by Laer Carroll
He was young and slender and wore on his shoulders twin video recorders. They were positioned at his eyes' height and so would give a 3D view of what he saw as if from his viewpoint. He wore a badge reading PRESS in big red letters. Just below each camera lens was the emblem of one of the major TV networks.
"Captain Kuznetsov! Could I have a word, please?"
Jane continued walking. He joined them, to the right of Kate who was on Jane's immediate right.
"Not today. Sorry. This is Jackson Makoto's day. He's the head of the Surveyor Project. Have your boss call us next week and we can set up an interview."
"Just one quick question--"
"Nope. Not going to say anything. It's all Dr. Makoto's show today."
"But--"
Kate turned toward him, her face unwelcoming. The blond Valkyrie was taller than he was and very fit. No one with a brain wanted Kate pissed at him.
She held out a business card to the man. He took it.
"Call me when this is over and we'll find a time for you next week. Now excuse us, please."
He peeled off to capture more local color. "I'll call you!"
<>
The encounter would be at 10:17 that morning local time. At 9:00 the Deputy Director of JPL, General Arthur Camden, spoke to all the invited visitors who'd watch the event from the auditorium they were in.
"I'm speaking today on the behalf of the Director, Dr. Vanessa Walters. She's in Washington at NASA headquarters and will watch the Surveyor encounter via TV with a group of other concerned individuals. We welcome you all.
"And now I turn you over to Ann Davis, the chief engineer of Surveyor under the leadership of Dr. Jackson Makoto, who is in the Mission Control center behind me as we speak."
There was muted applause from the nearly 200 of the reporters, scientists, interested JPL staff, and the Space Force crew. The General retired through a door behind the stage. Over the door was a huge TV screen showing the control center.
Davis was a sturdy black-haired woman with a prominent silver streak on one side of her short coiffure, dressed in a dark-blue women's business suit. She adjusted the microphone on the dais's lectern.
"Thank you, General. And the Surveyor crew welcomes you. As you can see, the dining service has set up a buffet with snacks and drinks on each side of you. Feel free as we watch to make use of it. At 11:00 the main cafeteria in the Headquarters building near the Reception Center opens. You've all been issued credit vouchers for it, so feel free to retire there for lunch."
She looked down at a slate computer in a recess on the lectern, then back up.
"I'll begin with a brief intro to the target of the Surveyor Project. As most of you know the asteroid belt is a flat donut-shaped collection of bodies in orbit beyond Mars and on this side of Jupiter."
Above her the TV screen showed a diagram of the solar system viewed from the Galactic North, "above" the solar system. Jupiter was in the circular orbit at the edges of the screen, the circle filling most of the screen. The Belt showed as a fuzzy circle inside the Jupiter circle.
"The Belt objects are very far apart, contrary to the movies and TV that shows them near each other and sometimes knocking into each other. That knocking does occur, though very rarely in the long history of the Solar System.
"Today's target, which we will hopefully get views of today, is the result of such knocking. At least this is our theory. For spectronomic analysis shows that it's made up of objects from two of the three main classes of asteroids. They are the carbon and the metal objects, making up 72% and 9% of the Belt. There may be some silicon objects which make up 15% of the Belt, but there's no evidence of them. We should discover if there are some in the weeks to come."
She paused to take a sip from a plastic bottle of water. Jane recognized this as a way to let her audience consider her words.
The screen behind her switched to a view of a collection of white cylinders and spheres and more complex objects held together by a framework of pipes in a rough box about three times as long as it was wide and high. Pipes made a framework to hold the objects and ran throughout the object.
"This is the drone which acts as a 'mothership' which is hauling eleven daughter ships out to the Belt. It will act as a base for those smaller ships to return to store Belt samples for study by a remotely operated laboratory.
"It will also act to recharge their super batteries. Each has its own solar array to recharge them, but the mothership has a warm-fusion electrical generator able to recharge them much better. The mothership also has a limited 'garage' where simple repairs can be made to the daughters."
Another sip.
"About the timeline of the Project. The first stage is near complete. This was the trip out to the Belt. This was made by starting a little over six weeks ago near the World Space Station and accelerating at up to twenty times the acceleration of objects near Earth. At a midpoint it began decelerating for not quite three weeks to near the Belt at a relative speed of zero.
"This rapid trip was made possible by the space jet and the super battery invented by Captain Jane Kuznetsov. We are lucky enough to have her with us today. Please stand up, Captain."
Jane was caught by surprise but not by much. She and Davis got along well. She stood up from her seat in the back row of the auditorium.
The nearly 200 audience members twisted and turned in their seats to look behind them. First one then a few then most of the people clapped for her. She let it go on for a minute or so, then saluted them and sat down. The applause slowly died.
"Thank you, Captain. And now we wait. I'm going to do that inside the control room. I have duties there. And for you, feel free to nosh and chat. We will have someone come onto the screen and keep you posted.
"And, Captain, please bring your crew out the door and around to the south side entrance. Dr. Makoto wants you in Mission Control."
<>
The big room was lit somewhat dimly to make the large TV screens in front of the room visible to everyone in it. In the middle were several dozen workstations in three rows curving to place the center TV screen at their focus. At the back of the room was a glassed-in room a few feet above the main floor level. It was as wide as that floor but not as deep. There were seats along the front and back of the a glassed-in room.
General Camden came forward to shake the hands of Jane and her crew as she was ushered in.
"What were you doing out there, Kuznetsov? This project wouldn't be as far along as it is if it weren't for you."
"I didn't want to intrude on Dr. Makoto's day, Sir."
"Bullshit to that," said that worthy, coming from behind the General to shake her hand. He was in a suit minus his coat and with his tie pulled loose. "I can share a little of the credit. There's plenty to go around--if this works out."
Jane returned his handshake. "It will. I reviewed your major documents and progress reports. Everything looks fine."
She had also periodically become JANE and spied on the communication links to the mothership. Even now she had Robot quietly viewing the data coming into the control room.
The three of them chatted for a while. They were very interested in her experiences on the Moon. Neither had yet had a chance to visit, though the General had been to the space station.
Makoto every once in a while would gaze out the VIP room's window at the view screens in the control room. Jane would watch him for a few seconds, then bring his attention back to their conversation.
Once she noticed that the General had been watching her with a small smile on his face. He knew that Jane was keeping Makoto from agonizing about the project. She smiled and nodded back.
"We're coming up to visual!" came a loud voice in the control room. Jane, the General, Makoto, Jane's crew, and several other VIPs stood up from their chairs and couches to step quickly to peer through the room's windows.
Down in the control room proper the project monitoring crew was energized, leaning forward in their seats to look at their mon
itors and at the large view screens in the front of the room. The two people standing, chief engineer Nelson and one other person, gazed intently at the screens.
On the left-hand of two screens beside the large central screen a white horizontal line with ruler marks under it was lengthening in the direction of a X. It marked the progress of the mothership. It was near to touching the X.
On the right-hand screen three columns of numbers scrolled upward.
Suddenly in the larger central screen a group of grey dots appeared to jump toward Jane.
Her spaceship emerged from a hyperspace gate. A giant Saturn-like planet appeared to jump toward her.
The memory was gone.
But Robot would have it. Time later to review it.
"Why did it jump toward us?" said Nicole. She said it very quietly to Riku. He answered as quietly.
"They send the video back as packets--"
Makoto had heard them.
"That's right. The packets are five seconds long. Our video display cuts off the last few milliseconds for technical reasons. When we distribute the video the two packets are spliced together so there's no jump or loss of data. We leave the jump in here to remind us of the packet nature of our communication."
Down below the Surveyor crew broke into cheers and then applause.
"They're applauding themselves?" said Nicole.
Now the applause was being replaced by chants of "Nel-son! Nel-son! Nel-son!"
Nicole was looking more confused than ever. Makoto rescued her.
"No, they're applauding Davis, our chief engineer. She shares her name with the actress who played housekeeper Alice Nelson on the old TV show The Brady Bunch."
"You people are weird," said Nicole.
"Yes, we are," Makoto said. He was grinning however.
Now the chants became "Jack-son! Jack-son! Jack-son!"
The General had a grin too.
"Go on, Makoto. Take a bow."
The head of the Surveyor Project walked to the exit of the VIP room and stood at the top of the short stair from the room down to the main floor. He gave a bow to the middle of the room, then the left, then the right. Then he shouted.
"All right, get back to work, you scurvy dogs!"
He returned to the VIP room to cheers then the hum of busy people.
"Yep," said Nicole. "Weird, the lot of you."
<>
The next several weeks were busy for the Space Force. They had several projects at JPL to which they gave tech assistance. Nicole was popular because she was a widely acknowledged expert on the cutting edge of 3D printing, Klaus in space civil engineering. Jane continued to give nominal and sometimes real assistance to the World Space Station's space-jet orbit-stabilization project. And they had their personal lives.
Jane spent much of her off time with Phil. On weekends she might fly him to various places in Princess. It was her personal property, not the Air Force so she need not get permission from the military. He used her for business trips to places which were also fun spots.
This included Argentina, because he was heavily involved in promoting soccer, a national obsession for Argentines. There they danced tango in the all-night milongas. She also bought the latest tango music and chatted with tango musicians. She even got to play the electronic keyboard in one of the tango nuevo bands.
The couple and especially she often appeared in various newspapers, newszines, and blogazines. Phil bought her some very sexy outfits which often were featured in those outlets.
Jane spent some time on weekends at CalTech. She was heavily involved in several cutting-edge mathematical fields. One of them was hyperspace communication, annoying many physicists who insisted that it conflicted with Relativity theory and hence was impossible.
Some nights she spent with her eyes closed and closely connected to Robot. It had indeed captured her fragmentary memory of traveling through a subspace tunnel to another star system. But nothing beyond that one memory ever surfaced.
Then one of the daughter ships discovered something in one of the asteroids.
<>
Jane was in Colorado at Peterson Air Force Base, home of the Air Force Space Command, the official name for the Space Force. She was with her immediate boss, Lieutenant General Allison Griffin, head of the Space Offensive Analysis Group. They were attending a two-day conference on space warfare. The first day was devoted to offensive weapons and tactics. The second day would be spent on defenses against those weapons. Jane was given an hour on the first day to talk about the contributions of the space jet to weaponry.
She spoke for twenty minutes, then answered questions for the rest of the hour, minus five minutes to get to the next talk. That evening she dined with the other heads of the 21 squadrons which made up the Analysis Group. Most were majors or lieutenant colonels. She was the only captain. She kept quiet most of the time and listened to them. She could learn a lot that way.
The diners continued on into the adjacent bar afterward to drink and socialize. Seven of them left early, citing family responsibilities.
An hour and a half into the socializing, leaning heavily on reminisces, one of the majors casually put an arm on Jane's back seat.
"How do you live with being so smart, Kuznetsov?" He had a charming smile and no doubt knew it.
Robot sensed an attack and merged with Jane. JANE weighed the evidence, including Robot's sensing of the man's neural and blood flows, and judged he was just beginning a campaign of seduction. SHE wasn't interested; SHE had Phil, after all. SHE dropped back into her biological part.
"How do you live with having a big dick? We were just born lucky." Her face was absolutely dead pan, totally cold and uncaring, having just come from being half machine.
The two big adjoining tables seating a now-eleven women and men burst into laughter.
He grinned and casually removed his arm from behind her back.
Attention diverted to Jane, a woman, Letitia, a former mission specialist astronaut, spoke.
"I heard that in China they call you The Dragon, the way we might call a hot-shit pilot an eagle here. Only they think you are singular, not one of a plure-plur... Fuck. PLURALITY. Is it true you can fly anything?"
The question was socially dangerous to answer truthfully, but Jane didn't care. She was beginning to want to go to her room and contact her family and she was pissed that she had to diplomatically stay away with these strangers.
"Yes. And kill absolutely anything that comes against me."
Her look was verging subtly into one part anger, part threat.
Letitia raised an eyebrow at the tone. Then her expression morphed into a grin.
"Well, I'm glad you're on our side. On a different subject, what's it like to date a billionaire?"
"It means I never have to be politically correct and pay half the bill. Excuse, I have to go call my sweetie."
She got up and said to the entire table that she'd enjoyed meeting them and hoped to do it again and to have a good night.
<>
As the restaurant was in the hotel in which she had booked a room Jane was in minutes checking her SuperSmart. A second-most-important text message was waiting for her. Not a family emergency then but a job-related one.
It was in an unbreakable private code.
All quiet on the Western front. An innocuous phrase meaning just the opposite: Urgent.
Ricky has a new hot motorbike meant Surveyor has discovered something.
Not a Jap bike meant Not a human product. Alien.
A German one meant an artifact.
I swear the idiot is going to go broke over his toys or kill himself. Or both meant Come directly to JPL.
The message hit her like an electric shock. She rode the elevator and strode the hall to her room in a hurry. There she phoned General Griffin while quickly packing to leave.
"Sir. Sorry to call you so late. But I have an urgent personal matter to discuss with you. Could I come to your home?"
The woman needed
no code to know that Jane did not have anything personal to discuss, but a job-related one.
"Certainly, Jane. My husband and I were just watching a talk show. You know my address?"
"I do. Thank you."
The Flyt cab arrived then delivered her to her boss's house near the base within minutes. She asked the driver to wait. He said Sure and pulled out a tablet to read a book, or maybe a magazine. Nevertheless Jane took her pull-along suitcase with her.
The General's husband answered the door in a bathrobe over pajamas. He was friendly and delivered her straight to the General's home office, then said "Good night" to her and "Don't stay up too late, Dear" to his wife.
Jane set her suitcase upright and took out her SuperSmart. She waved it around.
"Is that necessary, Captain? This room is swept for bugs every time I come home."
"With due respect to your counter-intelligence people, Sir, my detection equipment is better than anyone else's on the planet. Or off it."
The woman shrugged. She didn't subscribe to the opinion some people had that Jane was the smartest person on the planet. But she did believe Jane was smarter than anyone else in the military service when it came to technical subjects.
Jane put her phone away and took her commander's order to follow her and sit on the couch in a conversation nook in a corner of the room.
"Now what's the emergency?"
"Surveyor has discovered an alien artifact in the asteroid belt."
The General raised her eyebrows and sat up more alertly.
"You're sure?"
"I have a private code I share with my executive officer and the rest of my crew. It couldn't be faked. My phone would detect that and trace back the source of any faked message. If nearby, I'd personally deal with them."
The General knew that meant that in extreme cases Jane might violently deal with the offenders. Her subordinate, like a very few of her other subordinates, could be a deadly killer.
"So. A new era for the human race begins. If true."
"Yes, Sir. I would like permission to leave immediately for JPL."
