Game Reserve: Earth (Shaitan Wars Book 5)
Page 9
“The important thing to note is that when the captain ejected the black box core of the Majorca, the maintenance computer’s logs were reporting that over eighty percent of the external hull of the Majorca was intact, and the outside skin temperature was relatively cool, while the insides were raging with plasma fire. So, in a sense the dying crew was right. The Majorca burnt from the insides. There is no data on the eventual fate of the Majorca, because the core had been dumped into space before that thankfully, otherwise we wouldn’t have the data in the first place, but I have some speculations about its fate which I will come to shortly.
“So, the super weapon first made a hole in the hull of Majorca and then injected something which caused the temperature to rise catastrophically within seconds even while the outside skin was relatively cool. This is not how any electromagnetic wave works. Let us start with the lowest frequency, longest wavelength electromagnetic waves first i.e. microwave. In theory you can make a coherent beam of microwave like that of a laser, although we humans haven’t been able to make one yet. This is known as a Maser.
“Such Maser beams, however powerful would have not been able to punch a small hole in the hull of the ship. It would have acted very similar to a microwave oven. It would have heated up the entire hull of the ship first, and depending on the strength of the beam could have melted the hull. The thing is that most of the hull would have melted first before the insides started melting. The insides would have become hot for sure, boiling hot in fact, but not enough to cause plasma fires. Only after most of the hull had melted, would the insides start melting.
“The next higher electromagnetic wave is light, and the corresponding beam is the Laser. You all know the nature of damage that a laser causes on ships, because we use such weapons ourselves. Now, even if you imagine the aliens’ Lasers were a thousand times more powerful than ours, it would not cause the nature of damage observed on Majorca. It would simply cause the same damage as our lasers, only a thousand times faster.
“Coherent and concentrated light like a laser heats up the metal in the localized area it shines upon quickly, without giving enough time for the heat to spread around. This causes that portion of the metal to melt quickly and a hole is punched into the hull of the ship. If the laser is very powerful, then it would punch a hole right through the ship without significantly raising the temperature of the entire ship. If such a powerful laser were to be splayed around the hull of the ship, then it would cause a cut across the hull of a ship, like the Laser cutting lathes used in our factories to cut metal with a smooth finish. In no case would it cause a raging plasma fire inside the ship, and that too in a matter of seconds.
“The next higher electromagnetic wave is X-rays. X-ray lasers are theoretically possible, and some of our experiments have been able to achieve partial laser effects with x-rays for a few milliseconds in controlled nuclear explosions. In fact, most of the x-ray laser experiments have been done with an eye towards making weapons for the USC. There are extensive simulations available with the navy on the nature of devastation such a theoretical weapon could cause on a ship. It is nowhere close to the fate of the Majorca. In short even an x-ray laser would cause its initial damage on the outside hull before reaching inside.
“The highest frequency of electromagnetic waves are the Gamma rays. The only observed source of focused Gamma rays are during a supernova explosion and in the two jets on the opposing poles of a quasar. These are the two most violent natural phenomena in the universe. Although gamma rays are produced during a nuclear explosion, it is not in a focused form that can be directed from a distance at any target. There is a reason why directed gamma ray burst are so rare and only observed in the most violent event in the universe. Gamma rays are the wild untamed beasts of the universe. We humans don’t even have the conception to begin to imagine any engineering construct that can in any way project gamma rays, if such a thing is even possible.
“But we are assuming that the aliens are basically gods as far as their technology is concerned, so for the moment let us assume that they have tamed gamma rays. It would still not make sense for such intelligent aliens to use gamma rays to kill a ship, because gamma rays would make for a very lousy weapon for that purpose. The rays are so energetic, that most of it would simply pass through the entire ship without interacting with either the hull or the insides of the ship. It would make gamma rays an extremely inefficient weapon. The humans inside would die for sure, but over years and because of cell degradation due to cancer.
“So, as you can see, none of these suspects match the description of the crime. As I had said earlier, I am far more confident in what I can rule out, than the list of possible candidates that can be this super weapon. What I told you till now is the list that can be ruled out. What I am hypothesizing now is speculation to a large extent. There are perhaps hundreds of ways a very advanced alien could build this super weapon, if we humans have no conception of the science behind it. If, however the super weapon is built with science that we humans know, then I have one prime candidate. Before I come to it, let me rule out one wild speculation floating around in the corridors of this ship.
“It is very unlikely that the super weapon is something that rips time and space apart around its target, as some of you have speculated. I know it is the most fantastic weapon concept we can think about, and obviously the most farfetched weapon possible. Surprisingly if this had been the method of destruction of the fleet, we humans would have detected it, because we have the capability of detecting such effects! Any distortion in the fabric of spacetime creates gravity waves. Think of these gravity waves as ripples created in a stretched fabric, when such a stretched fabric is pinched, pulled and then released. Since the early twenty first century, we have very sensitive space based gravity wave detectors in space studying gravity waves from the earliest moments of the Big Bang to those created by the collapse of a neutron star.
“There are some very smart people on Cent Com, who probably had the very same speculation in their head after the first fleet was destroyed so dramatically. They checked with those gravity wave detectors. According to the logs of Majorca, Cent Com specifically advised their fleet that no gravity waves had been detected, so the super weapon was unlikely to be a spacetime warping kind of a weapon. Now that hopefully I have laid that speculation to rest, let me come to what I suspect this weapon to be, based on the sciences that we humans know about.
“It is based on a particle that we humans know about since the 1930s, and have been generating in our labs since the 1960s. It is Antimatter! Talking to a few of the crew last night, I realized that many thought of antimatter as some kind of fairy tale, make believe material that doesn’t exist in real life. Some that I spoke to, even likened it to anti-gravity – something used in fantastic tales but has no basis in physics. Nothing could be further from the truth. As they say, truth can be stranger than fiction. Antimatter is not just real, but believe it or not, we interact and feel it on a daily basis!
“Every time you hold a banana, you get a dose of a few hundred antielectrons hitting you! Banana contains Potassium-40 which naturally decays and releases antielectrons, also known as positrons. Anyone who has gone through a full medical checkup in Dr. Goetz’s labs, and has had a PET scan has had antimatter running through his or her blood stream. We have been using antimatter in PET scans for over two hundred years now. Isotopes that undergo natural decay like Potassium-40 are injected into our blood stream and the release of the antimatter registers in the scanner, through which doctors map the blood flow in our bodies.
“So, you may think that antimatter is pretty safe, if it can be used in medicine. You would be dead wrong if you thought so. It is the deadliest thing in this universe known to humans. Gram for gram, it is the most potent substance in terms of energy by far. A gram of antimatter would release a thousand times more energy than a gram of hydrogen fuel in a fusion reaction. That should put in perspective the amount of energy stored in antimatter.
“You have all heard of the famous equation of Einstein: E=mc2. Basically, the energy stored in matter is its mass multiplied by the square of the speed of light, which we all know is a fantastically big number. While this is the principle used in a fusion reaction to liberate energy from the matter, it is nowhere as efficient as we imagine it to be. Hydrogen gets converted to Helium, which itself has mass. So, in effect most of the matter stays as matter. Only the minute difference in mass between the Hydrogen fuels and the resulting Helium is converted into energy, which in the best case is just 0.7% of the fuel.
“When Antimatter touches normal matter that this universe and all of us are made from, it is an entirely different story. Every atom of antimatter is annihilated, taking an equal number of atoms of normal matter with it. It releases 100% of its mass as energy, taking an equal amount of normal matter with it. In effect it releases twice the amount of energy as the Einsteinian equation predicts. A few grams of antimatter would be enough to flatten out any large city like New York, Paris or London. It is the easiest conceivable bomb material since it requires no detonator. All that is needed is to make it touch normal matter, which is anything and everything in this universe, and it would go boom! This also makes it the most unstable thing in the universe that is next to impossible to handle and store safely.
“The antimatter we produce in our labs is usually antielectrons, also known as positrons, which have the opposite electrical charge to an electron. These positively charged positrons are held in a positively charged magnetic bottle, where the electrical charge prevents them from touching the surface of the bottle, which is of course made from normal matter. That has been the only way we have been able to contain and hold minute amounts of antimatter for short periods of time.
“Eventually those positrons find a way of touching the surface of the bottles due to quantum uncertainties in their position and evaporating away in tiny sparks of energy. We don’t know of any way to hold an atom of antimatter, since it would be electrically neutral. Even with these limitations, we can think of a way to use antimatter as a weapon in space. It would work only in space mind you, as you will see after my explanation, it would not work inside an atmosphere.
“Imagine for a moment, that you somehow had the technology to generate copious amounts of antielectrons or anti protons on demand. If you could do that, then you could use charged surface of a barrel as an electromagnetic waveguide to channel those antimatter particles. This is a fairly simple technology, as anyone who has seen a tube based television in a museum would know. It uses something called a cathode ray gun to emit a fine stream of electrons on a fluorescent screen. So, this has been a technology available to us for three hundred years. Only in this case we would be shooting anti electrons instead of electrons from a gun with the opposite electrical charge.
“This beam of positrons could travel a long distance in space for the obvious reason that there is no matter in space, until it hits something made from matter – like a target ship. Once it touches the hull of the ship, it will immediately annihilate, taking an electron along with it, and releasing all the mass held in those two particles as energy. With enough positrons hitting that spot of the hull, that particular spot would heat up beyond the melting point in a matter of milliseconds and most likely explosively breach that part of the hull. Once the hull is breached and the positrons reach inside the ship, the dynamics changes drastically.
“The antimatter hits the air inside the ship before it can hit anything else on the ship. Now it may look different to us, but the air has the same electrons as the atoms of any solid material like the bulkhead. So, the positrons go ahead and annihilates the electrons in the air, causing the air to almost instantly heat up to a few thousand degrees. Shorn off its electrons, the air truly turns into charged plasma that rages through the ship like a firestorm.
“The antimatter stream isn’t done yet. Once it can no longer find any more electrons in the air, and since anti electrons will only annihilate electrons, the positron stream would hit the bulkhead or any other physical matter in its path within the ship. Whatever this stream touches would almost instantaneously heat up to thousands of degrees either burning or melting, depending on the amount of oxygen still left in the air.
“Those material would not just stop at melting and catching fire. As the local temperature in those materials rises to beyond three thousand degrees, they would turn gaseous and immediately turn plasma themselves, adding to the plasma fire already raging through the ship. To any observer still alive on the ship, in those last few seconds, it would seem that the ship was burning up from the insides!”
Silence followed Sabina’s long dissertation. It was a few seconds before everyone realized that she had finished what she had to say. Even after realizing it, no one else spoke for some time, as the mental image of what the crew of USC Majorca would have seen in those last few seconds haunted them. Capt. Gorr finally spoke up reluctantly asking Sabina. “So that is your theory on this super weapon, Dr. Chitnis?”
“It is more like my best guess hypothesis, rather than a theory, but yes… that is what I could come up with. This is of course with the base assumption, that the super weapon is based on a science that we humans understand. If the super weapon is based on some science that we humans haven’t yet figured out, then my guess would be no better than yours captain.” Sabina replied sheepishly.
The group discussed Dr. Chitnis’s theory and most people with science degrees agreed that her hypothesis was the most plausible one. They discussed in detail about whether such a stream would be antielectrons or anti protons, and came to the view that it did not matter too much in term of lethality to their ship, but did make a difference on the strategy if one wanted to foil such a weapon. The discussion on the weapon started going in circles after some time, because they had so little data on it. Capt. Gorr decided to intervene and move on to the other topic on their agenda.
“So, I want ideas on how we can find out about the fate of the people on Earth, and be able to contact whoever may be left out there. It is clear that if we were to approach Earth, we would meet the same fate as other USC ships. That super ship is most likely patrolling somewhere near Earth. We can be certain that this ship and the aliens inside them have excellent sensors and scanners.
“I say this not just because they undoubtedly have superior technology to ours, but because they demonstrated those scanner’s capability by being able to detect each and every space installation of ours in the solar system in a matter of hours at the most, and then destroying them in an equally short period of time. We believe that sending a spy drone towards Earth would be futile, because our drone would meet the same fate before it can get anywhere near Earth.
“It might actually be worse than the simple destruction of our drone, because it might alert the aliens to our presence. If the aliens retrace the path of the drone and go about searching for us, they would be able to discover us fairly fast given the kind of acceleration their ship can achieve. Staying hidden is our best defense against the superior technology of the aliens. Out best chance of survival is to stay hidden behind this rock for the time being.
“We have been lucky so far, in that we haven’t been discovered in our approach. Our reaction less drives did help, but active scanning by the aliens could have given us away. Thankfully the aliens aren’t actively scanning this sector of the solar system. Perhaps they are complacent and think they have destroyed all human space assets, or perhaps they don
’t consider anything approaching them from far as a threat. We don’t know but we cannot risk moving in open space any further.” Capt. Gorr said.
“So, if we can’t send a probe towards Earth, and we cannot transmit radio signals from here, then how do we get in touch with Earth?!” Lt. Terzi wondered aloud.
“Before that, and even more pertinent question to ask XO would be, who do we get in touch with on Earth? Who is alive on Earth, and who is still in-charge?” Capt. Gorr quipped. “If we knew the answers to those question, then we might have the option to beam directed laser at a certain spot on Earth. Although the demons might be able to detect directed laser beams just as well as radio broadcast. The laser would have to travel through the atmosphere, which would be a dead giveaway for anyone with the kind of detection technology which I suspect the demons possess.”
“There is another potential problem!” Lt. Chu chipped in. “Given the danger of being discovered using radio communication, even if we were able to somehow contact someone on Earth, what return address do we give them to respond back to us?”
“Return Address?” Capt. Gorr asked, not familiar with many terms commonly used on Earth, not having been born or lived there.
“Oh, it’s just an expression which is a hangover from the twentieth century, sir.” Lt. Chu replied. “In the olden days before electronic communications, people would physically write messages on paper as I am sure you know, sir. This mail used to be physically delivered on the geographical address written on mail, and there would be a ‘return address’ appended to the message, so the receiver would know where to send the response to the mail.”
“Physical delivery!” Capt. Gorr exclaimed. “Now that is out of the box thinking!” He had a curious smile on his face.
Lt. Chu couldn’t follow the train of thought developing in his captain’s mind, so he asked. “Where are we going to find a postman in the Asteroid belt, who would deliver our letter to Earth?”