CHAPTER 11 – A MISSED RENDEZ-VOUS
07:30 (Universal Time)
Tuesday, December 20, 2321
Bridge of the Spacers League exploration ship H.S.S. STARQUEST
Arriving in low orbit over the third planet of 16 Cygni B
Triple star system 16 Cygni, 70.5 light-years from Earth
Captain Li Jing Peng felt optimism as his converted space liner, now the interstellar exploration ship STARQUEST, approached the third planet of 16 Cygni B, a yellow G-Class star that was itself part of the triple star system of 16 Cygni, situated some 70.5 light-years from Earth. That triple star system was composed of two yellow, G-Class stars and of one M-Class red dwarf star and, up to now, seemed to have three planets, one of which was a big gas giant similar to Jupiter, but with twice its mass and with a highly eccentric orbit around 16 Cygni B, while another could be described as a ball of lava, being way too close to its star. However, the third planet of the system, 16 Cygni Bd, appeared very promising, being a planet slightly larger than Earth and which blue and brown surface indicated the presence of both liquid oceans and large continents. A visible blue halo around the planet was a sign of the presence of a substantial atmosphere. With any luck, the STARQUEST may just have stumbled on a habitable world compatible with Human life, about the most precious kind of find right now for Humanity in the Universe.
‘’Are there any detectable artificial electro-magnetic signals in the system, or any artificial lights on the surface of 16 Cygni Bd?’’
‘’None up to now, Captain. We have initiated a long-range radar sweep in order to scan for possible asteroids or meteorites around or close to the planet. We have detected nothing of the sort so far.’’
‘’Alright, let’s adopt a low polar orbit around the third planet, so that we could start mapping and studying its surface and atmosphere.’’
‘’Aye, Captain!’’
Some fifteen minutes later, as the STARQUEST was about to insert itself into a low polar orbit, one of the sensors operators on duty on the bridge spoke up, excitement in her voice.
‘’Captain, our radar is now picking up a small object located in a geosynchronous orbit around the planet’s equator. From the quality of the radar echo, I would classify that object as being metallic in nature.’’
Li tensed up at once at those words: a metallic object in orbit meant the presence of another technological race, or at the least its passage in this system. With the bad precedence from the encounter of the KOSTROMA with the Drazt of Ross 128, that could mean possible trouble.
‘’ABORT ORBITAL INSERTION! ACTIVATE OUR SHIELD GENERATORS TO MAXIMUM INTENSITY! SCAN FOR ANY POSSIBLE SHIP IN THE VICINITY!’’
Li then waited nervously as his bridge crew obeyed his orders and scanned the void around them. Unfortunately, while the STARQUEST was superbly equipped for interstellar exploration, it had no armament whatsoever. After some three minutes, the sensors officer, Suzi Long, spoke up.
‘’No other ship detected within range of our sensors, Captain. That single metallic object seems in turn to be completely inert, with no signal or infra-red signature emanating from it. It is simply floating in space while in geo-stationary orbit.’’
‘’Possibilities?’’
‘’It could be an old reconnaissance satellite left behind by some passing ship a long time ago, Captain. However, only a close visual inspection will tell us what it is exactly.’’
‘’Very well! Pilot, head towards that floating object! We will however keep our shield generators on, just in case.’’
‘’Aye, Captain!’’
After another eight minutes, Suzi Long spoke up again.
‘’Captain, I have the object on visual. It appears to be some kind of small artificial satellite. I still can’t detect any signal or infra-red signature from it. I am switching the picture from our bow telescope to your station.’’
‘’Thank you, Suzi.’’ said Li, who then switched on one of his command chair’s viewing screens the view from the ship’s bow telescope, a powerful optical instrument designed for studying a planet from orbit. What he saw indeed looked like a small, rather primitive-looking artificial satellite. Judging from the pair of large dish antennas attached to it, they could well have been some sort of communications relay antennas.
‘’Alright, let’s approach that thing cautiously. Once within fifty kilometers from it, we will send a flying work station to go retrieve it and bring it aboard.’’
‘’I am alerting our duty craft crew to get ready, Captain. It should launch in about five minutes.’’
‘’Excellent! Tell our work station crew to be careful and to not take any risks. If it sees anything suspicious, it is to back off immediately. Also, once in our main craft airlock, that satellite will be kept under strict quarantine conditions. We will use robots as much as possible to inspect it from up close.’’
‘’Understood, Captain.’’
His mind in turmoil as he studied the possibilities about what that satellite meant for his mission, Li followed closely the events of the next minutes, watching as the small, two-person flying work station craft left its hangar bay via a craft airlock and sped towards the unidentified satellite. The small craft thankfully didn’t report any suspicious or hostile activity on the part of the satellite as it got within range of its manipulator arms. In fact, the satellite kept acting as if it was indeed dead. The pilot of the work station then made a remark that caught Li’s ear.
‘’Gee, this thing looks old as Hell! It is covered with thousands of micro-meteorite impacts. It also appears to be truly dead. I am going to grab it with my manipulator arms.’’
Two minutes later, the work station was flying back towards the STARQUEST, the dead satellite held in its arms’ pincers. Li got out of his chair as the craft and its find entered the small craft airlock.
‘’Mister Rambaldi, you have the bridge. I am going down to the small craft hangar section.’’
‘’Aye, Captain!’’
Using an elevator cabin to go down to the Hangar Deck, Captain Li arrived in the hangar complex, which housed a number of light shuttles, flying work stations and runabouts, in time to see the mysterious satellite being placed in a small, separate hangar designed specifically to quarantine small crafts. Watching through a thick, armored glass window, Li saw a number of maintenance and inspection robots become active around the satellite. It took only a minute or so before the first results were announced by the engineer in charge of the hangar complex.
‘’It definitely appears to have been some sort of communications relay satellite, Captain. It was powered by a radio-isotopic generator which used plutonium as fuel. However, the plutonium fuel rods are now completely dead.’’
Li snapped his head around in surprise on hearing that.
‘’Completely dead? But plutonium has a half-life of about ninety years, no?’’
‘’Eighty-eight years actually, Captain.’’ corrected the engineer. ‘’Which means that this satellite has been in space for over 180 years, probably much more.’’
‘’How much more, Mister Lindstrom?’’
‘’I can’t answer that until we will have checked other things, Captain. However, in view of the extension space corrosion from micro-meteorites visible on this satellite, I would say that it has most probably been in orbit for thousands of years, rather than hundreds of years. If a ship dropped off that satellite, then it is long gone by now.’’
‘’I see! Inform me as soon as you are able to estimate more precisely the age of that satellite, Mister Lindstrom.’’
‘’Will do, Captain.’’
‘’Thank you! I’m going back to the bridge. Hopefully, the study of the planet under us will give us more clues about that old satellite.’’
09:02 (Universal Time)
Bridge of the H.S.S. STARQUEST
Captain Li felt disturbed as his ship completed its first low polar orbit over 16 Cygni Bd: the various cameras, radars and spectrometers of his STARQUEST had only covered a small portion of the planet’s surface to date, but that had already been enough to reveal some contradictory facts. First, to his satisfaction and that of his crew, the analysis of the atmosphere via spectrometers and a couple of robotic probes had proved it to be eminently breathable, with an atmospheric pressure superior by twenty percent to that of Earth and an oxygen content of 24 percent, again higher than the 21 percent found at sea level on Earth. The average surface temperature had also proved to be a quite comfortable one, turning between plus 29 degrees Centigrade at the equator to minus five degrees at the poles. The surface gravity had been measured to be 1.1 Gs, a bit superior to Earth’s gravity but still easily tolerable by Humans. Liquid water oceans covered about eighty percent of the planet’s surface, with the remaining twenty percent being made up of two continents and thousands of islands, many of the latter being of volcanic origin. With the age of its parent star known to be about ten billion years, compared to the 4.6 billion years of the Sun, 16 Cygni Bd should have had ample time to develop plenty of life during such a long period of existence, especially in view of the apparently ideal conditions on its surface. However, the only life visible from orbit had been sparse and thin vegetation visible at the surface of the few islands the ship had overflown. Hopefully, more signs of life would show up once the ship started overflying one of the two continents, something that was due to happen in a few minutes. Li’s intercom then beeped, making him push a button. The face of Kurt Lindstrom then appeared on one of his viewing screens.
‘’Mister Lindstrom! What do you have for me?’’
‘’Some disturbing numbers, Captain. We have finished our preliminary studies of that old satellite and have a number of solid facts about it. First, about its age: it is over sixteen million years old, if we can believe our isotopic dating on parts of it.’’
‘’Sixteen million years old!’’ exclaimed Li, making more than one head around the bridge snap towards him. ‘’Are you sure?’’
‘’Very sure, Captain. Another fact is that it was not built by either Humans, Koorivars, Drazt or any other sentient race we know. The markings found on internal parts of the satellite are in a language and writing system totally unknown to us. The third fact is that the technology used in the satellite is a rather primitive one, about on par with what could be found around Earth at the start of the Space Age, in the mid-20th Century. We are still continuing to study it, but that’s about it for the moment, Captain.’’
‘’Thank you, Mister Lindstrom. That information is already quite useful.’’
Li was closing his intercom channel when the pilot, Vasyli Meklin, spoke up.
‘’We are starting to overfly the southern continent, Captain. All our sensors are online and active.’’
‘’Good! Hopefully, what we will see will help explain where this old satellite came from.’’
Concentrating his attention on a screen showing the view from a camera pointed at the vertical towards the surface of the planet, Li Jing Peng observed in silence the surface of the continent they were now overflying. He was nearly immediately struck by a number of strange details, and so was Suzi Long, his sensors officer.
‘’Captain, there is only thin, primeval vegetation visible on the ground, despite the favorable climatic conditions and abundance of liquid water. It doesn’t make sense! Also, I see what appears to be faint traces of large, multiple craters that have been eroded by time and then covered by growing vegetation. I can count hundreds of such craters dispersed around the surface of this continent, all of them with a minimum diameter of at least a few hundred meters.’’
‘’A dense asteroid bombardment in a distant past? On Earth, a single giant asteroid strike snuffed out the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago and caused a global winter that killed off the majority of both vegetal and animal species. Could that be what happened to this planet?’’
‘’Maybe, Captain.’’ answered Long, not sounding convinced at all about that. ‘’We will need to see more of the surface before I could advance some more possibilities.’’
‘’Very well! Let’s continue with our mapping and scanning, Miss Long.’’
A few minutes later, as the ship was about to overfly the northern coastline of the continent after crossing the whole land mass, Suzi Long suddenly pointed at something on the main camera’s view.
‘’There! Do you see that faint straight line on the ground, Captain?’’
‘’Uh, I do, but it is very faint indeed.’’
‘’And also very straight indeed: too much so to be a natural feature. I am going to point our main telescope at it.’’
Li was soon able to look at a much-enhanced picture of part of the faint line that had attracted Long’s attention. With the much higher magnitude of the image, that line was now plainly recognizable as being artificial.
‘’It looks like some kind of elevated highway, but crumbled and in ruins, with a thick layer of dust and dirt covering it.’’
‘’In my professional opinion, that is exactly what it is, Captain. This is a remnant from a now defunct civilization that once lived on this planet. My bet is that it disappeared millions of years ago, possibly in the same era when that old satellite was launched into space. As for the cause of that race’s disappearance, I fear that I now have a plausible explanation for it, Captain.’’
Li stared with incomprehension at his sensors officer for a couple of seconds before the awful truth downed on him.
‘’A nuclear war? All these old craters we saw would have been caused by the impact of nuclear warheads?’’
‘’As horrible as that possibility is, I believe that this is what happened, millions of years ago, Captain. However, it would be unprofessional on our part to make firm conclusions from all this before getting more facts. That, in my opinion, will require the sending of one or more ground exploration teams, Captain.’’
‘’I concur! Let’s complete our mapping and scanning of this planet, so that we could then choose the most appropriate spots to land our exploration teams.’’
11:26 (Universal Time)
Wednesday, December 21, 2321
Central plains of the northern continent
16 Cygni Bd
As the security officer in charge of his exploration team, Leonard Brinkley was the first to step out of the light shuttle, quickly followed by the gigantic Baya Mofongo. Both were armed with disintegrator rifles and wore protective coveralls and filtering masks. Scanning visually his surroundings and seeing nothing threatening, Brinkley then signaled the four other members of his team to come out as well. The access ramp of the shuttle closed up as soon as they were all out with their equipment and two anti-gravity scooters, so that the craft’s airlock could be decontaminated of any possible radioactive dust. Kimi Harakawa, the team’s exobiologist, bent down to grab and pull out of the ground a small plant, using her gloved right hand. She then visually examined the plant with critical eyes.
‘’Hum, a rather unimpressive-looking plant. Let’s see if it shows any traces of radiation contamination.’’
Passing slowly a very sensitive radiation meter over the plant gave results that did a lot to make her feel better.
‘’If this world was effectively killed by a nuclear war, then that war happened a very long time ago. Right now, the radioactivity level that I can detect from this plant is no higher than the normal level from natural background radiations. This planet pauses no dangers to us from a radioactivity standpoint. We can take our filtering masks off.’’
Her companions, relieved, took their masks off at once, shoving them back in their carrying pouches fixed to their belts. Francisco Dominguez, the team’s planetologist, made a grimace after scanning the sparse vegetation around them, none of which grew higher than a few centimeters.
‘’No animals in sight, not even insects. Whatever happened here must have completely killed off all animal and vegetal life. These plants appear to be primeval and are possibly some mutated forms of the rare plant life that survived whatever devastated this planet.’’
‘’Well, we are here to find out about that, people.’’ replied Leonard Brinkley. ‘’Let’s go examine this field of holes in the ground that so intrigued our specialists on the ship.’’
Climbing on their scooters, the team members then glided over the ground towards the nearest such hole, some forty meters away. Landing softly their scooters only meters away from the big dirt mound in which a horizontal circular hole was visible, the team members climbed the gently sloping slides of the mound, stopping at the edge of the hole and looking down in it.
‘’This was once an artificial kind of silo, now nearly filled with dust and dirt. It must have been quite deep originally.’’ said Ariel Shomron, the team’s geologist. ‘’I am going to use our underground mapping radar to find out its exact original dimensions.’’
As Shomron was preparing his mapping radar, Leonard Brinkley eyed with circumspection the two mounds flanking the hole on two sides.
‘’I don’t know, guys, but this reminds me of something I once saw in my history classes. Look at those two dirt mounds, the way they flank this hole: they are positioned exactly opposite to each other, with their centerline passing over the center of this hole. Ariel, could you scan first the sides of the hole and those two mounds? I believe that they are significant about this hole.’’
‘’Why not? We have all day to inspect this anyway.’’
Watched by his teammates, Shomron started walking around the large, four-meter-wide hole, pushing his mapping radar anti-gravity sled in front of him. At one point, the geologist stopped abruptly, then veered a full ninety degrees to the right and continued advancing for another few meters before stopping and calling up his companions.
‘’You were right about this being suspicious, Leonard: what had to be a steel track running from the edge of that hole to the mound I am now facing is clearly visible on my radar, some two meters below ground. Let me check something out.’’
Turning to the left and pushing his radar sled for some six meters, he then stopped and pivoted again to the left, apparently following something underground. He finally stopped and paused on the edge of the hole and looked soberly at Leonard.
‘’There is a second steel track running parallel to the other and also running towards that mound. I am starting to understand what this whole thing could be. I will however go check something else before giving my verdict.’’
Their biochemist, Amin Jamilian, scratched his head while watching Shomron as he pushed his radar sled around the hole’s circumference.
‘’Uh, what are we looking at, actually? I don’t have a clue.’’
Leonard gave him a somber look in response.
‘’In a nutshell, we are probably looking at an old nuclear missile silo, Amin. Since this hole contains only dirt, we must conclude that the missile that was once sitting inside it was launched. Those two mounds flanking the hole are probably the two pieces of a massive protective concrete cover sitting originally over the silo. Just before missile launch, those two pieces would have been pushed away on rails by explosive charges, opening the silo and letting the missile fly out of it.’’
‘’But, but there are a hundred such holes visible from space in this plain alone. They would all be missile silos?’’
‘’Yes, and there are probably hundreds or even thousands more such silos around this planet.’’
‘’Thousands of nuclear missiles?’’ exclaimed the horrified biochemist. ‘’who could have been mad enough to amass so many nuclear-tipped missiles?’’
‘’We did, once! In the 20th Century, there was at one point a total of over 40,000 nuclear weapons in service, ready to be launched and with men sitting next to their launch buttons. We nearly blew ourselves out of existence in that century. Those poor bastards on this planet probably did what we barely managed to avoid, some sixteen million years ago.’’
Those words left the team members silent for a long moment as they reflected on the scale of the tragedy that this world had once witnessed. Kimi Harakawa was the first to speak again after that, but what she said both stunned and shocked her companions.
‘’Well, it was too bad for that race, truly. On the other hand, it now leaves us with a fantastic gift.’’
‘’A fantastic gift? A graveyard world full of old ruins? Are you mad, Kimi?’’ exploded Jamilian. The exobiologist stared back at him, unrepentant.
‘’No, I am not mad, Amin. What I meant by that is that, by snuffing out all life on this planet for millenniums via massive radioactive fallouts and artificial nuclear Winter, that genocidal race has left behind a whole planet with a breathable atmosphere, liquid oceans and a good climate, but with next to no indigenous life left on it. Basically, this planet is now fully ours for the taking and we will be free to reseed to our liking its oceans and plant our own flora and crops on its continents and islands. As an old French saying went: the misfortune of some often makes others happy. This may sound both callous and cruel, but what would be the point of not profiting from this? If it would be up to me, I would call this world ‘Atlantis’, the name of a fabled, long-lost Earth civilization of the Antiquity.’’