puts us close to the asteroid belt.”

  “Short of it and above it.”

  Chen Jingyun checked his screen. “Yes sir. Setting it up.”

  “Tianlong, this is Lee. We’re going to jump close to the asteroid belt. We should still be well clear of it, and nearly twenty light-minutes from whatever it is that’s chasing us. We’ll rendezvous there.”

  “Copy that.”

  “It is imperative this information gets back to China. You already have copy of our data.”

  “But you have all the samples, sir.”

  “And with luck we can rendezvous later and share them out. Let’s see if our ghost wants to follow us first.”

  “Acknowledged.”

 
; “Go to warp when ready. Xinglong out.”

  “Tianlong out.”

  “Status?” Lee asked Chen.

  “Coming up on position now.” The ship’s thrusters fired again to halt the rotation. “Ready to warp.”

  “Execute.”

  The external screens and windows went black. A few tell-tale sparkles showed where tiny dust fragments disintegrated on the warp boundary, a much higher number than in deep space. Lee eyed the radiation monitor, but the levels were acceptable. Then the sparkling stopped and the blackness took on a subtly different hue. They were out of warp.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  It took a few tense minutes to make contact again with the Tianlong Huā. Tiny differences between the angles of two hastily-set courses put them almost a light-second apart, at two-hundred-sixty-thousand kilometers. Lee ordered a six millisecond jump, to bring that distance down to eighty thousand kilometers. He dared not try to cut it closer than that, but it brought communication lag down to a tolerable half-second round-trip.

  With what he hoped was a comfortable separation between themselves and the mysterious object, Lee had time to consider his next actions.

  “Any thoughts on what that was?” he asked, both his own crew and by signal to the Tianlong.

  “Could it have been something the Americans sent?” asked Zhang Min. “A Nessus robot probe?”

  “Interesting idea,” Lee said. “But I believe they only sent out one such, to Alpha Centauri.”

  “Could they have sent it out again?” the pilot, Cheng Jun, asked. “Or perhaps they sent others without making it public.”