SMD Event Center :
Ottawa :
Canada Corp. :
Michael and Alliras arrived at the SMD Event Center twelve minutes after speaking with Raymond Magrath. Taking the Colonel-By thoroughfare, they made it to the large neo-mod building in the southern section of Ottawa, near Gloucester and the international airport.
Inside the Event Center, the two men made their way to the seventh floor, Operations. Stepping off the conveyor tube, they entered organized chaos.
Technicians and operators were hustling back and forth, hovering over computers and monitors. All along the walls of the enormous room, giant DMR casements showed schematics of Earth, Luna, and the other planets. One showed the entire Sol System, with running statistics on each view scrolling up the legend casements. Most of the smaller monitors showed various asteroids in the belt.
Rows of desks housing computers and DMR casements divided the floor of the Event Center. Technicians and operators took up every available space.
Filled to capacity, the room held more people than would be present under normal circumstances. Most of those in attendance were regular evening shift. A few had not left after their shift ended, and stayed on through the emergency to lend their expertise.
Michael glanced at his watch.
The second night shift would arrive in four hours to spell the day shift. It did not matter what the emergency was; tired people made mistakes. Michael would direct them to go home himself, if it came to that. For the time being, he felt secure with an abundance of intellect in the room.
Raymond Magrath spotted them as they entered, and hurried over. With his thought-link patch secured to his temples over his widow’s peak, he nodded to the two, and directed their attention to the central screen.
Raymond was young, in his early thirties, but competent in his duties, regularly performing beyond his job description as administrative assistant.
Raymond wasted no breath with pleasantries. “It happened just over two hours ago.”
“What happened?” Alliras pressed.
Michael glanced over to Calbert, hovering over a technician.
Raymond squinted: a sign he was giving the CPU a command through the thought-link. Everyone had their own way of showing they were thought-linking, even though no physical movement was required. The central DMR casement flicked, and a new image superimposed itself for their scrutiny.
The legend explained that they were looking at Segment 14568 of the charted asteroid belt. The screen showed a number of large bodies, some rotating, others stationary.
The AI filtered out any rock smaller than a kilometer in diameter, to avoid creating a cluttered DMR display.
Many of the rocks had a white circle sketched on their surfaces, with a direct legend detailing their physical attributes and statistics, SMD mine number, and name, if they had one.
Michael saw an anomaly in one of the SMD asteroids.
One of the circle designations—Macklin’s Rock—showed that the site was in the process of being surveyed, but there was no real-time image of the asteroid itself on the screen.
“What happened?” he asked, repeating his superior’s question.
“The whole damned asteroid just vaporized on us. We have the EPS record cued and ready for playback.”
Just then, Calbert Loche spied them, and hurried over.
“Two surveyors were on that asteroid when it exploded. Although exploded is not quite the right term,” he added. “Disappeared, vaporized, vanished, who knows?”
At the moment, Michael was more concerned with the deaths rather than the technical explanation for the incident. “Who?”
“Margaret and Gabriel Manez, two senior geologists. They were checking a Nelson II at local site 14 when it happened.”
Raymond thought-linked to a smaller DMR monitor, and an archived image of Macklin’s Rock appeared, magnified, showing the location of the TAHU, and the thirty-seven prospective sites. Site 14 was illuminated in red.
Michael searched his memory. He prided himself on remembering the names of every person in the SMD, all 532 of them. A particular fact came to him, and he had trouble swallowing.
“There was a ten-year-old boy on that rock as well.”
“Yes,” Calbert answered, his voice low and solemn. “Alex, I believe is—was his name. Their son.” The hard look on his face told Michael that he felt just as responsible and remorseful as the VP.
“Survivors?”
“Sorry, Michael.” Calbert remained silent a moment, then concluded. “We don’t know what happened exactly.”
“Collision?”
“No. The EPS sent by the TAHU’s Hucs indicated something approaching them near light speed.”
“Light speed?” he blurted, shocked. “A Sunburst? Electric cloud storm? What was the point of origin?”
“None. We have no indication that it even originated off surface. We think it might be something they found at the site. Their Hucs’ long-range sensors picked up nothing, but the short-range picked up the anomaly about thirteen seconds before impact. Again, I’m not sure ‘impact’ is the right word, either.”
“That long? Thirteen seconds at light speed would be well past the boundaries of Macklin’s Rock,” Alliras pointed out, checking the statistics of the asteroid. “The origin of the pulse could be anywhere between Mars and Jupiter!”
Then Calbert’s words registered.
“The short-range picked it up? It’s geared for a few hundred klicks. That doesn’t make sense. Thirteen seconds? Are you sure?”
“That’s right, thirteen. The watch probe we have orbiting as sentry to this section EPSed that there was a oscillating pulse of energy—form unknown—at a point inside Macklin’s Rock.
“Whatever it was, it traveled, or at least originated under, the surface of the asteroid, just this side of the speed of light. Perhaps bouncing back and forth inside the rock a number of times, eating or consuming the asteroid from the inside out, before impacting with, or reaching, the surface. It was too fast to get a decent measure, to be sure, in any case. Whatever this energy source was, we have no signature on it, no means of identification.”
Michael struggled with his chemistry. “Whatever the substance was, it was inert until something triggered it. But what?”
“I agree in theory; there was some kind of fission taking place. Much more powerful than any nuclear reaction. If we only had a sample…”
“What do you mean?”
“All we know is that the energy pulse vaporized the entire rock in a matter of less than fifteen seconds.”
“Vaporized? Any traces?” Michael asked. “Resultant gases?”
Raymond shook his head. “None. Mass readings of the quadrant indicate a net loss of 142 teratons and change, exactly that of the Rock.”
“That’s impossible. Either it moved, or we’ve got millions of meteorites coming our way.”
“As far as we know, it didn’t move. There’s no trace signature of the solar wind tail. And there are no new meteorites in the segment indicating an explosion. None of the sensors picked up anythin; but then, again, the energy pulse of that thing was so strong, our sentry probes lost a few seconds of power. Anything could have happened in that time.
“—Anything,” he reiterated.
Michael sighed heavily. “What do we have to go on?”
“Just the recorded conversation between the surveyors—between Margaret and Gabriel,” Calbert corrected himself, his voice somber.
“Bring it up.”
“We should go into the conference room to view the log,” Raymond suggested, always thinking. “Right now, the techs don’t need the distraction.”
“Quite right.” Michael gestured to a portal leading to hall, which housed a series of conference rooms on either side.
*
With Calbert remaining at Ops, the three others seated themselves in leatherback swivel chairs around a large semicircular marble table facing a collection of DMR screens.<
br />
Raymond, his thought-link patch still connected, brought up schematics. The smaller monitors held images of Macklin’s Rock recorded two-and-a-half hours before the occurrence.
On the central DMR screen, the casement showed the Space Mining Division symbol for a moment, and then the image flicked to fifteen minutes before the event.
Raymond explained, “It took them a few hours to get to Site 14 after they left the TAHU. They checked the sites in rotation.”
A chronology sequencer on the lower part of the casement showed the time as 12:58 GMT. The image itself was the record from the ATV interface camera, which, as Margaret and Gabriel disembarked from the ATV in their bulky bioshield suits, followed them from about five meters away, hovering over the surface by an antimagneto engine and navigating by microfuel pulsors.
The septaphonics in the conference room carried the conversation between the two surveyors.
*
“Here it is, finally,” said Gabriel in his unmistakable accent, standing beside the ATV.
Margaret did not hesitate; she approached the site marker.
“Hucs reported the Nelson II had detected traces of a semi-large deposit of something beyond the core sampler range, didn’t it?”
“Yep. I brought the override code, just in case. We can get an extra twenty meters out of the sampler drill.”
He opened the ATV carry compartment and withdrew a telescopic extension for the drill, and joined his wife at the Nelson II.
*
Michael interrupted the playback with a hand gesture. The image froze at Raymond’s thought-link command.
“Do we have the readings of the Nelson II?”
“Yes.” The assistant brought them up on a secondary screen. “Non-conclusive. The mineral readings were typical as far as a kilometer down, nothing to write home about. No significant lodes. But when the drill reached its maximum depth, it registered a .002 per cent content reading by mass of some unknown substance.
“Obviously, Margaret and Gabriel believed it was a deposit of iron ore, as the record of their dialogue shows. This is why the potential value estimate he filed is so high.”
“Right.” Alliras cleared his throat. “Let’s finish the recording.”
*
The playback continued, with the two surveyors speculating on their find, and what they would do with their bonuses once they returned to Canada Station. Michael could not help but smile, even though his throat was tight, and his temples throbbed. It was a grim business.
*
“The Nelson II indicates the deposit begins fourteen meters below maximum depth,” Margaret reported.
Gabriel adjusted the depth cue on the drill, and tapped in the command to engage the Nelson II’s engine. The core drill twirled and dug into the asteroid.
“Any indication on size of deposit?” Margaret inquired as she monitored the Nelson II’s temp and friction indicators.
Watching the sample analysis display, Gabriel shook his head.
*
At 13:11:02 GMT, he reported, “Almost there, another minute or two.”
*
At 13:11:47 GMT, the image blanked.
*
The silence in the conference room drew out for a few minutes.
“Damn,” was Alliras comment.
Michael tried to be analytical. “Obviously, the deposit reacted with the something in the drill or sampler, or even with the friction and heat of the operation.”
“We’ve already begun analyses,” Raymond told him. “The makeup of the drill is designed to avoid causing a reaction to any known mineral compound, including plutonium and uranium. Whatever happened, it wasn’t nuclear.”
“So we’re left with heat?”
“We can’t rule out the possibility of a new element, one that does react to something in the drill?”
“So we are left where? At the beginning?”
“Yes.”
“Caught with our pants around our ankles, I would say,” Alliras put in. “Damn.”
They were interrupted by a message sent from Calbert. The casement appeared over the DMR of the survey playback. “Michael, one of our probe sentries has picked up small mass readings in the event area.”
“Be right there,” he replied, and the three men hurried back to the Operations Center.
*
Calbert greeted them with a nod. He pointed his hand to a medium-sized DMR on the east wall.
“Initial readings indicate a number of objects, ranging from 50 kg to 5000 kg mass.”
“Meteors?”
“No, ion pulse radar shows the objects as irregular, not cylindrical or spherical. We should be getting an image in about three minutes.”
The technicians and operators in the room all ceased their work and looked up at the DMR as the screen flicked to visual camera.
There was nothing on the screen at the moment, but the radar magnification indicated a range of 932 meters.
At a range of 500 meters, several objects could be discerned. One looked like the remnants of a Nelson II drill. Closer still, and the ATV could be seen, horribly mangled and burned.
One hundred meters in, the probe picked up two objects: the bodies of the two surveyors.
“Alive?” Michael shouted.
A tech punched a command sequence into his keyboard, and reported, “No, sir.”
“Damn!” Alliras swore; it was becoming a mantra.
Another technician reported, “All other objects identified as equipment from the survey team. Tools, rations, other accouterments.” Specific details at this point was lost on Michael and the others.
“What about the TAHU?”
“No sign, sir.”
“Recover everything out there,” Michael directed. “I want a detailed report and autopsy on my desk by nine tomorrow.”
The probe would magnetize the objects and drag them back to the Canuck Flyer, the mining orbiter, a large complex the surveyors used as a way station between Luna and the asteroids. With hundreds of engineers and processing technicians on board at any given time, there was a more than adequate mechanical and chemical laboratory, as well as an experienced medical staff on hand, more than qualified to perform the necessary procedures.
“What happened to Alex Manez?” Alliras said, but no one ventured an answer.
Michael, his body stiff, turned from the operations room and headed for the conveyor.
*
Alliras accompanied him down the hall. When Michael punched the up button for the conveyor, intending to ride to the seventeenth floor where his office was located, Alliras said, “I think I’ll go home to my wife, if that’s all right.”
“I wish I could do the same,” Michael said in a soft voice. “Right now, I have to write a press release for the media, and I have a few unpleasant calls to make to Margaret and Gabriel’s families.”
“I don’t envy you that task. By tomorrow, SMD stock might well be worthless.”
When the Alliras’s conveyor arrived first, he shook Michael’s hand. “I’m truly sorry about all this. I hate to sound clinical, but unless we can find out what that element your surveyors found on Macklin’s Rock, there’s no upside to this. The media will eat us for breakfast. We’ll lose our funding and our charter.”
“I know. Take care, Alliras. See you tomorrow.” “I’ll stop by mid-morning, if that’s all right.”
“Just fine. Convey my apologies to Angela.”
“I will. Try to get some sleep tonight yourself.”
“Right.”
Alliras stepped inside the conveyor tube. He nodded and tried to give Michael a smile as the doors shut.
The second tube arrived, and Michael rode it up to the top floor of the building.
*
In his office, he place two commlink calls. One to the Manez Family, and one to the Sheridans, and expressed his condolences as best as he could for the loss of their children and for their missing grandchild.
He then typed a short
press release or the media, posted it on the Associated Press Mesh Board, Highest Priority, then turned off his computer, opened the liquor cabinet and withdrew a bottle of scotch. He poured himself a stiff measure in a plastic coffee cup.
After a quarter of an hour, he placed a commlink call to his home.
“Hey, babes,” he said when his wife, Melanie, answered.
“You’re still at work?” she asked.
“Yeah. I think I might be a while. All-nighter. Gotta be here in case they find anything.”
“What’s wrong?”
Michael had to take a deep breath, and then he filled her in. They talked over the link for three hours.
He made sure to tell her he loved her before hanging up.
Michael finally stretched out on the couch in his office to try to catch a few winks.
__________
Unknown :
Disconnected.
Free falling.
Force of pressure.
The depths of space.
Lost in the farthest reaches.
Found by the light of Sol.
All things seen as if one.
Nothing is possible when everything is gone.
Feeling his way through the morass of darkness.
Screaming against the vast vacuum of madness and pain.
Sailing with the solar wind as guide to his destination.
For one instant he feels the power of all.
The next moment the call comes to him.
It is power; it is for him.
The beacon of a million stars.
The shores of all consciousness.
The signal is Home.
It calls him.
Come, Alex.
Come.
__________
USA, Inc. Exploration Site :
Mission Orcus 1 :
Pluto :
Helen’s voice of authority cut off the argument that threatened to boil over from the collected scientists.
“We’ve got something on the spectrograph sensor at the artifact site. It’s the Dis Pater.” Immediately, Henrietta Maria and Sakami Chin rushed over to the communications desk.
Forbidden The Stars Page 6