GALACTIC SURVEY (COLONY Book 3)

by Richard F. Weyand

  There were listings of the colony names. The first drop-offs, Amber and Earthsea. Arcadia. And the ones that came after Arcadia in the drop-offs: Aruba, Avalon, Atlantis, Bali, Dorado, Endor, Fiji, Hawaii, New Earth, Nirvana, Numenor, Olympia, Playa, Quant, Samoa, Spring, Summer, Tahiti, Terminus, Tonga, and Westernesse.

  But there was no listing of the colonies’ physical locations.

  Anywhere.

  How curious was that? It couldn’t have been accidental, JieMin decided. The locations of the other colonies had not just been unknown to the colonists. They had been deliberately obscured. Which made it really difficult for them to travel to the other colonies once they had hyperspace ships completed.

  Maybe that was the whole point of obscuring them.

  But these were Earth records, copied to the colony library before they left. Did that mean Earth did not know where the colonies were, either? It seemed incredible to JieMin. What could be the motivation behind such a move? And who could have enforced it? Dozens, maybe hundreds, of people must have known.

  JieMin broke for the day with more questions than answers.

  JieMin and ChaoLi rode the Arcadia Boulevard bus home together in the evening, as was their habit. They were both dressed in office clothes, he in a tropical print shirt and slacks, taking his cue from the former head of the math department, Klaus Boortz, she in a business suit appropriate for the head of the project. They didn’t speak of business matters in the public venue of the bus, because everything they were working on was secret.

  When they got home, LeiTao, their second child and bank baby, was stir frying dinner. At fifteen, she was working now, too, but she worked in the Uptown Market across the street and got home much earlier. JieMin and ChaoLi changed into lavalavas, and dinner was ready when they came back to the kitchen.

  Their eldest daughter ChaoPing had married JuMing last year, so it was just the six of them for dinner now – JieMin, ChaoLi, LeiTao, the twelve-year-old twin boys YanMing and YanJing, and their youngest son JieJun, who was now eight.

  Dinner was all family talk about school for the boys, and work and school for LeiTao. Everyone helped clean up after dinner, and then the boys were off to their room. LeiTao also excused herself to her room to do schoolwork.

  “You seem distracted,” ChaoLi said once the kids were gone.

  “I am having some trouble finding data in the archives,” JieMin said.

  “Something wrong with the archives or the search tools?”

  “No, that’s all fine. The data simply isn’t there.”

  “Is it data that should be there?” ChaoLi asked.

  “I would think so. We know, for example, that there is nothing in the archives for the Lake-Shore Drive. I looked for that years ago. And it makes sense that it was a secret, because it has huge potential as a weapon.

  “I’ve always been surprised, though, that Earth hasn’t been here. Hasn’t stopped by, either as conqueror or friend. They have the Lake-Shore Drive, right? They could stop by at some point. But they haven’t.

  “Now I’m wondering if they can.”

  “What do you mean?” ChaoLi asked.

  “What if they don’t know where we are?”

  “How could they not know where we are? They dropped us off here, right?”

  “Yes and no,” JieMin said. “Someone from Earth dropped us off here. Someone from Colony Headquarters. But the copies of the Earth archives for the colony project do not contain the data for the locations of the colonies. Someone dropped us off, yes, but it appears they may have kept exactly where a secret.”

  “That’s incredible.”

  “Yes. And now I wonder if Earth even has the Lake-Shore Drive. Perhaps they kept that a secret, too. Used the Lake-Shore Drive to drop us all off, and then destroyed it. In any case, neither of those pieces of information are in our copy of the Earth’s archives. Anywhere.”

  “So now what do you do?” ChaoLi asked.

  “One obvious thing is to figure out what other data is missing.”

  “But how do you do that? Do you know what should be there? How do you figure out what is missing if you don’t know what should be there?”

  “I don’t know,” JieMin said. “I suppose one way is to look at everything I can, follow my nose, until I run into a gap I can recognize.”

  He thought about it for a bit.

  “Another thing might be to look at the people who started the whole project, see if I can find out what their actual goals were, to see if I can find the motive to hide things.”

  He shrugged.

  “Really, I just don’t know.”

  The next day, JieMin spent the morning following the first path. He set the display to project documents, and to read them to him, while he watched and let them wash over him.

  Whenever JieMin found something interesting, he would pause that document and open another on the new interesting thing he had seen. He then let that document wash over him until he found something interesting, open a new document, and continue.

  JieMin was performing something of a random walk through the colony program documents, not knowing what he was looking for, but hoping he recognized it when he saw it. Or that a later integration of what he had seen would change his view of the project and bring some enlightenment.

  JieMin spent the entire morning viewing documents in this way. One thing was clear, the colony effort was a massive undertaking. The sheer scope of the effort, across the entire planet’s economy, was staggering.

  In the afternoon, JieMin followed the other tack, researching the backgrounds of the people who dreamed up and pushed the project in the first place.

  These weren’t at all obvious on first glance. JieMin had to dig back into the project, to its earliest days, to the earliest planning. A number of big corporations had been involved.

  Russ Porter, the CEO of Colorado Manufacturing Corporation had been involved. Ted Burke, billionaire industrialist and the majority owner of a number of large companies, including Lunar Mining & Materials, had been involved. And computer innovator Bernd Decker had been involved. Others had come along later, but these three were there very early on in the project.

  JieMin began reviewing the biographies and writings of these three men, who seemed to be there from the very beginning of the project. They were all public men, and there was a lot of material, including articles they had written, speaking engagements, and interviews.

  What had been their purpose – their real purpose – and had they achieved it?

  JieMin had a gift. Once his mind had seen enough of the pieces of a puzzle, the picture would snap together. He called these reorderings of things in his mind integrations, for lack of a better term. He didn’t know how his gift worked, and he was afraid to look into it too deeply, lest he break it.

  But JieMin knew how his mind worked, and how to use it. As he had gotten older, he had also gotten patient. If his mind didn’t produce an integration right away, it was because it didn’t have enough data.

  Day after day, JieMin viewed document after document – in the mornings those about the later stages of the project, and in the afternoons those about or written by the people involved from the very beginning of the project.

  JieMin was two weeks into his review of project documents when the first integration came. It was Friday night, when he had set the project aside for the weekend. He and ChaoLi had just finished making love, and he lay in the afterglow. That was a familiar time for an integration, as his mind was completely off his project and the integration could come freely.

  All of a sudden, he had it. A piece of it, anyway.

  JieMin got up and went over to the big armchair in their bedroom and started writing furiously in his notebook. When ChaoLi came back from the bathroom, and she saw him scribbling in the big armchair under the light, she knew better than to interrupt, and went back to bed.

  The kids had left the breakfast table, and JieMin and ChaoLi were sitting over their tea when she brought it
up.

  “Did you have an integration last night, JieMin?”

  “Yes. A small one, anyway. About the real purpose of the project.”

  “And what was their purpose?”

  “To solve the extinction-event problem,” JieMin said. “That isn’t much of a revelation. I mean, Janice Quant said as much in her inauguration speech on becoming World Authority Chairman. She said the goal of the project was to ‘Set mankind on a more secure footing against a global catastrophe.’ So it was out in the open, but you can never trust what a politician says.”

  “Yet you think that was their actual goal?”

  “Yes. The industrialist Ted Burke had written or spoken about the problem prior to the beginning of the project. How one global catastrophe could be an extinction event for the human race. And the computer guy, Bernd Decker, worked on massively parallel and survivable systems. So he knew about multiply redundant systems. It just all clicked together. I had been hesitant to accept Quant’s statement as the deeper truth, but I think it was. It all ties together.”

  “What does that mean for why they hid the data?”

  “I don’t know yet. That work is still ongoing. No integrations there yet.”

  That weekend was spent on family activities. On Saturday, JieMin and ChaoLi took a picnic lunch to the park with the boys, while LeiTao was off to the beach with her boyfriend. On Sunday, ChaoPing and JuMing came over for a big dinner in the early afternoon. It was nice to have everyone back together, and they spent the afternoon chatting. A quiet Sunday evening, and JieMin was back at it Monday morning.

  After his integration of Friday night, JieMin set aside the research into the founders of the project, and concentrated on the documentation of the later stages of the project.

  JieMin also had to help out the rest of his hyperspace math team as they closed in on a set of recommendations for the modifications to the hyperspace field generator to implement the ripple drive. One of the ideas they had come up with was to vary the field strength by a greater amount on one side of the probe than the other, which would allow the device to make turns in hyperspace. JieMin helped them work out a way to do that without having to rebuild the hyperspace field generator from scratch.

  As a result of this other work, JieMin couldn’t spend all his time on the colony project documentation, but it was his major concentration over the next two weeks.

  It would have been a curious exercise to watch JieMin work. He simply sat and stared into the three-dimensional display in his office. Text documents, videos, audio recordings played in the display, one after the other, seemingly at random. All of these played very fast, at one-point-five or one-point-seven-five times normal speed. JieMin stared into the display and let the wave of information wash over him.

  JieMin, of course, was selecting which documents he would watch. He would select anything which piqued his interest. He often tagged multiple portions of something he was watching for follow-up, and then run down those strands later.

  As JieMin watched, he continued to be amazed at the scope of the project. At how many things had been impacted. Following the project documentation into the project’s nooks and crannies, he was impressed with how thorough the effort had been. How much research had been done. How many people had been involved.

  As he more completely understood the full scope of the project, one question kept rising in JieMin’s mind.

  Where the hell had all the money come from?

  Propulsion

  Karl Huenemann looked at the specification for the hyperspace field generator that came out of Chen JieMin’s hyperspace mathematics group about a month after JieMin’s original conceptual breakthrough.

  The modifications they had made to the existing hyperspace field generator amounted to generating a standing wave within the hyperspace field, and then driving that standing wave slightly off its harmonic frequency. That would cause the standing wave to move along the hyperspace field from front to back or back to front, depending on whether one drove the standing wave slightly above or slightly below the harmonic frequency.

  Not only did they have a drive, they had reverse. Not a minor consideration. Slowing down would probably be smart as you approached your destination.

  Huenemann shook his head. Generating a standing wave in the field would not be a problem. He recalled ruefully how much work they had done to eliminate standing waves when first building the hyperspace field generator design they had. Had they not been able to get rid of the standing wave, they might have stumbled on the ripple drive by accident three years ago.

  Well, they had it now. He scheduled a meeting with Mikhail Borovsky to plan and schedule the work.

  They had modified the original probe to allow refueling of the device in orbit. The lift to orbit of the fuel alone was much cheaper than lifting the entire fueled device every test. For the modifications, though, they sent the big space-capable cargo shuttle up to orbit to retrieve the device and bring it back to the hyperspace facility next to the Arcadia City Shuttleport.

  With the device back on the ground, technicians set to work exposing and then modifying the hyperspace field generator.

  At the weekly meeting two weeks later, ChaoLi posed the question.

  “Where do you stand with the hyperspace field generator modifications, Karl?”

  “We’re almost done. We should be able to launch the probe next week.”

  “That leaves the question of the flight profile. What do you recommend?”

  Huenemann considered before answering.

  “That’s something of a problem. If we turn the drive on for too long, we will have to wait quite a while to find out what happened. If we turn it on for half an hour and the probe moves two light months, we’ll have to wait two months to even hear whether the probe survived. On the other hand, if we turn it on for too short a time, we don’t really learn much about the multiplier, because we don’t know what the delay will be before it kicks in.”

  JieMin stirred, and ChaoLi turned to him and raised an eyebrow.

  “I think we should separate the tests,” he said. “We really have three things to test here. One, will the drive work to move the probe at all? Two, what is the velocity curve of the probe under the ripple drive relative to space-time? And three, can we maneuver the probe in hyperspace by varying the ripple amplitude on one side of the device compared to the other? I think we should take these one at a time. Otherwise we get into the trouble Karl suggests in setting up the tests.”

  ChaoLi turned back to Huenemann. He was nodding.

  “I can sign up for that,” he said. “So for the first test, we turn on the ripple drive for a minute or two, and see what we get. Right?”

  JieMin nodded.

  “Perhaps only for a few seconds,” he said. “If we can travel at one light-year per hour, say, one minute is six light-days away. It would be almost a week before we heard back. A few seconds might be better, just to see if the drive works at all.”

  “OK, then,” Huenemann said. “We can do that next week.”

  “Excellent,” ChaoLi said. “Let’s plan on that.”

  “Two seconds? That’s it?” Mikhail Borovsky asked.

  “Yeah. Two seconds,” Huenemann told his project manager. “We’ll see how far it goes with just two seconds to start. I mean, if we run it too long and it ends up a light-year away, we won’t even know what happened for a year, and it’ll take a year for our message telling it to come back to even get to it, right?”

  “Right. I got it. Start small, see how far we get, and get an answer right away.”

  “Exactly. We don’t want to shoot this thing over the horizon and not be able to see where it ended up. So program the initial flight profile for two seconds and we’ll see what we get.”

  “OK, Karl. You got it.”

  Tuesday morning the tension was thick in the control room at the hyperspace facility headquarters alongside Arcadia City Shuttleport. They had finished all the testing last week. Yeste
rday they had fueled the device, and the large space-capable shuttle had delivered it to high orbit.

  Once in orbit, they had fired the probe’s rocket engines for seventy-five minutes to get it up to its normal-space cruise velocity. It had spent the rest of the day yesterday and overnight heading farther out from Arcadia, putting enough distance between itself and the gravity well of the planet for safe hyperspace transitions.

  Now it was time for the actual test.

  “Message round-trip time confirms the probe is now at a safe distance.”

  Borovsky looked back to the visitor’s area where Huenemann, JieMin, and ChaoLi watched. Huenemann nodded.

  “All right,” Borovsky said. “Send the message to initiate program. Time that message acknowledgment.”

  “Message sent.”

  Minutes passed.

  “We got an acknowledgement. We can confirm the probe’s current position.”

  In the visitor’s space, ChaoLi turned to Huenemann.

  “Now we wait?” she asked.

  “Now we wait. The longer the wait, the better off we are. A longer wait means it went farther. The probe’s already made the transition, run the drive, and transitioned back. We’re just waiting for its completion message to get back here so we know how far away it ended up.”

  ChaoLi nodded. Strange to think that the probe was already back in normal space, somewhere, and they were just waiting for pokey light-speed radio signals to get back to Arcadia. The time it took that message to get back was their yardstick for the distance traveled with just two seconds of thrust.

  The minutes stretched out as everyone waited. It was nearly an hour after the first message when they got the second.