Instead, Dante sounded angry, “Some people from the military are here and say they’re commandeering a saucer. Do you know what this is about?”
“No! Do they say why?”
“No, apparently I don’t have the ‘need to know.’ They want one that’s spaceworthy and can do at least a week long mission in deep space. The general that’s here asked his aide how long it would take to ‘get there’ and, though the guy whispered the answer, I still heard him say thirty-two hours. I’m not sure what destinations you can reach in thirty-two hours, but I thought that might help you figure it out.”
“Why aren’t they taking one of their own? We sold them a few small and medium-size saucers last year didn’t we?”
“Yeah, but apparently they’ve got all of them set up for suborbital and orbital work, not for lengthy deep space missions. My impression is they’ve just been putting up spy satellites and preparing for the orbital part of Earth warfare. They’ve had no interest in the rest of the solar system so far, but it seems like something’s changed their minds. Besides, I get the impression they want something big enough to transport a lot of men…” Dante continued almost plaintively, “Where the hell could they be going Tiona?”
While Dante spoke, Tiona and been thinking about Dr. Singer’s emergency call. “I don’t know, but I might know someone who does. I’m on my way to GSI and I might have some answers by the time I get there. Where should I land so the military boys don’t jump all over me?”
Dante suggested landing a block away and driving to the side entrance at street level. Once he’d signed off, Tiona put through a call to Dr. Singer. “Hello, Dr. Singer?”
“Yes, yes! Ms. Gettnor, you must send a mission to the new NEO! It’s separated into two objects and the smaller one is moving away from the bigger one. It generated ionized hydrogen for a little over twenty-five hours after the separation!”
“Hydrogen?” Tiona said uncertainly, not sure what that might mean.
“Ionized hydrogen! It’s probably from a plasma drive of some kind! Aliens! We’ve got to go and meet them!”
“Oh…” Tiona said, her mind spinning as several things suddenly fit together.
Tiona did make it in the side entrance unimpeded. Well, that wasn’t quite true, she was having some difficulty walking while watching her HUD as her AI downloaded pages about plasma drives and the orbit of the NEO.
She felt like she was just beginning to get a handle on it when she arrived at Dante’s office and found a couple of guards in military uniform outside his door. She blinked a couple of times, paused and said, “Um…”
The soldier said, “Keep moving ma’am, they’re having a top-secret meeting and they’re not to be interrupted.”
Tiona grinned at him, then spoke to her AI, “See if Dante will take my call.”
“Tiona, where the hell are you?!”
“Standing outside your door. Did you know you have some military guards out here keeping anyone from entering?”
“Dammit General,” Dante said, “didn’t you tell your guards that you were waiting for our CTO?”
“Yes!” A moment later the door jerked open and an angry looking general looked at his guards, “Did you men send away the company’s head tech guy?!” As they were answering with an emphatic “No sir,” his eyes flashed to Tiona and he continued, “I thought I told you not to let people stand around in the hall up here!” Then he tilted his head curiously as if he thought he might recognize Tiona.
Tiona put her hand up a little, saying, “Tech guy.”
The General looked angrily over his shoulder at Dante, “There’s some kind of tech person out here, but where the hell’s your CTO!”
Tiona lifted her hand again and said, “CTO.”
The general’s eyes narrowed as if he thought she was putting him on, then they widened. He said, “Shit! You’re Tiona Gettnor aren’t you?”
Tiona nodded.
The general waved her into the room with a grimace, “Sorry, in all this rushing around I’ve heard about the CTO and I’ve heard about Tiona Gettnor, but I hadn’t quite recognized they’re the same person. I’ll also apologize for the fact that your country needs to commandeer one of your spaceworthy saucers. Your brother,” the General darted a look at Dante, “claims he doesn’t know where they are. And, he claims that you guys don’t have very many!” The General turned back to her, “But he says you know where they are and what they’re doing.”
Tiona put out her hand, “Hello General…” she looked pointedly down at his name tag, then back up into his eyes, “Stoddard, I’m Tiona Gettnor.” She lifted an eyebrow making it evident that she expected a response.
Brusquely he shook her hand and said, “Thanks. We’re introduced. Now, where are the saucers?”
Tiona turned to the other officer in the room, putting out her hand again.
With a glance at his general he shook her hand, saying, “Hello Ms. Gettnor, I’m Major Daniel Vincent.”
Tiona turned to Dante, “Have they told you what this is all about yet?” At a shake of Dante’s head, she turned her eyes back to the general, “I’d imagine it has to do with the aliens that are in or on that NEO coming our way from the direction of the sun?” She looked at Dante, “Apparently a smaller object has separated from it. The small piece was propelled by a plasma drive of some type for a little over a day.” She turned back to the general lifted her eyebrow again, “Perhaps, General, you could tell us why you’re trying to keep this a secret from the very people you hope are going to fly you out there?”
“We’re trying to keep the populace from panicking!” Stoddard said, looking like he wanted to grit his teeth. “Though apparently some people who shouldn’t be talking… have been. Anyway, you don’t need to fly us out there, you just need to provide the saucer.”
“I think, General, you might find that we could be a great deal of help… If we were asked nicely rather than ordered around. Or, you can keep being a jerk and watching us drag our feet, it’s up to you. In any case, our spaceworthy saucers are currently scattered around the solar system. Neptune, Saturn, asteroid belt… None of them are immediately available.”
The general took a deep breath as if he were about to bellow, then slowly let it out. “Dammit!” He closed his eyes for a moment, “What’s the soonest you could have one here?”
Tiona knew she could have the big seventy-five meter saucer back from the asteroid belt in about four days, but didn’t want to say. “I’d have to look into it. Are you going to tell us what’s going on so we can help? Or are you going to continue trying to just order us around? I think you’ll find that telling us to ‘do this or do that’—rather than explaining the goal to us—works about as well as trying to tell a blindfolded man where to put his hand so he can catch a ball for you.”
Stoddard’s jaw twitched a couple of times, then he sighed, “Okay. This is all covered by the official secrets act. You can’t tell anyone else without my permission,” he glanced at Tiona, “not even stuff you learned from whoever told you about the NEO separation and plasma drive. Now, we first learned…” He stopped because Tiona had put up a halting hand.
“Don’t even bother telling me. I won’t be able to help you without asking for help from my people, and I can’t talk to them if I constantly have to be going to you for permission first. I’ll just figure out what’s happening myself, then try to decide whether I want to help you and how I can best help you after I’ve done that.” She turned and started for the door.
“Guards!” The general barked.
Tiona stopped and turned. Lifting an eyebrow again, she said, “If you’re about to tell them to arrest me, I can pretty much guarantee that that will be the end of any help I give you. You see, I’ve dealt with an amped up general before. One who’s since been court-martialed for the way he handled the situation. Now, if you’d like some help dealing with us irritating civilians, I might suggest you call on General James Cooper—he’s got a real talent for it.”<
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The guard had opened the door and looked in, “General?”
The general gave a dismissive wave, “Never mind.” As the guard let the door swing closed, the general said, “Sorry. You’re right, we do need your help. I’m going to tell you what’s going on, but ask you not to tell people you don’t think have the ‘need to know.’ Does that sound reasonable?”
Tiona nodded, and waved at the small conversational group of chairs in front of Dante’s desk, “May we sit?”
The general nodded and they settled into seats. True to his word, the general explained what he knew. Unfortunately, though the NEO had separated into two fragments eight days ago now, he’d only been notified about this four days ago when someone decided that the small fragment looked like it was going to pass much closer to the Earth than the large fragment. Then when they’d turned more observational resources on it to evaluate this possibility yesterday, they’d not only seen the ionized hydrogen suggesting a plasma drive, but they’d also begun picking up radio transmissions of a digital nature.
To Tiona’s surprise, Stoddard’s knowledge had come from an obscure military program which followed NEO’s because of the possibility the military might be called upon to try to prevent Earth impacts. Though they’d obtained a great deal of their data through a streaming agreement with the Near Earth Object Program at JPL, they’d analyzed it themselves rather than being told about it by Dr. Singer.
“So what is it you’re hoping that GSI’s saucers can help you do?” Tiona asked.
“Evaluate the threat,” Stoddard said as if it were obvious. “We need to get out there and get ‘eyes on.’ We’ve got to try to determine whether either of these objects are weaponized. If so, we need to assess the possibilities for countering the threat. It’s been suggested that the separated object is being maneuvered toward an Earth intersection by its plasma drive. We need an accurate evaluation of how big it is so we can know whether it’s a planet buster.”
Tiona narrowed her eyes, “An object large enough to fracture our planet is not going to be moved by a plasma drive.”
Stoddard shrugged his shoulders, “Yeah, I just meant something big enough for an extinction event.”
She shook her head, “The Chicxulub impactor was estimated to be ten kilometers in diameter and mass 3 trillion metric tons. Still not going to move it with a plasma drive.”
“Chicxulub?”
“The asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs.”
“Okay, so, something smaller, but still big enough to wipe out a country or something!” Stoddard said, sounding irritated.
“It doesn’t matter, anything small enough to be moved by a plasma drive over the distance they’ve got won’t even make it through the atmosphere.”
The general glanced at the major as if wondering what he thought, but then turned back to Tiona. “And why are you so sure of this?”
She shrugged, “It’s my job. We’re moving asteroids to the Earth and people are constantly panicking that we’re going to wipe them out. We routinely move objects in the range of 3000 metric tons from the belt to here with a saucer that can exert 4 million pounds of thrust. But even an object of 12,000 metric tons, the Chelyabinsk meteor in Russia a while ago, didn’t make it all the way to the ground in one piece. Admittedly it did a significant amount of damage and caused some injuries, but no one was killed.”
The general looked over at Major Vincent again, “Do her figures sound reasonable to you?”
The major nodded and Tiona got the impression he’d been telling the general something similar to this. Focusing her eyes on the major, she said, “From the reported size of the exhaust plume and assuming a very high exhaust velocity, I’m estimating that their drive generated 250 pounds of thrust. Is that in the range of what you’re getting?”
The major glanced at Stoddard as if wondering whether he was allowed to answer, but then nodded.
Tiona turned back to the general, “That’s a lot of thrust to get out of a plasma drive but I suppose they could be multiple smaller ones. However, even if true, it would exert less than 1 ten thousandth of a G of acceleration on an object the size of the Chelyabinsk meteor, much less something that would be big enough to hit the ground and kill millions of people. Moving something massive a significant amount with a so little acceleration takes years. Thankfully, orbital bombardment is much more difficult than a lot of people believe.”
The general glanced at Major Vincent again and received another nod as confirmation of this assessment. “So how would they be attacking us then?”
Tiona tilted her head, “Maybe they’re just coming by to say ‘howdy’?”
Stoddard shook his head, “I hope so, but my job is to prepare for the possibility that they might be coming to wipe us out. Again, how could they do that?”
Tiona looked at Major Vincent as she mused a little. “We’re forced to make a number of assumptions based on far too little data. However, if those hydrogen ions are really coming from a plasma drive, and they’re using it to push the smaller object somewhere, it must be light enough that they can move it readily. I would assume it’s a hollow object like a ship. I wouldn’t want to be riding in it.”
Stoddard said, “Why not?”
Tiona shrugged, “Too light to be carrying any significant radiation protection and there’s a lot of radiation near the sun…” She stopped and laughed, “Well, strike that stupid assumption. They could be using some form of electromagnetic shielding like we do.”
“Or maybe it’s a robot?”
“No, for it to present that large an image in our imaging systems, but have a mass low enough for a plasma drive, it’s got to be mostly hollow. No reason to make a robotic ship have a lot of empty space in it, so it has to be carrying some of the aliens.”
“So, if it’s carrying some aliens, maybe it’s got some super weapon on board they’re going to use to wipe us all out?”
Tiona rubbed an ear thoughtfully, “Maybe? Nuclear weapons? They almost certainly didn’t come from this solar system and if they’re capable of interstellar flight they’re way more capable than we are. Who knows what kind of weapons they might carry, though all the weapons we know about deliver energy in some form or other and it seems unlikely that a spaceship small enough to be pushed by a plasma drive could generate and control the kind of energy it would take to wipe out an entire planet.”
General Stoddard studied Tiona for a moment, then shrugged his shoulders, “Well, this is all very interesting, but the first order of business is to get out there and have a look at them. When can you get us a saucer?”
Tiona stared at him for a moment, thinking about whether she wanted to stonewall him for being such an arrogant jerk.
The general, apparently deciding she might be thinking exactly that, said, “Please.”
Tiona thought there was a silent, “or else,” that had come just after the, “please.” She said, “I’m pretty sure I can have one back from the asteroid belt in four days, but I have a condition.”
Stoddard narrowed his eyes, “I don’t think you’re in a position to dictate terms, but I’ll listen to them.”
“You need to send a diplomat too.”
The general snorted, “Fat lot of good that’ll do. We aren’t going to be able to speak their language!”
“Still, we need someone with skill and authority to carry out negotiations if they’re possible and they’re needed.”
“No. Not open for discussion. How many men will I be able to put on the saucer you’ll have for us four days from now?”
Tiona narrowed her eyes again, “When I ask the president about this, is she going to say she doesn’t think we should send a diplomat?”
The general stared at her for a moment as if trying to decide whether she had the traction to call the president. Apparently deciding that she might, he said, “If the president wants us to take a diplomat, we’ll take a diplomat.”
Tiona stood, “My AI’s forwarding you diagrams of the
living space in the seventy-five meter saucer. That’s what’s going to be coming back from the belt. I’ll leave it to you to figure out how many personnel you can stuff into the available space.” She walked out, half expecting the general to stop her so he could make further demands, but he didn’t.
Her thoughts in turmoil, Tiona went to her office at GSI so she’d have a place to think. Then, worried that she might forget, she sent a message to Rob Marshall out at the asteroid, asking him to disengage from the asteroid and return to Earth. “I know this will be a big disappointment,” she said, “but trust me, it’s important. Many lives could depend on it. We need the saucer back here at earth ASAP.” It was almost 13 light minutes to the saucer’s location, so Tiona figured she had about twenty-five minutes before she got a message from Rob bitching about it. However, even though he wouldn’t be happy, she expected he’d already be disengaging the saucer.
Tiona spent some time using the special orbital mechanics package in her AI to try to figure out how long it would take the aliens to get to Earth. Fortunately, most of the orbital parameters for the main alien ship had been uploaded as public knowledge on the net while it was still classified as a simple NEO. She didn’t have much information on the movements of the newly separated ship which she’d begun calling a daughter-ship in her own mind. She could approximate its thrust from the size of the ionized hydrogen exhaust plume which Dr. Singer had given her. If she knew how fast the daughter-ship was accelerating away from the mothership she’d be able to calculate its mass. Unfortunately there wasn’t even any information on the net to indicate that the separation had happened, much less the velocity of its departure. She sent a tersely worded query to General Stoddard asking about its mass. She phrased the question in such a way that it would be obvious how the mass could be determined.
Returning to the information she had and using wide ballparks she came up with numbers from three to nine weeks for the daughter-ship to arrive at Earth, depending on actual accelerations and when and how much they decelerated before they got here. She realized that that meant even NASA’s saucer that was way out at Neptune could make the sixteen day trip back to Earth before the daughter-ship arrived.
Vaz 4: Invaders Page 16
