Déjà Doomed

by Edward M. Lerner

  Here and now, he would welcome someone filling the silence. “Katya, would you care to add something? Or anyone else?”

  “Yes, please.” The words caught in her throat. “Nikolay was a talented and dedicated scientist, as we all have had the opportunity to appreciate. He was kind. Big-hearted. He had, if you attended closely enough to his words, a wonderful wry sense of humor. He was a photographer of great skill. A proud and patriotic Russian. A man with great patience and stamina and determination. I believe he was a dutiful son. But above all, quite simply, Kolya was a good man. He was my friend, and I shall miss him. I remember the time ….”

  When Ekatrina trailed off, Ilya offered his own anecdote. Marcus did, too.

  At last a pause stretched long enough for Yevgeny to suggest, “It is time we lay our friend to rest.”

  Marcus nodded.

  Yevgeny put on his helmet, voice-commanded its lamps, opened the inner door of the airlock, and returned to the near end of the tarp-covered body. “Ilya, give me a hand, please?”

  “Of course.” Ilya secured his helmet. “Suit, headlamps on”—and likely continuing out of habit—“camera on.”

  “No,” Yevgeny said firmly. “This is private, not some exploration to be recorded.”

  “Understood,” Marcus agreed sadly.

  “Suit, camera off,” Ilya said.

  The Russian men took opposite ends of the platform-box serving as Nikolay’s improvised bier. They maneuvered into the airlock, holding Nikolay level lest his sheet slip off. Kept horizontal, he only fit along the diagonal between the hatches. The pallbearers, awkwardly shifting their grips to the bier’s long sides, worked themselves into the unoccupied corners. Yevgeny positioned himself to be first out when the farther hatch opened.

  Marcus called (his voice faint through Yevgeny’s helmet), “We’ll follow right along.”

  “I thought we had agreed this was private,” Yevgeny reminded.

  “All right,” Marcus said.

  Yevgeny turned his head toward Ekatrina. “Bring along a portable lamp and fuel cell, please. Two sets if you can manage them.” Not waiting for an answer, he elbowed the button that started the airlock cycling.

  * * *

  Yevgeny backed from the airlock, head swiveling, searching for clear places amid scattered debris to set his feet. Helmet lamps offered the brightest light, but only in small spots. Scattered ceiling panels, dimly glowing, provided more general illumination. Drawing power from the photovoltaic paint in the occupied areas, alien circuitry must also have begun to regrow itself here. As far back as the cave-in, several meters past the openings to two side passages, only the dust coating and debris on the floor and several unpatched ceiling cracks distinguished this space from the climate-controlled side of the wall. It was much as he remembered from his early explorations, before the partition had gone up.

  “Where to?” Ilya asked.

  Yevgeny shook his head. “Radio silence,” he mouthed. They proceeded in silence, Yevgeny walking backward. Ilya paused, balancing Nikolay’s bier on a bent knee, to tap the hatch-close button before exiting the airlock. They went down the first side passage. Yevgeny peeked through the first open door—a half-empty storeroom—and backed in. With a quick dip of his head, he signaled: set Nikolay down here. He had just offered Ilya one end of a short length of fiber-optic cable when Ekatrina rejoined them.

  “I followed your light.” She set down the portable post lamp she had brought. The dark walls drank up its cool white radiance. “Poor Kolya.”

  “Radio silence,” Yevgeny mouthed once more. He handed her the end of a second cable.

  “You do realize,” she said, still on an open channel, “that radio waves won’t penetrate a metal wall.”

  He flourished the cable end in her face till she grabbed the plug and jacked in, disabling her helmet radio. “You’re the electrical engineer. There must be ways.”

  With a thoughtful expression, she conceded the point. “But why such secrecy for a memorial?”

  “We had our memorial inside,” Yevgeny said crisply. “This is a reconnaissance. And we must be quick to make use of this opportunity. Ilya, it’s your show.”

  After a blink of surprise, Ilya understood. “The alien power source. You want to find it. If it exists, that is.”

  Had Nikolay in all his searching found any trace of ancient solar panels? No. “We must have a look.”

  Ekatrina glowered. “This is so distasteful. So … dishonorable. Can we not—”

  “It is a matter of state security,” Yevgeny snapped.

  “Ilya?” she appealed.

  “If the aliens had conquered fusion, I’d like to know it.” The physicist shrugged. “You can disapprove of me later.”

  “Enough discussion,” Yevgeny said. “We have ten minutes, no more. If we linger too long, the Americans are apt to come check up on us. Ekatrina, you scout out this corridor. Ilya, you take the other open passage. I will wait by the airlock in case anyone decides to join us. If I come onto the radio, that’s your cue to hurry back before the airlock has time to cycle.”

  She stormed off, leaving fiber-optic cable ends dangling from the men’s helmets. Only someone with her temper could have mastered the low-gravity version of stomping.

  Ilya snatched up the lamp she had left behind. “Be back soon, I expect. If I recall correctly, there was a cave-in down my assigned corridor.”

  Yevgeny offered the endoscope and fiber-optic cable reel he had brought. “The endoscope has WiFi and cable interfaces to your HUD. The cable end has a fish-eye lens.”

  Ilya arched an eyebrow. “Planning ahead, I see.”

  “I try. Now, please hurry.” Yevgeny returned to the airlock, where Ekatrina had left the nearest hatch agape. Good: should that hatch begin to close, he would be forewarned of someone coming through.

  Three minutes passed. Five. Seven. In the still of vacuum and radio silence, the wait was unnerving. Apart from glimmers of light as Ilya and Ekatrina explored their assigned corridors, nothing changed but the clock digits on his HUD. Until Ilya bustled up, working the crank to rewind fiber-optic cable onto its reel.

  Grinning from ear to ear.

  Chapter 25

  Yevgeny knew how to move stealthily without acting furtive. On Earth. Even, he prided himself, on the lunar surface. But suited up for vacuum, deep inside a pressurized facility? By the dark of the sleep shift? That was an art he had yet to master. But barring bad luck, he reassured himself, he and Ilya would be through the rear airlock with the Americans none the wiser.

  Ekatrina had balked at her part. Such recalcitrance had long ceased to surprise him. “You’re exploiting Kolya’s death. Dishonoring his memory.”

  “No,” he had told her, “I am giving meaning to his death.”

  “By skulking about. By lying and keeping secrets.”

  Some days he could not summon the energy to argue with or cajole her. “Look,” he had said, “if the job is beyond you, just admit it.”

  And so here she was, in pajamas, slippers, and a robe, drink bulb in hand, her hair sleep-tousled, to loiter near the rear airlock. The opening line of her script, should any American make an untimely appearance, was brief: “I couldn’t sleep, so I decided to walk around for awhile.” But before that, at the first sound of a footfall, she would warn them ….

  The motor hum as the airlock hatch opened only seemed deafening. No one came to investigate, just as no one had stirred on the previous sleep shift when Yevgeny had, as a test, cycled the airlock at the same middle-of-the-“night” hour.

  “You’re set?” he asked her.

  “Robe and cocoa. A locked but never-used datasheet in my robe pocket. Yes, I’m set.” At his frown, she added, “And a signaling device in my other robe pocket. Just so you also have the matching unit.”

  He patted a tool-belt pocket. “Got it. Thanks
.”

  Radio waves could not penetrate the metal wall. And yet, if an American were to show up while she dallied, she had to have a way to warn them. So: the device she carried had two buttons. Red for stay where you are. Green for coast is clear. Press either button, and it emitted an intense burst of ultrasound. The device he carried, once firmly taped to the vacuum side of the partition, would translate inaudible acoustic vibrations to a low-power, short-range, radio signal for their helmet comms. Were her insecurity not useful, he might have praised the brilliant improvisation.

  The men seated and latched their helmets, then passed through to the partitioned-off area. While Yevgeny affixed his part of the warning system to the wall beside the hatch, Ilya went ahead. Yevgeny took an extra few minutes to sweep around the airlock for bugs, finding none.

  Catching up, he found the physicist shifting rock and mooncrete chunks from the cave-in that had all but sealed off the room at the end of the corridor. The obstacle had, here and there, been lowered to chin level. A meters-long collection of relocated rubble now rested along a junction of floor and corridor wall.

  Ilya turned as the bright, expanding ovals cast by headlamps announced Yevgeny’s approach. “No bugs? Radio, then?” he mouthed. At Yevgeny’s nod, they met on the prearranged secure channel. “Beautiful, is it not?”

  “Any radioactivity?”

  Ilya patted a meter dangling from his tool belt. “None. And there would not have been, not for eons.”

  Yevgeny lugged a breadbox-sized, almost flat concrete chunk and set it outside the blocked doorway. From that wobbly perch, craning his neck, nothing within came as a complete surprise. Still, the images from their first incursion, distorted by the fish-eye lens, had not done the room justice.

  But as impressive as all this wreckage was, he still struggled to recognize the supposed components of the hypothetical fusion reactor. Massive wire coils, presumably powerful electromagnets. The spherical configuration of glass tubes—gas lasers, Ilya had excitedly insisted—pointed, through slits in an onion-layered shell, at a central focus. (The geometric inferences Yevgeny took on faith. He strained even to extrapolate tubes from the splinters and sparkles of shattered glass among the rubble of the roof collapse. As for the so-called spherical shell, its supposed onion layers appeared minced.) A large cylindrical tank with a mirror finish, much dented. Where that tank had cracked open, glimpses of an inner lining. Along a side wall, a bundle of fat cables rose into the ceiling from what might once have been a power-distribution frame. Ocher shards and twisted metal around where a large concrete slab of ceiling had crushed a rack of alien electronics.

  “And you are certain,” Yevgeny said, “this was a fusion reactor.” Beyond yes or no, he did not expect to understand much of Ilya’s reply. He mainly wanted to gauge the confidence—or lack thereof—in Ilya’s response. “Why do I not see shielding?”

  “Short answer first. The onion shell absorbs most of the radiation. I believe the lasers are placed outside that shell for ease of servicing. The big electromagnets stop whatever charged particles escape through the slits. The few centimeters of passive material along the wall would be backup for the magnets, if those should go offline, and to block any high-energy photons that might escape through the shell slits from leaving the room.

  “On to your larger question, then. Yes. Without a doubt, this was a fusion reactor. See that big capacitor bank?”

  Yevgeny looked where Ilya pointed. “I thought those were batteries, or maybe fuel cells. For backup.”

  “The backup power storage is within the part of the base we occupy. No, this is something different. Permit me to give a quick bit of background. This reactor works by hitting tiny fuel droplets, one after another, with powerful laser pulses.”

  “Droplets,” Yevgeny repeated. “As in, from a liquid.” Somehow, that seemed odd.

  Ilya waved impatiently. “Yes, liquid. Bear with me. Each droplet, in its turn, is struck from all sides by the laser pulses. The intense pulses compress it in an instant into a many-millions-of-degrees-hot speck, under unearthly pressure.”

  “Conditions as in the interior of the Sun.”

  “Just so. And … voilà. Fusion. The thing is, the process requires dumping a lot of power, in a very brief time, into the lasers. And I mean, a lot. It is accomplished by discharging the capacitor bank. A fraction of the reactor’s output from the fusing of each droplet recharges the capacitors for their next discharge. That is simplified, of course.”

  Of course. “And how did the capacitors get charged before the initial fusion reaction?”

  Ilya looked around, then shrugged. “Not with anything I see. If I had to guess, and I suppose I do, with a jump-start from the ship that delivered the aliens here.”

  Those must have been some jumper cables. “All right. What else here catches your eye?”

  “Do you see that shiny tank? It is mirrored to keep out ambient heat, and double-walled for the same reason. That’s cryogenic storage for the fuel. And protruding from the tank, I think—no, I take that back; it must be—is the injection mechanism that delivers the stream of fuel droplets into the sphere of lasers.”

  “So why wrap a fusion reactor inside an onion shell?”

  Ilya grinned. “You will like this. The nuclear power plants we are familiar with are nothing more than big steam engines. The reactor makes heat. Heat produces steam. Steam turns big turbines for propulsion, or turns the rotors of electrical generators. Aside from nuclear reactions as the heat source, it’s all very nineteenth century.”

  “And with the aliens?”

  “Fusion happens within the onion shell. The concentric layers of the shell absorb the X-rays and charged particles emitted by the fusion reaction, converting that radiation directly into electrical power. And as I said, electromagnetic shielding traps any charged particles that manage to penetrate through the shell. Dirtside, only small lab prototypes do that sort of direct-conversion tech.”

  “That is impressive.” And very encouraging.

  “It gets better, Yevgeny. You can see there is only the one tank, meaning that the reactor runs off a single fuel. And the passive shielding along the walls, as you will also have noticed, is thin, indicating that the fusion reaction is aneutronic. Almost certainly—”

  “The reaction is a what?”

  “Aneutronic. Many fusion reactions, including all the easier ones, spew out neutrons as a byproduct.” Ilya chuckled. “Easier being a quite different thing than easy. No human research project has yet managed any kind of sustained fusion reaction. Anyway, neutrons, being neutral particles, are not deflected by electromagnets. And neutrons plow straight through most physical barriers, because atoms are mostly empty space. Hence, a fusion reaction fueled by, say, deuterium and tritium, requires lots of passive shielding to contain the neutrons.”

  “Then those ‘easier’ reactors are not what you would want on a fusion-powered ship. I see. And aneutronic?”

  “As you would expect from the name,” Ilya said. “A reaction that does not emit neutrons. Combine the types of shielding we see, and the liquid-fuel injector, and the single fuel tank, and I am led to believe this reactor ran on what happens to be the Moon’s most readily available fusion fuel: helium-3. When two helium-3 atoms fuse, the reaction produces one atom of helium-4, the common isotope, plus two protons, plus energy. A lot of energy.

  “And here is your answer to why fuel is delivered in liquid droplets, and not solid pellets. Beyond extreme cold, you would need more than twenty atmospheres of pressure to freeze helium. Liquid droplets are less bother.”

  Helium-3. The rare isotope for which the lunar strip mines outside Base Putin provided Russia a near monopoly, no matter that collecting the He-3 had been a hugely expensive gamble on as-yet undeveloped technology. A gamble that might be on the verge of paying off ….

  Yevgeny asked, “And you can reverse-engineer
their reactor technology from this wreckage?”

  “Well ….”

  “Then why the hell,” Yevgeny demanded, his optimism deflated in an instant like a popped balloon, “are you so excited?”

  “The underlying principles are basic physics, well understood for half a century. That is how I know what things here must be. From the relatively small number of lasers alone, it is clear the alien technology is far in advance of ours. Presuming these lasers haven’t all broken and degraded in the same way, experts might assemble enough clues to infer much. But the true secret, what we need to master, is subtle engineering detail. Calibrations, startup and shutdown procedures, and the like. That”—and Ilya gestured vaguely toward the crushed alien electronics—“I expect to have resided as programs and data in the mangled circuitry.”

  “But examining even this much of a onetime working power plant must be of value.”

  “Oh, indeed, not least as a feasibility proof. Just knowing that someone developed a practical fusion reactor along these lines will focus our own research. Another reason I am impressed? Size, or rather, the lack of it. Every human effort to develop similar technology, whether by national labs or various international consortia, has been huge. And did you notice the magnets?”

  “What about them?”

  “I see nothing to indicate they were cryo-cooled.”

  Ah. Room-temperature superconductors. “And if we bring home a sample of the wire? That can be analyzed? Reverse-engineered?”

  Ilya grinned. “Almost certainly.”

  A trophy of sorts, then. If not the secret of fusion, at least something. “I’ll help you dig.”

  By 3:30 am, when the alarm in Yevgeny’s helmet went off, the barrier was still chest-high. Both men were gray with rock dust, their sturdy gloves filthier still.

  “We will have to finish on another trip,” Ilya grumbled. “More likely, two.”

  Should they? With each foray they risked exposure, and the Americans gaining access to this technology. What Ilya had already observed must surely give Russian fusion research a tremendous boost.