Timelines

by Bob Blink

  Chapter 45

  Time Complex

  Late Evening Sunday, 1 October 2006

  Some of the time pressure had been lifted from our shoulders as a result of further study of the ship’s displays, specifically the star charts and slowly changing position of what we believed to be the alien mother ship. Having identified the star systems and tracking the movement of the mother ship since we first discovered the displays it appeared that given the distances involved and the apparent motion it would be almost three months before the ship completed the circuit shown and would return close to us again. That assumed there were no delays that would result in the ship lingering in the vicinity of one of the other systems. We had not been watching the ship’s movement long enough to have seen what the procedure was when one of the systems was approached. From the current projections, the opportunity would present itself within the next week to ten days. We would be watching the developments carefully as the time approached. Even now, the video from the monitor was being captured full time so that it could be stored, but also to allow repeated viewing of events that might be seen.

  “Any additional thoughts on the subject of disabling the station?” Carol asked.

  We were back together again, even though it was already evening and it had been a full day. A need to do something filled all of us. We had tossed around a couple of ideas after our tour outside the other day. Destroying the station seemed to offer the best hope for discouraging the aliens. The more we learned of their capabilities, the more certain it became that a direct encounter was doomed to failure. If their documentation was correct, and further indications of the time constraint had been found in the materials copied from the ship’s archives, then anything that would push the project beyond their completion deadline would work in our favor. Seeing that multiple systems were part of the overall project made it seem even more probable that the loss of one system would have to have been considered in their initial planning. We simply had to find a way to make it happen. The simplest solution would be for Jeff to convince his people to agree with our conclusions and to provide the help we requested. They had the means available. However, we were all somewhat doubtful they would be as convinced of the necessity to destroy the complex. Besides, much of our information was based on speculation from the limited clues available to us. Anyone from outside the project would need time to reach the same level of understanding of the aliens and their project.

  “Damaging the thermal radiator, if that’s what it really is, seems a daunting task,” Al replied. “The scale is massive, and knowing how they build, it isn’t going to be easy to cause a failure. Also, consider that all of the work would have to be done in vacuum, outside the station. We don’t have the equipment, or the proper training. We would have to know a lot more about the environment outside. What about the artificial gravity that exists inside the facility? Is there some form of gravity there, or are we suddenly in zero-g, with all of the complications of working in such an environment? Radiation levels might be a concern outside the station and adjacent to the power room. The tube is shielded, and we know how effective their shields are. But outside, . .” He shrugged. “We might be looking at the same kind of levels we saw inside the room. Besides, we don’t know their system design. A failure of the thermal rejection system might simply cause a staged shutdown, one that didn’t destroy the station, but put it in standby waiting for the aliens to come and make repairs. Once shutdown, the system would be of no use to us. No, I don’t think there is anything there unless we can learn a great deal more about the system first.”

  “What about de-orbiting the station? She had brought this up the other day, but Al and I already knew the answer then. She had wanted him to think it through and be sure.

  He smiled, but shook his head. “It’s a good idea. If we could de-orbit the station, cause it to fall into the atmosphere, most of the work would be done for us. But it’s not as simple as it sounds.”

  “I don’t see why we can’t just strap some rockets on the outside and slow it down.”

  “Look at the numbers,” Al explained. “It appears we are roughly a thousand miles above the surface. To get it solidly into the atmosphere, let’s say you want to reduce the perigee to about fifty miles. Higher would do it, but would take longer. So, say fifty miles. It’s a simple calculation. We would need to provide a change in station velocity of about 1500 feet per second.”

  “That doesn’t sound so hard,” Carol replied not wanting to be deterred. I had to give her credit. She knew this was our best chance at a backup, but it wasn’t going to work.

  “For a small object, probably not,” he admitted. “But look at the size of this station. How much mass is here? We know the alien’s metals are dense, very massive. In addition, there is the ship as well. It’s attached, and we don’t know how to separate it, so it would have to be accelerated as well. It’s another simple equation. Here look.”

  Al stood and walked over to the white board we had set up. All of us found it easier to plan if we could sketch or explain by writing key points down. He picked up a marker and wrote a simple variant of the rocket equation on the board. “There aren’t too many variables. We know the velocity delta we would need. We just talked about that. The Isp, or effective performance of the rocket, is dependent on the efficiency of the propellant and the rocket design. There are some really high performing propellants, but they are difficult to obtain. The highest Isp would be one of the ion engines, but it would take years to provide the needed velocity. So, we would have to assume a middle of the road propellant and rocket design. Say we use an Isp of about 300. That’s still pretty good.”

  “Bottom line,” Carol insisted.

  “Okay,” Al agreed reluctantly. I could tell he had wanted to walk through it so she would see there wasn’t much flexibility. “It takes about fourteen percent of the mass you want to accelerate in fuel. If this station was to weight one hundred tons, and I know it’s far more than that, you would need fourteen tons of propellant. All would have to be brought through the tunnels, carried outside, and put into a tank so it could feed the motor or motors we would have to acquire, mount, and point. Even if we could do that, if we mount the motor incorrectly, not knowing the mass properties of the station, we might simply spin the thing rather than apply the velocity increment in the proper direction.” He looked at her sadly. “I’m sorry Carol, but I don’t see how we can do it.”

  She slumped, finally accepting this option wasn’t going to be the solution she had hoped for. I knew how she felt. Once I learned that the station was in orbit, it had seemed that multiple possibilities for its destruction would present themselves. That hadn’t happened. The problems of working in space were not simple, and they were mostly problems we weren’t equipped to handle.

  “Then we need to find out how to operate that ship,” she insisted. “It surely would have the capability of pushing this thing where we want it. After all, it’s already attached for us.”

  We had people looking. So far there had been nothing found on ship operations. It wasn’t going to be learned by trial and error. John agreed to make their search a high priority. I wondered where he was this morning. He had sent apologies, but something had come up and he needed to stay with it for now.

  “Can we use the immense power being generated by the power system itself somehow?” Carol asked still hoping for an answer.

  “We don’t even understand the nature of the power and how they conduct it from place to place. The clear cabling we have seen clearly isn’t normal wiring. Even if we understood, I’m not sure how we can use the power destructively.” Al shrugged apologetically.

  There wasn’t much else to say about the options we had come up with thus far. A couple of nuclear bombs still seemed like the best option. Well, we would see what Jeff was able to do in that regard.

  “Dave sent a summary of the information his team has found in the files,” I explained. “For the most part it is either confirma
tion of what we have learned elsewhere, or more of the same kind of thing they have seen before. They have found additional information that documents the aliens are operating in multiple star systems. Some evidence points to the fact we are only seeing a portion of their overall activity. The mother ship and this ‘local’ cluster of stars seem to be only one of several pursuing the same goal. So far nothing on the ultimate purpose, but he thinks the reason is somewhere in the materials we have extracted from the ship.”

  No one had anything to say. The more we learned, the larger the scope of this thing became. I couldn’t imagine the resources involved.

  “We may also have discovered where their home world is located.” Al said suddenly.

  That got their attention. It didn’t help us in any way, but was something we all had wondered about. He stood up and walked over to the board and erased the equations he had put up a little while before. He sketched a rough oval.

  “Milky Way galaxy,” he said standing back a bit. “It spins this way,” and he sketched an arrow with a point indicating direction. “Our sun is about here, roughly a third of the way in from the outer edge. From the materials Dave’s team have sorted through, it sounds as if they are coming from a sun that is about here.” He drew another point on the oval, anti-spinward about an eighth of the way around, and a bit more outward, away from the center of the galaxy. It is something like two thousand light years away.”

  The incredible distance sounded staggering. We had been talking in term of dozens of light years. But this! Thousands of light years!

  “That sounds impossible,” I objected.

  “Dave is sending the materials,” Al explained. “He wants an independent verification. But if the translations are correct, it takes them almost two years to reach us.”

  “One of the reasons for the long absences,” Carol noted.

  “That, and the other systems they seem to be servicing,” Al added.

  The group was silent while they digested this information. I couldn’t see how to use the knowledge and neither apparently could they.

  Carol suddenly changed the direction of the conversation. “I just realized,” she commented. “We keep talking about how long it takes them to get from point to point. The aliens visited here a little more than a month ago. Then they left, and came back three plus a few days later. How did that work, if their mother ship is following a path that takes months to repeat?”

  Al had an answer, but it was only a guess. “I think the first team left the main ship as they were approaching the system. If you remember the trajectory, it never actually enters our system, but passes off to one side, roughly midway between our system and another on the other side of their path. The first team hurried ahead to get here, made their adjustments and flew back to intercept the main ship. It would have been possible for the main ship to deploy such teams to two systems about the same time this way. Then, as the main ship continued around the circuit moving away from our system, the second team left and flew back here. This time they would have had a long wait before the ship returned to pick them up.”

  I wondered. It seemed cumbersome. We would hopefully get some information as the ship approached the next systems on its circuit. I hoped the displays would show the minor ships as they made their journeys to the individual stars.

  I was about to ask Al about any progress they had made with equipment they had found on this ship, when a call came in from John. I put him on speaker so the others could hear. He was excited, and wanted us to meet him in the control room. He wouldn’t explain, claiming it would be best for us to see for ourselves. We were essentially done for now anyway. Curious, we made our way from the base office to the tunnel that would take us into the complex.

  Chapter 46

  Central Asia

  7179 AD

  She felt and heard the blast at almost the same time. Her skin felt prickly all over, and her fingers wanted to make random jumping motions on their own. The alien had fired as soon as the short rifle had swung around to the direction from which their shots had come. Fortunately, the creature hadn’t compensated for the difference in elevation, and had shot into the side of the hill, aiming at least fifty feet below the top of the cliff where they were hiding. Naiya wondered if there was information that she could use here. The alien seemed to know instinctively the direction from which the shot had come. But not the elevation from which it had originated. There was no time for thinking right now.

  Despite the uncomfortable feeling that had spread through her body she continued to move backwards. Dix was doing the same, and his somewhat jerky motions showed he was having some of the same problems with motor control as she was. She was already an additional fifteen feet back from the edge of the cliff when the second shot came. This time, the edge of the cliff itself provided additional protection. She looked over at Dix and signaled they should head back up the hill behind them. It was mostly rocks with the occasional tree. With the ground this rocky there would be no way for the alien to follow their trail, and there were hundreds of places they could hide. But they had to get there quickly. She sensed the alien wasn’t going to wait around. He would be coming for them. Only the hundred foot high cliff had given them protection and bought them some time while it tried to find the quickest way up.

  “Hurry,” she encouraged Dix, as they made their way across the flat and started up the slight incline that started fifty yards back from the edge of the cliff.

  “Legs don’t want to cooperate,” he replied, as he continued to half run half stumble his way across the rocky ground.

  Her own nerves were already starting to return to normal. Dix must have caught more of the residual energy from the alien’s poorly aimed shot. Well, it made sense. He had fired more rounds at the enemy, and his shots were the last ones fired. The alien had probably pointed more towards where Dix had been hiding. Now they had a serious problem, she realized. Their weapons weren’t going to be of much use. Hers had been an easy shot. A shot she could have made offhand, without careful aim. The alien’s energy shield had stopped the bullet from reaching its target. How were they going to deal with that?

  “Did you see what happened?” she asked Dix as they made their way into the cover provided by the first of the rocks and trees. She wanted confirmation of what she had witnessed.

  “That thing has some kind of barrier that comes on and deflects the shots. I saw yours and mine. They were all on target. Impossibly, they seemed to flash against the glowing barrier that just seemed to appear. It’s got to be automatic. No way the creature could have reacted that fast.”

  So Dix had seen it as well. Well, they were going to have to find another way. For now, they had to get out of sight. Far enough back and hidden so that the enemy couldn’t find them. Then they would have to watch, and think. She wasn’t willing to let it get out of sight again. That would mean trying to find it all over. Trying to find it might mean exposing themselves. She was certain a single shot from that weapon would kill them. So they had to know where it was all the time until they could come up with another means of finishing this. They could just let it go. But to what end? She had come here to kill it, and she was going to do that. Somehow. She just didn’t know how at the moment.

  “Getting better,” Dix mumbled as they continued to move into the rocks.

  The trees were thicker here, which added a bit of cover as well. Stopping behind a pair of rocks with several midsized aspens growing in front, she looked back to see if the alien was anywhere in sight. Dix rubbed his legs, his rifle resting against the side of the rock for the moment.

  “Damn, that felt weird,” he said. “I don’t think I could have fired the rifle there for a while. My fingers were almost numb.”

  “Mine weren’t that bad,” she informed him, “but I think you got more of the blast. And we were behind the rock and tree and well above where he aimed. Can you imagine if he had been on target?”

  Dix muttered a curse, as she continued to scan for t
he alien. Not in sight, which meant he hadn’t found a way up as yet, or he was playing smart and waiting, watching for movement that would give them away. She looked behind them and surveyed the tangle of rocks and brush. Just a bit behind them was a depression. Bordered by the rock and brush on this side, they would be able to make their way out of sight for another fifty yards parallel to the cliff face. At the end she could see where they could make their way behind another small hill. After that they would be up into thick trees that would hide them from view. Large boulders continued to jut out of the hillside randomly, but with satisfying frequency. They might help a little, but based on what she had just seen, even boulders were marginal protection. Staying hidden was going to be their only hope of remaining alive.

  “This way,” she said, slipping away from the observation point and making her way down into the depression she had eyed just a moment before. Dix followed close behind, this time moving easier.

  As quietly as they could, they made their way into the security provided by the foliage. Finally, secure more than one hundred and fifty yards down the valley from where they had taken their shots, and more than two hundred yards back from the cliff edge, they slipped into a shallow indentation between a couple of trees. From here they could watch for the alien.

  Thirty minutes passed. Then forty. Naiya was just starting to wonder if the alien had decided to ignore them and continue on its way. If so, they might have a difficult time finding it again. Then, suddenly, there it was. The lone ‘Builder’ made its way over the edge of the cliff about twenty meters from where they had set the ambush. Confidently, the alien walked back to where they had waited. He scouted the tree, standing in plain view. Any other time it would have been a tempting shot. Not now. She knew that it would be suicide to shoot now. Before they had been given time to get away by the cliff that separated them from the alien. Now they were on the same level. They wouldn’t have that advantage anymore. She didn’t know how much range the alien weapon had, but that wouldn’t matter. Simply walking into the fire from their rifles it would be able to get close enough to take them down.