The Battle of Titan

by Sudipto Majumdar

  There was not a single migration vessel available in readiness immediately, which had angered the council to no end. In fact none of the old migration vessels in orbit were serviceable. At best they could be used for scavenging, and scavenging was not advised on such long trips. The newest migration vessel was more than 50 thousand cycles old, the parts of such vessels were hardly reliable.

  Whatever the seer may say, it was not the builder caste’s fault. There had been no reason to build migration vessels… there was nowhere to migrate to. Since their migration to this world, resources had never been laid out for that purpose.

  Builders would use their caste’s left over resources to build a migration vessel over tens of thousands of cycles. They did this to keep the skills of building a migration ship alive and to train their young and the young warriors on them, so that the skills of astrogation and void warfare were not lost.

  Migration vessels were mammoth endeavors. The most massive task his beings ever undertake. The resources required to build even a single migration vessel strains his entire world. Now that the council had put all its available resources behind it, new migration vessels would be built much faster, but it would probably still take thousands of cycles to build the first one.

  The necessary infrastructure required to produce these vessels had simply been withering away. There were not nearly enough builders for this single project, they will have to spawn and train new builders to fulfill the requirements. The building station orbiting the world in the void, meant for building void vessels will have to expanded and updated. Last migration ship built in that building station was 50 thousand cycles ago!

  The only vessel available immediately that had a chance to cross the void was a remote tasting vessel used by the curious caste to explore the icy rocks at the edge of the system. The vessel was not designed to carry beings nor did it have any weapons.

  The vessel was slow, acceleration was barely enough to reach the destination within a reasonable time frame, but could carry enough reaction mass to cross the void to the source of the signal. There was no option but to use this only vessel for reconnaissance. The curious caste needed data from within the system to adapt their spawning and migration gears.

  Harmony was excited on this adventure of discovery. His unbound curiosity finally finding an outlet in an event like no other experienced by his beings in a few hundred thousand cycles. His skin slime experienced a chill however, when he tasted the words of the seer in conversation mode. "This is no adventure of discovery young Harmony. You have a lot to learn about the nature of our beings, our ways and our history. This is the beginning of war!"

  Chapter 2

  A mystery and a friendship discovered

  Summer of 2034

  Jorge was in a sour mood this evening. "Get a life Jorge, this is no way to spend the evenings of your youth" he grumbled to himself. He heaved a large sigh and got back to the large screen in front of his desk, to the work he knew needed to be done, and yet wondered how it was always him who got stuck up with the shittiest of jobs. Oh well, he knew why. At age 27 he was the youngest in the department, and being a mere PhD student put him in the hierarchy like ...well just above dirt.

  "Astronomy is 99% drudgery and 1% boredom" he had been warned in college. Did he listen? Well of course not! That would not have been Jorge! "If you want Jorge to do something, tell him not to do it" his mother would say. How right she is! Be it bungee jumping, sky diving or rock climbing he did everything his parents asked him not to do.

  So why would Astronomy be any different? Except there was a difference, astronomy was his life. He loved it more than anything else in the world. He could not imagine doing anything else in his life. No, astronomy was not a whim or a rebellion, it was all he wanted to do since he was 11 when he took his first look from his home telescope.

  So here he was Jorge Stenger PhD student at the University of Honolulu, the biggest beach party place in the world on a Friday evening cooped up in his small office working while his friends partied and got laid. If you can call this broom closet an office that is. At least it was private and he had it to himself.

  And what was he doing? Staring at pictures of endless comets and planetoids to find a needle in a haystack. To be fair, the computer had already done most of the skull-drudgery. He had to only look at about 0.1% of the pictures, all with helpful annotations from the computer. That still was close to a 1000 pictures, each with a few hundred points of light.

  Each picture would have a set of accompanying pictures taken in a time lapse manner a few days or a few weeks apart of that exact segment of the sky. The computer would helpfully circle a region of the photo with one or two points of light.

  The whole objective of the exercise was to identify unknown celestial objects and classify them. The technique was an old one really, used by astronomers for over a hundred years. All that the modern avatar had done, was to offload most of the grunt work to the computers, only highlighting the pictures with anything remotely interesting.

  It was still mind numbing work, due to the fact that while the old astronomers would take a few hundred pictures on photographic plates, from sitting under a single telescope all through the night, modern astronomy is networked to an array of ground based as well as space based telescopes taking pictures 24 hours a day from radio spectrum through infrared, visible light, ultraviolet, x-rays all the way to gamma rays. Modern astronomy generated millions of pictures every day stored on servers with peta-bytes of storage and processing capacity to match.

  Nothing much exciting came out of it ever. The most that one can realistically hope for was to identify a comet out of the billions that exist out there. Jorge himself had identified 4 comets in the last one year of working in the observatory, after observing nearly a hundred thousand images. These were quietly filed within the astronomical database probably never to be seen by any human ever again.

  After all there are many billions out there and almost none of any interest to humans... almost none. For amongst those billions, there may be one with humanity's name written on it. It may be heading for a direct collision with earth! So Jorge knew his work was important. Boring but important. Hey we would not want humanity to go out like the dinosaurs did, would we? But boring nonetheless Jorge sighed.

  It was in the middle of such thoughts that Jorge suddenly sat up as the present picture frame caught his attention. It was not what the picture had which was surprising, it was what it didn't have that caught his attention... motion. Why the hell had the computer flagged this picture? It is supposed to eliminate all pictures which have no difference with the previous frame and hence no motion. He read the annotation carefully.

  Sector:

  BDW 93.37, 86.78, 172.05

  Frames:

  1093

  Frequency:

  24 hrs.

  Flag Type:

  Anomalous

  Highlight coordinates:

  22.69x, 45.91y

  Tentative designation:

  XRT 7356550132

  Estimated mass:

  indeterminate, min 1010 Kg., max 1015 Kg.

  Estimated speed:

  indeterminate, min 0 m/s, max 4.6 x 107 m/s

  Estimated distance:

  indeterminate, min 30 AU, max 50,000 AU

  Estimated density:

  indeterminate, min 10-6 Kg/m3, max 1030 Kg/m3

  Estimated volume:

  indeterminate, min 10-3 m3, max 1016 m3

  Apparent magnitude:

  15.6, variable, anomalous

  Composition:

  4He 100%

  Prognosis:

  Too many anomalies, aborting further processing.... Flagged for manual processing... Data outside heuristic algorithm's parameters - count 10

  "Holy f***ing cow!" Exclaimed Jorge. He had never seen such data before! "Ok, let’s slow down and read it once again. I am sure there is a perfectly trivial explanation for this. So what does it say? Sector... Blah, Blah. Frames 1093,
Frequency 24 hours. So it has been snapping this daily for 1093 days, that’s nearly 3 years.

  Now the question is this... If it has been clicking away this... whatever it is for nearly 3 years, why has it decided to raise a flag today? I am sure Heidi or one of the geeks at the CS department will have an answer to that, after all Heidi understands all these algorithms, in fact some of them are her creation, and the geeks programmed it.

  If he were to put his money, the geeks screwed up and this is some obscure bug. Either this should not have been flagged at all or it should have been flagged much earlier.

  Jorge stood up to pour himself some stale coffee from the jar behind him and stretch, to straighten out the kinks from sitting on his desk for many hours at a stretch. He realized that computer estimates may be all wonky, but the raw data is solid. If he concentrated on the raw data he might still be able to make some sense out of this.

  The computer estimates that the thing weighs between 10 million tons to a trillion ton. Somewhere between a decent sized asteroid to a small moon. Basically it has no idea about the mass.

  The speed estimate was interesting. He quickly flipped through many of the previous frames and confirmed that the body had not moved laterally. He could understand the computer’s confusion on this one. If this thing is not standing still, then it must be coming head on.

  Nothing in space can stand still. If this thing had been standing still, then it would have been sucked into the sun or Jupiter billions of years ago, basic principles of Newtonian mechanics. So this body must be coming in head on.

  What is the probability of that? He would say next to zero. But if you are an astronomer you quickly learn that even one in a billion chance is a certainty when you have trillions of bodies floating around.

  He jumped to the luminosity value and compared with previous frame values. The body was slowly increasing in brightness, so it was definitely moving inwards head on... Unless this was some weird comet never before discovered which had its own light source and automatically increased its brightness... Not likely.

  Suddenly the absolute value of the brightness caught his attention. In all his excitement he had overlooked this simple piece of data. Holy shit! This thing is bright! This is too bright for a comet or any other Kuiper belt body. That high a value of brightness cannot be achieved through reflected light of the sun from such a far distance... even if the thing was made out of perfectly polished mirror! That thing is emanating light from its own source! What the hell is it? Nothing known in nature does that out there in the Kuiper belt.

  Being head on must also be also the reason why the computer is confused about the distance. The estimate basically says that it could be closer than Neptune or way beyond the Kuiper belt and into the Oort cloud. That is the same as saying it knows jack shit about the distance.

  Suddenly the distance measurement of an apparently stationary object got him thinking. The stars appear stationary to us, and yet we have been able to measure their distance by primitive telescopes using the parallax method. The principle is simple.

  The earth moves round the sun in an ellipse. You measure the angle of the star from one end of the ellipse, and after half a year measure the angle of the star from the opposite end of the ellipse. We know the diameter of earth’s orbit, and hence the distance between the two ends. From the change in angle of the star on the two ends, it is basic trigonometry to calculate the distance to the star.

  This thing has been under observation for three years. There should be enough data to do this simple calculation. Does the algorithms use the parallax method? He did not know, only the geeks or Heidi could tell offhand.

  He realized that he could not go any further without answers about the algorithms. Speaking to Heidi in the middle of the night for a lowly PhD student was out of the question, so he decided to hunt online for any of the CS geeks associated with the observatory or the university astronomy department.

  Since it was midnight on a Friday night he was not surprised to find all his usual contacts offline. He filtered his contact list for all CS staff. All were offline except for one amber... Ramesh Srinivasan. He could either be genuinely away from his device, or simply pretending to be so, that way he could simply ignore anyone he wishes without offending them.

  Ramesh was not a close friend but he knew him well. They had been together in campus since their freshman year. Both had started their PhD together. They had a common friend, but otherwise Ramesh was the polar opposite of Jorge in terms of personality and physical appearance.

  Diminutive and thin, decidedly un-athletic, Ramesh was soft spoken and shy introvert Indian origin guy. Jorge was tall and athletic though not muscular, Caucasian with a hint of Hispanic ancestry. He was brash and extrovert. Their interactions often centered on Jorge playfully introducing Ramesh to girls round the campus, and enjoying seeing him blush deep red despite his dark tan complexion.

  He decided to take a chance and flicked at the icon. "Hey Ramesh... man what’s up? I know you are there, pick up the line man it is urgent." He waited for a minute but got no reply. He was about to disconnect and go home when he got a reply, audio only.

  "Jorge if you are calling me at midnight on a Friday, to taunt me about being online and having no social life or gals, I am going to shove something nasty up your ass". Jorge put his palms up in submission. "Whoa man... this is serious computer business I called about. As you can see from my background image, I am in my office working on a Friday evening. Right now it is me who has no social life"

  That seem to mollify Ramesh enough for him to open up the video channel. Despite his efforts, Jorge could not help burst out in laughter the moment he saw Ramesh. "Dude what have you put on your forehead, you look funny!"

  Ramesh sneered back. "Yeah go ahead and make fun of my religious practice, so typical of you Jorge. For your information this is called a Tilak which you put on after you offer your prayers to Shiva, who happens to be a Hindu god for the benefit of ignoramuses like you. We are supposed to do this in the morning, but I never seem to manage to wake up early enough in the morning, and I don't want to go around wearing the Tilak at campus, inviting laughter from jerks like you. So I do this at night."

  Jorge was genuinely mortified at his own insensitivity. "Hey sorry man, I did not mean to make fun of your religious practice. You are right, sometimes I can be a real jerk. My mouth starts speaking before my brains can think. And about that issue of trouble waking up in the morning, I feel your pain bro. I have had the same problem all my life."

  That seem to mollify Ramesh enough again, so he asked "what is this super urgent stuff you wanted to talk about?"

  So Jorge explained the entire stuff as concisely as he could. Ramesh was nothing if not super smart. Though he was a computer science major, he was no slouch in physics either and knew enough astronomy to understand all the issues clearly. Ramesh knew he could not walk away from the problem. It was just too delicious, and he had to solve it. That is what he lived for and craved for… to solve problems in general and CS or mathematical problems in particular. This involved all of those.

  That did not mean he was not going to give some grief to Jorge first, it was too good an opportunity to miss. "I don't know man, I am not connected with the Astrophysics department, so I don't know any of their stuff. It will require time to hack into a few things, and I just started preparing to defend my thesis. I am really hard pressed for time."

  "Hey come on man, we are friends, you would do this teeny weeny thing for your friend, won’t you? Tell you what, I would throw you a treat at Toto's whenever you want". Jorge said with a wry smile.

  "Jorge you are a jerk and you know it. Toto's serves only steaks, burgers and beer, and you very well know that I am a vegetarian and do not drink." Ramesh said in an offended tone.

  "All right, all right, how about that Fluentez babe then?" Jorge was getting desperate now. "I know you have the hots for her… no use denying it… everyone on campus knows it. I will get you a bli
nd date with her... and… and just to get you guys started smoothly we will make it a double date with me and Mischa. I am sure you know Mischa and Fluentez are close friends. Fluentez will be very comfortable with Mischa and me around, and you two can ease into the evening.

  Whenever you give the signal we two will scoot, leaving you two alone. You know I think you are Fluentez's type. You two might even hit off something long term." Jorge was talking fast now, like a salesman desperate to close a deal. "You know it a really good deal. Come on now Ramesh what say you?"

  Ramesh did not want to push his luck too much with the grief thing, since he really wanted to dive into the problem. And to tell the truth it was really a very enticing offer, because he had more than just the hots for Fluentez. He dreamed of her every day.

  "Ok deal then. Let us get started. This is going to be a long night. Your system is basically an academic software and the data is all public domain. There should not be too many hurdles in getting read only access to the innards of the system. That is all you need to answer your questions. Let us get started with you sharing your screen and input devices with me."

  With that, Ramesh started doing his thing, occasionally asking questions about the systems used in his department. Some Jorge knew, others he didn't. Ramesh worked around these. The help file was easy to find, but had nothing on the algorithms used.

  Next they found the systems documentation, which required a minor hack into the public area of the CS group attached to the Astrophysics department. It was no surprise that most of the documents were simply placeholders copied from some template. Nobody had actually bothered to write the documentation. Programmers were notorious for hating and skimping on documentation, Ramesh was not really surprised.