Europa Strike(41)

The most far-traveled of Sam Too’s iterations, however, was a very long distance indeed from Earth.



Alpha Centauri A II

2200 hours (Zulu)



Sam Too could be in several places at once, a useful trick when you were the sole intelligent being within a range of 4.3 light years.

At the moment, most of her awareness was still resident within the twenty-meter confines of the Ad Astra, the upper stage of an A-M drive spacecraft launched from Earth orbit ten years before. She’d completed deceleration into the system five months earlier, and spent the time since carrying out a telescopic survey of both stellar components, Alpha Centauri A and B.

So far, her discoveries on that program track mirrored perfectly the information acquired from deep solar orbit by AI 929 Farstar. Alpha Centauri had been among the 1,000-kilometer space telescope’s first targets when it went online twelve years ago. Its observations of a world whose spectrum showed the distinct presence of oxygen in the atmosphere—and, therefore, of life—had determined the Ad Astra’s destination. Subsequent observations had identified continents covered by what was almost certainly vegetation, oceans, and certain other features that demanded close-up inspection.

It would be a long time before humans could make an interstellar voyage. That Sam had made the trek was due to a number of special considerations—that she could endure for months on end accelerations that would have killed a human; that she required no bulky life-support system, recycling facilities, rotating hab modules, climate control, food, or entertainment; that she could, in fact, measure time not by the one-by-one passing of milliseconds, but by the passage of discrete events—in essence, sleeping throughout most of the voyage, unless moved to greater awareness by a scheduled event on the mission plan or by an alarm from the ship’s sensors or autonomous systems. She remembered very little of the nine-year coast across the light years, save for those moments when she’d awoken to make navigational or scientific observations.

More than once, in fact, during the months before she’d been uploaded to the Ad Astra’s computer net, she’d argued with Jack Ramsey and others of the Hans Moravec Institute design team that humans would never reach the stars; it made far more sense to send emissaries such as herself. The universe, she’d argued with some passion, might well belong to instrumentalities such as herself, artificial intelligences designed to make voyages that mortal beings could dream about but never make in the flesh.

Her position, of course, was weakened by the obvious fact that organic intelligences did make interstellar voyages—and frequently, in fact. Half a million years ago, the Builders had attempted to terraform Mars, until someone else had found and destroyed them. Just twelve thousand years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age, the An had arrived, building a colony complex on the moon and in what would one day become Mesopotamia, had built their spectacular monuments, had enslaved half a million humans and in that enslavement introduced them to civilization. And then they had been destroyed by yet another interstellar visitation—the Ur-Bakar, the Hunters of the Dawn.

As her principal designer, Jack Ramsey, had said once with considerable feeling, “Hell, it’s beginning to look like Earth used to be the Grand Central Station of the Galaxy!”

Sam Too enjoyed argument, however, and frequently took hard-to-defend positions deliberately—an intellectual diversion that frequently exasperated her designers because they could never tell whether or not she was serious.

She had no one to argue with now, however. Sam was as alone as it was possible for any intelligent being to be.

Sam continued to compile data on the world she was orbiting, squirting every bit of data via laser aimed at a particularly bright star intruding on the W shape of Cassiopeia near its border with Cepheus. She already had the equivalent of hundreds of volumes; the essentials, laid out like an entry in a geographical almanac, gave a concise if dry image of the planet below.

Star: Alpha Centauri A

Stellar Class: GO; Radius: 1.05 Sol; Mass: 1.05 Sol; Luminosity: 1.45 Sol



Alpha Centauri A II:

Chiron



Physical Data

Distance from primary: mean 1.15 AU; Apasteron:

1.1728 AU; Periasteron: 1.1272 AU;

Orbital Eccentricity:.0198; Orbital Period 1.187 years (433.44 days);

Rotational Period: 19h 27m 56.25s; Diameter: 9795 km; Density: 5.512;

Planetary mass: 2.6892 × 1027 gm (0.45 Earth);

Circumference 30771.9 km;

Surface Area: 301410760.9 km2; Surface Gravity: 0.77 G;

Escape Velocity: 8.58 km/sec; Magnetic Field: 0.52 gauss; Axial Tilt: 8° 15“ 31.34”



Surface Data

Hydrosphere: 39%; Lithosphere: 61%; Desert, Arid, or Barren Terrain: 69%; Mountainous Terrain: 12%;