Bloodstar

They didn’t tell us, of course. After doing a quick check to make sure anything loose was tied down or put away—Doobie’s hooch went into a refrigerated storage tank in an equipment locker forward—we strapped ourselves standing against the acceleration couches growing out of the aft bulkhead. Ten minutes later, we felt the hab wheel spinning down, and for a few moments we were in microgravity. I could hear a Marine down the line being noisily sick—there’s always at least one—but I stayed put until the Clymer lit her main torch.

There was an odd moment of disorientation, because where “down” had been along the curving outer floor of the hab wheel, now it was toward the aft bulkhead. The bulkhead had become the deck, and instead of standing up against our acceleration couches, now we were lying in them flat. The viewall was reprogrammed to show on what had been the deck. Under Plottel Drive, we were accelerating at a steady one gravity, but “down” was now aft, not out toward the rim of the wheel.

They let us get up, then, and we spent the next hour learning to walk again. We’d been at .38 Gs for two weeks.

I was half expecting Alcubierre Drive to kick in at any time, but hour followed hour and we continued our steady acceleration. Thirty-four hours later we were ordered to the couches once more, and again there was a brief period of microgravity as the Clymer ponderously turned end for end.

That gave us an idea of where we were headed, though. There’d still been a good chance that we were headed for Europa, as originally planned. At the moment, however, Jupiter and its moons were a good six astronomical units from Mars—call it 900 million kilometers. Accelerate at one gravity halfway from Mars to Europa, and we’d have reached the turnover point in something over forty-two hours. A thirty-four-hour turnover—I ran the numbers through my Cerebral Data Feed in-head processors a second time to be sure—meant we’d covered half the current distance to Earth.

Which meant we were on our way home, to Starport One.

Once we were backing down, thirty hours out from Earth, though, we received a download over the shipnet on a planet none of us had ever heard of.

Download

Commonwealth Planetary Ephemeris

Entry: Gliese 581 IV

“Bloodstar”

Star: Gliese 581, Bloodstar, Hell’s Star

Type M3V

M = .31 Sol; R = 0.29 Sol; L = .013 Sol; T = 3480

K

Coordinates: RA 15

19

26

; Dec -07

43’ 20”; D = 20.3 ly

Planet: Gliese 581 IV

Name: Gliese 581 IV, Gliese 581 g, Bloodworld, Salvation, Midgard

Type: Terrestrial/rocky; “superearth”

Mean orbital radius: 0.14601 AU; Orbital period: 36

13

29

17

Inclination: 0.0

; Rotational period: 36

13.56

(tide-locked with primary)

Mass: 2.488 x 10

g = 4.17 Earth; Equatorial Diameter: 28,444 km = 2.3 Earth

Mean planetary density: 5.372 g/cc = .973 Earth

Surface Gravity: 1.85 G

Surface temperature range: ~ -60

C [Nightside] to 50

C [Dayside]

Surface atmospheric pressure: ~152 x 10

kPa [1.52 Earth average]

Percentage atmospheric composition: O

19.6, N

75.5, Ne 1.15, Ar 0.58, CO 1.42; CO

1.01, SO

0.69; others<500 ppm

Age: 8.3 billion years

Biology: C, N, H, Na, S

, O, Br, H

O; mobile photolithoautotrophs in oxygenating atmosphere symbiotic with sessile chemoorganoheterotrophs and chemosynthetic lithovores in librational twilight zones.

Human Presence: The Salvation of Man colony established in 2181 in the west planetary librational zone. Salvation was founded by a Rejectionist offshoot of the Neoessene Messianist Temple as a literal purgatory for the cleansing of human sin. There has been no contact with the colony since its founding.