Teegarden’s Star (SO025300.5+165258) is an M-type brown dwarf located about 12 light years from the Sol system, the location of Old Earth, in what was once, from a terran perspective, known as the constellation Aries.

Daniel Greene looked out of the broad viewport of the bridge of the interstellar freighter Marius. He lived and worked on the ship, along with thirty-five other crew members. Technically, he had an apartment back on Cueball, but he was home so seldom that it seemed odd when he was actually there, as though he were an overnight visitor in someone else’s house.

The Marius, in fact, was where he felt the most at home; it had been his domicile for more than fourteen years, ever since Captain Joseph Blondell had hired him on as a wet-behind-the-ears space pup just before he turned twenty-two. He had been born on Cueball, and when he’d finished basic edu at the age of 16, he’d puttered around for a couple of years, trying to decide what he was going to do with his life. He’d enrolled in higher edu classes, and that went all right for a while, but he got tired of seeing nothing but the inside of a classroom and a vidscreen all day long. He took a job as a construction assistant, building residential structures in various locations on Cueball, telling himself that the job was only a temporary position until he found something better.

Daniel’s father had died in an asteroid mining accident when Daniel was still a little kid named Danny. It had been just him and his mother for practically all his life. They had been able to live pretty well due to the settlement that his mother had received from the Corporation; oh, while they weren’t as rich as, say, the Corporation’s vice president, who lived on top of nearby Mount Everett (named for Cueball’s first Corporate vice president, Randall Charles Everett), they did all right for themselves.

About five years ago, Daniel’s mother had succumbed to mesothelioma. It had been caused by her time working in the Corporation’s factory, where they manufactured all sorts of useful items using carbon nanotubes. Over time, tiny shards of the microscopic structures, only a few nanometers wide and weighing almost nothing at all, would splinter off and be carried on the slightest of air currents. If they were breathed into a worker’s lungs, they were almost certain to lodge in the delicate bronchial tissue and begin causing injury, but the accumulated damage might not show up medically for as much as thirty or forty years. The Corporation provided masks and filters to workers upon request, but it was Corporate policy that the health hazards came with the job, and were part of the terms of employment. They had covered their asses pretty thoroughly on that one. They’d provide the protection, but whether the workers declined to use it or it simply failed, the Corporation wasn’t liable either way.

In the case of Daniel’s mother, she had only worked the factory assembly line for about seven years — from the time she was sixteen until she married Henry Greene when she was twenty-three — and in that day few of the workers bothered with masks. In those few years that she had spent working there, the damage had already been done, and the seed of her sickness planted. When she was diagnosed many years later, at the age of fifty-seven, there was nothing whatsoever that could be done for her. She died a wheezing, gasping death a year later with Daniel sitting and holding her hand, feeling as powerless as he’d ever felt in his life.

Long before that, however, long before his mother had even known she was ill, Daniel knew he wanted something more than to be a factory worker or an asteroid miner. He’d sat at the counter at the local greasy spoon diner, listening to the spacers talk about the places they’d been and the sights they’d seen. He’d never been off Cueball, but he’d seen pictures of things in the ‘Verse that would dazzle you. There was far more out there than this pale, rocky landscape and the bloated, moss-green gas giant planet called Verde that filled Cueball’s sky. There was much more than Cueball’s fifteen sister moons which danced through the sky night to night; there was even more than the dull, red-orange glare of the star they circled. They called it Teagarden, and according to what Daniel had learned about it from some of the old spacers, it barely qualified as a real star at all.

“Teagarden’s what they used to call a brown dwarf, in the olden days,” Daniel’s teacher had told him once. Melville Jones was now nearly 130 years old, and looked like that wizard, Gandalf, in the vids about the magic rings. He had long white hair and a beard to match, and his face was as craggy as the rock outcroppings that covered Cueball. He had been teaching at the schools on the little moon for decades, and garnered the respect of everyone that knew him. “It takes one thing to make a full-blown star,” he told Daniel, “Hydrogen gas, and lots of it. You get enough hydrogen together in a dense enough cloud, and gravity will start squeezing it down. After a while — and we’re talkin’ a few million years or so — the hydrogen will get squeezed down so hard that it starts changing. Starts fusing together, makin’ helium. Well, when that happens, you get a real star, one that shines like you wouldn’t believe. You’ve never been anywhere but the Teagarden system, so I wouldn’t expect you to know what it’s like, but I have. And they say that in the old days, when people still lived on the planet where we started out —”

“Earth, right? It was called Earth,” Daniel interjected.

“Yes, that’s right,” Jones smiled. “You can find vid of it in the history archives. Old Earth, or Terra, as some called it, was a beautiful place, too, with big oceans of water and skies full of white clouds of water vapor. Man didn’t have to process water back then; it covered most of the planet, and not just a few millimeters. It was kilometers deep in some places. Mankind had to move on, though, because we didn’t take care of the planet. We took all its resources and dirtied it up until it couldn’t support life any more. It’s still out there, somewhere, circling a pretty yellow star, but nobody lives on it any more. It’s all but dead.”

Daniel had sat, fascinated, hanging on every word.

“Anyhow, Teagarden doesn’t quite have what it takes to become a star, and it never will. There’s hydrogen, but not enough to have the sort of gravity it needs to initiate fusion, so it just gets hot. It glows, but it doesn’t truly shine. It’s enough to warm us up a bit, but it doesn’t put out a hundredth of the energy that it would if it had, maybe, twice as much hydrogen and could get a proper fusion reaction going,” Jones explained. “Of course, if we were here, this near to Teagarden, and it fired up into a genuine star, it’d incinerate us all, so it’s just as well, considering that we don’t have anywhere else to go in this system.”

Daniel had been about nine years old the first time Jones had explained that to him, and he’d never forgotten it. He decided then and there that he wanted to travel the spaceways, see other worlds, and stars, and nebulae.

When Mankind had begun to settle the stars hundreds of years before, it had been decided that a simple system of identifying spaceports was needed. There were too many different names for the same star, and it got confusing. Was it Rigel c, β Ori c, or HD 34085 c? α Cen A d, CCDM J14396-6050 d or LHS 50 d? Instead, they’d taken a cue from Old Earth’s system of airport designation, and assigned a three character code to each spaceport, using the 26 letters of the Standard alphabet plus the numeric digits from 0-9. This allowed for 46,656 possible combinations, which was more than enough to cover the planets and moons that had been colonized thus far. When they started to run out, which likely would not happen for a hundred years or so, they’d have to figure out a new system.

At any rate, when explorers discovered a habitable moon circling the one planet which orbited the dim object with the unwieldy designation of SO025300.5+165258, otherwise listed in the spacenav records as Teegarden’s Star after one of the astronomers that discovered it in 2002 AD, the system had its approval rubber-stamped for colonization and everyone soon began referring to the star simply as Teagarden.

The little star’s planetary womb had borne only a solitary gas giant, about one-quarter the mass of Jupiter, which, according to the historical records, had been the largest planet in the Old Earth system. Teagarden b zipped around its parent star in a little more than two days’ time, at a distance of just over two million kilometers from the surface of the star.

Where the records from Old Earth spoke of its star, which had been called Sol or the Sun, as being a dazzlingly brilliant yellow-white disk just a half-degree across in the sky of Old Earth, Teagarden was a dull red disk, glowing the dull orange of a space heater, some six degrees across — roughly twelve times the apparent diameter of the Earth’s Sun. Hanging in Cueball’s salmon-colored sky like a red rubber ball, Teagarden was a mere 160,000 kilometers across, compared to the Sun’s 1.4 million kilometers.

The solitary planet, formally named SO025300.5+165258 b, had been dubbed Verde after its greenish color. It was fairly large and massive compared to its parent, so that it didn’t so much orbit Teagarden as the two danced around their barycenter, the point where the center of the two bodies’ mass balanced each other.

As always, the initial group of colonists had the right to name their new world as they saw fit, and when the spaceport designation for the largest moon of Teagarden b was assigned as QBL, it seemed the choice of name was obvious: they christened it Cueball. The name was appropriate, since the small moon’s landscape mainly displayed whitish rock outcroppings similar to the formations known as the White Cliffs of Dover on Old Earth.

At any rate, decades later, at the age of 22, Daniel had taken the job offer from Captain Blondell and became one of seventeen hands among the crew of thirty-six that served on the Marius, what they called ‘Ordinary Spacemen.’ In the fourteen years since then, he had worked his way up through the ship’s crew, from able spaceman to boatswain, and then to the bridge crew, initially as third mate, then second mate. For three years he waited for Blondell to tap him for the first mate’s job; then he got the news of his mother’s sickness.

He’d taken a year off to care for her, and when he’d buried her, he inquired of Blondell about getting his job back. ‘Oh,’ said the Captain, ‘I’ve got a position for you, but someone’s taken the second mate’s job that you had. I’ve got a place for a boatswain, though.’

Back to boatswain? The taste of it was bitter in Daniel’s mouth. It was all right, though. He’d find something better. The Marius only ever shuttled between Cueball and the two mining stations in Teagarden’s asteroid belt, which spread out from ten million to thirty million kilometers from the feeble little star. He’d never seen anything more; not another star, not another planet, and never a nebula. It was time to start expanding his horizons.

Daniel accepted the boatswain’s job in order to keep an income, but immediately started putting out feelers, looking for a job on an interstellar liner, a Corporation explorer vessel… he didn’t much care what, as long as it got him out of the Teagarden system.

~~~~~

It was several months before he got a nibble regarding his job search. When he did, it came in the form of a message that appeared to come from the Corporation itself. There was an opening on the crew of the Magellan, an exploratory and research ship that was scheduled to go out on its second mission in six months’ time. The offer was for a third mate’s position. Daniel jumped at it.

This, of course, meant that Daniel had to seek passage to SP1, known as Spaceport One, where the Corporation’s exploration missions originated. It wasn’t an inexpensive journey; SP1 was on the third planet of Tau Ceti, the first system that Humanity had colonized after leaving earth. From Cueball, he’d have to seek passage either on a merchant ship or a commercial vessel that was headed that direction. Cueball was a little off the beaten track, but not that far off. It was a little over 7.6 light years to Tau Ceti, and therefore Spaceport Alpha, and there were still a fair number of merchants that passed through the QBL spaceport; however, there was rarely berth space for someone who just needed passage to another port, and on the ships that did have an opening, most of the captains were loath to hire a man that they knew wouldn’t be staying on.

As far as a commercial passenger seat, those were even rarer. QBL was not a destination that any of the spaceways companies had much reason to travel to, and it was not unusual for weeks to pass between one ship’s arrival and the next.

Finally, with less than a month to go before he needed to report to Spaceport One or forfeit the position, Daniel’s luck changed.

~~~~~

A cargo vessel called the Hengxing Ying had limped in to QBL a few days before with a ruptured exterior bulkhead and a dead Third Mate. They had been entering the Teagarden system, planning to refuel at QBL, when an incorrectly loaded set of charts caused them to approach the system directly in the plane of the asteroid belt’s orbit instead of at an angle, or, preferably, perpendicular to it.

They had been struck by a two-meter wide chunk of carbonaceous asteroid which had caved in the starboard side of the outer rear hull and caused a slight breach of the inner hull as well. The crewman, one Indigo Grant, had been one of three crew members who responded to the emergency; he had been the first there, and was exposed to near-vacuum conditions for nearly fifteen minutes as they struggled to seal the break. Just before they managed to close the leak, he had collapsed and was taken to his quarters on board the ship, where he stayed for the rest of the journey to Cueball, which took nearly three days. Unfortunately, by the time they arrived at the spaceport, he had passed away.

When the captain of the Hengxing Ying had inquired at the spaceport about whether an experienced spacer was available to fill Grant’s place, the personnel manager, a crusty, likeable old coot named Rogers Carlson, immediately recommended Daniel, knowing that this was just the sort of situation he was seeking. A brief interview later, Daniel was shaking Carlson’s massive paw of a hand and thanking him.

The restocking and repair of the Hengxing Ying took almost four days. During that time, Daniel made his goodbyes, few though they were, and gathered the meager belongings he planned to take with him. Then he boarded the Hengxing Ying and found his bunk.

Once the ship left the QBL spaceport, Daniel spent every off-duty moment staring out of one of the several viewports aboard the ship, staring out into the void, watching for the fascinating gallery of objects he was expecting to see.

He was rather surprised to realize just how much of space was an empty black void. Far ahead, he saw the twinkling, magnitude 2.5 star that was Tau Ceti. He was expecting to see it grow into a brilliant disk within days of leaving Cueball, but the star stubbornly remained little more than a point of light as the first two and a half days of the journey crept by. Daniel felt rather disappointed. Conversely, the dull orange ball that was Teagarden quickly faded behind them and was all but invisible at that same point in time.

Sixty hours out from QBL, the Hengxing Ying was outside Teagarden’s asteroid belt, and preparations were made for entering hyperspace.

Daniel was looking forward to the experience with eager anticipation; as he had only traveled within the boundaries of the Teagarden system in the past, hyperspace was an experience he had never had before.

To be continued