Peregrinus Orior

by Robertson, John

  Each plant would require only one hundred and twenty-five kilowatts of power capacity, which could be supplied by a modest three-hundred-kilowatt solar array operating ten hours per day combined with high-efficiency batteries for overnight operation. A low-cost one-megawatt array could supply the needs of all three plants. Alternatively, and even more efficiently, the plants could be tied into a full-sized solar farm serving all the power needs of a district. Solar farms are highly efficient sources of power in the hot, dry middle latitudes where water tends to be the scarcest, and a typical commercial scale farm could have up to one hundred megawatts of capacity, which the desalination plants would hardly put a dent in.

  Larry was now employed as the chief engineer of Fresh Water Solutions Inc., a brand-new corporation of which all the shares were registered to a trustee acting on behalf of the Government of the United States of America. The corporation had acquired a perpetual exclusive license to Larry’s technology for a large initial payment to MIT plus an annual license fee. It had also acquired the large warehouse in which Larry currently stood, located on the shore of the Boston outer harbor near the Weymouth Fore River mouth. The warehouse had been rapidly renovated, cleaned and fitted out as a high-tech assembly and fabrication facility. It was designed to produce the twenty-four cells required for a two-million-gallon-per-day desalination plant at the rate of four cells every three days. The warehouse included a wharf large enough to berth a full-sized transoceanic container ship, and one was expected to arrive in a few weeks.

  The scale-up had gone smoothly. The first unit had required only a few tweaks to achieve the same power usage efficiency as the bench model. Thereafter each unit had tested out within a few percent, plus or minus, of the design efficiency target. Larry was splitting his time between his laboratory and the warehouse, still refining the design parameters in hopes of squeezing out a little greater power usage efficiency.

  Larry was amazed and excited by the speed with which his dream was coming true. Of course, he couldn’t tell anyone about it, and there was an ample number of very competent-looking security guards stationed around the warehouse to discourage any uninvited visitors. The President of the United States was being kept fully informed of the success of the scale-up and the production rate of the high-efficiency desalination plants.

  While Larry mused over how much fresh water would soon be flowing into thirsty lands as a result of his work, another young man was crouched in a shallow wadi in just such a land. A hundred yards from the wadi stood a small compound, the object of the young man’s surveillance. The small compound was the home and headquarters of Tarek Maziq, one of Libya’s main warlords. Captain Mark Simpson and his team of seven other Delta Force operators had hiked the twenty miles from their drop point to the compound between dusk and eleven o’clock at night. They had travelled in the open desert, away from any roads or villages. They were now resting and observing.

  Several days earlier U.S. intelligence sources had determined that a Russian freighter landing at Sirte was carrying, in addition to food and medical supplies, a number of heavy transport trucks loaded with a large quantity of automatic rifles, crew-served machine guns and mortars. This military equipment was thought to be destined for delivery to Maziq, a ruthless and aggressive warlord the Russians had been currying favor with, in contravention of the standing UN resolution prohibiting supply of arms to any of the Libyan factions. The equipment was sufficient in quantity to shift the balance of military power in favor of Maziq in his simmering clashes with adjacent warlords. In particular, Maziq’s immediate target was expected to be the territory of Atia al-Obedi, leader of a more moderate faction.

  The Delta Force team was tasked with confirming the delivery of the arms to the Russian proxy, assisted by overhead drone photography and then, once confirmed, destroying the equipment. The team had been ordered to avoid any unnecessary loss of life and minimize collateral damage to the compound and its inhabitants, so they were armed with personal weapons only, plus thermite grenades for material destruction. However, the convoy transporting the equipment was expected to be heavily guarded by both Russian covert forces and Maziq’s men. The team would be extracted by helicopter from a location only a half-mile back along their ingress route once their mission was completed.

  At eleven thirty that night, the team could clearly hear the motors of several heavy-duty trucks approaching. Captain Simpson planned to wait until the convoy was inside the compound, unloading had begun and he had confirmation from the drone operator that the shipment was in fact prohibited military equipment. As the last of six large trucks approached the gate of the compound, eight wraiths slipped up behind the truck to either side of the opening. Minutes later, the overhead drone photographed an impressive array of military hardware being unloaded from the first truck and the Delta captain received the clearance he’d been waiting for.

  The gate guards were preoccupied with the arrival of the convoy and its load of toys and took no notice of the arrival of the Delta team. The guards would be found several hours later, still unconscious but with no more injuries than a moderate concussion. The convoy security force was not as fortunate. The Americans moved swiftly through the courtyard of the compound, dispatching all resistance with short two- or three-round bursts from their sound- and flash-suppressed M4A1 carbines. Several of the security force threw down their weapons and begged for mercy as they saw the more aggressive Russian operators meet a violent fate. They were then gagged, bound and moved back to the gate.

  Four of the Delta operators took up defensive positions in a crescent between the trucks and the main buildings of the compound. Three snapped additional pictures of the contents of each truck before lobbing several M14 incendiary thermite grenades into each truck plus one under the hood and a half dozen into the well-stocked armory building into which unloading had begun. Captain Simpson stood aside in the shadows, issuing occasional commands into his helmet-mounted speech-actuated tactical radio network microphone and watching closely for any activity from any of the adjacent buildings. He was filling the dual role of team command and tactical overwatch.

  For the captain, whose system was now coursing with adrenaline, it seemed to take forever before the incendiary placers reported they had completed their jobs. It was, in fact, less than five minutes from when the team entered the gate and Simpson issued the order for a controlled withdrawal to and then out through the gate. The operation had been conducted in near total silence, partly thanks to the swiftness, surprise and skill of the team operating in a low-light environment, but also partly thanks to luck. It would have been easy to have overlooked just one hostile fighter for long enough for him to have raised an alarm and to have brought fire onto one or more of the team. However, as it was, the captain thought there was a good chance that no one in the interior of the compound was even aware of the assault.

  The grenades were fused for two minutes and so most were already starting to cook as the team egressed. Each one would generate a four-thousand-degree furnace for a radius of about five yards. The team had ignited thirty of them. They would melt any nearby metallic objects and ignite any flammable materials. The team had withdrawn to their initial point in the wadi by the time the first of many thousands of rounds of ammunition began to cook off. They paused briefly to watch the fireworks before commencing the eight-minute march to their extraction site. The Blackhawk was flaring in as they reached the site, having been called in by the captain from their offshore station above the USS Gerald R. Ford.

  News of the successful operation made its way quickly up the military chain of command. President James Rushton disliked having authorized an action that would certainly result in the deaths of several men, even if they were in the service of entities hostile to the United States, and possibly including death or injury to American armed forces personnel. However, he would not shrink from the use of reasonable force to protect the interests of his country and its allies from hostile and unlawful actions by less princ
ipled parties. He was very relieved that he would soon be able to provide Libyans with constructive assistance in achieving a better quality of life, rather than just acting as a referee in the squabbles among their leaders.

  Chapter 16

  December 13, 2027

  El Peñón summit (9,000 feet) near Vicuña, Chile

  The third observation of object X/2027U3, the provisional name assigned to Darya’s comet, came about three weeks after the second observation. The senior scientist at the LSST observatory, Dr. George Rigby, was pleased to have another data point in hand, though he expected that the observed positions were a little too close together to provide a good orbital solution. The data was downloaded into the observatory’s orbital mechanics software and simultaneously transmitted to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Soon after, the previously routine investigation became decidedly nonroutine.

  The data fed into the algorithm in the JPL mainframe computer included the angles of the line of sight between the observatory and the object for each observation, as measured relative to the horizon and relative to true north. It also included the position of the observatory and the time of each observation. The software then estimated the orbital parameters of the object assuming that each of the three lines of sight intersected an elliptical orbit, with the Sun at the focus of the ellipse. The ellipse for long-period comets is necessarily highly eccentric, with the aphelion, or most distant point on the orbit, much farther away than the perihelion, or point nearest to the Sun. The aphelion for a long-period comet would likely be somewhere within the Oort cloud, one hundred AU or more from the Sun, while the perihelion could be less than one AU, that is, inside of the Earth’s orbit.

  There is typically some measurement error for each observation, so even three widely spaced observations would generate at best an approximate, or most likely orbit. Successive observations would gradually refine the predicted orbit to an eventual degree of precision, at least for the near term, of within a few hundred miles. However, this degree of precision requires multiple observations of the object at different points in its orbit.

  High levels of orbit prediction accuracy also require taking into consideration the fact that there are many more gravitational influences on the object than just the Sun. These would include the eight major planets, especially the four outer gas giants, plus the many other bodies orbiting the Sun. How much of an influence all these bodies would have depends on how close the object came to any of them on its various circuits of the solar system. So, the orbital calculations involve projecting the positions of all the major solar system objects in relationship to the initial estimated path of the new object, and then adjusting its predicted orbit to reflect the various tugs that it will experience along the way. This dynamic interaction may need to be extrapolated many years into the future for short-period objects because such an object may experience a different set of gravitational influences each time it passes through the inner solar system, potentially reshaping an initially harmless orbit into a dangerous one. The process involves sophisticated mathematical algorithms and very powerful computer processors. The current version of the orbit prediction software was known as Cruncher IV.

  The first sign that something unusual was in play was the extended period of time that Cruncher IV seemed to be taking to spit out its initial estimated orbit before the more complex step of integrating in the influences of the planets. Normally this should have taken a matter of seconds. When the program reported no initial estimate after crunching for over a minute, Tony Galletsia, the applied mathematician who had been assigned to oversee the analysis, suspended the computer run and requested a download of the last few cycles of calculations.

  Tony viewed Cruncher’s efforts to fit a conventional elliptical orbit to the three data points, including trying more unusual parabolic and hyperbolic paths. He looked at the orbital formula parameters that had been sequentially adjusted to find a rough fit, without success. He also had Cruncher generate a three-dimensional diagram of the solar system with the estimated position of the three observations and then with the closest fit ellipse overlaid into the picture. What he saw was a long, thin, nearly linear path extending back far behind and below the solar system, and then passing up through it. The three observation points didn’t line up well enough with the projected ellipse to satisfy Cruncher, which expected to find a near perfect fit, or more likely an array of them.

  However, the picture was clear enough to the mathematician to get his adrenaline spiking, especially after expanding the image of the object’s path as it transited up through the solar system.

  Tony sent off a brief text to the senior scientist at the LSST observatory, to his immediate department head, and to the head of JPL. Then he contacted a doctoral fellow who was under his supervision and asked him to check the information that had been fed into Cruncher against the original astronomical observations, looking for any possible error in the data.

  A few hours later Eleanor Appleton, senior manager of the Near-Earth Object Collision Risk Assessment Department at the JPL, joined Tony and the director of the JPL in a small video conference room. Dr. George Rigby, the Senior Scientist at the LSST observatory was linked into the meeting. Once the video link was established, Eleanor got right to business.

  “Okay Tony, you’ve got our undivided attention. Tell us what you know. Do we have a problem?”

  Tony replied, “It’s really too soon to know if we have a problem or not, but we could, which is why I gave you all the heads-up and suggested that we meet. What we know is this: George’s latest object doesn’t fit the normal pattern of a long-period comet, the most likely solar system body given where it is coming from, which means it doesn’t really fit the pattern for anything we’ve seen before.

  “The path it seems to be on has very little if any curvature, subject to the measurement error inherent in only three closely spaced observations. In other words, it seems to be passing through our solar system in a more or less straight line, not going around the Sun in any kind of orbit, even a highly eccentric one. It is possible that the Sun could capture it on its way through and draw it into an orbit like that of a long-period comet, in which case it might return many years from now. However, its current path seems like this will be both its first pass through the inner system and its last as well. Its path will certainly be bent a little as it passes through, but likely not slowed enough to be captured into a solar orbit. That will depend on how close it comes to the Sun and on how much mass and velocity it has.

  “We have no way to estimate mass at present. It isn’t near enough to any of the outer planets to perturb their orbits even if it were much larger than a typical comet, and nor will it get close enough for that on its present path. We’ll have to wait until it gets close enough to us to reflect sufficient sunlight for a direct observation of its apparent diameter, then use an assumed density.”

  The department head broke in, “Tony, how long will it be before it is close enough for direct observation and, more important, how close is it going to get to us?”

  “Yes boss, I was just coming to that,” he replied. “We have a pretty good velocity estimate based on our initial three observations. This thing is moving. It is closing on the inner solar system at two hundred and sixty miles per hour relative to the Sun. That’s much faster than a typical comet would travel when that far away from the Sun. So that’s another unusual feature of this object. It is currently quite a long way out, about fifty AU, still a lot farther out than the orbit of Neptune, the outermost planet, or even Pluto in the Kuiper belt. However, traveling at that speed it could be within the inner solar system in a little more than two years, sooner if its mass is similar to a typical comet and it accelerates as it gets closer. So, it should actually be visible to a big scope like the LSST in a few months depending on how reflective its surface is.

  “As to how near it will come to Earth, well, that’s why I thought this is important enough to call a m
eeting on short notice. With our three observations so tightly spaced together, there is still room for a lot of error in the initial estimates — its current position or distance out, its speed and, especially, its path direction through space. The path direction has the most uncertainty at present because a path uncertainty of only plus or minus one arc degree, which is about what we have at this time, will result in a large cone of possible trajectories when applied over a distance of fifty AU — about eighty million miles in diameter, or nearly the distance from the Sun to the Earth, at the point where the cone of possibilities intersects the solar system plane of the ecliptic.

  “The most probable path has the object climbing up through the plane of the ecliptic somewhere in the inner solar system, as indicated in this graphic.” Tony activated the large display screen in the video conference room and called up the trajectory he had developed.

  “If we move in for a close-up with the planets positioned where they will be at the time the object intercepts the plane of the ecliptic, it looks like this.” He then expanded the apparent magnification of the computer-generated diagram and overlaid the cone of possible trajectories he had developed over the last hour.

  A stunned silence ensued as the three leaders reflected on what they were seeing.

  Tony continued, “As you can see, the predicted path, as the object passes though the ecliptic, spans a wide range of possibilities until we can refine the data, but it includes a passage anywhere from just outside of Venus’s orbit almost to Mars’s orbit. And it definitely includes an intersection with Earth’s orbit as a possibility. That’s not a high possibility — there’s a lot of space out there — but it is a possibility.