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parents the pain of finding Syrdian mutilated and begging for the help they couldn’t give.
     

Chapter Two
     
    Norris walked over to where Donsaii still sat with the others staring at a screen. “I agree except for clause 2.6 where I would want to limit that to one year as well.”
    Donsaii’s eyes narrowed a moment, then she smiled, “ OK . My AI’s recording this as a binding contract, do you agree?”
    Norris shrugged, “Sure.”
    “Great, look at this with us.”
    Donsaii turned the screen they were looking at a little toward him and he saw an image of Earth from space . Although… he tilted his head curiously… The cloud cover was really heavy… Could it be Venus? No he saw a swath of blue in a break in the clouds. Norris narrowed his eyes and said, “That’s more clouds than I’ve ever seen…” He looked at the four of them and they were all grinning widely. He looked back at the screen, “What is this ?”
    Kenner said in a hushed voice, “That’s the third planet of Tau Ceti.”
    Norris stared at her, then at D onsaii, then back at the screen. The skin prickled on his scalp, “How?”
    Emmerit said, “The girls here sent a rocket out there with a camera.”
    “Oh Jeez,” Norris put a hand down on the table and leaned on it, taking an almost gasping breath. “Really? How?” He looked at the screen again, “Is that blue showing through the clouds?”
    “Yeah, oxygen, nitrogen , CO 2 atmosphere , ” Emmerit whispered reverently. “We’re assuming the blue is water. Initially, when the planet looked white from far away we thought it must be an ice world. It’s pretty far out at the outer edge of the ‘habitable zone’ where the temperature should be right for liquid water. We assumed it would be mostly frozen. There’s more CO 2 than Earth and quite a bit of methane that may be boosting the greenhouse effect”
    “My God! There must be some kind of life to create the oxygen. What does it look like?”
    Donsaii shrugged. “We don’t know. We haven’t sent anything down into the atmosphere yet. There is a huge green area in the southern hemisphere though; we’re thinking maybe some kind of ‘supercontinent’ like the original Pangaea here on Earth? Maybe the green means something like chlorophyll?”
    Norris’ eyes widened even further , “Really?”
    “Yeah, so that’s what we’ve been working on. We’re trying to design a vehicle that won’t contaminate TC3 with our organisms and vice versa. Then we can go down and have a look.”
    “TC3?”
    “Short for Tau Ceti Three. We don’t have a name for it yet. Here, look at this.”
    The screen filled with a diagram of a rocket. Donsaii said, “We can send data back through PGR chips, so that avoids any transfer of organism s as long as we sterilize the rocket before we put it through the port to TC3. However, normally we have ports sending LOX and LNG to the main rocket motor and just plain compressed gas through ports to act as attitude jets. Now our plan is to use steam for the attitude jets , since that should be sterile. At first we were thinking that the cold would kill organisms in the LOX and LNG that we use for our main rocket propellants. However, we’ve since learned that cryogenic temperatures are actually used to preserve bacteria. Now , microbes should be killed in the rocket’s flame , but what about the little puffs of gas that leak out right before ignition? We’ve been thinking about putting something toxic in the first puffs so that it will be sterile until the flame starts but then we’d be squirting toxic stuff into the atmosphere there… And the mechanics of putting something toxic in the initial puffs are problematic.” She frowned.
    Norris said, “How about using ethanol. Bacteria are killed in alcohols.”
    Emmerit frowned, “That’d be good, but we’d still have bacteria in the liquid oxygen.”
    “Use hydrogen peroxide as your oxidizer, bacteria die in that too.”
    “So both propellants