by M.A. Harris
Build Up
It was past midnight in the hollow, the downward pointed floodlights bathed the scene with yellow tinted light made orange by the surrounding red sandstone. In eerie near silence the Alexis Aurora hung in the air over one of the two currently unused Moonship pads. Cables hung down from the four open landing pad ports. One of the cables ran to a portable chiller set up on the edge of the pad, the others ran down to a huge, black fabric shrouded, shape.
Paul hung out the auxiliary hatch, glad of the safety belt around his waist. He spoke into the ear boom, “Rigger One, how’s your line?”
“On the mark Alexis.” Came the light Kentucky twang, Charlene didn’t look any more like a rigger than she sounded.
He called out the other three and got the same response. They were ready to move on then, “Patsy take up the slack, then half a ton over base thrust.”
“Take up the slack then half a ton over base, aye Commander.”
“Execute.”
The ground fell away and the lines straightened. The vast shroud below moved then took on a conical shape, there was a faint thump as the slack came out, the lines grew taut and then all motion ceased again.
“Half a ton over base Commander.” Patsy said softly.
“How’s it look down there, Conti?”
The construction boss’s voice came back clear and precise, “Like the pictures Paul. The gauges all show nominal weight distribution, the shroud looks like it’s tight as a drum.”
The conical shroud contained one of the two excavators they needed to get to the moon before the construction campaign could start. They had decided that since it was a high priority and a high-risk item they would lift it on the second construction camp lift. This would be the tenth trip to the moon in twenty-two days. There were already three people living at the Luna Haven site, working out of a little inflatable hut while they carried out a rapid site survey. Much of the construction gang’s equipment and quarters were already stockpiled on the moon. Another four trips and Conti and his crew would be ready to start.
Conti and a small construction prep crew had been up on the last several trips but wouldn’t be going up today. Paul didn’t want the added worry of passengers. Most of this trip’s cargo load was on the shrouded pallet below, and the few light items on the cargo deck he and his crew could deal with.
Paul leaned out over space and looked at the nearest landing pad port. It was swathed with radar absorbent cloth like the cargo shroud. “Cliff, how does the radar gun read?”
A pause, “It’s not great Paul, there are several spikes in the radar bands. I think we must be having some interaction between the shape and absorbency bands of the hull and the cloth.” It was about what they had expected, unfortunately computer modeling of stealth was still unreliable and they had no experts on staff to consult with.
“All aspects or some particular directions, Cliff?”
“As you’d expect it’s pretty directional, I’m uploading a map to the Alexis now. I don’t think we’re going to do a lot better if we try again.” Cliff’s voice was unhappy, but he’d already done the upload, which told Paul a lot.
“We don’t have the time anyway Cliff. I’ll have Raoul on the threat receivers full time as we go up.”
“Understood and agreed Flight Commander.” Cliff’s voice was formal.
“Roger that Base Commander. Raoul, I’m about to cast off the chiller line.” Paul pulled his head inside, slamming and locking the hatch. He undid the belt and hung it on its clip by the door.
“You’re about to cast off the chiller line aye, ready on the switch over on your command.”
Paul was at the line. “I’m about to cast off the chiller line, all clear below?”
Cliff’s voice, for the last time, “All clear, go with God Alexis.”
“Will do Base, switch the line Raoul.”
“Switched.”
Paul flipped the latches and rotated the big collar, the weight of the line pulled it out of his hand and it faded into the dusk, guided away from the cargo shroud by a pilot line, the pilot line went next, he pulled the shroud material into place and glanced around, “Chiller line gone, I’m on my way up.”
Two minutes later Paul was seated, “What’s the total expected mass, Copilot?”
“One seventy six point five four three tons, Commander.”
Paul checked, “One seventy six point five four three tons dialed in as nominal takeoff thrust.”
“Aye.”
“Ninety percent of take off thrust if you please, Patsy.”
“Aye Paul.”
The faint noise of the Stacks changed in tone. Paul saw the load gauges swing up in unison. His hand touched the thrust control and pushed it forward.
Patsy sang out, “One sixty, one seventy, one seventy five, one eighty, we have lift off….whoa.”
The ship shook and rolled as the cargo came off the ground and the inevitable asymmetries of load and thrust lines took effect. Paul clenched his teeth hard over his own curse. The simulator hadn’t really been able to mimic this behavior. The ship rocked back and forth, as it rolled to the right.
Paul didn’t try and counteract the swing or the roll at first, he increased the thrust, and so the speed, the models said that the aerodynamic load on the shroud would damp a lot of the motion, but as they went up and acceleration built faintly the pendulum swing seemed to be getting worse and Paul prepared to try and counter it. Though it had seemed to be forever they were only just clear of the hollow, as they rose above the bluff’s wind shadow the gentle northerly breeze caught them. The ship shivered and rolled again and the pendulum swing seemed to be about to fling them out of the sky, although the instruments stubbornly insisted that it was less than five degrees either way.
Twisting the thrust director Paul focused his eyes on the roll gauge; he needed to kill that first if he could. The roll died away and suddenly Paul realized that the gauge was telling him that the swing was dying as well as their speed picked up. Relief surged through him then Patsy’s war-whoop made him jump, “Damn it Patsy?”
“Sorry boss, but that was a beautiful job of flying.”
“Ditto Paul, I’d have been all over the sky.” Raoul chimed in.
Paul wanted to laugh, to admit that he’d come close to losing control, had thought he had by not reacting quickly enough for a few instants but Ted’s advice came back to him and he mentally shrugged, “Thanks Patsy, Raoul, it was a bit tight for a few moments but we look good now.” They were at the standard fifty mile an hour low altitude climb rate so he rolled the thrust back, “now we need to keep an eye on threats, we’re going to be low, slow and targetable for long enough to worry me and I don’t want to give anyone funny ideas if I can avoid it, even after we’re technically safe.”
Patsy had only just turned back to her screens when she yipped again, this time unhappily, “I have something from the south Paul, the waveform’s acquisition, not area search.” The radar reflection map came up on the main screen, a nasty four lobed star, though in the frequency band of immediate concern the star wasn’t very big. Patsy grunted then spoke, “Suggest we roll twenty degrees left Paul.”
“Doing it” Paul twisted the roll.
“I see something off to the east Patsy, Paul. A targeting radar just lit off, we’re only getting a side lobe, I think our bogey may have mistaken us for someone else.”
“Yeah, and ours just lost us or lost interest. I think whoever it is, is diving away to the west.” Patsy said with satisfaction.
“Did they get a good lock on us Patsy?” Paul was looking at their position; they were at only ten thousand feet and still almost directly over the Hollow.
“Don’t know why they were looking this way so intently boss, I did a replay of the last five minutes and I can’t see a search signal. I wonder if he spotted something passively, we’re a lot more vulnerable to bistatic radars than conventional ones. It’s possible he had his system in passive bistatic
mode and caught a lobe off us, maybe from the airport radar beacon. It might explain why he seemed a bit confused since as soon as he lit off his targeting radar he’d have lost us.” Patsy was tapping busily at her workstation as she spoke.
Paul nodded, to himself since Patsy was looking at her monitor array, “Sounds reasonable. Keep an eye out for anything else, and particularly for that pair, they may get done playing war and come looking for the anomaly.”
“Aye, aye Commander.” She flicked him a saucy smile over her shoulder.
-o-
An hour and a half later, deep in the bowels of the cruiser USS Portland, radar man first class Vicky Eliot frowned. The Portland’s Aegis Three radar system was highly automated and sophisticated, so much so that almost no one looked at ‘real’ radar data any longer. The computer that comprised the vast majority of the Aegis system digested all the sensor data and turned it into target tracks on tactical displays. Vicky was the exception, one of the system techs, she was on scraps and craps today, and she got to see almost raw information from the sensors. She saw the tracks that the computer couldn’t make sense of. If it perceived even the vaguest threat it would present the information on one of the tactical stations, but stuff that simply confused it was sent to scraps and craps.
Vicky had grown very good at figuring out what the sensors were seeing but today the ether had thrown up something outside the run of the mill sea gull with an aluminum pull tab in its crop, or metallic dust cloud in the upper troposphere. If the radar’s intermittent returns were to be believed the target was far to the south of the Portland. Assuming the range was right the only reason the target was visible was its altitude, the computer plotted it at sixty miles, almost low orbit, far above most of the atmosphere. If it was real the target was far too high to be flying in any normal sense, and yet whatever it was behaved as if it was flying, albeit fast, about a thousand miles an hour to the east with a small climbing vector. It was also accelerating, at a leisurely quarter gravity.
Whatever it was had appeared on the screen quite suddenly and had bloomed and faded quite erratically for the first minute or so. The laser radar had seemed to get a couple of ‘hits’ but had lost interest and now the radar signal was fading quickly, though it had stopped the erratic bloom and fade of the first minute or so.
It was no apparent threat to anyone since it was already out over the open sea and heading east fast, away from the Portland and the aircraft carrier Vinson’s battle group. In another minute or so the target would fall below the horizon and out of the Portland’s volume of concern.
Vicky couldn’t make up her mind what to do. The target appeared to be quite real on radar, but it wasn’t behaving right, she kept on wondering if it was a closer target somehow spoofing the radar, but the faint lidar hit and lack of any sign on the short range passive sensors seemed to indicate otherwise.
The track quite suddenly turned from a red dot to a red oval predicting location, the radar had lost the target. Vicky checked the lidar again, nothing. She did a covert check and found the big infrared telescope on the main mast was no longer slaved to the captain’s monitor. In an instant it was pointed at the point of the target oval, its most likely location.
For a few seconds she saw an odd image, an overlapping square and circle, their edges glowing dully against the gray background. But the odd geometric shape was falling around the world, before it was much more than an impression the thickening atmosphere between the Portland and the target washed the image out.
Vicky flicked the IR-telescope back to scan and leaned back. The scraps and craps screen showed lots of blue shapes now, no red ones. Vicky fed the information on the anomalous track to her secondary monitor and watched it all again. There was an odd firmness to the track, a reality that most radar ghosts lacked, if she had been in a court she would have sworn that whatever it was, it was real.
But. It was gone and she hadn’t called the Lieutenant over to check it out while it was live. The little prick would have kittens over that. He was, in Vicky’s opinion, a waste of oxygen, not only a prick but also incompetent and he groveled to his superiors, a combination Vicky, like many senior noncommissioned, found sickening. She tagged the track memory as medium interest, but probably some kind of software glitch, the safest noncommittal tag one could use.
She leaned back and let her imagination weave a dream about the target, about alien visitors and alien abduction. Her imagination was the reason she was so good at her job most of the time.