Майкл Бишоп - The Final Frontier - Stories of Exploring Space, Colonizing the Universe, and First Contact

Finally, she approached the site. Her heart skipped a beat when she saw the habitation section in the lights of the rover. It seemed almost intact.

She ran to the nearest reachable airlock. It was still functioning; she could get inside.

It didn’t look as if the ship had been through a bad accident. The corridor looked nearly normal. Everything was strapped or permanently fixed anyway, so a sight of total chaos wasn’t to be expected. However, most of the systems were disabled, as she found out by logging into the network.

The door of the control room opened in front of her, a little damaged, but working.

“Dimitri!”

He found time to get in an emergency suit and was safely strapped in his chair. Good. Theodora leaned to him. He looked unconscious. She logged into his suit and read the data quickly.

Time of death… Suit’s healthcare mechanisms could not help…

“Oh, Dimitri,” she croaked. Her throat was dry and she felt tears coming to her eyes. She forced them down. No time for this. Not now. She must do what he’d do in her place.

She moved his body in the suit to the cryosleep chamber. Once she managed it there, she ran a similar procedure as they had gone through many times before. Only this time it was slightly different, designed to keep a dead brain as little damaged as possible, in a state usable for later scanning of the neural network. Theodora knew that her Dimitri was gone; but they could use this data, complete it by every tiny bit of information available about his life, and create a virtual personality approximating Dimitri. He wouldn’t be gone so… completely.

After that, she checked on the ship’s systems again. No change whatsoever. Nothing needed her immediate attention now, at least for a short while.

She leaned on a wall and finally let the tears come.

This is a part of an older log, but I don’t want to repeat all that happened to me… I must go to sleep soon .

Kittiwake is dead now, as is Dimitri. I could do nothing in either case. I’ve got only one option, a quite desperate one. I have to equip my landing module in a way that it could carry me home. We went through this possibility in several emergency scenarios; I know what to do and that I can do it .

Of course, I’ll have to spend the journey awake. The module hasn’t got any cryosleep chamber and the one from the ship cannot be moved. But if the recycling systems work well, I can do it. I’ve got enough rations for about five years if I save the food a little. It doesn’t get me anywhere near Earth, but I looked through the possible trajectories into the inner solar system and it could get me near Saturn if I leave here in three weeks, before this window closes. If I don’t make it in this time, I’m as well as dead. But let’s suppose I make it, I must… During the journey, I can contact Earth and another ship, even if only an automatic one with more supplies and equipment, could meet me on the way. I’ll get home eventually .

If I succeed in rebuilding the landing module for an interplanetary journey. No one actually expected this to happen, but here I am. I must try .

The next few days were busy. Theodora kept salvaging things from Kittiwake and carefully enhancing the module’s systems. In most cases, enhancement was all she needed. Then she had to get rid of some parts needed only for the purposes of landing and surface operations—and finally attach the emergency fuel tanks and generate the fuel.

The module had a classical internal combustion engine. High thrust, but despairingly high need of fuel.

Fortunately, she was surrounded by methane and water ice—and purified liquid methane and oxygen were just the two things she needed. Once she got the separation and purification cycle running, the tanks were slowly being refilled. At least this was working as it should.

She’d very much like to let Earth know about the accident, but she couldn’t. Most of the relay stations were behind the Sun from her perspective now and the rest was unreachable by a weak antenna on the module; the one on the ship was too badly damaged. The Earth would know nothing about this until she’s on her way back.

The plan seemed more and more feasible each day. She clung to it like to what it really was—her only chance of surviving.

When a message that the drilling probe had reached its target depth and stopped drilling appeared on the screen of her helmet, Theodora was confused for a couple of seconds before she realized what it was about. It seemed like a whole different world—mapping the surface from above, sending probes… In the last three days, she had little sleep and focused on her works on the module only. She had completely forgotten about the probe.

Well, after she checks the fuel generators again, she should have some time to look at it, she was well ahead of the schedule. After all, true explorers didn’t abandon their aims even in times of great distress.

I’m glad I decided to have a look at it. Otherwise I’d die desperate and hopeless. Now, I’m strangely calm. It’s just what a discovery like this does with you. It makes you feel small. The amazement and awe…

Theodora couldn’t believe the results until she personally got down the shaft into a small space the probe had made around a part of the thing.

She stood in the small ice cave, looking at it full of wonder. She dared not touch it yet.

The surface was dark and smooth. Just about two square meters of it were uncovered; the rest was still surrounded by ice. According to the measurements, the thing was at least five hundred meters long and had a conic shape. There was no doubt that she discovered… a ship.

You cannot possibly imagine the feeling until you’re right there. And I wasn’t even expecting it. It was… I cannot really describe it. Unearthly. Wonderful. Amazing. Terrifying. All that and much more, mixed together .

I gave the alien ship every single moment I could spare. My module needed less and less tending to and I had almost two weeks until the flight window would close .

I named her Peregrine. It seemed appropriate to me. This wasn’t a small interplanetary ship like Kittiwake; this bird could fly a lot faster. But still… she seemed too small to be an interstellar vessel, even if this was only a habitation section and the engines were gone .

It was probably the greatest discovery in all human history yet. Just too bad I didn’t have a chance to tell anyone. I really hope someone’s listening .

Theodora directed all resources she didn’t vitally need for her module to Peregrine . Only a day after her initial discovery, the probes picked up another strange shape buried in the ice not far from the ship.

When they also reached it, Theodora was struck with wonder. It was clearly an engine section!

While she worked on her module, she kept receiving new data about it and everything suggested that Peregrine used some kind of fusion drive; at this first glance not far more advanced than human engine systems. It seemed to her even more intriguing than if she had found something completely unknown.

I was eventually able to run a radiometric dating of ice surrounding the ship. The results suggest that she landed here some two-hundred and fifty million years ago. The ice preserved it well. But I must wonder… what were they doing here? Why have they come to our solar system—and why just this once? Although I don’t understand a lot of what I see, the ship doesn’t seem that much sophisticated to me. Maybe it’s even something we could manage to make. But why use something like this to interstellar travel? With too little velocity, they’d never make it here in fewer than hundreds of years even if they came from the Alpha Centauri system!