Bernard's Promise by S. D. Falchetti

Author:S. D. Falchetti [Falchetti, S. D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-08-16T06:00:00+00:00

After some discussion, the crew agreed that they may want to collect samples from the destroyed alien craft. Beckman’s regular survey drones could not do this, but the ship’s repair drones can. The downside is potentially losing a repair drone if anything goes wrong. The drone arrives at its location forty-seven thousand kilometers above Astris’s surface, both of its external floodlights lit, swiveling. The first alien craft fragment passes through the light beam like a twinkling star. The probe pursues.

From Promise’s bridge, Beckman reads the telemetry. James is beside him, leaning on his workstation. “Fifteen centimeters, long axis. Two centimeters thick. Highly radioactive.” As he says that, white flecks blink on the display randomly. “Gamma ray hits on the photo sensor. Surface is smooth. Appears to be a hull piece. Material unknown. Looks wet, like it is sealed in a gloss coat.”

James points at the radar display. “Let’s put all of the pieces on the screen.”

Beckman taps an icon and the display forms a catalog of several thousand pieces tagged by the radar pulse.

Hitoshi says, “When it blew, based on light and heat output, we estimated a twenty kiloton explosion. Not much left.”

“We’ve got sensor data of it intact. I’ll run it through the forensic module and see what it can piece back together,” Beckman says. A progress bar spins on the screen, then a ghostly version of the boomerang craft appears overlaid with solid pieces reassembled by the forensic module. There aren’t many. Part of the upper mast, a chunk of the lower wing.

James points at the upper mast. “Can you get a view of that?”

The drone focuses on a patch of stars and zooms. Finally, a fin-shape comes into focus, turning end-over-end. “A little more than a hundred kilometers away. Drone can get there in eight minutes.”

“Okay, let’s do it. We can talk the surface plan while it travels.”

Beckman queues up the drone’s commands and switches the view to the eleven Centauri worlds. Promise has visited two of Rigil Kentaurus’s four planets. The remaining two, the lava-soaked first planet of Hestia and the frigid fourth planet of Boreas, are on the other side of the star. He overlays a curving trajectory from Promise to Hestia’s orbit. “Hestia has a ten-day year. It’ll be back on our side of the sun in four days. Launch a probe now, quarter-gee acceleration, intercept it then. Better than taking the ship there and getting toasted.”

“Right,” James says.

“Boreas is further. Could have a probe there in a week.”

“What about the communications relay?”

“Well,” Beckman says, “I’d like to put that at the sweet spot between Rigil and Toliman, assuming we’re going to drop probes around Toliman’s planets when we get there.”

“What’s your reco for Astris orbitals?”

“Drop six, just like we did on the Janus mission. It’ll give us three-sixty monitoring if anything’s coming our way.”

James looks around the room. “What’s everyone think about going planetside?”

“It’s our primary mission,” Ava says. “If Astris was potentially habitable, the plan was to go down. We need physical samples and all of the equipment in the science lab.

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