by J G Clements
I set my optics to maximum zoom, and could pick up the strobe part of the beacon. Plotting it into my nav computer, I looked at my options. He was only 35 minutes away at maximum thrust, but it would take more than 12 hours to rendezvous my ship to his. Dang. Get there quick and fly right by, or get there slow enough to be helpful but take half a day to get there. Double Dang.
In five minutes I had a plan, something I had thought about some time ago but never mentioned to anyone. The Fleet would have found it too risky. I piped my suit microphone to the Earth Station frequency to explain my idea while I got everything ready. I had a random thought, wondering if Sue was on duty tonight, but let that it go. While I was transmitting my idea, I got busy working on my Mule.
A Mule is a very simple rocket tube, with a small compartment to stand in. It was designed to make moving around from place to place a lot easier. I now had an idea for it that it was not intended for. In a few minutes it was fully fueled and I had what emergency supplies I could stuff into it. I was just about ready to go when Sue called. She must of had radio duty tonight or someone had gotten her out of bed. And it was nice to hear her wish me luck instead of trying to talk me out of my plan. “Come home in one piece, dear, and I’ll make you dinner.” Shucks. If only she didn’t say that to all the boys.
I mumbled a quick “Thanks” then made an additional comment to my dead microphone. I punched the final commands into my ship, said a prayer, then wedged myself and the mule in the airlock. I held tight to everything while my main ship motors caught and began to accelerate toward Mikes’ position. Well, not his position now, but where Mike’s position would be in an hour or so. I counted the seconds, and watched the mule’s clock tick down. In exactly 12 minutes, 14 seconds the Mule and I exited the ship just as it’s motors cut off.
I used the Mule to get away from my ship, floating as far away from it as I could get in the 30 seconds I had programmed in. After 30 seconds, I watched my ship execute a 180 flip and restart its motors. It was slowing, but the Mule and I were still traveling at my ship’s last velocity. During that 30 seconds, I had also located where I needed to go, aimed the mule, then hit the motor.
The mule was well named. It could kick. I was immediately pressed into my seat with a lot more pressure than I had experienced in some time. Probably 2 or 3 g’s. The rocket burned for almost a full 10 minutes then cut on its own timer just as I was about to punch the button manually. If I had done this right, I had used my main ship to accelerate me to get to Mike’s position quickly. But since my ship couldn’t break fast enough, I had exited the ship and used the Mule to slow myself down to match Mike’s drifting velocity. Of course the downside of this was that my ship had just rocketed past our position. My gallows-humor had something to say: “Bye ship. Don’t forget to write.”
But it worked. I was pretty close to Mike’s beacon. I started to reach for the locator unit, but didn’t need it. My eyes were clearing from the glare of the rocket blasts, and I could see his strobe about a thousand meters to my starboard. I still had plenty of fuel left in the Mule to make getting there easy.
In the five minutes it took me to get there, I had more than enough time to worry that maybe Mike wouldn’t be there. I hadn’t been able to get him on the radio, and began to have a bad feeling. At about this same time I decided I couldn’t see as well as I thought, so maybe my eyes were still blast-blind. I flipped on the night-vision and I immediately saw the ship. Or, more accurately, parts of the ship.
His ship was not a total debris field, but looked like it had been ripped or sliced in pieces. And neat pieces, too. The lines were straight, or looping curves that almost gave an artistic look to the mess. “Salvador Dali does Space” crossed my mind. Just as surprising, the pieces weren’t spreading very quickly, but seemed to be more or less just floating near one another. There was absolutely nothing in my experience to explain how a ship could break apart like that. No explosive, no mine and no meteor would do that to a ship. I could postulate only one way a ship could fail like that, and those facts didn’t fit into my current mental model of our solar system.
Time for that later. I chinned-on my suit radio, emergency frequency, “Mike…olly olly oxen free, come out, come out, wherever you are.” I listened.
There was a sort of half-laugh half-grunt in my earphones. “Stop it Jim...you’re making my ribs hurt. I think a couple of them are cracked.” I didn’t get a chance to ask him anything more since he was already giving me his report. “I’m in the aft pressurized bulkhead. My emergency suit is working and we might be able to get this bulkhead tight if you can give me a hand. My air is good…I have at least twelve hours at this activity level and I think I have enough power to run the regenerators.” I had a perfect fix on his position now, and jetted the mule gently toward him. In under 2 minutes, I had tethered the mule and was making my way into the aft section.
The damage to the ship continued to re-enforce my hypothesis of what happened. If I didn’t know better, I’d say it had been cut with a drunken laser. Wherever the bulkheads, tanks or walls had been ripped, it was a clean cut. No real sign of any ripping or bending of the metal. Something had cut the ship into about a half dozen pieces. And I was very uncomfortable thinking about how that was accomplished. But I wasn’t going to speculate in front of Mike. Instead, it was dawning on me that my ship, somewhere out there on autopilot, could meet the same fate. I had no plan B.
Mike was just where he said he was, in the aft bulkhead behind the primary recycling system. It wasn’t pressurized so I just floated in, being carful not to touch anything. My suit was cold from being outside and most the cabin was still pretty warm. I didn’t need any more problems today so I just hung in the doorway. Mike was across the cabin, in an emergency p-suit…one of those flimsy plastic bags you can get into in a real hurry if you need to. They are supposed to be puncture proof, but so are the seals on my frozen meal trays.
“Are you OK? What happened?” I started speaking until I decided I should probably hook my phone line into his suit and make it a bit easier to communicate. I’d also be able to download the status of his suit, his air supply, and his vital signs while we spoke. It took a few seconds to sync, then the data stream started. He appeared to be ok, and his suit was working as it was supposed to. He actually had enough air and heat for more than half a day, and I knew there were plenty of rations somewhere around here. Providing the pieces of the ship didn’t float too far apart. But to be honest, I was still spooked by what had happened to his ship. No one in the fleet was going to sleep well until they had this one figured out.
As I jacked my suit into his, I joined his explanation already in progress. “…appreciable thud or jar of an impact. Instead, I could see my ship falling to pieces around me and I wasn’t able to figure out why or how it was happening. When I could see the hull was breaching, I made it to the first emergency suit I could get into. And not a moment too soon. I lost cabin pressure just as the suit sealed and I was afraid I’d lose the suit integrity as it snapped into inflation against the vacuum. But the breach tossed me around like a volley ball and I ended up here.”
“Listen Mike...open your rations and drink some water. You probably are in shock so you should rehydrate”. Through his suit I wasn’t able to see if he had a concussion…you normally look at the pupils and how they dilate or don’t dilate to a bright light. That would have to wait. I had a lot of other things to do right now. I checked my suit chronometer and realized I was late. “Be right back”.
I was out the cabin and back to the Mule in a flash. It took a second to orient myself to the stars. This far out you use the sun and Jupiter to orient yourself. I looked in the direction I was supposed to look and held my breath. My eyes adjusted and in a few seconds I beheld the most beautiful sight in the sky: My ship, still in one piece and firing its main braking rockets as it slowed to match speeds to us. After having shot by us to get me here, it was now braking to a speed where we would catch up to it. Estimated Time t
o rendezvous was another 37 minutes. Not bad.
Back in to check on Mike and we started looking at what could be done to repair his ship. Or at least get it tight again. He was now in his usual pressure suit: I had put it into his emergency suit’s pass-through, though we had to disassemble his suit into components to do it. Still, I could tell he felt a ton better to be in his ‘real’ suit and he was ready to go. He said he planned to lash as much of the ship together to keep the pieces from floating away.
Leaving him to finish his fit-out, I was back outside as my ship finished its burn. I immediately mounted the Mule and made it to my air lock. Entering the cabin, I inserted the pin that locked out my firing jets. Despite all the hardware and computers, I was still afraid the ship might glitch and leave me here. A quick note to Mike that things were secure here and he should stop in for a drink, then I started my dialogue to the station.
I guess there was a lot of activity there because of me. Sue especially seemed joyful to hear from me, and after a few kind words to me, reverted to her sarcastic wit. “Glad you didn’t lose both ships Jim. How is Mike?”
“I’m just fine Sue. Thanks for asking. And yes, Mike is fine too, though I think he has a couple of cracked ribs. Can you put the doc on?” The Fleet actually have no less than three medical doctors. One of McKinsie’s many good ideas. “Oh, and by the way…did any of your telescopes get anything on tape?” When I explained how the ship was sliced-up, you could actually see the chatter go down from the other ships. They knew it was important, but no one was going to ask me any silly questions.
A Doctor came on, goes by the name of MD-5 and doesn’t use any name but ‘Doc’. He has an accent and no one but McKinsie himself knows his real name. Probably a good story there somewhere. He had Mike answer a lot of questions, pulse, respiration, urination, and had me try to check him for a concussion. He concluded that Mike didn’t have one which pleased both of us: We both wouldn’t have to stay awake all night. I think there was irony in his voice when he said Mike should get lots of rest the next few days. Mike was in good enough spirits to make a sarcastic comment, which made the Doc laugh, but brought an admonishment from Sue.
I got serious with Sue, and told her Mike and I are looking at the records and we’ll have some data in a few hours. We were beaming our logs over to her as we spoke. The Doc was right, Mike needed some rest, and I was still chilled to the bone from the EVAs I’d been doing. I began to get formal…so folks would know I meant what I was about to say, “This is Jim-88 and Mike-12. We are signing off for two hours.” I was just reaching to pull the switch when, against all protocol, I received a message waiting signal, and it was labeled ‘imperative’.
Folks know the rules up here, so I took the message. Normally, if I wanted to sign-off for 2 hours of sleep, no one would dare bother me unless it really couldn’t wait. “What is it…uh”, I took a second to see who it was from, “Phil-36 ?” I’d only had a few passing conversations with him. He was some sort of scientist, mostly good at photonics and other fields of physics. I had always assumed this meant he know a lot about how my computers really worked.
“Listen, I need to make something clear to you. And ask a favor. Can you get a spectrophotometer reading of Mike’s hull, right along one of the long gashes and compare that to the background readings from the rest of the hull? And I need it right away. I was about to ask him why it couldn’t wait when he added, “It’s a half-life issue.” I don’t understand radiation and isotopes very well, but I understood what ‘half-life’ meant. Phil was basically saying that the gashes would be more radioactive than normal hull steel. Oh joy. I wondered what else he knew that I didn’t.
“Ok, I can get that as soon as I am suited.” I was actually still in my suit. I just needed to attach fresh packs and put on the helmet. It took longer to find my spectrophotometer unit and make sure it was charged than it did to get out there. A spectrophotometer was just a device that looked at light, or radiation, across a very wide range of wavelengths, but did it one wavelength at a time. It was a remarkably good analytical tool. In less than 20 minutes, I had an answer to Phil.
“We show several isotopes along the gash, and here is the data”. I sent the file un-encoded and knew Phil would have it in a few seconds. “Phil…why is the gash radioactive with hull-metal isotopes? Wouldn’t that be kinda hard to do?” If the meteor or whatever had made the gashes had rubbed-off some material as it passed through, the isotopes would not be the same elements as the hull. The only isotopes we had found were based on the same elements as the hull.
“Jim, listen. I don’t think what took out Mike’s ship was a natural phenomena, and neither do you. It was a laser, and of a very efficient type. One that I don’t think any of us could have built.”
At some level I already knew that. I just wanted someone to tell me I was wrong. “Who Phil? The Chinese, the Russians”?
“Jim. I mean no one on Earth. I understand the physics but we are at least fifty years away from figuring out how to do that, much less making it a space-borne weapon”. He let this sink in for a few seconds. I wanted to ask about how such a thing would work but I knew I didn’t have the education to understand it. My knowledge of optics was lousy. Once you put a light through a prism and get the rainbow, I’m done.
“What should I do? You’ve got my attention. Is there anything in particular I can do, or just switch to general and aimless panic?” He completely ignored my cynicism.
“Listen…See if Mike might have done something to attract it. I’m betting it followed the ship, and maybe for some time. Take a good look at his tapes for the last couple of hours before the accident, and let me know. Call me when you are ready.”
“Thanks Phil.” I clicked-off and went to find Mike. He was in my mess…I guess it was going to be our mess for the next several months. The table was covered with drawings and charts, and he had pulled a couple of screens over, displaying different images. They showed images of his ship, and I could tell he was trying to figure what he could salvage.
“What did Phil want?”, he asked without even looking up. Mike has great leadership skills, and was already, in a subtle way, assuming charge. Though he would never admit it, and might not even be aware of it, that was who he was. As long as he made rational decisions, I’d go along. I had no idea what we would do if we ever really disagreed. But I suppose if push came to shove, I’d point out that this was my ship, and I was the Captain. But I put those thoughts aside.
“He said that he thinks he knows how your ship was destroyed. Only no one could have built it.”
“That’s great, cause I think I have pictures of it.” If there had been any gravity, I would have jumped over the table.
“Show me.”
There, on the screen, against a stationary backdrop of stars, there was a moving flash of light. Either there was some minor problem with our recordings, or the ship changed in reflectance. It seemed to be there, then we’d lose track of it, only to have it reappear along its projected track. What came to mind to me was it was either rotating or it was not uniform in color: Sometimes it reflected enough light for us to see it, sometimes it was invisible and we had to keep looking to get a reflection later. But there was no mistaking that it was moving across the star field, left to right in this view. Then it sort of vanished. I didn’t do any rigorous math, but it was far enough away to probably only amount to a single pixel in our digital cameras.
“Where did it go? I don’t see it.”
“Let me switch to the infrared recorder.” He made a few keystrokes and the display changed into a false-color type. He replayed the previous scene, but it wasn’t any clearer. Whatever it was, it had been just as cold as everything else out here. We switched back to visible optics, and tried to follow its progress. It moved from left to right, then before it would have gone off our screen, it glowed brighter...it must have become warmer, perhaps due to energy release. We switched back to infrared, and now it was clearly warmer than before. Just a
s I was about to say something, I could see that it had changed course and was coming straight toward the camera.
With a chill, I began to realize what had happened, and it make my skin crawl. It had changed it’s trajectory to come and attack Mike’s ship. Because its temperature was the same as the background of space, it must just have been drifting…no sign of any energy use that would have warmed it up. That means it must have been drifting for a long time, then somehow Mike’s ship had attracted its attention. It woke up, turned on its engines, came close enough to fry Mike. So much for ‘first contact’.
There was no escaping the conclusion we both would like to have avoided. There was something out here, of higher technology than us, and what really disturbed me, it was not friendly. That is, it seemed to shoot first, and ask questions…never.
Mike and I had nothing to say for some minutes, though I was hoping another shoe wouldn’t drop by me being the second ship destroyed today. I think we were both too shaken by it all to do anything. Our ships were not designed to fight. We were too busy just trying to get fuel, grow food, and stay alive. But this would change everything. Humankind would have to make a decision whether to stay on Earth and pretend nothing had happened, or mount enough men and equipment to explore this.
“Jim, take a look at the beginning of the tape.” I replayed the tape, but didn’t seem to pick up anything. “Do you see how the object just starts in that frame?”
“Yeah. I assume that’s where you decided to start the replay from.”
“No, if you look at the previous several frames, the object isn’t there. It just …appears…right there.” For the next half hour, we viewed and re-viewed the recordings, but couldn’t agree where the object came from. If could have popped out of nowhere or there wasn’t enough light to get a reflection. It had then traversed across our view for perhaps four or five minutes, at which point it had changed it’s trajectory toward Mike’s ship.
