by Geoff Nelder
A long exhale at the nothing-to-see gesture. “New data. There’s another stealth following the first two. All eighty light-minutes apart, about a billion and a half k.”
“Same size? Ah, we can’t tell until the marbles travel back again. Now, look here, it could all be a dastardly coincidence that this wagon train of massive things are arriving at the same time as us, but we need to create a breathing space. Partly to establish ourselves on Kepler-20h and maybe warn any Keps that might be there.”
“I hope you are not thinking—”
Penn stroked his hair back. “You think I’m thinking? Great, and maybe you’ll think to agree that we have to do it.”
“All right.”
Penn’s eyebrows danced a jig of surprise. “What, you agree?”
“Oui, I’ll send the data for the current location and trajectories of the masses to Kepler-20h on all the bandwidths we can broadcast.”
“Not that.”
“Non! I cannot agree to an attempt to destroy the mass. At least let us try and communicate with it.”
Penn’s green eyes bored into the Frenchman. “We cannot alert them to our knowing about them.”
“But they—”
“Already do, but not our military capability. Okay we couldn’t destroy an iron Jupiter, but whatever we do will likely put them off their course, and make the rest hesitate too. We send off an imploder, its likely too small for them to see it coming. It won’t generate a quasi blackhole until inside. Meanwhile, we go into our own stealth and fly to the planet to warn them.”
“It is imperative that we consult the whole crew. Oui, you can override all of us, but they might have a different take.”
“Maybe so, buddy, but they’d not be in a wakened-enough state to be of much assistance for another twenty-four hours. I’m gonna send it in ten minutes. It’ll take just over forty minutes to get there. Fast because of the entanglement pathway projected by our QM marbles I launched a while ago just in case.”
Gaston’s shoulders sagged at the outrageous aggression and cursed himself for not waking the women up before Penn. He tried to compose a message, virtually just mathematics, to alert anyone on Kepler-20h of the existence, location and trajectory of the incoming stealth object. He knew the Keps if they existed, might not use radio as a medium, nor anything else humans used. They were prepared for multi-com tech and he waved a finger at the send button. Off it transmitted across all the wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum including light, infra-red, which will quickly be lost, radio long, medium and long waves along with the dangerous ones but in low doses such as gamma and X-rays. Anyone receiving wouldn’t see it for months, so whatever happened to the object in the next half an hour, would be history when observed on the planet.
He took an anti-acid to quell the butterflies in his stomach. Hopefully, their crooked flight would settle into a tight orbit in there and vanish. On a whim he covertly tapped into Penn’s bio file. Extensions into his finances then his family’s. Ah, voila. His brother. No wonder the man held a grudge against mysterious spacecraft.
Gaston found the butterflies had extended their orbits. “Honest idiocy of flight” Robert Graves called it. Now his fingers had the jitters. He needed to do something.
“Commander, I’m setting in motion the waking of Em and Delta. They can’t stop you now but might be able to help prepare for the aftermath, if there is one.”
“Fine. I’m busy.”
Twenty minutes passed painfully by. Gaston’s eyes flicked between the viewport, his console and the bristling scarlet hair of Penn. Right now, Gaston hated him. Was he too harsh? Was Penn in a tangled knot inside for what he’d unleashed? They both knew that if it went wrong, and the imploder merely annoyed their invisible shadow, retaliation could be annihilation, or worse.
Invisible to his naked eye, it was moot whether an implosion would show in the viewport. Perhaps the stealth structure would break down and he’d see a planet-sized monster; a spaceship like he’d not imagined, maybe a purple jellyfish, or an eyeball. He shivered. The QM marbles continued to gather data but insufficient to give an outline better than a spherical boundary layer of where the time-space decoherences began. He returned his eyes to the viewport as the remaining seconds ticked on, on…on…
From black nothing, a giant sphere with a sky-blue sheen flickered then shrank to a point accompanied by a huge shout from Penn, who stood and unwisely punched the air above him. “Yeah! Argh, my arm.”
Gaston insisted on treating his commander’s knuckles before the blood dripped onto the deck. He glanced up. “I will go into the store, that instrument panel’s a write-off.”
“So’s that pesky monster, eh?”
Gaston followed his gaze to the console where the marbles showed nothing where nothing should have been before. If only it were a dream. A nightmare even if that sphere was nothing but cargo. Suppose there were creatures aboard? He knew Rules of Engagement weren’t applicable when survivability was at stake, especially after Earth’s first horrendous contact experience. Even so…
Penn continued, “Ah, see the others are slowing.”
One of Gaston’s black eyebrows worried itself upward. “Would the following sphere have been caught in the residual quasi-black hole if it had continued?”
“Nah, the effect has evaporated, but we’ve gotten the desired effect, the bastards might go away, or at least be considerably delayed. Obviously, we’ll diverge energy to keep our stealth in place, but continue to K-h at point five.”
Gaston glanced at the waking-up status panel and saw green lights. “If necessary, how many imploders do we have?”
“Six more, though if push comes to shove we could cannibalise part, or all of the drive to make more.”
“Mais non. Too drastic!”
“Hey, we all signed up for a one-way ride, but yeah, we wouldn’t disable our drive except as a last survival ploy.”
Gaston knew it was true, even so his now traumatised brain couldn’t help thinking of what he’d left behind. His parents died in an airplane crash when he was a teen, but Marie. Ah, Marie. He toed his chair to rotate like a slow roundabout while his eyes closed in reminiscence. She was the shining moon of his teenage life. The magnificent poems he scribed, although few reached her appreciation. His favourite took his heart from those times with her, to now:
L’amour est l’emblème de l’éternité,
Il confond toute la notion de temps,
Efface toute la mémoire d’un commencement,
Toute la crainte d’une extrémité.
He relished its notion of love confounding all notion of time, effacing memories of beginning and all fear of an end. So apt though of course not his poetry. Merci to Madam de Staël. Marie didn’t get it, the meaning that is, was or used to be. He hoped she had worn the pink T-shirt he’d given her with e.e. cummings love ditty:
i carry your heart with me
i carry it in my heart
So much he should have said. They shared a bed in Paris, a lawn in Lyon, in a wood near Angers then he lost her on a Maglev train to New Brussels. She’d accused him of not searching hard enough, yet he had, and returned to ask at all the stops. A nagging doubt obliged him to suspect she’d hid in a toilet just in case he would overcome his commitment issues and force her to do likewise.
He caught his reflection in a console. Short black hair topping a worried face wobbled back at him.
Penn’s voice boomed at him. “You have control, Gaston. I’m off for a shower and proper food. Inform me of any changes.”
**
“You did what?” Em erupted with indignation, followed by a more sleep-lagged Delta, whose hazelnut brown hair stuck out of her ebony head like a hedgehog. Whether by style or insufficient hiber-wax removal was hard to say.
Apart from a ‘Not me, him’ from Gaston, with an arm pointing accusingly at Penn’s cabin, he’d decided to allow the waves of verbalised anger flow until they finally ebbed.
He should ha
rbour comfort now his moderate voice was chorused by the two women and yet guilt snuck in, as if he should have grappled their leader in an unseemly fight to prevent Penn’s aggressive act. The discomforting glares from the women told him they thought so too.
He tried distraction by using his own tiny stock of expensive French coffee. Sadly, he couldn’t bring beans to roast and grind, but he opened his penultimate vacuum pack. In spite of the tension, hardening everything in the dayroom, his nose couldn’t help lifting and widening to the rich aroma. It appeared to work on Delta, who rubbed his shoulder as if she understood. Eventually, even Em sat with them around a circular table. They were all in their mid-twenties, hibernation notwithstanding, with a focus on the mission to establish an exploration base on K-h, or one of the other Kepler-20 planets though K-h was the most Earth-like. They were to send a feasibility report back to other SpaceWeb ships once established.
Gaston offered a positive thought. “That should have been the final hiber-sleep for all of us. No more gunky wax, putting our lives in the hands of bots and AI, nor nightmares.”
Oops. They both lowered eyebrows at him at that. Em had her elbows in the air applying a bobble to her blond ponytail. A fuzz of armpit hair reminded him of Marie’s heart-shaped pubic hair. Incredulously, after over 1,062 years, he stiffened. Merci for the table. He looked away and at his coffee.
He added to the distraction. “These reusable cartons bring nothing to the taste.”
Delta curled a lip in agreement, but Em, with her quintessentially English near-porcelain white skin, tinted with a hint of rosy cheeks, tilted her head while frowning at him. “Never mind the coffee, what are you really thinking?”
What? She was clever, but not clairvoyant.
“Of course, we need to focus on what is ahead, use long-range scopes and marbles to determine the best landing site. Check any responses to my transmissions and analyse any kind of activity on the planet.”
Em wagged a finger. Was she going to accuse him of leering, perversion, armpit fetishism?
“And the other planets. Just because we’d find it difficult to live with temperatures that would melt tin, or with four-g and little or no oxygen doesn’t mean they don’t have life.”
With hopefully not too obvious relief, Gaston said, “Absolutement. We have to cease thinking like a human.”
He examined Delta, realising she’d not spoken since being woken. Was this their first side-effect, being struck dumb? He tried to recall the hibernation process probability data relating to gender, age and ethnicity. Suppose We was the first to use the process beyond a year. “Delta, oui, it is a shock, no? The commander did it against my recommendation, but he thought it was the best course of action not just for us, but for those on the planet and for those back on Earth.”
She lowered her hedgehog head and burst into tears. Em snarled at him and hugged the distraught black woman.
Gaston stood and stepped forward to group hug. “So sorry, Delta, excuse my bumbling stupidity.” Saying that but he’d no idea what he’d said wrong. Em waved him away.
Finally, intelligible words tumbled out. “M…my f…family…”
Ah, he’d said ‘back on Earth’. Stupid.
Penn strode out of his cabin, already talking, presumably as a pre-emptive strike. “Work to do, people. Em, give me options for slingshot and catch-up, or intercept for Kepler-20h. Delta, there’s a fault in engineering three. Isolate and fix or replace, Gaston, there’s no additional linguistic or bio stuff for you to prepare so clean up and stow the hibernation pods. Everyone meet for dinner here at 1900. Oh, and good to see us all together, awake and working as a team. I’ve a report to send.” He turned his back on the three and returned to his cabin.
Both the women said, “Yessir,” as if nothing had happened. No possible mass murder, or act of violence bringing imminent annihilation. He put out a hand to stop Em leaving.
“Qu est ce que? Em? No gnashing of teeth?”
“Oh, don’t you worry, my little French bauble, he’ll get his comeuppance, but we have to act on what is and he’s right: there’s work to do.”
He never knew whether to be flattered by her endearments or to be insulted by them. He had work to do too, now he was on cleaning duties, Huh.
Six months later in orbit around Kepler-20h
“We can’t take much more of this buffeting,” Em called to Penn. “We must get to a higher orbit.”
Gaston was going to say the same, but his teeth vibrated so much he didn’t trust he could articulate coherently. He glanced around at the shaking cockpit and saw Delta was missing, probably down in engineering to fix whatever stabilizers could be boosted.
Penn called out, “Nah, we’ll ride it out. Altitude now is a hundred thou kilometres and we need to descend to thirty for a geo-synchronous orbit. Yeah, it’s kinda unexpected to find this turbulence so far out of its exosphere. Any theories, people?”
Gaston spread his hands. “We only really know the planetary atmosphere characteristics of our own solar system in detail. The sampling of Epsilon and Gliese hasn’t prepared us for the vast variations possible.”
Penn grunted approval. “So, it’s possible we’re hitting a natural outer layer of atmosphere generated by exotic gases interacting with solar radiation and—”
“Or it’s a defensive shield and we’ll be shaken to bits before getting much further.” Em threw her verbal spanner into the cosy chat, but she was serious.
Penn harrumphed again. “All your attempts to identify civilisation has failed. No organised transmissions, no large structures, no straight lines, no artificial lights…yeah, I interpreted those as natural. We’ve an unadulterated Eden down there, if only we survive this turbulence.”
Gaston mistrusted Penn’s analysis, but said, “Why do we not use our QM marbles to smooth a route? It seems to me that instead of relatively even layers of atmosphere as on Earth, here are lobes that are vertical as well as horizontal. Rossby Waves, driving the jet streams on our home planet do this, but these have more energy.”
“Been thinking that myself,” Delta said. She shook her head to everyone’s unasked query on enhancing their craft’s stability. “Plus, the electromagnetic field out here is stronger than on Earth, it’s been messing up our AI until it realized, but it’s variable. I suggest we slip out of our quasi-Alcubierre ring now and deploy our wings as proportional to the turbulence, doable if we follow Gaston’s advice with smoothing the route.”
An hour later they followed a temporary ‘oiling’ of the waves deeper into the exosphere to the geosynchronous altitude of 30,000 kilometres. Three marbles less, a thousand left.
“If Keps were monitoring us, they’d know,” Penn reminded them, “that we’re not a threatening incoming asteroid. Yeah, they might think we’re potentially hostile, but look how little we are and we’ve been transmitting all sorts to them for months. Hardly the actions of an invader.”
Em wagged a finger at him. “That’s so wishful thinking. A sneaky invader could do exactly the same and size isn’t everything as you demonstrated with the imploder.”
Gaston sat and sipped iced water, glad it wasn’t him having to needle Penn with such obvious truths. Grateful too he wasn’t on the receiving end of Em’s barbs.
Delta came up beside him and stroked his hand. “Give me a sip?”
He did, but wished she didn’t do that. Both thats. The coming on to him signals and the sharing of cups and utensils. Maybe it was just him, but he preferred they followed hygiene regs to cut down the catastrophe of a ship-borne illness. Also, he quietly lusted after Em. Not because she’s blonde, but her whole Lara Croft attitude and… chemistry? They’d made a pact so it’s détente for now. Keep distance from each other to avoid alley-cat-fights until planet fall. In any case, Penn was only interested in himself and Em’s fights with the commander could be interpreted as a love-hate though she’d say hate-hate.
How to spurn Delta without rapprochement?
The ship lurche
d to the accompaniment of alarms, a scream from Delta and a “Belt up everyone” from Penn.
All four, suited, went through well-rehearsed emergency routines, but hardly believed their screens when after half an hour it looked as if Suppose We would break up in the stratosphere, burning cherry-red and beyond a safe return.
The cabin heated, buckled and filled with metallic and mental screeching even after all alarms were disabled. Over his radio, Gaston heard, “Escape pods now.”
Gaston shared an escape pod with Delta. Far from his emotive choice though useful to have an engineer with him. Mission control experts decided this configuration before they’d left Earth. Something to do with optimising total mass, rather than avoiding arguments. The AI now in sole command of Suppose We, would continue to battle its own crashing. Having jettisoned the crew, most of the stores and spare heavy stuff, it would deploy wings and if that failed, chutes. It would have launched communications satellites – more marbles.
Besides the one with Penn and Em, two other escape pods descended with them containing life support, weapons and – hilariously – gifts for the natives. Anthropology had made few changes in greeting strangers over the centuries.
“What can you see?” Delta pleaded, “there’s too much sweat running into my eyes. Suit has failed some of its bio-feedback.”
“Do not fret, it cannot last much longer. Hopefully, the pod’s own AI will use the retro gizmos in time. The screen shows a lot of green down there, Hopefully, that is forest rather than a consommé a la epinard or another kind of pea soup.” He tried to wriggle to ease cramp in his side but they were both cocooned in a giant shock absorbing gel. He blacked out.
When Gaston awoke he saw the escape pod was on its side, at least it was the opposite side to his cramp for that had abated. All lights were green, as was the view on the screen. His urge to stretch became thwarted as his arms and legs were hemmed in by his body restraint.
“Are you awake, Delta?”