by J G Clements
Since the stars didn’t move, he was able to mentally subtract many of them from his observations. After two weeks, he had subliminally memorized the actual starfield and seemed able to ignore them. He identified some icy-meteors that must have been spinning or tumbling since they tended to change brightness at some constant rhythm. He called them blinkers, since that’s how they behaved. Still, every time he found one he zoomed his optics onto it and tried to observe it long enough to convince himself that it was just that….an icy rock spinning in its orbit. He had never forgotten what he had seen the day that Mike’s ship got sliced to pieces.
The scariest part of his mission was the fact he was orbiting the wrong way. Though this orbit was better for encountering more objects, it also increased the chance that he might collide with something. He was going the wrong way on a very high-speed highway. If he didn’t see anything closing on him before it hit him, he would most likely be reduced to atoms. If he did see something on a collision course, he’d have at most several minutes to light his fusion reactor and get out of the way. And of course, if he generated that much heat, he might as well signal the Sisk for an early pickup since his mission would be compromised.
He sat, chewing his rations slowly. He had asked for something that would take a lot of chewing, since that was an easy way to eat slowly. When you have four months of very little to do, chewing could be the highlight of your day.
Another blinker, and after triggering the camera to concentrate on that part of his sky, he zoomed his own optics out to see what it was. At the extreme end of the zoom, he held his breath and even stopped chewing to keep his eye movement to a minimum. The blinking seemed to have subsided, and he was thinking about an object that spun on two different axis to do that.
He seemed to lose it entirely, then picked it up again much further along its trajectory than he thought it should be. It must have been moving fast to get that far between rotations. Assuming it was just another icy meteor spinning in it trajectory, he wasn’t fully prepared for what he found. Focusing his optics, he confirmed it: A Swarm ship. No, he reined in his excitement: Some sort of ship. The shape though was unmistakably the cone shape that the Swarm used. But the tapered cone design seemed to be common. He concluded it was a ship, but it was a provisional conclusion that it was a Swarm ship.
But if it was a Swarm, it wasn’t one of the small fighters. The records called this size ship a ‘hauler’ since it was much too big to be a fighter. Not large enough to be one of their really big beam-weapon ships, this was just an arbitrary designation. Those ships weren’t encountered often, but they had the punch to cripple or destroy a ship as large as the Sisk. He had been told, and all the tapes he watched had confirmed it, the Swarm came in three sizes of ships, or at least that’s all that had been encountered. Swarmers, Haulers, and Beamers. If other types existed, no one had come back from an encounter with any to provide records. And there were ships that had been lost, ships bigger than the Oddjob.
Swallowing, his meal entirely forgotten, he moved his head back off the optics. Shaking his head to clear his sight, he again glued himself to his optics and watched. Another trip, tilting your head to use different rods and cones in the eye, he continued to stare. Convinced it was a Swarm ship, he was remarkably calm. Not to get his hopes up, he started enumerating the reasons it could be out here. One, it was a derelict. Two, it really was a Hauler out in the middle of nowhere on the way to somewhere. Though the ‘somewhere’ would be worth knowing. Three, he had found some base or gathering place of the Swarm. That was exciting, but at the same time, nerve-wracking since he might be discovered if there was a large collection of them nearby.
For the first time, he considered that they might be as observant as he was trying to be. Would his iceberg of a ship fool them? Instead of being worried for his own life, he seemed to consider it more like a puzzle to be solved. As all these thoughts ran through one part of his mind, another part of his mind was focused on learning what he could. The ship was not tumbling, but seemed to be slowly rotating around its long axis. It was visible for a second, then as it rotated it disappeared. He’d wait, then pick it up again a minute or so later. Several pilots had called this the ‘rotisserie’ method. It was sometimes used to evenly distribute heat when operating near the sun. And it could probably be used to generate some centrifugal force to simulate gravity.
For over an hour he kept his eye on it. If he breathed at all during that time, he was not conscious of it. He measured the spin rate and clocked it at around fifty seconds or so per revolution. With that understood, he changed the timing in the camera system to take a photo every fifty seconds, hoping to get a better trajectory on it. If not a better trajectory, at least he’d have a better video of the ship.
He did not have very sophisticated instruments to plot its trajectory. That was intentional, since his ship had been designed to be nothing more than an icy rock hurtling through space. However, he could try to measure the size blip in the photos he was taking and figure out if it was closing on him or moving away.
Doing so, of course, meant he had to light-up some of his equipment and spoil his night vision. Still, now that he knew where the ship was, he was willing to sacrifice some of it, in order to get a better prognosis on where the ship was likely to be. To his surprise, it was neither orbiting clockwise or counterclockwise, but seemed to be in a skew trajectory, on its way out of the ecliptic plane.
This solar system, just like Earth’s, had most of the planets circling in the same plane. As if all the planets were sitting on the same dinner plate with the sun at the center of it. But an object could rise above the dinner plate, and could even establish an orbit in the z-axis above the sun. Of course, every time it re-entered the ecliptic plane, there might be a planet waiting there to mess with it, but that was a chance that it would just have to take. Or, as Jim realized, just calculated so it could be avoided.
He leaned back from his optics, convinced that he would not lose the location of the ship. Instead, he was trying to figure out his next step. The most intelligent one would be to do nothing. Finish the four months, try to keep an eye on the ship, then signal the Sisk to come pick him up. But Jim, ever the experimentalist, started thinking about other possibilities.
If he was to signal the Sisk now, would the ship see him? Would it move to destroy him, or run for it? Or, to be fair in all possibilities, just ignore him? No, the Swarm never ignored you. It would take the Sisk about five days to get here. Plenty of time for the ship to destroy him. But, by his calculations the ship would be far enough away within two days that he’d probably no longer be able to track it.
Another ration bar in his mouth, he was chewing again. He wasn’t sure if it helped him to think, but it seemed to take a part of his mind off his problems, leaving what he hoped was the smarter part of his mind to work on the important problems. He had researched everything the Crekie knew about the Swarm, and they still didn’t know if the Swarm used, or for that matter, even detected, radio transmissions.
Standard Fleet policy was to assume the Swarm might detect radio transmissions, but they couldn’t or wouldn’t try to understand what was being said. Making absolutely no effort to communicate with anyone, it wasn’t even known if they used any languages. Or for that matter, if they even had a language of their own. Jim’s mind turned to trying to figure out if there was value to knowing that. If radio was something they didn’t use or detect, that could make Fleet operations a tad easier.
He suddenly stopped chewing. A suggestion from the chewing part of his brain had just been made, and it was jaw dropping. Jim found himself examining the idea looking for a flaw. It was dangerous, but that didn’t seem to bother him much. ‘Would it work?’ was what he was more interested in. He examined all the possible outcomes from the experiment that he had just thought of. There were several that suggested he might not live thru it. But all of them suggested that a large amount of data was going to be collected regardless of what happened
to him, personally.
Making up his mind, after all these weeks of inactivity, he was suddenly busy. He had to program the communications gear of his ship, get his suit ready, and about a dozen other tasks that he had thought he wouldn’t need to perform out here. How wrong he was.
Chapter 20 : Paul-24
Ceres Report: Antennas
I’ve been able to get an antenna high enough to give me continuous communication with the Earth Fleet. It wasn’t that hard, but low gravity makes some things really strange. For starters, I piled rocks up to make a much higher starting point. On Earth, the gravity would have made this tough, but on Ceres it was easy. In a couple days I had a cairn over twenty feet high, which left me with only another ten feet to go.
I had enough tubing to complete it, then moved the receiver from my ship onto it.
I can only transmit once every ten hours of so, but thats fine. I can at least get the ball games in real time. Or as real time being this far from Earth would allow. Small victories are just that: Victories.
I am Paul-24, and I was asked by the Recruiter guy to make this log.
We all watched as Jim-88’s ship ejected from the cargo bay and drifted off into the darkness. This far away from the sun, it was almost impossible to spot him after half an hour, even knowing where to look. A couple of the guys used the zoom optics, I think more to give them practice than for anything else. The Captain had explained that Jim would be gone for somewhere between two and four months, and our job was to survey as many of the ice giants as we could in that time.
It had been decided to use one-man ships with each ship having a drone out in front. The drone would be in low orbit…and vulnerable to an attack…but expendable. The manned ships, including mine, would be in higher orbits. There had also been some support for putting 2 pilots in each ship. With a crew of two, they could spend full time looking at the drone’s data while still piloting and keeping watch for local threats. With single-piloted ships, flying duties would mean the pilot couldn’t spend full time looking at the data. Consequently, it was agreed that some ships would have one pilot and others two. As one pilot remarked, just because you’re fighting to save your race from extinction, doesn’t mean you should have to give up date night.
The approach to operating the drone was to not send it many, or even better, any correction signals. Any radio chatter from the manned ships, even tight-beam transmissions, would produce some scatter down on the planet. The drones can send data upward, away from the planet with little chance of detection, but it had to be a one-way street. No one knew if Swarmers even monitored radio frequencies. We had been told that the Crekie didn’t think they did. But Jim said he wasn’t so sure. And that was enough for us: No radios.
This was about our fourteenth or fifteenth moon this month. By now we had it down to an art. My drone was less than four miles above the surface. And with no atmosphere, it was actually possible to maintain it in orbit at that altitude, though not a stable one. But the benefits were worth it. For starters, four miles is close enough to get a lot of detail. And better, by the time the drone ‘came into view’ above the horizon, it was over your position in a few minutes. If there was an active mine, they’d have very little time to get undercover.
One of the chiefs had suggested we just put a single drone in orbit, and be patient while it photographed every square foot. Then the data could be examined later. Jim talked everyone out of that by explaining that the Swarm would have lots of time to hide if they knew that a drone was due over them in a few days. He said the goal had to include complete surprise, with a complete mapping-scan in a few hours, not in a few weeks.
So I flew in a much higher orbit than my drone, which meant it took me much longer to complete an orbit. The cost for that was it would be out of contact with me almost 40% of the time. Passing behind the planet on its much faster trajectory, I wouldn’t be able to see what it saw until it lapped me, but that was just something that had to be done. I could fly to a lower orbit, or even in the same orbit, but that would make me a sitting duck for a beam weapon. And besides, I didn’t want to use my fusion drive: Too much waste heat.
We had been at this moon for almost five hours before I got the first hint that there was something interesting down there. This moon, like most, had been pockmarked with meteor hits. Craters upon craters of perfectly round impact areas. There were craters inside of craters inside of craters. With no weather to erase anything, each hit was immortalized in the planet’s surface. But one set caught my eye: The center crater was a direct bullseye in a larger crater. Coincidence, maybe, but I made a note of where it was.
Over the last couple weeks and dozens of moons, planets, planetoids…whatever you want to name them… I hadn’t seen much worth a second look. This was different…it appeared too perfect. I would love to have directed my drone to gives this a second or third look, but again, signals sent to the drone were a give away. And I couldn’t go down to look at it until everyone else had finished their surveying. But the very bottom of the crater is really what had my attention: It appeared to be dark, like a hole. Could be just a trick of light. Or it could be a hole.
I’m not normally patient, but waited the three more hours for the scan to finish. When it was, there would be a recall broadcast to let us know we were released from our duties, and could break radio silence. By then, this moon would be totally mapped, and we could move on to the next. The Sisk would rendevous with us at the same time the broadcast was made, in case anyone did stir up a hornets nest.
Just about the time the ‘all done’ signal came, the Sisk entered our orbit. Estimated time of arrival about thirty minutes. Plenty of time to go look. One-man ships aren’t set up for atmospheric work, but there was no atmosphere here. I could land using the fusion drive, just as long as I was far enough away to not blow too much debris at what I wanted to examine.
I settled on a site about a half-mile away. A baby crater just outside the slope of the main crater. The main crater looked pretty normal, but the crater inside it had steeper walls than I was used to seeing. Though it had looked like a hole…or a shadow…from orbit, you couldn’t see much from the ground. Instead, I had to hike over the rim of the big crater, then walk up to the rim of the inner crater.
Unfortunately, my landing had stirred up a lot of dust and debris so I did have to wait a few minutes for the visibility to improve. With no atmosphere there was no wind to disperse it, and the lower gravity didn’t help in letting it settle very fast. But I could tell this crater was unusually steep: If I had had a bowling ball, I think it would have rolled to the bottom.
Before I had left my ship, I had radioed the location and my intention to disembark over to the Sisk.. If I had wanted, I could have waited for a back-up ship. That would have been safer. But to be candid, not as much fun. I found this hole, and I wanted to see what was in it.
Descending down the inside of the inner crater, I approached to within twenty yards or so of it’s bottom. My doubts evaporated…there was a hole there and it wasn’t just a trick of the light! As I absorbed this…my mind racing…the Health-Monitor in my suit started beeping. It indicated I had an elevated heart rate. No kidding. Honestly, I felt like I had discovered King Tutts tomb. Of course, as I recalled, there was some story about the discovers of the tomb all having fallen ill due to a curse. Well….I had a pressure suit and they didn’t. So.
I got into a better position to see my discovery and had my next surprise: The hole had an ice rim on it. A smooth ice rim, almost as smooth as a docking collar on a ship. No doubt it wasn’t natural. The diameter of the hole was almost forty feet across, and the width of the rim…or docking collar as I was now thinking about it… was easily three feet wide. If I had had a matching collar, made from ice or steel I could have attached to this and probably made an airtight seal. Obviously, this was an artifact. Now we only had to figure out if the Swarm built it.
My first instinct was to walk over to the rim and look inside. At some le
vel I believe I’m alive today because I’ve pretty much ignored my first instinct my entire life. Instead, I listened to to my second, third and fourth instincts, who were all shouting ‘don’t walk to the edge!’ in unison. When they are all agree like that, you really have to listen. Instead of looking over the edge, I circled around the rim, being careful to stay back at a comfortable distance.
It was uneventful, but I began to think about what would happen if the hole had an undercut where I was standing. I might be standing on a thin crust over a huge cavern. If it broke through, I’d fall. And maybe a long way. The gravity here was only about a third that of Earth. That may sound safe, but one thing they don’t mention to you is that there is no terminal velocity when falling in an airless void. With enough height, you can easily exceed the 120 miles an hour or so that limits your falling speed on Earth. With that thought uppermost in my mind, I backed away another fifty feet, and making one more entire lap around the hole, I retreated to my ship. I suppose some assistance here would be worth it.
The radio system has a set of telltales that lets you know how many folks are listening in. I was told, hopefully jokingly, that it was invented by a “social networking” programmer as an answer to some of the text message services back on Earth. Regardless, when I radioed the Sisk to let them know that I found a hole that was most certainly man-made, all my telltales lit up. I had a lot of folks listening. I also began to worry that I’d lose my prerogative to explore it. I found it: It was my hole and I was going to insist that I be the one to explore it.
Fortunately, my misgivings were taken away by the Sisk. Captain DuBois himself took to the air, announcing to all pilots and crews in the area they were to stand-by to assist with whatever Paul-24 needed. I now saw the tell-tales as helpers, not folks that would push me out of the way. Mentally, I thanked the Captain, then didn’t waste any time.
