The Sails of Tau Ceti

The Sails of Tau Ceti

A Novel By

Michael McCollum

Sci Fi - Arizona, Inc.

Third Millennium Publishing

A Cooperative of Online Writers and Resources

PROLOGUE

Faslorn of the Phelan stood on the bridge of the starship
Far Horizons
and watched as thick bundles of gossamer thread poured forth from their storage holds. The shroud lines had been streaming aft through half a dozen changes of the watch. Now the first phase of the star brake’s deployment was nearing its end.

Faslorn let his eyes roam the ship’s instruments as the last few
kel
of bundled lines leaped free. His attention returned to the screens as the star brake’s million
kel
long mass stretched to its full length and suddenly grew taut.

“Sound the alarm,” Faslorn ordered. “Rebound coming.”

The warning echoed through every corridor of the giant starship. Thousands of crewmembers stopped what they were doing and anchored themselves. Faslorn wrapped a six-fingered hand around a nearby stanchion and held on tight. Far out along the star brake, he could see the reflection wave racing toward
Far Horizons
.

The rebound wave struck the ship and caused the deck to jump beneath his feet. He barely noticed the rolling motion as stresses redistributed themselves throughout the starship. All of his attention was taken up by the screens. His twin hearts beat a little faster as he scanned the giant construct on which depended his own fate, and that of one hundred thousand crewmates.

“No damage to brake or ship,” one of the deployment technicians reported.

Faslorn emitted the Phelan equivalent of a sigh. “Very well. Cut the restraining straps.”

All along the folded brake, tiny glittering lights illuminated the eternal night of space as the straps that kept the brake furled were cut. With the restraints gone, centrifugal force took over. There was a vast rippling as the gossamer fabric of the brake began to unfurl.

It was difficult to observe the progress of the deployment. The furled brake had been a long line that twisted and turned on its way to the vanishing point. As the mass unfolded, it revealed the reflective film that made up the bulk of its surface area. There is nothing in space more difficult to see than a one hundred percent reflective surface. It reflects the blackness of space, while distorting the reflected images of stars. To an observer, it seems as though the universe has been wrenched into convolutions by some giant, unseen claw.

Far behind the starship, a giant flower opened its petals to space, marking the end of a voyage that had lasted more than three Phelan lifetimes. It was a voyage that had begun in fire and would end by grazing the photosphere of the small yellow sun that was their destination, which, at the moment, was merely the brightest point of light in the sky.

Faslorn’s would likely be the last generation of Phelan to live their lives between the stars. Within a few dozen
tarn
, they would encounter the thinking beings of the yellow sun. It was Faslorn’s task, and that of his shipmates, to win a home among the strange bipedal creatures that styled themselves
Homo sapiens
. If he were successful, the next generation of Phelan would be born with solid ground rather than steel deck beneath their feet. If not, then Faslorn’s line would likely end with him.

“Look how it fills the sky,” his assistant said. Overhead the star brake had expanded until it blotted out the cold point of light that had once been home.

Faslorn’s gesture was the Phelan equivalent of a smile. “That it does, Paldar. It won’t be long now before they notice us.”

As the commander of
Far Horizons
watched the continuing dance of deployment, he thought of the difficult task ahead. It was somehow symbolic that the stars behind were slowly being blotted out by reflections of the stars ahead.

Far Horizons
was committed. There would be no turning back. The fate of two intelligent species would be decided by what happened next.

1 Starhopper

CHAPTER 1

The ruddy orb of Mars covered one full quadrant of star flecked sky and flooded the transparent dome with a ruby light. As beautiful as the sight was, Victoria Bronson had eyes only for the pyramid shaped collection of fuel tanks and piping silhouetted against the planet. After twenty years of planning and three years of construction,
Starhopper
was nearly ready. Soon tankers would pump a hundred thousand tons of liquid hydrogen into the craft’s capacious fuel tanks. Ten days later, assuming no glitches were found during the complex countdown, humanity’s first visitor to another star would be hurled outbound on its long journey into the deep black.

People had dreamed of travel to the stars for almost as long as they had known the tiny points of light were distant suns. While poets wrote paeans to starflight, engineers bemoaned the prodigious energies involved. Writers of escapist fiction dreamed up fantastic schemes for flitting between stellar systems, while physicists attacked the problem with no less imagination. Scientists speculated that wormholes, extra spatial dimensions, or warped space-time might prove to be chinks in the armor of the Einstein barrier. Unfortunately, the efforts of the scientists proved no more effective than those of the poets and writers. Despite everything, the stars remained uncomfortably beyond the outstretched grasp of humanity.

That is, until the year 2217. In that year, a young Martian physicist named Dardan Pierce suggested that the time had come to begin explorations of the nearer stars. In a paper published in the
System Journal for Astrophysics
, Pierce laid out the parameters for a successful interstellar crossing. Pierce’s starship was no fanciful faster-than-light speedster, but rather a craft requiring most of a human lifetime to make the journey. At the end of his paper, he exhorted his colleagues to build an instrumented probe as a demonstration project and to send that device to explore the worlds known to circle Alpha Centauri, Sol’s closest neighbor in the firmament.

The engines that would drive humanity’s first interstellar probe would be powered by antimatter, a technology first developed in the middle of the twenty-first century. The earliest antimatter powered spacecraft had used micrograms of the volatile stuff to heat hydrogen, which was then expelled through conventional rocket nozzles. Modern craft consumed kilograms of antiprotons, converting hydrogen to relativistic plasma before channeling it rearward through a series of magnetic nozzles.

The
Starhopper
booster would accelerate the instrument package to one-tenth light speed. As each tank was drained of reaction mass, it would be jettisoned. At the end of the boost phase, the giant engines would grow cold and
Starhopper
would coast outbound toward Alpha Centauri, having left a trail of debris extending all the way back to Mars in its wake. Nearly half a century after launch, the instrument package would command the booster to turn end for end and begin decelerating. Again, fuel tanks and their supporting structure would be jettisoned as they were emptied. Even the engines would be discarded once they finished their task of slowing the instrument package to intrasystem velocity.

The
Starhopper
that entered the Centauri system would bear little resemblance to the one that left Mars. The instrument package represented only 0.1 percent of the original vehicle mass. Even so, at 110 tons, it was as large as a small spaceship. The instrument section contained maneuvering engines, antimatter, reaction mass, a power reactor, communications gear, and instruments able to wrest the secrets from the half dozen alien worlds known to orbit the Centauri suns.

Tory Bronson lay on her back on the carpeted deck of a Phobos surface dome and gazed up to where the interstellar booster maintained station on the larger of the two Martian moons. She thought of all the problems and crises that had been bested since the program’s conception. At times, Dard Pierce had often told her, it had seemed as though the probe would never be built. Even now, the coalition of governments, universities, and corporations that supported
Starhopper
were grudging in their largesse.

Tory had been three years old when Pierce published his original paper. By the time he had gathered up enough backers to begin planning in earnest, Tory had entered the University of Olympus on Mars. It had been her intention to become a lawyer. She first heard about the project at one of Pierce’s lectures, which she attended because she needed the extra credit for a science class. That might have been her only exposure to Starhopper had not her career plans changed at the beginning of her sophomore year. The change came about when she was fitted with her first computer implant.

Like antimatter propulsion, the implants were an old technology that had been steadily improved over a century of use. The first implants had been simple aural devices, little more than fancy hearing aids that allowed the user to subvocalize a command, and then receive the computer’s response directly to the inner ear. In those days, implants had been little more than status symbols for the rich, subminiature cellular phones for conducting business while pretending to do something else. Not until a method for directly stimulating the brain was developed did the modern computer implant become possible. The heart of an implant was its molecular computer and direct stimulus/response microcircuit. Once implanted behind the left ear (the right ear for left-handed people), it sensed the complex electrical rhythm of the brain and translated conscious thoughts into electrical impulses that were then transmitted to a remote computer. The computer’s response was then translated back into brain waves, and the required patterns induced in the sensory centers of the brain.

There were limitations, of course. The wearer had to learn to think in such a manner that the implant interpreted that mental activity as a command, and not as the background noise that was normal thought. It was a little like learning to wiggle one’s ears. No one could precisely describe how to accomplish it, but once the skill was mastered, it was never forgotten. The implants did nothing to make the wearer more intelligent. What they did do was provide a phenomenal memory, to the point where one could “remember” things they had never known.

There were other practical limitations on implant use. Most people quickly reached a point where additional data merely confused them. The problem, long known to students, was known as “avalanche effect” because it felt as though one was being buried under an avalanche of data. The symptoms were that anyone who tried to delve too far into a subject ended up disoriented and muddled.

Curiously, a few people seemed immune to the problem. No matter how complex the task, these rare minds were able to keep the goal in view without becoming mired down in detail. Such clear-headedness was an inborn talent. It could not be taught or learned. Those so blessed found themselves in demand as managers, organizers of complex projects, and most especially, as high level computer synergists.

A synergist was not a computer programmer since the computers had long ago been given the ability to program themselves. Rather, synergists watched over the flow of the automated software generating programs, and nudged them in the proper direction. For like the vast majority of human beings, computers, too, tended to become bogged down in the details.

Upon learning that she was immune to avalanche effect, Tory Bronson switched from the College of Law to Synergistic Science. There she met Ben Tallen. He was another Synergism candidate. After dating for most of their sophomore year, they agreed to move in together. As time went on, they began to talk about landing high paying jobs with some Earth-based megacorp, and though the subject rarely arose, Tory, at least, had visions of marriage.

A month before graduation, Tory was accessing the list of companies who would be interviewing at the university placement center and discovered the Starhopper Project. She remembered the lecture she had attended years earlier and decided to check it out. What she was not prepared for was Ben’s reaction when she told him about it that night at dinner.

“What the hell are you interviewing with them for?” he asked around a crust of pizza.

“I’ve got a free period and it sounds interesting.”

“Don’t be a frump!”

“Who are you calling a frump, skinker?”

“You, if you interview with that damned black sky project. You know who is behind it, don’t you? Old Centauri Pierce over in Astrophysics! It is his hobby. He’s gotten a bit of funding from the local yokels and is now trying to scam Earth into lofting the rest.”

“So where’s the harm in listening?”

“The harm, my dear demented love, is the damage you may do to your chances of getting on with an EarthCorp. If they hear you’ve been talking to nuts, they might decide you aren’t the proper material for them.”