Solar Express
Page 23
Castenada is currently under investigation by the Noram Inspector-General’s office in regard to charges that he revealed classified DOEA material to the media after the Administration failed to provide additional disaster relief to New York City.
Senator Kim Greywinter (D-ALB), chairman of the DOEA oversight committee, just finished holding hearings on the Administration’s request. Greywinter suggested that failing to take advantage of the “startling information” provided by the Space Service would be a grievous mistake. He also noted that Castenada had a “perfect record of deliberate misinformation.”
Castenada could not be reached for further comment.
EC Chancellor Rumikov chided both Noram and the Sinese Federation for failing to inform other nations about the potential alien spacecraft, and stated that it would set “a terrible precedent” if either failed to share fully any scientific information recovered from missions to investigate the object.
DOEA Secretary Luvalle declined comment on whether the Noram probe was manned and whether it had actually reached the mysterious object, despite reports from various astronomical facilities that a small body has been sighted orbiting the mysterious object that rotates slowly, showing alternatively a shimmering brilliant white side and a dark side.
Sinese Minister for Space Wong Mengyi let it be known through ministry officials that no comment would be forthcoming until the Sinese probe reached the object and relayed preliminary information to ministry scientists. A Sinese official who declined to be named also stated that any interference with Sinese space operations and research would be considered “hostile military action” and would invalidate all nonmilitarization of space treaties and agreements …
42
RECON THREE
10 NOVEMBER 2114
Tavoian slept longer than usual, at least longer than he had been, but that made sense given how he’d collapsed the night before and given the fact that he was sleeping in weightless conditions. It was still comparatively early—0537 UTC—when he woke and checked the time, but after some initial grogginess, he felt much better. He felt even more refreshed after eating, prepared foods or not, largely from squeeze type containers, which indicated that whoever had stocked Recon three had known that most of the provisions would have to be consumed in weightless conditions, rather than under acceleration or decel. The orange juice even tasted remotely fresh.
He cleaned up quickly, then settled in front of the controls. There were no messages, either from the colonel or anyone else, and he wanted to get started before there were any. The next step was to run a systems check on the AI rover, before sending it down to the artifact on the ISV and then through the open doors of the hexagon to see where the passages might lead. Because he believed in backups, he’d decided to have the rover go as far as it could under his direction. Then when it reached the end of the fiber-optic line—or if the line snarled or broke—it could proceed on its own. Tavoian intended to use direct control and linkage as far as he could so that he had real-time visuals, even though he knew that to get into the depths of the alien artifact he’d have to set the rover loose on its own. He only had two rovers. He could likely cobble together a third if necessary, but he certainly didn’t want to hazard the rovers unnecessarily or quickly, not when he was likely to be on station for more than two months, although he had the feeling he probably wouldn’t be the only Noram ship around the artifact before that long, not after the colonel transmitted images and data to the head of Space Command.
Then again … With all the possible hostilities between the great powers and the position of the artifact on the far side of the sun from Earth, even the colonel might have trouble gathering the necessary resources for a full scientific team, especially doing so quickly enough to allow them sufficient time and resources. But that’s not your problem, and you’ve got enough to deal with without worrying about his difficulties.
Getting the systems check done, and then transmitting the programmed instructions and guidelines inputted to the rover’s AI took close to an hour, and close to another hour passed before the ISV hovered above the half-open door to the hexagonal chamber that had held the unmarked equipment still anchored to the floor. Tavoian eased the AI rover, using its fully charged thruster pack and trailing the fiber-optic line, through the opening, past the protrusion that might be some form of equipment or technology—or might not—and then through the second opening. The idea was to guide the rover in the direction of the outer hull, hoping to find another passage there leading “down,” the idea being to see if there might be a way close to the hull that led around the barrier at the bottom of the central hexagonal shaft.
If that failed, Tavoian could look for other “doors” that had been left open, but in his estimation, there were over twenty thousand hexagons in the artifact, assuming the places where he hadn’t yet explored were like the others. Trying to send the rover through all those passages would exhaust all the thruster propellant before even a fraction of the hexagons were investigated. The next possibility was remote, but he could try beaming various lights and electromagnetic wavelengths at the doors to see if that created any reaction …
One thing at a time. He pulled his thoughts back to the rover. Once through the second opening, the one out of the first hexagon, because he could only go parallel to the outer hull, he guided the rover to the left. Some twelve meters farther on he came to a four-way junction—left or right, each at sixty-degree angles, or toward the rim and where the silvery hull ended or away from it, at a ninety-degree angle. He guided the rover toward the hull, for all of about eight meters, when it reached the layer of hexagonal chambers closer to the hull. The next junction was a stretch of twenty-five meters away, but the short passageway “out” toward the hull ended in a blank wall of the dark green material.
“Are there any color differentiations?” he asked the ship’s AI.
NEGATIVE.
“Are there any other differentiations not visible to the human eye?”
THE SURFACE PARALLEL TO THE FLAT SIDES OF THE HEXAGON AND CLOSEST TO THE OUTER ARC OF THE ARTIFACT IS FRACTIONALLY ROUGHER. WITHOUT IR CAPABILITIES, MORE DISTINCTION IS NOT POSSIBLE.
Another indication that they did spin the larger sphere.
Tavoian supposed that was progress. After quick inspection of the blank wall, he headed the rover back to the last passage split, and turned the rover farther along a passageway parallel to the rim of the artifact, looking for another passage leading back out toward the rim, but when he guided the rover outward once more, passage was blocked by another blank wall.
Once more he guided the rover back to the last junction and went parallel along another twenty-plus-meter stretch … and, abruptly, the image from the rover vanished.
“What happened?”
THE SIGNAL WAS LOST. MOST PROBABLE CAUSE WAS TENSION ON THE LINE. SECOND MOST PROBABLE CAUSE WAS PRESSURE ON THE LINE AGAINST A SHARP EDGE OR OBJECT.
Tavoian mentally calculated. The ISV carried five hundred meters of line on a largely frictionless spool. According to the ISV readouts, a little less than 140 meters of line had paid out. He had a good general idea where the rover was, but no way to track it where it might go. He could only hope that the AI guidance would enable it to get farther along, perhaps even to find a way past or through the barriers seemingly built into the artifact everywhere to restrict access to whatever lay immediately under the outer silvery hull. Because that hull was so strong that human technology that could be transported to the artifact was unlikely to break through it, the only real hope was to find ways into that section of the ship without using force. Of course, doing that was essentially useless if the AI couldn’t also direct the rover back to the ISV.
Thinking of that, he focused on the images from the ISV. Nothing had changed. It remained over the open door, occasionally using its thrusters to hold its position. As he studied the image, Tavoian wondered if there was any way he could figure out to simply attach the ISV in position …
For the moment, he had to hope for the best.
His thoughts went back to the alien artifact. How did they communicate within the original sphere? There had to be a comm system built into the walls of the structure. Would the areas around the “doors” respond to electronic signals? Light or laser pulses? Various levels of electromagnetic radiation?
Tavoian heard his stomach growl. He did feel hungry, and a little light-headed. He checked the time—0957 UTC. That late already?
“Notify me if there’s any sign of the rover … or anything else, including any other spacecraft that might be approaching.” Tavoian didn’t expect the Sinese longliner for another day, but relying on expectations wasn’t a good idea, especially given the situation between Noram and the Sinese. Since there was little point in sitting and waiting, he decided he might as well check to see if any new messages had arrived and then take a break and eat something, especially since it had been hours since breakfast.
There was a message from the colonel, requesting a report on any new developments as they occurred. Tavoian replied that there were no new developments, but that he had dispatched an AI-guided unit on another search of an area of the artifact in an effort to discover a way into apparently sealed areas.
Once that message was dispatched, he took several long swallows of tea from one of his squeezebottles, ate a few crackers, trying to do so without spraying crumbs anywhere, since they’d eventually end up in the ventilation system, and turned to the problem at hand. What other ways might there be to discover more about the artifact? The light reflected from the green surfaces varied minutely, but precisely, with a definitely engineered wavelength differential. What would happen if you replicated those exact wavelengths? The first step was to determine if that were possible with the resources he had on board Recon three. It only took moments to verify that he did indeed have a tunable broadband laser that covered wavelengths from longer than the infrared up through the UV spectrum, and it had enough power to generate a continuous light that would meet his specifications. Best of all, it could be recharged from the deployed solar panels, and it had been adapted to be mounted on the ISV.
Tavoian had no idea who had been intelligent or farsighted enough to include that piece of equipment, but he was glad of it. Without it, it would have been hard to pursue that line of inquiry. Then he took a deep breath and called up the “Investigatory Methods” document that suggested various tests. It didn’t take much reading for him to see that some of the suggested “inquiries” weren’t going to be much help. How could he sample various materials when he didn’t have anything that could cut or break the material of the artifact? Then he read the line beneath:
Any loose material, detritus, or even dust might prove useful …
He hadn’t even thought of that. He continued reading, nodding occasionally. When he finished, he had to admit that the colonel either knew a great deal more than military and space matters, or he had access to a wide range of expertise. Either way …
While he waited for the return of the AI rover—and kept hoping that it would return—he made his way to the equipment hold, the one aft of the passenger area, where he located the tunable broadband laser and brought it forward to the passenger area, now serving as a de facto workroom, where he readied it, as much as he could, for mounting on the ISV. He had taken out the small extruder/nanotube formulator, just in case he needed additional supports for mounting, but it turned out those weren’t needed.
When he finished and returned to the control area, he asked the ship’s AI, “Is there any signal from the AI rover?”
NEGATIVE.
With a headshake, Tavoian made his way forward to the control area, where he used the system to find the location of the sampling gear. While he hadn’t looked for dust or loose material in corners of the artifact, surely there had to be some … somewhere in all those chambers and passageways.
He was just about to go aft once more for the sampling gear when the ship’s AI announced, SIGNAL RECEIVED FROM AI ROVER.
Simultaneously, an image appeared on the control wall—that of the ISV as seen from the hexagonal opening.
“YES!” Tavoian couldn’t help shouting, but that was tempered by the AI.
THE ROVER IS IN A LOW POWER STATE.
Immediately Tavoian took control of the ISV and the rover, and began the recovery of the AI. He didn’t breathe easily until the ISV was safely in the main lock of Recon three, a good half hour later. While the lock was being pressurized and the temperature slowly raised, he had the rover’s images uploaded to the ship’s AI.
Then he began to watch them, from the beginning, so that he had some idea where the AI had guided the rover. The first views were what he had already seen before the fiber-optic line had separated. After that, the AI followed the general guidelines he’d set up, and worked itself “down” another set of hexagons, then out into another blank wall, then back and down, and into what looked to be another dead end … but wasn’t, because in the corner of what initially appeared to be a corner, there was an open hexagonal “door,” except narrower than those open above, perhaps a little less than a meter across at its widest point. The passageway ran straight onward beyond the door, if roughly paralleling the outer hull.
The rover continued through the opening and along the passageway for less than twenty meters before coming to another narrow hexagonal door on the outboard side of the passageway. The rover entered and scanned the chamber beyond—the first actual semirectangular space in the artifact—some thirty meters wide and thirty high, it extended at least 150 meters in length, and the side away from the rover curved slightly, suggesting that it might lie directly beneath the outer hull. There were also ridges protruding less than half a meter from the hull-side surface, forming a rectangle slightly smaller than the surface itself. From what Tavoian could tell from the rover’s scanning light, the surfaces were all green, possibly slightly lighter in color than those on the outside.
A cargo or launching lock? While that was Tavoian’s first thought, outside of the suggestion of lock doors created by the protrusions, there was nothing else obvious in the chamber.
The AI completed its scan, returned to the narrow passage, and continued onward for another fifty meters to where the passage turned left and ended at another hexagonal opening. The “door” was fully open, assuming that the false color images the ship’s AI had created for Tavoian earlier corresponded to full opening, but what the rover’s image revealed for the first time was that a section of the interior edges of the opening were not regular. The corners of the opening that would have been at the base, assuming the artifact had been rotating for artificial gravity, were surrounded by uneven rounded masses of the same green material as the walls, as if someone or something had deliberately done so to keep the opening from closing. There was no sign of melting or other materials any higher.
As the rover moved through the defaced doorway and began to scan the immense chamber beyond, Tavoian swallowed even at the initial images. It took him a moment to place what he saw in perspective, especially with the limited beam width of the rover’s light. What appeared to be an immense pillar or small tower jutted out in front of him, except that it was more than twenty meters away and extended toward what had to be the underside of the outer hull. The towerlike column, which also looked to be hexagonal, did not quite reach that underside, but stopped a few meters short of one end of what looked to be hexagonal funnel-like devices, possibly energy-focusing equipment, apparently just beneath the inside of the out
er hull of the artifact. Unlike anything else Tavoian had seen in the artifact, that hexagonal pillar or tower was a pale gray.
As the rover moved farther into the huge chamber, Tavoian checked the other images. Standard radar showed nothing, but the laser scanner showed other columns protruding from the wall or barrier that separated the chamber from the remainder of the artifact. How many, he couldn’t tell, but his gut instinct was that there were thirty-two—the same number as the slightly discolored circles revealed by Recon three’s scanners. The rover slowly turned, and its scanners took in the area around it, but revealed nothing but bulkheads and decks, and the towerlike pillars. There were no fused masses, no other protrusions, and not even any debris, from what Tavoian could determine.
After moving to a point close to and beneath the first pillar, the rover again scanned the chamber, revealing more towers, then turned and began the return to the ISV. Tavoian checked the timing, then nodded. The rover was down to a little more than half power, and the AI had cut off the exploration. As the rover reentered the passageway paralleling the outer hull, Tavoian had the AI create programming for the route the rover had taken, so that it could be used again. Then he returned his attention to the screens showing the area around Recon three.
“Are there any other craft in detection range?”
NEGATIVE THIS TIME.
Tavoian considered what the AI rover had discovered. Although he had no way to prove it, his instincts told him that the columns were the discharge points of something, most likely the drives or engines that had propelled the original sphere.