Chapter 10: Mankind Leaves the Sandbox

We were finally ready to set out. It had been a long fifty seven years since that first day I got the slipstream drive to work.

Our overt mandate was one of exploration. Of course, if we returned with our holds full of rare earths that would be perfectly acceptable too.

We planned to visit all the stars within fifteen light years of Earth that were not red dwarfs. It seemed odd that we had such a high percentage of them in our near stellar neighborhood, so we planned to visit a close pair of red dwarfs towards the end of our mission, Groombridge 34 and Ross 248. First, however, we planned on surveying the Tau Centi system, Sirius, Procyon, Alpha Centauri and Epsilon Indi. They were all in wildly different directions so we picked the biggest, brightest stars in our list to visit first--Sirius, then Procyon. We had great hopes for the Sirius system, as it was a double star with a barely luminescent white dwarf the size of Earth. We made preliminary plans to attempt mining the dwarf by using shearing fields and several tractor fields in concert.

We arrived in the Sirius system in four days. A scan for orbiting debris showed very little. We reasoned that the radiation pressure of Sirius A had scattered it all into a very distant and diffuse Kuiper-type belt. Then we attempted to approach Sirius B to attempt mining it.

The surface temperature was well beyond what we could work with, and a trial extraction was defeated by the enormous surface gravity of the collapsed white dwarf. Disappointed, we left for the Procyon system.

Bright white marker stars just weren't very lucky for us. Procyon was also a twin, with a smaller, younger much less luminous partner. The ultraviolet radiation was nearly off the scale. We continued on to Tau Ceti

There we found a quite respectable asteroid belt and used our radar to begin mapping it out. We lucked into a drift of metal-bearing asteroids exhibiting large percentages of period 5 and 6 elements, including the noble metals and various lanthanides, known on Earth as rare-earth metals. We stayed there harvesting rare-earths for over a year and a half. The captain was quite pleased to learn that we had harvested several tons of refined Niobium, a major component in most superconducting alloys. We filled every spare bunker and landing bay aboard with refined metals, and still had sealed pallets stored on the production floor. It had turned out to be quite a profitable stop. Even so, we harvested a bare fraction of that drift. Our next scheduled stop was the Epsilon Indi system.

Our mass defect imaging detected something unusual in the system. Oh, we already knew that it was a triple system with two brown dwarf suns orbiting a larger orange K-class star. We found artifacts orbiting the brown dwarfs. From three A. U. s out we could visibly see metal artifacts--habitats and factories. Our mandate did not include first contact. I was all for turning around, picking up our skirts and running like hell, but the captain had other ideas. We detected no RF other than the normal microwave background noise. On closer approach we found that a bolometer reading taken on the artifacts showed space-normal temperatures. They appeared to be uninhabited. We took many, many pictures through one of the ship's telescopes. I led an optics team that constructed a high-resolution CCD-backed camera. It was taken out by a mining ship to catch the details around the openings of one of the artifacts. With careful observation of the system using the mass defect sensor I detected abnormalities within the photospheres of the two brown dwarfs. They were directly below each of the artifacts. I believe that I figured it out. Those buggers had live power taps running, siphoning energy out of the stars.