by Larry Niven
Kitayama nodded in response to his kaikei’s bow, then studied the data tablet beside him. Two channels were already pulsing, ready to be activated: a red one that would send a narrow lascom transmission to the prospecting boat, and a green one that would open a secure line to the oyabun. Kitayama smiled, pressed the red button, and then the green one.
* * *
Forty seconds after the red button was pressed, and at a distance of forty light-seconds, the computer in Iarngavi’s and Yakazuki’s small prospecting boat received a lascom signal that did not route through to the communications panel in the bridge. Instead, it was a coded command that was addressed for the subprocessor overseeing engine operations. Which obeyed the command immediately.
The magnetic bottle on the plasma drive flickered out of existence. The superheated hydrogen expanded in every direction, including right through the hull of the craft. When it came into contact with the oxygenated atmosphere within, combustion occurred.
Which Tomoaki Kitayama’s small, undetected spy drone duly recorded and transmitted.
* * *
Eighty seconds after Kitayama pressed the red button, a small, bright, yellow flare twinkled momentarily on the synced screens of the oyabun and his most trusted kobun. They nodded in unison.
“The package is in place, then,” the oyabun said, his eyes sharp and satisfied. “And no loose ends.”
“Yes, oyabun, and only we know of its existence and position.”
“And now it is our job to forget the package, Tomoaki.”
“Forget what package, oyabun?”
Kitayama matched the oyabun’s smile with one of his own.
2420 BCE: Wunderland, leading Trojan point asteroids, and planetside near Munchen
Upon the dull surface of the rock-that-was-not-a-rock, reflections of Alpha Centauri’s steady yellow light shone faintly. Other highlights—faint, brief—flickered across its surface: signs of the dying flares of ships and asteroids nearby. A human ship—a ramscoop traveling within a gnat’s whisker of the speed of light itself—had come rushing into the system, spewing death and destruction as it came. Scores of large, steel-alloy projectiles had been strewn in a wide arc as the craft made its approach: many had already ploughed into various planetoids, the debris from which had surged outward like shrapnel from anti-personnel warheads, destroying nearby kzin warships.
The remaining projectiles were now approaching various planets and planetoids located deeper in the system, several bound for the kzin subpolar bases on Wunderland itself. The Fifth Kzin Fleet, primed to begin its long sublight trek to invade Earth, could not respond in time: without any real warning, they were functionally stationary from the time the attack commenced to the time that it finished.
The magnetically induced corona that followed hard on the energetic bow-wave of the ramscoop tested the limits of the kzinti’s EM shielding. Those limits, as well as many throughout the human communities of the asteroid belt known as the Serpent’s Swarm, were exceeded by the next high-energy cataclysm: the cascade of coronal mass ejections triggered by the projectiles that had plunged straight into Alpha Centauri prime. Although no danger to the stability of the star, they tore huge holes down to the bottom of the photosphere, leaving nature-abhorred vacuums in their wake, as well as a brief moment of absolute magnetic disruption.
When the plasma rushed back into the empty vortices left in the wake of these warheads, and the magnetic fields reconnected, it was akin to high waves rushing headlong upon each other in the ocean: a shattering torrent sprayed upward from the thunderous collision of these two opposed forces. But, in this case, it was particles and radiation that sprayed outward through the system, due to arrive at Wunderland within a day, and the center of the Swarm within two.
Amidst all the destruction and streaming particles and energies, the kzinti missed detecting two subtler, but ultimately more destructive, actions taken by the human ramscoop vessel. Firstly, it deposited a small infiltration/commando ship which, equipped with a stasis field, would soon wreak legendary havoc across the system. Secondly, and functionally undetectable since it was but one emission among countless others, the main vessel sent a brief, powerful omnidirectional signal, which was backed up by transmitters in two of the near-relativistic projectiles. Around the system, as the signal spread outward, a variety of dormant systems awoke in response to its summons.
One such system was embedded in the small space-rock drifting serenely with the rest of the rubble that comprised the trailing edge of Wunderland’s leading cluster of Trojan point asteroids. Low power electronics, aided by bioelectric relays that generated no discernible signature, awakened automated systems. Motion recorders and atomic clocks compared data with beacon triangulation systems and visual trackers. Having confirmed its precise location within the Alpha Centauri system—and, in that same act, having determined Wunderland’s relative bearing—navigational computers calculated trajectories, thrust, and duration. The moment the flight solution was confirmed, the low-power plasma thruster ignited. The pseudo-rock accelerated backward along its orbital track toward Wunderland.
* * *
The man in the protective tube at the center of the pseudo-rock awoke to the smell of fried circuitry and an alarm which both rang in his ears and pulsed in his mandibular implant. He tried to rise up, couldn’t, groggily tried looking around, couldn’t really do that either. But he slowly made his eyes focus.
They showed him a small screen at the far end of a compartment so tight that it reminded him of when, as a preschooler, he had hidden in a mossy, narrow-gauge culvert to stymie the bigger kids during an epic game of hide-and-seek. They’d never found him. Of course, he had almost failed to extricate himself, too. What price glory?
Despite the smoke and tocsin that both warned of impending catastrophe, he realized he’d almost nodded off: the cold-sleep grogginess was not out of him. He triggered a stimulant autoinjector, felt a needle pierce his thigh: he needed all his wits and all his training to figure out what was happening, right now.
He was unsurprised that the news was not good. This cryopod-capsule was the same one into which they had stuck him, three months after the kzinti invaded. The top brass hadn’t been sure of very much, back then: the only thing they could agree upon was that, when the time right, he’d be awakened and sent back to Wunderland to resume the fight against the kzin.
However, it was the method of his return that was now instilling a modest measure of anxiety in him. The small screen located only thirty centimeters in front of him was displaying status reports from his primary systems. Most of the indicators were orange, with a smattering of red and green tags. Thrust and manual systems were okay, but the more sensitive systems—such as automated guidance and sensors—were either unreliable or dead.
Another circuit fried and as the acrid smoke wafted around him, he wondered, how long before something catches fire? Fortunately, that wouldn’t be him: the unipiece combat suit he was wearing was inflammable. On the other hand, even if live flame couldn’t reach his skin and roast him, the narrow space could easily enough become a pressure cooker. So far there had only been shorting wires, but soon enough, now—
A new, more urgent klaxon superimposed itself on the multiple malfunction tones: a collision alarm. Which, without the sensors, didn’t tell him much: it could be a basketball-sized rock at short range, or a whole planet at long range. He toggled the screen over to simple visual pickup, which rolled bars of grey and green for a moment before it straightened out into an incompletely colorized image. But despite the distortions, he immediately knew what he was looking at.
Wunderland. He was going to crash into Wunderland.
Which was a pretty sizable problem. He should have been awakened hours before reaching this point—except, now that he checked, the automated revival system had failed completely. So what the hell had happened?
The answer popped up when he checked the astrographic plot and position logs. They had been pretty good up to
an hour ago. Then, right in the middle of a data-line, the positional reporting feed went haywire and stopped. And now that he was looking at it, all the other failed systems had gone down at the same second.
The reason for that simultaneous failure became clear: the external sensor archives showed a more or less normal electromagnetic and radiant soup outside, until an hour ago. Then the readings went completely off the scale for the better part of twenty minutes. The peaks of the rad and solar wind readings were like nothing he’d ever seen. And so he knew: he’d been caught in a coronal mass ejection. The worst ever recorded. He was lucky anything was still working, but was damned unlucky to be auto-deployed right into the biggest solar storm on record.
But no, he realized: it might not just be a matter of bad luck. This immense coronal mass ejection was probably the result of something big and fast crashing into the sun at near-relativistic speeds. Which might be a fast STL craft from Earth, since there wasn’t much else he could think of which would approach at such speeds, and since that would also be the logical means whereby humanity would respond to the kzin attack upon Wunderland.
Great. So he had visuals, manual guidance controls, and thrusters. Not much else, but then again, those were all he really needed to land.
Well, those and a whole lot of luck. Eyeball guidance would be hard enough in terms of getting near the preferred pre-planned drop zone. The real challenge was making sure he came in at the correct angle. Too steep and he’d burn up. Too shallow and he’d bounce off, without enough juice left to counterboost, come about, and push in for another try. So the learning curve on this task, for which he had received not quite one hour of simulator training, was fairly daunting: one strike and you’re out.
Which reacquainted him with the adrenaline-fueled truth that nothing focuses one’s mind so much as imminent mortal danger. Luckily, he didn’t need to tumble his rock into a counterboost position: the automated attitude adjustment system had taken care of both that and the braking thrust sometime yesterday when he was still in cold sleep. But about an hour ago, the computer watchdogging that system had gone down for good, which meant that he now had to counterthrust immediately and hard in order to compensate for the lost hour.
He brought the plasma engine online, taking note of the rate of volatile consumption and the time. Then he shifted over to the viewscreen again, pinged the planet with a laser, pinged again after five seconds, and a third time after yet another five count to confirm range, his initial rate of closure, his absolute velocity, and the rate of its decrease given the current counterboost setting.
And in performing these tasks, he got his first bit of good news: he had enough fuel left to make a clean deorbit at a survivable speed, and still retain a sizable reserve. Which meant he could afford to spend a little main thruster fuel to selectively vector the exhaust for gross corrections to his descent attitude, and thereby save the dedicated but short-duration attitude control thrusters for terminal, detailed adjustments. If he was any judge of such things—and he really wasn’t—he guessed that the probability of his making it to the ground alive had just jumped from unpromising to pretty good.
And that happy change had come just in time: grain-sized debris started buffeting his pseudo-rock, requiring brief corrections, and leading him to wonder: where did this debris field come from? This was clean space on the charts, and there was no way regular use could have—
The answer to his question came in the form of moonrise: one of Wunderland’s two, very small satellites came around the terminator. Suddenly bathed in the yellow glow of Alpha Centauri, it showed a markedly different reflection pattern. Even its shape looked different, as if—
Then he understood. Whatever had arrived in this system, and had probably caused the coronal mass ejections, had savaged planetary bodies as well. The moon’s new, somewhat lopsided shape was evidence that much of it had been blown free, and that the lighter debris was beginning to migrate out into various orbital tracks surrounding Wunderland. Such as the one he was traversing now. The planet itself was flickering at the poles—probably impact sites—and wreathed in dark, slowly expanding clouds.
Cheating the nose a little closer to the planet, he held the rock more or less on course, noting two bright flares ahead of him. What? Counter fire? Kzin interceptors juicing their afterburners? But no, he realized after another moment: it was simply a pair of meteorites, glowing and flaring as they entered Wunderland’s atmosphere. As he watched, he saw almost half a dozen other descending streaks of light, bright against the dark clouds below. Chunks of the moon, those blown inward or close enough to quickly succumb to the planet’s gravity, were being pulled in to their fiery death. Which was good news: his own falling rock would not even be an anomaly under these conditions, and thereby, warrant no special investigation. Presuming that there were any kzinti down below who still had the operational leisure to investigate just one more shooting star.
Which, he realized, was what his rock was starting to become. The backup skin-temperature sensors showed a growing thermal spike: he was hitting dense atmosphere and starting to buck. He felt, more than read from the screen, that his angle was a little too shallow. Using the attitude control thrusters, he brought the nose into a steeper descent. He had allowed the rock’s descent angle to remain slightly shallow up until now, because it was relatively simple in the early reentry phases to push the ship’s vector closer to the planet’s line of gravitic attraction. Conversely, if one started with too steep angle of descent, it took a great deal more energy to correct into a more oblique trajectory. And in doing so, it was too easy to overshoot the proper point of correction and skitter off the atmosphere like a flat stone skimmed across a pond.
As the rock’s rate of descent increased, the cooling systems started making an ominous ticking which rapidly escalated into a knocking, accompanied by smoke. No, not smoke: vapor from the overtaxed condensers—overtaxed because several of them had gone off-line. The remaining units were overloading as they struggled to meet the minimum environmental demands. It started to become stiflingly hot in the capsule.
The ride became bumpier, but the pseudo-rock was well into a viselike grasp of Wunderland’s gravity, which now impeded further side-vectoring. In fact, he was fairly certain that there was hardly any further danger of catastrophe unless one or more of the drogue chutes failed, or there was a problem when—
The external ablative coating, which also served as the capsule’s pseudo-rock exterior, peeled off with a thunderous clatter, followed by a slight tug that started the nose of the capsule drifting away from its drop trajectory. Another half-degree, and the increased drag on the nose would swing it further off the descent line, which would further increase the drag, and then the capsule would start—
Tumbling meant death. He gingerly brought the best-situated attitude control thruster back on-line, ready to deliver the faintest nudge of correction. Too little and he might not have the time to try again; too much and he’d swing out of descent alignment in the other direction, and again, begin tumbling ass-over-eyeballs down to a very kinetic demise. He brushed the thrust toggle so briefly that he wondered if the system had even engaged . . .
But the nose swung slowly back into stable alignment. Two seconds later, the cooling system died with a roar, and genuine smoke started filling the capsule. Checking his watch, he sealed the helmet faceplate of his combat suit, and waited for the first drogue chute to deploy, hoping the fire in the cooling system would not spread too quickly.
The expected bump was so hard that his faceplate banged into the screen and blanked it. But it told him that yes, indeed, the first drogue chute had deployed. Two more bumps meant he was now at an altitude of 2500 meters, and moving at a paltry 500 kph.
He flared the main thruster briefly, the slaved ACTs joining in, maintaining the drop trajectory against any marginal side-vectoring. Again, he found himself slammed sharply against the capsule’s screen as his final braking burn dropped the speed to 300 kph.
Ironically, the burn he couldn’t control was internal: he was pretty sure the comfort liner of the capsule was now starting to spark and flare.
Which meant that even if he survived landing, he’d do so with a live fire aboard. And he still had almost twenty percent of his volatiles in tankage. In short, he was now riding a bomb with a lit fuse down to a hard landing. Typical landing protocols dictated retaining the fuel as an insurance against terminal chute failure, but at this point, chute failure was only a dire possibility. A hard landing with a live fire and fuel aboard was currently a dire certainty. He flipped the cover back on the emergency manual overrides, and depressed the third button from the left. The fuel tanks vented with a sound like a suddenly punctured aerosol can, meaning that he was now completely in the hands of fate. And if the main chute did not deploy—
A sudden jerk and sense of sustained deceleration signaled that the main chute was out and full: the predictable, faint swaying motion was the harbinger of a gentle ride to the ground.
Gentle, but hardly a relief: the flame in the capsule was now steady, working its way up the liner and causing further short-outs. The heat in his combat suit suddenly increased, became intense, soared toward unbearable—
—just as, with sudden thump, the capsule jarred to a rough halt. In the same second, there was a creaky wheeze, and then a blast of explosive bolts blew the top of the capsule off. The flames around him roared up, greedily feeding upon the abundant oxygen in the atmosphere.
He tumbled out of the coffinlike remains of the capsule, turned about and leaned back into the conflagration, the combat suit setting up a desperate warning squall: complete failure was imminent—
Rummaging about under the control panel, he sprung open a small, armored cargo receptacle, and yanked out the four-liter secure container he found there.