The swarm always brightened perceptibly when addressed with a question. Johnny Winger had seen that effect develop over recent months…he figured ANAD did it as a courtesy to his human colleagues.
***ANAD did not recognize detected configurations at the temple…ANAD performed search routine on all known algorithms in Quantum Corps database…no referent located…incompatible logic specification…could not match logic execution with any known pattern***
“I guess he’s saying he doesn’t have a clue,” General Linx interpreted.
UNSAC was growing impatient. “Recommendations, gentlemen? We have a Level 1 threat to the planet…an asteroid is coming our way and we don’t seem to be in control of it. We have demands on the table from Red Hammer…a helluva lot of money and a demand to shut down Quantum Corps.”
Linx eyed Winger and responded. “We’d better characterize those protective bots at Kolkata and find a way to penetrate that temple and put that generator out of action, sir. If this Nakamura’s theory is even partly correct, the source of the perturbations may well be Shavindra temple. Put it out of action and clean up all the loose fabs in that part of the world. We do that and maybe we damage or eliminate Red Hammer’s ability to maneuver Wilks-Lucayo. Then their threats become hollow.”
“Perhaps GreenMars can still regain control,” UNSAC said. “I’m being briefed later today by the Board of Governors on recovery efforts…the Secretary-General wants a full accounting by 1800 hours this evening…details and options.”
“Quantum Corps will get to work on penetrating that temple, sir,” Linx added. “We’ve got a few tactical tricks of our own.”
“Send me a plan by 1200 hours today, General.” UNSAC started to sign off, then had a separate thought. “Oh…and General, append to your plan a report on what would be involved in shutting down all Quantum Corps facilities.”
Linx was incredulous. “Begging your pardon, sir…surely, we can’t seriously entertain—“
UNSAC cut him off. “I entertain every option, General. If we can’t stop what Red Hammer is doing, or whoever is behind this scheme, we may have no choice but to comply with their demands. It’s an option and the Secretary-General wants options. I intend to give him as many as possible.”
Linx could hardly hide a scowl. His Teutonic temper was beginning to boil, but he knew he was dealing with a superior here. Options…he turned the word over in his mind, finding the taste coppery and bitter.
“Very well, sir. You’ll have my report by 1200 hours.”
UNSAC signed off.
Linx and Kraft and the rest then glared at the United Nations logo that filled the screen…a map of the world with olive branches cradling the globe. In less than a year, if they didn’t find a way to stop Red Hammer, that same globe would be enveloped in fire and chaos beyond imagining.
GreenMars Operations Center,
Mariner City, Mars
September 12, 2080 (U.T.)
Greg Nygren manipulated the solar system simulator to show the effects of the quantum disturbance once again. The Board of Governors was in session but only three had shown up at the briefing. Nygren wanted to show them visually what was happening with 2351 Wilks-Lucayo.
As the GreenMars executives watched the 3-D display, all the planets and major bodies swept along in their trajectories. Even as a kid, Nygren had enjoyed running sims on the same software, making planets and moons, even stars and whole galaxies dance to his whims. Playing God with galaxies was always an attractive antidote to those long nights when his parents had nearly killed each other arguing and screaming.
Now, someone else was playing God.
“The best explanation,” Nygren told them, “is that somehow a diverting force is being generated that can manipulate the underlying cosmic string structure of the solar system…forcing Wilks-Lucayo onto this new course.”
Li Thanh was First Governor of the GreenMars Board. The Vietnamese engineer was skeptical. “I thought strings were unproven as a theory.”
Nygren let the latest sim run its course. The projection of Wilks-Lucayo followed a curving trajectory through the systems of Saturn and Jupiter, seemingly oblivious to the massive gravity wells of the two planets. As the sim ended, the asteroid dropped steadily sunward, right into the path of Earth.
“Ever since the vacuum potential experiments at Farside back in the ‘40s, strings have been the best explanation for how gravity interacts with matter and the other fundamental forces. Farside’s experiments didn’t directly detect strings—“
“—just their shadows,” said Ali Hamid, another Governor in attendance. “I read the papers too. Saw the experiments in video. Nobody has a better explanation but I still don’t understand why we think the string matrix of the solar system is being manipulated. Farside showed that natural perturbations sometimes occur, sort of like quantum-scale earthquakes. Things just go haywire every so often.”
“It’s the fact that Farside was able to show the latest disturbances have two sources: one in the Kolkata region of Earth and one right here on Mars. Plus the disturbances continue. It’s not an isolated event, like you’d expect from a natural process. Every time we try to correct Wilks-Lucayo’s trajectory, the disturbances begin again…Farside can ‘see’ decoherence waves as probability states are generated and then collapse.”
“Theory’s nice, Nygren, but what are we doing about this? What can we do about it?” Victor Enfield was the third Governor at the briefing. He was a gruff Brit with a sandy moustache and beard that bristled when he was agitated.
“Where on Mars does Farside see this disturbance coming from?” asked Thanh.
“About twelve kilometers northwest of us. The Candor canyonlands. I want to request help from Public Security, maybe even Frontier Corps. Organize an expedition and see what’s out there. So far, satellite imagery doesn’t show much.”
Thanh considered that. “Involving Frontier Corps means dealing with UNISPACE. Not a good idea politically. The rest of the Board won’t like that. Wolves in the sheep pen and all that. I’d rather handle this locally.”
“What counteractions have been tried?” asked Hamid. Hamid was an Egyptian immigrant, part of the Cairene contingent that had come to Mars twenty years before and built settlements around an underground aquifer up in Acidalia Planitia. Little Nile was a stern and devout Muslim community that prided itself on being self-contained, as much as anyone on Mars could be self-contained. They had even disdained the respirocyte treatment as an insult to God, preferring to travel about outside their settlements in antique spacesuits, like dinosaurs, many thought.
Nygren detailed the Ops Center’s efforts so far. “We can push Wilks-Lucayo back toward her original course with impulse motors. But each time we do that, the perturbing force comes back. We’ve tried longer and longer thrust periods but we’re chewing up the asteroid’s surface fast by all this thrusting and the center of mass is being shifted, which means even more thrusting to correct that.”
“Your report mentioned a gravity tractor ship in the vicinity,” said Enfield. “Why not use that as well?”
“We’ll soon have to try it,” Nygren admitted. He decided not to bother the Governors with all the controversy surrounding that. “The main trouble with gravity tractor is that it’s not very precise. This far from the final target, precision isn’t so critical. Inside Jupiter orbit, it is. But gravity tractor is a viable option. We’re maneuvering the ship to an intercept trajectory right now. But it’ll take time. There’s also the kinetic impact method. And explosives. All of them will take time to play out. Wilks is over ten a.u. away at the moment, over a billion and a half kilometers.”
“How much time?”
Nygren had done the analysis himself. “We normally keep two ships orbiting the sun at about 10 a.u. That’s roughly the distance to Saturn. But Wilks is in a much different orbit…out of plane, different period. It’ll take the better part
of a year to intercept the asteroid. By then, Wilks will be inside the orbit of Mars and picking up speed fast.”
Li Thanh was scribbling something on his thoughtpad. “We’ve got to act before that. Gentlemen, I recommend we request help from Public Security…try to find that quantum source out in the canyonlands and put it out of action. If that doesn’t work, I’ll have to go to the MarsFed Council. If you can’t regain control of the asteroid soon, I’ll have to get authorization to destroy it…if we can.”
Nygren left the meeting and went back to the Operations Center. The building was a non-descript tan brick structure on Labyrinth Drive, top ward, first level. The Great Rotunda was only a few blocks east; night had already come to Candor Chasma and the shadows were creeping westward along the sidewalks.
Nygren went to Operations Control and told Giddings, the shift supervisor, what the Board had decided. Giddings was hovering over a console with several other technicians.
“Better get over to Public Security, Greg. I’ll send a message ahead. There’s a detective there…name’s Borodin, I think. We’ve got a good relationship with his office. He can get the permits and outfitting to go outside pretty quick.”
Nygren watched as a tech named Jaworski typed commands on a keypad and selected icons from a screen.
“Any luck with the impulse motors?”
Giddings shrugged. “Jaws is working the high-latitude arrays right now. We have more surface material there to work with. The equatorial motors have been used so much, the diggers have excavated pits more than two hundred meters below the surface. We’re running out of accessible material.”
Nygren looked on as Jaworski set up the command string for transmission. The commands would be sent off at all at once to the system controller, which was actually little more than a box of electronics half buried in a small crater on Wilks-Lucayo’s surface. The controller, known to the techs as SID for reasons that made no sense to Nygren, would operate the fuel loading robots. Rock and soil would be trenched out of a small ravine, conveyed to a compactor, shaped, sifted and charged electrically, then fed into an electromagnetic slingshot known as a mass driver. Flung away from the asteroid at a velocity of five kilometers per second, the charge would impart a tiny, but measurable impulse to Wilks-Lucayo, bit by bit nudging the half-mile wide asteroid onto a new course.
That was the theory.
“Transmitting now—“ Jaworski stabbed a button. Then he sank back in his chair to wait. “May as well go get a beer, boys. This’ll take about twelve hours.”
The command string sped away from Mariner City’s antenna array at lightspeed. Some twelve hours later, SID received the instructions and commenced operations for a new impulse sequence. Inside of an hour, the north and south polar latitudinal arrays began firing chunks of rock, which jetted away from the asteroid’s surface in a stream of pellets. The delta-v experienced by the asteroid was infinitesimal but if allowed to continue over time, a significant shift in the velocity vector could be anticipated.
At the same time as SID fired its polar latitudinal arrays, a massive pulse of decoherence waves erupted and spread out across the inner Solar System like ripples spreading across a pond. The disturbance came from two sources, one on Earth, one on Mars.
Asteroid 2351 Wilks-Lucayo soon became a small feather caught in a hurricane. The tiny velocity shift caused by the mass driver motors was quickly nulled out and the forty-thousand ton object tugged back onto her original Earth-bound trajectory. Like a sailing ship riding the winds, Wilks-Lucayo offered no resistance to the gravitational ‘tacking’ that had just occurred.
Invisible fingers pulled the asteroid inexorably Earthward, following the steepening gravity well of the Sun. Every mass in the Solar System shuddered and changed course, as the disturbance spread rapidly outward, heading off into interstellar space.
The gravitational landscape of the entire Solar System had been shifted, just so that Wilks-Lucayo could be maintained on its current heading.
Tracking would confirm this shift in less than a day. And with this confirmation would come a grim determination inside the GreenMars Ops Center to find the source of this disturbance and put it out of action for good.
Mariner City,
Candor Chasma, Mars
September 12, 2080 U.T.
Life in the Frontier Corps was always one adventure after another, thought Duncan Price. No two days were ever the same. First, you investigate the mysterious death of six scientists on a routine expedition into the Hellas Basin. You suspect the survivor, one Chinese meteorologist Dr. Dao Wen-Hsien, had something to do with it.
Then, on a separate expedition into the Candor canyonlands a few kilometers northwest of the city, your primary suspect up and disappears. Completely disappears. No body, no clothing, no nothing. The man just vanishes, whisked out of existence.
Price drummed his fingers on the case folder, scrolled through reports on his screen. Somehow, out of all this mess, he’d have to fashion a report of his own. One thing that UNISPACE loved was reports, lots of reports. But how could he begin to explain this one?
Price had checked with MarsNet, gotten surveillance imagery from every satellite he could, authorized drones to scour the area from lower altitudes.
The only thing that had ever shown up was an isolated cluster of nanobotic debris, in a shallow valley off the main drive out to Landfall, the site of the first landing. The drones had probed and sniffed but found little of interest. Most likely, some egghead had accidentally dropped a containment vessel and the little buggers had gotten out and gotten fried in Mars’ harsh, high UV environment. Careless, yes. Unethical, to be sure. Illegal…possibly. He decided to check Public Security’s latest manifest of recent expeditions. Maybe somebody had reported losing a bunch of bots.
Price’s eyes fell to an appointment reminder that had just chimed and popped up on his pod screen. And now this…someone he didn’t know from GreenMars wanted Frontier Corps help in organizing yet another trip outside…some kind of disturbance up in the same canyonlands.
Duncan Price rubbed his eyes. Coincidence? He didn’t put much stock in any of that, but in order to close out the case, he figured he’d better accommodate the request. So he called up the Expeditions desk at Public Security. The local cops owed him a favor anyway.
DPS and UNISPACE had never gotten along very well, from the first days on Mars. Maybe it was the fact that Public Security was local and UNISPACE was UN and there was nothing UNISPACE loved more than throwing its weight around on cases.
Price managed to reach Nick Rentoria at the Department’s Expeditions desk. EXP issued permits and generally regulated all authorized trips outside of habitable spaces on Mars.
“Inspector Price…it’s a privilege and an honor,” Rentoria lied. “What can we do for our fellow law enforcement professionals today?”
How about falling on a sword, for starters, Price thought but didn’t say. At the least, you had to have correct relations with PubSec. UNISPACE didn’t work in a vacuum…although sometimes, we really do work in a vacuum, Price figured wryly.
“Nick, I’m trying to find out why our sniffer drones spotted a bunch of nanobot debris outside the city a few days ago. Anybody from a recent trip lose any containment vessels?”
Rentoria smirked back at the Frontier Corps inspector over the vid. “This wouldn’t have anything to do with that missing Chinese weather guy, would it?”
“Sorry, Nick…you know how it is. UNISPACE case and all that. You know I can’t go into any details.”
Rentoria nodded sagely. “I thought so. We’re about ten steps ahead of you, Price, as usual. Already checked out the expedition logs…even interrogated the expedition boss, guy named Ziegler. Claims he didn’t see anything. So far, the man checks out clean.”
Price wanted to reach through the screen and place his hands firmly around Rentoria’s neck. PubSec loved to show up UNISPACE on cases th
at overlapped jurisdictions.
“So what’s this atom fluff my sniffers keep seeing around the same area? The eggheads lose something?”
Rentoria shrugged. “Hey, it’s your case. Go out there and see for yourself. I’ll even write you up a permit,” he snorted. Public Security had the authority to issue permits for trips outside hab spaces planet-wide. “Hell, it’s probably a trash bin somebody dumped out the back of a marscat. Violating every environmental ordinance on the books too.”
“It’s not trash,” Price was certain of that. A pity UNISPACE had to work with such troglodytes. “It’s definitely nano. And it needs to be investigated. This Dao fellow just up and vanished, according to your buddy Ziegler’s report. I see from the reports that PubSec whitewashed the follow-up as usual. What’s the matter, Nick, you afraid some big Martian mole man will jump out and get you?”
The two law enforcement officers continued sniping at each other but the end result was that Public Security would loan UNISPACE a ‘cat to take a trip up into the Tectonic Hills and see what this atom fluff was all about.
Probably nothing, Price figured. But before he closed the book on the Dao case, he needed to run down this latest bit of evidence. And there was that GreenMars engineer---what was his name? Nygren something---who wanted a Frontier Corps cop to accompany him on some kind of investigation in the same area.
Price emailed Nygren at the GreenMars Operations center:
Meet me at Southlocks, top ward, at 0800 hours two days from now with all your gear. I’ll get the marscat. We can accommodate four in all. EXP Permit # 080-051. Don’t be late…
Price tapped SEND and then sat back to think. Nygren had mentioned a disturbance in the badlands north of Ares Park…the Landfall region where humans had first set down on the Red Planet fifty-two years before.
What the hell did all that mean? And what interest did an engineer from GreenMars have in things stirring about up in the Candor canyonlands? Weren’t they more concerned with smashing asteroids into things? Or seeding Mars’ dry soil to make this crimson hellhole more livable?
Johnny Winger and the Hellas Enigma Page 9