Alpha Centauri: The Return (T-Space Alpha Centauri Book 3)
Page 21
Sawyer’s report of a possible advanced alien sighting is never made public, instead disappearing into the files of the Union de Terre’s nascent homeworld defense organization.
∞ ∞ ∞
Epsilon Eridani
Very little information ever comes out of China about the voyage of the Xinglong Huā, other than some planetological data and analysis of collected specimens. That it was terraformed is confirmed, on a time-line similar to that of the Alpha Centauri planets. The loss of crewman Wang Wei to an animal attack is also confirmed. No data from the ship’s logs is ever made public, although there are numerous rumors. It is denied that there was ever a second ship.
Two years later, a cautious Union de Terre return mission turns up nothing beyond evidence of the original landing. Most of those who were even aware of the attack rumor write off the story as a fabrication. Some of the more imaginative speculate that it was an automated system left over from the terraforming whose AI had, for lack of a better term, gone crazy over the millennia. It acquires the nickname “the Ben Gunn probe”, after the lone maroonee in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. The tale is regarded as a fanciful legend by the geologists, prospectors and asteroid-miners who later come to visit the surprisingly mineral-rich system.
It would be decades before further details come to light, and then only within the confines of a shadowy intelligence organization.
∞
END BOOK III
This concludes the epic of the crew of the first expedition to Alpha Centauri. The story of the further settlement of the system will continue in Alpha Centauri: Kakuloa.
A review is always appreciated!
Some of the unanswered questions raised in the Alpha Centauri series, including a little about the “shadowy intelligence organization” mentioned in the epilog, are addressed in stories set years after the system is settled, beginning with The Chara Talisman and its sequel The Reticuli Deception (both currently available, with others to follow).
The Jason Curtis short story “Renee (and the Space Raiders)” is also set on Kakuloa, a couple of decades after First Landing.
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