Lee didn’t think either was likely, but it wasn’t impossible. Except... “It exhibited high acceleration. Nearly a thousand gees. I don’t think the Americans have anything that can do that.”
“Xinglong, this is Zhing Yuan.” The captain of the Tianlong. “Your reports suggested the planet had been terraformed, with life imported from Earth. Could it be a ship, or perhaps a sentinel, left by the Terraformers?”
“Not a ship, surely, after tens of millions of years?” said Lee. “But a robot sentinel, perhaps. That is still an incredibly long time for a machine to last. And why would it chase us?”
“Perhaps it was merely trying to make contact,” said Chen Jingyun.
“A radio signal would work as well. It had radar.”
“To last so long, it would be self-repairing,” said Captain Yuan, “and have machine intelligence. Maybe it was getting lonely.”
“Possibly. But so far its intentions have seemed more hostile than friendly. I think it best to assume the worst. We should avoid giving it any information about us, including where we came from.”
“Hence warping towards Sirius first. A wise move.”
“I would like to rendezvous first. Wang Wei is in serious condition. I would like your medic to assist.”
“Certainly, Captain Lee.”
Lee consulted briefly with Chen Jingyun, his first officer and navigator, then keyed his mic again. “Tianlong, set a rendezvous course with us. We will pass you the computations. We should meet up in forty minutes.” If the alien probe, or whatever it was, could move at light-speed, it might be able to reach them before that. But to do that it would have had to spot them the instant they came out of warp, and against the noisy background of the asteroid belt. Lee didn’t like the risk, low though it might be, but he had little choice. Trying to attempt a faster rendezvous would mean burning maneuvering fuel they would need to return to Earth.
“This is Tianlong. Acknowledged.”
∞ ∞ ∞
Rendezvous was still ten minutes away when an alarm light lit up on the console.
“Captain! Contact aft! Range four-hundred-thirty thousand kilometers!”
Damn. “Closing speed?”
“Sir! I read over two thousand kilometers per second! That’s impossible!”
Nearly one-percent of light-speed. What was powering that thing? It would be on them in three minutes! Lee keyed the radio.
“Xinglong to Tianlong. Contact aft. ETA three minutes. Abort rendezvous, head out of the system. When clear, warp towards Sirius per original plan.” He turned to Cheng Jun. “Pilot, change course, take us out.”
“Xinglong, this is Tianlong, ackn—” the signal cut off in a burst of static.
Lee looked at the console. Red lights and alerts were popping up all over the screens. What the—? Lee acted instantly, slapping at a control and putting his hand over the pilot’s on the controller and shoving it forward. Sudden acceleration pushed them back in their seats.
The starboard-facing window lit up in a blaze of purple light.
They were under attack. Lee had recognized the signs of a charge build-up prior to the main strike of a particle-beam weapon, and his sudden course change had made it miss. How long to recharge? he wondered.
He had to get the information back to Earth. There were hostile aliens, or alien probes, out here. He knew what he had to do, but he didn’t like it. Zhing Yuan had been a friend, and he had a crew of his own.
“Tianlong, this is Xinglong. Status report.”
“This is Tianlong. We experienced a power surge, but no critical damage. What happened?”
“We are under attack. This has to be reported. Zhing Yuan, I need you to do what you can to distract that probe while we get clear of the system.”
The response took a few seconds in coming. “Acknowledged, Lee Shing. How long do you need us to delay it?”
There was a slim chance. Perhaps the Tianlong could lose it amongst the asteroids. The rocks were thousands of kilometers apart, but with the dust and enough distance, perhaps they could pretend to be just another piece of debris. But it was unlikely. Zhing Yuan knew what Lee was asking of him just as well as Lee did. “I... I need you to delay it as long as you can. China needs it.”
“Acknowledged. Zhù nǐ hǎo yùn. Tianlong out.”
“Zhù nǐ hǎo yùn.” Good luck.
Lee turned to the pilot, who just stared at him wordlessly. “Get us clear of the system. We’ve got two minutes before that thing shows up, if it doesn’t shoot us first. Go!”
∞ ∞ ∞
Aboard the Tianlong Huā
“Make course towards the hostile probe,” Captain Zhing ordered. “Let’s give it something to think about. At the first sign of electrical build up, take evasive action. Maximum acceleration. Do it!”
His small crew were professionals. The scientists had transferred to the Xinglong prior to landing. That was something, anyway.
“Communications, set telemetry for continuous transmission to Xinglong. All external sensor readings.” Any data could prove helpful to them.
“Affirmative.”
“What is the position of the hostile?” Zhing asked.
“Range is two-hundred thousand kilometers, course is toward—” He was cut off as the ship lurched sideways, and the panel lit up with warnings. The windows lit up with a violet flash, and most of the lights and displays flickered out. The critical systems remained operational, but when the secondary panels rebooted they were awash with warning lights.
“Under-voltage on main bus. Switching to auxiliary.”
“Damage?” Zhing demanded.
“Some systems offline. Breakers tripped and are resetting. Fusion plant and warp pods still operational. I think the extreme range helped.”
Zhing agreed. That, and the fact that the most critical systems were designed to withstand power and radiation surges from warp effects.
“Make for the asteroid belt. Five microsecond warp. And, try to find us a clear spot.”
With a warp that short they wouldn’t lose whatever was pursuing them, but Zhing didn’t want to. He wanted its attention diverted away from the Xinglong, and some distance to weaken the effect of that damned beam weapon. Just so long as they didn’t run into anything big in the process.
“Acknowledged.” The ship was already turning towards the belt. There was a flicker almost too short to notice. “Warp complete. Range now two-hundred forty thousand kilometers.”
“Bring the reactor to emergency power; I want those warp capacitors charged quickly,” Zhing said. “Where’s the nearest asteroid?”
“Twenty-three thousand kilometers. It is approximately fifty-five meters in diameter.”
Barely big enough to hide behind, but it was something. “Make for it. Maximum thrust.”
The pilot reacted instantly, firing maneuvering thrusters to get the Tianlong moving while simultaneously rotating it to point her nose at the asteroid. As it turned, Zhing felt as much as heard the vibrations of the main engine ignition sequence starting. The pilot had taken him at his word.
The Tianlong came into position. “Firing!” called the pilot. The massive launch and landing engines ignited, and the acceleration pushed Zhing into his seat at two gees.
“Turnover at midpoint,” Zhing said. “How soon?” They would have to decelerate for the last half of the trip to not overshoot.
“Thirty-six seconds, sir.”
“Acknowledged.” So just over a minute to get to the asteroid. At least the flare of their exhaust would make a nice distraction to hold the attention of whatever was chasing them.
They passed the turnover point and had rotated to begin deceleration with no reaction from the object. Then: “Sir, hostile is angling to intercept.”
Zhing was running out of options. “Is the Xinglong clear?”
The answer took a moment. The crew had been focusing on the hostile. “Negative, sir. Still accelerating out of the system. It will be several minutes before they’re clear to warp.”
Alright, thought Zhing, let’s settle this. “Bring the ship around. Bring the targeting telescope to bear on our mysterious friend out there. Let’s find out if we can see what he looks like.”
The targeting telescope was the large aperture telescope aligned with the axis of the Tianlong. Because a ship couldn’t steer while in warp, it was essential to line it up as precisely as possible before a jump, especially if that was going to be several light years.
By the time they had the object in sight, its range was down to less than a hundred thousand kilometers. Still a long way to see any details, but without atmospheric distortion, they could make out its shape.
“Square? Why is it square?” the pilot wondered aloud.
“From this angle it is, anyway,” Zhing said. “Flat sides would help with radar stealth, perhaps.” He thought he could make out triangular sections within the square, as though it were divided from corner to corner.
“Status of Xinglong?”
“Still in system, at least five minutes before they warp.”
So at least they’re getting a copy of this, Zhing thought.
“Sir! Electrical field rising. Evasive action?”
“Negative.” Zhing checked the scope. The enemy craft was dead center. “Go to warp.”
“Sir?”
“Let’s go meet our ancestors.”
∞ ∞ ∞
A few milliseconds later, the warp bubble of the Tianlong intersected the hull of the alien craft. The tidal interaction was strong enough to rip the very atoms apart. The resulting explosion was like a nuclear bomb, and the prompt radiation in turn detonated the Tianlong’s deuterium store.
Several seconds later, the flash reached the Xinglong, still fleeing the system toward space clear enough for a long jump. Captain Lee knew exactly what had happened; he had been monitoring the Tianlong’s telemetry. He vowed to honor Zhing Yuan’s memory, but to never set foot outside the solar system again.
At the edge of the expanding cloud from the explosion, several large fragments of the alien probe had escaped vaporization. Unseen, they drifted off into the asteroid belt. They no longer posed a threat. Perhaps, if humans ever returned to the system, some asteroid miner would stumble over them.
Chapter 16: Meet Sid Ryden
Lunar Quarantine Lab
“How are the screening results coming?” Darwin asked of Sid Ryden, one of the lab technicians. He referred to the massive biochemical screening survey that was part of the quarantine process.
The technique would have been familiar to just about any Microbiology 101 student in the last hundred years or so. Nutrient-filled Petri dishes would be swabbed with a seed culture of a chosen bacteria. Small paper disks–like confetti–would be doped with extracts from the various organic samples the team had brought back. A few of these would be arrayed on each Petri dish, which would then be incubated for a several days.
On a control dish, with undoped confetti disks, the result would be an even film of bacterial colony. With the impregnated disks, the result would be either no effect, with the colony growing right up to the edge of the disk, or in rare cases, the colony might be thicker around a disk, showing that the extract in fact enhanced bacterial growth. But in some cases, a clear zone around the disk would appear where bacteria had not grown. This would indicate that some chemical in the extract inhibited the growth of the bacteria, and the diameter of the zone would show how effective that was.
Darwin’s team had done something similar while on the planet, ensuring that any native microorganisms that could grow on, for example, a culture medium made with terrestrial mammal red blood cells, could be killed by known antibiotics. Any organisms they’d found that could grow on such media had, in fact, been easily killed. If they hadn’t, the expedition might have ended right there.
It was this same effect, over a hundred and forty years ago, that led to the discovery of penicillin. A mold colony had accidentally contaminated a Petri dish on which Alexander Fleming had been growing a staphylococcus culture, and the culture had not grown in areas close to the mold. Fleming had been bright enough to wonder why not.
These days, it was still a simple and useful technique for quickly screening numerous samples against numerous culture types for interesting–whether beneficial or harmful–biological effects. These would then be investigated with more modern techniques. Darwin had a good idea how much work was involved, although modern robotic lab equipment automated a lot of it.
“They’re coming along quite well,” Ryden said. “We have over a thousand extracts from the samples your team brought back, and we’re screening each of those against two hundred and thirty cultures. It’s a lot of work, but so far, we’ve found about a dozen penicillin analogs, none of which are really any more effective than antibiotics we already have; a few potentially interesting kinds of bacteriophage; and another couple of dozen which have a biological effect but we haven’t figured out quite why, yet.”
“Oh? Of course, there could be any of dozens of reasons for that.”
“Sure, and probably most of them will turn out not to be very interesting. But we’ve already had queries from several of the big bio-pharmaceutical companies who want samples. You never know what will turn up.”
That was true. Darwin knew that despite the advances in computer modeling of biochemical interactions, protein folding, and the like, the sheer number of possibilities–combinations of combinations of combinations—made it a challenge to predict biochemical interactions, even with the latest quantum computers. Anything the computers came up with would still have to be synthesized–itself a challenge–then tested for usefulness and non-toxicity. And most of the time they still came up duds.
If they started with compounds with known biological activity–even, perhaps especially, in a slightly alien biochemistry–they could leapfrog a lot of blind alleys that had looked good in the computer model, or which the computers hadn’t even come up with yet. Of course the companies would be interested. Just as they had been even with the few primitive lifeforms Darwin had found on Mars, not that any of those had amounted to much.
“Okay, good. Send me a summary of the results, and start preparing sample batches for the bio-pharmaceutical companies. Only inactive stuff for now, sterilized plant and animal extracts. No microbes or fungi or anything else that can reproduce until we’ve thoroughly researched it and approved it for release from quarantine.” The last thing they needed was to introduce some kind of blight, plague, or exotic species with no predators into Earth’s biosphere. It had suffered enough over the past century.
“Got it,” Ryden said.
Chapter 17: The Chinese Return
Lunar Quarantine Facility
Drake was working late, eating dinner at his desk, when the news came. Major Keating’s message popped up on his screen. “The Chinese are back. Please come to my office.”
Drake lost no time doing just that. The major stood as Drake entered and waved him towards a seat, Drake could hardly contain himself.
“The Chinese? When? Where from?”
“Slow down, sir. We got a signal from the gravitational observatory out at the Sun-Jupiter L3 point. They picked up what looks like the characteristic ripple of a ship coming out of warp. That was confirmed by the LIGO-3 observatory. Several of our listening stations then also picked up a radio signal.”
“What did it say?”
“It was encrypted, but it was clearly Chinese. Yours was the only other warp mission we know of. We’ve got our deep space telescopes scanning the area.”
“Any idea where they went?”
“Hard to be sure, but given where in the sky t
hey appeared, it was probably either Tau Ceti or Epsilon Eridani.” The two constellations, Cetus and Eridanus, were adjacent, Drake knew. “Epsilon Eridani is closer by a bit over a light year, and we know it has planets and asteroid belts.” He paused for a moment, thinking. “Hell, it and Tau Ceti are only five light years apart. They could almost have gone to both, but it wouldn’t leave them much sightseeing time.”
“Epsilon Eridani is a crowded system. That’s taking a big risk.”
“Tau Ceti has a dust disk too, but thinner. Maybe almost as crowded, maybe not. But if they faked the explosion at Alpha Centauri, the risk is less than we think it is. I’m sure they took it cautiously.”
“Epsilon Eridani is what, eleven light years away?”
“Ten-point-five, but close enough.”
“That’s a good five or six weeks in warp,” Drake said, “unless they’ve managed to improve our design. Each way.”
“They would have left not long before you returned. I’m a little surprised they didn’t wait for your data.”
“They had no reason to think it would have any bearing on them. They already knew the warp drive worked, the Xīng Huā made it most of the way to Alpha Centauri. Was it the Xīng Huā?”
“We don’t know yet, but we suspect not. If they reverse-engineered the warp modules, it might not have been flyable,”. The major paused, as though deciding how much he should say. “They could have had one or more ships ready to go as soon as they manufactured their own. We know they were close anyway.”
Drake considered this. Yes, that was likely the case. They had the external and interface specs from building the Xīng Huā. It wouldn’t have been too hard to build something which just needed the warp modules plugged in. So, the Chinese had warp-capable ships. That raised a possibility.
“What are the chances we could persuade them to send a ship out to Alpha Centauri, to recover the international crew?”
Alpha Centauri: The Return (T-Space Alpha Centauri Book 3) Page 10
