Solar Express

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  “I’ve checked out the control system and the lock panels. I know the location of the fuel and drive system panels, but I’ve never checked them. Those are beyond me.” Not to mention that getting to them required special tools.

  “You’re one of the ones who needs to know how everything fits together.”

  “I find it helpful, sir.”

  “I suppose you can repair an AI, too?” The colonel’s tone was sardonic.

  “I don’t think trying that would be a good idea, especially in combat, sir.” Tavoian decided against mentioning that he’d built simple AIs as a way to earn money after university and before he’d been accepted for the Space Service. In some ways, it had been only slightly more difficult than sophisticated black-boxing.

  “Why do you think we put you through all of this, when it’s likely that the ship’s AI will handle it all?” The colonel looked straight at Tavoian.

  “I can think of three reasons, sir. First, it gives us a far better understanding of what’s entailed. Second, that understanding should enable us to know when to override the AI if it’s damaged or scrambled … or even hacked. Third, there is always the possibility that the AI might become inoperative.”

  “Next question. You know that a space installation is a sitting duck to a high speed torp attack. Ours as well as theirs. Once anyone starts such attacks, no one will have any installations left. So why are we training any of you for such attacks?”

  Tavoian managed not to frown. The colonel had already made that point before. Was that another test? “You’d mentioned that before, sir. If we don’t have that capability immediately ready, they can take out our installations, and they’ll have the only ones left.”

  “Which will require us to destroy their installations Earthside, because the time required for a ground-based missile to reach geosynchronous orbit height is sufficient for antimissile missiles to lock on.”

  Tavoian didn’t say what he was thinking—that an armed standoff wasn’t the most secure way in which to avoid hostilities, except he didn’t have a better answer. From what he could tell, neither did the colonel.

  “Don’t you think the Sinese and the Indians know that, Captain?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then why are we spending all the time, effort, facilities, on this training?”

  “Because history shows that failure to respond emboldens the opposition.”

  “Those were my words. Do you believe them?”

  “I think that there are often leaders in any field who gamble that their opponents won’t prepare for the obvious because that preparation is too costly. And sometimes it is … the fall of the USSR … or the near collapse of the United States. I don’t know where you draw the line.”

  “It’s always a question. We’ll be discussing this later. Now … your vector analysis and reaction leaves more than something to be desired…”

  Tavoian nodded and listened intently, unpleasant as he sometimes found the way in which the colonel expressed himself in debriefings.

  Almost an hour later, the colonel finished and released Tavoian, who made his way back to his quarters in the main section of Donovan Base. After showering and donning a clean shipsuit, he sat down before the small comm terminal in the cubicle that was his “stateroom.”

  More than a week had gone by since he’d received Alayna’s last message, and almost two since Kit’s. He hadn’t wanted to send anything until he had a better understanding of the base and his duty and training—especially knowing that every comm was reviewed, and if it revealed something, it was rejected and returned with the offending section highlighted. Then the studies and the simulator training had consumed him, especially trying to estimate combined speed and power vectors almost instantaneously. The colonel’s continual emphasis on the fact that the cold equations trumped mere effort and sentimentality every time didn’t help much, either.

  Tavoian pushed away those thoughts and concentrated on the messages he’d neglected for too long.

  Kit first. He squared his shoulders and began.

  14

  CLASSIFICATION: EYES ONLY

  TO:

  Hensen Correia Deputy Secretary

  Department of Off-Earth Affairs

  FROM:

  Khelson LeMay Lieutenant General

  Noram Space Command

  SUBJ:

  Jade Spear

  DATE:

  18 April 2114

  Background:

  The Sinese spacecraft [code name: Jade Spear] that departed the Sinese installation at L4 on 19 March 2114 has the exhaust profile similar to an MTF drive. The use of an adapted MTF drive suggests mass/payload considerations. The spacecraft is estimated to be 340 meters in length with an approximate estimated mass of 5,400 metric tons. The crew number is likely seventeen. Multiple shuttle trips from the Sinese space elevator to the Sinese installation [see asteroid 2031 SJ4] indicate extensive equipment/cargo, including extensive hydroponics/organic recycling systems.

  Current Situation:

  Multi-point analysis from Noram Mars Orbit Cubesat array confirms Jade Spear making course corrections at approximately 4.25 AU from solar center. Course line continues toward Jupiter. Probability exceeds .70 that target is Europa.

  Mission Possibilities:

  • Establish orbit station with lander to study Europa in depth

  • Establish mining base to extract deuterium to obtain fuel for possible DF spacecraft, or to supplement existing deuterium supplies

  • Establish a mining base for other reasons, based on results of unmanned 2101 Sinese probe [Pearl Fisher]

  • Other undetermined

  15

  DAEDALUS BASE

  19 APRIL 2114

  Thursday morning, Alayna slumped/sat in front of the COFAR displays after dealing with the routine of checking the systems and then the messages. She was tired. How she could be that tired when her legs only had to support a sixth of the weight they did on Earth she wasn’t certain, especially since she’d never been overweight … and still wasn’t. And she certainly hadn’t been staying up late trying to stay abreast of the latest realies. She couldn’t because the media links to Farside were strictly data and text, and even the newsies were limited to text. Bandwidth was precious, and there wasn’t enough commercial traffic to justify full-scale video transmissions. She did have the small realie library of favorites she’d brought with her, and those left by previous resident directors, although many of those Luis had left had been in Spanish. Supposedly, all video transmissions were screened after what events surrounding the Middle East Meltdown a generation earlier had shown—and, again, that sort of screening was far too expensive for the few hundred people spread across Luna. Screening text and data was far cheaper and easier. Of course, the optical images COFAR sent Earthside were screened, but that was through the massive Noram center in Bluffdale. No one ever mentioned the fact that another part of the problem was that there was never enough funding for infrastructure, and no politician wanted to pay for something used by only a few, and no business wanted to invest in anything that didn’t offer a solid return.

  What else is new?

  She stifled a yawn and tried to think about what else she ought to be doing. She didn’t have any immediate reports for Dr. Braun, and apparently the Noram IG visit hadn’t generated any problems for the Farside Foundation or for Alayna. Not yet, anyway. She’d already checked the roller, and it was fully charged. Finally, she asked Marcel, “What should I be doing that I feel too tired to do?” She knew the AI would tell her something, since she’d asked a question.

  “The word ‘should’ implies a moral obligation. I cannot make that judgment for you.”

  “Some help you are. Have you found any new fractals in the solar scans you processed while I was sleeping?”

  “There are numerous instances of fractal patterns in the instances of mini-granulations. There have always been such patterns.”

  “Display the latest ones please.
Along the same latitude band. With their heliographic coordinates.”

  Marcel began to flash the images before Alayna, highlighting the fractal patterns in green. “Would you like me to create more overlays of the type you have requested before?”

  “Why not?”

  “Is that affirmative?”

  “It is.”

  The overlays didn’t tell her anything except that the fractal mini-granulations looked similar to the previous ones. Still, she studied them intently, almost as if doing so might reveal something … anything at all. Once again, all she saw were the latest views of granulations in a Gaussian distribution, with the multi-fractal mini-granulations apparently filling the spaces between.

  More than an hour later, with all her pressing and routine duties under control, she decided to reread Chris’s latest message.

  Dear Alayna—

  I’ve been assigned to a Space Service unit that provides additional pilot training … and I’m definitely being trained … and then some. I won’t bore you with the details except to say that I was a late addition, and I’ve had to catch up. That’s one reason why this message is later than it should be … much later …

  She frowned. He didn’t give a second reason.

  In your last message, the quote you referenced stated that scientists got excited, but more often over what “matters.” That brings up the question of what people feel is exciting and why. It also raises the question of what matters and why. I’m not a scientist. I only hold the far less exalted and less meaningful position of a pilot. At times that’s little more than a high-tech or glorified transport driver, and sometimes I’m more like a backseat driver to the AI. But it seems to me that what matters to most people is in the here and now. One of the problems our ancestors had in dealing with global warming was that they couldn’t see the problem as something that affected them. It didn’t “matter” to their lives.

  I have the feeling that if you discovered that the sun would go nova or have a massive solar flare in exactly 197 years, three months, two days, and three hours … that it would be news for a few days, a few weeks at most, and then most people would get back to their lives. You scientists would immediately begin to work on ways to mitigate the impact, or build habitats. Half the politicians would immediately denounce the science, and the other half would agree, but not on how much funding to pay for dealing with the problem. On the other hand, if an alien spacecraft appeared—not that anything like that is at all probable given the size of just our galaxy—everyone would throw money at the various space services and military to deal with the alien threat, even before knowing what such implausible aliens intended. When I was in university, I saw an old cinema about an alien artifact. I don’t remember the title. It was probably dated when it was created, at least from what I recall from somewhere. But the bottom line was that all the warring nations would unite in the face of a greater power. Leaving aside the doubtfulness of a greater power, if anything like that actually happened, I don’t see much hope of unity.

  Along those pessimistic or at least cynical lines, here’s another quote from Observations:

  Complete and total honesty will destroy any politician because government, even a totalitarian government, can never deliver all that its clients desire. Self-serving dishonesty, in saying what each constituency wants to hear to that constituency, was an effective strategy before the age of mass and instant media, and is still useful in addressing those constituencies whose support is ideologically based, rather than fact-based, so long as factual inaccuracies are avoided, but the use of contradicting “statements of fact” results in the political equivalent of the “death of a thousand cuts,” unless the politician is interested in only a short term in office.

  At the same time, more than occasional nonresponsiveness is not acceptable in a media-driven society. Therefore, a successful politician must be truthful, of necessity, the majority of the time. This is not as difficult as it might appear. It does require that a politician use more absolutely verifiable facts than many are comfortable with, but those facts only need to be marginally relevant, and the more facts that can be cited that reinforce already formed stereotypical views, the better. An accurate fact in an incorrect context is an effective lie.

  As she finished reading the quote, Alayna pondered over just what kind of training Chris was engaged in. The cynicism had been there before, but now there was definitely a darker shade to his words.

  I do hope you’re making progress in your work, if only by eliminating the impossible in order to find out what’s there … or what isn’t. I admire your desire for discovery and the passion behind it …

  “I hope that’s the scientific passion you admire,” she murmured.

  Thankfully, Marcel did not ask for a clarification.

  She thought about sending a reply to Chris, then decided against it, for the moment. “Marcel … do you have any better data on the anomaly?” She really didn’t like calling it “Provisional Comet COFAR,” not when it could turn out to be something else, even a rogue and strange asteroid flung into a cometary orbit by Jupiter or who knew what else. She didn’t know of anything like that, but between the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud there was certainly a chance of just about anything, improbable as it might seem. And Chris’s comment about an alien artifact had made her think. With silver … could it be…?

  She shook her head. As he’d said, aliens visiting the solar system were implausible. More like totally impossible.

  “Provisional Comet COFAR is now almost four-tenths of an AU closer to the sun. The most recent observations suggest more strongly that it is a solid body and that its diameter is less than three kilometers. Its albedo varies periodically and significantly. The probability is greater than eighty percent that the variation results from different surface characteristics exposed to solar radiation as the body rotates.”

  “Can you calculate its period from the data?”

  “Based on current observational data, the period is 11,318 years.”

  Definitely a long-period something. Probably just a two-faced, gassed-out, rogue comet nucleus, the cometary equivalent of Iapetus. “Is there anything more?” Another stupid question.

  “That is all, Dr. Wong-Grant.”

  Alayna turned her thoughts back to her project, her real work, and most likely her only hope of building the body of work necessary to find a “real” job in her field. Should she consider tracking granulations at a higher solar latitude? She shook her head. According to years of observations, except for the latitudes near the solar poles, the granulation activity was similar, and she needed to find something that was an indication of solar processes, not an inexplicable outlier.

  ORBITAL MECHANICS

  16

  DAEDALUS BASE

  13 SEPTEMBER 2114

  Alayna woke up with the nonsense poem or rhyme in her thoughts again—except she’d finally looked it up and discovered it actually was a poem called “Antigonish” and that it had been put to music almost two centuries before. By a poet called Means, no less. Then she corrected herself. His name was Mearns. It has to mean something if your subconscious keeps bringing it up … and even changing the writer’s name. She winced at the semi-pun. But what? Why did she keep thinking about the man on the stair who wasn’t there?

  Even after going through her morning routine, checking the messages, and hoping that there was a message from Chris, which there wasn’t, and hoping there wasn’t one from her fretting father, which there was, and making certain all station systems were operating within parameters, her thoughts kept drifting back to what wasn’t there in all the solar scans and data she kept messaging and analyzing.

  “What if what’s not showing is what’s important?”

  “How do you want me to apply that question?” asked Marcel.

  “I don’t know. Not yet.”

  She had to think things through, again, and more intelligently. The larger granulations weren’t necessarily regular, but
they weren’t fractal, and certainly not multi-fractal, and she had found only two examples of small mini-granulations that were essentially regular, and those appeared to be affects of the flux lines bordering the larger granules. She keyed in another search. While she could have asked Marcel, she didn’t want to seem crazy. After less than a minute she smiled at the lines before her:

  … a multi-fractality test reveals that the structures smaller than 600 km represent a multi-fractal, whereas on a larger scale the granulation pattern shows no multi-fractality and can be considered as a Gaussian random field …

  Maybe she shouldn’t be looking for regularity, but for why the mini-granulations came up as multi-fractals and why the standard granulations or the super granulations were essentially “regular” shapes in a Gaussian distribution. If she tried that, the question was, then, how to separate out the random field represented by convective granulation from whatever the multi-fractal mini-granulations resulted from or represented. Had anyone followed up on that? She keyed in another search and waited … and waited. It seemed like forever, but it was less than a minute before the display stated, “No results for query.”

  She tried a number of variations, but the system response was the same.

  Theoretically, natural fractals did not exist in three-dimensional form, at least not that she was aware, although she recalled the resurgence of the Mandelbulb—mathematical attempts to re-create Mandelbrot set fractals in three dimensions—but could Marcel do that by isolating a sample of mini-granulations and seeing if there was any way to extrapolate into three dimensions?

  It wouldn’t be a good idea to have him do that until it was day on Farside, when the demands on the system were less and when the solar cells were all online. She put a reminder to herself into her calendar, then asked, “What do the latest observations of our provisional comet show?”