The Contact Episode Four

by Albert Sartison

  “That applies to the structure of the anomaly in the plane of the ecliptic,” he continued after thinking for a few more seconds. “But on the basis of the readings from the large cargo ship, which has travelled a considerable distance from the plane of the planetary orbits, this is the picture we have...”

  On his drawing, Shelby sketched in a cloud repeating the shape of the Solar System, as if wrapped round it on all sides. It was also flattened at the top and bottom and shaped like a disc, but larger than the star system it contained.

  “The question now arises, does the distortion of the anomalous zone increase linearly or in some other way?” asked Shelby, looking at Steve and Clive.

  Steve spent some time immersed in calculations.

  “We don’t have very many points of measurement, and the precision leaves something to be desired, but it looks as though the change is linear in the plane of the ecliptic and exponential perpendicular to it,” he concluded, after doing a few things to the model.

  Clive glanced at the figures calculated by Steve.

  “It could well be that the change is also exponential in the plane of the ecliptic, it’s just that the graph of its growth is very shallow, so it appears to be linear.”

  Shelby began walking round the room, with his hands folded behind his back, thinking aloud.

  “If we are observing disturbances to the flight trajectories of space traffic, why do the orbits of the planets round the sun remain unchanged? The anomaly ought to act on them too.”

  “The anomaly only manifests itself beginning at a certain speed relative to the central star, but the planets have a lower orbital speed than our traffic,” Clive surmised.

  Shelby suddenly stopped.

  “What speed value shows us the anomaly?”

  “From 70 km per second upwards.”

  Shelby resumed his pacing round the room.

  “Hmm, yes, that’s one and a half times the orbital speed of Mercury, which is our fastest...”

  Suddenly he stopped and snapped his fingers as if struck by an inspiration.

  “Don’t you see anything strange in the shape of this anomaly?”

  Steve and Clive looked at each other. Was there anything about this anomaly that wasn’t strange?

  Shelby had such extensive teaching experience that working with pupils had become an integral part of his nature. He hardly ever expressed a clever thought himself, but gave his pupils a chance to get there themselves, only asking leading questions.

  “Steve, remind me of the angle of the ecliptic to the plane of the Milky Way,” he said.

  Steve gazed at the ceiling, recalling recent work in a seminar where this angle of inclination was always getting under his feet. Damn, how many degrees was it?

  The next moment, Steve felt an unpleasant coldness beginning at the back of his neck and running down his spine. He understood where Shelby was going with this. Horrified, he looked the Professor in the eyes. You didn’t need to be a good reader of body language or thought to understand Steve’s reaction. Shelby just nodded in agreement with Steve’s thoughts, as if he had spoken them out loud.

  “Yes, Steve, just so.”

  Clive, not understanding what this was about, looked from one to the other.

  “Hang on, I don’t understand. What is JUST SO?”

  Shelby continued looking Steve in the eyes, as if he had not heard Clive.

  “We must arrange a conference with MacQueen – urgently,” he said eventually, and set off for the door. After pressing the button, and waiting for the heavy locks to open, he turned to Steve.

  “By the way, Steve, your friend Maggie asked me why you weren’t to be seen in the situation room,” he said.

  “Really? What did you tell her?” asked Steve, surprised by this sudden change of subject.

  “I told her you intended to look in on the hall soon, then you would tell her everything yourself,” replied Shelby with a smile.

  Clive snorted in disgust.

  “There’s no time for that,” he said.

  “You lads have been sitting in this cell for too long. After the conference with MacQueen, take a break and get some fresh air. No-one expects you to work incessantly, like robots,” said Shelby softly. “Take that as an order.”

  Unforeseen circumstances

  Rohas calmly allowed the two seconds allocated to him by the ship’s computer for cancelling the order to elapse. His face, as usual in decisive situations, became quite emotionless and did not express the slightest feeling.

  In accordance with the protocol loaded into it, the computer of the ship carrying the commander of the second echelon, which was the nearest ship of the group to Europa, gave the command to neutralise the rogue gun.

  A bright spark flashed under the belly of the fighter. Rohas observed what was going on from the viewpoint of many cameras, including that of the escort fighter, which was relaying what was happening from close up. The viewing angle was selected so that the frame covered both Europa and the ship firing at it. After the spark there was a bright flash of lightning on the surface of the satellite, which was immediately covered in clouds of dust and steam raised by the explosion.

  At the moment of the flare-up on the surface, it seemed to the General that the epicentre of the explosion lay somewhat to the east of the gun barrel. A miss from such a short distance? Incredible! He turned his gaze to the monitor displaying the parameters of E1. If it had been a hit, communication would have been broken off, but the display still showed the heading of readiness for attack:

  “MODE: COMBAT”

  An instant later it became clear that the fighter had failed to hit the target. The explosion was a low-power one, which was enough to blow the gun barrel to smithereens, but gave the gun crew a chance to survive. From a distance of thirty thousand kilometres, it couldn’t miss. There was no need for a reserve of explosive power.

  But it turned out that the target had not been hit. Almost as soon as he realised this, Rohas saw a whole series of sparks flashing from under the belly of the same fighter. It had taken the command computer a brief instant to register the miss, then it decided to repeat the decapitating strike, this time with a whole burst of pulses of incomparably greater power. During this time, the alien ship had already entered E1’s target zone.

  At this moment, the light inside the command compartment blinked out and came on again. The image from the camera disappeared.

  “Sir, we have a failure of the onboard system. Emergency reboot,” the operator reported.

  “What was that? Why is there no visual contact?” asked the General. His eyes flashed from one display to another, but they all showed only the system reboot message.

  “Visual contact will be restored in five seconds – four, three, two, one. Contact restored! Image on the main screen.”

  The General looked at the display. Where the even surface of Europa had been, a snowstorm was spreading in all directions. Judging by its density and rate of expansion, the explosion which had caused it must have been of tremendous force, much more than required to reduce E1 to nothing but dust. One fighter was not capable of making such a powerful strike. Apparently the second echelon command computer had fired a salvo from the many barrels targeting the gun on Europa.

  Suddenly the First Mate turned to Rohas. His face was as white as a sheet, as if all the blood had rushed from his head.

  “Sir... The intruder...” he said, and pointed to one of the displays in front of them.

  The General went right up to it. On the screen indicated by the First Mate, he could see images from the camera tracking the flight of the alien ship. On the usual map of Jupiter, just below the equator, a strange bright blotch was creeping, covering part of the planet. It had already reached the size of the lesser red spot to the south of it and was continuing to grow rapidly.

  Suddenly Rohas realised that the black edging on one side of the blotch was nothing but its shadow on the upper layers of Jupiter’s clouds. The bright blotch w
as not in the atmosphere of the planet, but above it. The centre of it was lit from within, like storm clouds illuminated by flashes of lightning, and when the illumination faded out, the General noticed something like a tail sticking out of it, so that the blotch itself was no longer a regular round shape, but looked more like a comma.

  The tail of the comma was barely noticeable except where it extended beyond the bounds of Jupiter, but it was clearly visible against the black background of the starry sky. The thread of the tail curved far away into space and was gradually lost from sight. Its colour changed before his eyes. From shining high-temperature white, it changed to red, then burgundy, then looked like ash, and then totally black.

  “Status, quick!” ordered Rohas.

  “Sir, E1 managed to hit the intruder before it was destroyed,” was the brief reply from the officer responsible for keeping the object in orbit round Jupiter under observation. He hesitated, expecting the General to attack him for this news, as if it were his fault.

  But Rohas remained completely calm, and took the news without batting an eyelid. He returned to his chair.

  “Energy in the epicentre?” he asked impassively.

  The officer turned away from his display for a minute to look at the columns of figures on one of the others.

  “From 400 to 450 megatons of TNT,” he replied a few seconds later.

  Rohas considered this for a moment, then had a sudden thought.

  “The tail from the explosion, was that one of the fragments?”

  “Yes, sir... Or rather... No, sir. It seems the intruder did not disintegrate, it was thrown out of orbit, but after that it carried out a piloted manoeuvre.”

  The General could not believe his ears. The intruder had taken 450 megatons like a slap on the backside, only being moved out of its orbit? You had to take your hat off to an enemy like that.

  “Where is it now?”

  “It’s turned and is leaving, sir. It’s picking up speed. I have received independent confirmations from several tracking satellites, sir. The object is leaving the Solar System. Its trajectory is away from the centre, at an angle of 16 degrees to the plane of the ecliptic. It is heading towards the constellation of Auriga.”

  “Speed?”

  “Fifty per cent of the speed of light. It is continuing to accelerate. Distance from Jupiter one and a half million kilometres. The object is changing trajectory, it is increasing the angle to the plane of the ecliptic to 40 degrees. Speed 60% c. Continuing to accelerate.”

  The personnel present in the command compartment recovered from the shock and began giving the General information about the state of affairs. A picture of what had happened gradually began to appear before his eyes.

  After the lack of response to the warning shot, the second echelon command computer took the decision to neutralise the gun. The first shot did not hit the target. For an unknown reason, the pulse charge moved much slower than the targeting apparatus program had assumed. As a result of the attacking ship’s own movement and the orbital speed of Europa, the explosion was offset several hundred metres from the target.

  The computer coordinating the attack observed the result of the explosion, and as soon as it became clear to it that the shot could not have hit the target, it decided to put matters right with a whole burst of pulses. But the greater the energy the pulses possessed, the more strongly the unknown reason affected their flight trajectory.

  After missing for the second time, and unable to understand the reason for this, the computer called on assistance from the other ships. All the ships of the second echelon with E1 in their sights fired a maximum-power salvo at it. By compensating for the inaccuracy of aim with the power of the strike, the gun on Europa was finally destroyed.

  Millions of tons of ice were thrown into space by the explosion, laying bare the ocean hidden under them. A huge crater had appeared in the satellite, which was filled with water rushing into it. From the epicentre of the explosion, after the outflow of ice, a huge fountain of water shot up, scattering cubic kilometres of water into space.

  The sunlight, diffusing in the columns of water and ice, turned the consequences of the massive strike into a terrifying display. The optic lenses of the blockade group’s ships registered something like a nuclear mushroom growing from Europa. In the sun’s rays, it seemed even more massive than it actually was. The mushroom seemed to have absorbed the entire ocean splashing under the surface of Jupiter’s satellite.

  For an instant before the rogue weapon was swept away by the explosions, the alien ship was in E1’s target zone. At the last moment, billions of amperes had flowed along the cables extending from the capacitors to the gun barrel, directing all their stored energy into it. E1 had time to fire a mighty pulse before it was turned to dust and ejected into space mixed with the ice.

  The incomers’ ship had detected the approaching shot and carried out an evasive manoeuvre, as a result of which it was hit at a tangent. Part of the pulse detonated in the direct vicinity of the ship, throwing it out of Jupiter’s orbit. The main charge exploded microseconds later, slightly out of focus because of the sliding impact.

  The monstrous explosion rudely threw the incomer away from the planet, but the incomer was again able to master the situation. It damped out the angular moments, turned, and, rapidly picking up speed, set off away from the centre of the Solar System.

  The guns of the first echelon were carefully tracking the object’s behaviour, but at the moment of the explosion, blinded by the bright flash, lost it from view. When they picked it up again, the incomer was already far from where the blockade group was deployed. Since it had left the orbit of Jupiter along the green corridor, moving away from the centre of the Solar System, so not posing a threat to Earth’s security, there was no second attack.

  “Sir, the fighters of the second echelon close to Europa request permission to change position. The explosion on the satellite ejected a lot of ice into space, and a high-speed front of material fragments from the surface is approaching them.”

  “Permission to change position granted. Other ships not to leave formation. Send reconnaissance drones to the zone of the strike on the intruder. I need samples from the epicentre of the explosion. Others to await further orders.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  Rohas again looked at the plasma spot creeping over Jupiter. It had now become noticeable that the effect of the explosion had changed the upper clouds of the planet. At the point of contact with the shock wave, the Jovian whirlwinds were breaking up before merging with the creeping spot.

  “Sir, we are no longer observing the object,” reported one of the officers.

  “Last known speed?”

  “Seventy per cent of c.”

  “Acceleration?”

  “Acceleration began to decrease from 65% c, at 70% it ceased.”

  Rohas nodded. It appeared that the assumption about the object’s maximum speed was correct. He got up from his chair and rubbed his neck.

  “End of combat alarm. I need a full report in 20 minutes,” he ordered, and signalled to the computer:

  “Message for the General Staff, top secret...”

  The lacking element

  “Mr. Shelby, I hope you will be able to reveal the secret of the anomaly this time,” said MacQueen as soon as the protected video channel was open.

  “I think I have the explanation. Do you simply want to know the results of our studies, or are you interested in the details?” asked Shelby.

  To all appearances, MacQueen was in high spirits.

  “Well, we have a few hours left till the expiry of the ultimatum, so the background to the question also interests me,” he said, looking at his watch.

  “I must warn you...” Shelby began, but MacQueen interrupted him immediately.

  “Professor, I know that you have very little time, and that the data leave something to be desired. I completely trust your scientific instinct.”

  “Well, OK... After studying the nature
of the anomaly, it was obvious to us that it manifested itself only at high speeds. This is why it affects our spacecraft but not the rotation of the planets round the sun. And a good thing too, otherwise our entire star system could simply collapse like a house of cards. The planets would just fall into the sun.

  “At first, the anomaly appeared to us to be isotropic, something like cosmic microwave residual radiation, which, as you know, is quite uniform in all directions. But after analysing the telemetry of that large cargo ship moving outside the orbital plane of the planets, it became clear to us that on the contrary, the anomaly is anisotropic to the highest degree. It changes its value depending on the position in space. In the plane of the ecliptic it is barely noticeable, but perpendicular to it, the anomaly makes itself felt even at a relatively short distance, increasing exponentially.

  “The question now arises: if the anomaly is some general previously unknown astrophysical phenomenon, why does its shape repeat that of the Solar System?

  “Our Solar System is part of the Milky Way galaxy, which is a spiral star formation. The stars forming such galaxies have the property of rotation round the centre. Our sun is no exception. The entire Solar System rotates round the galactic centre. And now we come to the most interesting part. The ecliptic is at an angle to the plane of the galaxy round which it is rotating. That is, moving in space, our star system ought to pass through the anomaly, not get stuck in it; after all, it is moving in the very direction in which the anomaly is exponentially increasing. But this is not happening. The most probable explanation of this fact is that the anomaly zone follows behind our central star.

  “As a consequence of that, we believe that the anomaly is artificially induced from outside. Taking the events of recent weeks into account, we must assume that the appearance of the object near Jupiter and the appearance of the anomaly are connected to each other.

  “The incomers most probably developed it and brought it into effect in such a way that it was not noticeable in the plane of the ecliptic, i.e. where most of our traffic is, but at the same time, any material body going beyond the limits of our assimilated space immediately enters the anomaly network.