Third Contact

by James Wilson

  Some areas of the ship had an outer layer that acted as both a shield from the outside environment and part of the ship-wide gravitational field generation system. The outer layer or skin was made of high-density compressed matter. When the cylinders spun, they generated a force like a gravitational field that pulled any object inside down to the floor. The gravitational field was strongest near the outer portion of the ship and near zero at the center.

  The top section of the ship, the nose cone, was a dome shape about thirty feet tall and had a translucent skin. The nose cone was also called the instrument deck and was where all the forward sensors detectors and collectors were housed. There was no need for a gravitational field in this section of the ship.

  Just below the nose cone was the second section, which was about forty feet tall; this area was also free of gravity and part of its skin was translucent just like the nose cone. It housed both a crew lounge and some storage space. In the lounge, the crew was free to float around and look at the Milky Way as it passed by at almost the speed of light. Most operations in the top two sections were automated so the area was only accessed for occasional maintenance and when members of the crew wanted to go to the lounge.

  Considerably larger than the first two sections, the third section was 150 feet tall. This section spun on its axis and the outer skin generated a gravitational field. Just inside the thick skin of the ship was a hexagon that created six floors around the perimeter of the cylinder. When on the outer floors, the Eark would feel about seventy percent of the gravity that their ancestors would have felt back on Timouri. The six floors were separated by walls with a set of stairs for going from floor to floor. At each set of stairs was also a hallway that led to the Zero-G elevators.

  Two floors of the third section comprised both the bridge and several small control rooms. One of the two floors next to the bridge was dedicated to the library. The other floors were divided into conference rooms, laboratories, and another small utility area. The next floor housed seven crew quarters with enough space for the five crew couples that were awake during the cruising phase of the trip with a couple of crew quarters to spare. The last floor was the nursery and school where the young Eark born on the ship spent most of their days while their parents were working. There was always at least one adult Eark there to watch over the little ones and to guide them through their education.

  The fourth section of the ship was the hangar deck, which was over eighty-feet tall. Several small ships and a fleet of maintenance robots were housed in the hangar. There were also air locks and large doors for ships and bots to exit and return to and from the ship. They had a wide variety of robotic ships that swept the area for debris that could impact the ship and performed routine maintenance. This section also housed the very large and much-used pool area, where they had a variety of types of cleverly designed pools. The pools stretched around part of the perimeter to take advantage of the higher gravity around the outer portion of the ship.

  The fifth cylindrical section of the ship was the Crew Transport Module. At 6,300 feet in length, it was by far the largest section of the ship. The top 100 feet of the module was a small crew lounge where the Eark rested when they first came out of stasis. There was also a maintenance area and some small spaces for storage. At the bottom of the Transport Module was a fifty-foot tall machinery storage area. The large center section of the Transport Module was a 6,250-foot-long cylinder that was divided into five 72-degree segments. Each segment was further divided along its length into fifty sections. Each of these sections was a long room with twenty cyrostasis chambers inside. There were enough stasis chambers for a total of 5,000 crew members. During the 200 years of acceleration and deceleration, all crew members were required to be in their stasis chambers; they would not survive otherwise.

  Below the Crew Transport Module was a 100 foot tall section where the two large replicators were stored. Each expedition departed with two fully assembled replicators on board. It took a long time to build the replicators, and they were needed as soon as they arrived at their destination; they were critical for every stage of the construction of the Stella Metentis and needed to be able to start replicating soon after arrival. These replicators were able to form the large high-density metal alloy pieces required to build the Stella Metentis. They were not usable during transport as they required a very high level of energy input to produce anything. They were designed to be operated near a star. The Eark had other much smaller replicators on board the ship that were used for simpler and smaller things that might be needed during the journey.

  Next, the fuel storage and engine area together were about 130-feet tall. Most of this space was consumed by the ion engine array. The intake of the engines first had to convert the high density fuel material into a much lower density plasma that could be accelerated by the engines and exhausted out the tail of the ship. Over a 200-year supply of fuel didn’t take much space as the fuel was compressed into an extremely high density, almost as dense as the nucleus of an atom. The Eark had mastered the ability to transform energy or ordinary matter into a number of different high-density states that could be used in many different ways. They mostly used this high-density matter as fuel for their ion engines, as shielding on most of their ships, and as a construction material for the Stella Metentis. The Eark were also experts in their ability to store and move this material around.

  Finally, at the tail end of the ship was the 100-foot-tall engine exhaust section. Each of the eight ion engines had its own hexagonal-shaped exhaust cone. Several of the cones around the perimeter could be adjusted to change the direction of the exhaust. This thrust vectoring gave the Eark the ability to easily turn the ship around, which they had to do before they started the deceleration process.

  CHAPTER 29

  FLYBY

  Not too long after establishing that the vessel would arrive at Earth in the first half of 4821, it became clear that the vessel was not on a direct path to Earth. Since its discovery in 4808, no signal of any kind had been detected from the vessel, and its course still had not changed. If the ship did not make a small adjustment in its course soon, it would fly past the Earth, missing it by only about seventy million miles. On its present course, it would fly directly into the Sun.

  Early in the year 4821, the vessel became visible to the naked eye. While underground construction and new colony launches were continuing at their fastest pace, several special vessel viewing areas were set up around the globe for people to come to the surface and see for themselves. Almost everyone wanted to have a look. Some would take any chance they could get to view the night sky, with or without the approaching vessel.

  In Region A, Jeff Feltman, an underground farmer, wanted to take his wife Susan to see the vessel. He had not seen the stars at night since he was seven years old. His parents’ place had an air shaft that he would climb up through to the surface. On summer nights, he would spend hours looking at the Milky Way with his binoculars.

  While on the train to the viewing area, he asked his wife, “When was the last time you saw the sky at night?”

  Susan replied, “I’ve never been to the surface, so I’ve never seen the stars. That’s why I wanted you to bring me to this so badly.”

  “Well, it’s supposed to be very clear tonight and I think they will have several telescopes set up,” Jeff said. “In addition to the vessel, we should be able to see the Andromeda galaxy and the Orion nebula.”

  “Will the Red Surfer star be out tonight?” asked Susan.

  “No, my dear. That star is gone. It has not been seen for over a thousand years. I’m not sure if we will be able to see the Lagoon Nebula or not; that’s where the Red Surfer used to be.”

  The date for the flyby was set for the second week of April. The population was on edge, and still the vessel had not changed its direction. Slowly, a consensus was beginning to build that the vessel was not coming to Earth. The day came and went, and the vessel passed by as if it had no interest in the p
lanet Earth at all. The collective sigh of relief was followed by a planet-wide party that lasted for days. A holiday was observed for a week; everyone was given time off from work except those that were essential, and their hours and duties were slashed to the minimum so that everyone on the planet could take some time to celebrate the continued existence of humanity, at least for the moment. However, there was mounting speculation that there may be an association between the vessel and the stellar-dimming phenomenon. This notion had a way of ending the celebrations and putting the population back on notice that their way of life might still be under considerable threat.

  CHAPTER 30

  THE PLAN

  After about fifty years of assembly and the slow accumulation of the crew members, the ship departed its Tenth Generation Eark star, Drakariea, for its nearly 3,000-year journey to Sol. For the first 100 years, all the crew members would be in stasis while the ship accelerated to over seventy-five percent the speed of light. When the acceleration phase ended, the first team of ten crew members would be automatically awakened by the ship’s systems. They remained on duty for a ten-year shift to operate and maintain the ship. After their shift ended, they returned to stasis, and the next team would be awakened to take over operations.

  When the ship had cruised nearly 2,800 years on the path to its new star, it had to be turned around 180 degrees, and all crew members had to return to their stasis chambers for deceleration. After the long cruising period, the crew transport module was more than half full with a total of 3,307 Eark. All the new crew members would have spent about twenty years taking classes and on-the-job training in preparation for their new jobs at Sol.

  Once the deceleration phase was over, they expected to be less than a light year from Sol, with about five years of traveling remaining till they reached their final position above the North Pole of the Sun. At this point, the last team of ten crew members would be awakened and would have many jobs to keep them busy for the last five years.

  Among this last crew was Captain Agafya, whose job was to bring the ship to its new home at Sol and oversee all operations. The Captain was second-in-command under Admiral Nikodima. Other members of the last crew would make any needed repairs to the ship prepare to build the Stella Metentis. Work on bringing the replicators online started right away, as this process took over a year to complete. All of the machinery involved in construction and all of the life support systems would be tested. Except for what the automated systems did during acceleration and deceleration, nothing would have been touched for about 100 years.

  All the final maneuvers were handled by the ship’s automated systems. The captain and his lieutenants watched everything closely. In an unlikely event, they could guide the ship manually into position. Once at its perch above Sol, the 200-year task of building the Stella Metentis began.

  When in position and all the radiant power from the star was available, the most critical task was to get the replicators producing the infrastructure components. Millions of miles of high-density metal alloy was needed for the backbone of all the modules. The Stella Metentis alone required enough material to circle the Sun four times. Construction required a continuous supply of parts. Once it was operational, the replicators would be run continuously for the entire construction phase, stopping only for maintenance.

  The first task was to produce the North Pole habitat module, a long cylindrical building that would take its position a few miles further from the Sun than the ship. A second habitat module would be built ten years later at the South Pole station when the second ship arrived. The design called for enough housing for 10,000 Eark, but half that was more than enough for what was needed now, so only part of the housing units would be built to start with. The first of three large indoor pools was built as well, so the Eark would have a place to swim and fish after a hard shift of work on the Harvester.

  Similar to their other designs, the habitat module had a high-density outer skin that served dual purposes: it acted as a shield from cosmic rays and high-energy radiation and was part of the artificial gravity system. Again like the ship, the elevator’s shafts made up the core of the cylinder and had no effective generated gravitational field to allow the residents to quickly go from level to level.

  As more and more housing became available, more of the crew members were awakened from stasis, and the rate of construction slowly began to reach its peak. After enough housing units were completed and sufficient crew members were available, construction of the collector and the converter became the priority and were built in parallel. A few years later, construction of the transmitter would get started.

  The collector was built between the Sun and the ship about a mile below the ship’s position. The converter was positioned just above the collector. Over ninety percent of the energy produced by the Sun would eventually be funneled into the north collector and enter the converter where the highest energy radiation would be first converted into x-rays and ultimately into microwave radiation before leaving the transmitter.

  As the construction of the habitat module continued, two much smaller habitat modules were also built. These modules would head out in opposite directions and fly to the equator, where bases of operations would be set up to begin construction of two of the center sections of the first two spokes. The other two center sections of the spokes would be built by the crew of the second ship in the same way about a decade later. The spokes guided the solar output from the star to the North collector using the Sun’s own plasma gas and precise control of the electromagnetic fields around the Sun’s surface.

  Construction of the entire Stella Metentis took a full crew like the one at Sol about 200 years to complete. The crew would spend about another 100 years to get all its internal systems finished and everything up to a hundred percent capacity.

  CHAPTER 31

  MANEUVERS

  An honored reporter had been working at the SubNet News since before discovery of the vessel. She had been involved with reporting of the slowly-evolving story in some way at every step. She was now in charge of putting together a two-hour video summary of related events over the last twenty years that would air just before tonight’s one hour coverage of the latest vessel news.

  The first news clip from 4810 opened with the original discoveries of the vessel: the first record of it by the PSS1 ground telescope in 4808 and the rediscovery by Alexei Karla in 4809. The clip next covered some of the changes that the discovery brought to life on Earth. There was also an accounting of some of the observation platforms that were built and put into place to watch the vessel.

  The second and third clips were a result of the 4817 discovery of the second vessel. SubNet News led the story from the day of the discovery, showing that both vessels had the same trajectory and the same apparent shape and size. The second vessel soon became known as the sister ship.

  The next story first covered the anxiety in Earth’s entire population. Tension was very high after the discovery of the sister ship, and with the first ship drawing even closer, it remained high from that point on. Another area included in this portion of the film was how after seven years, the vessels had affected almost every person’s life here on Earth, with many new jobs in both defense and research and a completely revamped budget and priority list. In just a few short years, the planet had been transformed.

  The fourth segment in the sequence was a complete one-hour special news event centered on the flyby, the day the first vessel crossed Earth’s orbit in 4821. For the two years prior, everyone watched and waited for the vessel to adjust its course to bring it directly to Earth, but the course correction never came. To everyone’s surprise and relief, the vessel flew right past Earth as if we were not even here. It was at that time that we began to realize that the vessel was headed for the Sun. The broadcast also presented many of the details (or lack thereof) about the vessels that had been discovered over years of observation. Its trajectory had not changed once, and no signals of any kind had ever been dete
cted from the ship.

  Tonight’s coverage would show in detail the ten orbits that the vessel made around the Sun over the last several weeks. It came in high above the North Pole of the Sun and orbited perpendicular to the plane of the planet’s orbit. The first orbit was at a distance of about fifteen million miles. Each orbit brought the vessel a little closer to the Sun. The segment would highlight how on its eighth orbit at a distance of about two million miles, it began slowing down and finally came to a complete stop just about one-and-a-half-million miles directly above the North Pole of the Sun. Since parking in that spot, it had not moved or emitted any detectable signals.

  CHAPTER 32

  WEAPONS

  Before First Contact, life was simple: we were alone in the vast universe. After First Contact, we were overjoyed by the fact that we were not alone and that life probably filled the galaxy. But nostalgia soon gave rise to the notion that a percentage of that alien life could be hostile. The larger of Earth’s regions started to believe that defensive measures should be taken in case hostile aliens decided to visit Earth.

  In the late forty-second century, the newly formed Earth Guard group began a three-part approach to defense. A new comprehensive weapons program was started. Development of plans to colonize the Moon, Mars, and several asteroids began, and Earth’s population would become as hidden from outsiders as possible.