“You should be doing something for your fitness, young man,” he said in place of a welcome. “And go for a checkup with a heart specialist, too.”
“Oh, thank you for the suggestion,” responded the journalist, feigning pain in his chest.
“Do come in before we have an emergency in the stairway. Coffee?” Alain waved the editor in with a sweeping gesture.
Eigenbrod glanced at the floor.
He is probably wondering whether to take off his shoes, thought Alain. “Don’t worry about them,” he said, nodding at Eigenbrod’s feet.
The visitor nodded in gratitude and entered the apartment. He went straight to the sitting room and took a seat with a wheeze. “Nice and cool in here,” he observed.
“This old building—it stays that way even in August,” answered Alain. He wondered what might have earned him this visit. “So, what about your coffee?”
“Thank you, no, I don’t have much time today,” replied Eigenbrod. “You probably wonder about the surprise visit.”
You bet I do, thought Alain Petit, but kept quiet. The other man would surely keep talking.
“My assignment to visit you didn’t come from my lazy colleague or my boss this time.”
“So…?” Don’t make me pull teeth! thought Alain.
“Of all things, I got a call from the Ark, from a certain Heather Marshall.”
The name sounds familiar… Wasn’t that the astronomer who had sent him the original data? Yes, but wasn’t she working at the DKIST in Maui?
“Interesting,” said Alain. He sat down as a feeling welled up that something big was cooking here.
“Yes, very much so. Ms. Marshall requested me to invite you on behalf of NASA.”
“An invitation? With you inviting me?”
“Monsieur Petit, your address can’t be found on the web, and the topic was strictly on a need-to-know basis. So they checked who wrote the original article about you.”
“That was you.”
“I remember that. They asked me for your address, but that is not how it works. My sources are protected.”
“So it wasn’t that you were concerned with the developing story?”
“Probably that, too,” Arthur Eigenbrod admitted as he sat up straight. “The story is worth it, you see. You, Alain… you are to go into space. To fly to the sun, to be precise.”
Alain froze in place. He checked the journalist’s expression and waited for laughter. But there was no joke waiting to be sprung, no mischievous smirk, just a curious expression. Perhaps the editor was mentally typing out the description of how Alain Petit received this piece of incredible news.
Can this possibly be true? wondered Alain. And, how does one respond if the answer is for the books? He had no idea. “I am surprised,” was all he could say.
“You don’t look that way.”
Alain touched his cheeks. They were cool. He was fully composed. Was that some kind of shock reaction? “Why me?” he asked.
“The official version or my opinion?”
“Both.”
“Officially, your engineering experience is a perfect match. But, I believe it is politics. You are the only astronaut who isn’t from the U.S. Us Frenchies have a good reputation right now, so that wouldn’t bother anybody else. And then there are the practical aspects. You are interested in the mission goal, you have time, you are not expensive, and you are an easy sale for the media. After all, you started this whole thing.”
“Sure, for headlines like ‘Space Pensioner,’” said Alain.
“You aren’t even close to the oldest person in space. Remember the 101-year-old lady from Japan last year? Her son had gifted her a trip to the Ark.”
“She was back home the next day. For me it will be weeks.”
“Three months.”
“And won’t I need some formal training?”
“Not for twenty years now. You will have a very experienced commander. Does the name Amy Michaels ring a bell?”
“Sure. The Enceladus mission!”
“She will head this mission, too.”
Alain only remembered vaguely—that mission had occurred 30 years ago—that the commander had been around his own age. It would be most surprising if she wasn’t over 70 like himself.
“And the others? How old are they, over 80?”
Eigenbrod laughed. “No, you and Amy will be the seniors. Heather Marshall will be going, you know her already. Plus Callis John, who was responsible for the solar probe at the Jet Propulsion Lab. Both have years to go before retiring.”
“There is that, at least. So when will this happen?”
“Tomorrow, or the day after at the latest.”
“Good. Nothing like a little heads-up before going on a space trip.” Alain stood up and looked around. “I need to be packing then.”
His hands were moist. He wiped them on his pants. First, he needed a drink.
May 13, 2074, Mercury
Artem shook his foot and a sock flew off to the corner of the room in a high arc. Sobachka raced to battle the evil sock. It put up a good fight, but eventually the sock had no choice but to submit to the top dog on Mercury. Sobachka proudly brought her trophy to Artem, wagging her tail all the way. Artem bent down and praised her accordingly. The sock was made of synthetics that showed no wear at all from dog teeth. It joined its sister on the way into the laundry bag.
The laundry bag had a pungent smell. He was quick to close it. It was high time to wash. The last weeks had been murderous—twelve hours daily in his spacesuit had left very little time for household chores.
The improvised radio telescope was now set up. Mikhail, who had studied physics for two years, was in charge of processing the incoming signals. He had special software that would take the individual signals and create a composite image. The image would be encrypted and sent to the RB Group headquarters in Siberia.
The small bed squeaked as Artem sat down. It had probably come out of Russian army stocks from back in the 20th century. His cubicle was small and pretty spartan, but he spent most of his free time here regardless. When he wasn’t sleeping, training, or working he played with Sobachka. The rest of the team met after shifts for drinks and TV, but neither interested him.
Thinking about it, he considered it a small wonder that time seemed to fly by anyway. Shouldn’t he have been bored to death a long time ago? Perhaps it was the permanent danger from the hostile environment that made life bearable. If that was the case, a return to Earth was out of the question. Artem dropped his head into his hands. He had felt this way his entire remembered life, and since leaving had instinctively done everything to avoid going back to his home planet. Considering everything, he probably had to be grateful to the RB Group for forcibly recruiting him.
“Guys, you want to see something crazy?” asked Mikhail through the base camp radio. What an idiot, Artem thought to himself. He probably was watching some video and getting excited over some stuntman doing incredible stuff. Hard boot soles battered the corridor outside. Curiosity got the better of him so he stood up, shrugging his shoulders. Sobachka was right by his side and sped out of the door as he opened it.
The babble of voices provided directions. The team had gathered in the tech lab. The hubbub grew louder. Others could see nothing, like him, and were pushing colleagues aside. It was a rough place here—he wasn’t the only criminal RB had hired for the job.
“Watch out!” he heard Mikhail’s voice cut through. Artem visualized him getting crushed at his desk.
Pushing a colleague aside, a stalwart woman called out, “Hey, we want to see something, too.”
“Give me a minute,” came back from Mikhail.
“You kidding us?” This man, tattoos across his jaws, wasn’t loud but the threat was well understood.
“I’ll put it on the big screen.”
That was probably Mikhail’s salvation. The messroom with the big screen for viewing canned videos held 50, more than enough for the entire staff. Artem
jumped aside to avoid the inevitable crush of bodies and picked up Sobachka to be on the safe side.
Irina, the stalwart woman who had complained earlier, bumped into him and his dog. Sobachka gave a scared yelp. Irina stopped, excused herself, and stroked Sobachka. Then she looked at Artem.
“Do you want me to visit you later and play with your little one?” she asked with a sly smile on her face. “With your little dog, of course.”
That was a new attitude from her. Sobachka obviously made women connect, but he preferred to forego Irina’s visit.
“My shift is starting soon,” he lied.
“Well, then let’s get going,” Irina replied while grabbing his shoulders and turning him around. “I’ve never seen Mikhail so excited. We can’t miss this.” Her bosom slammed into his back as she pushed him forward, protecting him and Sobachka from further jostling.
They entered the messroom just as the big screen lit up. Those present spread to fill the seats around tables and the rest sat on benches along the sides of the room. The screen was on the high wall next to the entrance and was well visible all the way from the opposite side.
“If it went by my rules, only people fresh out of a shower would be allowed in here,” said Irina.
She was dead right. The room smelled of sweat in all flavors. It was bad. Artem lifted his arm and checked his own status. So-so, he thought, probably time to change the T-shirt soon.
The screen morphed into a gray pixilated surface full of odd patterns. Some of the men hooted and whistled, thinking there was poor reception.
“Enough waiting now,” said Mikhail, addressing them from the tech lab via speakers. “What you are seeing here is a true sensation.”
More whistles derisively underlined the statement.
“Hey, keep cool, a radio telescope is no camera. We ping the target, the solar surface, which isn’t a fixed surface at all, pixel by pixel and line by line. This is better than anything they could do back on Earth. Resolution is mind-blowing. Do you see this line?”
Part of the picture was magnified, making pixels even more obvious, but the line Mikhail referred to had become even more visible in the process.
“That definitely is an artificial structure all around the sun,” his voice explained. He sounded awestruck.
“Who cares?” said one of the men at the side of the room.
“Shhhh,” hushed Irina.
“If that feels small and insignificant,” continued Mikhail’s explanation, “that thing is at least five kilometers thick and more than four million kilometers long. And there are more of them, in a regular grid around the entire star.”
“Which star?” asked someone from the back.
“The sun, you moron,” shouted Irina in his direction. Then she turned to Artem and quietly asked him, “Isn’t that crazy?”
Artem nodded.
“If the lines are 50,000 kilometers at the equator, then there must be about 80 of them, each consisting of about 80,000,000 cubic kilometers of material. That’s a total of 6,400,000,000 cubic kilometers! Someone took the equivalent of half our moon, pressed it into pipe shape, and laid it out around the sun. Or whatever they really did.”
“Guess it wasn’t our team,” came from the back. The others laughed out loud.
“But what is this good for?” Irina asked while scratching her chin. Artem had been thinking along the same lines.
“I have no idea what this is about,” added Mikhail. “That’s for the eggheads on Earth.”
“Perhaps it has something to do with solar activity,” said Irina quietly so that only Artem could hear it.
“What makes you say that?”
“I was an electrical engineer way back,” she replied. “That thing is like a huge cage around the sun.”
“To protect the sun?” whispered Artem.
“Or to protect us from the sun.”
“The best is yet to come.” Mikhail had yet to finish his presentation. The image changed. It looked as though the viewer was flying over the solar surface. Artem stood up onto his tiptoes because of a young woman who had stood up in his line of sight.
“This thing does not belong here, either,” said Mikhail, tracing out a red circle around an odd structure.
The highlighted object reminded Artem of an ancient hourglass, without the usual framework. Two symmetric triangles with an elegant swoosh in their long sides stood atop each other in a mirror image, meeting at their apexes.
“Our readings show these things are rotating,” added Mikhail. “They are about six kilometers wide and ten kilometers tall, overall. It could also be that the two triangles—or should I say cones?—don’t touch at all. Our instruments are not sensitive enough to tell for sure.”
“A huge spaceship,” whispered Irina, and pensively tapped her lips with her index finger.
“It is noteworthy that the cones point straight at the North and South poles of the sun, respectively,” continued Mikhail. “But of course that could just be a consequence of being docked to one of those lines.”
“Like a bike being oriented by the bike stand it is attached to,” Artem thought out loud.
“A bicycle. Nice analogy,” answered Irina.
“If I was to speculate about the function,” said Mikhail, “then this object is in charge of controlling the lines around the sun. Or it had that function in the past. Maybe the builders lived in there. Or they continue to live there.”
“Booohring,” someone hollered from the back. Artem turned around. It was a young man with long hair, his friends busy patting his shoulder. A pathetic guy, he deserved to get hit come the right occasion.
“Incredible,” said Irina. “I never would have expected to see an alien spaceship with my own eyes.”
“I need to go there,” said Artem.
“Are you out of your mind? That is in the middle of the sun,” Irina shot back.
“Not exactly, it must be in the photosphere. That’s the solar surface.”
“I know,” said Irina. “Do you think I’m stupid?”
Artem turned and looked around. Most people had relaxed and were chatting. The sensational discovery on the screen in front of them had faded from their minds already.
“Sorry. You do seem to be the only sensible person here, apart from Sobachka and myself, of course,” replied Artem.
“Thanks, that is nice of you.” Irina smiled at him. She looked quite attractive that way. Artem turned around abruptly. That was a can of worms he did not want to open. He’d had too many already. And if she really was nice, she didn’t deserve to be drawn into his troubles.
Artem gave Irina a quick nod, set Sobachka down, and left for his cabin.
“Comrades,” he heard Mikhail say over the speakers, “it goes without saying that what you have just witnessed is top secret. Your communication is monitored and censored already, but if you try to let this out, your entire data feed will be cut for two weeks.”
May 14, 2074, Mercury
“You will investigate the alien object and take ownership of it for us this decision is final.”
The synthetic voice had given the order in a flat staccato rhythm, with no trace of emotion. Artem had been waiting for this call. His instinct had not failed him. It had been clear that the decision was going to come down to him. He was the logical choice, it was all but inevitable.
Irina was the only other candidate. It would have been a pity had the message come to her, because he would have had to convince her, or even incapacitate her if she would not yield to him. This mission was made for him. He was the only person on board who had handled a spaceship alone and for an extended period of time. Irina, he found out only yesterday, had been a co-pilot for three years. He hadn’t expected that.
His thought process had been quite simple. The risk of somebody else discovering the alien object was rising every day. The conglomerate had no time to waste. Starting a ship from Earth outside regular schedules would have raised flags. Nobody was watching Mercury, h
owever. And starting from here would provide an incredible head start in the race.
The downside was having to work with what Mercury had to offer. The second stage of the barge was still up in orbit. That left the ‘yacht,’ a four-seater. It needed quite a refitting to reach the photosphere. But with the right pilot—himself—one could eliminate three out of four seats. That was how he had rationalized his selection, and it had been gratifying to get the same explanation fed back to him from Earth. He was tempted to believe that the highly-paid engineers down there had been led by his thoughts.
Artem, don’t hold your nose too high, he told himself. The plan got accepted because it was logical. The yacht had strong propulsion engines to help the base camp managers flee the planet in a pinch. They would have to give up that exit plan now. Artem almost found himself hoping the base camp would be hit by an asteroid during his absence. It wouldn’t bother him, except maybe for Irina.
But the propulsion unit of the yacht would not protect him from heat or radiation. The scientists on Earth had proposed a shield. A solar probe had used such a shield to successfully go all the way to the chromosphere. He would have to go even closer, though. Then he remembered the camouflage technology his ship had used to protect him against discovery by the conglomerate goons. With the right materials it was possible to redirect radiation of various wavelengths right around an object. Heat transport in the solar atmosphere was mostly by radiation. If one could get it to flow around the ship, things would stay cool, literally.
It would also make the yacht invisible to many types of instruments. That would facilitate the approach to the object. And it gave him completely fresh options for the time after the solar rendezvous. Good-bye forever, Mercury! he thought. If the RB Group gives me such a nice ship, who is to prevent me using it for my own purposes?
He had briefly considered using the yacht to disappear right after launch, instead of flying close to the sun, as Icarus had done in Greek mythology. But that felt wrong. Not for moral reasons—morality had no place in deadly space—but because he simply had to see this thing. The object was bigger than anything ever constructed by mankind, and it was beyond their horizon now and probably into the next thousand years. The opportunity to touch such technology was something he simply could not refuse.
Silent Sun: Hard Science Fiction Page 11