Rocket’s Red Glare

by David Hardy

  “Why’d you say a thing like that?” Longstreet glared at his assistant. Enahoro tried to look innocent. He had to distract Gupta, so he asked her, “What did you find on the antenna –the FART?”

  “Yeah, Fumi, what did you hit on the WART, because cheaters don’t get to name anything?” Gupta thrust out his chin. Longstreet almost laughed. With a receding chin, the other astronomer looked silly rather than truculent. Gupta realized it and lowered his gaze in an attempt to appear more studious.

  “Can I name it? It’s only a rogue planet.” Enahoro sidled toward the gently swaying plastic ribbons, as if being a step closer to leaving the storage room won her the naming right.

  “That’s something, but we find them all the time. Fomalhaut B, for one, and what’s the other one’s designation we checked out a few months ago?” Longstreet moved deliberately and placed the king on top of his card structure. “I win!”

  “PSO J318.5-22,” Enahoro said. “There are a lot of other free-floating planets out there.”

  “No suns, only planets, yeah. What’s the size on the one you hit?” Longstreet stepped back as his tower of cards began to crumble.

  “About six times Jupiter size. I have verified most of the details. Can I name it?”

  “Why so anxious? We’re a team. A bored team stuck on the far side of the Moon, granted, but we agreed to name anything worthwhile together. If you want to name it after yourself—”

  “Wait, Hugh, she’s not telling us something important.” Gupta tried for truculence again and immediately regretted it when Enahoro laughed.

  “If I can’t name it, we need to get our act together fast when we report the find.”

  “Moons?” Longstreet stepped back as his tower fell slowly, the low gravity making the destruction look more impressive than it should have. He rubbed the glue off his fingers onto his pants legs.

  “I’ll need to do more work.”

  Longstreet faced her. Bright eyes shone in a face darker than space. Then she grinned, adding a new lightness.

  “How far away is the new rogue planet you just discovered?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “That is close. Fifteen light years puts it—” Longstreet caught his breath. “It’s not light years away, is it?”

  She jumped up and came back to the deck in a slow motion happy dance. Clapping loudly, she said in triumph, “It’s fifteen light hours away. That puts its transit through the Oort Cloud. It’s in our solar system. And there’s more. I’ve confirmed that the radio signals originating from it are being sent by an intelligent life form!”

  ○●○

  Longstreet worked at the computer station, honing the resolution on the radio telescope until every change produced less data. He had reached the point of diminishing returns. Nothing he did now would give him more than that pouring into the data banks. When he leaned back and stared at the screen above him, he said, “There it is. Liber. That’s what we’re officially calling it, right?” He never took his eyes off the ghost image formed by his radio probing. The picture of the distant – near! – rogue planet revealed hardly more than a fuzz ball, but it held him in a complete hypnotic trance.

  They had been working at the Lunar Farside Deep Space Radio Observatory for less than a month. The dedication ribbon had been symbolically cut and bureaucrats on Earth and on the Lunar Nearside had barely finished congratulating themselves. This discovery would give them more ammunition to expand the facility and have yet another ribbon cutting because his team had found an entire planet bigger than even mighty Jupiter in their own backyard in record time. The entire solar system, from one edge to the other was only 4000 AUs – 525 light hours across. Liber had sneaked into their territory, hardly twice the distance of Pluto, while the array was being built. This proved its capability as much as the earlier Hubble and Webb had expanded the universe at the beginning of the century.

  The difference between finding billions of unknown galaxies and the sunless rogue planet Liber was immense, though. Liber had come to them. And Liber held intelligent life beaming radio messages to them.

  His team had discovered other intelligent life in the universe. After only a month of operation.

  “Which moon do you think it might be? The one with the aliens on it?” Longstreet shifted the view of the moon system around in a sped up, crazy 3D spin. They had worked feverishly to identify ten satellites. There would be more, but these were the important ones. Two were Earth-sized and likely candidates for the aliens’ home world.

  “We can start a pool,” Gupta said. “Dibs on the third moon in.”

  Longstreet started to put a bet on a different moon when the screen flashed twice, the image replaced by marching letters. It took him a second to understand what he witnessed.

  “I don’t believe it.” He almost choked from the emotions assaulting him. “Fumi finds Liber and less than six hours later we decipher the aliens’ message. That’s a translation of what they’re sending.”

  “Three cheers for decent computing power. I knew the money wasn’t wasted like Wu said.” Enahoro moved closer to the screen, although its contents were readable from anywhere in the control room. “That’s incredible. They are asking for coordinates to send a probe.”

  “Not a probe,” Longstreet said. “The translation is more like exchange. They want something of ours in return for a cargo ship loaded with goodies from their world.” He sucked in his breath, realizing contact had moved too fast for him to keep up. He had hoped to keep their discovery a secret for a few more days, just to revel in knowing something no one else on the Moon or Earth or Mars knew. The quick translation shot that to hell and gone. Now he had to contact Jana Wu and let her know what they had discovered.

  The contact would be ripped from his hands then and turned over to “senior” scientists and UN bureaucrats back on Earth.

  “We can’t launch anything from here. We don’t have a rocket or rail gun launcher or anything capable of enough speed to get our curios to them before Liber leaves our system.” Gupta began pacing, to Longstreet’s annoyance. “We have to let them know we’ll swap something, though. But how? What? What should we send them? I always thought the old Voyager with its brass plate and phonograph record was shit. Who cares about a bunch of UN officials greeting you, especially if you’re an alien? And the music was awful. I mean, Mozart and not Bowie?”

  “They could have put Holz’ The Planets in it,” Enahoro said.

  Gupta snorted and shook his head.

  “A Space Oddity would have been better.”

  “That wasn’t written until after Voyager,” Longstreet said, distracted. He tried to understand how it was possible to be at such a junction in human history, and he felt so helpless.

  “Wasn’t either,” Gupta said. “Bowie did it before the launch.”

  “Stop it, you two. It doesn’t matter. What does is first contact. Do we send a reply? If Hugh is right in the translation, we can encode a greeting of our own and send it back. We can make mutual contact!”

  “Why send music at all? What do we know of alien tastes?” Gupta began gesturing as if he semaphored the reply with his arms.

  “We know more about yours,” Longstreet said, distracted. “That explains the noise you play when you think we can’t hear.”

  He ignored Gupta’s protests as he read through the simple phrases sent by the aliens. Rumor had it that the NSA had provided the basic algorithm in the heart of the radio antenna’s computer designed to resolve patterns. All the spying of the past hundred years had paid off.

  “First, we let Chuy know. He’s the only one with the clout that I trust.” Longstreet hated the idea of passing the responsibility along to the head of the lunar observation team. He wanted to keep going and not answer to anyone else.

  “Maldonado’s going to steal the credit just because he’s our boss,” complained Gupta. “Remember how he put his name as senior researcher on Larkin’s paper about meteor impact craters? He doesn’t know shit
about any of that, and that got him his job lording it over us.”

  “Director of Lunar Observations Chuy Maldonado.” Longstreet’s tongue burned as he spoke. Chuy wasn’t a bad sort, but his days as working astronomer were long past. In spite of what Gupta said about stealing credit for research done by others, that wasn’t unusual or even much noted. He wasn’t much better than Jana Wu when it came to appeasing the funding agencies and the United Nations, yet their rectenna facility had been equipped with state of the art electronics and computers. For that, Longstreet gave Maldonado a great deal of credit.

  Wherever the programs interpreting the data came from, NSA or elsewhere, they had proven their advantage in only hours by deciphering a completely alien message.

  “If we put off letting him know for a couple more days,” Enahoro said, “we might find what the Liberans intend to send in their capsule. Being able to give Chuy the complete package might help keep us in the loop as resident ‘experts’.”

  “Liberans?” Gupta laughed. “Maybe they intend to send us a bookmobile. A cosmic library.”

  “I’d take it. With our computers, we’d know everything there was to know about them inside a week.” He grinned ruefully. “Likely, we’d find they write nothing but porn.”

  “That might be even more interesting.” Enahoro looked at her colleagues and shrugged. “Just saying that would tell us about their physiology, mores, even their sex toys.”

  “You’re still mad that somebody hacked your vibrator, aren’t you?” Gupta tried to look innocent and failed.

  “Enough. We have real problems to solve.”

  Longstreet typed in a message and ran it through the computer for translation and beaming to the Liberans. “Let’s ask if there’s something in particular they want. That might give us an idea about conditions on their world.”

  “Be careful if they ask for high-yield nukes.” Gupta peered over his shoulder as he composed the message and then pressed SEND.

  “Hugh, you sent that! You replied without—” Gupta tried to input a deletion, not that it would have stopped the radio message already beamed into space.

  He pushed Gupta away. Endless arguments were the stuff of committees and bureaucrats. Analysis paralysis would set in and prevent important contact from ever occurring. Progress came from individuals, not mobs, and especially mobs following Roberts Rules of Order.

  A single baleful red light flashed. His question was on its way. He pushed to his feet and rebounded slightly. He hadn’t gotten his lunar legs yet, having arrived only three months earlier. Gupta had been onsite for construction and was a year into a two year assignment. Enahoro had come with Longstreet as his assistant, but she adapted to the lesser gravity quicker than he had. He admired the way she moved like a ballet dancer.

  “We can find an excuse to wait for their reply, if it comes at all, then—”

  “There it is,” Enahoro said. “They are skirting a direct answer, but that looks like a wire-frame illustration of their rocket. The gibberish that’s not translated must be the manifest.”

  Longstreet started to speak, then was forced to attend to alarms going off all across his instruments. He looked at his two fellow scientists and shook his head. They both knew what to expect.

  “Prepare the airlock. We’ve got company from Nearside.”

  “That didn’t take them long to figure out we’re being naughty,” Gupta said. “How did Wu figure it out so fast?”

  “Wu is spying on everything we do. There’s no other answer.” Longstreet fumed as he began reprogramming the habitat to accommodate five visitors, since that was the standard crew for a UN Lunar hopper.

  ○●○

  “The usual way, at least in the military, is to either court martial or give a medal for any behavior that might be controversial.” Hugh Longstreet refused to be cowed by the UN’s lunar director. Jana Wu glared at him. His anger burned away any fawning he might have been inclined to engage in, hoping to remain in charge of the alien contact process. “So, are you going to fire us or give us a commendation for doing something no one else in human history has done?”

  “My analysts say you have contacted an intelligent alien race on this free planet.”

  “Liber,” Longstreet said. His voice almost cracked. He spoke too loudly. “We named it Liber.”

  “You had no right to do that. This has to be dealt with at a much higher level than... than...”

  “Than mere astronomers?”

  “Where did you get your degree, again?” Wu hardly came up to his chin so she motioned for him to sit. He refused.

  “BU.”

  “Boston University?”

  “Ballarat U. I won an internship on the Aussie array while I worked on my doctorate.” He wondered what calculations ran through her mind. If he had contacts in Boston, maybe he knew some MIT grads or profs. That would prove harder to silence him, if he did. But Australia claimed little prestige other than feeding China, and he could be declared a renegade, a rebel, someone who had gone crazy with the Outback heat.

  “Yes, BU. That BU.” Wu showed a moment’s uneasiness, then the gears meshed and her decisions came smoothly. “You violated procedure when you failed to immediately contact Dr. Maldonado, who would have alerted me to this historic find.” She spoke past him, as if already writing her speech when she accepted the accolades for the discovery.

  “He knows now. So do you. We never thought contact would happen so quickly once Dr. Enahoro pinpointed Liber.”

  “Naming the rogue should never have been done, nor should contact have been attempted. These are matters to be decided at much higher levels, even above my directorate. Contact must be done by crypto-experts to avoid any misunderstanding and to determine the intentions of the, uh, interlopers.”

  “They want to swap souvenirs. At least, that’s what our translation of their signal shows. They aren’t planning some invasion intent on wiping out Homo sap.”

  “How do you know?”

  Longstreet laughed, then regretted it. She was serious.

  “Their planet – the satellite they live on circling Liber – is more than twice the distance from Earth than Pluto’s six light hours. How do you mount any invasion over a distance like that? What kind of supply route do you maintain to keep your soldiers fed?”

  “War robots. They might be a heavily mechanized culture. Soldiers need not be fed, just powered.”

  “That’s farfetched. The distance between us is only going to increase. Liber is passing by.”

  “They might want a world around a star.”

  “Earth,” Longstreet said, heaving a sigh. “We would hold the advantage of having our supplies near, and they would have to reinforce from fifteen light hours away. Talk to a general or admiral or somebody who knows these things.” He went cold inside when he realized that she had, and the crazy idea of an alien invasion was being considered seriously.

  “You are relieved from duties here, you and your team. A hopper will be sent as soon as possible to carry you back to Nearside base.”

  “I want my dismissal in writing, with cause stated. It had better mention Liber and—” Longstreet was cut off when Chuy Maldonado barged into the room. He had seen the director angry before, but nothing like this.

  Maldonado ignored him and planted himself in front of Wu. He balled his hands. Longstreet wondered if a fist fight was going to break out. He hoped not. He had heard Wu was a skilled martial artist. His immediate boss was a street brawler while the UN chief executive preferred more political, less direct attacks. In this fight, Wu had the advantage.

  “Dr. Maldonado, I didn’t know you had arrived.” The way she pronounced each word made it sound as if she would have blown the man’s lunar hopper into atoms if she had.

  “You’re ruining our observations by dumping all those cubesats over my antenna array. Call them down. How do you expect us to do our work littering our view with noisy radio sources?”

  “Dr. Maldonado, I ordered the cub
esats deployed to give direct communication with the Nearside headquarters. There was no need for you to come all this way when you could have monitored progress from your office.”

  “There’s the coaxial cable that runs around the Moon. I’ve warned you before about mucking up viewing and adding to radio interference. That’s why we came to the Farside, to get away from such sky clutter.”

  “We will discuss this after I have finished with Mr. Longstreet.”

  “Doctor Longstreet.” Longstreet emphasized his degree. It might be from a minor Aussie university, but his work had been world class. That and a detailed proposal for radio mapping had earned him this coveted post on the Moon.

  “Yes, whatever.” Wu brushed him off as she tried to deal with Maldonado. “I have authority to deal with this emergency. It comes from the highest levels on Earth.”

  “You might have gotten some UN pinhead to shut down this facility, but my authority comes from the North American Federation, not the United Nations. I’ve been told to proceed as I see fit. Dr. Longstreet remains in charge here, him and his excellent team, and I am bringing in a second team to be under his authority to collect as much data as possible about Liber – and to communicate with the inhabitants of that planet.”

  “No, you aren’t. I—”

  “When I get back to Nearside, I expect to have my authority to be confirmed by the Secretary of Research.”

  “You contacted the NAF?” Wu fought to keep her anger in check. “This is a matter for the Secretary General, not some minor NAF functionary.”

  “The money for most of the lunar equipment comes through the SecRes after the Chinese pulled out last year. Nobody else is willing to finance the oxygen you waste with every breath.”

  Maldonado pushed past her, stopped before leaving the room and said, “I’m going back now. Come with me or not. It doesn’t matter because I am ordering Dr. Longstreet to proceed as he has been and to make contact with the aliens in any way he sees fit. I trust his common sense and expertise completely.” The hot look he shot at Longstreet told a different story, but this was a power struggle between the NAF and the UN. In that instant, it didn’t even matter that Maldonado would put his name first on the official news release about discovering intelligent aliens.