It took them another day of debate and discussions before they were able to hammer out a strategy which everyone thought had the best chance of getting the job done. They sent it out to the president’s office and his set of scientific advisers, who did not have any issues with it, but did suggest minor modifications to improve the effectiveness. Jason could see Oleg’s fingerprints all over the suggestions.
With all the decisions made, they had to get it implemented. It really meant a lot of programming and testing. Drawing out contingency plans and the whole shebang of preparations that any mission control has to do. They had 20 days to implement, and the entire Sentinel mission went into overdrive. The engineers, programmers and the staff at the mission control would have very little sleep in the next 20 days.
Jason had also ensured that his co-conspirators on the other side were aware of their plans. He got back a cryptic response. “Good to see the Americans develop some sense finally. We wish you luck and will back you up if necessary. Unfortunately you left your big guns at home.” Jason knew the person who had sent this message.
The person was taking far higher personal risk than Jason was. Jason was risking his career and at worst imprisonment. This person had put his life at stake. For him the penalty would be death. He could say far less and more cryptically, so Jason read between the lines and understood what he was trying to say and was relieved. There were nukes in play as a backup.
While the engineers and programmers who had built Sentinel were getting busy with the task of major reprogramming of the spacecraft, Jason called a conference of most of his mission control staff to work out the implementation of the strategy. Every fine point and contingency would be discussed threadbare.
It would be ensured that each and every one of them from every shift knew everything to the last detail. They would get only one shot at this, and no one could afford a single screw up. After the initial briefing to the control staff, Jason had organized a conference call with the Darmstadt team to tap into their experience. Let them know the Sentinel’s plans and get their feedback.
The conference call went on expected lines and as it was winding down, Jason said on a whim. “Stephan I don’t expect them at Darmstadt to need a third shift controller in a hurry, now that Sedna – 1 mission is over. We at Houston however could do very well with your experience for this last part of the Sentinel mission. There is nothing like having a person who has been there done that standing right next to us in the mission control pit. What do you say? Could you help us for these few weeks with your presence?”
Stephan and everyone in the conference room at Houston was taken by surprise as Jason was smiling a mischievous smile. Houston had access to Stephan and the entire Darmstadt team available to them at a minute’s notice via teleconference. No one needed to travel to Houston for that purpose. The entire team was puzzled, since this had never been discussed beforehand.
Jason continued “I am sorry Jürgen, I don’t mean to go over your head, but we at Houston really like Stephan, don’t we?” Jason was grinning and panned his head towards his team finally stopping his eyes on Saloni. Everyone in the room had figured out what this was about by now and were all grinning except Saloni, who was blushing deep red.
Jürgen was Stephan’s boss and the Chief mission controller of the Sedna – 1 project. Jürgen and Jason had taken many training courses together and considered each other friends. Jason was sure Jürgen would agree. It seems Jürgen was equally aware of the long distance romance. Office romance doesn’t stay secret in any country it would seem.
“Of course I have no issues if Stephan has none.” Jürgen said giving a wide knowing grin himself. To add to Stephan’s discomfort. Jürgen pressed on, addressing Stephan directly. “You don’t mind travelling all the way to America do you Stephan.” He said in a tone as if it was such a huge trouble and burden he was putting on Stephan’s shoulders.
Stephan was flustered and blushing at the same time, and someone in Darmstadt had been mischievous and zoomed the camera to focus only on Stephan. His discomfiture and embarrassment was there for everyone in Houston to see in all its glory on the large screen. Everyone in the room burst out laughing. Even Saloni, despite being in a similar state herself could not help but put her hand over her mouth and suppress her laughter.
“Yes… I… I mean yes sir. I will go as you order sir.” Stephan blurted out clearly happy but also wanting this conversation to end desperately. Jürgen however was having too much fun and would not let it go so easily. “I am not giving you any order. We are not in the military. You want to go or not? You decide. No one is forcing you.”
There was a moment of panic in Stephan’s face fearing losing the opportunity. He almost shouted. “Yes. I want to go! I mean… yes I will go sir.” There was no controlling the laughter on both sides of the Atlantic now.
Everyone had their fill of laughter at young Stephan’s expense while Stephan himself wished that the earth would part and take him down with it and out of this conference room. Jürgen made a last shot at Stephan before closing the meeting. “So it is settled then, Stephan would travel to Houston, as quickly as his eagerness allows him to.”
The control hall would have been only talking about Saloni and now present in the flesh Stephan for the next 20 days, but for the fact that they were all so neck deep in work that they barely got time to eat, sleep or even go home. It is a testament to the warped priorities of human beings that they found time to gossip about it anyway.
The 20 days flew by and they approached what they had started calling the spectator time, which was just over 6 hours in the case of Sentinel. Sentinel was so far away, that it took light just over three hours to reach from earth. So everything they were seeing from Sentinel had already happened three hours ago.
If they wanted to react to something they were seeing and send a command to the Sentinel immediately, it would take three hours for it to reach. So in effect it takes six hours to react to anything seen from Sentinel.
When your rendezvous time with the alien craft reaches six hours, it means that there is no point trying to send it any signals based on the images being sent because it would be past the alien craft by the time the signal is received and can be acted upon. So for the last six hours of the approach, you are basically a spectator of what transpires.
Unlike Sedna – 1 however, the Sentinel team had made special preparations for the spectator time. Humans could not command the Sentinel from earth, but humans could send a small part of their brain into the craft in advance. One of the many group of programmers, engineers and military strategist has done nothing but plan and program for the last six hours of Sentinel’s flight before it reached the alien ship.
They had uploaded huge number of parameters trying to cover every contingency they could think of. It could not be termed artificial intelligence, humans were very far from it yet. It was more like an incredibly long and complex list of what-if scenarios and instructions for each such scenario.
The alien ship made its opening move about half an hour after they went into spectator time. This time the move was different from the last time. Unlike Sedna – 1 which had deliberately been aimed to miss the alien craft, Sentinel was aimed directly at the alien craft. There was a minor blast like last time of what the engineers had determined would most likely be explosive bolts.
This time the blast however was from directly in front of the alien craft. The part detached this time was of a far higher mass than last time. There actually was a radar profile of the detached part, which proved its greater dimension and mass. The geeks at the trenches promptly named it Z2.
This time Z2 remained on its original course, but the alien ship shifted direction by a tiny fraction to miss Sentinel by about 2 Km. However this eventuality was one of the obvious ones thought through by the by the team.
Sentinel’s onboard computer had the programming to handle this eventuality. Sentinel started changing course to again get into a collision course w
ith the alien ship. Z2 was also tracking Sentinel, and it changed its course to get into a collision course with Sentinel.
Thus began an amusing race between three bodies in space approaching each other. If there had been enough distance then the alien craft would have ended up turning 90° trying to avoid a direct collision with Sentinel, while Sentinel would also have ended up turning 90° trying to chase and get into a head on collision with the alien craft, while Z2 would have been the third comic player trying to get into a collision with Sentinel, but never managing do so as it tracked the parabolic trajectory of Sentinel.
At the speed at which the two crafts were approaching each other, there was not enough distance between the two, and they would end up colliding. For a change it was the human craft which had the advantage due its chemical lateral thrusters, which could generate far higher thrust than the ion lateral thrusters that the alien ship had.
This meant Sentinel could out turn its enemy, and hence the alien ship had no chance of avoid a collision. After about 45 minutes of this cat and mouse game, the alien ship changed tactics. It no longer tried to avoid a collision with Sentinel. Instead it switched off its thrusters and started coasting.
The front telescope of Sentinel could now view the alien ship in resolution of tens of pixels, and the lighting had also improved as it had entered beyond Neptune’s orbit into the solar system. They could clearly make out that the alien ship was turning, most probably to start decelerating.
Why it was doing this was obvious. Z2 had continued in its original course and was on track to make a collision with Sentinel. The alien ship was simply trying to put as much distance between itself and that collision as possible. This situation had also been anticipated, and double insurance had be purchase for this eventuality.
The government may have prevented NASA from loading nukes, but not from loading conventional missiles. The original planning of Sentinel had assumed that it would be loaded with tactical nuclear weapons. Instead of loading one large tactical nuke, they had planned for four lower 20 ton yield tactical nuclear missiles, each weighing 150 Kg along with propellant.
This would maximize the spread, and the chance of hitting in case a few missed. They were limited to four, since the designers could only allow them a total of 600 Kg. When the nukes went off the table, the tubes were replaced by the closest match conventional missiles. These were the US Navy’s Wrath missiles usually fired from fighters and helicopters.
They weighed about 140 kg with the rocket and propellant, and its newly developed and classified explosive could still give a yield equivalent to about 200 Kg of TNT. That was only about 1% of the yield of the tactical nuke, but with their hands tied behind their backs, it was the best the engineers could do.
For this particular situation though it would be enough. A single missile left its port and launched headlong towards Z2. Two minutes later a second missile lefts its port to follow the first missile on its mission. Human targeting was not expected to be as accurate on such a high speed collision as the aliens were, so they had launched two missiles in the hope that at least one would connect.
It was not that the aliens had some technology that the humans didn’t have, that made human targeting less accurate. It all boiled down to the speed of their computers. At this high speed with the enemy trying to evade you by making micro changes in random direction hundreds of times every second, you had to keep up with your sensors to make minute course corrections a hundred times a second to stay on target.
The sensors were also an issue and the aliens probably had more sensitive sensors, but that was not the decisive factor because human sensors were good enough. What made the corrections slower in case of humans, was that the computer couldn’t keep pace with the amount of corrections every second.
The wrath missiles, which were designed to cut through air resistance on earth, streaked blindingly fast in the emptiness of space. When the first missile caught up with Z2 there was a collective moan in the control hall as it missed completely. The software on Sentinel would right now be prepping the next two missiles as it waited to see the result of the second missile.
The second missile approached Z2, which was now estimated to be a round object between 40 and 50 meters in diameter. It could be a cylindrical object or a dish shaped object. All they could see from the profile presented to them, was a circle. The second missile didn’t miss, but it almost had missed.
Even from the distance that Sentinel was, it was obvious that the missile had hit around the edge of the object. It actually turned out to be a good thing. The large momentum the missile had built, along with the explosive energy released on impact at one edge of the circular device, put it in a crazy wild tumble and spin.
They could now see as Z2 rotated, that it was a conical plate. Engineers guessed that it must be the impact protection shield in front of the alien ship meant for protection from minor space rock impacts. Humans were building a similar shield now in front of their ships. Sedna – 1 had one, as does the Sentinel.
This realization put all the human planners watching in a tizzy. Why would they throw their shield at Sentinel? Earlier they had thrown what looked like a detached lateral thruster at Sedna – 1 using it as a kinetic kill device. Was it possible that the aliens are throwing pieces of their ship at the humans, and not weapons because they had none? Was this an unarmed exploration ship?
This thought brought crashing down all the certainties they had developed over the last few weeks, about the nature and intentions of the aliens. From the president’s scientific advisors, to Jason, Stephan, Saloni, Boris, Clarisse and all their colleagues watching could not help be filled with self-doubt all over again. Were they attacking a peaceful unarmed interstellar alien exploration ship?
Jason shook his head. It was all out of their control now. No point having second thoughts. The die was cast. It was all in the hands of a software they wrote and uploaded many days ago. Humanity’s relations with the Shaitans, for the better or the worse had been decided by fate.
Z2 was now in uncontrollable tumble, which its puny single ion thrusters, placed to provide it with frontal thrust but no attitude control, could not hope to correct. It would tumble and drift out of the way of Sentinel.
Still Sentinel would not take a chance. Shortly, it unleashed its second item of insurance, its powerful lateral chemical thrusters. They moved Sentinel further away from the tumbling Z2. It was a good thing that Sentinel did move away as a matter of precaution, because Z2 was not done yet.
Either the occupants of the alien craft, or the software in it figured out that it would never be able to fulfill its purpose of ramming sentinel head on, so it did the next best thing it could possibly do. It exploded into thousands of pieces, may be even hundreds of thousands of pieces. Houston could not make out the pieces, all it saw was an explosion followed by the disappearance of Z2.
It was not the explosion that was supposed to hurt Sentinel, but the fragments. The fragments spread across kilometers in every direction and dispersed. They could no longer deliver a killing blow to Sentinel, but even small fragments penetrating the hull of Sentinel or its sensors could do serious damage to it and possible even disable it.
Sentinel flew through the debris field, it had no option or time to further deviate course. Thanks to Sentinel moving further from Z2, it was out of the dense debris field. But with hundreds of thousands of pieces the probability of one or two pieces hitting was always there, and so it did.
Mission control immediately started getting alarms and people dived into analysis, while Jason prayed that nothing had happened to the lateral thrust controls, which would aim it back at the alien craft. Before the trenches could finish their analysis, he got the answer, as he saw the live feed of sentinel change course to get back to collision course with the alien craft.
A voice shouted from the trenches. “Two possible points of entry of shrapnel identified. One most probably went through to the missile ports while the other probab
ly went right through from one end and exiting from the other. There is no damage indicated but for insulation damage. The missiles are inoperative, but being made out of dense heavy metal, they stopped the shrapnel from going in any further and hence causing any damage.
The other damage is causing a slow leakage of heat which the onboard plutonium decay heater would not be able to compensate. The craft will slowly go cold and its internal systems will freeze and die in about 20 hours. No big deal, we don’t need 20 hours.”
Yes we don’t need 20 hours, it will all be decided in the next few hours. Still the loss of the missiles was a pity. It reduced their options. At least the missiles had protected the rest of the ship in the process of dying.
The alien ship noted the survival of Sentinel and changed its tactics once again. It stopped decelerating and turned its main thrusters sideways. Now it was facing at an angle to its line of approach and then it lit up its main thrusters.
This was clearly its last desperate move. It was now using its main thrusters which were now acting like a lateral thruster, to move away from the line of collision. Ion thrusters may be efficient long running, while chemical rocket thrusters may be inefficient short running systems, but chemical rockets are hundreds of times more powerful. Sentinel’s lateral thrusters were able to keep up with the alien main ion thruster, but only just.
It was now only a matter of minutes before they met each other. In the end when the collision happened, just like Sedna – 1, human eyes could not track it. One moment the alien ship was a fuzzy spot and the next the images from Sentinel disappeared.
They had programmed the last minute to be captured at a 1000 frames per second, but there would not be enough bandwidth to transmit it in real time, so it would have been buffered and all available bandwidth used to transmit it. Jason did not hope to have gotten much of that transmitted before the ship died.
Now they were in a peculiar position. They had no way of knowing from up close if they had caused enough damage and had been able to stop the alien craft. Mission control screens immediately switched to pictures being taken from every available telescope in space and land.
The Battle of Titan Page 13