Prelude to Extinction

by Andreas Karpf

  Kate stared blankly at him from a few meters away – it was as close as she dare come. Devon walked over to face him and said something that was rendered unintelligible by a gust of wind and sand. Jack didn’t care and just stared back at the billowing yellow smoke. As he took a single step toward it, Devon repeated himself more loudly, “Sir! I think that gas did this.”

  Devon pointed to charring on his own suit. “When the charges blew, I immediately looked back at the doors and saw the cloud coming toward us. It was reflex, but I just dove out of the way. It barely clipped me, but hit Alex head-on. If I’d...”

  “Stop,” Jack said with all of the force he could muster. “Get back to the shuttle and out of that suit now! If it’s been compromised, then it could breach any minute. I’m not losing anyone else.”

  Devon took a couple hesitant steps away, prompting Jack to shout, “Move it!” His pilot’s attempt at self-blame only amplified his own feelings of guilt. He himself had set the charges and detonated them.

  “Jack,” Kate called.

  He took a deep breath before turning and nodding for her to continue.

  “I don’t think we want that suit in the shuttle. If that stuff can burn through composite-reinforced Kevlar, then we don’t want even a trace of it in our breathable air.”

  She was right. “Devon, do as Kate said. Follow full decontamination procedures when you’re-board. Stow it in a hazard container.”

  “Understood.”

  He looked back at the Arch. The charges had ripped open a jagged, two-meter wide hole, though there was no way to tell where it led. The yellow gas continued pouring out and showed no signs of letting up; it just streamed off into the distance, guided by the howling winds around them. Turning to face Alex’s body again shined a spotlight on his error: they should have been upwind of the blast like he was. He should’ve ordered them there, instead of just telling them to move further away. Replaying it again and again in his mind, he vainly looked for some way to change what had happened. Part of him was honest enough, though, to realize there was no way to foresee this; and no matter how many times he walked through it, he would have made the same decisions. Right now, he loathed that part of himself.

  “Sir?”

  It was Kate. “Continue.”

  “It might be prudent to head back.”

  “I know.”

  “Captain?” This time it was Devon’s voice on the comm. link.

  “Go ahead.”

  “I suggest you take the same precautions with Alex’s body as with the suits.”

  “I know!” He didn’t need to be reminded of what he had to do. “We’re on our way.”

  Chapter 19 – July 23, 2124

  Kurt sat alone at his table in the small mess hall, staring at his breakfast. It was tough enough under normal circumstances to enjoy reconstituted scrambled eggs; but now, despite his persistent hunger, he actually had to force himself to eat. His first bite of the bland meal brought on an urge to throw the rest out. Their current rationing, however, prohibited that.

  He drew a deep breath and poked at his meal before taking another bite. He knew his disgust had nothing to do with the eggs; he just had no desire to eat. An all-encompassing fatigue weighed on him. His head and eyes ached from exhaustion. All he wanted was a good, long night’s sleep – a chance for his mind to let go of everything and relax. There was no time for that, though. He didn’t even have time to collect his thoughts and approach his work methodically – time that he desperately needed. Jack had made it clear that the damage report had to be finished within the day. After that he still had to come up with a way to protect the ship, should they have to go through another one of those devices. The problem was, he hated being pressured. It made him feel like he was being manipulated. He was well aware of their situation and didn’t need anyone, especially Jack, spelling it out for him. Anger grew easily from his exhaustion, and his thoughts of Alex’s death only fueled it further. The fact that their friend died so pointlessly was too much. He pushed himself back from the table and tried to regain control of his thoughts. The work he had just been dreading offered him his only escape. Immersing himself in damage and structural analyses would force everything else from his mind. The tension started to ebb as he glanced at his watch: He had to be back in engineering in fifteen minutes. “I guess Nadya’ll eat alone later,” he said softly to himself. As he took another bite, he felt a tap on his shoulder and found his wife standing behind him. “So, you did make it,” he said.

  Nadya gently rubbed his shoulders and asked, “You OK?”

  “I don’t know. I mean it just doesn’t feel like any of this is real. Now Alex on top of this…”

  “I know,” she answered softly.

  “I just can’t believe he’s dead. Who would do that…fill an entire building with that stuff?”

  “I don’t know,” Nadya said as she kissed the top of his head. “I don’t know.”

  “It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Jack seems to think whoever attacked this planet used it to kill off any survivors from the initial attack.”

  “Why?” he asked, knowing she didn’t have any answers.

  Nadya just rubbed his shoulders again as the paradox ate at him: he needed to know what was going on, but didn’t want to think about any of it anymore. His mind struggled to find anything else on which to focus. Finally, latching on the mundane, he asked, “Anyway, what happened, I thought you’d get back here before me?”

  “Don and I got tied up reviewing some of the data. It looks like we came up with an idea.”

  Kurt looked up, pushed out a chair for her to sit down and said, “Tell me about it.”

  “Actually, there’s no time to eat right now. We need your help.”

  Kurt had no objection to putting the rest of his breakfast away for later. “What do you need?”

  She led the way out the door. “Well, let’s just say it’s a little unconventional. Anyway, I’ll let Don explain it since it’s mostly his idea.”

  Don was waiting for them in one of the IPV’s small labs. Kurt gave him a quick “Hi.” Don responded with a polite nod, and asked, “Has Nadya explained what we’re trying to do?”

  “Not yet.”

  “OK, well we’ve finished our analysis and have confirmed that we are indeed three-hundred-thirty-five light-years from Earth. With respect to a time measurement, we can’t be quite so precise. Basically, our knowledge of interstellar drift velocities isn’t that accurate. We have, however, been able to refine the previous estimates a bit and now believe that we moved back between three-hundred-ten and three-hundred-sixty years.”

  Kurt was still having trouble accepting the concept and just repeated what Don had said, “Three-hundred-ten to three-hundred-sixty years?”

  “Yes.”

  “So what does that really mean to us?” Kurt asked.

  “The ramifications of course are immense. But leaving philosophy and science aside, it does have one important consequence for us right now.”

  “Consequence?”

  “Well, maybe I should say that it offers us an intriguing opportunity. If the actual amount of time we traveled back was more than 346 years –-within the range we’ve determined – and we’re roughly only 335 light-years from Earth, then any message we transmit back home would arrive early enough for them to relay it to us at Epsilon-Eri – before we entered the alien device.”

  Kurt realized that his confusion must have been obvious as Don continued, “Since we’re 335 light-years from Earth, then it’ll take any message we send 335 years to get there. If we traveled back let’s say 346 years, then the message will arrive at Earth just over a decade before we arrive at Epsilon-Eri.”

  Nadya jumped in, “Don’t you see Kurt? Earth could then relay a message warning us not to go near the rings!”

  “But we already did,” Kurt protested, “we’re here now!”

  “You’re missing the point,” Don said. “Don’t think of time as a l
inear flow of events written in stone.”

  “Come on Don, time is time. Events have happened. What you’re talking about is a paradox. I mean how can you just re-write what’s going on? It’s not possible.”

  “I don’t pretend to understand how or what is possible anymore,” Don continued. “How we got here is completely irrelevant. Put it out of your mind. All that matters is that we are sitting 335 light-years from Earth, and our date is quite possibly 346 or more years before we left. The laws of Physics, at least the ones that we understand, still apply. If we send a message from here to Earth, it will take that message 335 years to get there. There’s definitely no doubt about that. That means it may well arrive eleven or more years before we enter that … that thing. If so, Earth could relay the message to us. Taking into account the fact that it would take ten-and-a-half years for their messages to reach us at Epsilon Eri, we could receive it before we go in. Don’t you see? We’d simply know not to go near the device. None of this will happen.”

  Thinking he saw a simple error in their logic, he asked, “Why would you send it to Earth anyway, and not just to us at Epsilon Eri?” As the statement left his mouth, he became frustrated by the ridiculousness of the concept of ‘sending a message to themselves.’ Don started answering though before he could react.

  “It wouldn’t work – any signal sent from here would be far too weak for anything we have on the Magellan to detect. Earth on the other hand does have...”

  “Just stop!” Kurt demanded. “I don’t want to get pulled into this hypothetical crap. It doesn’t matter anyway. We can’t just stop ourselves from doing something that gets us here if we’re already here. I mean if the warning were to work, then wouldn’t we be back at Epsilon Eri right now? Talking about setting up base camp or something much less insane?”

  Nadya replied, “Maybe we need to complete the action of sending the message in our time-frame before we see the results.”

  Don grew impatient and said, “Kurt, we can spin our wheels all day on the meaning of paradoxes and timelines. But, what we really do need to do is to figure out how to send this message. I mean it’s worth a shot and is certainly better than just sitting here.”

  Sending a message was a real enough issue on which he could focus. He also immediately saw a problem. “At three-hundred-thirty-five light-years, even with a mega-watt radio transmission, it’d still be too weak for Earth’s communications networks. If we had the Magellan maybe, but we don’t...”

  “Don was asking me before about the IPV’s laser system,” Nadya interjected.

  “Maybe,” Kurt answered. “But the lasers are in the visible range. Earth wouldn’t be looking for communications at those wavelengths...”

  “What wavelengths did the Magellan use?” Don asked.

  “We used frequency modulated X-ray laser bursts,” Kurt replied. “It gave us the bandwidth necessary to send any amount of information we needed. There are orbital receivers around Earth for that, but we don’t have that type of equipment on the IPV.”

  “You said we have a visible light laser system, right?” Don asked.

  “Yes. But like I said, nobody would be looking in that range for communications. Plus, the signal would be so weak when it got there, I don’t think anyone would see it.”

  “Telescopes might be able to see it,” Don offered.

  “What do you mean?” Kurt asked.

  Don ignored Kurt’s question, and instead asked, “How powerful a laser pulse could you generate using the IPV’s equipment?”

  “We might be able to achieve powers on the order of a Gigawatt per pulse,” Kurt answered.

  “That sound promising,” Nadya added.

  “I’m not sure yet,” Don replied. “Laser beams diverge. I mean not a whole lot, but over this sort of distance, that could be a real problem. Kurt, any idea of the laser’s divergence?”

  “Give me a second,” Kurt replied. He worked his way through a series of specifications on his hand-held console before answering, “On the order of ten micro-radians.”

  “Ok, that might be promising. I just need to do the math for a second,” Don said softly as he set to work on his own terminal. Then speaking mostly to himself he continued, “We’re roughly three-hundred-thirty-five light-years from home; there’re nine-point-five trillion kilometers per light year…”

  Kurt watched the man’s fingers dance across the terminal. Suddenly, Don paused and just stared silently at his screen.

  “Well, what did you find?” Kurt asked.

  “The laser beam will be thirty-billion kilometers wide when it reaches home; we’re talking about three times the size of Pluto’s orbit.”

  “How weak will the light be?” Nadya asked cautiously.

  “About as bright as a twenty-seventh magnitude star. It’s something any moderate-level observatory can see. But the problem is they use long exposures to see things that dim – they’d never see the modulation containing our signal.”

  “Wait,” Kurt said. “What about the lunar telescope array?”

  “What about it?” Don asked.

  “It’s only the most powerful astronomical facility ever built. Heck, Jack was on the design team and on-site for its construction.”

  Don just glared back at him. Kurt knew the two had barely spoken since Alex’s death, but Don’s look said this ran deep.

  Nadya hit the intercom before Don could react and said, “Jack, respond please.”

  There was a barely perceptible pause before Jack replied, “Yes, Nadya. What do you need?”

  “Can you come over to lab suite one?”

  “OK, give me a minute.”

  An awkward silence followed. After a few seconds Kurt felt the odd need to break it by saying something. “One of my early assignments was on the portion of the array near the lunar north pole. It’s where I met Jack.”

  Neither said a word in reply. Nadya, of course knew the story; but it felt like Don outright resented the comment. Rather than pursue the issue, Kurt just looked down at his terminal.

  Jack entered a few moments later and immediately looked to Nadya.

  “We’ve got a question for you,” she said.

  “I figured that,” Jack replied.

  Before she could continue, Kurt said, “They want to send a message to Earth.”

  They room stayed silent. Kurt watched Jack, looking for some sort of reaction, but he just stared ahead, not looking at anyone in particular. His face was expressionless as he no doubt was starting to see what it might mean. A few more seconds passed before Jack softly said, “Shit, why the hell didn’t I see this before.”

  “Because I’m the scientist and you’re the captain,” Don shot back. Kurt hoped it was an attempt at humor, rather than a swipe at Jack. The grin that formed on Jack’s face, though said he either took it to be the former, or just didn’t care.

  “Hey, I was and am still one of those scientists too you know.” Don didn’t answer and Jack continued, “Don, give me the details.”

  There was only a brief pause, before Don relented and spoke. “We’re about three-hundred-thirty-five light-years from Earth and our time displacement is somewhere between three-hundred-ten and three-sixty years in the past.”

  “So what’s the plan?”

  “Kurt’s calculated he can push the IPV’s laser to about a Gigawatt per pulse. The problem is the intensity when it reaches Earth.”

  “What’re we talking?” Jack asked quickly.

  “About zero-point four attowatts-per-square-meter.”

  Kurt watch Jack pause, then look directly at him as he said, “And I assume Kurt suggested the lunar array might be able to see it.”

  “Yes,” Don replied, then ignoring the comment continued, “It’s about the same as a twenty-seventh magnitude star.”

  “I see,” Jack answered. “The array’s limit is far dimmer – about forty-fifth magnitude. So it can see objects about six-million times weaker than our beam. The problem is, it uses a twenty-ho
ur integration time to achieve that limit.

  “That means even at six million times brighter, we still won’t be able to modulate the amplitude very fast,” Kurt said.

  “Right,” Jack replied. “Under ideal conditions, it wouldn’t be able to see any modulations faster than a hundred hertz. From a practical point of view though, I’m thinking more like ten hertz.

  “Ten bits per second,” Don muttered. “That’s practically Morse code. We’re going to have keep the message simple.”

  “That shouldn’t be too hard,” Kurt said. “We’ll just give them enough information to know the message is from us, and what we need them to do.”

  “Then there’s the next problem,” Don said. “How do we get them to pay attention and look for an embedded message?”

  “I assume you already have an answer to that,” Jack said.

  “In principle,” Don replied with a hint of condescension. “Kurt, what’s the laser’s wavelength?”

  “I think it’s around 650 nanometers, I’d have to check.”

  “Before you do that, can you tune it? I mean to a very specific wavelength?”

  “Yes, it’s a solid state system, so it wouldn’t be that hard. Just as long as your target wavelength is relatively close to 650.”

  “I need it to be 656.3 nanometers,” Don said.

  “That’s the Hydrogen-Alpha line; clever,” Jack added. “They would definitely be monitoring that.”

  Kurt thought about it for a moment and said, “We can do that.”

  “I see,” Don said thoughtfully. “The problem is, if the signal just appears, the observing programs will assume it’s any one of a variety of natural phenomena and start a long-term observation schedule.”

  “That’s good, right?” Nadya asked.

  “No, they might overlook the rapid modulations of a message.”