The Alpha Project: Book One

  Martha heaved a sigh of relief. The four shuttles had all evacuated safely with the twenty-two crewmembers distributed between them. They were all arranged with computer-precision line abreast in convoy, five kilometres apart from each other waiting for the moment when the trajectory would be right to take them into orbit around their destination planet. She ordered a cool drink through the shuttle’s food service console, pulled the cap off the straw and sucked contemplatively at the contents. ‘Banana and mango, suitably tropical in all the circumstances’ she mused.

  On-screen appeared an update from Com1.

  ‘Hydroponicum H4 – canopy failure.’ Now they had lost two.

  “Aren’t you going to get out of that suit?” Martha looked at Desmond with the air of one accustomed to, but nonetheless intolerant of children. For some reason, Amelie found it amusing and giggled, which was a bit of a mistake. Martha looked her squarely in the eyes and responded frostily “and the same goes for you madam. Or are you afraid you might smell of something that you shouldn’t?”

  She lowered her eyes before that awful stare and blushed deeply with shame. She had briefly toyed with the idea of making a rude reply but found that she had no words adequate to the occasion and anyway, her voice seemed to have seized up so she simply avoided Mother’s glare, unclipped the safety belt and got up out of her chair, proceeded to take off the oversuit. Desmond had shrugged and done the same so that they were soon wearing only their undersuits and had become, hopefully at least, more or less indistinguishable from the other three occupants of the cabin. She rolled up her suit and stowed it beneath her chair. Looking down at herself, she was faintly surprised at how ordinary she looked, how unstained and unsweaty the fleece was. Turquoise in colour, a single zip from neck to crutch and the legend F4 emblazoned over the right breast which, she realised with a flash of pride, jutted out proudly and was, by any standards, shapely. “So up yours, Mother!” The words rose unbidden in her mind. “Because I’m young and beautiful and I’ve just ceased to be a virgin. And I enjoyed it! Actually it was fantastic!”

  She took hold of Desmond’s hand, albeit surreptitiously and gave it a squeeze. Electricity flashed between them and with appalling suddenness, she wanted him with an almost frightening urgency. Their eyes met and locked together, there wasn’t any need for words. Nonetheless she mouthed the phrase ‘I love you’ and he replied the same, squeezed back against her fingers and disengaged them moments before Mother turned round to them again. “H3 is holding on, you must have done something good after all!” she said and gave the briefest hint of a smile.

  She patched through on their personal radio link. “Matthias?”

  “Martha?” His radio voice, clipped at the edges of the speech frequency range but still expressive, and now of anxiety.

  “What happens if Alpha Four doesn’t survive?”

  “We have to simply fly in and get on with what we’ve got!”

  “Oh, Matthias, how can we do that? We just have so little on board the shuttles. Nothing to create an infrastructure with. One or two tents and rations for a month or so. What then?”

  “How can we know? We just have to take it as it comes. One thing’s for certain, though and that is whatever we face unless we can recover the ship, there’s no going back because all the hibernation cubicles are in the accommodation block.”

  “We should check out the on-board inventory. We’ll be short of so many essentials. Like medical kit – what happens if we get major injuries? We are going to be delivering babies within a year. Nine months in Amelie’s case, no doubt! Do we have the genetic engineering stuff? We could all be taken out by the local bacteria before we even get a foothold on the place. So many things Matthais. I’m frightened. Very frightened!”

  “Try to be calm, they rely on us and so much more now. You have to be strong Martha, and so must I. We have to behave like the leaders we are. Be brave. Don’t let it show!”

  *************************************************************

  They had gathered together. They were the team who put up the sprays in H3, and H3 was now the only one left since Com1 had reported in to tell them that H1 had also gone down. Desmond and Amelie, a strikingly good looking Filipino lad by the name of Manny, a Caucasian girl called Dana and an Indian, Gitangali. Their brief and frantic efforts which had been so-far responsible for saving H3’s canopy from collapsing under the intense broad-spectrum radiation from the sun which had long been their destination yet had so quickly become their potential executioner, had given them the semblance of a team. Now they spoke as one and Martha found herself on the receiving end of their combined voice.

  “What is going to happen now, Mother? What if the ship is lost?”

  “Chances are that it won’t happen. With the weight of the shuttles removed, Com1 reports that its orbit is recovering. There is plenty of systems redundancy. Even though we have lost three of the hydroponica and so reduced the range of species, we can do very well with only the one.”

  “Do we know when we can go back on board?”

  “Not yet, certainly. Alpha Four is still at risk. If she overheats too much, the fuel or lox tanks might explode. Also there is the possibility of structural collapse, so close in to the sun’s gravity field and with the metals heating up. They were designed against brittle failure in the cold of deep space, not the sort of heating she is getting so close in. It is better for us to assume the worst and that she will yet be lost. I’m sorry, but that’s how it is.”

  “So what happens now?” Manny spoke for them. “Are we going to sit out here and watch? Isn’t there anything we can do?”

  Martha nodded. “The on-board computer is working up our best orbit to our new home. When we get to the right configuration, we are going to fly there straight away and go into parking orbit until Alpha Four joins us. At least, that’s the plan.”

  She typed in some commands and a long-familiar image appeared on the main viewer. The blue-green beautiful body of their new and as yet un-named home was rotating slowly before them, a reproduction of the original flyby made by one of the Alpha Project’s high speed probes, now 125 standard years ago. It served to calm the agitation of the young crewmembers who were pledged to be its initial colonists. It was their home-to-be, virgin, untamed, uncolonised. A new world created by a benevolent god, almost 40 light years from the spent and exhausted planet from which they had set out. Awakened from hibernation after almost ninety-one years in deep space, ten young men and ten young women along with their two leaders were at the threshold of a new life, a new world, the beginnings of a new human colony.

  Only the ship had lost an engine and didn’t have enough fusion power to pull her out into a safe slingshot orbit around its sun.

  The on-board computer announced an alert. ‘All crewmembers return to their seats, please. Power-up is in five, repeat five standard minutes, at 1.25g for 25 standard hours and approximately 17 standard minutes to turnround point. It is recommended that you rest as much as you can, mild sedatives are available on request to the food service console, subject to health restrictions.’

  ******************************************************************

  Manny touched her arm, squeezed and looked into her eyes, smilingly. “Mother wants you” he said. “She didn’t look very pleased!”

  Amelie’s young face was pale and anxious, she was almost in tears. “What have I done wrong, now?”

  He smiled, suddenly offering the comfort of his open, cheerful countenance. “Don’t be afraid, little one. She won’t eat you!”

  “No Manny, but she can make a damned good try!” So saying, Amelie pulled herself forward, slid back the door into the cockpit and, on a waved invitation from Martha within, pulled herself into the co-pilot’s seat. Martha looked her up and down, Amelie suddenly sensed fear and danger and cringed beneath her look.

  “What is it, Mother?” she asked tremulously.
>
  “Are you superstitious F4?” She paused for an instant, then added “Amelie.”

  “Mother?”

  Martha’s demeanour was not encouraging, her eyes alight with malign rage. Amelie looked down at her clenched hands and winced. “Have I done anything wrong, Mother?” she said, her mind instantly alive with jerky, replayed scenes from the ecstasy of her love-making with Desmond in the now immolated paradise of H2. “Have I – sinned?”

  “Look at the screen, Amelie.”

  Her eyes took in the low-quality images, at first uncomprehendingly, then recognising the interior of a personal cabin, the hibernation unit within and now going to maximum focus on to the detail of the bed from which she had recently, but feeling so long ago now, lain in the long, mindless sleep of hibernation. Teddy was on her pillow. Her eyes filled with tears and suddenly there was a desperate heart-wrenching pain called from somewhere within her rapidly evaporating childhood. She wanted him! She wanted to cuddle his soft, fur-smelling smell and feel his fleecy exterior. Suddenly she ached for his safety and soft, cot-like comfort. Her eyes were drawn instead to the magnetism of Martha’s dreadful face, then back to the scene.

  Teddy was surrounded with white oozing vapours and then, with a suddenness which made her almost jerk out of her seat, he burst into flames, a bright, smokeless cadence which ranged rapidly out on to the pillow and, seconds later rendered the interior impenetrable with a white fog, turning to blackness, interspersed with yellow flashes until the canopy burst and the cabin interior was engulfed with fire and the camera winked out.

  “We lost most of the accommodation block.” Martha’s voice was flat, cold. “Most of the doors had been left open, including yours. The fire suppression system operated but, as you should recall from your training,” Martha stared witheringly into her face, “as we work in low-pressure pure oxygen, it is almost impossible to knock down once it gets away. They learned that on the very first of the space missions in the Mercury capsule, costing the lives of three crewmembers. Far too long ago for your pretty little head even to have been bothered with it as a history lesson, Alpha crewmember or not.

  But today it has come back to haunt us. The fire spread into most of the cabins before the intensity of the flames must have burned through the walls of the facility, vented it to space and killed it. We don’t know how many of the hibernation cubicles have been damaged or destroyed. Whether any or all of them can be recovered, we do not know.” Mother’s eyes bored into hers. “But for certain, yours is lost. You at least, and most of the rest of us now have no escape route. F4, there is no going back to earth whatever greets us so we had better pray that the planet we are going to will be habitable!”

  Amelie swallowed. Her mind was being burned out by Mother’s terrible stare. “How old was your cuddly toy?”

  “He was my grandmother’s. She gave him to me for good luck. Mother, I’m so sorry!” Amelie collapsed into herself, weeping piteous tears that she could no way find to suppress in the ultimate agony of torment. How could I have known?”

  “Because,” Martha answered for her “you smuggled it on board, fearing that it would be taken from you. Now you know why it would have been! Go back to your place” she spat angrily, “it may be that we will all die because of it!

  Chapter 3

  There was something wrong with the planet’s albedo. Matthias had the optical telescope up to full magnification so that their destination appeared as a tiny half disk, somewhere in the middle of its phase cycle. Even on visual, he could see that it was too light in colour. He set up the spectroscope and took a digital image which he fed into the on-board computer so that he could establish a link to Com1’s vastly greater computing power.

  “Com1, can you run me a comparison with the archive data about P2?”

  Com1’s response appeared only a few seconds later in the form of a graph with the visible spectrum as X axis and two spectral range curves running across the screen. They were completely different. The readings he had just taken showed maybe 30% greater reflectance in the lighter colour bands and correspondingly less in the green-blue range. It looked as though their intended home was covered in clouds.

  “Com1, can you run a check against the general planetary archive and give me the closest comparable spectrum?”

  This time the response took almost a minute before a picture of a planet appeared. Its coordinates underlined the image along with a list of physical attributes, mostly irrelevant, but Matthias’ heart sank as he read off the surface temperature readings. The compared planet had been in an ice age. It was barely above zero at the equator and the polar regions were at a frigid minus 90oC with the temperate zones reading in the minus twenties and thirties.

  He reset the telescope, adjusted the spectral range into the infrared, scanned it again and returned the data to Com1. This time, the temperature comparisons displayed on screen. P2 was only slightly warmer than the reference planet. He shook his head, puzzled. What he was seeing was inconceivable.

  “Com1, how long ago was the archive scan made?

  “115 Standard years, two standard months and 15 standard days.”

  “How can it be so different in such a small time?”

  “Data gained from Earth ice cores and geophysical modelling give a best estimate of around 90 standard years for a flip-flop transition from interglacial to fully established ice-age. As such the P2 data is consistent with that event.”

  “OK Com1, but why should such an event have occurred now?

  “The highest probability is orbital eccentricity. The greater the eccentricity, the less the time interval between flip-flop states.”

  “Can you determine orbital eccentricity on the basis of the P2 archive data and current readings, then use it to predict periodicity of the glacial cycle?”

  “Negative. The observatory telescope is no longer tracking due to thermal expansion and distortion of the azimuthal mountings. Any observations would be too inaccurate to be meaningful.”

  “Can you not take readings from my telescope here?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “So why didn’t you say so?”

  “You didn’t ask.” Matthias shook his head in irritation and went off to the washroom.

  Com1 was off screen for several minutes before bringing Matthias’s attention back to it with an audio jingle based on Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’, singularly inappropriate in the circumstances. He had displayed the estimate as 6455 P2 years (7146 Standard years) +

  60.

  “Com1, how is it that this was not calculated on the basis of data from the original probe?”

  “Insufficient orbital data gathered due to high speed of fly-by. Such readings as were taken did not suggest a high probability of climate change within the operating span of the mission. The risk rating was therefore deemed to be low, i.e. ‘acceptable risk.’

  Matthias switched Com1 off. ‘Acceptable to whom?’ he pondered. ‘Ordeal by fire and now by ice. Is God putting us to some sort of test, I wonder!’

  For the time being he decided to keep it to himself, even from Martha. They would have to know soon enough but for the moment he wanted to ponder their options, such as they were. He ordered a hot drink for himself from the meal service console and sank back into his seat watching the beauty of the starfield ahead of them. P2 was not yet visible to naked sight, or at least, he corrected himself, not yet visible to his unaided sight which was less sharp than it had been so that he now wore spectacles for reading and let his diminishing far point get on with itself, it wasn’t yet a significant impairment.

  His crew of five were all more or less slumbering after their frenzied spate of activity during the evacuation of the ship, sprawled out over two seats each in a conveniently arranged double row running fore and aft behind him. So just now, for the time being there was quiet, if not peace and he had the pilot’s cockpit to himself.

  Their fate, he reasoned, would
be dependant on a number of unpromising variables. Now that the accommodation block fire had destroyed some of the hibernation modules, the fallback plan of returning home was no longer viable. Certainly not for all of them anyway and he, Matthias shrank from the idea that he might be put into the position of deciding who would sleep and who would grow old in the confines of the creaking wreck of Alpha Four, eking out the diminishing supply of consumables with only Hydroponicum three to succour them. No it was not an option he could accept. They must all be together in facing their desperate future.

  Which looked like the icy wastes of P2. They could only really know how possible that was going to be by sending a shuttle down to examine the surface. Maybe it would be possible to grow enough food, they had a pretty good range of species which could be genetically modified to fit the conditions. It looked as though they were going to have to, he decided so the next part of the equation was going to be Alpha Four’s status as an orbital base camp.

  He called Com1 for a report and the answer came back as a moderate encouragement. She was well on her way clear of the star now and her temperature sensors were all dropping steadily back towards normal. There had been no further damage. Happily, the main storage tanks and the main warehouse were unharmed and, he reflected, everybody had survived uninjured apart from a few minor burns, bumps and scrapes and all four shuttles were intact and fully operational. Things could have been a lot worse.