Genesis Earth Read online

  I opened the door and walked the fifteen meters to the door at the end of the corridor. Beyond the second door, I saw the long, narrow, windowless hallway stretching to the reactor and engine rooms. The reactor room was seventy meters away, and the engine room—the furthest point on the deck from the bridge—was another fifty meters past that. In between, the long, straight corridor stretched like a narrow tunnel. When I turned on the lights in the corridor, one of the lights at the far end flickered on and off, apparently broken. In the narrow space, the flickering played tricks with my eyes, making it hard to see the end.

  As I stared down the corridor, the feeling that I was being watched seized hold of me again. Something was definitely out there.

  You’re imagining things, I told myself. This was pointless. I turned around to return to the bridge, but stopped before I reached the door. My legs felt weak, and my heart pounded in my chest. I couldn’t go back—not without knowing for sure.

  It wasn’t hard, really. Silly, perhaps, but not difficult. All I had to do was walk to the end of the corridor—check the engine and reactor rooms. That was all.

  I took in a deep breath and bit my lower lip. The door slid open, and I stepped into the corridor.

  Caution! Entering low gravity zone, the signs on the wall said about twenty meters down. My legs felt light under my body, and I started to feel dizzy. I held onto both railings with my hands and pulled myself along. The flickering light filled my vision, but I still couldn’t make out the far end clearly.

  The noise of the reactor was much louder here. The hum came from every direction, filling my ears and making it harder for me to think clearly. I paused for a few seconds and realized that I was sweating. Was the air hotter here, or was it just my imagination? I wasn’t sure.

  It seemed like an eternity before I made it to the maintenance room. In the low gravity, my feet floated more than they fell, making it hard to get traction. Down here, the throbbing of the reactor shook the very walls of the ship. This place wasn’t built to be comfortable—it was built to be functional.

  Nothing was in the room except the indicators and manual controls for the reactor itself. At a quick glance, they all appeared normal—and the room empty. I pulled myself out of the tight space with sweaty hands and made for the engine room. Only thirty yards now. The flickering light of the broken bulb filled my vision as I pulled myself forward.

  In an instant, chills shot down my back. Something was watching me from behind.

  I spun myself around to face the other side of the corridor. In the low gravity, I rose up and banged my shoulder against the ceiling. Wincing in pain, I pulled myself down again and looked towards the living quarters and the bridge. The door seemed miniscule to me, almost a mile away. The light flickered above my head. I felt as if the tunnel had swallowed me.

  The feeling seized me again—something was still watching me from behind. It was on both ends of the corridor, and I was stuck in the middle.

  The sweat flecked off of my forehead and made funny shapes that floated slowly to the walls and ceiling. My breathing was barely under control. I glanced toward the engine room. Twenty more meters and an ominously dark door. No safety, no refuge.

  I spun around and half ran, half pulled myself in the opposite direction.

  I didn’t stop running until I reached the bridge and locked the door behind me. I turned on all the lights so that only the brightest stars were visible through the windows. That done, I collapsed on the floor next to the panel, heart pounding, breath fast and shallow.

  A wave of embarrassment hit me. What would my parents think to see me lose my nerve like this? What would Tom and the rest of the old timers back home think of me? Would they take me for a scientist or for a scared little child? I felt ashamed for my irrational fear. Even if there was something alien on the ship, this was no way to handle it.

  No, I decided. I’m not going to let my fears get the better of me. Mankind’s greatest paradigm shift would come through our mission—this was no place for irrational fears and childish behavior.

  I stood up, took my seat on the bridge, and turned off the alarm. Why I hadn’t done that before, I didn’t know. I stared at the computer, heartbeat gradually slowing, and wondered what I should do next.

  A tapping sound came from the door behind me. Chills shot up and down my arms. I spun around and saw Terra’s puzzled face peering in at me from the small window in the door. It was only her. I breathed deep and rose to let her in.

  “What’s going on?” she asked, stepping onto the bridge. “Why did you lock the door?”

  “It’s—not important,” I stuttered. I felt like a fool.

  She glanced around the room for a second, then looked right at me and frowned. Her eyes narrowed, and she folded her arms.

  “Did you come into the observatory without asking me?”

  Her words caught me so off guard that I didn’t know what to say or do. I just stared back at her.

  “Why did you come up there?”

  Her voice was like ice.

  “I—you were asleep,” I stammered.

  “Never come up there again.”

  I frowned. “What?”

  “The observatory is my space. I’m the astronomer. That’s where I work. You have no right to come up there without asking me first.”

  A combative and tenacious sense of personal rights out of keeping with the actual situation.

  She was wrong, of course. Her overreaction to what I’d done almost tempted me to point that out. I didn’t dare argue with her, however—the look on her face could not have been more vicious if I’d threatened to kill her firstborn child. Instead, I swallowed my comment and pointed to the computer screen in front of me.

  “Look at this.”

  She leaned over, arms still folded. “What is it?”

  “While you were sleeping in the observatory, the scanner picked up an artificial object.”

  She skimmed the data, still frowning. For a long time, she didn’t speak. Her eyes narrowed, then widened with recognition.

  “This is just like what we saw from the wormhole.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’d better get back to the observatory,” she said, heading for the door.

  “Wait,” I said, calling after her. “You’re not going to up and fall asleep again, are you?”

  “I’ll take some stimulants.”

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

  She turned around in the doorway and shot me an angry look. “I can handle it. Just promise me you won’t invade my workspace anymore.”

  “Whatever you want. Just figure out what’s out there.”

  She spun on her heels and left the room.

  * * * * *

  After thirty minutes of analysis, we started to get some answers.

  “I think I’ve figured out what happened,” Terra said over the intercom.

  “Yeah?”

  I was on the bridge, ‘directing’ our study, but from her workstation in the observatory, Terra was the one calling the shots. All of the data was in her computer, and she wasn’t sharing it with me—at least, not as readily as I’d have liked. She gave me bits and pieces here and there, but they were all minor—nothing large enough to give me a comprehensive picture. When I asked her to send me more, or to at least see what she was working on, she gave me vague and incoherent answers, as if she was too busy to pay me much attention. It was maddeningly frustrating, but what could I do?

  “The temporary shift in local space-time is analogous to the warping effect from the Heinlein wormhole back at Sol,” she said. “In fact, the only practical difference I’m seeing is one of scale—that, and the fact that the wormhole disappeared right after the object came through.”

  “Wait,” I said. “You’re telling me that a wormhole spontaneously opened, an object nearly a hundred times the size of our ship came through it, and then the wormhole shut again without so much as leaving a trace?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

  “But—but that’s impossible. The energy needed to warp space-time for even—”

  “I don’t know how it happened,” she said, her voice surprisingly petulant. “And yes, I’m aware that it violates our current understanding of physics, but that’s what the scanners observed. There’s no other reasonable explanation.”

  “Are you sure?” I certainly wasn’t.

  “I’m not about to let you come up and look over my shoulder, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “No, thanks.” I sighed and rubbed my forehead with my hands. “What about the object?”

  “Well, that’s the interesting part. It came through the wormhole doing only about point five cee, but get this—when it emerged from the wormhole, it was already accelerating over one point one times ten to the fifteenth power kilometers per second squared!”

  “How fast is that?”

  She coughed. “Fast enough to hit near light speeds in five minutes.”

  I frowned. “And you’re saying this object came through the wormhole already accelerating at that rate?”

  “Yeah. Unless the data’s off, there was no shift in acceleration as long as our scanners traced it.”

  Impossible. Even if the space-time warp phenomenon was some kind of temporary wormhole—something I wasn’t yet ready to accept—a spaceship that size wouldn’t barrel through it while accelerating at such a rate. It was utterly beyond the realm of plausibility—like shooting a laser at a spinning penny and expecting it to pierce a perfect hole through Lincoln’s eye.

  “You don’t believe me,” Terra said.

  “Not quite,” I answered. “What you’re saying is—”

  She coughed again. “I’m just telling you what I observed.”
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  “All right, sure.” What else could I say?

  “You want to know what else I found?”

  “Of course,” I said, closing my eyes as I rubbed my throbbing temples.

  “The emissions that object put out are identical to the ones we detected from the wormhole. Identical.”

  “So?”

  “So I checked up on the first radiation burst, and it turns out it was actually a series of double bursts, each occurring little more than a couple hours after each other.”

  “Right,” I said. I already knew this, of course. I’d been over those reports dozens of times. Sometimes, I even saw them in my sleep.

  “So you know how the scanners lost track of the object when it picked up enough speed?” she continued. “I traced the object’s path and plotted its predicted course.”

  “Where was it headed?”

  “Well, the trajectory was only my best guess, since the data isn’t perfect, but—”

  “Terra, cut to the chase,” I said, my hands trembling. “What did you find?”

  She paused for a second. “I’m not entirely certain,” she said, her enthusiasm slightly muted. “But just a few of minutes ago, the scanners detected similar emissions in the vicinity of the sixth planet.”

  “Do you think it’s from the same object?”

  “It’s gotta be. It lies right along the path of the object’s initial trajectory.”

  “Wow,” I said, leaning forward in my chair. “What do you think it is?”

  “I don’t know, but whatever it is, it’s huge, and it isn’t natural.”

  She coughed again. Those stimulants were probably putting more of a strain on her body than she was willing to admit.

  She sent me some pictures, which I brought up on the bridge holoscreen monitors. They showed a cigar shaped silhouette, set against a stunning image of the sixth planet: an enormous gas giant with swirling bands of red, yellow, and orange. The object was ovoid, about twice as long as it was wide, tapering towards the front and flatter towards the back. At higher resolutions, I made out a handful of dome-like structures along the body, but the rest was surprisingly smooth—far too smooth to be natural.

  I checked the image scale, and chills ran down my arms. The object was nearly two kilometers long—longer, almost, than Heinlein station itself.

  It had to be a starship.

  “What is it doing now?” I asked. My palms were sweating.

  She paused for a second. “It finished decelerating from relativistic speeds a little while ago. Now, it appears to have entered a capture orbit with the planet.”

  “Is that it?”

  “Yeah,” she said, her voice a bit uneasy.

  “What else can you tell me about it?” I asked. “Can you get some better images? Are you detecting anything across the radio frequencies? Is it trying to contact us?”

  “I don’t know. I can check, I guess.”

  She sounded uneasy, but at the time, I hardly noticed.

  “What about the third planet?” I asked. “Did you see anyth—”

  “You mean Icaria?”

  “Yes,” I said, “Icaria. Did you notice anything unusual in the vicinity of Icaria? Anything in response to the object?”

  “Not really,” she said. “The scanners show no change in the last few hours.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing significant, anyways. No radio emissions, no lights on the dark side of the planet, nothing obvious.” Her voice drifted off a bit, and she coughed again.

  “What about the—”

  “Michael, I’m wiped out. I’ve got to get some rest.”

  I paused for a moment. We were hours, perhaps even minutes away from first contact, but if Terra wasn’t functional, that wouldn’t do. It wouldn’t do at all.

  “I need you back on duty in eight hours, if you can manage it,” I said. “I won’t attempt any transmissions to the object, but we shouldn’t wait too long before sending out some kind of a message.”

  “Why not?” she asked. “What’s the rush?”

  I frowned. Why was she acting so apathetic? This was, quite possibly, the most important moment of our mission: making contact with that ship. I had to admit she was right, though. It was safer to wait until we were ready.

  Still, I didn’t like the idea of waiting. It made me feel as if I were on the other side of the glass, looking down the long, flickering corridor again. I needed to confront it, to find some answers to the hundreds of questions buzzing and swarming in my mind. Until I had data—cold, hard, indisputable data—the very presence of that mysterious object made me antsy. If I didn’t get answers, and get them fast, I didn’t know what I would do.

  I stood up and started pacing. With space as tight as it was, that was a difficult thing to do for very long.

  “All right,” I said, “but in the meantime, I’m going to dispatch some probes to the sixth planet to observe the object. They shouldn’t arrive for a few days, but I’ll time them so that we’ll both be awake when they arrive. How does that sound?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “I said, how does that sound?”

  “What? Oh, yeah, sounds good.”

  “I also want to make a detailed survey of Icaria and dispatch a few probes to map the surface and give us some detailed images,” I said. “That’s the only habitable planet in this system, and we need to know if there’s any kind of intelligent life down there. I’ll work on that while you’re sleeping.”

  “You don’t have to come up to the observatory to do that, do you?”

  I frowned. “No. I can work the telescopes remotely from the bridge.”

  “Good.”

  She yawned. A moment later, I heard the door to the observatory slide open, and Terra’s groggy footsteps as she made her way to the sleeping quarters.

  I leaned forward and attacked my work, grateful for something to keep me busy. Anything that kept my mind off of the alien object at the sixth world was a welcome distraction.

  * * * * *

  I sent out the probes to Icaria soon after Terra went to bed. Each probe was equipped with a miniature NOVA engine and could accelerate to relativistic speeds faster than the Icarus. Even so, the alien object was so distant that the probes wouldn’t arrive for a couple days. Until then, I would have to satisfy my curiosity with the blurry images from the telescopes. I was tempted to broadcast a transmission in the object’s general direction, but with only a few hours of lag time between us, that would have to wait until Terra was awake, frustrating as that may be.

  With nothing else to do on that front, I took some breakfast and threw myself into the planetology work, analyzing the data we’d gathered on Icaria.

  Like most sciences, planetology began as a subset of an older, more established field: in this case, astronomy. With the flood of exoplanetary data gleaned in the late 21st century, the study of these newly discovered worlds soon grew into its own distinct discipline. As with other young, budding sciences, planetology possesses no central unifying theory—or, at least, it didn’t when Terra and I left Heinlein station.

  Numerous contradictory paradigms and research traditions have battled for dominance in the field, but only a few central themes have emerged out of the fray. Probably the most famous of these is the question: what characteristics does a planet require to generate and maintain a functioning biosphere? Over years of study, an academic consensus grew and developed, outlining the basic requirements and conditions for life.

  In all ways, Icaria was a perfect textbook case. Its volume was about 130% that of Earth, and its mass between 110% and 115%, judging from the orbits of its two moons. It possessed a magnetosphere powerful enough to shield the surface from harmful interstellar radiation, much like Earth’s. A spectroscopic analysis of the atmosphere showed that it was composed primarily of oxygen and nitrogen—in slightly different amounts than Earth’s atmosphere, but still perfectly breathable. Based on the initial photographic survey, I estimated that between 50% to 60% of the surface was covered in liquid water. From the variable cloud cover, I deduced that Icaria had a considerably complex weather system. Most importantly, the continents were covered in splotches of green, signs of chlorophyl-based plant life.