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Teddy Roosevelt, Lupasha System, Coro Region, Tolo Arm
December 12th, 2037
Shortly after emerging from hyperspace, Teddy Roosevelt and her two accompanying ships were cast free from Second Octal one at a time, conveniently hurled in the direction of their destination. As was the way of the Behemoths, her arrival was timed so she was coasting toward the stargate.
The orcas were awoken from their chemically-induced slumber and rebreathers were affixed. It was the second time they’d undergone the procedure, and the first time they were ready for it. They came out much less disoriented than the previous time, showing no signs of stress or illness. Moloko reunited with her calf, and all was good.
Terry watched their ship detach from the observation dome on Teddy Roosevelt, now configured once again for standard operations. Captain Baker seemed happy her ship was no longer spinning around upside down.
“Welcome to the Lupasha system,” she said.
Terry couldn’t see much. The star was more orange than Sol was yellow, and it seemed dimmer or smaller, he couldn’t make up his mind which. “Doesn’t look like the kind of place we’d find a world the cetaceans can live on,” he remarked.
“Looks can be deceiving,” Doc said as he floated into the observation dome, his mom right behind.
“You’ve been here?” Captain Baker asked. Doc nodded. “Dead end, if you ask me.”
“What’s here?” Terry asked.
“Lupasha was supposed to be a massive trade hub,” Doc said. “The star’s an orange dwarf, or K-class, as the astronomers called it. On Earth, astronomers had it tagged as a possible exoplanet system.”
Terry nodded. “We learned about those. We also learned, after we got stellar data from the Union, most of our guesses were less than accurate.”
“Correct,” the captain said. “There weren’t any inhabitable planets here. At least, sort of.” She touched a control and a low-resolution Tri-V came up. Terry saw it was far lower resolution than the miniature one on his slate. Displayed was the Lupasha star system, primary in the center, and planets projecting white rings to show their orbits. There were only three.
The captain continued her description, “The planet furthest out is a rock ball, gathered up from the system’s Kuiper belt over billions of years. Not much there, and too hard to mine. Too unstable. The next is in the middle zone, and should have been one of those so-called Goldilocks planets. Only it turned out to be a dwarf planet. It does have an oxygen atmosphere, but because Lupasha is so dim, what water it has is frozen, and there’s no active core.” She shrugged. “Some minerals, but again, not worth it.
“The surprise turned out to be the last planet, closest to the sun.” The Tri-V’s grainy image centered on a gas giant. It somewhat resembled Jupiter, with numerous titanic gaseous vortexes raging in its atmosphere. It also had a prominent ring like Saturn. “It’s big, too. A little bigger, and Lupasha might have been a binary system. Instead, we were left with this big-ass gas ball.
“Like gas giants in Sol, this one has multiple moons. Jupiter has 79, Saturn 53, Uranus 27, and Neptune 13. Some big, some small. Lupasha 1 here only has 11. But one of those 11 proved interesting.” She looked at Terry. “Did you study Jupiter’s moons?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Excellent. Can you tell me which one turned out to have life?”
“Trick question,” Terry said and smiled. “Two of them did; Ganymede has a strange spongiform life.”
“An exotic,” the captain said. “Even the Union doesn’t understand it.”
“Then you mean Europa.” The captain nodded. “They’re just tiny multi-celled organisms, and some plants living off the volcanic sulfur vents.”
“Elegant little closed system,” Captain Baker agreed. “Still, it was life, and it proved you didn’t need sunlight for life to evolve. One of the moons here is just like Europa, only larger.”
The Tri-V view moved to show a white planet in the foreground, the surface a latticework of cracks and impact craters. Data appeared next to the image, showing orbital speed, albedo, gravity, and surface temperature.
“Surface temp?” Terry’s mom asked.
“Yes,” Doc said.
“Insane,” she said.
Terry examined the display. “52 degrees isn’t cold,” he said, “it’s hot!” All the adults looked at him with the expressions they used when he’d missed something. “What?”
“Fifty-two kelvin,” his mom said.
“Oh, hell,” he said, both amazed and feeling embarrassed. He wasn’t sure, but thought 52 kelvin was around 300 degrees below zero. Barely above the temperature of liquid nitrogen.
“Frozen hell,” his mom said.
“It might be frozen, but it also had potential,” Doc said. “It all has to do with the Izlians. They had an interest in Lupasha 1, the gas giant. It showed potential as a home for them.”
“What race could live on a gas giant?” Terry asked.
The captain smiled and touched the Tri-V controls. The gas giant was replaced by what Terry thought was a fuzzy image of a Humboldt squid. “This is as good an image as we have of them,” she explained. “Like the life forms on Ganymede, the Izlians are exotic. Their lifecycle isn’t based on carbon, like ours. They live inside gas giants and would find our atmosphere just as lethal as we find theirs.”
“The Izlians are starship builders,” Doc said. “Some people say they basically wrote the manual on space combat. They’ve got huge fleets of ships, shipyards, and industrial operations. This moon was ideal to provide the elements needed to construct some parts of starships, right next door to a gas giant they could live in.”
“So, what happened?” Terry’s mom asked.
“I’m getting to that,” Doc said. “The moon has the same liquid oceans under the ice as Europa, if deeper. They also have a much richer variety of life, as well. More than a few surprises. Well, the Izlians contracted with the Selroth, who would do the mining of the moon while they built their little colony. The problem arose when the Selroth backed out; they didn’t like the chemical composition of the moon’s oceans. Apparently there weren’t enough minerals to make it worth it for the Izlians to perform remote or robotic mining. They gave up.”
“But not until after they had the stargate installed,” Captain Baker said. “Also a space station.” She laughed. “Must have cost them a fortune.”
“How do we factor in?” Terry’s mom asked.
“The Izlians still want some of those resources and were willing to pay for a quiet exam. The leasehold is open on the planet/moon, but if they made a big show over interest, it might turn into a contested situation.”
“How do you get these leaseholds?” she asked.
“You can slap down a huge pile of money to the Cartography Guild, fight someone to gain control, or use the planet to extract a certain amount of resources for a certain period of time without anyone else doing the same thing.”
“Those are pretty vague situations,” she said.
“It can be,” Doc agreed. “Since this was an established mine at one point, the quantities are established; 20 million kilos of any ore within five years, then a 1 million credit fee. Or a 5 million credit fee up front. The Izlians are nothing if not cheap; they want to go for the mining, so the fee is paid for in profits.”
“You and your men came here to scout,” Terry said.
Doc nodded. “Yes, we did. We built a submersible and went down to recon the mining and habitat facilities for the Izlians. After we verified it’s all still there, they offered us the contract to prove the claim.”
“If the Selroth couldn’t live there, how are we going to?” Terry asked.
“The ocean’s chemistry is nearly identical to ours,” his mom explained. “This also means the cetaceans can live there.” Terry nodded in understanding. Now it all made sense. “We can, too, with some adaptations.”
“Like what?”
“We’re still working on it,” she said, glancing at Doc.
Terry looked at Doc and then his mom. Of course, adults loved keeping secrets from kids. A lot of times it was because they thought kids couldn’t handle the truth, which was completely wrong. Maybe little kids couldn’t. Twelve wasn’t a little kid. Terry had enough details, and the GalNet; he’d get his own answers. “We going down there now?”
“We’re going to the space station first,” Doc said.
“Where we’ll be parting company,” Captain Baker said.
“You aren’t taking us to the planet?”
“Can’t,” she said, and shrugged. “No way to refuel, so we couldn’t get back into space.”
“We’re going to hire local talent to get us down to the moon.”
“Does the moon have a name?” Terry asked.
“It did in the Selroth language,” Doc said. “Sounded like a hiccup underwater.” Terry laughed. “Tina came up with its new name: Hoarfrost.”
* * * * *
