Keystones: Tau Prime Read online

  Calm drained his glass. “Excellent. Unless anyone has any objections, it’s time to begin.” Hearing none, Calm executed the commands to undock the ship.

  Deklan felt the tremble that came when the docking clamps released. The forward window showed the bay retreat as Serenity drew gradually away.

  A controlled burn from the thrusters then took the ship into space. The Terra Rings leaped into view, massive spinning structures. Serenity swung around into the gap between Rings Two and Three before Calm engaged the Doppler Bubble Drive and left the Rings far behind. Instead of crawling between the two structures, they were coursing freely through open space.

  Deklan watched as Calm brought them up to about half of maximum speed. At that rate it was going to take less than two minutes to reach the wormhole.

  Calm wore a smile that suggested a nearly manic level of happiness. Jonny looked excited but not to the same extent as Calm. Beal’s perky smile seemed almost inappropriately relaxed. She was leaning back in her chair and had both hands behind her head, thoroughly enjoying the show.

  Upon reaching the small fleet of ships stationed outside the wormhole, the craft slowed. “We have to make sure they see us,” Calm said, winking at Deklan, “if only to cement your celebrity further, Mr. Tobin, and of course to bring Mr. Day and Dr. Beal into the limelight.”

  After a ten-second pause Calm punched the ship back into motion. “I hope you’re all sure about this,” he announced, “because we’re not going back.”

  Serenity dove into the mouth of the wormhole. Black nothingness gave way to pulsing purple. Sensors went off, and screens tracked information. Deklan understood less than half of what he saw, but he was mesmerized by the wonder. The tunnel had narrowed from the gaping maw they had entered, but it was still vast and framed by walls that shimmered with a hypnotic splendor.

  Without warning Deklan and the rest of the crew floated out of their seats. A message came up on all of the screens: “Doppler Bubble Drive Disabled.”

  Before Deklan could even think of how to react, Calm said, “Releasing probe.” He glanced around him. “We might as well activate the wheel in the sleeping quarters.”

  A new screen lit up showing a small probe fired from the ship. It had a spherical head and tendrils that trailed behind, looking almost like a white squid. They tracked the probe for a few seconds before the space around it rippled and the probe abruptly vanished.

  Deklan attempted to mimic the nonchalance of the other crew members as they pulled themselves back into their seats. Calm, like Deklan, had been born on Earth, but his actions aboard the ship made it clear that he was thoroughly at home in space.

  Another screen filled with diagnostic information. Serenity was in perfect running order.

  Jonny broke the silence. “Does anyone have any theories as to why the Doppler Bubble Drive went offline?”

  “I do,” replied Calm slowly. “The rules here are different. I feel similar forces around me all the time, but I’m feeling something different in here. It’s something I’ve felt only once before during The Sweep.” Calm leaned back and tapped his fingers on the console, producing a drumming noise. “The Sweep altered our entire world. It had to do something strange to space and time to do that. The Doppler Bubble Drive manipulates space and time. Maybe things are so different inside a wormhole that the drive can’t function as normally it does.”

  Deklan was surprised. You didn’t expect celebrities to espouse theories that tackled the ramifications of localized subspace variations on interplanetary travel.

  Jonny shook his head. “It can’t be that simple. The probe worked just fine.”

  Calm stroked his chin, apparently not annoyed by the dissenting opinion. “It could be the size. It’s well known that, the bigger the object being moved, the less effectively the drive works. It could be that in here this ship is now too large, but the probe isn’t.”

  Deklan worried that this was going to make the others want to turn back. “Well,” he said, “that’s an inconvenience, but is it enough to stop us?”

  Calm snorted. “Hardly! You aren’t going to find many ships smaller than Serenity that are capable of going on a voyage like this one.” His voice was firm. “No, we continue. I want to see the other side.”

  Day 12

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  New Stars

  The undulating wall of the wormhole was visible through the viewport of the bridge. Flares of energy bathed the room in a purple hue.

  Deklan sat on the bridge with Jonny. He hadn’t yet got a sense of the man, who was by turns friendly and serious. At the moment he seemed to be in a serious state of mind, non-talkative and focused on the display in front of him. Like Deklan, he wore one of the uniforms that Calm had given them. Uniforms were unnecessary on a relatively small private craft, but Calm had opinions, and it wasn’t as though Deklan’s wardrobe had survived The Sweep.

  A series of alerts lit up at Deklan’s station, little icons at the side of his screen. “We have more probes returning,” he announced. “Do you think they’ve found anything?”

  Jonny didn’t look up. “They’ll have found something.”

  Deklan sighed. After six days of slow travel he was bored. There were only so many manuals he could read and so many training exercises he could perform. He’d spent two hours on making sure that he had a complete understanding of the safety protocols used with an EVA suit. His presence on the bridge was superfluous. He wasn’t a pilot, though in a pinch he could be trusted to activate the auto-pilot function. His actual onboard duties hadn’t commenced yet, and he was desperate for activity. Hence his fascination with the returning probes.

  Just then Jonny lunged into the air, both arms raised high above his head. “Yes!” His yell shattered the peace of the bridge.

  Deklan looked at him in bewilderment. “What?”

  “They’ve found it. They’ve found harvestable resources and an Earth-normal planet!”

  Deklan’s heart sped in his chest like an engine surging to life. “How far? How long?” he asked. He knew that humanity’s future was in space-based habitats, but to be among the first to visit a new world where people could live would be amazing.

  Jonny turned to him, still floating and his left fist still held high. “No more than six hours, and we’re clear.” Jonny hooked his foot onto his console and pulled himself back down to a seated position, a victorious smile still plastered on his face. “You should rest. Who knows how long we’ll be awake once we get there.”

  A beep sounded as Deklan was leaving the bridge.

  “Wait,” Jonny called to him. “Scratch that. Can you head down to the probe bay and check on the fifth probe? It isn’t uploading data, and I’d like to know why. It might be important.”

  It was a measure of Deklan’s desire for activity that he responded to this request with enthusiasm. “Sure,” he said. “I’m on it.” He gripped the edge of the door and with a shove propelled himself down the hallway, gliding parallel to the floor. All other concerns aside, weightlessness was fun.

  The probe bay was a small room just off the shuttle repair bay. Scores of probes lined the walls in a manner that allowed for either manual or automatic release. The fifth probe had returned to its usual place, but the slot was lit with a yellow diagnostic light.

  Up close the probes were bigger than they had appeared from the bridge. The spherical heads were fifty centimeters wide, but the trailing tendrils had withdrawn into the main body for ease of storage, little nubs being the only indication of their existence. The surface of each probe was covered in overlapping white rectangular plates. The smaller plates were about ten centimeters long on their shorter sides.

  Deklan had no idea of how to fix a probe, but he could run diagnostics, and more importantly he could do acrobatics while he was at it. He keyed the release sequence and took the probe in hand for placement on the diagnostics cradle. He then executed a backflip that allowed him to bounce along the ceiling before touching down on the fa
r side of the bay.

  Jonny’s voice came over the intercom. “Having fun, Deklan?”

  Deklan flashed a thumbs-up in the air. He couldn’t resist tweaking Jonny. “I am. Is it still wild and exciting on the bridge?”

  With inexperienced hands he placed the probe on the cradle. It didn’t look quite right. He rotated it one hundred and eighty degrees so that the tail nubs faced up. The cradle lit up and locked the probe into place. Information crackled onto the diagnostics hologram: “Memory Corrupted,” “Hardware Damaged.” As the text faded away, the hologram became detailed schematics of the probe coupled with instructions. An animation showed a recorder being removed from the center of the probe for further analysis.

  Deklan’s smile faded. “Hardware Damaged” was a troubling report and an odd one because he didn’t see any signs of damage. Even stranger was the fact that diagnostic cradles could usually read the information off damaged probes.

  Jonny’s voice came back over the com system. “Congratulations. This just became more important than sleep. We need to know why that probe isn’t working.”

  Deklan didn’t mind. The diagnostics showed the first tool that he needed to use—an electrostatic flexer. He’d never even heard of that type of tool before, but it looked cool. It was shaped like a drill, but instead of ending in a cutting bit there was a tripod of short legs. It looked straightforward enough.

  He propped the legs atop the specific plate indicated on the schematic, a plate that looked no different than any other, and pulled the trigger. A charge appeared at the tip of each of the tripod’s legs, and the plate flexed like a muscle. It pulled away from the surrounding plates, its edges drawing in and the center bowing out.

  Deklan waited until every edge of the plate was clear of the probe and then pulled it out. Beneath the plate was an ordinary access panel with a handle. He snapped the electrostatic flexer into place on the diagnostics cradle and turned again to the hologram for further instructions. He then slipped his fingers around the handle and twisted it ninety degrees. There was a click of release as the panel swung open. A flare of bright yellow light burst out of the probe, blinding him.

  Deklan woke to see Jamie Beal holding one of his eyelids open while shining a penlight into his eyes. He recoiled, or tried to, but Jamie had a strong grip on his head.

  Her mouth was a dissatisfied moue as she completed her inspection of Deklan. “Do you know how annoying it is,” she said, “to have an immortal patient who collapses for no reason while carrying out a routine diagnostic process?”

  Deklan blinked and tried to escape Jamie’s iron grip. It was useless. He felt like a child pawing at an adult. “Do you mind? Something bright flashed in my eyes.”

  “Yes.” Jamie sounded tired. “Jonny went over the footage. There was a momentary flare from some circuitry in the probe, and you keeled over.”

  Deklan sat up and rubbed at his head and eyes where Jamie had manhandled him. “You have a terrible bedside manner, did you know that? Terrible.”

  Jamie nodded, somehow making the acknowledgment sardonic. “Yes, I have a terrible bedside manner. Surely that’s the problem here.” Her tone grew more agitated with every passing word. “Not that you’ve been unconscious for six hours and nothing in the medical bay is giving us a clue why. I liked the idea of having an all-Keystone crew so that we wouldn’t have to deal with another Avery. I even recommended you. Now for a medically inexplicable reason you’ve collapsed. How do I know that you aren’t going to turn into something ugly and eat us all while we’re asleep? How?”

  Deklan held up his hands like a shield that could protect him from her torrent of words. “Motion sensors and a buddy system.”

  Tension drained from Jamie like water running downhill. “That could work,” she replied.

  “Good. Now what do you mean in saying that there’s no explanation for why I collapsed?”

  Jamie showed him her tablet. Sure enough, every diagnostics category indicated green.

  “Well, okay,” conceded Deklan, “that’s odd, but I’m telling you it was the light.”

  “You’re not epileptic or light-sensitive.”

  “Not that I’m aware of, no.” A stray detail from Jamie’s tirade drifted to the front of his mind. “Did you say six hours?”

  “Yes.”

  “So we’re out of the wormhole?”

  “Yes. Jonny and Calm are on the bridge.”

  Deklan bounced off the table. “I have to go see this. A whole new solar system!”

  Jamie looked unimpressed. “There’s not a lot to see that we didn’t already see from the probes.” She stopped to give him a dirty look. “By ‘we’ I mean that Jonny and Calm didn’t see from the probes while I was busy tending to you.”

  “Then why aren’t you as excited as I am?”

  “I watched the footage from here after I made sure that you were stable.” From Jamie’s tone you would have thought she was sucking on lemons.

  Jonny’s voice then came over the com system. “Deklan, so good of you to join us. You both need to see this.”

  A dark screen illuminated to show Deklan his first view of the new solar system. A blue sun cast a harsh but beautiful light. Side windows revealed close-up images of the planets. There were seven gaseous giants, each of which dwarfed Jupiter, and another wormhole, giving the system two wormholes in space. But that wasn’t what was most impressive. The feed zoomed in on one image until it filled the entire screen. It was a shiny blue globe.

  Jonny sounded triumphant. “We have readings back. The atmosphere is breathable. In fact, it’s almost Earth-normal. People could live there. Deklan, we need you up here.”

  Deklan was amazed by this positive confirmation of an Earth-normal planet. Everyone had believed they existed, but he was one of the first people to see one up close. In response to his summons to the bridge, Deklan asked, “Why?”

  “We need to know the laws on planetary annexation.”

  When he returned to the bridge, Calm nodded at him. “Ah, Mr. Tobin, glad you’re back up. We have some questions for you.”

  Deklan returned Calm’s nod as he approached a vacant console. “Yes,” he said, “planetary annexation. It’s not a specialty of mine. There haven’t been unclaimed planets to annex for over a century now.” Deklan’s hands flew over a keyboard as he consulted Serenity’s legal library. “Over a century ago America tried to claim the moon by planting a flag. The United Nations at the time declared it a non-legal action. Since then other and more complex issues have arisen, such as the legal rights of ownership for stable Lagrange points.”

  At the mention of Lagrange points, Jonny did a swift double-take before diagrams popped up showing all of the Lagrange points in the system and highlighting the stable ones.

  Deklan cleared his throat. “As I was saying, Lagrange points and planets have been claimed on a by-use basis. Otherwise they are owned equally.” Deklan examined the blue globe that Jonny had said was nearly Earth-normal. “Now this might be different. We’ve never had a planet like this to colonize. It might well bring us into the realm of new law.”

  “I see,” said Calm in a dubious voice. “And what exactly does that mean?”

  Deklan hoped that his next words weren’t going to end his chances of continuing to search for Susan. “It means that there is no clear precedent, but if you can prove that you’re using it before anyone else, you may be able to stake a claim and have it stick.”

  Calm shook his head. “I can’t say that I care. I want to explore, not own.”

  “You don’t care?” said a slack-jawed Jonny.

  “Not about the money, no. But I do want to see what’s on that new planet. Send a probe back down the wormhole announcing the news.” Calm showed the broadest smile that Deklan had seen from him. “We’re about to be the first men to visit an extra-solar planet.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Planet Fall

  “Don’t you think that we should go down in a shuttle?” Jonny asked.


  Calm barely paid any attention to Jonny as he went through an environmental checklist. The planet now christened “Exo” appeared to be free of environmental hazards that could jeopardize Serenity. “No, not really. Why?”

  Jonny looked frustrated but controlled. “Because I don’t want to trust a safety list created a century ago by someone who never had to try to land on an unknown Earth-normal planet!” He paused and evaluated Calm’s face before he continued. “If we damage a shuttle, we can maybe come up with a solution. However, if we damage Serenity, we’re screwed. There are no safety nets out here. We don’t know the planet’s physical laws.”

  Deklan nodded in silent agreement with every point. Jonny was making a good case. Deklan hoped that Calm would concur.

  Calm sat with an elbow on the table and his head resting on his fist. “Fine. Prepare Tempest, and let’s check our EVA suits.”

  Deklan breathed more easily.

  “Mr. Day,” said Calm, “you stay up here on Serenity. Mr. Tobin, you’re coming with me.”

  A rush of emotions flooded Deklan—fear, excitement, surprise, and anxiety. “What?” he exclaimed, with Jonny just a heartbeat behind.

  “You said it yourself, Mr. Day. Something could go wrong. Mr. Tobin and I are the closest thing to indestructible that we’ve got. We’ll leave Dr. Beal up here too just in case something goes wrong.”

  Jonny’s mouth hung open. Deklan couldn’t blame him. He’d be frustrated too if he’d just talked himself out of being one of the first men to walk on a new planet.

  Calm was already leaving the bridge when he said, “Mr. Tobin, let’s check our suits.”

  Deklan walked in silence next to Calm for ten or fifteen seconds before speaking. “Do you know what to expect down there? Do you have scans of the surface?”