The First Exoplanet

by T. J. Sedgwick

  “Sir, I checked with the Near-Earth Object team. It was flagged because, until today, 375 Nemesis’ next close approach with Earth was set to be nowhere near us. In fact, there would be no intersection – that is, collision risk – for the next ten thousand years. That’s as far as the model had been run to.”

  “And now?” asked General Guardini.

  “Sir, now the model is now telling us that it’s going to hit Earth in three-hundred and twelve days’ time!” exclaimed the young man, showing some barely hidden signs of distress and bewilderment.

  Guardini had just taken a breath and was about to respond when Brown continued with some urgency.

  “Sir, sorry, but that’s not all. Captain Mills had them re-task the Helios telescope array to take a look. Here are the stills they took, sir,” said Brown, bringing up a series of pictures on the right-hand display of 375 Nemesis.

  The asteroid photos looked like the same lumpy ball of space rock that the computer had rendered on the middle display already, except with more detail. Pits, dips and peaks could be seen on its stark, sunlit surface of moon-like grey. The most surprising thing was not the asteroid itself but the thing in space next to it. Floating alongside the giant asteroid was a sunlit shape, long and flat and around one-percent of the space rock’s size.

  “Now look at this, sir,” said Corporal Brown, bring up a grainier, but clearly magnified shot of the smaller object.

  He didn't need to say it but did anyway. ”Confirmed alien vessel, sir. No known human ship in our database matches it and nothing in Solar System flight plans network either. Definitely alien. Then I searched within the image and found these.”

  Guardini looked on silently, trying to take it all in, staring at the screen as the next zoomed-in image appeared. It showed a cylindrical structure with plume of some sort emanating from it.

  “Sir, there are another two of these things visible on the asteroid's surface.”

  “My God,” whispered Guardini, in awe at the unfolding alien plot, “this is no accident. The aliens have sent the asteroid on a collision course with Earth. You know if that thing hits we’re looking at an extinction event to rival what happened to the dinosaurs sixty-five million years ago?”

  “Yes, sir, I do. And I don’t know if the aliens planned it or not, but that asteroid is the same size as the one that hit sixty-five million years ago,” replied the worried looking young Brown.

  “Well, it would at least give them an idea of the effect... They have definitely been reading human research on this if it is true. Anyway, the main question is what can we do about it? And why do they want to destroy Earth rather than capture it? I mean it’s a valuable resource if nothing else.”

  “They must be pretty mad after Stellar Shield...” replied Brown.

  “Even so, it doesn’t make sense—to me at least. Why not invade? Earth’s a close match to Gaia and it’d be more valuable intact,” reasoned Guardini with a hint of wishful thinking, not wanting to accept this as Earth’s fate.

  “I guess we don't really understand them, do we, sir?”

  “We have the Harpoon System, couldn't we use that?” enquired a third voice – that of the dashing Scottish Captain Mills – as the tall, ruggedly handsome officer came over to join them. The Harpoon was an unmanned spacecraft that could attach itself to asteroids or comets on a collision course with Earth and use its powerful thrusters to alter the course.

  “That’s one option, Captain, but Harpoons are civilian drones and that”—he pointed to the screen—“is an alien destroyer next to that asteroid. The Atlantic might struggle to take it on. A Harpoon would have no chance without an escort and we need every last ship and drone for the defence of Earth,” replied Guardini to the younger Scotsman.

  “Aye, sir, but if we don't do anything about the asteroid there won’t be an Earth, or at least, not much of a human civilization anyway. We can escort a small fleet of Harpoons with nuclear-armed Vipers perhaps,” Mills suggested.

  “Look, Captain Mills, we have more pressing concerns in the short-term. This whole asteroid thing could be a ruse to get us to commit forces and distract us while the aliens transit close to Earth. We have twelve months to deal with it once we’ve dispensed with the aliens. Anyway, we have other methods at our disposal. Corporal Brown, do we know if the alien thrusters on the asteroid would have stopped firing yet? I mean when were those stills taken?”

  “Sir, those photos would have been taken during the trajectory adjustment. 375 Nemesis has been tracking a ballistic course for the last half hour now, so the thrusters deviating its course will have stopped firing already,” said Brown, not quite understanding the relevance of the question or where it was going. “Can't we just destroy or deflect the asteroid?” he asked.

  “First of all, the lasers we have couldn't destroy it and it’s not a comet so we couldn't create a jet on one side by heating it up with a laser and allowing that jet to change its course. Besides, the aliens would just set it back on a collision course with Earth again. No, whatever we do we need to take out those Alien thrusters and the escorting destroyer before we change the course of the asteroid. Then maybe we can use the Harpoons, as you suggest, Captain Mills. That’s all assuming they don't send further destroyers. Whatever we do, we need to get in and quickly destroy the alien ship, then destroy the thrusters and then deflect the asteroid. Harpoons launched today wouldn't get there for another four months and they’re big craft so they wouldn't even fit through the Citadel’s FTL gate. So there’s no chance of jumping them nearby even if the accuracy was good enough,” said Guardini, sighing.

  “How about nuclear-armed Vipers, sir?” suggested Mills again, hopefully.

  “How would that work, Mills?” asked a sceptical Guardini.

  “Transit the Vipers to near the asteroid, with at least one for the destroyer, one or more for the asteroid deflection. Fly them to target and detonate them. Simple.”

  “But what you’re forgetting, Captain, is that we used up all of our cloaked Vipers in Stellar Shield. That was over a hundred and forty Vipers and portable nukes. We’ve got just fifty Vipers left and they’re for Earth defence as well as a limited nuclear arsenal. As I said, Earth takes priority because of the time factor. My preferred plan is to use the Citadel’s kinetic energy weapon—its mass driver,” said Major-General Guardini.

  “Won’t the projectiles take a while to get there too?” asked Mills.

  “True, but we can fire a wide spread for a sustained period without committing assets to going there. As I say, I think this is a ruse to divert our forces and attention. A clever ruse, but a ruse nonetheless. The projectiles will be enough to deflect the asteroid and we get hundreds of chances. Any ship would struggle to take them all out before they hit home and deflect the asteroid.”

  “It’s a good call I think, sir. If we’d sent the Atlantic out of position we’d really be hosed!” Captain Mills smiled, agreeing with his superior’s proposal.

  “Well done, by the way, Corporal Brown, good work. I’ll escalate this now to General McIver and put something in action ASAP,” concluded the Italian Space Force general, confident that he’d divined the solution to 375 Nemesis as it sped at twenty-five kilometres per second towards Earth.

  ***

  April 8, 2063 Western Global Alliance Space Ship, Atlantic

  The Western Global Alliance Space Ship Atlantic orbited one-kilometre distant from its place of birth, the Assembly Module of the Citadel Space Station. Building of an identical second ship had recently begun in order to bolster Earth’s defences still further should they repel the imminently expected alien assault. The Corvette-sized Atlantic was sixty-meters long—small in comparison to the alien destroyers, which were five times longer with a breadth to match Atlantic’s length. But that small package belied the stealth, firepower and defensive systems that put her in a different league from any other human ship. She would, so the theory went, be able to pick off alien ships one-by-one as they transited into the
Solar System. This was based on the logic that the aliens would be using an FTL gate rather than fitting each of their ships with an FTL drive. Should each of their destroyers have its own FTL drive then the task would get decidedly more difficult.

  Although many of the Atlantic’s systems were autonomous, she had a human crew of four. AI systems were still no match for the seventy-kilo biological computers, known as humans, when it came to poorly-defined missions and improvisation. This was humanity’s first true capital ship and was built specifically for the alien threat. Although fast, she had no FTL drive. There seemed to be a technical hurdle that no one had managed to solve yet, limiting the mass that it could transit. It was a worrying sign of the aliens’ fast learning curve that they had managed to transit at least one destroyer to asteroid 375 Nemesis. They had received the FTL technology inadvertently and now surpassed the inventors in their achievement. It wouldn't have been the first time in the history that the student had overtaken the teacher.

  The matte-black ship – Atlantic – was an elongated arrowhead shaped with a multitude of muddled triangular surfaces all over her radar-absorbent body. She was built for function rather than form and the weird, pyramidal bumps and surfaces would provide vital passive stealth should the cloaking field generator go down. If it was a visually appealing flagship people were looking for, they weren’t going to get it from Atlantic. There were far more pressing concerns and the engineering team’s energy had gone into getting the balance of propulsion, weapons and defence just right. The ship’s immense fusion reactors powered the engines that could accelerate her as fast as the crew’s bodies would allow. That was a major limitation, but was an accepted trade-off given that her role would be in the relatively confined distances of the Earth-Moon system.

  Her weapons systems consisted of a main laser cannon, which fired up to two-second pulses of one-petawatt energy. Exposing a target to two-petajoules of energy in such a short space of time would, it was hoped, make short work of the alien vessels. The rate of fire was the major advance, taking only four seconds between pulses for a full power bank recharge. There had been lasers that could fire at the petawatt energy level for many decades, but it was how long it could now be sustained for and how quickly it could recharge for the next shot that was astounding. Smaller, defensive lasers occupied spots over the top, bottom and sides of the hull, numbering half a dozen on each surface. These could simultaneously and autonomously engage flights of enemy fighters. In addition to the lasers, the close-in defence pods were for short range engagements of less than five kilometres and were sophisticated gun turrets firing heavy-calibre armour-piercing or explosive shells. There were two each on the top, bottom, starboard and port.

  The cloaking shield was a scaled-up version of that used on the Vipers of Operation Stellar Shield and earlier missions. The armour was a classified nano-carbon-metal alloy, which could handle projectile hits and explosions and was designed to be resistant to plasma weapons fire. The experimental EM-field generator enveloped the ship in a strong electromagnetic field. This was the only known defence against the particle weapons that the aliens sported on their destroyers. The high-energy streams of particles would be deflected around the Atlantic should the strength of the field be enough. The WGASS Atlantic was Earth’s superweapon and she now lay in wait, cloaked next to her mother ship, the Alliance Citadel.

  Captain Sonia Winters sat in her command chair flanked by First Officer Denzel Morgan with Private Walter McCauley and Sergeant Avantika Sharma seated behind her. Winters had spent more time in space than almost any other active Space Force member, most of it on the Citadel space station. The tall, strawberry blonde, Canadian was organised and ruthlessly efficient while being warm and human with the people in her life. Her crew and superiors respected her deeply and she’d been rewarded with this most prestigious and important of positions. What Winters and the other three knew about the Atlantic was a closely kept secret that ensured the aliens would not benefit from her state-of-the-art technology. She was rigged with a self-destruct mechanism, which would blow the ship and her crew to smithereens should they fail to make it out in the escape pod. The one-hundred megaton thermonuclear device that had been planted in the belly of the Atlantic was far too large to have been simply a self-destruct mechanism and doubled as what might be the last-gasp attempt to take down the alien fleet. Winters was under no illusions that she and her three colleagues would need to be extremely lucky to get away from a blast of that size intact, even with the sturdy escape pod’s protection.

  She had no family ties anymore. Ever since her fiancé died seven years previously she’d never found love again and felt she never would. He’d been her everything, the man she’d planned to marry and start a family with. As an only child, with her parents gone, she had no other close relatives to speak of and her career had become her life. She didn’t care about the old, tired mantra about living to work, working to live. She loved what she did and cared for her crew and fellow servicemen and women; they were her family now. She’d had boyfriends, it was true, but had no desire to be tied down. Unusually for her, since being assigned next to Morgan she’d felt an old connection return, but this was not the time nor the place to act on it. Perhaps when she was older a change of heart would come, she told herself. Maybe in a different place and time—maybe in a different life.

  Since passing the aliens’ deadline today, the alert level was now at DefCon One – the highest it could be – indicating a state of war. They were fully aware of the asteroid that the aliens had nudged towards a future collision with Earth and of the destroyer flanking the ten-kilometre-wide space rock. Winters had argued for a chance to engage the destroyer and set right the asteroid, but command had different ideas and suspected a ruse. This rationale led to only one conclusion: that an attack on Earth was imminent. Ever since then they’d been ordered to stay hidden and silent next to the most prized asset in human space—the irreplaceable Alliance Citadel.

  They weren’t the only ones in a defensive posture. The gravimetric monitoring network was on high alert for FTL transit arrivals from Avendano. The Citadel had all defensive systems at the ready, including its fleet of fifty Viper drones. Twenty-five Skylift Unmanned Space Vehicles, that normally plied the commercial routes between the continents, had been modified and pressed into service. They carried a payload of missiles on the newly-added pylons under their wings; if they hit home they could do some serious damage to the alien destroyers. But with no armour and only rudimentary evasion routines possible, nobody had any illusions about how they’d fare against a determined warship. The Russians had equipped their fleet of five shuttles with lasers, but knew that, too, was an improvisation of limited value. Where the Russians and Chinese really did have the upper hand, at least within orbital altitudes, was in their anti-satellite capabilities. If the aliens got close enough to these ground-based systems then they may prove useful. The problem for Earth’s military planners was that they had not, so far, seen the aliens’ destroyers in action. Until that happened it was difficult to assess the balance of power and counter them efficiently.

  First Officer, Denzel Morgan, turned to Winters and said in his rich baritone, his black eyes focused and competent as ever, ”Captain, Citadel inform us that they are about to launch the first KEW shot at the 375 Nemesis asteroid.”

  The barrage of hundreds of five-tonne projectiles was all command had been willing to commit to deflecting the Earth-killer and its alien escort and this bothered Morgan more than he cared to mention. His family were down there and he, like Winters, had been dearly wishing that they’d reconsider and let them loose on the alien destroyer and asteroid. Only clearing away the enemy would allow the Harpoons to do what they were designed for: diverting a near-Earth asteroid away from the planet. He fully understood the ruse theory but couldn't see how anything the aliens could do with their fleet would be worse than the asteroid strike. Morgan was one of the best and was highly respected by both leaders and subordinates a
like. He and Winters had a close relationship, having graduated the Space Force Academy in the same class. Whether they were personally involved or not was the subject of much conversation among those who had the time and inclination to indulge in gossip. Things had happened in the past, but they were too professional to let anything more than the merest hint of attraction surface while on duty.

  “Private McCauley, bring up visuals please,” ordered Morgan to his younger fellow American, manning comms and sensors.

  “Yes sir,” said McCauley, complying.

  The main viewscreen at the front of the compact command deck flashed into life and showed the first five-tonne lump of tungsten alloy disappearing into the distance, becoming a mere speck in almost the blink of the eye. The velocity was astounding, and the momentum it generated on the Citadel would have rocked her back off her heels had it not been for the compensation of the station’s thrusters, which kept her orbit true and steady. They were receiving the updates via the laser link, which could be maintained during hostilities and was encrypted and essentially impossible to intercept being narrow-beam and point-to-point. Even if the aliens had learnt English, there was no way they’d be able to read the human comms. Every three seconds another projectile was pumped out as a steady stream of dots drew a line to their vanishing point. Even at this rate, it would take fifteen hours to go through the three-hundred-odd projectiles planned. The station had been packed to the gunwales in preparation with many additional deliveries by Skylift USV.