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CHAPTER 15

July 16, 2089

“ . . . on this historic day one hundred twenty years ago, mankind embarked on its first mission to another heavenly body—the Moon. Just as those brave Apollo 11 astronauts faced the depths of space as never before, the brave crew of the Samaritan will engage the fusion drive and begin its departure from the Moon, sending man- and womankind on our most courageous journey yet. We will depart this, our home solar system, for the first time ever, reaching out a helping hand to our nearest stellar neighbors. Today humanity becomes a star-faring species . . . ” The secretary general of the United Nations continued to speak in the most-watched live presentation feed in the history of mankind.

“ . . . the Samaritan is firing its onboard fusion drive and has just now departed lunar orbit. I’m certain the mood in the space dock, as around the globe, must be jubilant. The scientists, engineers, and spacecraft technicians, and mission planners, and all other members of this multinational team, have managed to meet the ambitious schedule and we are now on this momentous day launching to the stars. The lower-powered engines are now sending the Samaritan out toward the orbit of Mars, where in a few short weeks it will engage its Samara Drive and be on its way to Proxima Centauri. On its way to meet our brothers and sisters across space . . . ”

Roy Burbank was among those watching the ship depart with his own eyeballs from the space dock. He was one of the lucky few. The rest of the world watched it on video feeds around the planet and the Moon and throughout the solar system. He and his engineering team had installed, tested, troubleshot, and fixed no less than twenty-two of the major subsystems on the Samaritan and for that he was quite proud. They had done their job and done it well. He still had nagging concerns about the PINS and was not quite able to let go of the uneasy feeling that he had overlooked something despite having gone back over the equipment twice more after the initial installation and tests were completed. It was performing exactly as it should.

Burbank was planning to enjoy the day of celebration for as long as he could because he knew that tomorrow he was taking a weeklong cruise vacation with his wife to Mars and back, then it would be back to work. He’d been assigned to work on the next starship being assembled on the other side of the dock. He didn’t yet know what he would be doing. He didn’t even know the name of the ship. As far as he could tell, no one did. His employers had been quite stingy with the ship’s technical specifications, insisting that he sign a comprehensive nondisclosure agreement before they would allow him to see or begin reviewing the specifications. And they would only allow him to begin preparing for the job on the day he reported to work. He suspected he would spend the first several days, perhaps even weeks, poring over design and detailed technical information about the ship before he would even begin hands-on engineering work. That was okay. He needed a break.

As the Samaritan faded from view, becoming a small, bright, moving speck in a sea of specks that was the stars, Burbank wondered what awaited the crew on their special relativistic journey and when they arrived. He did the math and figured out that nature was going to do weird things to the crew during their flight. The Samara Drive would allow the ship to accelerate at a constant one fifth of one Earth standard gravity, providing a comfortable onboard gravity roughly equivalent to that experienced by astronauts on the surface of the Moon. It was enough to keep the muscles from decaying too much when they were awake and moving around. While they were asleep, the electrostimulation of their muscles and bones would have the same effect, or better. The electrostim was designed to approximate one full Earth gravity.

But that wasn’t the weird part. To optimize the trip time, the Samaritan would accelerate at two-tenths gravity until the halfway point, then turn around and begin decelerating until they slowed down enough for the onboard fusion drive to bring them safely into orbit around Proxima Centauri b. At that acceleration, the ship would eventually reach just over eighty-five percent the speed of light before the deceleration phase began. At those speeds, Einstein’s special relativity would kick in and slow down their clocks—the rate at which time would pass for the crew. Taking into account the constantly changing speed due to continual acceleration and deceleration, the crew would age about seven years during the voyage while almost exactly ten years would pass here on Earth. If the crew could watch people on Earth during the trip, then they would see those left behind start moving, talking, and experiencing life faster and faster, like fast-forwarding through the latest VR sim.

Burbank knew that special relativity had been verified many, many times in different experiments, and even measured at relatively low speeds with high-precision clocks. But this was to be the first time that humans would experience time dilation on a scale that would be truly experiential. Burbank wondered what it would feel like for the crew. Would they notice any difference? He doubted it, but wondered, nonetheless.

He was extremely glad they were the ones going. He liked to think about things like relativistic travel and life on other worlds, but at the end of the day all he really wanted was an hour or so at the pub with his friends and coworkers, followed by dinner and an evening with his wife, Chloe. And when the weekend came around, bye-bye to all work thoughts and one hundred percent focus on Chloe. They were even starting to talk about having a family—well, once her last month was done at the ER. There was absolutely no way that he would sacrifice that for a trip to any world in the galaxy. No, his feet were firmly planted near Sol and preferably on Earth. His goal was to save enough money working at the space dock to afford a place in the Norwegian countryside where they could build a house, raise their family, and grow old together. He smiled at the thought and noticed that he had lost sight of the Samaritan’s exhaust among the other points of starlight. They were on their way—more power to them.

Of course, Roy knew that the Samaritan wouldn’t engage the Samara Drive for quite some time to come. In fact, as modern-day spacecraft were concerned, the Samaritan was very average and maybe even on the low end as far as speed was concerned. The cruise ship that he and his wife were getting on tomorrow traveled a bit more than twice as fast. In fact, as part of the cruise package they hoped to see the Samaritan when they passed it going out and then coming back. Roy’s boss had awarded him with the cruise as a bonus for all the late hours he’d put in while getting the ship ready.

The cruise ship was almost the same crew complement as the Samaritan but wasn’t quite as big since there was no interstellar drive on the thing. Since the Samaritan was big and used modern nuclear fusion-based plasma propulsion for interplanetary travel, there was a lot more mass for the standard engines to push and therefore it was slower. It would take it several weeks to reach a point far enough from shipping lanes and other habitat regions within the Sol system before it could safely ignite the star drive. Perhaps, he thought, some of the crew might get cold feet and could still jump ship right up until a week before igniting the drive. It would take that long to get clear of the dangerous exhaust path of the interstellar engine—assuming there was a really fast ship nearby.

* * *

The ship had been underway for less than three hours when the chime sounded, indicating that dinner was being served in the mess hall. Rain, and about half of the thirty-six-person crew, moved from their stations to the mess to take dinner together. The remaining crew members would eat on the second shift. There simply wasn’t room for everyone to gather in the same room at the same time.

Rain entered the mess hall and immediately noticed how small and cramped it was. It was the first meal post-departure and the first time that the crew was alone together without the technicians and engineers from the space dock intermingled with them. As she scanned the room, she saw some familiar faces and one in particular—Enrico Vulpetti, the aerospace engineer from Georgia Tech who had first told her of the Samaritan’s existence. He said he would make it as part of the crew and, true to his word, here he was. She hadn’t seen him anywhere in the past few days and wondered where he’d been keeping himself before launch. He motioned for her to join him and three others around one of the tables in the corner of the room.

“Dr. Vulpetti, it’s good to see you here,” said Rain as she approached his table and sat down.

“Dr. Gilster—or should I say, Lorraine—it’s good to see you also. And remember, you should call me Enrico. We’re going to be spending a long time together and formalities can get very tedious,” he replied, breaking into the same big smile she remembered from when she met him after her lecture over two years before. He was definitely a charmer.

“Fine, Enrico, and you should call me Rain. The only people who call me Lorraine are strangers and my parents,” she said, breaking into her own smile.

“Rain. I’m glad you are here. Let me introduce you to Neil, Catherine, and Yoko. They are among the ship’s biologists and we are just revisiting a discussion that I’m sure isn’t new to you—the Proximans’ humanity.”

After exchanging pleasantries with the biologists and eating most of her lemon flounder, rice, and brussels sprouts freeze-dried meal (with a fresh green salad!), the conversation drifted back to the subject of biology.

“It just isn’t possible for these two hugely different planetary ecosystems to have followed a path of parallel evolution to produce Homo sapiens, at roughly the same time, with roughly the same level of technological development. The probability of that occurring is zero,” said Neil Polkingham. Neil was in his early forties, thin, and very Caucasian with pale skin and red hair. His British accent gave him away as one of the persistent upper class who had probably attended only the best universities in the United Kingdom.

“I agree with Neil,” Yoko Pearl nodded. Yoko spoke English with what sounded to Rain like a Japanese accent. She was an attractive woman who looked to be in her thirties with long black hair and an intense gaze that bespoke of a passion for her subject matter expertise. She continued, “Proxima Centauri b has a year that is only eleven Earth days. It has virtually no axial tilt, so there aren’t seasons. It orbits closer to its star than Mercury does to ours. That means it’s bathed in Proxima Centauri’s stellar wind that is three orders of magnitude more intense than that we experience at Earth. That alone should scour the planet clean of life, repeatedly, even if it did start to develop there. And if that isn’t enough, Proxima Centauri is a flare star. Just a year before you heard those radio signals for the first time, astronomers cataloged a large solar storm there that, had it been our star, would have ripped away the Earth’s ozone layer and killed us all. Not only should there be no humans there, but there also shouldn’t be any life at all.”

“Not to mention history,” Neil added. “We know life first originated on Earth within a billion years of its formation, only to be wiped out, or nearly so, several times. We all know about the meteorite that killed off the dinosaurs and allowed our ancestors, the mammals, to survive, thrive, and evolve into the life-forms we see on Earth today. That meteorite was an accident of history that forced evolution in a very different direction from where it was headed pre-impact. It forced all that crap into the upper atmosphere that basically stopped photosynthesis and plunged the planet into the equivalent of a mini ice age. But that wasn’t the first great extinction or the worst. Two hundred and fifty million years ago there was the Permian extinction that wiped out over ninety percent of the planet’s species. It was caused by the eruption of a super volcano. That, too, was an accident of history. Did Proxima Centauri b have their own meteorite impact and super-volcano eruptions at the same times? With the same life-forms surviving and eventually becoming human? It is just impossible.”

“But they are there. They are human,” interjected Catherine Nkrumah. In their dinner conversation, Rain had learned that Catherine was from Guinea, had studied at Columbia in New York City, and, until the ship departed Earth, lived in Sydney, Australia. She was half of one of the few married couples on the ship. Her husband, Kieran, a doctor specializing in fertility, was responsible for the frozen embryos and their possible, future use with the Proximans. Until this point, Catherine had been quietly and politely listening to the discussion.

“Agreed. But there they are. The seemingly impossible appears to be possible—factual,” said Yoko. “What about panspermia?”

“We’ve thought about that. Let’s assume life evolved on Earth some time ago and then some big rock hit the planet and knocked pieces of it off into space. Let’s also assume that these pieces contained Earth life. For that Earth life to get to Proxima Centauri b, the energy of the impact would have to have given the rock enough velocity to escape the Sun’s gravity and reach interstellar space. It would then have to have crossed through over four light-years’ deep space at nearly absolute zero temperatures, taking hundreds of thousands or millions of years to do so, and then land on Proxima, surviving the passage through its atmosphere and high-speed impact, to live and grow on a totally alien world. And then the parallel evolution and historical events we discussed earlier would have to happen. Simply preposterous,” said Neil.

“Oh, not so preposterous, as you’ve got your physics all wrong,” Rain disagreed. “There is no reason that an object the size of a rock had to be accelerated across the interstellar void. Simple dust particles or ice crystals barely large enough to see could still house millions of viruses, microbes, DNA, you name it. Such tiny particles could really be vastly accelerated well beyond the rock idea.”

“Hmmm, hadn’t considered that. Why had I not considered that?” Yoko mumbled to herself.

“It almost makes you believe in God. Directed evolution. Maybe all those Ancient Astronaut theorists were on to something.” Enrico chuckled.

“Not sure why you laugh at that comment, Enrico,” Rain replied matter-of-factly. “Nobody has any scientific proof one way or the other if any mystical gods from the past were real or not. Who knows? Advanced aliens might be just as plausible a hypothesis as any if they turned out to be real, but the problem is being able to falsify something that happened so long ago. Experimental verification of the hypothesis would prove to be extremely tough. Awfully hard to prove the negative too.”

“Ah yes, prove that Santa Clause doesn’t exist . . . very difficult,” Yoko agreed.

“Or maybe the solution could be more like the old Star Trek ‘Preservers,’” Rain said, offering another possibility. “When they made those early science fiction television shows they didn’t have the money to create truly alien aliens, so they used people wearing makeup. To explain why many of the aliens their starship encountered looked so human, they invoked some ancient alien race that had planted humanlike life on multiple planets—the Preservers.”

“This isn’t an old television show and once we invoke God, we’re basically giving up our search for scientific truth and accepting superstition, mysticism, or fantasy,” said Neil dismissively if not arrogantly.

“Oh, I don’t know about that, Neil. God can come in so many forms and one of them might be scientifically measurable and believable.” Rain had never succumbed to the cliché that physicists were atheists. She wasn’t sure what exactly to call herself, but she had no scientific evidence to rule God out and she knew several scientists who were able to be objective scientists and hold deep religious beliefs. It was very hard to prove or disprove something didn’t exist and she did her best to stay out of such a faulty path of endeavor. In the end, she followed the scientific method in most things. That was sort of her religion.

“What other options are there?” asked Enrico.

Yoko squirmed, looking like she wanted to say something, but couldn’t bring herself to interrupt and get it out.

“What is it, Yoko?” asked Rain.

“I am sure you are familiar with the story of Little Red Riding Hood. If you think of that story in the context of our current situation—look at the seeming impossibility of what we’re discussing here and combine it with warnings of Stephen Hawking—then there is one other possible conclusion,” Yoko said, her eyes moving from person to person until finally stopping on Rain’s.

“That this whole ‘Proximans are human and in dire need of our help’ thing is all a ruse meant to lure us to Proxima Centauri so we can be eaten by the Big Bad Wolf?” Rain said.

“Or something like that,” said Yoko.

* * *

The Interstellarerforscher spacecraft was robotic and designed to use its Samara Drive to go farther into the interstellar medium between the stars, at a faster speed, than any previous ship. It was ostensibly a German-funded science mission, equipped with high-power radar and sensors to measure the background radiation, the galactic cosmic ray flux, dust particle density, and magnetic field strength in the vastness of the space between Earth’s star, Sol, and its neighbors. It was one thing to say that humans were going to build a crewed starship and send it on a journey across more than the four light-years separating Sol from Proxima Centauri and quite another to say that humans would send the starship and have it survive the journey. There were simply too many unknowns about the space between here and there. How many micrometeors and of what size, on average, will the ship encounter along the way? Hitting a dust grain while traveling at seven tenths the speed of light was one thing; hitting an object with the mass of a baseball was quite another. The ship’s dust-charging magnetic shield could quite easily deflect one-to-two-gram interstellar dust grains but a chunk of rock the mass of a baseball would almost certainly get through the shielding and impact the ship with the explosive force equivalent to more than one million tons of TNT. Needless to say, that would be a mission-ending event. Fortunately, space is big and there aren’t many chunks of rock between the stars that weigh as much as a baseball. But that didn’t really help, because there were probably some that big out there and hitting just one would be catastrophic. One of the goals of the Interstellarerforscher was to measure the density of these particles to assess the probability of Samaritan hitting one on its much-longer journey.

The plan was for the Interstellarerforscher to launch a few days before the Samaritan and for it to fly just ahead of the crewed ship, searching the path for objects the Samaritan might encounter and relay the hazard information in time for a course correction to be made to avoid any sort of catastrophic event.

Deep within the fusion reactor onboard the Interstellarerforscher, enshrouded by intense magnetic fields generated by high-temperature superconducting electromagnets, hydrogen atoms were being forced closer and closer together by the combination of the magnetic fields and high-energy lasers until the electrostatic forces keeping the two like-charged nuclei apart were overcome by the nuclear force pulling them together, allowing them to fuse into helium, releasing energy. The fusion reaction increased in intensity, with more and more hydrogen being converted into helium and releasing yet more energy like in the interior of a main sequence star, ramping up the power available for the Samara Drive.

Once the minimum power threshold was achieved, the Samara Drive was activated. Within it, ultraviolet light as intense as any produced in nature lanced outward from the stern of the ship. From Newton’s Law—for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction—the starship recoiled in the other direction as the light was emitted, accelerating it forward.

The beam of ultraviolet light, had it been close to and pointed toward the Earth, would have burned a hole through the atmosphere, scorching some of the planet’s surface in the process. But the ship’s designers knew this, and, working with the United Nations, established a “keep out” region extending beyond the Moon in within which it was forbidden to activate Samara Drives of a certain power level. From that distance, the intense UV light beam diverged to an intensity that was not a threat to the Earth, the Moon or any of the many spacecraft now operating in near-Earth space. To minimize the risk to other spacecraft in the inner solar system, many of which could conceivably end up in the path of the light produced by a Samara Drive, a flight plan had to be approved that showed when and where the drive would be activated and by analysis show that none of the many registered operational spacecraft nearby were in harm’s way. So far, there had never been an accident.

* * *

Glenn “Pops” Yenne was looking forward to the end of the journey. Despite his nickname, Yenne wasn’t that old; at fifty-two he was just older than the rest of his small three-person crew and they never let him forget it. True, at the end of a run he would get paid a large sum of money and there would be the temptation to blow it all on gambling, booze, and drugs, and by paying for sex once he returned to Earth. Unlike his much-younger crew, he knew his days hauling contraband through deep space would soon have to come to an end and he needed to save some money to live on when that day came. Besides, his libido wasn’t what it used to be, he never took drugs, and he really didn’t like the hangovers that came from days-long drinking binges. Hence his fuddy-duddy nickname of “Pops.” Instead of sex, drugs, and alcohol, he was thinking of the Caribbean beaches and days lounging by the seaside with nothing to do except admire the fine forms sunbathing all around him. Yes, the money was good, but there certainly wasn’t much to spend it on out here.

Here was an interesting term to describe a location somewhere in the void between Mars and Earth. They had just dropped off contraband to two of the mining stations in the main belt, drugs and real-by-God Kentucky bourbon among it. Now they were taking some of the rare earth metals carefully skimmed from the mining company’s operations back to the Moon where they were in high demand for the burgeoning lunar mining and manufacturing facilities. It was far cheaper for some of the smaller companies to buy their raw materials from him than to import them from Earth and pay the tariffs and taxes levied by the various transport and port authorities. When would the politicians realize that the confiscatory taxation only fostered black markets according to the universal economic laws of supply and demand? He hoped they wouldn’t learn too soon. Having them get smart would be bad for business. And he was really looking forward to having enough business to afford his Caribbean dream.

He was, as usual, running his ship, the Matador, without a universal transponder and with minimal radio or laser communication with anyone else. The only thing nearby—and by considering solar system distances, it was virtually on top of the Matador—was some small robotic spacecraft outbound toward Mars. Looking at their relative trajectories, they would pass within about five hundred kilometers of each other at closest approach, which would be soon. If Matador were a passenger liner, then the Collision Alert warnings would already be going off. Yenne wasn’t worried about collision with the spacecraft—five hundred kilometers was still a huge distance. He also wasn’t worried about detection by it. If the spacecraft did have radar for tracking nearby objects, and if it did detect him, the likelihood of his ship being reported to the authorities was extremely small. Solar system traffic control out here, unlike in cis-lunar space, was virtually nonexistent. And if the spacecraft did send a message to anyone, no one would really be able to do anything at all about it. The Matador would be long gone, no one would know it was the Matador since his transponder was turned off, and no one would likely even care.

Yenne and his crew were breaking the law and advertising their location and trajectory would be just about the most stupid thing they could do. The emptiness of space virtually assured that he wouldn’t be detected and stopped. And that meant success and payment. The risk was minimal and the profits high. After all, what could possibly go wrong out here in the middle of nowhere?

“Hey, Pops. Do you think those aliens out at Proxima would be in the market for some Captain Morgan?” The question came from Angelo Trabant, the youngest of the crew. Tall, rather gangly, and sporting a head full of black curly hair, Angelo wasn’t the sharpest stick in the stack, but Yenne knew he could count on him in a pinch. Angelo was one of those people who didn’t easily panic and could make quick, usually helpful, decisions when it mattered most. Yenne liked him.

“If they are as human as the newsies say they are, then I bet we couldn’t get them enough rum even with a hundred ships like ours,” Yenne replied, grinning. He knew it wasn’t he and his crew who would be running rum to Proxima, but the mere thought brought a smile to his face.

“Hey, Angelo, are you stupid or what? Proxima is so far away that we’d all be dead before this piece-of-shit ship could get across four light-years—no offense, Pops.” The soundbite was contributed by another of the crew, Addie Yang. Addie, the sole female on board, was also the toughest person on the ship. She knew her vulnerabilities and wasn’t leaving her honor to chance. Any guy who moved the wrong way with her was likely to have his throat slit or his groin crushed—or both. Other than that, Addie was about as easy to work with as anyone Yenne had ever encountered. She always offered to do the extra job, never complained, and rarely screwed up.

Yes, Yenne had a good crew. Their line of work was shady, but otherwise they were quite respectable.

But none of that mattered in the least when the ultraviolet light from the Interstellarerforscher’s Samara Drive, traveling at 186,000 miles per second, sliced through the front of the Matador, vaporizing all four members of the crew and most of their cargo. Yenne didn’t have time to be offended that his ship was being insulted nor did Angelo have time to even think of a smart-ass reply. They never even knew anything was wrong before their neurons, along with the rest of their bodies, were turned into vapor.

The coolant lines to the Matador’s fusion reactor were immediately severed, causing the reactor’s sun-like heat to rapidly go from contained to completely uncontained, otherwise known as an explosion, in a fraction of second. It wasn’t really a nuclear explosion, because that’s not allowed by the physics of a fusion reactor losing coolant, but more of a rapid-heating explosion—one that was visible to naked eye on or near Mars and to any space telescope that happened to have it in the line of sight at the time.

A few seconds later, nothing remained of the Matador except an expanding ball of plasma, a few pieces of metal that were accelerated by the explosion, and the flash from the explosion radiating outward in all directions at the speed of light.

* * *

For the Interstellarerforscher and the controllers at the German Space Operations Center near Oberpfaffenhofen who were responsible for it, the boost was perfect and proceeding according to plan. The ship was accelerating in the direction opposite to its ultraviolet-light lance and on its way to scout the path for the Samaritan on its soon-to-begin, decade-long journey. As was tradition when a new space mission started, the controllers stood and cheered, watching the telemetry stream indicate a picture-perfect engine start and as-predicted shipboard acceleration. Preceding the Samaritan by only a few days, the media attention was significant. After all, Interstellarerforscher was the first truly interstellar spacecraft built and launched by humans.

The radio telemetry from Interstellarerforscher took fourteen minutes to reach Oberpfaffenhofen. The light from the exploding Matador took the same amount of time to reach Earth-based and near-Earth space-based telescopes. It took almost a full twenty-four hours for the astronomers to see the explosion, understand it for what it was, notify the International Space Traffic Control Authority, and for them to then put two and two together to figure out that the unknown ship’s demise was almost certainly linked to the departure of the Interstellarerforscher and its lethal ultraviolet exhaust.

For the scientists, engineers, and politicians, the danger posed by the Samara Drive suddenly moved from the theoretical to the real. For another group, or perhaps groups, it was merely a confirmation of what they already knew: The Samara Drive, what it enabled and how it was going to be used to contact aliens, was dangerous. Dangerous enough that someone had to do something about it.



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