Sombrero Galaxy, 31.1 million light-years from Earth
System #1129
In orbit of planet SG#1129/2, “Tectonia”
Approximately 146.6 million kilometres from the nearest
Solarsphere
Life keeps moving, if you cannot adapt you will get
trapped in the past. Captain Baxter rested his hand on the bulkhead, his
heavy heart juxtaposed with the lack of gravity. The looming mission had caused
him many nights of deep anxiety, but he trusted his science team to the end. He
read the mission log from the Gunslinger’s Society for the 300th
time: “Jake, planet SG#1129/2 is an enigma. We received a mysterious radio
signal from there, to our first probes in the system. Nothing else has come
through since and we have been unable to collect any data on the planet. Figure
out why our probes have pulled no data from it… If there are undocumented alien
species, document them, interrogate them, and kill them if necessary. I want a
full report, and do not return to the Terra Duomo until the mission is
complete. You are equipped for a 3 year mission and I expect you to use it if
necessary. -Admiral Fox”
Baxter had been slinging for the Duomo for nearly 2
decades now. He rose to the rank of captain by following his one unbreakable
adage: do things right and thorough the first time, and move on. Tectonia was,
from the beginning, the absolute antithesis.
First it was the long-range sensors. Radar and ladar turned
up white noise, except the occasional blip of large moving objects on the
planetary surface.
Second the probes. Oh… all the lost probes. Jen
Marshall in engineering nearly tore Baxter to shreds when he suggested to send
the fifth to its’ imminent destruction. As each ventured through the
Jupiter-like atmospheric storm the signal stopped. With the Garibaldi’s
scopes aimed just right you could see the probes begin to burn, before
disappearing below the cloud line.
Finally, the scientists were on edge. They had debated
themselves out into two mindsets. Two roughly-defined groups with the
fate of the mission and the entire Garibaldi crew hanging in the
balance. The exobiologists, chemists and astronomers wanted to wait it out,
call home for more probes and observe SG#1129/2 over the next 2 years before
making any moves. Something about not disturbing the balance or cycle of
life. Or whatever. How could anything live in that fog? However, the
environmentalists, geologists and physicists had a plan. They wanted to prep
the Garibaldi for atmosphere, reinforce the outer hull, and bring her
down to see for ourselves. Yet individually they all flipped sides every night
after yelling in the galley and drinking too much Charon whisky.
“It is a serious mess. If they keep stoking this fire we are
going to end as burned up as our probes” Jen lamented. “There is no way we can
make it through the atmosphere alive. I don’t care how many patches or upgrades
we make to the hull. It is not going to work.”
“Well we are sure as shit not waiting around for 2 years,”
said Baxter.
“Are you getting old? Two years a lot to you now?”
“Hmmph,” grunted Baxter. “Good one, but you know this is not
how I do business. Do you remember the time on Charon?”
“Ya ya ya I know. You talked those mercs down and got all the whisky out without firing a shot. I remember,” said Jen. “It is different out here… out of Earth’s system. This is the frontier. We are venturing into the unknown, and it is good to have a little caution.”
***
The alarm klaxon rang dead in the middle of Baxter’s sleep
cycle. A lifetime of gunslinger training kicked his body into action; he found
himself rolled behind his bed with his blaster in his hand before the rest of
his neuronal network caught up. Sometimes instinct can be wrong, just his
terminal not an alarm. If you cannot adapt…
This is a scientific mission. I have to keep reminding
myself of that.
The call was from the head astronomer Dr. Alexis Athena.
Baxter let it ring out. If it was important, she would call back. The scientific
debate had been roaring for 3 months, and his patience for their indecision had
run thin. The second call came as he was freshening up. One quick wipe of the
towel over his head to dry off. Perks of being bald. Baxter answered with a
rough start, but was quickly cut-off.
“Wha…”
“Captain. Come as fast as you can to the observatory. Ezra
and I have been working overtime and I think we got something.”
“Not Ezra please. I am not coming to supervise another
heated lab meeting, am I?”
“No. I know he can be a little eccentric, but he’s the best
damn geologist I’ve seen. His dissertation on the water cycle in terraforming
projects was riveting, and although we may not need him out in the black,” said Alexis
“we need him down there.”
“On my way,” said Baxter as he closed the connection. He
arrived at the observatory in the aft of the Garibaldi a few minutes later,
after a long climb along the central ladder. Dr. Ezra Alexander floated expectantly
just beyond the doorway. Sweat beaded off his long thin hair, forming a halo of
salty spheres around his head and a breadcrumb-trail to the recycler. Maybe it
was a metaphor for how shit this plan was going to be. Maybe Baxter was just
tired.
Ezra played with his thick rimmed glasses, running his finger around the circle lenses. The nervous tick continued until he spotted the captain. Ezra slipped the glasses back on, clipping them at the
ears. “Welcome captain,” Ezra said. “I think we got it.”
“So, do you remember those blips?” continued Alexis.
“Yes,” said Baxter “I thought we concluded they were not
related to any orbital patterns months ago.”
“Essentially random, yes. Less chance we could aim our
scopes on them than the early explorers had of riding the Solarsphere to
anywhere with a rock.”
“Get to the point. Why am I here?”
Ezra stepped in. “Pattern recognition. I had a theory
captain. It started long ago, from when I first saw that fog. I did not share it with anyone except Dr. Athena, and that was not until a few days ago anyways.
You see, I am a geologist and environmentalist by training. In my youth
that meant a lot of terraforming projects figuring out how to create and adapt life
to exist somewhere dead, and that did not want it. That planet is alive, captain
Baxter, but it does not want us.”
“Alive how?” said Baxter.
“Everyone understood plate tectonics and continental drift well
before I was born. But me… I have always had an obsession with maps. With how
the shifting of the world’s form can influence our evolution, our expansion.
Truthfully, Earth is alive too. Not sentient like us, nor nearly in the same timeframe,
but it moves and changes. Earthquakes and volcanoes and valleys. That planet.
That planet is alive like us.”
Ezra paused for dramatic effect. Alexis and Baxter shared a
resigned, annoyed glance. Let the man have his moment.
“So I got Dr. Athena to feed me all the telescope data on
these blips in the fog cover: when and where they occur, how large the opening is.
You get the idea. The astronomers had been feeding this data into pattern
matching algorithms with little success. I initially suspected that the fog
comes not from a storm but from a shifting in the planetary form. Rampant
volcanism driven by geologic activity at a rate unheard of until now. When we
prompted the system to treat these blips as surrounding zones of subduction where deep
lithosphere trenches form instead of volcanoes, we got our answer. Feeding the machine learning
algorithms with plate tectonic sample data from thousands of well-studied
worlds, we were finally able to map out a pattern.”
“That planet is experiencing continental drift in what has
got to be the kilometres per day range” Athena said.
The faintest hint of a smile gleamed across Baxter’s face.
He ran his hand across his stubbly beard to hide it from the others. “Are you
telling me you can predict the blips?”
“We already have for the last 15 of them,” Athena said. “With
the right timing, we can send probes, or even the Garibaldi safely down.”
“Looks like there’s no more need to debate. You were both
right, to an extent,” Baxter said. Or both wrong more likely. “Well I
think it is time we gave SG#1129/2 a catchier name.”
With a smirk like a little kid with his favourite book, Ezra
spoke up. “Tectonia.”
Image from: https://images.nasa.gov/details-201503120105HQ
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