The Orphan in Near-Space (The Space Orphan Book 2)

by Laer Carroll

  Jane's boss glanced at Jane's suitcase. She rose, taking a phone from her robe pocket.

  "Have your cab drop you off at the South gate to the base. A military police vehicle will take you to the hangar where your plane is housed. Keep me posted, Captain."

  Jane rose too.

  "Thank you, Sir. Daily. Or hourly, if need be."

  "Safe trip, Captain."

  <>

  The General had also called the Peterson air traffic control tower and given Jane a Level Two priority for taking off from the base. Jane was soon in the air.

  It took over two hours to near the Los Angeles area. At last she passed over the San Gabriel mountain range to the north of the long east-west corridor named for the range. Below stretched the golden lights of that long valley. Jane notified Kate of her near approach.

  Thirty minutes later Princess dropped down out of the night sky to the plaza between the reception building and the tall headquarters building across the plaza to the north.

  Kate and Klaus were waiting as Princess folded her wings into a tent above her body and floated to rest on the white concrete, blazing with lights despite the early morning hour.

  "Captain. Glad you're home."

  She turned and began to walk the three blocks to the building housing the Mission Control Center, Jane walking with her. As they did so Klaus entered Princess and took off for the short quarter-mile trip down the hill to park on one of the two concrete landing pads which Jane's group shared with the local fire department.

  Inside the half-lit room was calmly busy. Kate led Jane to three low cubicles at the third row of cubicles where her four crew members had been assigned seats for the duration of the emergency. Kate had Jane sit in Klaus's seat. Nicole and Riku greeted her.

  "So, what's this artifact? And how was it discovered?"

  Nicole said, "It's a habitat. Quite old to judge from the meteoric erosion of its outside. It's embedded in the largest rock in the Rosaceae group of asteroids. They're named that because the rocks have a pinkish appearance."

  Riku said, "The group was picked because spectroscopic evidence suggested it had both water ice and metals."

  Nicole said, "And they were proved right. This may be why aliens chose this group as a place to build on."

  "So where is this habitat?"

  "On this one."

  She tapped out a command on her computer keyboard. The screen lit up with a pinkish potato-shaped rock on a black background. It was about 600 miles wide and 1000 miles as long according to the white rulers superimposed over the image. It had a surface scored by meteorite strikes.

  In the center of the view a white square was visible. Jane took hold of the old-fashioned mouse beside the keyboard and used it to zoom in on the square.

  It looked like the roof of a building with smoothly rounded corners.

  She zoomed in closer and the image became fuzzier.

  "Any closer views?"

  Nicole edged Jane aside long enough to bring up a video taken from a drone flying down and then around the "building." Jane studied the image. A white ruler imposed over it showed it to be about the size of an American football field.

  "Then they found a door. Here's that image."

  The next drone view was from the ground. The building, if that was what it was, was about ten feet tall, according to another superimposed ruler image. The drone might be a dozen feet from the artifact.

  Looking closely Jane could be seen a faint door-shaped outline on the side of the building. On one side of it at about waist height, if it was a human-sized building, was an ordinary-looking handle. On the side of the door about head height was a blank panel.

  Riku said, "That panel might be a video screen when operating."

  On screen a metal arm reached out a hand, grasped the handle, and twisted it first one way then the other. On the "other" twist the handle turned. The door opened. The view expanded as the drone entered what was soon obviously an airlock.

  On the opposite side from the door was another door with a handle. Beside it was another blank panel. The drone approached the door and the scene froze.

  Riku said, "The drone is pretty smart but it had to get further instructions. It takes about 45 minutes after it asks for a command for the question to get to us. Then it takes another 45 for it to get an answer.

  "But it was three hours before a group here decided to open the inside door just enough to see if air escaped through it into the air lock, which it's pretty likely this room is. Considering the volume of the building, the expansion of any air into the lock wouldn't decrease the overall air volume that much."

  On screen the robot hand turned the handle of the inside door. There was no out rush of air. Instead the door opened a bit.

  Nicole pointed at the side of the door that had popped away from the air lock a few inches.

  "See how the edges are shaped? Any pressure on the inside of the building would just seal it tighter."

  Jane nodded. Beveled edges on airlock doors were a standard feature.

  Nicole restarted the video. The room lit by the lights of the drone was about the size and shape of a human living room. It was perfectly bare. There was no dust on the floor, from what Jane could see when the drone "looked" down at it.

  There were openings into two halls. The drone took one.

  For the next half hour the drone explored. It found dozens of other rooms of different sizes and shapes. All were equally bare and clean.

  Nicole stopped the video.

  "The entire first floor was like that. No need to see all of it just yet. They sent in three other drones. Together they completely mapped the top three floors. Here are the architectural diagrams.

  "See this?" She put a cursor on part of a diagram. "There are four of them inside the building. They look like entrances to an elevator. Of course we won't know for sure right now.

  "But that was suggestive enough that the drone operators had one drone take one of several stairways down as far as it would go. If there are no more floors below the bottom floor found then the building has 32 floors. Maybe there is more below accessible through hatches, like machinery serving the upper parts of the structure. But so far no evidence of that was found."

  Riku said, "One of the researchers here got an idea. She asked for one of the aerial, erh, spatial, drones to circle the rock. It was a good guess. Look at this."

  At a command on his terminal an image came alight. It showed the rock slowly turning. Dotted all over it were superimposed white squares, hundreds of them.

  "You can't see them because, unlike the first building's top, they are covered in dust. But there are more buildings. Cap, This asteroid is a city. A big one. And this is just the surface. Who knows what's further inside."

  Jane rolled back the ergo chair she'd borrowed from a nearby workstation.

  "Surveyor has its work cut out for them."

  Kate said, "Including keeping this secret until the right time to announce it."

  Riku said, "They can't keep this secret too long. It's bound to leak eventually no matter how hard they try."

  Jane said, "For now this is our top priority. No mention of this to our family and friends."

  Kate said, "We're obviously going to be up to something, with our late hours and excitement we can't hide. Best to say something like--"

  Riku said, "We're on a fun new project. Tell you all about it soon but for now, suffer!"

  Everyone laughed. Jane said, "OK, that has the virtue of the truth and making light of it maybe will shield you from pressure. But it's serious. No leaks.

  "One last question. Any indication of how old this installation is?"

  Klaus raised his hand.

  "The surface of the building shows that something impacted it and knocked loose most of its dust covering. What remains was contact welded in place by the weight of the dust above it. In the very low gravity of the asteroid that would take many hundreds of years. Photos of tops of some of the other buildings sho
w erosion from meteorite impacts going back thousands of years."

  "So," said Riku. "No bug-eyed aliens living inside the asteroid ready to come at us with their claws.

  "About that, Captain. Nicky has something she's got to tell you."

  Jane turned toward Nicole. She turned toward her computer screen and brought up an image.

  "A drone discovered this on the third floor. Otherwise the floor like all the others was perfectly empty and clean."

  In the video the two hands of a drone reached down and carefully picked up an object and brought it up into the focus of its headlights.

  "The Surveyor crew had the drone video it from all angles, including some from very close, before they gave it the command to pick it up. They halfway expected it to fall apart."

  In the near zero-g environment of the asteroid the forces applied to the object would be slight when picked up. Still, if Jane's suspicions of the age of the asteroid city were true, "falling apart" had been likely.

  It hadn't.

  The robot gently turned the object in several directions. It still survived.

  "It's a doll, Captain," said Riku. "A robodoll. Nothing organic would be as sturdy."

  A laughing centaur danced before her. It was blue and had cat ears and close blue fur on most of its body. It wore an armless and legless swim suit as it shook off the water from the swimming pool behind it. From the pool a smaller version of it splashed her with water.

  The memory was gone.

  Jane's words were soft and slow. "This is what lived here. Cat centaurs. Why were they here? Why did they leave?"

  Nicole said, "Someday we'll find out, Boss. I'm sure. But notice what it has on its neck."

  She tapped a virtual button and the screen showed the doll from above. Around its neck were a ribbon and a bow positioned atop the ribbon. They were bright red.

  Riku said, "This tells us a lot about their basic psychology--if it's not some kind malicious fake clue. They were like us.

  "And if that ribbon is organic, and can survive having a bit of it snipped off, the mothership's lab may be able to carbon-14 date it."

  <>

  It could. The ribbon was 19,000 years old.

  Chapter 16 - Hyperspace

  EXCERPT from Entertainment Channel 17 - All the News all the Time

  "Dr. Hawthorne, thank you for an interview so quickly after your group released your report on the asteroid city in the Rose group of asteroids."

  "Happy to be here."

  "I'm sure our audience will want to read the entire report. But they'd appreciate a quick rundown of some of the results."

  The attractive blond interviewer held up a bound report about a half inch thick.

  "First, what do you say to the people who are concerned about bacterial or viral infection?"

  "Happily, we are safe. The Cattus Centaurus, or Cats in popular terms, do have a DNA-like genetic basis. But the components are different. Comparing us to them is like, not apples and oranges, but apples and pine cones.

  "Besides, they vanished 19,000 years ago."

  "Is that number certain?"

  "There has been a good deal of argument about that. But IF it it's valid in this case, it's a good approximation."

  "But we still might encounter them."

  "I'd love to. But after that long a time...?"

  He waggled a hand in a maybe-so maybe-no gesture.

  "The doll that was found looks a bit like the centaurs of our legends. Is there a chance that the Cats visited us and provoked those tales?"

  "Of course. But the mythic tales are based on horses, which is a natural view that primitive people might have when they saw horse riders the first time.

  "Besides, none of the tales mention the centaurs having the blue color of Cats."

  "If the cat-doll owners were themselves like the doll."

  "True. But if the owners were anything like us they made their dolls in their own image."

  "It will be interesting if we ever have a chance to find out. Now, on a related matter, ...."

  END EXCERPT

  <>

  Jane and her crew were quite busy after the announcement of the discovery in the asteroids, Jane especially with her background in space jets. More knowledge of the technology of those devices was propagating, but it was still within the channels the US insisted on to keep the tech from hostile countries.

  This most especially included the most radical of the three Chinese splinter countries, The One True Most Glorious Realm of the People of Light. This country had captured the southeast part of the country. The officials of that country often complained loud and long about "being denied their rightful part" of the "bounties of space."

  A consortium of countries organized to send a human expedition to the asteroids. The spacecraft design they eventually chose resembled the NASA Surveyor mothership but on a much larger scale. As with the earlier effort, it began as a framework constructed in space from parts made on Earth. Then parts were added made up of rounded-end cylinders, spheres, boxes, and pipes to provide life support, energy storage and distribution, and so on.

  Crucial to the design was a four-spoked wheel with a "can" at the end of each spoke. Once the spaceship arrived at the asteroids the wheel would rotate to provide artificial gravity. Until then the "cans" at the end of the spokes were ratcheted down to the body of the craft and turned so that their "down" was toward the back of the craft. The space jets would operate at continuous one-gravity acceleration on the trip for a little over three days then decelerate a little less than three days.

  It would take only a year to build the spacecraft after the design was OK'd, a tribute to the Rapid Manufacturing theories.

  <>

  Meanwhile Jane was busy with a private project which she spent time on during weekends: communication via hyperspace.

  Her brief memory of coming out of a hyperspace tunnel was still clear in Robot's memory. She revisited it often. She was sure it was an actual memory instead of a fictional product of the advanced society which had engendered her, something like the popular Star Battles movies.

  She might be wrong. But her hyperspace theory seemed sound to her. A few mostly younger physicists at CalTech agreed. She and they were persuasive. More and more physicists around the world became enthusiastic about it, despite its contravention of Relativity.

  Early one morning, lying beside Phil, she dozed and turned her mind once again to the latest iteration of her theory. Idly she reflected on how it related to her space-jet theory.

  If she...adapted a space jet...this way...it might....

  She sat upright. Phil shifted and made a quiet sound of protest. Jane became perfectly still.

  When he subsided fully back into sleep Jane carefully left the bed and went into his study. One laptop on a table in a corner was hers. She typed quickly, capturing the essence of her ideas. Done she printed the document out on one of his printers.

  She took the document down to his kitchen and made hot chocolate. Sipping it in the living room, her feet up on the coffee table in front of the couch, she read it over.

  She put it down and stared at the far wall with its big-screen wall-mounted TV. She did not see it. Instead she was seeing a hyperspace communicator and watching it work.

  It was worth spending some time and money on trying to build two and seeing if they actually talked to each other.

  <>

  On Monday Jane filled out a standard form to request funding for "Experiments to Test Certain Communication Theories Derived from the Omniverse Hypothesis." She gave it a Confidential classification and sent it to her boss via Space Force encryption for that classification level.

  If it was intercepted and the encryption broken that title might sound innocuous enough to have it discarded. If they read the contents the mention of hyperspace might have the same effect. "Hyperspace" was still something movies used to hand-wave explain impossible processes like super-light-speed travel.

  She had it signed
by Riku and OK'd with her initials, JK. There were plenty of JK's in the Space Force in addition to the genius Jane Kuznetsov so that might also throw off any spies.

  When the funding was approved the Jane Gang went into near full-time effort on the project.

  They had meetings in which the details of the experimental communicators were filled in. Requests for bids on contracts for two orbital sleds were sent out. A tentative schedule was made up for the two sleds to be constructed in orbit, the communicators (made by the Gang) installed, and for the Gang to spend a month on the World Space Station running the communicator tests.

  Meanwhile the project to build the asteroid-exploration spacecraft was going full-speed ahead. The framework of the vehicle was being constructed in orbit ten miles or so ahead of the WSS. Contracts had been let for the parts which would go into the craft. Personnel were being considered for the expedition.

  The tech side of the expedition drew a lot of interest among technology fans. None of it was new. In fact it was fairly old hat (and so considered reliable). But the scale of the project was much larger than anything which had gone before it.

  The personnel side was what drew the most interest--and argument. Every nation wanted someone on the expedition.

  The three Chinese nations were the loudest in their arguments. Finally space for one person from each of them was added to the project. That this might result in a murder or two was a risk the planners accepted. Procedures were put into place to minimize that risk. Among other measures, the personal effects brought up by each of the three would be scrutinized for any innocuous objects which might be cleverly disguised weapons.

  Jane was consulted often by the space-jet engineers assigned to the project. When the several engines were installed she and her crew went up to the Station to help inspect the result. Kate, under Jane's instructions, timed this to coincide with the hyperspace communication tests.

  <>

  At Edwards for their spacesuit tests and refitting Klaus looked critically at Jane as she came out of the fitting back room to the common area where the rest of them waited. They'd all had their suits requalified for space but the crew had stayed around to find out what had happened with their boss.