This is a very interesting book. Quantum entanglement? That’s the way were going to travel between stars, not just between planets. As a science fiction fan, you surely that space is really, really vast, almost incomprehensibly so.
You also know just how long it would take us to reach any of the stars and planets we read about, so quantum teleportation sounds like the way we’ll have to go. Now that’s not a bad way to travel, that is, if you don’t mind getting instantly copied and destroyed while being instantly printed out alive at the other end of your journey.
That’s what this book is about. Traveling to the stars. it’s the year 2118 and Earth has had no alien contact So, if aliens or whatever won’t visit us, then we’ll have to go visit them. The Endeavour was the first starship built by Earth to go through a quantum stargate. She would have a crew of twelve. The overall Mission Commander was Tom Hites and the Endeavour Commander was Harry Cosgrove. Several other crew members are introduced with several of those not having last names. Not sure why, but I couldn’t find them for Johnny, Ash, Dimitrov or Yumi.
Anyway, the first mission for the Endeavour was to go to Tau Ceti, twelve-light years away. The Endeavour would travel through the Sol System quantum stargate and emerge instantly from the Tau Ceti quantum stargate that was previously built and tested by an Earth drone. While it would seem as no time had passed for the crew, some twenty-five years would pass on Earth for each of the outbound and inbound trips.
Arriving at Tau Ceti, their initial objective was to establish orbit around a planet/moon named Eden. It orbited a gigantic planet named Atlas, but Eden appeared to be a twin of Earth. It had almost the same size of Earth, a compatible temperature with water, planet life, seas with ocean life, but no evidence of intelligent life. It was to be the first planet in another star system for humans to explore. And the did so until they had to suddenly leave.
It turns out that the Tau Ceti system isn’t all that pleasant with what seems to be the remnants of a severe astrological disturbance at some point in its past. A planet must have shattered and now has pieces of it flying all though the system causing all sorts of problems for the smaller planets and moons. Eden gets its share of impactors with most causing extinction events. Once such event chases the one of the two Endeavour ground missions to evacuate. They almost did that too late!
The biological studies made by the teams on the ground of Eden were somewhat interesting, but they knew most of what they found from the myriad of drones previously sent to the planet. But, there was one finding in the geological study that suggested some one had been to Eden some 150,000 years ago and had stopped the impactors from hitting the planet for about a thousand years. Just who did that, an alien intelligence, maybe, was what the rest of the book goes on to find out.
The whole premise to this book is, “Where are they aliens?”. The Endeavor journeys to find out going much further than their original twelve-light year trip. And each time they leave Earth, they return to find a different world. At some point, they could come back and that Earth humans have turned into the aliens they were always looking for. Maybe, may be not!
Well written first book in this series. I’m not exactly sure where the next book will lead, but I’m going to follow!