Prologue
2150 AD
—One Week Before Arrival—
Captain Clayton Cross stood in front of the viewscreens on the bridge of the UNES Forerunner One. Three hundred and sixty degrees of uninterrupted visibility. The majority of the ship’s control stations and officers were arrayed around the ‘front’ half of that circle, sitting right behind where he stood.
“Beautiful, isn’t it, sir?” Commander Taylor said.
“Quite,” Clayton replied, glancing at her. She stood straight as a board beside him with hands clasped behind her back. Commander Taylor was short and trim, dark-skinned, but with light honey-brown eyes. She was his second-in-command and the executive officer of the ship.
Dropping his voice to a hushed whisper, he added, “Any sign of those blips we were tracking?”
Taylor shook her head. Starlight from the viewscreens glanced off her black hair, tucked into a tight bun behind her head. “No, sir.”
“I see,” he replied, looking back to the fore.
“Maybe they were comets. Or asteroids,” Taylor added.
“Then why did they disappear when we got close?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
He nodded into the gleaming darkness of space. “That’s a calculated move, Commander. A conscious decision to hide.”
“But how? And if they could do that, why not hide all along?”
“Maybe they had to maneuver first,” Clayton suggested.
“Then we’re calling this first contact?” Taylor breathed. “Should we inform the Ambassador?”
Clayton regarded her steadily. The United Nations of Earth had been clear when they’d founded the Space Force: space exploration was not a military enterprise, nor should it become one. As such, Ambassador Morgan was the civilian leader in charge of the overall mission.
Clayton looked away from his XO. “Not yet, Commander. He’ll just run around like a chicken with no head, spraying doom and gloom everywhere.”
“Colorful, sir,” Taylor replied, her lips curling under a wrinkled nose.
“We need more info before we tell anyone about this. Keep scanning and let me know what you find.”
“Aye, sir.”
TRAPPIST-1
Chapter 1
—Two Days Before Arrival—
Clayton sat behind the brushed aluminum desk in his quarters aboard Forerunner One, staring at the watch in his hands. It was an older model smart watch. The wallpaper image behind the ticking black hands on the crisp display was Samara’s smiling face. Her blue eyes were an even richer and deeper hue than the sky in the background, her blond hair aglow with sunlight.
That was back when they were the young, newly-wedded power couple that everyone else secretly wanted to be: high on life and destined to conquer the world together.
That is, until a car on autopilot cruised through a red light at sixty miles per hour. The car’s cameras had been malfunctioning. It hit Samara and three others, killing her and an elderly man instantly. The other two victims had survived, but barely.
Samara had been a practicing resident at the Ronald Reagan Medical Center. She’d had her whole career and life ahead of her. And maybe she still did. It was too soon to say.
He studied the watch again, running his fingertips over the gold-plated bezel around Samara’s face. Before she’d died, he and Samara had their neural pathways mapped. He’d made several copies since, one of which was sitting in his hands, saved to the quantum crystal matrix of the watch. He’d bought it for himself and saved Samara’s neural map to it before he’d left Earth. Just in case something happened to civilization while he was gone. With Samara’s life at stake, he couldn’t be too careful.
When Samara had told him about the experimental program at her hospital, he’d thought she was joking. But then he’d seen the results for himself: a browsable, searchable network of all the memories and structures that made a person who they were. Some couples might have balked at that kind of openness, but he and Samara had never kept any secrets from each other. Not big ones, anyway. A week later, they both joined the program and had their neural networks mapped in the name of science. He’d never imagined that they might actually need to use them. But now Samara’s mind map was the only hope he had for them to be together again.
Clayton turned the watch over and read the inscription underneath.
I’m waiting for you.
It was a reminder to himself. A promise he’d made to Sam, even though she’d already passed on by the time he’d made it. In theory, he had a snapshot of everything that had made Samara who she was. Now he just had to wait for the technology to be developed that could breathe life into that digital effigy.
One day.
That was the reason he’d transferred from mission planning to an active duty role on Forerunner One. Moving at relativistic speed on their way to Trappist-1 was like hopping in a time machine. At half the speed of light, time was moving 15% slower for him on board Forerunner One than it was for everyone else back on Earth. But add to that the fact that he’d spent the past seventy-eight years in cryo, waiting to arrive, and it gave him the best possible chance of living to see the technology that would someday bring Samara back. Seventy-eight years plus 15%. That meant almost ninety years had already passed on Earth. And over one hundred and seventy-nine years would pass before he could possibly return. After all that time, someone had to have found a way to bring Samara back.
They had to.
Clayton pushed those thoughts away and spun his chair around to the viewport behind him, distracting himself with the view. It wasn’t a real window. Since there were so many internal rooms, and since radiation shielding wasn’t cheap, most of the viewports were actually digital displays tied to real-time holofeeds from the Forerunner’s external cameras. But that had the added advantage of making the windows all configurable, and they doubled as control interfaces for the ship’s systems.
This viewport was already set to show their destination. Dead center of the display was the pale red dot of Trappist-1. Other stars littered the void around it. All of them were blue-shifted by the sheer velocity of Forerunner One’s approach. The stars didn’t look any bluer to him, but his civilian first contact specialist, Dr. Reed, had explained to him that stars emit light across the entire spectrum, so the doppler effect simply shifted visible light into the ultraviolet and x-ray range, and infrared light into the visible spectrum. Go fast enough and you’d actually be able to see radar and microwaves with the naked eye. But now that they’d flipped around and were decelerating in advance of their arrival, all of that starlight was gradually shifting back to its usual wavelengths.
Clayton spent a moment mentally tracing imaginary constellations around Trappist-1 using his augmented reality contacts (ARCs). Glowing green lines appeared, guided by his thoughts and his Neuralink implant. He drew a diamond. A lop-sided star. Then an elephant, and then—
He stopped. In the process of removing lines and painting new ones, he’d accidentally drawn a skull.
He waved his hand to wipe the image off the screen and spun his chair away from the viewport. Strapping his watch back on, he swiped over to the mission timer.
2d 3h 5m
In just over two days Forerunner One would arrive and make history. By now Forerunners Two and Three had already reached their destinations. They’d been bound for Gliese 667 and Wolf 1061 respectively, both of which were a lot closer than Trappist-1.
A musical chime drew Clayton’s eyes up to the door. Connecting to the ship’s intercom system, he answered and simultaneously saw an image of the person standing outside: a familiar woman—his first contact specialist—tall and trim with her brown hair tucked into a bun.
“Doctor Reed. Did you need something?” he asked.
She looked up at the camera mounted above his door, her brown eyes wide and bright with excitement. Her head bobbed quickly. “We just had a breakthrough with the Visualizers. We—Dr. Grouse and I—thought you might like to see it for yourself, sir.”
A smile tugged at the corners of Clayton’s mouth. “You mean you finally got them working?”
“They were always working, sir.”
“For us,” Clayton corrected.
Reed dismissed that caveat with a shrug and a burgeoning grin. “Well, now they’re working for Charlie, too.”
Clayton felt his brow furrowing with genuine surprise. “You got one of them to read a dog’s mind?”
“Not just his mind. His dreams.”
That knocked Clayton back in his chair. He sat blinking in shock, staring at Dr. Reed’s grinning face. She was slowly nodding, observing his reaction on her end via the camera mounted on the ceiling inside his quarters.
“So what do dogs dream about?” Clayton asked.
“Uh-uh. No spoilers. You’ll have to come down to the lab and see for yourself.”
Clayton smiled crookedly and jumped out of his chair. It flew back on a sliding rail, hitting rubber stoppers just before it could reach the viewport. “I’ll be right there.”
Chapter 2
Clayton left his quarters at a brisk pace, forcing Dr. Reed to run to keep up. After just a few seconds they were both breathing hard. The ship was currently experiencing one point four Gs as it decelerated, making even light exercise a chore.
Doors to the other crew quarters flashed by on either side. They reached a bank of four elevators at the end of the corridor and stopped. Clayton activated the call button with a thought, and Dr. Reed slumped against the wall, breathing hard, her brow beaded with sweat.
Clayton nodded to her. “You need to schedule more exercise in your downtime.”
Reed flashed a wry smile. “What downtime, sir?”
He snorted at that. “Good point.”
The elevator on the far right opened, and they strode in. A woman was already standing there. She came to attention and said, “Captain.”
He recognized the woman from her gray eyes, jutting chin, and bristly blond hair at the same time as he read the rank and last name over her right breast. His AR contacts made the name tape glow bright blue.
PO3 Salazar
“At ease, Petty Officer,” he said.
She nodded, and he turned to face the doors with Dr. Reed. Using his ARCs, Clayton selected the Science Lab on level nine.
The elevator slowed to a stop, momentarily adding to the 1.4 Gs already weighing on Clayton’s knees. The doors parted quickly, and he led the way around the circular corridor that encircled the elevators. Other passages branched off at right angles like the spokes of a wheel, each of them lined with doors to various laboratories. Clayton took the right-hand passage and walked quickly by the doors and windows to various labs, pausing only once to check on the leafy green rows of vegetables and fruit growing under glowing blue UV lamps.
Then came the labs with biologists and geneticists working in sterile white suits. They were testing and splicing blood samples from the crew, trying to make the human genome more adaptable and resilient to alien environments. Those experiments were still in their infancy, but the hope was that some day colonists would be able to breathe alien atmospheres without the aid of filter masks or oxygen tanks.
Dr. Reed stopped with him to look in on one of those labs. She rapped on the window and shook her head, pointing to a case of blood samples that was in danger of getting elbowed off the counter.
She sighed and they continued down the corridor. “Those samples represent six months of work.”
“Have they had any luck?”
“Plenty,” Dr. Reed replied. “At this rate, we’ll be able to breathe the air on whatever planet we decide to colonize before we even make landfall.”
Clayton arched an eyebrow at her. “What about pathogens?”
“We can prevent allergic reactions, but if you mean hostile alien microbes, we’ll need to work on vaccines and countermeasures for each strain that we encounter.”
They reached the comms lab and Dr. Reed waved the door open and led the way inside. Dr. Grouse was the only other person in the room. He was short and round, chosen for this mission because of his brains and in spite of his physical condition.
Dr. Grouse looked up as they approached, his plump face stretching into a grin. He hefted a malleable electrode helmet with a big, glossy black visor. A goofy grin sprang to his lips that was complemented nicely by his bouncing, curly brown hair and vivid blue eyes. “Captain! You’re just in time!”
Clayton’s eyes scanned the room. There was a chimp strapped down to a stretcher with a matching helmet on its head and wires trailing to a nearby computer console. The visor on the chimp’s helmet was down, and by some miracle, it wasn’t fighting its bonds. Must be sedated, Clayton decided.
A second stretcher bore a Golden Retriever—Charlie—with another electrode helmet on its head, but no visor. The dog’s eyes were closed, its legs kicking spasmodically in its sleep. Clayton noticed drool leaking from the corner of its snout.
He frowned and crossed his arms over his chest, his eyes back on the chimp. What was his name again? “In time for what?” he asked.
Dr. Grouse held out the electrode helmet to him. “Put it on and you’ll see.”
Clayton hesitated and glanced at Dr. Reed. She nodded. “It’s safe, sir, don’t worry. I was using it to look inside Charlie’s head just a few minutes before I came to see you.”
Clayton uncrossed his arms with a sigh, and took the helmet from Dr. Grouse. The other man helped him put it on and shaped it to his head. Electrodes pressed firmly to Clayton’s scalp through his razor-short black hair.
“Dr. Reed said you learned how to read a dog’s thoughts, so what’s the chimp doing here?”
“Archimedes is here to join the conversation.”
Archimedes. That’s his name.
“The conversation?” Clayton asked.
“You’ll see, Captain. You’ll see! Are you ready?”
Dr. Grouse’s enthusiasm wasn’t as infectious as he probably thought it was. If anything, Clayton found it unsettling. He was about to have his brain wired to a dog’s and a chimp’s via a device that was somehow capable of reading and transmitting mental images directly between all three of them.
“I’m ready...” Clayton said slowly.
Bright images flickered over Dr. Grouse’s eyes as he used his ARCs to configure the communicator, and then a prompt appeared on Clayton’s own contacts, asking him to authorize a connection between his Neuralink and the communicator. Clayton approved the request, grateful that the technology wasn’t so invasive as to somehow project images into his brain without his permission. A glowing green countdown appeared on Clayton’s ARCs:
Ten, nine, eight...
Dr. Grouse folded the visor down in front of his eyes, blocking out the lab. Clayton frowned, disoriented. He heard a chair rolling on mag wheels. “Here you are, sir,” Reed said. “You should be sitting down for this.”
He felt around blindly for the chair and then flopped into it with a whuff of escaping air from the cushion. The countdown hit zero, and suddenly he was flying through a grassy green field with a bright yellow disk hovering in the air before him. A golden snout with a wet black nose protruded from the lower portion of the screen. Suddenly, his view jumped up, and the disc was protruding from that snout.
“Come here, boy!” That was Dr. Grouse’s voice, followed by the sound of him whistling.
The scene panned around, and Clayton noticed paws galloping in and out of his view as Charlie ran toward his master. Dr. Grouse was stooped down and grinning, clapping for Charlie. “Good boy!” The view shook as he wrestled the Frisbee away and patted Charlie enthusiastically on the head.
Clayton heard Charlie barking for the doctor to throw the Frisbee again. Those sounds came to Clayton’s ears through miniature speakers built into the frame of the helmet, rather than through the comm piece in his ear. Again, he appreciated the less invasive approach.
“What is this?” he asked, shaking his head. Even his own dreams weren’t this vivid.
“Amazing, right?” Dr. Reed asked, sounding breathless.
“This isn’t a dream,” Clayton insisted.
“Not exactly, no,” Dr. Grouse admitted. “It’s a memory that we’re triggering during an induced REM cycle.”
“So where does the chimp fit in?” Clayton asked.
“Archimedes is a receiver like you. He’s watching the same thing,” Dr. Grouse explained. “Now look what happens when we make him the transmitter and you and Charlie the receivers.”
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