Alien hostiles, p.6
Alien Hostiles, page 6
“Maybe not,” Groton replied. “Scientists were explaining the acceleration as thrust from jets of gas heated by the Sun. But it was peculiar enough that they kept their eye on it. Anyway, it’s well out past the orbit of Saturn now. Somewhere between Saturn and Uranus and headed toward the constellation of Pegasus.”
“Okay,” Hunter said. “We go visit this Messenger From Far Away. What then? What are we supposed to do with it?”
“Just check it out, take measurements and basic data. Try to decide if it’s natural or artificial. And our psychics will try to see inside it, just in case it is some kind of interstellar spaceship.”
“Sounds simple enough,” Hunter conceded. “What’s the catch?”
“Catch?”
“There’s always a catch.”
“Well, if we pick up signs of life, we need to try to put a team over there. Xenocultural people to try and make contact. And the JSST will be there to provide support. The xeno people will be in charge of course.”
“Jesus. I knew it.”
“Shouldn’t be a problem,” Groton said. He gave a wicked grin. “I mean . . . contacting an unknown alien species out in deep space. What could possibly go wrong?”
“Ask me when we get back.”
“There may not even be an after. Like I said, they’re still debating that part of the mission at higher levels. Some say at very high levels. Who knows? Maybe we’ll get lucky and they’ll call off that part of the op.”
“One thing I’ve learned in my career in the military, sir,” Hunter said. “Do not count on luck, because some bastard is always going to be there to screw you over. . . .”
“So what could possibly go wrong?” Becky McClure asked, a mischievous grin on her face. “Sounds like a walk in the park.”
“Girl, you haven’t been working for the government all that long, have you?” Dr. Simone Carter shook her head. She was the mission’s xenopsychiatrist, as well as the assistant head of Hillenkoetter’s science department.
“Long enough. And my father did government work for a long time, too.”
“Hmm. Well, when you’re dealing with aliens, things are never a ‘walk in the park.’ There’s always another twist, another surprise, something else they never told you. Oumuamua is one great, huge question mark, and anything could be hiding in there.”
“I’m perfectly willing to believe in microbial life squirreled away inside a comet,” McClure said, “but alien civilizations using one to hitch a ride? That seems a bit of a stretch.”
“I hope you’re right, Becky. I hope to God you’re right. But we’re going in locked and loaded, as they say, and ready to deal with any surprises.”
“With psychics?” It was all McClure could do to keep from laughing out loud.
“With psychics. Keep an open mind. You’ll go further that way.”
“I’m already going to Aldebaran,” McClure replied. “I think that’s far enough.”
They were sitting inside Carter’s office on board the Hillenkoetter. A wall behind her was displaying a painting, an artist’s rendering of what the asteroid Oumuamua might look like. According to Carter, when it had passed through Sol’s inner system, the object had never been imaged; it was too small and too dim. If it looked anything like the painting, though, it was strange. Asteroids, comets, meteoroids . . . they all tended to be more compact. Larger bodies, planets and large asteroids like Ceres or the moons of Mars, tended to be spherical, compressed into balls by their own gravity. The small ones might be irregular but looked more like potatoes. Not . . . carrots.
But space was full of surprises. McClure remembered seeing photos a few years ago of a comet called 67P that looked distinctly like a giant rubber ducky in space. Anything was possible, she supposed . . . even giant carrots.
A chime sounded on Carter’s desk. “Yes?”
“Dr. Carter? Dr. Hargreaves and his . . . people are here to see you.”
“Send them in.”
Three people, a woman and two men, entered the office, moving a bit clumsily in the low gravity.
“Dr. Hargreaves,” Carter said, rising. “Welcome to Luna!”
“Thank you, Ms. Carter,” the older of the two men said. “It’s good to be here.” He indicated the other two. “Mr. Lassiter. Ms. Ashley.”
“It’s Doctor Carter, please. And this is Dr. McClure, our evolutionary biologist.”
“Pleased to meet you.”
“Of course you should have known who we are if you guys are psychics,” McClure said. She meant it lightly, as a joke, but it sounded flat and petty to her ears, and a look from Carter told her that the boss wasn’t pleased with it either.
“I’m not the psychic,” Hargreaves said. “I’m their control. And in any case, that’s not the way remote viewing works. No parlor tricks.”
“And certainly no Carnac the Magnificent routines,” Ashley added. She had, possibly, the most piercing gaze McClure had ever seen, and her round glasses gave her an owlish look. Her partner was painfully thin, awkward, and looked uncomfortable, as though he wanted to be elsewhere.
“We’re glad to hear it, Ms. Ashley,” Carter said. “Won’t you all sit down?”
And she began explaining the mission.
Carter pointed to the illustration of Oumuamua, showing them their target. Julia Ashley, it turned out, had been on the path for a degree in astrophysics and knew all about the interstellar visitor, but Eric Lassiter had the look of a kid who’d spent most of his teen years playing video games in his family’s basement.
“If Oumuamua looks like it’s artificial,” Carter explained, “we’ll need you two to—”
“If you please, Dr. Carter,” Hargreaves said, holding up a hand. “Don’t give them any information. Nothing about any potential targets. When they begin their sessions, all they’ll have is a set of coordinates, nothing more. Any description you might give them of either the target itself or what you want to know might contaminate the results.”
“If you say so.” Carter looked dubious. “I would think that anything we could tell you would help with the final results, though.”
“Not in this case. Our viewers return raw data, nothing more. It’s up to others to take that data and interpret it. So . . . if you could have someone show us to our quarters?”
“Of course.” Carter used her intercom to summon a naval rating to take them to the civilian berthing area. “If there’s anything you need, Dr. Hargreaves, just let me know.”
After the three left, McClure looked at Carter. “Those are our psychics? The woman looks competent enough, but that kid . . .”
“It’s not up to us, Becky.”
“It’s witchcraft. Assuming it works. . . .”
“They’re your new partners, Dr. McClure. As our senior xenobiologist on board, you’ll be working with them closely in any attempt to make first contact with sapient alien life-forms. Treat them with respect. There may be more to this witchcraft than you realize.”
“Okay, Dr. Carter. But if it involves sacrificing chickens, I’m outta here. . . .”
There weren’t any bars on the Moon, and that was the absolute worst part of being stationed here. Lieutenant David Duvall—who bore the call sign “Double-D”—sat in the base recreation lounge and tried to imagine that the soft drink in his hand was a bourbon and Coke. “This place,” he said with a heartfelt bitterness, “sucks.”
Lieutenant Ralph “Duff” Cotter, sitting across the low table from him, chugged the last of his iced tea, grimaced, and crumpled the paper cup. “You got that straight, Double-D.”
Duvall and Cotter were two of the pilots attached to the Solar Warden project, trained to fly several different models of advanced antigravity spacecraft.
“As a liberty port, this place is worse than Bumfuck, Nowhere! They at least could ship some alcohol up here.”
Cotter lifted his wadded-up empty cup. “Let’s hear it for Fightin’ Joe Daniels.”
Duvall hoisted his own half-empty can. “May he never get any.”
For over a century, the US Navy had been dry, by order of then-secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, a teetotaler and supporter of the Temperance Movement.
“I heard some of the guys in Engineering had smuggled up some beer,” Cotter said. “A crate labeled ‘machine parts.’ Think it’s true?”
“I’d love to find out. Think they’d give us some?”
“They’d sell it. Probably for an arm and a leg, but even a near beer might be worth it.”
Duvall emptied the can of soda, then regarded it critically. “Be better if it was something stronger. I wonder . . .”
“What are you plotting, Double-D?”
“Oh, just wondering if a guy I know in the dispensary could help us. A corpsman . . .”
“Sounds promising.”
“Back on the Nimitz, there was a second-class corpsman down in sick bay who distilled ethanol from potatoes.”
“Vodka?”
“Sorta. Not as pure as Smirnoff’s, but it had a kick.”
“Maybe that’s why you saw that UFO that one time.”
“You saw it too, Duff.”
“Power of suggestion.”
“Hey, guys. Buy a girl a drink?”
Lieutenant Traci Bucknell, better known in the squadron as “Bucky,” was Duvall’s RIO, Radar Intercept Officer, who flew back seat on his TR-3R. She was a pretty blonde, and she was about as no-nonsense as they came.
“Sure,” Duvall said. “What’ll you have?”
“Same as you.”
“Duff?”
“None for me. I’m driving.”
Duvall got up and walked to the machine. It was larceny, he thought, that they actually charged for soda up here, claiming that the space on supply flights had to be justified. Given that supply shuttles were antigrav ships that didn’t worry about mass, it sounded more like a scam to him.
“You hear the latest scuttlebutt?” Bucknell asked him when he handed her the can.
“No. What’s that?”
“We’re gonna get to make first contact with an alien . . . a real alien. They’re calling it ‘Eye-One.’”
“Not a time traveler?”
“A xenolith. That’s what this guy I know in CIC says.”
“Xenolith? That’s Greek for . . . what? ‘Strange stone’? ‘Foreign stone’?”
“I guess. The word is there’s this asteroid in the outer system that’s stirred up some interest. Maybe that’s what they mean.”
“‘Strange space rock,’” Cotter said, nodding. “Works for me.”
“What would work for me is getting stoned, xeno or otherwise,” Duvall said. “This boat is getting on my nerves.”
Bucknell lifted her can. “To the finer things in life.”
“Amen.”
Chapter Four
“If ‘Oumuamua originated from a population of similar objects on random trajectories, its discovery requires the production of a thousand trillion such objects per star in the Milky Way. This number exceeds considerably theoretical expectations for asteroids based on a calculation I published with collaborators a decade ago. However, the inferred abundance could be reduced considerably if ‘Oumuamua was on a reconnaissance mission.”
“On ‘Oumuamua,” Professor Avi Loeb, Harvard University, 2018
25 February 1942
Colonel Caldwell continued studying the whatever-it-was through his binoculars. The glare from the lights and the constant strobe flash of explosions made it almost impossible to make out what the thing pinned by the searchlights against the sky actually was, but he was sure he could see something there.
It was big . . . at least a hundred feet across, maybe more. It was—when he could see it when the searchlights briefly lost it—glowing with a faint orange hue. And it was moving . . . though it had spent much of the past hour hovering over the city as round after round detonated on or around it. At first, Caldwell had been convinced that it must be an errant barrage balloon, but a balloon would move with the wind, not simply . . . hover.
And now that it was moving, it was drifting south, toward the ocean, but slowly, far too slowly to be an aircraft.
A zeppelin? The Japanese military didn’t have those, and no way could the Nazis have gotten one of those gasbag airships over to this side of the country, assuming they even had any now after the Hindenburg. Besides, that thing had been up there for almost two hours, smack at the center of a storm of exploding ordnance. Surely, any balloon or fabric-covered structure would have been shredded by now.
So far, it hadn’t fought back—no bombs, no gunfire. But that only somehow increased the sense of menace. . . .
The Present Day
Captain Groton leaned forward in his bridge command chair. “Let’s take us out,” he said.
“Gravity at ninety-five percent,” the helm officer called from a console forward. “All normal.”
“Inertial dampers on,” Groton said. He felt a faint inner flutter as the ship’s artificial gravity adjusted and the compensators switched on.
“Inertials on, aye, aye, sir.”
“Inertial mass to fifteen percent.”
“Inertial mass, one-five percent, aye, sir.”
“Give us juice, Mr. Coleman. Five percent.”
“Energy to five percent, aye, sir.”
The faintest of humming vibrations, a thrum felt more than heard, transmitted itself up through the deck.
“Take us to twenty feet.”
Gently, the USSS Hillenkoetter lifted her nearly 100,000 tons of mass. Moving slowly, the bulky cylinder threaded her way out through the massive airlock and emerged from the cavern above the harsh and dazzling light of the lunar surface. Gently drifting higher, she accelerated just enough to enter lunar orbit, where she settled down to wait for two members of her carrier battle group, the cruisers Inman and McCone.
The cruisers were intended as escorts . . . each a flattened cylinder around 540 feet long and massing eight to nine thousand tons—about the same as a Ticonderoga-class missile cruiser in the wet Navy. As with American carrier battle groups on Earth, they were intended to protect the heavy guns of the squadron—the much larger spacecraft carrier and the squadrons of fighters she carried.
Commander William James, Hillenkoetter’s tactical officer, stood forward, looking over the shoulder of the rating manning the ship’s sensors. “Inman and McCone are in position, sir,” he reported. “Port and starboard.”
“Thank you, Commander. Navigation?”
Lieutenant Janice Keel already had the course information displayed. “Entered and locked in, Captain. Absolute coordinates are right ascension 23 hours 51 minutes, declination plus 24 degrees 45 seconds.”
“Very well. Admiral?”
Admiral Franklin Winchester sat in a padded chair on the flag bridge, directly abaft of the bridge, where he would run the strategic aspects of the operation and the entire battle group while Groton handled the tactical parts. “Yes, Captain.”
“Ready to execute on your command, sir.”
“You may proceed with Phase One of the mission, Captain.”
“Comm . . . pass the word to Inman and McCone, maintain station. Helm Officer . . . ahead slow, space normal.”
“Ahead slow, space normal, aye, aye, sir.”
Oumuamua currently lay some fifteen astronomical units out from Earth—a little shy of the orbit of Uranus, though at the moment that frigid world was some hundreds of millions of miles farther along in its orbit. It would take a beam of light almost two hours to cross that void, and while Hillenkoetter was capable of faster-than-light travel, she would make this voyage at sublight speed. Her drives were precise enough over light-year distances, but inside the claustrophobic confines of a solar system it was tough to manage pinpoint accuracy. Missing a star system by a hundred million miles as compared to trillions was no big deal; missing the planet next door by that amount could be catastrophic.
As Hillenkoetter’s space drive engaged, the view ahead became distorted, the stars seemed to be squeezing together toward a point directly ahead of the ship’s blunt prow, a distortion caused by their velocity as they accelerated above 70 percent of the speed of light.
At that speed, they would arrive at Oumuamua in another three hours.
Three hours out from Earth, Hunter sat in one of the carrier’s rec lounges, a large and comfortable room with sofas and one entire wall devoted to sectional screens showing a camera view of the ship’s front. With him were Dr. McClure and Dr. Brody. They were watching as the oddly distorted stars ahead shifted back into a more random pattern with Hillenkoetter’s deceleration.
“This is the captain speaking,” Groton’s voice announced over the intercom. “We have arrived in the general area of our quarry. Radar has tagged it about three million miles ahead. We should arrive shortly.”
“Pretty good shooting,” Brody said.
“Missing by three million miles?” Hunter said. “I’m glad he’s not in my unit.”
“Across eleven and a half billion miles?” Brody said with a dry chuckle. “That’s within zero point zero three percent! Not bad for Kentucky windage!”
“So they knew where the asteroid is,” McClure said.
“Oh, yes. Its orbital elements were well-known, even though it became too dim to see last year. And it’s moving fast, but not that fast.”
“It could have changed course,” Hunter suggested. “And I heard that it was speeding up.”
“Not enough to really matter. It’s moving at a fair clip for an asteroid right now—about 26.5 kilometers per second—but it’s going to be another twenty thousand years before it exits our solar system.”
“That long?”
“Hey, the solar system is a hell of a big place. Anyway, we pretty much knew where it would be. And it looks like we were right.”
“I can’t wait to actually see—” McClure began.
And then it was there, swelling in an instant from a pinpoint of light to a wall of rock hanging in emptiness before them.
“My God . . .” Hunter said softly.
