The Ouroboros Wave

by Hayashi, Jyouji

  “Barbara, can you change the view?”

  “Depends. What do you want?”

  “Regolith by size, color-coded. I want to see how the fragments are distributed.”

  “That’s easy. Wait for it.” Barbara was already sending the commands to her agent. After a few seconds the image was covered with a rainbow of colors. The distribution of regolith around craters formed hundreds of millions of years ago was as standard as anything you’d find in a textbook. The finest fragments had blown off into space while the heavier fragments had stayed on the surface. There was a gradation of material, from fine to coarse, near the craters. Still, this wasn’t the answer to our riddle.

  A completely different pattern showed up in several locations—small spots surrounded by tight concentric circles of surface fragments with completely different distributions from the craters. Each circle of regolith was composed of a different size of fragment, with the fragments becoming smaller with distance from the center. These formations were new—they were superimposed on the splash-out from the older craters. Maybe this was the source of the regolith on the array? It would explain why the weathering was different on different sides of the asteroid. The near-side array shielded the surface from falling regolith, but the far side was exposed to the regolith.

  “Captain, I think we have our answer.” Rebecca and Barbara looked at me in disbelief. “The asteroid is the problem. We just need to prove it.”

  “Can you do that?”

  “Dragonslayer can transmit in microwave frequencies. That should tell us.”

  IT TOOK A WHILE to get the experiment set up. Some of the code for the microwave relay had to be tweaked so the emitters could be controlled independently instead of acting as a single array. Before the experiment we deployed laser spectrometers on the surface—especially around the concentric regolith deposits—throwing in some infrared sensors for good measure. These assets were more basic than their names suggested: light alloy poles a meter or so long, each topped with a simple sensor cluster about the size of a fist. Still, they were highly reliable. The surface of the asteroid was now dotted with these sensor packages, like giant pushpins. There were a few eyeballs too, cruising above the surface for backup observation.

  “You think this is going to work, Seiya?”

  “You never know till you try.” Barbara and I were on the surface, ready to respond if anything happened. Dragonslayer was already sending microwaves down to the surface. Nothing was happening so far, but that was expected.

  We stood inside a support station, a kind of cage, monitoring the sensors. We’d been on the surface for hours now, so we were hooked up to an umbilicus that kept us supplied with oxygen and heating water.

  The first sign that something was happening came from one of the infrared sensors. The microwaves were starting to heat up the surface. To the naked eye it was still nothing more than aluminum columns standing in the regolith-covered surface, but the columns and surface were already far above absolute zero.

  “Keep an eye on the spectrometers. It’ll take a while for the heat to penetrate the surface.”

  “Will do. Looks like you were right.”

  “It’s too early to tell. But we’ll know soon enough.”

  The spectrometers started returning solid indications sooner than I’d expected. The first reading came from an area near one of the hottest parts of the surface.

  “Seiya, look! We’ve got gas. Steam… cyanide… hydrocarbons. Typical comet constituents.”

  “I knew it. This is why Rapu started revolving.”

  “You found it!” Rebecca was jubilant. She probably hadn’t expected such a clear-cut outcome. With the data we were getting, the answer was straightforward. Rapushinupurukuru was a CAT object. Although it was stripped of nearly all its volatiles, thousands of tons remained in subsurface fissures and spaces. The microwave system was designed to relay huge amounts of power transmitted from Kali’s accretion disk. That generated heat. Dissipating this heat down through the columns and into the asteroid shouldn’t have caused any problems, but a simple sensor malfunction on the construction robot had led to the columns being much shorter than planned. This had massively increased the amount of heat reaching the surface.

  As the asteroid warmed, gas streaming from cracks in the surface had blown regolith particles upward, essentially acting on the asteroid as a rocket engine—and causing it to rotate. Its rotational force had shredded the greater part of the array, which hadn’t been anchored to the surface but extended for kilometers into space, held together with flimsy joints never intended to withstand more than a tiny amount of external stress.

  All that was left of the array was the central section. That had held some of its heat a bit longer, and now finer particles of regolith blown upward from the surface could reach and settle on what was left of the array. Rotation had then gradually brought the asteroid back to its original frigid temperature.

  “See? It wasn’t little green men after all.” I basked in my moment of glory. Rebecca shook her head.

  “Not so fast. There’s still that anomalous transmission.”

  Frankly, I’d forgotten about that, but Rebecca had orders to run down anything unexplained. “Maybe the signal came from the volatiles? Induced current flow from the power supply?”

  “A pulsed signal at regular intervals? Come on, Seiya.”

  “Well, how should I know?”

  “I can hear it,” Barbara murmured. Rebecca and I glanced at each other. For a moment we wondered if Barbara was losing her mind.

  “One of the eyeballs picked up a signal. It’s weak, but it’s definitely there.”

  Rebecca peered at the monitors. “It’s two hundred meters from here, right under the center of the array.”

  We walked to the array, where we ducked underneath the mesh and crouched close to the surface. Our semi-rigid suits made it difficult to crawl; instead, we advanced toward the eyeball on our hands—actually the tips of our fingers—stirring up coarse regolith in the low gravity. It felt like we were moving very fast, though it was probably only about walking speed.

  Barbara pointed ahead. We dug our fingers into the surface to stop our forward motion. Our fingertips scored patterns in regolith that had lain undisturbed for millions of years.

  “Look, Seiya. Do you see what I see?” Barbara was pointing to a slender spar of metal, about thirty centimeters long, emerging from the regolith directly below the floating sphere. A transmitter.

  I carefully began to clear regolith from around the transmitter. The regolith was deeper here than elsewhere. A few seconds later we could see a metal tube about twenty centimeters in diameter. Protected by the regolith, the tube and its nameplate looked as new as the day they’d been built.

  “What is this?” said Rebecca.

  “A penetrator. From an unmanned probe, launched from Callisto.”

  “YOU WERE RIGHT, Seiya. But how did you figure it out?”

  “Partly intuition. The database had no record of data from a probe sent to 2053CJ. But then again, we only checked for data from successful missions.”

  “Then they did send a probe. And it carried a penetrator to send back information about surface composition.”

  “Penetrators were part of the standard instrument suite.”

  We looked at the piece of space hardware built a century ago. We could hear its faint signal on our suit receivers; it was probably transmitting a range of telemetry data about this far-flung rock.

  I asked Barbara to run another database query—not for observational data from unmanned probes, but for launch information on all known probes, successful or not. It turned out that Callisto’s colonists had been busily studying 2053CJ after all.

  The probe used an ion propulsion system. To rendezvous with the asteroid as it passed its ascending node on the ecliptic, the probe had to reach a speed of at least twenty-two kilometers per second to match the complex velocity vectors of the asteroid, respective to orbital speed a
s well as speed relative to the ecliptic. On paper, the probe’s engine had enough power to reach the required velocity.

  With barely any resources, Callisto’s colonists would have had to cobble together recycled components to build the probe. They had only one chance to reach the asteroid, so they not only set out to image the surface, they were ambitious enough to load a small penetrator to evaluate surface composition. With their limited resources and technology it was an all-or-nothing gamble.

  Unfortunately, communication with the probe was lost shortly after launch. The project ended in failure and was eventually forgotten. But even though the probe’s communication system had failed, its other systems seemed to have worked perfectly.

  The penetrator had a power source, but it would have failed after a few months or years. Still, the regolith had shielded its delicate circuits from Sol’s ion flux. A century later, induced current from an array built by a robot over its resting place prodded these circuits briefly to life. The penetrator awoke and dutifully took up where it had left off. The relay picked up the signal and sent it on to Callisto. And now, as long as Dragonslayer kept bathing it with microwaves, the penetrator would keep transmitting.

  “So all we were doing was chasing a hundred-year-old piece of junk?” Barbara started to yank the penetrator out of the regolith. I reached out and put my glove on hers. She peered at me warily.

  “We can’t imagine what they went through to get this here. Now it’s doing what they intended it to do. Callisto’s been waiting for this signal for a century. We can wait a few minutes and let it do its job.”

  Barbara withdrew her hand, unclipped the booster antenna from her suit, and attached it to the penetrator. “There. That should give it a little help.”

  The signal sped via Dragonslayer toward the home of its makers in the Jovian system. In three more hours, it would finally be home. One hundred years and three hours. It had been a long mission.

  TO UNCOVER THE TRUTH, you have to delve deep. No investigation of history can approach the truth without probing beyond immediate surface appearances.

  For example: are humans genuinely rational?

  Not an easy question to answer. It was humanity that forced a small black hole out of its orbit, chasing dreams of an energy network that would span the solar system.

  But judging humanity by the scale of its dreams would be a mistake.

  Not all of humanity was eager to see work proceed on an artificial accretion disk. Different forces were at work to prevent AADD from realizing its plans. These forces were also human.

  Why make a determined effort to bar the path of progress? Again, not an easy thing to explain. One would have to account for the structure of human consciousness.

  Consciousness is not a unified entity. Multiple awareness subsystems in the brain give rise to the socially determined composite phenomenon we call consciousness. The human species and its collective actions can never be understood without comprehending the hidden workings of these independent subsystems.

  At the level of the collective, human consciousness oscillates between stability and chaos.

  Faced with the challenges of survival in space, AADD created the device called the web and used it to forge a collective that was greater than the sum of its parts. But this new conception of what it meant to be human unleashed forces that were pushing humanity’s collective consciousness toward chaos.

  These were the forces stoking the conflicts between AADD and the people of Earth. Many of them manifested in the same way: as violence.

  HYDRA’S ICE

  A.D. 2145

  Minus 38 Hours 30 Minutes

  COOPERATE and we’ll guarantee your safety. Otherwise—

  Gunfire. Breaking glass. A scream, abruptly cut off.

  That’s what you’ll get. Are we clear?

  The lift module was rising at a thousand kilometers per hour. No one in the circular lounge was inclined to take on the hijackers.

  “I mean, are these guys shitheads or what? Discharging a firearm in the lounge?”

  Shiran Kanda was listening to Mikal, her squad leader, reporting from orbit overhead. It was an open circuit. Everyone on the team could hear everyone else.

  “You should be seeing them pretty soon, Mikal. We’ll only have the one chance, you know.”

  “Yes, Professor, I’m aware of that.”

  “They’ve been holed up for more than ten hours. Everyone will be hitting the wall pretty soon.” Shiran was six thousand kilometers above the surface of Mars, at Clarke Station on Tsutenkaku, the orbital elevator. Mikal and his squad were at least ten thousand kilometers higher.

  “Once we’re in we’ll bag them in a few seconds. Are we still waiting on visuals?”

  “No. The cameras are down. When they came in shooting, they decapitated the main server. The backup system doesn’t support visuals, just control functions.”

  “How are we getting audio?”

  “Thank me for that,” said Samar, Shiran’s forensic team leader. “We’re laser-painting the lift. Doppler vibrometer.”

  “Good work,” said Mikal. “Are our bad boys all in the same location?”

  “All indications are affirmative,” said Shiran. “No one’s exited the lounge.”

  “All right. I just hope we don’t have to use these.” On her web’s retinal feed, Shiran saw Mikal raise his machine pistol. The compact weapon fired plastic rounds whose energy fell off rapidly with distance. Still, they could be set to deliver more than enough kinetic energy to terminate at close range. “I still don’t get it, Professor. Why bother to assassinate someone, anyway?”

  “Assassinations are one organization’s way of signaling another organization. Who, how, and where you kill—it all means something. It’s a message, pure and simple.”

  “Then they should save us the trouble. Every child in Sol System knows Earth isn’t our friend.”

  Mikal and Shiran reviewed the assault strategy. The lives of the squad members depended on successful completion of each step of the plan. “Professor, the module is approaching Clarke orbit.”

  “All right, Mikal. Lock and load.”

  The squad was suited up, ready to move. Shiran watched them finish prepping. On schedule, a cylinder the size of a multistory building flashed past the squad’s orbiting capsule at close to three hundred meters a second. The capsule’s guidance system maneuvered automatically, accelerating to close with the lift, then changing course to move directly beneath it.

  “How’re you holding up, Mikal?”

  “No worries, Professor. Three Gs, at ease.” Shiran needn’t have worried. She was raised on Mars, so three Earth gravities of sudden acceleration would have made her feel close to ten times heavier. But every member of the assault squad was trained for the stress of acceleration. She was a Guardian, though it had been a while since she’d been on an op like this.

  The capsule was now moving slightly faster than the lift, closing the gap to less than a hundred meters, invisible from the lift in the dead angle.

  Why’d you have to use your weapon? How do we explain this to the client?

  You’d rather get caught?

  By AADD? They can’t touch us. Deportation, sure. But hostage taking, that might even get us prosecuted on Earth. And you have to make it worse!

  The voices from the lounge were distinct over the laser pickup. “Mikal, you better get moving. It sounds like they’ll be at each other’s throats soon.”

  The lift was a twenty-meter cylinder moving up the side of the orbital elevator. From its base on Mt. Rokko to its orbital anchor on Deimos, the elevator stretched across twenty-two thousand kilometers. The lift contained a food counter and spartan rest facilities for the full-day ascent. To take advantage of the fantastic views of Mars, the two-thirds of the lift that faced away from the elevator were sheathed in transparent polycarbonate, carbon-reinforced for radiation shielding and structural strength. A utility corridor extended along the spine of the lift where it attached
to the elevator. The guest rooms were on the other side of the corridor—windowless for better protection from radiation.

  In an emergency the capsule could dock with the lift to make repairs and evacuate passengers. At this altitude there was no atmospheric resistance, only the black shadows and stark sunlight of space. Above the day side there was enough photon scatter to give some visibility in the shadows. The squad had night-vision lenses to cut through the darkness.

  Mikal opened the hatch and climbed out. The elevator’s carbon nanotube cables seemed close enough to touch. Climbing out onto the moving capsule was not for the faint of heart. The cables were streaming past at almost three hundred meters a second. Anything brushing against them would instantly be torn to pieces.

  Using hand signals in case the hijackers were monitoring their communications, Mikal guided the capsule closer to the lift. With twenty meters to go he motioned for a stop, then resumed the approach centimeter by centimeter. In the few minutes since their rendezvous with the lift had begun they had gained nearly a hundred kilometers of altitude.

  Mars hung below them, hundreds of times larger than a full Moon seen from Earth. It seemed unbelievable that this bundle of cables led all the way down to that disk. As the capsule closed with its quarry, Mikal had a few moments to look out on his home planet. The view calmed him.

  He held up his hand. The capsule was a meter from the lift. Docking would alert everyone inside. The only thing to do was hold a constant speed and jump the gap.

  Mikal pushed off from the capsule and landed in the docking bay. In stationary orbit the lift would pass through a brief zone of true weightlessness, but they had not reached that altitude yet. Beyond Clarke—or stationary—orbit, centrifugal force would gradually take over. Normally the lift would stop and turn 180 degrees in preparation for the reverse gravitational pull of the rest of the trip to Deimos. But the hijackers were wasting no time. They were heading directly for the spaceport on Deimos.