Turning Point (Book 1): A Time To Die

by Wandrey, Mark

  Andrew turned and began to examine the space in more detail. Dozens of storage compartments for everything from soda cans to boxes of little plastic swizzle sticks lined the walls. “Bingo,” he whispered as he opened one to find a pair of binders with “Airbus–A380F” printed on the spine. One read “Trouble Shooter,” and the other “Checklists.” He grabbed the troubleshooter binder and looked at the tabs. A second later he was examining the massive craft’s schematic layout.

  It only took him a short time to find where they were. The red outline around galley storage matched the specially made book. Andrew spent a minute flipping between pages, getting a feel for the construction of the underbelly of the plane. Finally, he tore a couple of pages from the manual, folded them, and stuffed them into a pocket on his flight jumpsuit, before putting the binder back where he’d found it.

  “Did you find anything?” one of the passengers asked in halting English.

  “I hope so,” Andrew answered. He went to one wall, found a recessed ring and pulled. A tape closure resisted, and he pulled until it broke. The wall panel came away, and a much louder roar from the plane’s engines flooded the room. “This crawlway leads to the amidships cargo hold, and from there to the forward galley storage, and into the forward bar. There’s a spiral staircase that goes to the middeck. It accesses the flight deck as well, about 60 meters forward of us.”

  “That’s a bloody long distance,” Dr. White said, having calmed the flight attendant while Andrew studied. The man handed him a couple water bottles.

  Andrew took one and drank it in a long series of swallows. Setting the empty bottle on a cabinet, he stuffed the full one into a pocket on his uniform. “It’s not that bad. I crawled 200 meters under barbed wire and through mud while some crazy Marine shot over our heads during survival training. This can’t be that bad.”

  “Was anyone trying to eat you during that training?”

  Andrew had to admit the doctor had him there. “I can’t say they were. But those leathernecks are mean dudes.” He knelt at the opening and looked inside. It was all but black, with only a few intermittent clusters of red LED lights. There wasn’t much room as the designers only intended for mechanics to use it on the ground. “Wish me luck.”

  “Best of luck,” the doctor said, and Andrew was off into the dark.

  * * *

  Jeremiah Osborne looked at the computer display and scratched his head. Osborne’s best and brightest engineers had completely taken over the main machine shop of Oceanic Orbital Enterprises on Long Beach’s Pier 11. He’d ridden them the last 24 hours like a taskmaster of old, personally stripping powerful computers from orbital operations and moving them down to the ex-machine shop, before turning them over to the material science teams who’d once helped craft ultra-high-tech alloys for his rocket. He completely forgot all those millions he’d spent, his memories washed away by his prize from the desert.

  “So, you are saying there is anomalous chemical analysis data coming back on the metals?” he asked the team leader, a man who’d worked for OOE since Jeremiah created it. He’d stolen the man from NASA when budget cutbacks gutted it.

  “Well,” the scientist explained, “we didn’t really do a proper test because we couldn’t cut off a piece of the metal.”

  “You said the melting point was too high, and it’s acting like the whole piece was part of a matrix?”

  “Yes,” the scientist said, pointing at a screen. “You see the way the molecular structure is linked? This is a hypothesis, of course. It distributes energy almost like a superconductor mixed with a Prince Rupert’s drop. Anyway, we got some spectral analysis from a tiny amount of spall we got by hitting it with a laser, and that’s where this came from.” He touched the corner of the screen, and the display changed. It was a typical chemical analysis from a mass spectrometer; each element was represented by a line on a graph.

  “I understand this better,” Jeremiah said.

  “You see here what you’d expect from a terrestrial metal. This is an analysis from the titanium, chromium, and molybdenum alloy we use on a primary bell housing, before coating it with ablative ceramic.”

  “I know, I helped design it, Ed.”

  “Oh, sure, sorry. Anyway,” he said and tapped the screen, “this is from our little craft.”

  The spectral analysis was principally similar. The majority of it was an iron alloy. It had small percentages of manganese, aluminum, and copper, and a higher percentage of titanium. But there, far to the right, were three little red bars. “What are those?” Jeremiah asked, and pointed.

  “We have no idea,” the scientist replied. “The substance has an atomic weight similar to that of tungsten, but its properties are closer to diamond. The alloying principle may be imbuing this superconducting quality. It’s quite amazing.”

  Jeremiah left him and visited his electronic and electrical engineers. They were busy examining the interior of the craft with tiny flexible cameras. They’d removed all the dirt inside from the pilot digging its way out after the landing. It was far too small to allow access to anything larger than a small dog, but inside the cabin were tantalizing indications of interfaces of unusual origin. “Any ideas?” he asked the team leader.

  “We’re guessing their systems use a touch contact of some sort, possibly close proximity like a Bluetooth. We’ve been running the electromagnetic spectrum but haven’t gotten a bite yet.” The cockpit, unfortunately, didn’t allow access to the rest of the vehicle.

  Down the hull, a pair of technicians were slowly passing a bulky instrument—connected to a laptop by clearly improvised connections—back and forth across the craft. The lead noticed his gaze. “The only noticeable RF pings we’ve been getting are these little blips all along the hull.” He took Jeremiah to where the computer was making a 3D image of the craft. Every time their sensor picked up a ping the computer noted the location and signal quality.

  Jeremiah watched them work in silence. He noted the regularity of the readings and their arrangement on the hull. His engineer’s mind came to a quick conclusion. “Rivets,” he said.

  The electrical engineer supervising the readings looked up at him. “Rivets?”

  Jeremiah looked back at him for a moment before remembering he was talking to an electrical, not mechanical, engineer. “Yes.” He went to a workbench, found one of the prototype models of the ship, and brought it back. He pointed to the lines of little points showing rivets. “You have to connect body panels to the superstructure in some way.”

  The man looked at his display, then back at the model. The resemblance was undeniable. “Okay sir, you have a point. But why would rivets be giving off an EM signature?”

  “I don’t know,” Jeremiah admitted. “Have you tried communicating with them?”

  Several of the technicians started laughing, until they saw that their boss was serious, at which point they stopped. “I don’t see how that is possible,” one of them said.

  “Well,” Jeremiah said, and turned to his material science team, “is there a welding process that might give off an EM signature like that?”

  The woman heading the group examined the readings for a second, then shook her head. “No sir. I could see some sort of radioactive residue from a radical welding process giving off EM, but it would also be emitting other waves or particles. The only radiation we’re getting is from the aft end of the craft.”

  Jeremiah glanced at the ship. They’d erected a series of heavy lead plates around the rear section to shield the working teams from stray radiation. There wasn’t much of it, but there was enough that he didn’t want to face a lawsuit if someone got a melanoma or something.

  “That must mean there is a control to release the plates,” Jeremiah told his bemused mechanical team leader.

  “Sir,” the man said, “a control on every single rivet? Isn’t that extremely wasteful?”

  “We get more detailed with computer controls every year,” Jeremiah reminded him. “Think of how compli
cated car braking systems have gotten in the last 20 years. What used to be a simple hydraulic line is now a complicated feedback system, using multiple inputs and computers, to create a dynamic feedback loop from the wheels. Traction control, too. Hell, my car even has fly-by-wire for the damned throttle!”

  “He has a point,” the electrical team leader agreed. They exchanged looks and some heads nodded.

  An hour later, Jeremiah returned from getting a cup of coffee and checking his email to find the teams working together to finish improvising an EM transmitter/receiver device capable of a range of frequencies.

  “We jury-rigged this from a backup telemetry reporting module off our ship’s aileron controls,” the mechanical engineer told him.

  “Let’s see what happens.” Jeremiah gestured at the craft. A volunteer took the transceiver, connected to a laptop by a long USB cable, and ran it along the hull slowly until he found a rivet point just behind what appeared to be the cockpit entrance.

  “There!” a tech called out. “Back a millimeter…over a smidge…got it!” The laptop screen displayed the EM signature, recorded it in extreme detail, and expanded on it. It wasn’t just a simple EM spike. It was a repeating signal with structure.

  “Check another,” Jeremiah said, and they did. It looked identical, but when they ran it through signal analysis software from the communications department, it became obvious there were tiny differences. “Can we see if the signal is a data set of some sort?” More analysis followed.

  At first there didn’t appear to be a discernable pattern, just random noise. That was until a computer tech who was linking another pair of PCs for them to crunch numbers looked at the analysis of the data. “That’s cool,” he said, “What does it say?”

  “Nothing we can tell,” a commo tech said.

  “You deciphered it?”

  “It’s not binary,” the tech said.

  “No, it’s ternary.” Blank stares. “Base three? You know, zero, one, and plus one?” More blank stares. “You guys never studied Soviet computer history?”

  Jeremiah laughed and went for more coffee. He’d spent years gathering eclectic minds at OOE like some people gather strange posters or bad Christmas sweaters. It looked like it was beginning to pay off.

  When he returned, the computer guy and three of his buddies were nearly done writing a quick translation program. A retired MIT professor who’d stepped on a lot of toes and landed at OOE came over when Jeremiah returned. The man had taken over the programming department and gotten it in line, writing all their operating systems from scratch when NASA refused to help. “Jeremiah, this is fascinating! What has NASA said about our screwing around with that thing?”

  “Not a word,” Jeremiah said, and took out his smartphone. There was still no reply, and he’d sent two more emails and left a voicemail for Al as well. “I couldn’t wait to get rid of it when I first found it. Now…” he gestured at the ship, “I hope they don’t sweep in and take away my toy before I finish playing with it.”

  “So you believe this is a real, honest-to-God, alien spaceship?”

  Jeremiah walked over and turned a monitor around so the other man could see the high-resolution image of the desiccated body he’d brought back from the Texas desert. “Yeah, actually I do.”

  “Mr. Osborne?” Jeremiah turned to see the comms specialist and the computer crew waving at him. “We’re ready to try transmitting. We’re curious what might happen.”

  “Sure,” he said and nodded to them. “Let’s see what happens.” No one noticed that Jeremiah took a few steps back toward a thick Plexiglas shield. He watched as they began by echoing the signals back at the rivet points. There was no response. Next, they tried variations of other signals from different bolts with similar results. Finally, after two hours of watching them work, Jeremiah quietly left them to their task and went up to his little apartment above the main vehicle assembly floor.

  The single-stage-to-orbit craft sat there like it had for almost a month, fully assembled and ready to fly. Azanti, tail number OOE01, was the culmination of his life’s dream. The SSTO could carry an 11-ton payload with a crew of four; it had a 14-ton payload capacity in automated mode. Its linear aerospike motors were completely revolutionary, based on a design abandoned by NASA decades ago. If the design proved out, it could return from orbit and be ready to fly again with only 100 man-hours of labor.

  Years of work and innovation culminated in a single lifting-body prototype that had about two-thirds the displacement of a 747, with hundreds of thousands of moving parts. One reporter had called the Azanti “the summation of the best developments of manned space flight to date.” And in a little room downstairs was a tiny ship that made his achievement look like a soapbox derby car sitting next to a Grand Prix racecar. Jeremiah fell asleep with mixed feelings and slept fitfully.

  In the morning, he found hot coffee and Danish waiting in his outer office, a present from one of the interns. He took a few minutes to shower and dress. The coffee was the perfect drinking temperature. Down in the machine shop, he found the same team still working. “You people haven’t stopped?” They scarcely noticed him. “Okay,” he said, and moved over to look at various computer displays over their shoulders.

  Aerospace engineering was his primary area of expertise. As such, the computer programming and results he was looking at were almost incomprehensible. What little background he had in programming was useless for understanding this new ‘ternary’ language they were using.

  “Did you ever ascertain why ternary?” he asked one of the computer techs.

  “We think it’s using a quantum-level processor,” the tech replied.

  “That’s…pretty advanced,” Jeremiah said.

  “You could say that,” his MIT professor said, sporting a day’s growth of beard and carrying a big mug of coffee. “Our lab at the Institute produced some prototype quantum processors. Our biggest problem was understanding what we could do with them. It was like handing the Red Baron an F-22. If we’re right, this ship uses quantum processors as well as quantum memory.”

  Jeremiah nodded to cover the fact he didn’t know what that meant. The professor glanced at him and chuckled. “A quantum processor could be capable of operating at nearly infinite speeds, and a quantum memory would have nearly infinite storage.”

  “Oh!” Jeremiah said. That made sense. “No luck with the rivets?”

  “I’m not convinced that’s what we’re working with,” the professor said. “Could be these are just transmitters or something.” Jeremiah noted that a few people nodded, some shook their heads, and still more looked noncommittal. “But, on the chance you’re correct, Gilbert has been writing what you could call the first human-written quantum program.”

  “What does it do?”

  “It’s supposed to talk to another quantum program. It’s only a few thousand lines of code. It takes all the signals we’ve recorded, extrapolates patterns, and sends back a reply. It won’t help if it takes a unique pre-programmed response, but you’d have to assume it would take a predictable response. At least that’s the direction we’re taking with this.”

  Jeremiah shrugged. “Okay, you’re the computer expert. How soon?”

  “We’ve been trying for about an hour.”

  Jeremiah nodded again and watched them work. They were passing the transceiver along the hull recording, transmitting, sensing, and moving on. It seemed an agonizingly slow process.

  “That’s interesting,” one of the programmers said.

  “What?” the professor asked, moving over to them.

  “The program just got its first reply.”

  “Reply?” Jeremiah asked. They dropped into deep technobabble and ignored him. Normally he wouldn’t tolerate that, but he knew enough to realize when he was in over his head, and the people he paid a lot of money to were almost in over their heads as well. So, they kept working while he quietly grumbled and waited.

  The team became increasingly excited and frust
rated. Finally, they stopped for a minute, and the programming whiz did some of his magic. Then they tried again, but with very different results. They put the transceiver back where they first started hours ago, just behind the cockpit, and activated the program. Even back where Jeremiah was standing, he heard a distinctive “PING!”

  “Nobody fucking move,” the engineering head spoke in a clear tone. Everyone did as instructed, especially Jeremiah, who was afraid, for a second, he’d shit his pants.

  After a moment, a somewhat shaky tech ever so slowly placed the transceiver against the hull again. “Well that’s different,” the man at the computer said.

  “What?” Jeremiah squeaked.

  “No signal now,” someone said. They moved the unit and found another signal. The man running the program lifted an eyebrow, and the professor looked at Jeremiah.

  “Try another,” Jeremiah suggested. The professor nodded, and they moved to another point. The computer chewed on the code for a moment and suddenly, “PING!” Another transmission point was gone. “I think you’ve figured it out.”

  “Yes, but figured what out?” the professor wondered. At Jeremiah’s prompting, they continued working in an expanding square pattern behind the cockpit opening until, after releasing several more rivets, a section of hull suddenly detached. The tech who’d been operating the transceiver looked up in surprise.

  “Slight increase in radiation,” a technician announced. “Non-ionizing; no danger.”

  The tech operating the transceiver retreated, and a small robot moved in. The dislodged plate was still in its place, raised a millimeter above its surroundings. The robot used a delicate arm to touch the plate, and it bobbed gracefully from the touch. “It’s levitating,” Jeremiah said quietly. The robot arm took hold of the plate, and, after applying a bit of force, pulled it away without fanfare.