The Tempest (First Contact) Read online

  The Tempest

  Copyright © 2022.

  All rights reserved. The right of Peter Cawdron to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Cover art generated by DALL·E 2 (OpenAI) and Peter Cawdron as “An astronaut on an ice moon in a storm, abstract, impressionist.”

  Dedication

  To the teachers that shaped my curiosity and imagination at

  Penrose High School in Auckland, New Zealand during the 80s

  (now known as One Tree Hill High School)

  Quote

  A human being is a spatially

  and temporally limited piece of the whole,

  what we call the ‘Universe.’

  He experiences himself and his feelings as separate from the rest,

  [but that’s] an optical illusion of his consciousness.

  —Albert Einstein

  Act I: The Tempest

  ______________________________

  Sewage

  “You should program a bot to do this,” Emma says, holding a spotlight within the darkened hull of the Sycorax. Her voice echoes. Shadows stretch out below her, being cast by the aluminum grating beneath her feet.

  Marc hangs from the walkway beneath her. He’s working with a wrench. All of his tools have straps attached to them, not only so they won’t fall, but in case they’re ever used outside the spacecraft, they won’t float away.

  “It’s too complex,” Marc replies. For him, this isn’t a chore so much as a passion. “I’ve got to be sure I’m retrieving viable material and not sludge.”

  “I meant to hold the light,” she says, “not take samples, although a synth could do that too!”

  “Where’s the fun in that?” he asks.

  Emma shifts her weight. The angle of the light changes. Shadows dance across the holding tanks extending the length of the interstellar spacecraft.

  Marc is dangling easily fifty meters below her on a climbing rope. The shaft beneath him extends another fifty meters again, leading down to the engines at the rear of the Sycorax. As the craft is under power, generating a warp bubble to maintain a relativistic speed, there’s a sense of artificial gravity. They’re not accelerating—not in the traditional sense of the word—but it feels like it.

  Even though the Sycorax is cruising at 60% of the speed of light, the illusion of gravity is closer to what’s felt on Mars than on Earth. If Marc fell, the impact would be fatal, but his harness is secure. Even so, a slight slip on the rope causes his heart to race. To him, it feels good to be alive and in the moment. It beats the dull monotony of their normal flight routines.

  Six hexagonal storage tanks surround him, recycling sewage. Out beyond them, fuel tanks wrap around the hull, placing him and Emma in the center of the bullseye. The shaft is barely wide enough for him to descend on the rope. Maintenance was somewhat of an afterthought. Basic monitoring indicators were included, but access to the tanks while in flight wasn’t considered important. Warp drives get more attention than sewage.

  Life on the Sycorax is boring. Eighteen thousand colonists lie in stasis tubes awaiting the end of their journey in another star system. The crew of ten has been divided into five teams of two. Each team has been assigned an 18-month rotation, which equates to six years in stasis followed by a year and a half on duty. Then it’s a case of rinse and repeat until they arrive in orbit around New Haven in roughly fifty years. This is Marc’s third duty on the watch. Each time he wakes from cryo-sleep, the stars look the same. It’s as though the Sycorax is stationary rather than plowing through the Milky Way at an ungodly speed.

  “And you’re sure this is a problem?” Emma asks, sounding annoyed. “You’re not just inventing work because you’re bored?”

  “It’s a potential problem,” Marc replies, twisting around on his rope as he looks up at her.

  Each of the crew has a specialist role extending beyond their general training. For Marc, it’s effluent treatment and bio-regeneration. It’s not glamorous, but it got him a berth on the Sycorax. Even in cryo-stasis, eighteen thousand people produce a helluva lot of excrement. Who knew there would be interstellar career opportunities in piss and shit?

  He says, “The bacterial load has to be finely balanced. We’ve got to make sure we’re cultivating the right microbes in the right proportions or we could get fecal blooms that throw out the whole mix.”

  “All I hear is blah, blah, blah,” Emma replies, shaking her head over the railing. She pokes her tongue at him, teasing him with mock indifference.

  “I’m serious,” Marc says, extracting another sample from an access port. He’s taking samples every ten meters so he can better understand the microbial population density at various depths within the tank. Tiny monitoring LEDs have been strung out on each of the tanks like Christmas tree lights running the length of the hold. They glow with a soft green, a pale yellow or a deep red to indicate temperature variations due to the bacterial load within the tanks. There’s only one red light near the top of the primary effluent tank but it’s due to a faulty sensor. Most of the LEDs are green.

  “It’s not a problem,” Emma says.

  “It could be.”

  “When?”

  “In four months. In four years.”

  “And you don’t want to be dragged out of stasis to fix a leak, huh?”

  “It’s a lot easier to fix now,” he says. “Before it becomes a problem.”

  “Ah,” she says, wagging a finger at him. “So I was right. It’s not a problem.”

  “I’m being proactive.”

  “Whatever!”

  Emma is less than impressed by his diligence.

  Marc’s not sure why she wants to get back to the bridge. It’s not like they do anything beyond watching fluctuations in the warp bubble as their compacted region of spacetime soars through wisps of interstellar hydrogen. Seeing the odd fragment of dust light up as it vaporizes in the outer shell of the bubble is oddly satisfying, but it only happens a couple of times a day. Grains of sand will glow like fireflies for a few seconds. And just like bugs hitting a windshield, they’ll go splat and then peel away to one side, being dragged along by the electromagnetic current within the warp bubble. As beautiful as they are, they’re doomed to fade and disappear into obscurity.

  Although it may be slight, there is a danger of extra-solar comets and stray asteroids colliding with the warp bubble surrounding the Sycorax. The craft’s long-range sensors will detect anything larger than a basketball at a distance of several light hours, giving them plenty of time to maneuver. On an interstellar spacecraft, there’s always p—l—e—n—t—y of time. Time is the one resource they’re never lacking. Adjustments in the warp bubble can be executed by the flight computer in milliseconds. Even if the duty crew did nothing at all, the onboard navigation system would kick into effect at a distance of one light minute—that’s eighteen million kilometers to avoid a garden-variety rock. At that range, a course correction of 0.001 degrees will translate into hundreds of kilometers separating them as they sail past.

  Small collisions, though, are spectacular. Anything the size of a baseball will smear around the bubble and glow like molten gold for a few seconds. Emma calls them angel poop. She saw one a few months ago. Marc was in the bathroom at the time. He got to see the replay from the logs, but it wasn’t the same.

  “Hurry up,” Emma says from the walkway above him. She’s getting impatient. “There’s a rogue on the radar. I wanna see that baby. It’s the only interesting thing out here for a dozen light-years.”

  Marc lowers himself to the next access port. The rope twists, causing him to spin. He kicks with his legs, pushing against one of the tanks and resisting the torque.

  Bubbles of spacetime aren’t always entirely predictable. Fluctuations in the warp field cause irregular acceleration on their bodies. It’s only by a few centimeters per second, but it’s unnerving. And it can come at an angle, causing him to slip or stagger when moving around the cockpit. If they’re passing through a gas cloud, walking around inside the Sycorax is like tiptoeing down a driveway covered in black ice.

  The Sycorax is a deep space hauler. She’s designed to maximize profits not comfort. As the passengers are popsicles, there’s no need for luxury. The corridors within the Sycorax are narrow tubes barely wide enough to crawl through. On those rare occasions when the ship is not under power and experiencing weightlessness, the passages are easy enough for someone to pull themselves through. While under warp, they’re like crawling through tunnels at a kids’ playground. The only thing that’s missing is the ball pit.

  Technically, the same laws of physics apply inside and outside the warp bubble, but it doesn’t always seem that way. The Sycorax is soaring along several orders of magnitude faster than what its engines can achieve in regular space. Warp bubbles are the cheat code of the universe, but nothing can break the speed of light. Given time, spacecraft can get close, with the record being 86% relative to nearby stars, but nothing can travel faster than light itself.

  As he dangles there, Marc thinks about how bonkers/crazy it is to be racing between stars. Emma might be bored. Marc’s not. He might not understand astronavigation, but he appreciates how astonishing it is for a bunch of hairless apes from the third boulder in orbit around Sol to be plowing through spacetime at speeds his ancestors
could never imagine. For them, light was divine. Light brought life. The ancient tribes that dotted the African savannah could have never dreamed of a spacecraft like the Sycorax. Or perhaps they did. Perhaps, instead of dreaming of it in a single night, they dreamed across generations.

  The Greek poet Homer wrote of Bellerophon, who caught Pegasus and rode the winged horse into the sun-drenched sky. A thousand years later, the French philosopher Voltaire wrote of Micromégas sailing to Earth from the star Sirius, gliding on a sunbeam. In an age where the moons of Jupiter were hazy blobs seen darkly through a looking glass, Voltaire could not have known about life on the fourth planet in orbit around Sirius—and yet he dreamed of it and wrote about it regardless. Oh, the Sirians turned out to be microbes rather than ten-mile-high giants, but they are very much alive, just as he suspected. Then came the 20th century and a bazillion books, films and TV shows about the exploration of space. Flash Gordon, Forbidden Planet, Star Trek and Star Wars all captured the imagination of the public—and yet the nature of light was still misunderstood. Traveling at the speed of light was akin to riding on a magic carpet. A flash of stars would streak by these fictional spacecraft, racing behind them in a blur as they jumped into hyperspace. In mere seconds, these tiny plastic models hung from fishing wire in front of cloth-covered green screens would fly from one imaginary planet to the next.

  Marc knows better.

  Light isn’t magic, but it is far simpler than it seems. Light is energy. It’s a form of radiation. Light radiates from matter. Far from being arbitrary or the equivalent of a freeway speed sign, the speed of light isn’t a limit as such. It’s simply the rate at which energy flows unimpeded through spacetime. If something could go faster than light then light would go that fast as there’s nothing holding it back. Matter has a pesky little attribute known as mass which resists change. Light is energy, whereas mass requires energy to move—it’s a subtle but important distinction. Light has an advantage over mass. It’s already as energetic as it could possibly be. Having grown up in Hawaii, Marc likens the motion of the Sycorax to surfing a wave. He can surf a wave off Launiupoko, but he can’t surf from his wave to another one in front of him for one simple reason: it’s the wave that carries him on.

  The exotic matter drive on the Sycorax compresses and stretches spacetime, but there’s only so far it can go on the mass/energy seesaw. Light isn’t special, it’s just more obvious than other forms of radiation. Spacetime is malleable like plasticine—it can be molded and stretched but not broken.

  The Sycorax is a marvel of modern engineering. It’s been designed around the concept of mass symmetry. To keep the warp bubble stable, the spacecraft’s mass is evenly distributed. The tanks around Marc balance the sewage, water treatment, nutrient reclamation and protein harvesting for the colonists in suspended animation, constantly cycling from one tank to another. The fuel tanks are evenly spaced further out around the bio-farm. Rather than drawing from one tank and then another, the engines draw from all twelve fuel tanks evenly. If an effluent tank gets clogged and too much mass accumulates within it, the warp bubble will shift, flexing and changing its shape accordingly. Balancing the tanks is important, or so he keeps telling Emma.

  Emma sighs as Marc fiddles with another collection kit.

  Emma is a flight engineer. She doesn’t like it when Marc calls her a grease monkey. She may not appreciate it, but the sludge circulating in these tubes recycles nutrients with 99.997% efficiency. With the nearest Costco over a bazillion kilometers away, it’s a case of, “Recycle or die.”

  Although technically they’re always on duty while out of cryo, there’s a lot of downtime on the Sycorax. Sometimes, during their artificial evenings, they’ll sit around drinking some of Marc’s illicit home-brewed beer, debating the pros and cons of galactic colonization. Marc argues that bio-engineering is more important to the colonies than the warp drive. Emma just laughs. To her, such a concept is absurd, but Marc insists there’s no point traveling to another planet if you can’t live there.

  “Come on,” she says, urging him to hurry up collecting samples. “Our closest pass is 80 AU—in about ten minutes. I really want to see this thing!”

  Marc has no interest in a rogue planet adrift in space without being in orbit around a star. Rogues are dark and cold. They’re the billiard balls of the universe—the eight ball. They’ve been given a nudge and sent soaring through interstellar space bereft of their host star. If this rogue is an ice giant, it’ll probably still light up in infrared with a gravitationally compressed, molten metallic core and lots of radioactive elements. To astrophysicists, though, anything beyond helium is a metal so there could be any old trash in the core. It won’t be visible to the human eye—not at eighty times the distance of Earth to the Sun. Marc imagines a darkened Jupiter drifting aimlessly through space. Emma’s not going to see much even with the powerful scopes on the Sycorax. 80 AU is four times the distance from Earth to Uranus.

  “At best, it’s a failed star—a dark star,” Marc says, taking another sample from the tank. “That’s all. You won’t see much. Just a faint smudge on the console.”

  “It’s better than staring at poo,” Emma replies, leaning on the railing.

  “Hah,” Marc says, smiling as he looks up at her. He recognizes something subtle in the way their conversation is unfolding. What sounds like casual banter has a deeper meaning. Although he can’t see her face beyond the glare of the light shining in his eyes, he’s reasonably sure he knows what she’s thinking.

  “What?” she asks, looking at the clumsy grin on his face.

  “Nothing.”

  Emma needs to go number two. Oh, she wants to see that rogue planet as well, but the way she’s fiddling with the light suggests more than boredom. Marc’s had Emma down in the hold for almost two hours. She needs to go to the bathroom, probably for ones and twos. Looking at a vat filled with excrement doesn’t help—apparently.

  “I’m on my way up,” he says, ignoring the last couple of access ports. He’s got enough samples to work with. After labeling the sample, he places it in the collection bag hanging from his belt. The tank tends to contain a smooth gradient matching known patterns. As long as there are no significant deviations in the samples he’s collected, he’ll be able to extrapolate and fill in the blanks. If there’s a healthy curve matching the model, it’ll be fine. If not, he can always come back and collect the rest.

  “Oh, finally,” she says.

  Yeah, he thinks. She really needs to go. And he’s been his usual oblivious self, bumbling along reading every metric except her social clues. There would have come a point where she couldn’t wait any longer and would have had to say something. Marc’s glad he picked up on her hints before then.

  Emma is an extroverted introvert. Marc didn’t think such a combination was possible, but she’ll be bubbly and boisterous one moment and then immerse herself in a book for hours. She’ll go from manic rabbit to deeply pondering the origins of the universe in a heartbeat. There’s no romance between them. Oh, he wouldn’t mind if there was. And he suspects she would like a bit of a fling, but they’ve still got a bunch of shifts to complete. It seems they both know how torturous those could become if their relationship went sour. Professionalism is for the best. Maybe when they get to New Haven something will happen between them. Emma’s already joked about spending a couple of months at the resort in the New Hawaiian Islands. Joked. Yeah, he laughed as well, but it’s not quite a joke. Perhaps once the responsibility of caring for eighteen thousand people has lifted they’ll both relax.

  Emma smiles as he hauls himself up the rope using a climbing ratchet. She knows he knows. She appreciates him calling it quits. It’s the way she’s looking at him that gives it away. Being considerate never goes unnoticed.

  “Just leave the light,” Marc says, hanging a few feet below the grating. He swings his tool bag up onto the walkway and clips it onto an anchor point. The collection samples are in a bag hanging from a line dangling beneath him. He hauls the bag up and clips it onto the same anchor point. Climbing up over the railing is easier if he doesn’t have equipment rattling around on his harness.