GALACTIC SURVEY (COLONY Book 3)

by Richard F. Weyand

  They were also getting better at bringing the probe closer in to Arcadia on its return trip, and having the desired exit velocity on transitioning out of hyperspace.

  The time came when they were ready to try the first interstellar flight of the probe. The idea was to program the probe to travel to the nearest star, take some pictures, and return on its own.

  There was a known exoplanet around that star, though it was not suitable for colonization due to an estimated surface gravity of almost four times that of Earth or Arcadia.

  It should make for some nice pictures, though.

  “You think it’s time for that step, gentlemen?” ChaoLi asked.

  Huenemann and JieMin looked at each other. JieMin gave him a tiny nod.

  “Yes, ChaoLi, we think so,” Huenemann said. “We now have the probe entering orbit around Arcadia on its own. It transitions out of hyper when it’s close, gets its bearings, then makes one last trip into hyperspace to hit the right spot. We think we can do the same thing with the exoplanet around Beacon, have it take some pictures, and come back.”

  “And the trip is how long?”

  “Three light-years in each direction. Our calculations given our cruise velocity with the current generation ripple drive are that it will be about an hour each way, including acceleration within hyperspace.”

  ChaoLi looked to JieMin and he nodded. She turned back to Huenemann.

  “And will we get close enough on that first hop for the probe to be able to approach the planet? At both ends, really.”

  “The probe will take two additional bumps in hyperspace if it needs to. It’s pretty adaptive right now.”

  “Has it had to do that already, Karl?”

  “Yes. On that one longer test we did. It missed the mark by quite a bit on the first hop, then it took one to get closer, and another to hit the right place and velocity to cruise into orbit.”

  ChaoLi nodded.

  “All right, then. You may proceed.”

  “Thanks, ChaoLi. Figure early next week.”

  Huenemann clapped his hands and turned to JieMin.

  “This is going to be exciting,” he said.

  “Indeed,” JieMin said.

  That weekend, ChaoLi and JieMin went up to the roof of the apartment building one night. The star the colonists had named Beacon was the closest star to Arcadia, and by far the brightest star in the night sky. It blazed above them.

  “All the way there and back, in two hours. That will be pretty amazing, JieMin.”

  “Yes. It is finally coming about. It’s been twenty years since I first saw hyperspace in my mind, but it is finally coming about.”

  “What about the other colonies? Have JongJu’s people reported their findings yet?”

  “No,” JieMin said. “We’re looking at mid to late next week.”

  “Now that we have a way to get there, we need a place to go.”

  “I know. Aaron Barkley has the first two colonies nailed down to within fifty light years or so. We need to get the new probe built, with the radio direction finder equipment, and we should be able to find them.”

  “And the others?” ChaoLi asked.

  “We’ll see what MinYan and her accounting team have come up with next week. Then we’ll see.”

  The hyperspace probe was all fueled and ready to go on Monday morning. They started it on its way with its rocket engine, getting it moving away from the planet. It would take the best part of a day to move far enough away from the planet for a hyperspace transition to be safe, performed without tearing the probe apart.

  On Tuesday morning, they were ready to start the hyperspace portion of the test. The multiple test flights they had done over the last few weeks had become routine. For this first interstellar flight, though, everyone was gathered in the control room at the hyperspace project headquarters adjacent to the Arcadia City Shuttleport.

  “Flight profile is loaded and the probe reports ready,” the communications technician said.

  “Send the initiation command,” Huenemann said.

  “Initiation command sent.”

  A few seconds later, he reported again.

  “Acknowledgement received. Comm link to the probe is gone.”

  Huenemann turned to ChaoLi and JieMin.

  “Time for coffee and donuts. We got a couple hours before it gets back.”

  “We know for sure that it transitioned?” ChaoLi asked.

  “Yes. A little trick the comm people started playing. They leave the carrier on the probe’s transmitter on at reduced power. But they can see when the probe transitions because they lose the carrier.”

  “I see,” ChaoLi said. “So we have a couple hours now?”

  “Yeah. I had them put out refreshments in the conference room. Might as well be comfy.”

  An hour and forty-five minutes later, they were back in the control room, in the observer seats in the back of the room. It was about fifteen minutes later when the communications technician spoke up.

  “I have carrier. The probe is reporting its return. It’s downloading pictures.”

  They all looked to the big display on the front wall. It was another minute before a picture popped up on the display. It showed a star with a planet in the foreground.

  “Spectral analysis of the picture indicates this is Beacon or a star of the same class,” one of the analysis people said.

  After a minute, another picture took its place. This one showed the star rising from behind the planet.

  “Ooo. Sunrise,” ChaoLi said. “On an alien planet. I like that one.”

  New pictures continued to appear on one-minute intervals. ChaoLi turned to Huenemann.

  “You’re to be congratulated, Karl. You and your whole team. This is tremendous.”

  “And funding for the new probe?” Huenemann asked.

  “With a success like this under your belt, that becomes much more likely. I will let you know.”

  ChaoLi and JieMin got on the Arcadia City Shuttleport bus back to town. The bus’s route ringed the shuttleport, and passed directly in front of the hyperspace project facility.

  They were not the only people on the bus, so they did not talk any specifics about the project.

  “What now?” JieMin asked.

  “For all it’s been a tremendous day, it is not yet noon,” ChaoLi said. “I have put in a request to meet with the Chen, and will report in this afternoon. What about you?”

  “The accounting people will be giving me their report tomorrow morning. Until then, I’m sort of at loose ends.”

  “So we go back home and have lunch. I’ll give my report, and then we can have the rest of the afternoon together.”

  “That would be nice.”

  Chen Zufu accepted ChaoLi’s meeting request for just after lunch, and asked that she bring JieMin along. When they arrived at Chen Zufu’s tea room, Chen Zumu was also there.

  Chen MinChao was still Chen Zufu, and Jessica Chen-Jasic was still Chen Zumu. They were now in their mid-70s, and both white-haired, wearing silk robes and seated on pillows before a low table. They would retire soon, JieMin thought. Five years, perhaps, or ten at the most.

  “Be seated, ChaoLi. JieMin.

  “Yes, Chen Zufu.”

  ChaoLi and JieMin sat on pillows on this side of the low table. JieMin allowed ChaoLi to sit on his left – to Chen Zufu’s right and therefore the most honored position – because she had been named first.

  Chen Zufu’s tea girl came in and served all four of them tea, then departed without a word. ChaoLi sipped first, then JieMin, then Jessica, then MinChao, as host, last.

  They were small etiquettes, but, to JieMin, such small things made the world work. Made the big things – the hard things –easier.

  “I understand you have something to report, ChaoLi.”

  “Yes, Chen Zufu.”

  “You may proceed.”

  “Thank you, Chen Zufu.”

  ChaoLi told them of this morning’s successful interstellar te
st of the hyperspace probe. She also sent them the picture of the sunrise of Beacon over the exoplanet Beacon-1.

  “So we have sent the hyperspace probe to another star system, taken pictures, and had it return safely?” Jessica asked.

  “Yes, Chen Zumu.”

  “In two hours?”

  “Yes, Chen Zumu, plus a day on each end to get to and from a safe distance for hyperspace transitions.”

  “That is extraordinary.”

  Jessica turned to JieMin.

  “You are to be congratulated, JieMin. What is it now? Twenty years since you postulated the existence of hyperspace?”

  “Yes, Chen Zumu.”

  “And now here we are. Thanks to your vision.”

  “Thank you, Chen Zumu.”

  Jessica nodded and turned back to ChaoLi.

  “And now the question arises as to what do we do next in the project.”

  “Yes, Chen Zumu.”

  “What do you suggest, ChaoLi?”

  “We need to know that living beings – humans in particular – can survive hyperspace travel, Chen Zumu. We think so. We can’t see any reason why not. But that needs to be tested, starting with some other animals first.”

  “For which we need a probe with a cabin. Like the new design.”

  “Yes, Chen Zumu.”

  Jessica turned to MinChao. He nodded to her and turned to ChaoLi.

  “Do you have the current income spreadsheet for the project, ChaoLi?”

  “Of course, Chen Zufu.”

  “Send it to me, please.”

  ChaoLi sent him the income statement from her project subsystem of the family’s accounting system. MinChao’s eyes became unfocused as he worked through it in his heads-up display. He worked several minutes, then focused once again on ChaoLi.

  “If we have accomplished interstellar flight, our advance payments from the government increase. Can we prove those pictures are authentic?”

  ChaoLi looked at JieMin, and he stirred.

  “I believe we can, Chen Zufu. The computer people at the university have some software for analyzing images for artifacts of editing. We helped them with the mathematics a few years back.”

  “Excellent,” MinChao said.

  He looked to Jessica, and she nodded slightly. He turned back to ChaoLi.

  “You may build two of the new probes, ChaoLi.”

  “Thank you, Chen Zufu.”

  “And, once again, excellent job. Both of you.”

  “Thank you, Chen Zufu.”

  “So what do we do for the rest of the afternoon?” JieMin asked when they got back to their apartment.

  “Beach,” ChaoLi said. “It’s been months.”

  “Done.”

  They stripped down and, nude, headed for the bus.

  When they got to the beach, they found that the city government had extended the wide part of the beach almost two miles northward to accommodate the growth of the city, and there were two more bus stops at the beach, one each mile.

  Their secret spot – the secluded cove – was still secluded and private, but it was a much shorter walk from the third bus stop.

  It was a beautiful afternoon for making love on the beach.

  Integration

  The day after the first interstellar test, JieMin was in his office at the University of Arcadia. He had a meeting this morning, but the first thing he did is check with the computer science contact he had from the photo verification work he had done a few years back.

  Sue Gaffney assured him the application they had ultimately come up with was excellent at detecting doctored photos and videos. They had had a university-wide contest to see if someone could fool the software, and no one had been able to do it, in either direction. JieMin asked her if she could send him a link to the software and give him permission on it, and Sue said she would.

  MinYan, FangTao, and JieLing came by about nine o’clock.

  “Come in, come in. Have a seat,” JieMin said.

  When they were seated, he had two questions for them.

  “Was I right? Did you find anything?”

  “You might say that. I might better describe it as a target-rich environment.”

  “Really.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  MinYan raised an eyebrow and gestured to the three-dimensional display at the far end of JieMin’s office. He sent her a temporary control access to the display, which she shared with FangTao and JieLing.

  “We’ll show you what we found,” MinYan said.

  JieLing and FangTao took turns running through the report, which laid out the situation they had described to MinYan the previous Friday. At the end of it, JieMin sat stunned.

  “All these firms?” JieMin asked, waving at the screen.

  “Fake,” MinYan said. “What we call false fronts.”

  “But there must be hundreds of them.”

  “With thousands of employees. Who were also all fake. Fake investment houses, engineering firms, law firms,....”

  “Law firms?”

  “Yes,” MinYan said. “To file the documents, obtain zoning permits, fend off lawsuits. ‘Oh, that was filed by John Smith, the lawyer from Smith, Jones, and Clark. He has his law degree from such-and-such university law school.’ All fake.”

  “All fake?”

  “Well, the university was real. The diploma, John Smith, and his law firm were all fake.”

  “But why?” JieMin asked.

  “To hide where the money was coming from and where it was going. And how much of it. The total amount of money spent on the colony project was staggering. They spent over a year’s planetary domestic product on the colony project. Granted that was over about twenty years, but even so.”

  “So these people – these fake people – just popped into existence? I mean, in the documentation.”

  “No, not exactly,” MinYan said. “They have full bios and everything. Birth records. Where they went to school. That sort of thing. But there’s no presence on any public forums, no prior publications, no prior tax records, no relatives, no spouses, no kids, and then – Voila! – there they are.”

  JieMin shook his head. It just didn’t make sense.

  “Doesn’t it take a lot of work to generate a false identity like that?” he asked. “Plus illicit access to multiple databases and such? You’re talking about a lot of work there, and not a little risk.”

  “Yes. Absolutely. It would have taken thousands of people working non-stop to pull this off. But we can’t find any leaks. No project money going to some shadowy group. No apparent financial motive. No nothing.”

  “This is bewildering. Why not just have all those people working on the project? They had to know the law, or engineering, or finance in order to pull it off. Why do it at one level remove if you need to have all the expertise anyway? You just add all the extra work of generating and maintaining the false fronts.”

  “And that is the big open question,” MinYan said. “What was the motivation for this ruse? As you say, it doesn’t make any sense. The accounting can’t tell us motivations, though. It can only tell us what they did, not why they did it.”

  “All right. Well, thank you very much for doing this investigation. I thought I was seeing something unusual, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.”

  “You’re very welcome, Professor Chen. And if you do find out the why, please fill us in. We’re dying to know.”

  JieMin nodded and the accounting team left.

  That afternoon, JieMin sat in front of the display running through all the exhibits. The lists of potentially false-front firms. The lists of potentially fake persons. The diagrams of the cash flows.

  The list of potentially fake persons held a few surprises. It listed Anthony Lake and Donald Shore among them. How could they be fake persons? They invented the Lake-Shore Drive.

  Or did they? Did someone else invent it, some other team, and then invent those two people to name it after, giving them the credit for others’ work? That didn�
�t seem likely.

  It also listed Janice Quant among the potentially fake persons. How could that be? She was the Chairman of the World Authority. She appeared hundreds of times, before millions of people. Didn’t she?

  JieMin also looked at diagrams of the cash flows. The amount of money was staggering. Prior to Janice Quant becoming Vice Chairman of the World Authority, and using government monies for the project, the money was all coming out of the stock market, through dozens of investment houses, all of which were false fronts. Those investment houses as a group outperformed all other investment houses in the marketplace by phenomenal margins.

  The diagrams flagged one place where the money went with no connection to the project. Bernd Decker’s computer project. Billions upon billions of credits spent, with no apparent utility to the project or anyone else. No papers published. No documentation of the architecture.

  JieMin pushed down into the documents behind those numbers. He found invoices – lots of invoices – for hardware purchases, extending over the life of the project.

  Wait a minute.

  JieMin starting flipping through the invoices, maintaining a running total in his head. When he finished, he just stared at the display. Two hundred and fifty thousand advanced multiprocessor blades. He thought the biggest computer on Arcadia was several hundred multiprocessor blades.

  What the hell did one do with two hundred and fifty thousand multiprocessor blades and not have it show up anywhere?

  On Thursday when he got to the office, JieMin checked his messages and found the login Sue Gaffney sent him for the photo/video analysis software. She had actually sent it to him yesterday morning, right after they had talked, but he hadn’t checked messages. He had just been too absorbed in the accounting report.

  JieMin ran all the pictures from the first interstellar run of the hyperspace probe through the analyzer, and it verified they were all unmodified, unfabricated images. He sent the results of that analysis to ChaoLi.

  Then it occurred to him. Why not use the image analysis software against the news wire videos from the colony project?