The red dwarf star Gliese 625 and its planet, Gliese 625b.
CHAPTER 5 – GLIESE 625
09:09 (Universal Time)
Wednesday, April 21, 2320
Command bridge of the A.M.S. KOSTROMA
Gliese 625 star system
‘’Jump completed. We are now inside the Gliese 625 System, some five AU from the star.’’
Dana Durning then swiveled her padded chair to look up soberly at Tina, still strapped in her command chair.
‘’There will be no turning back after this mission, Tina. The Koomak Interstellar Drive will change Humanity forever by opening the stars to us.’’
‘’Hopefully, it will stimulate the best in Humanity, rather than the worst.’’ replied Tina, equally sober. Dana was fully right in her prediction and, once they would return to the Solar System and prove that the Koomak Drive was both safe and reliable to use, she expected Humanity to embark at once on an explosive program of interstellar exploration and colonization. Unfortunately, the recent past didn’t bode well about that exploration program being executed by every political entity in the Solar System with the proper caution and respect due to alien life forms which may be found on the way. In the V.I.P. chairs behind Tina, Shalmanazar bent sideways to whisper to Shanandar.
‘’Could we go somewhere to speak in private for a short moment, Captain Shanandar?’’
‘’Of course! Follow me!’’
Coming out of his chair, Shanandar led Shalmanazar down from the command platform and into the small rotunda where the elevator shafts serving the bridge complex ended. There, he opened the door of one of the unisex, single-user washroom compartments of the rotunda and invited the leader of the mining complex survivors in before closing and locking the door behind him.
‘’washrooms and toilet stalls are part of the compartments not watched by cameras and microphones controlled by the ship’s central computer, Spirit. Before you start thinking of that as a sign of encroachment on individual liberties and intimacy, know that those cameras and microphones are in place strictly as safety and security measures, in case some crewmember or passenger suffers an accident or sudden illness. Spirit actually became a good friend of my own ship’s central computer, Shanya, and is a most benevolent entity. Now that I said this, what did you want to discuss in private with me?’’
‘’I wanted to discuss about our host, Captain Forster. Are all Humans like her?’’
Shanandar nearly snickered at that question.
‘’Hardly! She is in fact rather exceptional when compared to the average Human. For one thing, she handled the rescue and salvage of my ship and crew on Eris in a masterful and careful way and always showed me and my compatriots complete honesty and respect. She even consciously risked the wrath of her political leaders in order to protect us and safeguard our knowledge. Now, you must understand that the Humans don’t have a unified leadership. There are factions on Earth that are intensely hostile to Spacers like Tina and would be ready to violently exploit us if they could. Those factions, including the African Union and the Southern Federation, are in fact still in a state of quasi-war with the Spacers League and its main allies on Earth, the Northern Alliance and the European Union. Fortunately, those same factions have been run out from Space and are now confined to the surface of the Earth.’’
‘’I see! So, I can have full confidence in Captain Forster and her promises?’’
‘’In her, yes! She will do the utmost to fulfill the promises she makes, but sometimes, some political leaders in the Solar System may oppose her wishes, in which case Tina may or may not overcome that opposition. As for the rest of the Humans aboard this ship, I have learned to appreciate their friendship, kindness and generosity.’’
Shalmanazar mulled that information for a moment before nodding his head.
‘’Very well, I will trust Captain Forster and her crew to have only the best of intentions for my people. What is going to happen next?’’
‘’We are now on the trail of the SHUNDAR, one of the two other evacuation ships which fled Shouria with my VEON SHOURIA just before the destruction of our home world. The KOSTROMA will explore the Gliese 625 system to see if the SHUNDAR stopped in it to resettle its 22,000 refugees. If no traces of the SHUNDAR are found, then the KOSTROMA will jump to the next planned stop of the SHUNDAR, and then the next one, until we find and join up with it. Once that will be done, we will go search for our third evacuation ship, the SHANIZAR.’’
‘’And when could my people hope to arrive into their new home?’’
‘’It will depend on what we find on our way during this rescue mission. If we find a Koorivar colony created by the crew of the SHUNDAR, then Tina will lend her ship’s assistance to it for a while and will drop your people off at that colony, if that is their wish. If we find no traces of our ships, we will then return to the Solar System, where my own people will be too happy to welcome your people.’’
‘’What about the SHANIZAR? Couldn’t they also have created a colony of their own?’’
‘’No!’’ replied firmly Shanandar, surprising Shalmanazar. ‘’The SHANIZAR’s flight plan called for a 384 year-long trip in Space towards the Ross 128 system. It is presently still traveling through space at high sub-light speed and won’t reach Ross 128 for another 23 years…if all goes well. Captain Forster has thus decided to concentrate her present efforts on finding the SHUNDAR. Once that part of the mission will be completed, the KOSTROMA will go meet the SHANIZAR in mid-Space. In view of the long length of its trip and considering the multiple systems degradation my own ship suffered on its own, shorter trip, the SHANIZAR may well be already a crippled ship.’’
‘’I understand. Let’s hope then that our people in the SHUNDAR will have succeeded in finding a new home for our race.’’
‘’So do I! Maybe we will find something in the Gliese 625 system. Let’s go back to the bridge now.’’
Unfortunately for everyone, the next few hours brought only some discouraging data about the Gliese 625 system. After listening and observing in pure passive mode for one hour, Tina then ordered their active sensors to be switched on, but still did not find anything of interest. Only one planet, Gliese 625b, was visible in the system, orbiting close to its red dwarf star, while an asteroid belt turned around the star at some distance. The planet was a big one, with nearly triple the mass of Earth and was too hot to be habitable, with average surface temperatures of 45-55 degrees Celsius, a dry, desert-like surface and an atmosphere poor in oxygen and barely breathable. Tina finally settled on putting her ship in orbit around Gliese 625b, so that a detailed mapping of the planet could be done, then gave her command chair to Renée d’Argenteuil, the Second Pilot of the KOSTROMA, and left the bridge to go rest and spend some time with her young baby son. On his part, Shanandar also left the bridge at that point, accompanied by Shalmanazar, and went down with him to the old passenger accommodations where the mining complex survivors had been lodged. There, he found the medical experts of his Koorivar crew contingent busy giving medical checks and treatments to the survivors, helped in this by the Human doctors and nurses of the ship. Overall, the medical prognostic of the survivors was guarded at best, with most of them suffering from malnutrition and from long-term conditions that had been left untreated for years. Allied with the nearly non-existent level of formal education of the survivors, all that promised a difficult future for most of them in whatever kind of new life they would find in the weeks and months to come. Shalmanazar broke in tears on realizing that.
‘’My poor people! Even now that we have been saved from our mining complex, we will still have to live through more difficult times.’’
‘’Don’t be too pessimistic, Shalmanazar.’’ said gently Shanandar. ‘’The children in your group still have good chances of being able to readapt to a normal, productive life. Talking of children, where is the young one whom I spotted first in the mine?’’
‘’Kiryn? Uh, let me ask.’’
It took some minutes and questions to a number of Koorivars before they found nine year-old Kiryn, who was being checked by a Koorivar medic. The two adults waited until the medic had finished checking the child, declaring him generally fit apart from being skinny, before Shanandar bent down to speak gently to the child.
‘’Hello Kiryn! You remember me, Captain Shanandar?’’
‘’Yes, I do! What will happen next to me?’’
‘’You and the other survivors will be resettled in a new home world once our search for more survivors from Shouria is completed. Where are your parents, Kiryn?’’
‘’They are dead.’’ answered the child in a downcast voice. ‘’They defended our allocation of food from looters and were killed by them. Many of our people died the same way before we finally got rid of all the looters.’’
‘’I…I am sorry to hear that, Kiryn. Who is taking care of you now?’’
‘’Nobody! I have been surviving by myself for half of my life now.’’
Shanandar was rendered speechless for a moment by that, as tears started rolling on his face. Swallowing hard the big lump in his throat, he then took a decision on an impulse.
‘’Kiryn, would you like to stay with me and my two children, Shazanar and Shanir, and be part of my family?’’
Kiryn looked up at him, then nodded slowly his head without speaking. Next, the child got up from his bench and went to hug Shanandar, who warmly greeted him in his arms.
‘’Come, my child: let’s go find and meet my two other children.’’
Shalmanazar, deeply moved, watched Shanandar and Kiryn walk away. He then mentally thanked the Universe for having people like Shanandar and Tina Forster around.
11:36 (Universal Time)
Thursday, April 22, 2320
Command bridge of the A.M.S. KOSTROMA
In low orbit around planet Gliese 625b
Minh Wa Hien nearly didn’t notice at first the surface feature but quickly retraced her scan to the solitary crater visible on the dry surface of a plateau on Gliese 625b. Using a battery of various sensors, she got some very unusual readings from that crater and shouted out from her sensors station on the bridge.
‘’Renée, I have something here!’’
That attracted at once to her station Renée d’Argenteuil, who was on command watch duty at the time. The tall French woman bent down to look at her sensors screen.
‘’What do you have exactly, Hien?’’
‘’A solitary impact crater in a zone otherwise devoid of craters. My magnetometer is also detecting some metal at the bottom of that crater. Maybe an iron-nickel meteorite slammed down there.’’
‘’Well, this is the first anomaly that we have noticed in a whole day of scanning. Also, I doubt that Tina will be satisfied with a simple ‘maybe’. I am going to call her.’’
Hoping fervently that this crater didn’t mark the end of the Koorivar refugee ship they were looking for, Renée hurried back to the command chair, where she contacted Tina Forster and informed her of their find. That call brought Tina to the bridge in minutes, where she examined the data and pictures gathered by Hien.
‘’This is definitely worth investigating. That crater was made by something quite massive, which impacted at an angle rather than at the near vertical.’’
‘’The surface gravity is a good 1.6 G, while the local temperature is at 53 degrees Celsius, with only nineteen percent of oxygen in the air. Any ground team will need to wear power suits to work in such an environment.’’ warned d’Argenteuil, making Tina nod her head.
‘’Quite right! This sounds like a job for my heroic husband Michel.’’
Both Hien and Renée smiled at those last words.
‘’He is liable to think that you are trying to get rid of him, Tina.’’
‘’Nah! Michel can handle anything. Well, almost anything. We will send him and three other members down in a shuttle to go check that crater. Damn, I hope that this is not marking the tomb of the SHUNDAR.’’
Less than two hours later, a personnel shuttle left its hangar on the KOSTROMA and started its descent through the planet’s atmosphere. Inside, wearing a big, intricate powered spacesuit like his three comrades, Michel Koniev watched the surface grow on the external view cameras of the shuttle. Apart from having a powered exoskeleton, his suit was equipped with both anti-gravity and directed gravity generators, something that was going to allow him to move and work with ease in the normally very difficult conditions found on Gliese 625b. Such powered spacesuits were both very expensive and uncommon and were typically provided only to select crewmembers of a ship. Michel’s security section was part of those select few. While Tina normally didn’t like to see weapons being carried by her crew, Michel had argued with her that, in view of all the unknowns about this planet, some weapons should be carried by his investigative team. He thus had brought with him a space pulse rifle and a pulse pistol, weapons which used rocket-propelled projectiles and rear-facing rocket exhaust ports which made them nearly recoilless in zero-G conditions. His three companions, Leo Sanchez, Ahmed Jibril and Martha Lang, were similarly armed. Martha Lang, as the Third Engineer of the KOSTROMA and its specialist in emergency ship repairs, who had been deemed essential by Michel for this job, thus accompanied the three security men down to the surface.
‘’I see the impact crater ahead! It’s a big one!’’ announced by intercom their pilot, Valentina Suvarova. ‘’ETA in two minutes!’’
‘’Okay! Last equipment check, everybody!’’ said in turn Michel. The three men and one woman then checked each other’s suit and grabbed the bags containing their work tools and portable sensors for their investigation. A soft impact then marked their landing on the rock and sand surface of the planet. Un-strapping themselves and getting out of their padded seats, the four members of the team filed up inside the aft airlock of the shuttle, closing the inner door behind them. Once the pressure with the outside was duplicated, they opened the outer door of the airlock and stepped out, closing firmly the steel door as soon as all four were out. A strong wind blew at once sand against them, making Michel grimace.
‘’Well, this is not exactly my idea of an ideal vacation spot. Let’s check out the conditions out here.’’
‘’Charged particles radiation level is tolerable for short and medium exposure, but quite unhealthy for any prolonged exposure.’’ announced Ahmed Jibril. ‘’The air is also very dry and hot and…what the hell?’’
Michel saw Jibril quickly swat the air in front of his helmet, as if chasing an insect. The reason quickly became evident when Michel had to swipe away a big flying insect which measured a good two centimeters in length and over six centimeters in span from wingtip to wingtip. More flying insects were soon buzzing around the team members.
‘’Hell, these insects make Siberian flies look like mere mosquitoes!’’
‘’Yeah, and a few of them are trying to munch through my suit.’’ added Leo Sanchez. ‘’Good luck to them on that, though.’’
‘’Well, let’s ignore them for the moment. We will however have to be careful to decontaminate ourselves once back in the shuttle. We have no ideas of what kind of microscopic life there is on this planet. Follow me towards the crater.’’
Walking in single file behind Michel, his three companions walked energetically towards the lip of the nearby crater, which had a diameter of about 600 meters and a depth of seventy meters. The layer of sand over the rocky surface was quite thick and made their walking more laborious. Martha Lang suddenly screamed in her microphone while jumping sideways, frightened by something.
‘’EEEK! WHAT’S THAT THING?’’
Michel’s reflex was to grab the handle of his pistol while turning quickly around. He however didn’t draw his weapon from its holster when he saw what had scared Martha: what looked like a sea worm measuring some twenty centimeters long had sprung out of the sand to try to bite into Martha’s armored boot. A swipe by Martha, using her utility knife, then cut in two the sand worm. The two parts then independently swam back into the sand, watched by the disgusted engineer.
‘’What an awful creature! This planet is the shits!’’
‘’I would tend to agree with you, Martha.’’ said Michel. ‘’Let me call the ship quickly to signal this… KOSTROMA, this is the landing team, over.’’
‘’Go ahead, landing team!’’
‘’KOSTROMA, there is life on Gliese 625b, but it isn’t exactly a fun place for vacationers. We have encountered up to now dozens of giant flying insects and one large sand worm that tried to eat Martha’s foot. We have video images of them taken by our helmet cameras. We will now proceed down one slope of the impact crater.’’
‘’Understood, landing team. KOSTROMA out!’’
Michel then decided to fly down into the crater, in view of the sandy slope that could easily make them slide and lose their footing. Activating his directional gravity generators, he rose up from the sand and advanced a few meters past the lip of the crater before going down in a gentle glide slope, followed by the others. The four of them landed near the center of the crater, where it was at its deepest. However, it was evident that the crater was not a recent one, in view of the erosion of the slopes and lips. Using a portable seismic radar, Michel started scanning the ground around him. He however had to stop nearly at once, shocked.
‘’Martha, come and look at this radar reading, quickly!’’
The engineer did so and nearly took a step back after one view at the screen of the radar unit.
‘’My god! This looks like the remains of a spaceship! There are metal ribs, beams and plates all over the place. Do you think that this…’’
‘’…That this is what’s left of the SHUNDAR? I hope not! I am going to transmit those radar scans up to the KOSTROMA.’’
Michel felt nearly sick as he opened a channel with their ship: if this was indeed the remains of the SHUNDAR, then over 22,000 Koorivar refugees had ended their lives right here, on this hellish planet.
On the KOSTROMA, Michel’s message and radar scans data hit Tina like a giant hammer. She barely kept herself from bursting into tears of frustration and grief, but needed a few seconds to compose herself and distribute some orders.
‘’KOSTROMA to landing team: start digging in order to get at the nearest pieces of debris. We need to ascertain without a doubt the origin of those debris. I am going to send some reinforcement with extra digging equipment. KOSTROMA, out!’’
As Tina switched to ship’s intercom mode, she made a quiet wish to herself.
‘’Please, please, God: don’t make this the tomb of the SHUNDAR.’’
20:41 (Universal Time)
Impact crater, surface of Gliese 625b
‘’STOP! STOP! I SEE SOMETHING! LET’S FINISH DIGGING BY HAND.’’
Michel Koniev, along with Martha Lang and Leo Sanchez, fell on their knees and started shoveling dirt and sand away with their gloved hands. Parts of some metallic instrument panel progressively appeared as they dug. Soon, they were able to extract a piece of plate some half a square meter from the ground and avidly examined it.
‘’It seems to be made of some kind of aluminum alloy. It is definitely a kind of instrument panel, with cuts for instrument displays.’’
‘’Hey, there is some kind of small serial number plate fixed to that corner of the plate.’’
Three helmet lamps immediately converged on that part, brightly illuminating it.
‘’There are characters visible! However, they are not in English.’’
‘’Are they in Koorivarese?’’
‘’Uh, no!’’ said Michel. ‘’In fact, I never saw such characters before. Anybody here can read these?’’
The other crewmembers working with his team in the crater took turns looking at the plate, without any success in identifying the characters. Michel was in the process of sending a picture of the said characters up to the KOSTROMA for analysis when Martha Lang scanned the plate with a multi-sensor device.
‘’Michel, this is not from the SHUNDAR.’’
‘’Oh? How can you be so sure, Martha?’’
‘’How? Because my spectral and isotopic analyzer tells me that this piece of metal is over 6,000 years old. This simply can’t be from the SHUNDAR.’’
‘’SIX THOUSAND YEARS OLD? But, where does it come, then?’’
Martha’s expression was most sober when she answered him.
‘’From an alien, non-Koorivar ship that crashed here millenniums ago, when Earth was still in the Early Bronze Age.’’
14:08 (Universal Time)
Monday, May 10, 2320
Bio-chemistry analysis laboratory, A.M.S. KOSTROMA
In low orbit over Gliese 625b
Tina, Michel, Shanandar and Doctor Koomak stood silent and immobile while looking down at the remains of what had to have been some kind of spacesuit made for someone who was neither Human nor Koorivar.
‘’A third space-faring civilization, just in this small portion of our galaxy.’’ said softly Tina. ‘’This piece of news will hit hard when we will return to the Solar System. Did your people ever had an inkling about the existence of such a race, Koomak?’’
‘’None at all! This is as much a shock to me as it is to you, Tina. Allied with the fact that we found insects and worms on Gliese 625B, this would tend to indicate that life is quite common around our galaxy, after all.’’
‘’Indeed! Some of the religious prophets on Earth are bound to choke on this piece of news. At least, this crash site was not that of the SHUNDAR.’’
‘’Thank the stars for that!’’ replied Shanandar before looking again at the ancient spacesuit. ‘’Two pairs of arms, each ending in six-fingered hands, a massive torso and head and a pair of short, thick legs. That creature must have had some phenomenal digital dexterity. Judging from its proportions, I would also surmise that it came from a heavy gravity world, with a felt gravity at least equal to that of Shouria.’’
‘’You are probably right about that, Shanandar. Let’s hope that the analysis of these remains and of the debris found in the crater on the planet will tell us more about this alien race. For the time being, I would like to call it the ‘Gordo’.’’
‘’The ‘Gordo’?’’ said Koomak, mystified. ‘’Why? Does it mean anything in English?’’
‘’No, but ‘gor’ are the three first letters of the word ‘gorilla’, the name for a type of big and very strong primate on Earth. Also, ‘Gordo’ means ‘big’ in Spanish.’’
‘’Makes sense!’’ declared Michel, smiling. ‘’I buy that!’’
‘’Then, ‘Gordo’ it is!’’ said Koomak while shrugging his shoulders.
08:45 (Universal Time)
Saturday, May 15, 2320
Conference room in the ship’s conference center
Level 10 (Main Cafeteria Deck), A.M.S. KOSTROMA
In low orbit around Gliese 625b
‘’So, Maria, did we learn anything new in the last few days about the vessel that crashed on Gliese 625b, or about its occupants?’’
Maria Perez, the ship’s chief medical officer and an expert in bio-chemistry, exchanged a quick look with Rose Tillman, the ship’s chief engineer, before answering Tina’s question, with the nine other participants to the meeting listening on.
‘’Well, to be honest, the crash was so violent and also so ancient that there was very little left that could be analyzed in depth. I was able to isolate a tiny portion of fossilized DNA from a crushed piece of bone which had been protected from fire by the spacesuit worn by one of the three sets of alien remains we could recover, but what I could get out of it was extremely limited. The only thing I could say now with certainty is that the DNA of these ‘Gordos’, as you call them, has little in common with Human or even Koorivar DNA. We can thus pretty much conclude that the Gordos evolved completely independently from either us or the Koorivar. Their general built with a massive, strong body, certainly indicates a home world with probably strong felt gravity of at least 1.2 G, if not more. From the remains of their spacesuits, the Gordos measured over 190 centimeters in height, with wide torsos and shoulders and biceps that would make World-class weightlifters jealous. The shape of their helmets also indicates a voluminous cranium: those Gordos were probably no mere ‘chimps’, if I could use an old expression.’’
‘’What about the spacesuits themselves and the ship’s remains, Rose?’’
‘’As Maria already said, the crash and the millenniums since then left us little to analyze. In-depth isotopic analysis did confirm that the crash happened some 6,300 years ago, when both us Humans and the Koorivar were still at primitive levels of civilization. We did not find any traces of what could have been any sort of chemical or isotopic fuel inside the crater, so those Gordos possibly used some form of electro-magnetic or directed gravity propulsion, and this some 6,300 years ago! What level of technology they attained since then i