Eventually, precise observations of the Builders’ ship resulted in the surprising conclusion that it would not stop at the Vert-Ring. Projections based on the velocity and angle of the ship’s approach ruled out the possibility of docking at the Vert-Ring’s stationary position. It also appeared increasingly likely that their ship would pass by both the earth and the moon, which produced sighs of relief because the dangerous scenario of having an alien ship with an unknown agenda suddenly appear in the daytime sky would be avoided. Crime was still virulent and contagious in the post-Ring world. Aki shuddered to imagine the damage that would be generated by worldwide, large-scale riots.
When the Builders had reached a distance of eighty astronomical units from the sun, about twice as far from the sun as Pluto, their final destination became clear. They were traveling at an astonishing 1,500 kilometers per second on a direct course for Mercury.
It would take six months for their velocity to slow to forty kilometers per second; at that speed the Builders’ ship would reach its final destination. UNSDF Fleet Headquarters immediately went to work devising a plan of defense that was not dependent on where the Builders would be when they were attacked but instead was based on the velocity of the incoming ship. The plan was to target the Builders’ propulsion system before the ship dropped below the velocity required to escape the sun’s gravity and leave the solar system. If the UNSDF could disable the Builders’ deceleration capabilities soon enough they would pass through the solar system—never able to return—the way they would have if Aki had not been persuasive and if the Ring had not been restored with the Vert-Ring.
If, however, the Builders’ ship were not stopped in time, even if that ship were destroyed, its remnants would be trapped by the sun’s pull and would eventually enter a stable orbit somewhere within the solar system. A fear was that remaining in the solar system would allow the Builders to launch their invasive nanobots to transform one or several planets into the massive factory that Mercury had become.
The escape velocity at the likeliest point of contact, the decreasing speed of the Builders’ ship, and the velocity of any debris propelled away from their line of trajectory were used to calculate the plan’s execution. Once the calculations were checked and rechecked, the UNSDF analysts announced that the interceptive attack had to begin five days before the Builders would arrive at Mercury. More precisely: by 1 am GMT on July 29, 2041. In the highly probable event that negotiation by the Contact Ship failed, the UNSDF would commence its attack when the Builders were traveling at a speed of eighty-eight kilometers per second, thirty million kilometers from Mercury.
The UNSDF fleet was comprised of nine ships: the UNSS Phalanx (Contact Ship); UNSS Rutherford, Chadwick, and Curie (First Armada); the UNSS Crookes, Einstein, and Millikan (Second Armada); and the UNSS Thompson (Graser Ship) and Becquerel (Graser Support Ship).
As determined by Strategic Command, the Phalanx was the only noncombat ship and the only vessel authorized to attempt a rendezvous with the Builders. The attack would be executed in three stages, with twenty-four hours separating the waves. This allowed the ships to reconfigure themselves for the next stage. The First Armada would attack on Day 1 and the Second Armada would take over on Day 2. After launching its nuclear missiles and spiderwebs, each ship would retreat fourteen hours before impact in order to attain the reasonably safe distance of two hundred thousand kilometers.
The two remaining combat ships would be used, if needed, on Day 3. As a final resort, the Thompson would attempt to destroy the Builders with the graser. The Becquerel would transport the graser initially, then the graser would be transferred to the Thompson. The crew of the latter ship would board the Becquerel and the Thompson would use all of its fuel to propel the graser into position where it would then be operated remotely.
Aki and her Contact Team on the Phalanx traveled ahead of the combat ships to rendezvous with the Builders’ ship and, if all went well, board it. On a technological level, this would be an incredibly challenging feat. The Phalanx would need to match the Builders’ speed, direction, and position with meticulous precision. Moreover, to allow ample time for the planned attack, the rendezvous had to be completed while the Builders were still traveling at relatively high velocity. To achieve this, the Phalanx had been retrofitted with four nuclear-powered NERVA III engines and a massive liquid-fuel booster rocket that would be jettisoned after its use. Even though the UNSS Phalanx carried only five crewmembers, the ship measured an impressive 180 meters with the booster rocket attached, making Aki’s ship longer than any space station.
Of all the fleet’s ships, the Phalanx had the greatest capability to change its velocity. Nonetheless, the Phalanx would wait until the Builders’ ship decelerated to less than ninety-five kilometers per second before attempting to dock. This allowed twenty hours of negotiation before the UNSDF attacked the Builders. During that time, the Contact Team hoped to board the alien vessel and communicate with the beings presumed to be on board. If the Contact Team were not able to ascertain the Builders’ intentions, or if the Contact Team concluded that the Builders were intractably hostile, the attack would be launched as scheduled, whether Aki and her team were still on board the Builders’ ship or not. Without any reservations, Aki was ready to consider that worst-case scenario and accept the potential consequences of her actions. After plotting the Phalanx’s voyage, Aki felt that she had analyzed her ship’s contingencies. Her only task left was to hope the computers functioned properly and that, above all, the Builders did not change their course.
ACT II: JUNE 14, 2041
THE PHALANX BEGAN its long voyage in the invisible current of the sun’s gravity. Heading toward the blazing star, on the 120th day, the ship passed perihelion. The eight combat ships fired their nuclear engines one by one to enter their deceleration phase, placing them into a solar orbit that nearly matched Mercury’s. Since Mercury’s orbit is elliptical and the fleet’s was circular, Mercury would approach the fleet from behind, temporarily pass and then retreat as the two met a second time. That point in space was where the Builders’ ship was projected to arrive, which placed the fleet in the best possible strategic position to launch their attack. The Phalanx used Mercury’s weak gravitational pull to shift its trajectory outward, causing the ship to decelerate slightly just before reaching perihelion. When the Phalanx reached Mercury’s orbit again, the Phalanx would point itself toward Mercury and accelerate, propelling itself toward the planet with as much speed as it could muster.
In such close proximity to Mercury, with the Vert-Ring production facilities still operating, the ships were likely to come in contact with ring material being ejected from the surface. For protection, each ship was coated with a prophylactic coating immunizing the hulls to the corrosion that resulted from contamination. Advances had been made in decoding the inner workings of the messenger cells. Messenger cells had been reprogrammed to deactivate ring material when the messengers touched it. The reprogrammed cells were replicated and applied to the hulls of the fleet’s nine ships. If the retardant functioned as planned, the fleet would avoid a recurrence of the situation that led to Mark Ridley’s heroic sacrifice.
Another concern was that real-time communication within the fleet was impeded. Since transmissions were delayed due to the distance between the four groups, decisions that required precision and needed to be made within a few seconds would have to be made individually.
When the fleet reached perihelion, the Builders were between the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn. Though the arrival of alien entities still seemed nigh impossible to the crews of the ships and to everyone on Earth, the Builders would reach Mercury in fifty-five days. One of the senior technical engineers likened the Builders to Edmund Hamilton’s 1940s hero Captain Future because he felt such a sense of cosmic awe when he contemplated their advanced technology. On July 19, the alien vessel passed through the earth’s orbit around the sun. Since the earth was on the opposite side of the sun from the ship, the many panicked
reports of sightings by amateur skywatchers of the ship as it flew by were discounted. The high-powered telescope on the Phalanx was the first to establish visual contact, providing the first glimpse of the alien vessel’s shape.
The telescope’s image was processed to remove the glaring light of the nuclear pulse engine. That process of sampling and smoothing revealed an object that looked like a wheel turned sideways, or a doughnut that measured three hundred meters across with a massive engine filling the hole in the center. It bore a resemblance to some of the earlier designs of Earth’s space stations. The telescope did not reveal much surface detail except for variations in shading around the outer edge that confirmed the craft made one revolution every forty-three seconds. The object rotated at a speed that created artificial gravity on the inside of the tube equivalent to one-third of a G.
“Wow. Look at that thing. If we rendezvous, the seventy billion dollars spent will seem like a bargain,” Aki said from her cocoon, faking enthusiasm because she felt it was her job as commander and that it best fit the circumstances to play the role of a brave leader. Internal doubts and her awareness that a great deal could go wrong were best kept hidden. The core objective of her mission was to make contact, establish communications, and determine whether the attack should proceed within an extraordinarily small window of time—but that thought, along with the doubts of the last few years of her life, was also best relegated to the back of her mind.
There had been much speculation regarding the design of the Builder ship. The various hypotheses of what was contained within the ship included artificial life-forms, simple robots, nanomachines, capsules of microorganisms, frozen embryos, and even bodiless brains existing in liquid-filled pods. Because of the wildly imaginative ideas that had surfaced, the actual image of the ship seemed rather anticlimactic.
“Could anything besides biological life-forms require artificial gravity? If they are alive and mobile in one-third of a G, they are probably not too different from us in size,” Aki said.
“That’s the good old undying optimism we need, Aki. I’m sure they’ve been sitting around playing poker and making up drinking games to pass the time, just like we have,” Raul responded. “We’re just going to ring their doorbell, walk on board, and then hug them without speaking until we all start weeping.”
“Do you have to be flippant?”
“I’ll be disappointed if they look too much like us. I’m hoping they’re so different that we have to coin neologisms in order to describe them. ”
“Who knows? Maybe they are so different we will not even be able to make up new words to describe them.” Aki could tell that Raul knew how nervous she felt.
“They’ve mastered nanotech and interstellar travel. It’s hard to believe they need physical bodies. Compared to what they’re capable of creating, fleshy organic bodies seem inefficient and limiting. I bet they can upload their consciousness to computers.”
“If that were true, their voyage would have ended when the nanomachines first arrived on Mercury. I mean, if they can convert themselves into software and data, they should have been able to program themselves into the nanites,” Aki said. “Even if that was beyond them—not that much seems beyond them—they would construct a data receiver on Mercury and transport their consciousness via radio communication, Mr. Computer Genius.”
“Maybe the brain can’t be converted into data that easily. Maybe the quantum state of each constituent atom in the brain is significant and necessary for the brain to function as a whole. If that’s the case, an organic medium like a brain is necessary to store the information. Builders might be able to do it, but the process would take ages to transfer that much data at a rate of one corresponding atom pair at a time. That explains why they sent a big ship to come after the nanomachines had landed—which, of course, would mean that their ship is stuffed full to overflowing with piles and piles of brains.” Raul laughed at how outrageous his own theory suddenly sounded. “Well, at any rate, that’s what I was hoping to uncover. Thinking it through, they wouldn’t need artificial gravity to transport brains and computers. Maybe consciousness does require a physical body after all.”
Twenty years earlier, when research had revealed how massive the Builders’ ship was, Aki had felt certain that the ship would contain physical life-forms. She believed her theory was confirmed when it was discovered that the gases emitted from their nuclear engines contained traces of carbon.
“It seems right that consciousness needs to be integrated into a physical form,” Aki said.
“That might hold for humans, but mental activities are, pure and simple, nothing more than information. Reaching a higher stage of evolution might allow the two to separate.”
Aki had often pondered whether consciousness could be converted into digital data. Her best comparison had been how ants excreted pheromones for many different purposes including the building of networks on the ground that indicated the optimal path for the rest of the ant colony to follow. Individual ants wandering randomly laid a trail that dissipated over time. Once a specific path had substantially more traffic, the odor of the pheromones became concentrated. Ever more ants would follow that path, further concentrating the pheremonic potency so that path would be followed by even more ants. If this pheromonal chemosignaling system were sufficiently developed, the system itself could be considered a form of consciousness. How does one identify where consciousness resides? Aki found herself thinking. The intellectual conundrum seemed almost safe compared to the actuality of the Builders and the imminence of contact. Is it found among the ants, in the pheromone, and on the ground? Despite the elements that comprise the simple system, pinpointing the consciousness becomes unanswerably complex.
The cylindrical tube that composed the bulk of the Builders’ ship became known as the Torus. Confirming that the alien vessel had artificial gravity was good news for the UNSDF. If the Builders required gravity and a pressurized atmosphere, a puncture to the Torus’s hull could potentially kill off whatever life lurked within the ship.
Several days later, as the Torus came closer, higher resolution images were obtained. The Torus and the center part of the ship were connected by six support structures reminiscent of spokes on a bicycle wheel. The center area was blocked from view by the glare of the nuclear pulse engine, but analysts were able to discern a protruding three-way nozzle that appeared to be a heatexhaust system.
The Torus was forty meters thick, giving it the same internal volume as three hundred jumbo jets or a small space colony. The interior volume of the Torus could contain an expansive amount of space difficult for three people to traverse in less than twenty hours. Considering how much larger the ship had originally been, it was likely that any remaining life-forms would be packed tightly, which raised Aki’s hopes because overcrowding implied that it wouldn’t take long for her crew to find one of the Torus’s passengers.
ACT III: JULY 25, 2041
THREE DAYS BEFORE RENDEZVOUS
THE PHALANX POINTED its bow toward where Mercury would be in nine days, then fired its booster rocket at full thrust. The Builders’ ship was already inside Mercurial orbit, quickly gaining on the Phalanx from thirty million kilometers off its stern. There was some concern that orienting the propellant stream from the Phalanx’s nuclear engine toward the Builders might be mistaken for an attack. Given the great distance that remained between the two ships, the risk was assessed as minimal. Musing on the process in her cocoon, Aki pictured the Phalanx receiving the baton in a relay race, running ahead in the same direction as the person handing off the baton, ensuring that both runners would be traveling at the same speed when the runners met. Since the Builders were seasoned spacefarers, the prediction was that the Builders would ascertain that the Phalanx was attempting a rendezvous.
With the Phalanx’s engines pointed at the Builders’ ship, the glare made maintaining visual contact with the vessel impossible. In place of visuals, all major observational equipment arrayed in local spa
ce and not blocked by the sun became critical, even though the information arrived intermittently. The alien vessel continued to show no change in trajectory or rate of deceleration.
Thirty hours later, when the booster engines had burned their liquid fuel, the boosters and their massive fuel tanks were released. Once the engines on the main body of the Phalanx were fired and the ship’s velocity increased, the Phalanx pulled past its jettisoned booster unit.
“Wave goodbye to the most expensive piece of equipment humanity has ever built,” mumbled Igor, who had helped design and build the booster. “I should celebrate that I didn’t screw up. Going outside and exposing myself to radiation to fix that complicated booster would be godawful. As long as the Builders don’t eat our ship and we don’t get blown up by our own weapons, we’ll survive another day.”
Despite his lapses into negativity, Aki knew that Igor felt a part of himself had been ejected along with the booster unit. He was a man who liked playing to an audience.
Two days later, amid the gas from the engine blast, a white light appeared as the glare of the Builders’ nuclear engine became visible. The light looked stationary to the naked eye but was actually approaching the Phalanx at a frightful speed. The Phalanx launched an unmanned hound to see what would happen when a probe approached the Builders’ ship. Three days later, when the distance between the two ships had diminished to a hundred thousand kilometers, the UNSS Phalanx turned around 180 degrees to face the approaching vessel head-on.
According to Igor, this maneuver was the biggest climax of the mission, save releasing the booster unit. Aki was surprised that the rendezvous and its potential outcome was less important to Igor than the vehicular maneuvers and the jettisoning of the boosters. As the 130-meter Phalanx made its about-face, the laser communications system—which had to remain pointing at four distinct locations in the inner solar system—and the thirty-seven high-gain antennae, the five deep-space telescopes, and several hundred sensors all needed to turn in sync in order to remain pointing at their respective targets. Despite attempts to avoid creating blind spots, some devices would need to be switched to auxiliary systems, many of which were located on the opposing side of the ship to provide fail-safes. Finally, once the half turn was complete, the two main engines were set to match the Builders’ deceleration of 1/100 of a G. For Igor, coordinating the dozens of elements essential to the maneuver was as exhilarating as singing a solo at Carnegie Hall.
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