Family Law 2: The Long Voyage of the Little Fleet (10 page)

Chapter 5

The Small Fleet picked a star beyond the Bunnies' that the
Roadrunner
had not visited after passing through the Bunnies' system or in the arch back to them. The system turned out to be unusual in that it had twenty planets. Several with moons. None were water worlds, nor did any show signs of life and none huge gas giants. That there was no large band disturbed by the gravity of large planets which helped explain such a crowded system.

The odds one had a particularly heavy concentration of an important mineral was not worth tying up the Fleet to do a survey. They recorded the general scan information and moved on. Radar showed nothing unusual within the orbits of the planets.

* * *

The next system never formed planets. It was a disk of unconsolidated material. The Little Fleet stopped short and cautiously moved over the plane of most of the orbiting junk. There was a radar return from deep in the mess, suspiciously similar to the alien reflectors marking the mineral rich asteroids  previously. Gordon was unwilling to risk even a shuttle to investigate this one. It did suggest the unknown aliens could safely navigate in a cluttered system that intimidated them. They moved on.

* * *

The system beyond was a hierarchical
three star system. A tightly orbiting pair and a larger companion. Only it wasn't when they looked closer. There was a brown dwarf orbiting the larger companion instead of a simple three body system. Not many brown dwarfs had been examined closely. There was one about six light years from Earth, but like most it didn't have sufficient mass to make jumping into its gravity well a safe transition. There were no interesting planets in the system, a couple small gas planets way out and some asteroids than were far too thin to call a belt. The brown giant however had satellites and that was so unusual they took a closer look. On the way in they scanned the system hard with radar. The echo they got was not off in the fringes of the system, but right where they were going.

There were several rocks tagged with reflectors, the same crude sort they'd seen before. These were a bit smaller and more of them. The brown dwarf was lousy with moons and moonlets rich in elements of high atomic number. One moon had been excavated so much it had a pit in one side. There was a bigger boom anchored next to the pit, bigger than the ones used to mount radar reflectors. Everyone quickly agreed it was a ship mooring mast. After sampling showed platinum group metals, tungsten, osmium, gold, thorium and uranium on various rocks the consensus was that this moon system was far from played out and it was abandoned while being worked.

The rock with the uranium deposits appears to have been so rich it was once critical for a period of time, the Fargone Marines exploring by suit informed them. There were elements consistent with the decay products of fission products and laser vaporization even revealed traces of transuranics.

The end of the mooring mast had clamping marks and discoloration. Testing with the laser showed the yellow markings were from a bronze alloy. Most of the rubbed off bronze had been eroded by micrometeorite impacts. The system wasn't that dirty, so the mast was
old
.

Gordon sent
The Champion William
to orbit a claim satellite around the whole brown dwarf system. There was enough here to make them all rich many times over.

They didn't have a real Astrophysicist, but a fellow in engineering followed all the latest research as a hobby and they'd loaded all the recent papers for him. Gordon gave him a call.

"Ernie, are there any current theories of stellar formation that would explain such a system?"

"No, not a one. I can confidently say nobody predicted this, but if I were you I'd keep the find quiet until you have to make it public. If only we can figure out why it formed we have a much better chance of finding similar systems. I would really like first shot at putting a clam satellite around them too."

"Don't you think this one will give you more money than you could ever spend?"

"I don't think you can
imagine
how much I could spend. I'd like to be able to buy and sell deep space explorers and warships like Lee. You're damn near as rich as her from Providence. Does that mean you'll be turning down your cut from this find because you have enough?"

"Uh..."

"Yeah, that's what I thought. Brown dwarfs are not that uncommon but we don't have many in the sphere of human exploration. It would be expensive to visit a brown dwarf all alone by itself. They don't have enough mass to make it a safe transition unless you have an ungodly velocity, so going to and from one will be expensive in fuel. You come in close to one too, so it takes a lot of fuel just to vector away from hitting the damn things. If there isn't another gas giant associated with one you'd have to mine it directly for fuel and most of them are still pretty damn hot, even if they haven't ignited as main sequence stars."

"This is a pretty fortunate combination then, isn't it?"

"It sure is. We have a couple small gas planets further out to fuel up and the bigger star the brown dwarf orbits lets us make a safe jump in. We should look hard for this combination. I'd hate to make a fast pass through a system and miss a brown dwarf hidden on the back side of the main star. That's assuming there are similar moon systems around others, but the possibility of finding more is exciting and certainly worth pursuing. I'm having a hard time understanding how so many heavy elements congregated, but I have even less of a clue how they accrued in separate masses, so concentrated."

"Thank you for your help. I'm recommending you for a double share on this one, for your advice."

"Excellent, that's why I came along. But I admit seeing such systems ahead of the big boys with all the proper degrees and professional reputations is sweet. But have they found any more artifacts?"

"Not so much as a busted bolt and we have the Fargone Marines crawling around that mined out pit, looking in every pocket and crevasse with hand lamps. Whoever they were, aside from the reflectors, it seems like they were obsessively neat."

Ernie nodded agreement. "Yeah, if it was Humans who mined that big a pit out of the moon you'd have a dump heap of bent and worn machinery parts, busted drill bits, bad cables and empty ration bags and cans besides the junk like worn over-gloves and empty lube injectors that guys just drop wherever they finish using them." 

* * *

"That's
it
?" Thor asked two days later, looking sort of peeved. The object was round with a scalloped edge. "What is it?" He asked. He made no move to take it from Gordon's hand.

"A cap of some sort I'd guess, see the other side is concave with threads." He flipped it over in his hand. A spiral of threads ran down the side wall to a flat inside surface without any gasket.

"And no bottle to screw it on?"

"Hey, we almost missed
this
. It was under some dark ore pieces and it was only because the Marine took the initiative to poke around with the rod he was carrying that it came to light. I put him on the list for a double share."

"It might not go on a bottle," Lee objected. "There are tanks on machinery that hold lubricants and other fluids. I used to carry specimen bottles for bugs and small plants that had a similar lid. The body was glass too, not the same as the lid. The lid was some sort of plastic. What is this made of?"

"Aluminum, with a little silicon, tin and traces of magnesium, hard anodized and dyed," Gordon supplied. "That's why it has a little bright chip in the surface on the inside flat. They cut a little piece out on the milling machine to analyze. The machinist was helpful too. He looked at the threads under a magnifier and told us they were milled on with a spinning cutter that had the thread profile along its edge. You also need a robotic machine tool to do that, you can't feed it in by hand. A single point tool could do it on a lath, but that's not how it was done."

"The edge tells us they have fingers," Lee said confidently.

"I don't know. Why not tentacles?" Thor asked.

"Tentacles aren't going to be as strong. If they had tentacles the edge would have little knobs or slots you could wrap a tentacle completely around. I've struggled to get jammed jar lids off before. Sometimes I had to get my dad to take a knife and rap it all around the edge to get them loose."

"You scare me sometimes," Thor admitted. Lee just shrugged. It seemed obvious.

"Ah, it tells us something else," Gordon said, with a smug smile. They just looked at him and wouldn't beg to be enlightened.

"Their hand is at least big enough to span across it and have enough finger length to fold over the edge and engage the dips on the edge."

Lee put her own small hand out and fit it over the cap. It was about a hundred millimeters across. "Yeah and most of them had a bigger hand than I do, it's a real stretch for me." The Derf though had more than enough reach.

Gordon frowned, deep in thought. "I'd caution that it has likely been hundreds of thousands of years since this rock was mined. We should not presume the same race made the reflectors and the screw lid. This might be from someone like us, who came through exploring long after the original miners and got sloppy and left an artifact behind. I'm not saying it's likely, but it
is
possible."

"Whether there was one race or two, the fact they are so neat about cleaning up a site, says a lot to me. They are either different than us psychologically or they have had bad experiences meeting others and now don't want to give them any clue about their race by leaving artifacts behind," Lee said.

Thor nodded agreement. "Things we consider an aberration or impairment might be normal. You might have an entire race of obsessive compulsive people. They might never allow randomness. Piles of objects oriented every which way would offend them. Everything would have to be turned the same way and lined up. Someone who was a slob would be institutionalized as crazy. I bet they'd see patterns whether they were there or not, like humans who get involved with numerology or astrology."

"I saw a little of that in the Bunnies," Gordon suggested. "I'm not sure we wouldn't classify the lot of them as mentally ill. They drove that road across the continent and by damn it was going to be level even if they had to tear down a mountain range to do it. Where is the need?"

"Of course if that's literally what the Teen told them to do, they'd do so, wouldn't they? Lee asked.

"Yeah, I bet you don't ask the Teen if he's sure that's what he wants," Gordon agreed.

"That reasoning fits with the fact they had an absolutely
fixed
idea about the Teen and there was no making a partial change or adjustment. It was all or nothing," Thor said and actually shuddered.

"We have been leaving claims satellites," Lee reminded them. "If it's dangerous to leave things that tell a lot about you then I suggest we clean up after ourselves too. Just in case. Let's not leave anything more complex than those beacons. They tell much more about us than these radar reflectors, but there isn't much we can do about that while the Survey demands they be placed for claims. We might suggest back home that something like the reflectors is safer than a big squawking radio beacon."

"We should pick them back up on the way home," Gordon decided. "The chance somebody will cross over our path and claim something we didn't tag is so small. If somebody decides to do a deep voyage like us surely they will go off a different route. Following us they could expect we'd have already claimed the good stuff and their effort could be wasted."

"It sounds sort of paranoid, but I agree," Thor said. "I just wish we had somebody who could give us an accurate idea how old these reflectors are. I'm going to have one of the small ones here put whole in the vacuum sample box on our hull. When we get back maybe somebody can date them."

"I wonder how long one of our claims satellites will keep transmitting? They only hold the claim for five years, so I doubt they spend money to make them last very long," Gordon guessed. "I'll ask engineering if they have specs on it."

"Maybe that's a good thing," Lee decided. "Are we done here?'

"Oh yeah," Gordon set the cap down. "We'll let the off shift stand a watch and we'll transition out of this system in the morning. I sent
Roadrunner
to look closer at the binary orbiting around this star and they should be back and grappled to
Murphy's Law
by our shift."

* * *

Ernie Goddard from engineering left a message he'd like to talk to Gordon overnight. Gordon wondered if he'd ask for a bigger share than a double. The man seemed a little avaricious, but he was spot on that Gordon didn't want to limit his own wealth, he had to admit. Why didn't he just leave a text message? Gordon already had too many messages to sort every morning.

"Ernie? Gordon here. What did you want to talk about?" The man was up already and dressed.

"I understand you have a couple weaponized jump drones?"

"Yes, though I'd appreciate if the Little Fleet didn't broadcast that in port. They are a very dangerous weapon to use. I only bought two and I'd be very reluctant to use them except in extreme circumstances. If you guess wrong you could easily kill an innocent ship or station on the far side of jump."

"I can see all that. But I've been thinking about these brown dwarfs. If we find another that is harder to make a safe jump in and examine with a ship, perhaps you could put a few sensors and recording equipment on one of those drones and it could safely make a jump in and examine a brown dwarf system for rocks and moons like the jackpot we found. Now, I don't know if the warhead is easily removable, but if you can take even some of the warhead mass off it will make the drone even easier to transition into a low mass system. Would you consider that and see if it's helpful?"

"The warhead is a separate Fargone package on a New Japan drone, so it's relatively easy to yank it out and put it in storage. We can even put it back in later if we expend the other drone and really need it. All the extra computing power it carries will allow us to give it detailed instructions for doing a survey too. I'll have your boss start making a sensor pack and data recording system for one of the drones and I'll tell him it was your idea." Gordon got a twinge of guilt at his first thoughts about Ernie. "And Ernie, this is what makes a crew really successful, good ideas from everybody. Don't let it go to your head, but I'm going to put you down for another share for exemplary service. I'd keep it to myself if I were you. Some of the others who are not as quick with ideas might be jealous."