by Diane Duane
Scotty smiled. “Flattery will get you everywhere, lass,” he said, not looking up.
Jim looked back at the eclipse, still caught in the repeating loop of the few minutes of totality as seen from the northern Pacific. The so-called Great Eclipse or Fireball Eclipse of 2218 had not only had an unusually long totality, but had coincided with a sunspot maximum, and the solar storm ongoing during the umbra’s track across the Earth had produced coronal behavior like nothing ever seen before during an eclipse—outrageous, frightening, enough to give the impression to a viewer that the sun was actually angry, and might do something terminal to its subject worlds. Ael reached out and touched the control to let the image continue through its normal cycle. “…It’s temporary, at any rate,” Jim said. “The moon’s getting slowly further away from us. Thirty or thirty-five thousand years from now, and the fit won’t be perfect anymore. Nothing but annular eclipses for us, then, until the oscillation stops and the moon’s orbit begins closing in again.”
“And then what?”
“Then it starts to fall,” Jim said, “and tidal forces pull it apart. If we’re lucky, Earth ends up with rings. If we’re not lucky…rings, and most likely a ‘cometary winter.’”
Ael looked rueful. “Much later, though, I assume.”
“Five or six hundred thousand of our years, give or take a few.”
Ael smiled slightly. “Not something we need worry about overmuch, then. Our own concerns lie closer in time.”
Jim nodded. The corona licked and lashed in apparent fury; then there came a tremor at the trailing limb, the solar brilliance piercing through the lunar valleys, and the “diamond ring” effect flashed out in full glory, blinding. Ael stood up, gazing at it with the expression of someone faced with an insoluble riddle. “The Elements clearly do have a sense of humor,” she said at last, as the sun showed a full blazing crescent of its limb and the corona faded to invisibility. “Unwise of us to ignore it when we see it being displayed. Few are angrier, the poet says, than those who tell a joke and hear no laughter….”
“I don’t like to step on anyone’s punch lines either,” Jim said.
McCoy came in and paused, looking at the eclipse with a somewhat jaundiced eye. Jim noticed the look. “Problems, Bones?”
“After I saw the recording of the bridge view from yesterday,” McCoy said, folding his arms, “I don’t much like the look of that.”
“If you like, Doctor,” Spock said as he came in the door, “I will send down to catering for a pot for you to bang on, to frighten away the wolf.”
“‘Wolf’?”
“The one you no doubt feel sure is eating the sun.”
McCoy’s look got slightly sourer as he sat down at the table. “No need to get cute, Mr. Spock. I was merely suggesting that the sun here looks like it was about to pull the same kind of trick 15 Trianguli tried yesterday.”
Spock sat down with a slight expression of weariness. “Earth’s primary has been known to produce the occasional coronal mass ejection,” Spock said, “but normally it does so unassisted.”
“Yes, well, 15 isn’t likely to try anything like that unassisted now, is it, as a result of being tampered with?”
“I would estimate the odds for that as being—”
“Minuscule,” Scotty said, and “Vanishingly small,” K’s’t’lk said, and “Statistically insignificant,” Spock said, all of them together.
Jim and Ael exchanged a glance. “So much agreement,” Jim said, sitting down at the head of the table, “frightens me more than usual. I would move out of the area immediately, except that people are meeting us here. How long till the task force turns up now, Spock?”
“Twelve hours and thirty-three minutes, Captain.”
“Thank you.”
Other crew began coming in: more science department staff, especially several of the more senior astrophysics specialists; and a couple more department heads, including Uhura; and some of Ael’s people from Bloodwing, among them tr’Keirianh the master engineer and Aidoann t’Khialmnae, who was doubling as science officer until another more junior crewman should be elevated to that position from the ranks. Or what they have left of ranks, Jim thought as the rest of the group filtered in. I wish I could help her out somehow. Spock’s had a look at their automation by now, but there’s no substitute for people you can trust….
“Are we all here?” Jim said. “All right. Anything we need to handle before we get started?”
“One thing, Captain,” Uhura said. “Just before I left the bridge, we received a message from the Sempach. There have been some schedule changes, it seems. At least a couple of the other ships will be joining us en route to the meeting point at RV Tri, and Sempach is now scheduled to rendezvous with us much earlier than the other starships meeting us here, perhaps within the hour. Commodore Danilov sends his compliments, and would like to see you at your earliest convenience.”
“Very well.” Uhura would have repeated the commodore’s phrasing word for word, which made Jim just slightly nervous. “Earliest convenience” might sound polite enough, but it was not-very-secret code for “the minute I arrive, and not a second later.” Dan was either very worried about something, or his nose was out of joint, or possibly both. But at least Jim thought he might hear something from Starfleet that they hadn’t seen fit to transmit to Enterprise on the usual channels. Or I’m going to get a very long grilling about what happened when we got here….
“All right,” Jim said. “Let’s hear what you’ve got.”
K’s’t’lk tapped at the reader on the table in front of her and brought up her own notes, which she started chiming her way through at speed for the benefit of the science department staff on hand. Jim, who had read her preliminary abstract over breakfast and had then immediately resolved never to do such a thing again before the caffeine took, now settled back to wait for the expanded analysis, which would mean more to him than the raw figures.
It took a while, during which he had leisure to worry about Danilov’s arrival. “We had been looking for indications of what stars would definitely not be candidates for the Sunseed process,” K’s’t’lk finally said, “so that we could concentrate on the ones that were, and could avoid spreading our energies into areas that didn’t require them. We feel we don’t really need to worry too much about stars that genuinely fall into the ‘dwarf’ category, because they are the most difficult candidates for induction…and indeed, without some genuinely inspired on-the-fly calculations by Mr. Spock, we would not have managed induction at 15 Tri at all. Our conclusion is that dwarf stars are not massive enough to produce coronae with a high enough ‘ambient’ energy level to induce ion storms using Sunseed. And this includes Sol, which is a genuine nonmarginal dwarf G0, so that’s one less thing for the Federation to worry about.”
The computer console chirped softly as Scotty worked over it, preparing another display. “However, there are plenty of other non-dwarf stars that have inhabited planets,” Scotty said, “the ratio being about one dwarf to four. Based on what we’ve seen most recently, and on data from the induction that followed the pursuit of Enterprise, Intrepid, and Bloodwing by the Romulans on the way out of Levaeri V, we’ve managed to cobble together some suggestions for protecting normal main-sequence stars from such inductions. All these are very tentative, of course….”
Scotty killed the eclipse hologram, and the space above the middle of the table started filling up with diagrams and bar charts and pie charts and graphs with jittering lines. “While the coronal mass ejection we produced was a ‘standard’ one of the halo type with helium alpha,” K’s’t’lk said, “there were interesting variations. One of the most telling phenomena for our purposes was the way the sunspots came up all of a sudden during the induction, completely unnaturally, in a pattern that bears no resemblance whatever to the usual ‘butterfly’ diagram, the plot of the heliographic latitude of the sunspots versus time. Much too much intrusion of the spots into the polar latitudes, suggesting that Sunseed’s speci
fic effect on the solar magnetic field is to derange the field intensities not above, but below local average rates, a ‘curdling’ effect which spreads all through the lower stellar atmosphere and…”
Jim glanced down the table at Ael. She was making desultory notes on a clipboard-padd, though nothing like the hurried and systematic ones which were being made by tr’Keirianh beside her; and she looked up, caught Jim’s glance, and smiled, very slightly, a look of complete bemusement. Jim went back to making his own notes for the moment, which were mostly about things to discuss with Danilov when he got in.
“…this being the case, the ‘best’ candidates, the top of the ‘bell curve’ and the stars most susceptible to this kind of interference, would be Bw stars with sufficiently weak helium lines, or Be stars with the necessary ‘forbidden’ lines in their spectra,” K’s’t’lk was saying. “And fortunately, few of these have planets.”
Scotty looked up then. “But most other stellar classes suffer as well. Nearly all stars with planets around them, in both Federation and Klingon space, fall on the upper side of the bell curve—probably nearly all the Rihannsu ones as well, though data on that is less certain. We have good astrocartography on the area, but less data on which stellar systems are populated.”
“I will gladly help you there,” Ael said. “But some of the rumors coming out of the Empire suggest that the data may not be correct for long. Populations are moving, or being moved, or in extreme cases being wiped out, along the fringes of the Imperium. Mostly the latter.”
Scotty nodded, pausing to bring up another starmap in the hologram over the table, one which filled with a map of the Neutral Zone boundary and many pulsing points of light. “At any rate, as you see here, nearly every populated star system in which the primary is not a dwarf is now a potential target for attacks which at best will make interstellar shipping difficult, and at worst will impair starships’ ability to achieve high warp, damage many of them, destroy some of them. This weapon can be moderately easily deployed by an enemy willing to divide his forces sufficiently, going from star to star at warp speeds and leaving bigger and bigger ion storms in his wake.”
“There is also a possibility that Mr. Scott and the commander have not mentioned,” Spock said, “which is a theoretical one, impossible to test…but I would dislike seeing any test made. If too many ion storms of this sort were started at one time by a group of ships in a given area of space, the storm front could possibly gain enough energy to propagate itself for a prolonged period along a wavefront light-minutes or even light-days long. At such energy levels it could propagate into subspace as well, deranging its structure and fabric.” Spock looked much more troubled than the mere unpredictability of results could account for. “Such an ‘ion firestorm’ might render subspace useless for communication, or even incapable of supporting speeds higher than c…which would at best mean that there were patches or ruts in subspace where starships could not go. At worst it could mean the end of warpspeed travel in this part of the galaxy, for everyone involved.”
Jim looked at Ael. “Do your people know about the possibility of this effect, do you think?”
“I cannot say,” Ael said. “But if they find out about it, I make no doubt they would consider its use as a weapon of the ‘doomsday’ sort.”
Jim nodded to Scotty, who killed the displays. “So. Recommendations?”
Scotty looked uneasy. K’s’t’lk jangled, an unnerved sound, the Hamalki version of nervously clearing one’s throat. “Captain,” Spock said, “my simplest recommendation for the moment is not under any circumstances to allow Romulans, the party most likely now to use the Sunseed routines, into Federation space in strength. But that may shortly become impossible.”
“And if they do get in?”
The engineer and the Hamalki looked at him rather bleakly. “I’d prevent that if I could,” K’s’t’lk said. “For the time being.”
“Hope springs eternal,” Scotty said, smiling at K’s’t’lk a little grimly. “But Captain, the next recommendation is to start building solar orbiting facilities in every inhabited star system, heavily shielded for defense, carrying complements of photon torpedoes and lasers capable of disrupting any attacking ship’s attempts to ‘seed’ a corona.”
“That would take years!” McCoy said.
“Aye,” Scotty said. “Years we haven’t got. And any mobile platform can be destroyed if you bring enough power to bear.”
“‘For the time being,’ though,” McCoy said, looking over at K’s’t’lk. “I thought you were also looking for ‘remote solutions.’ Ways to handle this problem without having to chase around all over space. Orbital stations aren’t all that remote.”
Scotty and K’s’t’lk threw each other a regretful glance. “No,” K’s’t’lk said. “They’d be an interim solution at best. Remote solutions are a lot harder, because we’re still trying to write equations that will adequately express the problem. Mr. Spock has had a run at this…”
McCoy glanced over at Spock. “And you haven’t solved it already? You mean you hit a problem and bounced?” The look in his eye was not entirely regret.
“Doctor,” Spock said, “one must have a complete question before one can find answers. Even in your slightly chaotic science, you would not treat a patient before he had been properly diagnosed. In this situation—”
“Slightly chaotic—?!”
“—partial solutions are worse than none at all. The only way to affect stars remotely, without directly applying energy to them via phasers, photon torpedoes, and other such mechanical methods, is to alter the structure of the medium in which they are immersed—space and subspace themselves.”
“It’s not easy,” K’s’t’lk said, her chiming becoming more complex, a toccata scaling up in sixths. “Leaving out the use of supraphysical instrumentalities like elective mass to alter the shape of space—”
“You’d better leave them out,” Jim said sharply. “No messing around with my engines this time, Commander! We’ve got too much trouble in this reality to go getting ourselves immersed in some other one.”
K’s’t’lk contrived to look faintly embarrassed—a good trick for someone with no facial features to speak of, except all those hot blue eyes. “I did promise, Captain,” K’s’t’lk said. Jim settled back and tried not to look too stern. “At any rate, Sc’tty and I have been investigating some other possibilities for ways to stop a Sunseed induction. Some of them have to do with stellar ‘diagnostic’ techniques which go back a ways. The most promising of these involves atomic resonance spectrometry, and evaluation of the acoustic oscillation of a given star, with an eye to bending subspace so that it alters the frequency of that oscillation, changing the solar magnetic field’s influence on the corona and derailing the Sunseed effect that way—”
McCoy looked up suddenly. “Wait a minute. ‘Acoustic’? As in sound? You mean the whole thing—a whole star, a sun, vibrates?”
“Oscillates, yes, indeed, Doctor. Like a plucked string. As for sound, naturally you could not hear it in vacuum, there being no medium to transmit it, but acoustic vibration it remains nonetheless. Possibly the ‘music of the spheres’ your people used to talk about.”
“Now, hold on just a second—”
“But even your poets mention stars singing. I’d thought perhaps they were unusually perceptive of stellar physics in either the acoustical or nonphysical mode…”
“Uh,” McCoy said.
“Give up while there’s still time, Bones,” Jim said softly, and smiled.
“You mean they weren’t? Then they were inspired,” K’s’t’lk said. “But in any case, the oscillation is a phenomenon that has been known for centuries, even among your own people. Your astrophysicists have been using it for some time to analyze the general health of your stars, and to predict their moods.”
“Commander,” Spock said, looking interested, “this line of inquiry was not mentioned in this morning’s précis…”
“No.
Scotty came up with it on the way here in the lift, and we’ve been discussing it since.”
“It is a fascinating concept,” Spock said, folding his hands, steepling the fingers. “A star treated in such a manner might be made to produce oscillations that would cancel out those induced by the Sunseed routines, along the ‘canceling sines’ principle.”
Scotty looked uncertain. “I follow you, Mr. Spock, but you’ve still got the problem of the complexity of the waves induced in the first place. They’re not so simple as sines, either in the original generation or the way they interact with one another after induction. It’s not one standing wave you’d have to cancel, but ripple after ripple in the solar ‘pond,’ all washing through one another and altering one another’s frequencies and amplitudes. And then there’s the matter of how the star’s chromosphere reacts to the stress. Depending on the class of the star and the balance of the various heavy metals—”
“I grant the validity of the concern,” Spock said, “but more to the point is the manner in which subspace is caused to make this alteration in the star’s acoustical ‘body.’ Again one comes up against the logistical difficulties attendant on needing to build, deploy, and defend a mobile field generator of some kind.”
Scotty raised his eyebrows, and bent over the computer console again, which chirped softly as he started doing some calculations. “It’s possible that such a generator might not actually have to be near the star,” Scotty said, “if you were using subspace to transmit the information about how subspace was itself going to be altered elsewhere. Like throwing a rock into the water. The ripples start here, but they wind up there…”
“That would take quite a while,” K’s’t’lk said, her chiming going minor-key. “Unless you feel like invoking the equivalence heresy, and I’m not sure that’s appropriate with our present data. Now if, instead, you altered subspace string structure by using the Gott III hypothesis to—”
“Sorry, K’s’t’lk, you lost me,” Jim said. “‘Heresy’? Kind of an odd term to come up in a discussion of astrophysics…”