Prelude to Extinction

by Andreas Karpf

  Jack didn’t answer as he gazed out the window and only slowly became cognizant of what he saw before; the red substance was running down the windshield at a steady pace. He softly voiced his disbelief, “This isn’t right.”

  Not hearing Jack’s comment, Devon declared, “What’s going on? I mean, look ... it’s a vacuum out there and there’s barely any gravity, but it’s flowing like water across a windshield. It should’ve either boiled off or frozen.”

  Jack paid little attention to the protests, and gazed deeper into the fog. Sunlight scattered off the tiny particles, creating a surreal ruby-laced mist that sparkled intermittently. The tiny red droplets mixed with the dust and circulated around them. Its ebb and flow brought to mind images of sand kicked up from the sea bottom in the surf, and swirling in its currents. Out of the corner of his eye he caught sight of Devon and Masako looking at him, waiting for a statement, or some sort of instructions. He decided they could wait a few moments longer, and instead chose to continue studying the mist.

  It took only a few more seconds before Devon finally broke the silence. “Sir, I don’t think this is going to settle down any time soon.”

  Jack smiled and said, “I agree.”

  “So, how long do you want to give it?”

  “A little anxious aren’t we?”

  “No, it’s just...”

  “Don’t worry, I’m not about to leave after going through all of the trouble of getting here. The problem is I don’t think the conditions are going to improve any over the couple hours we can afford to sit here.”

  “Captain, let me do a quick spectral analysis of the mist,” Masako said. “It’ll at least give us an idea of what we’re dealing with.”

  “Go ahead,” he answered as he stared out the window. It was difficult not to be mesmerized by the natural kaleidoscope gently circulating in front of him. His attention drifted like the streams of dust in the cloud outside. Eddies slowly unwound themselves, while other wisps curled into new vortices. He wasn’t sure how much time had passed before Masako finally said, “This doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Just give us a quick rundown.”

  “The problem is our equipment is too limited … but the bottom line is I don’t see any radiation danger, or any other hazardous readings. The spectroscopic results show two distinct components to the mist. The first is as expected: ammoniated clays, carbonates, iron and magnesium compounds, as well as water ice. All are common to this class of asteroid. The other component however is completely unknown. It does not have any spectral lines in any part of the spectrum. There is no out-gassing, or anything else that can be measured without directly retrieving a sample.”

  “You’re saying it’s inert?” Jack asked.

  “Within the limits of the shuttle’s equipment, it is completely non-reactive.”

  “Can you give an estimate as to when this will all settle down?”

  “Not precisely. The lower limit would be on the order of days.”

  Jack rubbed his chin; the answer was what he had expected. He turned to look at both of them and asked another question whose answer was a forgone conclusion. “Shall we go for a walk?”

  “I’ll get the gear,” Devon answered as he jumped up from his seat, and pushed his way across the five-meter interior of the shuttle.

  Jack followed Masako to the rear of the shuttle and began donning his EVA suit. Though he was well aware of their equipment, he still felt a bit awkward as he pulled on the protective gear. The suits carried aboard the Magellan were a completely new design. Comprised of beige, Kevlar-coated tights, they were more like thick wetsuits than the traditional, bulky spacesuits he was accustomed to wearing back home. The truth was, the computer-controlled fabric was a marvel of technology. It automatically applied pressure as necessary to compensate for the harsh conditions outside, as well as had integrated heating and cooling systems. There was no loss in protection, and its increased flexibility was definitely welcome. His subconscious, however, longed for the familiarity and accompanying feeling of security that came with wearing a heavy, armored suit. Pushing the thought from his mind, he strapped on his environmental pack, donned his helmet, and said, “Are you both ready?”

  “Yes, sir,” was the simultaneous, enthusiastic answer.

  Jack squeezed by, stepped into the closet-sized airlock, and closed the inner door. It took only a few seconds for the airlock to cycle through. A green, “open” button lit up when vacuum was achieved, at which point Jack pressed it without hesitation. The heavy, outer door unlatched with a deep, metallic clank he felt through the floor, and slid open.

  Jack stepped out into the rusty fog without saying a word. The shuttle’s flood lights tried to cut through the mist, but penetrated barely twenty meters; just far enough for him to make out the crater wall. The ground was covered with a fine, grey soil and was littered with a myriad of pebbles and rocks. Randomly interspaced with their rocky counterparts were dozens of dust-covered, metallic nodules. Their size and shape suggested that they were indeed the same material found in the orbiting debris cloud. Jack bent down, picked up a finger-sized nugget, and brushed the dust off of its silvery surface. It glistened in the light from his suit. As Devon exited the airlock and walked up next to him, Jack said, “Be sure to get a few samples of these. Make sure they’re different sizes.”

  “Got it.”

  Jack admired his sample for another second before placing it in a storage bag. With an easy jump he launched himself toward the crater wall. The low gravity allowed him to reach a height of nearly three meters before he was pulled back to the ground. Bending his knees on landing, he absorbed most of the force, limiting his next bounce – the last thing he needed was an uncontrolled collision with a jagged rock. By the time he reached the wall, though, dozens of tiny red drops were running down his faceplate, obscuring his view. He reflexively tried to wipe them aside with his glove, but only succeeded in redistributing the fluid into new patters. His frustration grew as it took several more tries before he cleared an oblong area at eye-level.

  Devon landed next to him, and as he fought to clear a window of his own made the obvious remark, “This crap’s a royal pain.” On finishing his battle, Devon took a step forward, stared at a small maroon puddle, and gently kicked it. The fluid flowed with the same ease as water around his foot. A small amount near his toe followed the path of his boot upward, and continued in a long, slow, arcing trajectory away from them. “It’s got no real viscosity – I didn’t feel anything.”

  Masako joined them as Jack walked to an area shaded from the direct light of Epsilon Eri, and tapped at the sensors on his glove. The surface temperature read negative two-hundred-forty-nine degrees Celsius: only a couple dozen degrees above absolute zero. Spotting a small pool of the substance hidden deep in the shadows, he probed it with his foot. The material flowed just as easily as had Devon’s puddle, prompting him to say, “Damn, it’s liquid even here.”

  Masako came over, pulled a screw driver from her tool belt, and crouched down next to the puddle. She gently stirred the fluid and watched it run effortlessly off the blade of the tool. “It behaves like a superfluid. Maybe it was used as a lubricant or something,” she said before scooping a small sample into a container.

  “Good, stow that. Let’s have a look at our metal artifact over here,” Jack said as he led the way to the table-sized square of metal. Its surface was perfectly reflective – so much so that it had no color of its own. Jack detected a gentle curvature to its surface only through the slight distortion of his image. Reaching out, he gently ran a finger down its side. It was hard and perfectly smooth. Turning to his companions, he said, “See if there’re any smaller pieces around here – anything that we might not have seen in the photos.”

  They moved off in either direction as Jack crouched down to inspect the base where the metal met the asteroid’s surface. He brushed away a small deposit of dust and found that the metal continued downward. As he started digging, he felt the
cracking and crumbling of a fragile material. His helmet’s light revealed several thin, fractured shards of glass lying in his freshly dug hole. The pieces were a rough, translucent gray-green, and filled with bubbles. It resembled volcanic glass – likely formed from the heat of an impact. Jack worked his way along the base, then up the side. It was the same all around. The artifact was completely embedded in the rock wall. Taking a small hammer from his tool belt, he broke off some of the crust covering the right edge of the object. His tapping progressed to hammering, revealing more and more metal buried beneath. He stopped only when he reached a layer of solid rock. Harder strikes failed to clear any more away, and he paused to take a breath and stare at it. The rock appeared to have been molten at some point, and solidified around the object. Impulsively, Jack swung his hammer lightly at the metal, striking it squarely. It left no mark. More forceful strikes were equally ineffective.

  “Jack, I think that you’ll want to see this,” Devon called.

  Jack looked around, but couldn’t find his companion. His puzzled turns, led Devon to say, “Up here, sir.”

  Craning his neck upward, he spotted his pilot standing some thirty meters above at the top of the crater wall. “What is it?”

  “You should see for yourself.”

  Jack groaned as he looked up the steep, near-vertical slope of the crater. After a quick search, he spotted an appropriate ledge about halfway up, crouched down and launched himself with a moderate jump. He rose quickly and immediately realized his misjudgment; he was going overshoot the ledge by several meters. His eyes scanned the nearly sheer wall above, looking for something to grab and control his ascent, and spotted two small protruding rocks. As his rise slowed, he reached for them; but they were just beyond his grasp. A moment later he hit the wall and let out a grunt. His ascent stopped, and he started sliding down. The sound of his suit scraping against the rock filled his ears. His descent was slow for the moment, giving him time to look around, but there was nothing to grab. Instead he slammed his hammer, point first, into the rock. It held, stopping his slide.

  “You OK sir?” Devon asked sheepishly.

  “Yes,” Jack answered, hoping he succeeded in hiding his frustration and embarrassment. There was a small crevice within arm’s reach and he dug his fingers into it. A quick twist of his wrist freed the hammer from its hold. He drew a deep breath and with a sharp tug on the crevice, gave himself the speed he needed to finish his ascent. Landing gracefully next to Devon, Jack looked around and saw Masako walking along the upper rim about a hundred meters to his right. He glanced down at the interior crater wall before asking, “OK, what’s so interesting up here?”

  “Look across the crater.”

  Jack did as asked. At this height, they were above much of the cloud their landing had created, giving them a relatively clear view. Stretching about four hundred meters across, the crater was a near-perfect circle, indicating that the impact from which it was born was nearly head on. The rim’s inner edge had a gentler slope than the one he’d just ascended, and met with a flat, rather unremarkable floor that was littered with rocks and boulders. A slight sparkle in the soil made him recognize the presence of more of the metal fragments. He scanned the edges, looking for larger artifacts but saw none. In the back of his mind he knew something else wasn’t quite right.

  Impatient to make his point, Devon broke the silence, “Notice that there’s no interior cratering. And, off to the left here,” Devon said as he pointed, “you can see our crater’s wall overlays another, older one. This appears to be the youngest feature on the asteroid.”

  “By your tone, I take it you don’t think this is a coincidence.”

  “No, and I’m not really happy with what this points to. I started walking around the perimeter like you asked, and found some smaller, embedded, polished metal fragments. I then thought I’d get a better view from up here. That’s when I noticed the lack of internal cratering. Since the fragments are all embedded in the wall, it suggests that they were distributed by the impact. The pieces scattered in the soil likely fell back to the surface afterwards. If, as I’m guessing, the embedded fragments are distributed evenly all the way around, then the original structure was exactly at ground-zero. That would be much too coincidental to be a chance impact.”

  Jack gazed across the crater floor, looking for any sign of newer craters. But there were none; Just a gray, moon-like sandy soil, with its collection of rocks, silvery nuggets and the occasional boulder. “How far around the rim did you get before you came up here?”

  “Maybe five percent.”

  “Masako,” Jack said, “what do you think?”

  “Dev’s guess isn’t bad; but it’s not an impact.”

  “What do you mean?” Devon asked with genuine curiosity.

  “You’re right, there is no interior cratering, so this is definitely the youngest feature on this asteroid. However, if you look at the shape of the crater floor, it isn’t consistent with an impact.”

  “Explain,” Jack said.

  “Its structure is almost the opposite of what we’d expect. The height of the floor inside the crater is actually higher than the ground outside. In addition, the central region of the interior is lower than the floor near the rim. An asteroidal impact of this size should result in a crater floor that is lower than the outside terrain, but also accompanied by a raised central peak. Now, this crater’s certainly not volcanic either. If I had to guess, I’d say some of its features are consistent with an explosive event of some sort, but non-volcanic in origin.”

  “So if the debris is evenly scattered around the entire crater wall, we could conclude that it was some central structure that exploded,” Devon added.

  “There’s not enough data to conclude that yet,” Masako replied. “The other possibility is that something like a large ship crashed here and exploded. Unlike an asteroid, it wouldn’t have the mass to depress the entire crater floor. So it could yield the crater configuration and debris pattern we’ve seen so far.”

  “So what does this really mean?” Devon asked.

  “I’m not sure. I mean it could be some sort of tragic accident that happened here. But I don’t know.”

  “Let’s hold off on the speculation for now,” Jack said calmly. “Right now, I’d really like to get a sample of that metal. While I do that, I’d like you two to do a little digging. Get one of the drills and let’s see how far the larger fragments extend beneath the rock.”

  “OK,” Devon answered.

  Jack took a couple steps back from the edge, then jogged back toward it, leaping at the end. He watched the outer slope of the crater wall pass beneath him, and admired the billows of crimson-tinted dust below. The ultra-low gravity gave him the sensation of gliding above the clouds rather than falling freely. It wasn’t until several seconds had passed that it became apparent he was even moving downward. The clouds slowly rose to meet him, and again he was surrounded by the surreal fog. The ground became visible, and a moment later Jack landed in a crouching position, absorbing the landing. He figured the force of impact really wasn’t much more than jumping off a chair back on Earth. Devon landed a few meters to his left and quickly headed to the shuttle to retrieve his equipment.

  Jack returned to the large fragment, and looked for a suitable place to cut. The lower left corner’s reflection showed slightly more distortion than the rest of the object. He hoped the stress that warped it had also weakened it. Bringing his face to within a few centimeters of the mirror-like surface, he searched for other defects: there were none. It was smooth and featureless, not even providing him with the slightest scratch on which to start cutting. He took a deep breath, withdrew a small power saw from his tool-belt, and pressed it against the spot with the greatest deformation. Its circular blade spun against the object, but failed to penetrate. Jack increased its speed, and pressed harder. After giving it more than a minute, he pulled the machine back and reviewed his progress: the surface remained unblemished.

 
; “Devon,” he called. “Bring me the laser cutter on your way back.” He examined the saw’s blade for damage and let the word, “Damn,” slip from his mouth. The blade’s once sharp, diamond coated teeth were nearly completely worn away.

  “What’s wrong?” Devon asked as he came up behind him.

  Jack ignored the question, and said, “Let me have the cutter.”

  Devon handed him the meter-long device which could have easily passed for a thick bodied rifle. The bulk of the cutter was mostly an advanced power source that fed a high-energy laser beam capable of cutting through a half a foot of steel. Jack slung the normally heavy machine easily into position in the asteroid’s low-g environment. “OK, stand back,” he said as he flipped a protective eye-guard on the machine into position and pressed the trigger. A blinding, violet, beam of light, orders of magnitude brighter than the sun, leapt from the cutter’s muzzle, striking the object’s surface and reflecting immediately off into space. Thousands of secondary reflections from the tiny droplets in the fog bathed the landscape in a blazing purple glow. The visor was rendered useless – light stabbed at his eyes from all angles, forcing him to shut them tight. He held the trigger anyway, hoping to make some progress. At the count of ten, he finally disengaged the beam, and found himself standing nearly sightless.

  Forcing back competing feelings of fear and frustration, he said in a measured tone, “Devon, I can’t see a damned thing. How about you?”

  “Nothing. I shut my eyes almost immediately after the initial blast, but it was too late.”

  “Masako,” he called out, “what’s your status?”

  “Not good,” she replied. “I looked in your direction out of curiosity when you started cutting and got a good eye-full.”

  He took a deep breath, but the frustration won out, and shouted, “Goddamn it!” Reaching forward with his hand, he found the crater wall, but it didn’t do him any good.

  “Captain, what’s your status?” Palmer’s steady voice called over the radio.