“Um… Yeah…” Lee trailed off, thinking that any bomb probably acted differently in space.
“I think the cloud’s almost all local materials. Dirt, water, air, heated to incandescence, exploding outward and pushing other materials ahead of it. Out in space, you get a bright flash, a lot of radiation, then nothing. The bomb’s materials all get vaporized. Since space is a vacuum, you don’t have stuff pushed away, and after the bomb’s materials themselves have fully expanded, there’s no reason for anything to rush back and fill the void—everything’s a void in space.”
Lee’s eyes narrowed. “What happened to SC Phoenix?”
“I’m sure it was vaporized too. The explosion was right next to it.”
“No,” Lee said with certainty that surprised even her. “It’s made of Stade.”
“Oh, come on. Even Stade can’t stand up to an A-bomb!”
“Maybe not,” Lee said slowly. “But I wouldn’t bet on it. Let’s see if we can go through the video frame-by-frame and figure out which way she was blown.”
When they found the first frame after the explosion, Massey said, “If it didn’t get vaporized, it got shoved far enough between the last frame when it was intact, and this one here, that we can’t see which way it went.”
Lee pointed, “I’m betting this dark streak to the upper left of the flash is a shadow of the Phoenix.”
“Really?” Massey asked, leaning closer. “You think it blocked the explosion to that side?”
“No,” Lee said. “I think it got shoved in that direction during the moment the frame was shot and left a tiny streak in the exposure.” She straightened, “I think if we search that direction, we’ll find her.”
Massey leaned back in her chair and looked up at Lee, “What’s the point? Even if the frame and hull are okay, that kind of massive acceleration would trash the interior… um, including the people…”
“Their relatives…” Lee said softly, “may want their remains, even if they’re, uh, badly damaged.” Smashed to a paste, Lee thought but didn’t voice.
Massey was speaking to the AI again. Moments later the screen zoomed back to cover more area, then—as was made evident from the movement of the background stars—started scanning toward the upper left. In less than a minute it started tracking a flashing light that was moving rapidly against the background. Massey said, “I’ll be damned.”
As Massey asked the AI to zoom in, Lee asked hopefully, “Have they turned on some kind of flashing beacon?”
Massey shook her head. “Phoenix’s tumbling out of control,” she said sadly. “The flashes come when she’s oriented to reflect the sun at us…” Massey jerked her head around in surprise. “Holy shit! We’re getting a signal from her black box! That must be one tough SOB.”
It’s good to know Stade survived an atomic explosion, Lee thought, but I doubt it’s much comfort to the people on board. She turned to Massey, “Let's redo our trajectory so we wind up paralleling the aliens at 5,000 kilometers, not 1,000, okay?”
Massey’s eyes widened, “Good idea… Um, are you sure we should keep approaching their trajectory and trying to keep an eye on them? They just killed a much faster ship. One that had a military crew on board.”
Lee shrugged. “Nobody else can do it for something like six days yet. Barring some strange maneuvers, we’re going to decelerate to a relative stop across from them anyway since we already set up the maneuver and we can’t stop any faster. I guess we could rotate laterally and vector straight away to the side so we’d go right past them at a much greater distance, but it’d delay our return to Earth and… I think the mother world needs us here.”
Massey’s eyes were still on the screen showing the tumbling Phoenix. “I have no idea what we could contribute.”
Lee said, “Ruth…” She used the captain’s first name to grab her attention. “Remember the aliens only did in SC Phoenix through treachery. We won’t fall for that. We’ll park ourselves 5,000 kilometers away and watch those bastards like a hawk. If they shoot some kind of beam weapon at us, our hull will shrug it off. If they try to send one of those bombs our way, we can accelerate faster than they can so we’ll just run away from it. Meanwhile, we’ll keep Earth up to date on what’s going on out here so they have everything they need to plan their response… That reminds me. Did you send your video of the bomb going off to them?”
“Oh,” Massey said, “no. I’ll get right on it. I’ll, uh, send video and trajectory data for the Phoenix after the blast too.”
“Do that,” Lee said, realizing Massey meant that they needed to get the trajectory data to Earth in case SC Maui didn’t make it either. “Make sure we haven’t missed any instructions they’ve sent us while we were otherwise occupied. Plan out our change of trajectory. Keep your people busy helping you so they don’t have too much time to think about what just happened. I’m going to look at the stasis system here on Maui to see if I can figure a way to staze the entire ship’s interior if it looks like something bad’s about to happen.”
Massey narrowed her eyes at Lee, “You think you know how to do that?”
“Sure,” Lee said confidently, even though she wasn’t certain at all, just wanted to buck Massey up. “I designed the Island-class ships, you know?”
“No,” Massey said, suspiciously, “I didn’t know.”
Lee waved a hand breezily, “Look it up in the ship’s documentation. ‘April Lee - design team leader.’ If you’ve got the documentation for Nantucket, the first ship in the class, you’ll find my name on the build team for it as well because I had to be there to troubleshoot. Can I borrow Ray Jones to help me work on the stazing system?”
“Um, sure,” Massey said, looking flummoxed.
~~~
Lee had just explained to Ray how they would determine whether areas inside the hull were outside the double-mirrored sheath that allowed stazing of its interior. She’d told him, “There are always some areas that aren’t fully incorporated. Once we’ve figured out what those areas contain and how important they are, we can decide whether we need to staze them separately and whether—”
A crewwoman named Carol Lipsitz interrupted her, “Ms. Lee, you have an encrypted message from Earth!”
From Kaem? Lee wondered, her first reaction being that he should be so busy with the analysis of what’d happened to Phoenix that he wouldn’t have had time to compose a message about it. Then she realized the news of Phoenix’s demise wouldn’t have reached Earth yet—it being over an hour distant at present. He’s answering my query, she realized.
Lee,
You asked about weaponizing your cargo. I realize that by the time you get this message, you’ll already know whether Phoenix’s meeting with the aliens went well and, hopefully, my advice here will be moot. Nonetheless, I thought I’d answer to the best of my ability.
The most important thing to remember is that if you’re threatened, you should be able to escape into stasis for the expected duration of any crisis. My recollection is that when you designed the ships, you set them up to be able to staze their entire interiors. You’d know more about that than I, but my area of expertise suggests that I remind you someone may have made modifications that breached the mirrored sheath and such defects may result in an incomplete stazing.
If some areas aren’t stazed, it won’t be a problem unless some people or important pieces of equipment are in those lacunae. Even then, as long as the lacunae can’t be reached by the aliens during an attack, it’d be okay—unless the stasis lasts so long that air in the lacuna runs out.
Or, I just realized, if an explosion violently moves Maui and the person in the lacuna gets banged around.
Also, remember that the interiors of space suits can be stazed, so if you get into them when bad stuff might happen, you can protect yourself individually.
What weapons could you improvise? Here are a few I thought of:
You can staze yourself inside a spacesuit. In a weightless situation, you could use the su
it’s thrusters to speed yourself toward an enemy, staze yourself at the last moment, and crash into him.
The manifest lists “steel bar stock” for 3D printers. These are one-centimeter diameter by fifty-centimeter-long rods which would make formidable clubs. Put friction tape around the handle end so you have a good grip.
You could staze liters of liquid nitrogen and throw them at the enemy. When they destaze, they’ll release a lot of very cold liquid, which would likely cause some injury. More importantly, it expands 700 times as it vaporizes. If the aliens breathe oxygen like we think they do, having their oxygen displaced away by seven hundred liters of nitrogen could cause them to pass out or die. Unfortunately, the fact that you’ll have to plan out exactly when you want the nitrogen to destaze will markedly limit such nitrogen Stades’ flexibility as weapons. Perhaps you could leave them as booby traps in rooms.
The manifest lists “90% isopropyl alcohol.” This would burn well enough to use it in a low-grade Molotov cocktail. Put it in a glass bottle, stuff a sock soaked in the alcohol into the bottle’s opening, light the sock and throw the bottle hard enough it breaks. The alcohol splashes out, catches on fire, and should do quite a bit of incendiary damage.
“Caps” and the line below it, “Semtex,” refers to blasting caps and the plastic explosive Semtex. They were going to use them for tunneling Ceres. I’m not quite sure how you’d use it for fighting since the detonator has to be wired to the blasting caps (the wiring’s on the manifest line below the Semtex). But, if you could sneak a lump of Semtex up to an enemy with the wiring trailing behind, you could certainly do some damage. It’d be clumsy, but you could also throw the detonator with the Semtex and activate the detonator over your network.
You may not realize that the cryptic manifest listing, “disks for generator” refers to stazed plutonium 239 for Ceres’ nuclear reactor. They don’t represent enough (or the correct grade of) plutonium to build an ordinary nuclear weapon, but all of it together would go critical if enclosed in a neutron reflector like Stade. You could, for example, unstaze the disks (one at a time!), restaze them short term, i.e. thirty minutes, then staze a chamber around all of them that would last until you’d be ready for it to go off. At thirty minutes the plutonium would unstaze and go critical inside the outer layer of Stade, then explode. Normally this reactor-grade plutonium would “fizzle,” i.e. blow itself apart before enough of a chain reaction occurred to cause much of an explosion. In the situation I just described, however, the bomb wouldn’t come apart because it’d be contained inside the outer layer of stade. Therefore, chain-reaction fission would likely progress significantly beyond the point achieved in most weapons. When that outer layer of Stade vanishes, it would unleash the atomic explosion that’d already occurred inside of it. Obviously, doing this would be extremely dangerous and wouldn’t be something you could do quickly. Be aware that atomic weapons must be very close to induce blast damage in space. There’s nothing to transmit the shock wave that does the physical destruction. It will still release large amounts of radiation that presumably would be more harmful to the aliens than to you since the Stade hull of Maui would protect you.
As a last-ditch, if the ship’s invaded you could Staze the entire ship and wait for us to unstaze and rescue you. If possible in such a situation, send us orbital specs and anything you can about where you are and where the aliens are in the ship to help plan such a rescue. Hopefully, the aliens are friendly (it’s hard to imagine aliens crossing interstellar distances to start a war) and all these suggestions will be silly things we’ll look back on and laugh about in our old age.
Kaem
Lee found herself picturing Kaem’s shock when he saw how the interaction with the aliens had actually gone.
Shaking herself, she forwarded Kaem’s weapon suggestions to Massey, asking the captain to assign crew to locate the bar stock, the alcohol, and the reactor fuel, then to start them building Molotov cocktails—mostly because she wanted the crew to be busy doing things that might be of use, not sitting around worrying.
Meanwhile, she kept thinking about the first suggestion—about sending yourself at an alien in your suit, stazing yourself at the last minute, and crashing into him. It seemed inelegant and unlikely to cause a lot of harm, but her mind couldn’t seem to leave it alone.
Pushing that to the back burner, she composed a message replying to Kaem, reporting her thoughts about the aliens’ treachery. She said that, even if that grenade and bomb didn’t indicate implacable evil, it at least suggested a mindset that viewed humanity as an obstacle they needed to eliminate. Something to get out of the way so they could get on with whatever they were planning to do here. “I truly hope you have a different interpretation you can convince me of…” she said to conclude that section.
In the next section, she described their intent to pull into a parallel trajectory at 5,000 kilometers—not one thousand—to observe and report.
In the last section, she offered to go after SC Phoenix with Maui and try to return it to Earth—if they needed someone to carry out that grim task. She vaguely pictured catching Phoenix in the big dish on Maui, though she realized that stopping its tumble beforehand could be problematic. Also, she suspected that loading Phoenix in the dish—necessarily off-center because Phoenix would lie in the dish on one side of Maui’s tubular body—would throw the center-of-gravity of Maui far enough off its centerline that the thrust deflectors for the fusion torch might not be able to compensate. I could do the calculations to work that out if I get a few moments… a few moments without even more important stuff to worry about, she thought.
Chapter Eight
“It’s what?!” Diddiq asked, disbelievingly.
“The alien ship looks intact,” Rabaq said, apprehensively shrugging his antennae. “Our scopes show it’s tumbling rapidly, but it didn’t break apart and it’s still sending out one of their annoying radio signals. In fact, a study of the best images we’ve obtained suggests it’s undamaged.”
“Wasn’t the bomb attached directly to its hull?!”
Rabaq raised his antennae affirmatively.
“What in the primal planet could survive being attached to a six-kiloton nuclear weapon?!”
Diddiq realized how loudly he’d radiated the question when it echoed stridently through the bridge and Rabaq came to a spread-legged pose of attention.
Quietly, Rabaq said, “I don’t know, Expedition Leader.”
A quick survey of the bridge personnel showed their alarm at his outburst. Control yourself! Diddiq thought, ashamed of his behavior. Speaking calmly, he said, “Find out if we have a nuclear weapon expert on board who might be able to understand how they did it. If so, bring them out of hibernation.” He paused for a moment’s thought, “The shuttle did get solian specimens that it’s bringing to us?” Diddiq asked.
“Yes, Expedition Leader,” Rabaq replied.
“Get those specimens to the bio-scientists as soon as we have them on board. If these aliens can survive a nuclear blast, we’re going to need the best bio-weapon our scientists can create. Something that’ll tilt the hunt in our favor. Start setting up our dispersal systems so we can distribute that bio-weapon as soon as we begin to orbit the solians’ planet… Or,” he said thoughtfully, “even before we orbit if that’s possible.
“We’re done trying to communicate with the solians then?” Rabaq asked.
Raising his antennae affirmatively, Diddiq said, “The only reason we communicated with them was so we could get them to come close enough that we could obtain specimens. Get their bodies on board and impress our urgency on the bio people.”
“What if the bodies we collected from their ship contain a bio-weapon the solians are trying to attack us with?” Rabaq asked quietly.
“It’s my understanding no one should be able to design a bio-weapon without a target specimen they can use to plan the method of their bio-attack…” Diddiq said thoughtfully, “But, just in case that’s wrong, mention it to Sibiq, the b
ioscience leader. Tell him to take appropriate precautions whether he thinks it’s true or not.”
“Okay,” Rabaq said, his antennae rotating as he forwarded instructions to some of his junior officers.
***
When someone in the room said, “He’s on,” Kaem looked up at the big screen.
President Del Rio was on the display, sitting behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office.
Not a press conference then, Kaem thought. He must not want questions.
After a moment, Del Rio cleared his throat and began, “Good morning. Because of the storm of rumors that have swamped the internet since we announced the presence of the aliens in our solar system, I must bring you up to date. I have to emphasize that, at this time, our information is woefully incomplete. I would’ve preferred to wait until we had a little better knowledge of the aliens and their intents. However, it appears that a lack of information has led to widespread assumptions that things are even worse than they are, and that such rumors are doing more harm than the truth, even if the truth is unpleasant and incomplete.”
He paused and spoke with gravity, “You probably already understand from what I’ve said that things are not in fact good…
“Let me walk you through the events as they have unfolded.”
Taking a breath, the president said “First of all, the alien vessels made shallow passes through Saturn’s atmosphere, apparently to scoop up some of that planet’s atmosphere as fuel for their rockets. Swinging so close to Saturn changed their courses significantly. The smallest alien ship has since turned back toward the edge of the solar system. Saturn only deflected the courses of the three large ones a little, but that was sufficient enough that when they came out, their trajectory aimed somewhat toward Earth. Course corrections made since then have made it obvious that they are coming to our homeworld, and that we must deal with them.
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