“What? But why?”

  “So that the technology doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. I never got a clear picture of who they were more worried about, other nations on Earth or some hypothetical intelligent aliens.”

  “That’s a stupid directive,” Vukovich said. “Ah, with all due respect. Anyone in a position to find the IPM has interstellar travel already.”

  “I raised that point myself. It didn’t go over. I don’t know if they’re worried about Centauri inhabitants—”

  “There aren’t any.”

  “Maybe they’re hiding. Look, I know there aren’t any, and that destroying the things isn’t really necessary, but the professional paranoids managed to come up with some crazy scenarios where they figure the risk doesn’t outweigh the cost. Our orders are to destroy them.”

  “But—”

  “No. I’m already stretching my orders as it is, albeit with good reason. And there’s no easy way to get it there, and I want to leave for Able as soon as we’re ready here. No, you will have to make do with the Anderson’s IPM.”

  Vukovich sighed. “All right, thank you. I’ll get on it.”

  CHAPTER 30: GOODBYES

  Centauri Station, orbiting Centauri A II

  They had reassembled the station in orbit above planet Able. It hardly seemed worth it for the few days before they disassembled it yet again for the warp trip back to the Solar System, but it was the only practical way to quickly get from one ship to another.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  The Anderson was due to depart in just hours now. Sawyer’s omni chirped. What now? “Sawyer here.”

  “Commander Sawyer, this is Drake, please report to my office.”

  Was he going to cancel at the last minute? Sawyer felt a knot in her guts. “Aye sir, I’ll be right there.”

  She made her way through the hub and into the Heinlein. She stopped at the Commodore’s door and took a breath, steeling herself against what she thought was coming. “Sawyer reporting as ordered, Sir.”

  “Thank you. I know you’re busy, so this won’t take long, then you can get back to landing prep.”

  So he wasn’t scrubbing the landing. Then what?

  “Commander Sawyer, you are going to be in charge of the Anderson and the survival of your landing party until such time as there’s a return mission, which I hope will be very soon.”

  “Uh, yes sir.” Where was this going?

  “That’s way too much responsibility for a Commander. Therefore, I’m promoting you to Captain.”

  “What?”

  “Well, acting Captain is all I can do for a field promotion, but I’ll push to have that confirmed. I’m not sure how much weight my word will carry though. I’ll announce it to the crew before you depart, assuming you accept?”

  “Thank you, sir. Yes, sir.” This was the opposite of what she’d been expecting, but in hindsight it made sense.

  “Congratulations, then.” He held out his hand for a symbolic handshake, which Sawyer took.

  “Now, Captain, you have a ship and a landing to prepare for. I suggest you get back to work.” The voice was stern, but followed by a smile. “And good luck, Elizabeth.”

  “Aye sir. Thank you.” She turned to leave.

  “Oh, and Elizabeth . . . .” he called before she made it through the hatchway.

  “Yes?”

  “When you run into trouble down there, and I do mean when, not if, just ask yourself ‘what would Mark Watney do?’”.

  She smiled. “He’d ‘science the shit out of it.’” Her smile faded. “I think a better question would be, ‘what would Shackleton do?’” She knew that Drake considered that early Antarctic explorer to be one of his heroes. When their ship, Endurance, had become frozen in the ice, Ernest Shackleton had kept his crew alive for more than a year and a half, and had crossed over 700 miles of ocean in an open boat to effect a rescue, bringing them all back. No wonder the decision to let her and the landing party stay behind had been hard.

  Drake nodded once. “Damned right. Keep your team alive, we’ll be back here as soon as we can.”

  “Roger that.” She turned back to the hatchway to make her way to the Anderson. Her first command, good for all of one de-orbit and landing. And she did have work to do.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Aboard the Anderson, still docked to Centauri Station

  “Elizabeth, I know you’re busy, but do you have a few minutes?” Darwin asked as he paused at the entrance from the docking hub.

  She looked up from the console she had been working at, and glanced at the time on her omni. George’s timing was terrible. “A very few, we need to get the Anderson locked down for undocking. What’s on your mind?”

  “Well, congratulations on your promotion. It also occurs to me that we might not see each other again. I suppose that’s always been true, but 4.3 light years kind of puts a nail on it. And I’m going to miss you.”

  The thought hit her harder than she would have expected. For all their disagreements, there was still an attraction. Must be pheromones, she told herself. “Even if you’re not on the next expedition, I’ll be going back with it. We’ll see each other again. You’ll probably be gloating while I’m stuck in your damn quarantine lab.” For all her brave words, she knew there was a chance she might not make it back. She was about to land on an unknown world, with no immediate way to return.

  “Probably.” Darwin sounded as unconvinced as she felt. “And speaking of the quarantine lab, I have something for you.” He held out a small specimen box. “Something they gave me as a going away present. Right now you’re more likely to find a use for it than me.”

  She opened it. “A potato?” Under any other circumstances, a girl would probably be offended. Now, though, Sawyer thought it was the most romantic gift she’d ever received. Damn it, she was not going to cry in front of George. Instead she put her arms around his neck and kissed him.

  “You bastard,” she said, her tone belying the words. “Now I’ll miss you.”

  “You’ll be too busy,” he said. Sawyer thought he seemed a bit flustered, like he hadn’t expected her reaction, or that he was feeling the same way. “Anyway, you’re right, we’ll likely see each other in a couple of months.”

  Perhaps. “On that note, I really do need to get back to work. Thank you, that was unexpected.” Sawyer turned, somewhat reluctantly, back to her console.

  “Sure,” Darwin said, and he pushed off, grabbing the handle by the hatchway and pausing for a moment. “Goodbye, Elizabeth.”

  He pushed off again, back toward the Heinlein.

  Sawyer couldn’t quite focus on her screen. She blinked a few times to clear her vision, and said to herself, aloud but softly, “Goodbye George.”

  CHAPTER 31: LANDING

  In orbit, above Alpha Centauri A II

  “Last chance to change your mind. After this you’re stuck here.” Drake signaled to the Anderson.

  “We know. ‘No way to return to orbit let alone Earth until a return mission arrives, if ever.’ We’re tired of hearing it. Give us a GO,” Sawyer said over the comm.

  “All right. Anderson, you are GO for de-orbit burn. Good luck.”

  The United States Starship Poul Anderson had already backed off to a safe distance from the other two remaining ships. To the observers on the Heinlein and Chandrasekhar, the burn of the Anderson’s main engines came as a pale glow above the limb of the planet—the second out from Alpha Centauri A, and looking as Earth-like as Kakuloa had.

  The Anderson receded quickly, slowing as the other two ships, docked together, continued in their orbit.

  “There they go,” said Darwin.

  “Still wish you were going with them?” Drake asked him.

  Darwin considered the question before responding. Part of him did wish he was aboard, descending for a landing on the second extrasolar planet humankind would explore. He looked up through the window at Alpha Centauri B, A’s companion star, but the planet he’d landed on, Kakuloa, was lost in its glare.

  “We did find some strange things there. I would still dearly love to compare and contrast whatever is down here—” he gestured at the planet below “—with Kakuloa’s and Earth’s biology.”

  If the Chinese Xīng Huā hadn’t hit that comet fragment while in warp, destroying itself and their second fuel-synthesis module with it, then Anderson could have returned to space after its upcoming landing. He would have been able to explore that planet and still return to Earth. Life’s full of little trade-offs, he thought.

  “But,” he continued, holding up a hand to forestall Drake’s inevitable repetition of their ongoing argument, “I know I can’t. You’re right that I’m probably the best person to explain our findings so far, and the implications.” He looked over at Drake and smiled. “Although I’m sure you just want me there to divert the first footstep hullabaloo from you.”

  “I never set foot on the planet. It’s all you, George. But yes, you can explain it better than I can.”

  “That this place was terraformed, with life from Earth no less, about the time the dinosaurs died out? I can’t explain that any better than you can.”

  “Perhaps, but you can justify those conclusions from the data we have better than me. I’m going to be busy urging everyone to keep exploring, to build new ships, and to rescue the crew we’re casting away here.”

  “More like maroonees than castaways, but you’re right.”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  The Anderson landed without incident, and initial surveys confirmed what they’d determined from orbit via the probes. The air was breathable and the local biochemistry wouldn’t kill them any time soon.

  The Heinlein and Chandrasekhar would remain in orbit another two days while the landing crew attempted to resolve the question as to whether the local lifeforms could be related to Earth or Kakuloa forms, or whether they were clearly different. It would take considerably longer to determine if the planet itself had been terraformed.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Aboard Heinlein, above Alpha Centauri A II

  The ships had undocked and the inflatable hub, its job done, had been discarded. There was a general buzz of activity to secure everything for the trip back. Darwin was already feeling a little cramped, between the jettison of the central docking hub and the extra crew. The absence of the landing party was a mixed blessing; there were fewer crew making the return voyage, but they were also short one starship. Two, counting the Krechet still on Kakuloa’s surface.

  His omni chirped. “Darwin here,” he answered.

  “There’s a message for you from Dr. Singh on the planet.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “She says, ‘We have found several species of monocotyledonous plants, their hollow stems have leaf-bearing nodes. Their flowers are spikelets. We haven’t been able to catch a local furry creature yet to count the vertebrae, but we have definitely found grasses.’”

  “Huh. We didn’t see any grasses on Kakuloa. Maybe we weren’t looking in the right place, or it never established itself.”

  “So, yet more evidence that life here is Earth related?” asked Drake. None of the preliminary tests so far had shown anything different.

  “Yes. Very much so.”

  “That’s good enough for me,” Drake said. “Let’s go home.”

  CHAPTER 32: HOME AGAIN

  Entering the Solar System

  The trip back was relatively uneventful. With the confidence they now had in the warp drives, and the fact that there were now just two ships to coordinate, the times in warp were longer and closer together than they’d been on the trip out.

  In a week they were entering the outer Solar System, cautiously and from below the plane of the ecliptic to minimize the chances of a repeat of the Xīng Huā accident. If indeed it had been one.

  When they reached about the distance of Neptune, the two ships paused to more carefully calibrate their position. The Solar system was a lot more crowded than the Alpha Centauri system, whose two suns had cleared a lot of it out. The Heinlein also began broadcasting news of their return, along with some of the less startling data they had collected. The Terraformer hypothesis could wait.

  The news that only two of the original five ships had returned stirred up considerable consternation, and Drake gave a brief synopsis of the situation, along with his assurance that he’d give full details and data dumps after they landed on the Moon.

  “We’re going to be in quarantine for at least a month, it will give us something to talk about,” he said.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Quarantine Facility, Luna

  The Heinlein and Chandrasekhar settled onto the landing pads at the Interstellar Quarantine Facility on the Moon. The crews would be essentially prisoners there for the next month, and their samples would remain there indefinitely. But there was lab space for them to work, and with less than half the expected number of crew returning, plenty of living space too.

  Drake made sure the crews were settled in while the medics checked them over. Then he sought out the base security office. He wanted a secure circuit away from anyone else in the facility who might overhear.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  “You’ve been a little restrained with the data you downloaded, sir” Major Keating, the security officer, said. “Keeping secrets?”

  “Actually, yes. We had some disturbing surprises in the Centauri system. Bottom line is that we’re probably not alone; it looks like those planets were deliberately engineered.”

  “What? Engineered?” he echoed, not quite understanding. Drake took a moment to savor the confusion evident on the man’s face. “Do you mean terraformed? By who?”

  “That we have no idea,” Drake said. “There were no signs that we saw, other than the planet and the life on it. But that’s not what I came to talk about right now.”

  “Oh? There’s something else?”

  “Two things, actually. First, since I exceeded my orders by leaving the Anderson and half the crew at Alpha Centauri, I should probably turn myself in to await court martial.”

  The security officer shrugged. “Fair enough, consider yourself confined to base,” he said, and grinned. Nobody was going anywhere for a while anyway. “Besides, if the place was terraformed, it sounds like you did the right thing. They all volunteered, right?”

  “Of course!”

  “Then any court martial will probably exonerate you. So what’s the second thing? You mentioned two.”

  Drake paused, then said: “We have reason to suspect that the Xīng Huā wasn’t really destroyed in a collision. The data didn’t add up. If it wasn’t, they probably hightailed it back here and have been reverse-engineering the warp drive. Any signs of that?”

  “No, but space is big. If they weren’t in near-Earth orbit we might not notice them. For all we know they could be fifty kilometers from here on the Moon. If we weren’t looking for them we might not notice.”

  “You might want to start looking.”

  “Indeed.” The security officer ran a hand through his hair and let out a low whistle. “It would explain a few anomalies, and some of the orders that Chinese companies have been placing, or refusing.”

  “We’ll have to bring them into line,” Drake said, his tone grim. “What we found is just too big and, frankly, too scary for Earth not to face with a united front.”

  “Yeah, but good luck with that.”

  “I guess it depends what we find at the next star we go out to.”

  “Let’s just hope we don’t find the Chinese there first.”

  CHAPTER 33: EPILOGUE

  Near Epsilon Eridani, 10.5 light years from Earth

  The Chinese Dragon, or Longzi, class starships Xinglong Huā and Tianlong Huā came out of warp well above the plane of Epsilon Eridani’s ecliptic. The star had two asteroid belts, as well as a cometary belt twice as large as Sol’s Kuiper belt, so it was prudent to take the last steps of the approach carefully. Captain Lee didn’t want a repeat of what he had only faked at Alpha Centauri.

  From Earth, telescopic observation had given strong evidence of planets, and hints that one might be life-bearing, but the crowded system made it difficult to be certain from ten light years away. The Chinese mission would find out. The odds were long. Epsilon Eridani was less than a billion years old, and in Earth’s history, life had barely gotten started by that point. But something showed a hint of blue and a surprising oxygen line in its spectrum.

  The Xinglong and Tianlong moved deeper into the system, observing everything. There it was, well within the inner asteroid belt, at a distance from the star that would put it between Venus and Earth if were orbiting Sol. Since Epsilon Eridani was slightly dimmer than Earth’s sun, this put it within the not-too-hot, not-too-cold Goldilocks zone.

  The blue planet had a single large moon, and as they approached the planet, telescopic observation showed clouds and continents. It looked startlingly Earth-like, although perhaps with more land and less ocean, it would be dryer, like a larger, partially terraformed Mars. It had sizable ice-caps at the poles.

  The ships settled into low orbit around the planet, then sent down a remote drone for close inspection and sampling. The crew watched the monitors as the drone ejected its heat shield and came to flying speed, soaring away under its own power.

  “Look there, a group of flying creatures.”

  “Bring the drone closer,” ordered Lee. “Let us get a look.”

  “They are avoiding the drone, but look,” Wu froze a frame and enlarged it. “Two wings, two legs, a beak—”

  “—and feathers. Are those birds?”

  The drone pilot was still watching the live feed, now flying it low over the broad open plain they had targeted as a landing area. A herd of large animals grazed there, disturbingly familiar looking animals, with shaggy hair or fur. “I do not know about birds, but those,” he pointed to the screen, “could be cousins to elephants.”