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  The Incident at Kruger 60

  A miner on a journey to search for Ununpentium, also known as UUP takes on a young girl in space as a partner, and they discover something neither of them believe. It could be alien life, and looks that way. Or is it?Alex and Laura have to find the answer before a incident occurs in the history of space that could have severe consequences for mankind itself. Along the way they meet the worst kind of people, and some of the best as well. But the question is who can you really trust when everyone is trying to advance their own interests.

  Follow Alex and Laura from Kruger 60 to Kroatzys' Station, Tau Ceti, Morda Prima, and finally to Trajians 7 while they try to find out what is really going on in space...

  The Incident at Kruger 60

  by Christopher Rehm

  ©2012. All rights reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, trademarked products, events, and locations are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any resemblances to actual events or persons, living or dead, are entirely coincidental.

  First story changes from initial writing 02.06.2012

  Second changes, and updates, 28.10.2012

  Reformatted 3.11.2012

  Added NCX index, minor corrections 10.11.2012

  The Journey to Kruger 60

  Copyright and Publication

  Index

  The Journey to Kruger 60

  Arrival at Kruger 60

  The First Excursion

  The Flight to Ross 248

  Kroatzy's Station, Ross 248

  Jochim

  The Trip Back to Kruger 60

  The Disappearance

  The Trip Back to Kroatzys' Station

  On the Run

  Discoveries

  About the Author

  Part 1.

  The Journey to Kruger 60

  I woke up in the bunk above the cockpit, with the soft hum of electronics in my ears. There was the regular ping of the debris warning system, the sound of the fans on the computers whirring, and the sound of hard drives spinning in the eternal darkness. The ship was on auto pilot, headed for a small, dead planet circling Kruger 60B, a red dwarf fourteen light years from earth. I climbed down off the bunk, into the cramped control room of the little craft.

  There were just two seats at the controls, and two more slightly behind them, at each side, where technicians, or scientists, had they been aboard, could work. In the back of the craft were a small kitchen and a smaller bench table for eating and communal activities. It was dark inside, with only a ghostly blue illumination from the panel lights. There were two further bunks on each side of the bench table, above it. The girl I had met on Bernard's star was asleep in the left bunk.

  At that point I didn’t really know all that much about her. She was young, about half my age. Smart, but something odd about her. Like she wasn't always caught up in the day to day troubles of the world, and it didn’t matter to her. Lost, clearly. But maybe not as lost as others, who think they know their way in life.

  She was thin, really thin. Long curly hair, sort of a cross between brunette and dark red head. Probably it was dirty. Thin face, small bookish pointy nose. Glasses. Small framed body. And dirty clothes, and a gaunt look. I went to the galley and made some coffee. I sat on the bench, by the narrow table and thought for a moment.

  I wasn’t in the habit of rescuing people. Especially young women. I'd had enough experience with that in the past. But when I met her in the bar on New Demos, something about her said trust me. Weird, because I wasn’t really one to do that at the time. I guess I liked traveling around alone. The last 10 years of mining had been good to me. Simpler, I think than the years before that. I think I had been looking for that.

  I had been there for two weeks, unloading my cargo from the last trip, making some minor repairs, and generally relaxing. I had met her one evening at the bar, studying a strange language. We had struck up a conversation. She was out of place there. Like a University student at a rough harbor bar. And I think what was weirdest about it was at the same time it seemed to suit her perfectly. We hit it off immediately, something about her honesty sat well with me. We talked for several hours. In the end, and I'll never quite know why I did it, I asked her where she lived and what she was doing, and she told me bumming around space. She came back to my ship, and crashed in the bunk above. She had no place to go. She was a street kid, who somehow got herself boosted to one of the colonies on one of the planetary moons. Her family had raised her on earth, her dad had died at fourteen, and her mother abandoned her a year later. She had been cruising the solar system since. She liked to read, and claimed she was carrying around about 2000 books on her portable computer. She knew a couple of earth languages and was trying to learn something from some old book on dead languages, some early Gothic. For someone who had virtually nothing and little obvious in the way of prospects she had a remarkably positive attitude. We ended up hanging out a lot that last week, and suddenly decided at the end of it I really liked her vibe. And she wanted to earn some money, and on this trip an extra pair of hands could really be useful. That was probably what persuaded me to take her with me when I left. Some things In life never change, you suddenly meet people who enter your life, and then become a huge part of it, when you least expect it. Fate seems to exist everywhere in the universe, not just on earth.

  The glowing fractured mass out side the crafts windows over the cockpit showed that we were still cruising on the wave, the time wrinkle in space time that allowed us to travel faster than the speed of light. The two small windows showed an eerie reddish purple glow, and something that looked like continually shattering glass outside the ship. That was normal, that’s what space travel looked like.

  I drank my coffee. The lights blinked and glowed on the control panel. We had about four weeks ahead of us, and had just pulled out of New Demos last evening. We were going to this little planet I knew around Kruger 60 B, for some mining. There was a load of Ununpentium there for the taking, and the price was right, about 5000 credits per kilogram of the stuff. A couple of hundred kilograms would set me up well for the next two years or so.

  I finished the coffee and got up, and half climbed and floated to the cockpit seat for the pilot. I settled into the big leather seat, and put the headphones on.

  I rolled the dial thru the subspace frequencies. Nothing unusual. Some news reports from earth and the colonies. Some music. A football game. I took the headphones off. The ship hummed quietly. A few lights blinked here and there. Four weeks. Time for some reading, or just sleeping. Interstellar travel was usually extremely boring. And that was good, because if it got exciting it usually meant something was very very wrong.

  I put the subspace radio on the speakers, not too loud, and started to pan thru the freqs again. I was looking for the tones; sounds that were not made by earth people, but were, clearly of intelligent origin. No one knew what the tones meant, or where they came from. There wasn’t any such thing as direction finding with sub space radio. Usually they weren’t too hard to find, and today was no exception. Suddenly they came into focus. They sound like some kind of flute or pipe instrument, continuously changing, in a rather pleasant, if random way. I like the tones. Interesting to listen to, and to speculate what, exactly, did they mean, and where did they come from. They made an interesting musical background to the light show out the windows.

  She had an interest in them too. A lot of people did, but she had a couple of notebooks of ideas about them. Some interesting ideas, well thought out. Probably another reason I had decided to take her with me. I was looking forward to hearing more about what she thought about them. She was apparently, very good at languages, had R
ussian, Chinese, Spanish and English down well, and a lot of knowledge about others. Like a said, a real bookworm.

  I drifted off, back to sleep. There wasn’t anything pressing going on for four weeks. Space travel is really dull. For hundreds of years people fantasized about it and about the adventures they would have. What they didn’t think about was the boredom. And the dangers. Out here you really were all alone. If anything went wrong, chances were good you were done for. And you would never be seen or heard from again. People disappear rather frequently, traveling around space, and the area within fifty light years of earth. So far no longer range probes had been launched. The space commission determined what areas of the universe were open for travel and what wasn’t. So far about twenty three solar systems were open to humans. None of them had any alien life forms. The commission had discovered five worlds in the region that had life, but it was primitive compared to earth, about fifty million years behind earth’s development. We were still looking for intelligent life in the universe, but the search was slow and careful. The commission was charged by the human federation with careful, slow deliberate exploration; in the hopes of avoiding some kind of massive problem when (and if) first contact came. It was assumed that any new race would probably be far more advanced than humanity and humanity had decided it was in its own best interests to make sure they didn’t get wiped out in the process.

  I like mysteries. Unsolved ones. That’s why I listen to the tones. I’ve run a number of numerical regressions on them, looking for patterns, that’s what makes them interesting. There aren’t any patterns in the tones at all, at least none anyone has found yet. They are totally random. Or at least they appear to be. So far. Really, at this point no one knows. Lots of theories, no one actually knows a thing.

  I was headed to a small barren planet off the star Kruger 60B. There is nothing there really except for one thing. Ununpentium. Lots of it. And its worth its weight in, well, ununpentium. That’s what drives these ships. It's an element that when processed and placed in the drive system allows us to go from one place to the next. Basically it's a material that when excited with the right electromotive forces creates a gravity wave that warps space. So you can travel light years in a month. Kruger 60B (actually Kruger 60 A and B, its a binary star system) is sixteen light years from earth. Four weeks and change our time, ship time, and we will be there. The other nice thing is that the way space and time are warped, you don’t get the effects of relativity, so when we get back in a few months, people won't be 500 years older. Eh... Space drives are less exciting than they seem. They work, that’s what counts. No mysteries there.

  The holy grail of space exploration is, of course, finding intelligent life. It's also potentially probably the most dangerous thing out there, simply because of the unknowns. We all like to think that when we make contact, they will turn out to be friendlies and help us solve the myriad of problems that still exist in the solar system. Of course no one is naïve enough to believe that is the only possible outcome. Thus the caution in exploration. The space commission has twelve large deep space exploration ships. Each one holds a crew and scientific staff of about 450 people. All the best minds that can be assembled. They work outside the limits of the open deep space area. Far outside. There is a simple system: we have a buffer zone, that is restricted, about three times as big as the open zone. The deep space cruisers work beyond that area, very slowly and very carefully. No one except space commission soldiers and support staff is allowed into the restricted zone. Under severe penalty. No one really wants to go there anyway, the further you get away from the open zone the harder it is to get back if anything goes wrong. Well basically there is no way to get back. Rescue missions are expensive, far too expensive to send out for a missing mining ship. Or a lost freighter. Or some cowboy adventurer.

  So far we have small colonies on two of Jupiter's moons, our moon, Mars and a number of exoplanets. There are about 1,600,000 people who live off the earth. That took sixty years: and a lot of mistakes along the way. Living in an environment without a proper atmosphere isn’t an easy thing to do. Most of the colonies are deep underground, with only the necessary support services on the surface. It's safer to build underground and build blast doors that you can close up than to build on the surface. Yea it costs money, but one blown airlock and you have a lot of dead people in a few seconds. We learned the hard way.

  “Eh... Alexi?”

  She was waking up.

  “Yes, Laura?”

  “How long have I slept?”

  “Long time... Maybe... Sixteen hours...”

  She got out of the bunk and tossed her hair.

  “Coffee?” she said.

  “Sure, I can use another cup.”

  The panel lights glowed blue and yellow. The tones continued to play softly in the cabin. She brought the coffee and slumped down into the pilots chair next to mine.

  The ship was on auto pilot. It would be for the next two and a half weeks. Basically there was nothing to do but kill time.

  “So tell me some more about history... You were talking about how we got to this... This situation...”

  That was weird. She could just switch on and switch off, when she got up and went to bed. It only took her like two minutes to pull herself together in the morning mentally. But somehow it fit her personality. I sipped the coffee and slumped back in the chair.

  “Hmm. OK... Well as I told you, there were a number of really big wars in the 21st century. Bad ones. All over natural resources. In the end, there wasn’t really a better solution than to shift over to nuclear power. After two billion people were killed, the empire was formed out of the old countries of China, the US, Russia and the EU. Basically the scientists took over. Because they had to. The rest of the power structure had already collapsed because it simply wasn’t meeting the peoples needs. It took almost sixty years before people realized first, that big corporations were not going to solve or even help them with their problems, and that governments were bought out by the big corporations. Second, a generation of people, basically idiots, had to work thru their ideology and stupidity before people would listen to reason. In many ways the first half of the 21st century was something of a new dark ages. People renounced science, logical thinking, rationality, everything.”

  “That all changed when Romulus Trenhook started the scientific empire movement. At first no one took him seriously. Then they realized he was serious, and a threat. Then he won.”

  “Sounds like something that old guy Gandhi would say.” She said.

  “True enough.” I looked back at the control panel and closed my eyes.

  “The scientific empire movement led to solving the food crisis, and to space exploration. It rerouted peoples native aggression towards settling in the universe. The rest of the story you prolly know.”

  She was quiet for a while. Then she spoke:

  “Well, we still got a long way to go. I’m sure you got lots of other stories...”

  “That I do.”

  “And you seem to really know history. Me, I’ve always been a literature and fiction fan.”

  “Unusual combination for a spacefarer.”

  “Well, maybe. But I also want to write, and you have to explore the world if you want to be a good writer.”

  “True enough.”

  Then we drifted off talking about the 21st century, and what caused all the trouble. And later just drift off. Traveling thru space has a timeless, hypnotic quality. Once your ship is underway, it's almost as if time comes to a stop. It changes the rhythm of life.

  The monitor screens danced yellow and blue. I sat silently for a moment. And pondered. The tones sang out as ever. It would be a long journey to Kruger 60B. We talked more about the history of the last hundred years, and how we got to this point in the world. How did a bunch of scientists take over the management of the planet. Pretty unlikely when you consider that scientists and the like don’t usually gravitate towards politics. And we talked a litt
le about my life, my previous life traveling through the solar system. I grew up on a freighter. So spacefaring is in the blood. And did a lot of other things in space. And we listened to the tones. And we spent a lot of time lost in ourselves. Sometimes is really hard to live in a small cramped space with others on a ship. With her it was remarkably easy. So the weeks had gone by pleasantly. She did a lot of reading, and we didn’t seem to have any problems in the cabin together. A lot of the time she was, in fact, sort of unnoticeable. And then she would just pop up with something and it was like we had been talking for hours about it. But it worked. The weeks went by quickly enough. Pretty soon we had something of a routine. Wake, talk, read for a few hours, talk, listen to the tones, talk, and then crash. Time of day doesn’t really mean anything in space, so people just follow their body rhythms. I was a little surprised how comfortable I was to have someone around the ship again. It had been a couple of years. At least.

  Arrival at Kruger 60.