Planetary astronomers had catalogued hundreds of asteroids crossing within Mercury’s orbit, Jay’s rock among them. Not many of them also reached as far out from the Sun as Earth. But of the few asteroids that did, their orbits were inclined compared to Earth’s, and so no threat. Jay’s rock, included—
Until, without warning, its orbit was no longer inclined. Until, the event unseen, its orbit had been shifted. And careening Earthward from against the glare of the Sun, that rock had, until scant days earlier, been all but impossible to spot.
Jay, naturally, never referred to his rock. Instead, he used its official catalogue number, actually easier to wrap one’s mouth around than the formal alias: a pretentious mock-Latinate neologism of far too many syllables.
At about Jay’s eighth awkward catalogue reference, a man from Homeland Security muttered, “Why not call the damned rock Damocles, and have done with it?”
“However appropriate,” Jay said, “it turns out that particular name is already taken. Damocles is one of the Centaurs, a group of asteroids that cross the orbits of the giant planets. In the long term, close encounters with these planets make many Centaur orbits unstable—”
Short. Not techie. Val interrupted. “Any mythological name you can think of has been taken. I suggest”—channeling a fictional comet from one of her favorite reads—“the Hammer.”
“It will do,” Tyler said firmly. Crabbily. “Proceed, Doctor Singh.”
As Jay hesitated, a Russian military officer asked, “Can we be sure Hammer is a familiar rock? We are to believe its orbit changed radically. It is small, and for the moment, distant, and all but invisible against the bright Sun. It seems far more plausible this is a new discovery.”
Val could see the metaphorical wheels turning, Jay further tongue-tied, unable to balance short and not techie with presenting a core aspect of his dissertation. She could see him preparing to launch into an exposition on machine learning and pattern recognition. She headed it off. “Yes, we’re sure. And that’s why”—besides the threat of extinction—“this is so unusual.”
“Kirill?” Tyler prompted.
“After reviewing NASA’s data, our astronomers took independent observations. With a high degree of certainty, they concur. Hammer is a known asteroid whose orbit has radically changed.”
“Thank you, Kirill.” Tyler made the soft, deep in his throat noise Val had come to know meant pick up the pace.
That advisory was prescient, because they had reached Val’s opportunity to get lost in the figurative weeds. “I’ll forego the details”—orbital mechanics being about as unintuitive as things came—“but only a few scenarios can account for the Hammer’s recent orbit change. They all involve a sustained push against the rock near perihelion. Sorry, that’s astronomer-speak for an orbit’s closest point to the Sun. They all involve the Hammer getting a gravity assist—that is, a speed boost—and a change in orbital plane, from a grazing flyby of the Sun. And only one scenario fits with … well, there’s another interesting dimension to this situation.”
“Anna Petrova, with Roscosmos,” a dark-haired woman introduced herself. “I do not understand. Any gravitational interaction, such as a close encounter with Mercury, would involve an attraction. A push makes no astronomical sense, much less a sustained push.”
“No astronomical sense at all.” And lest the implication was too subtle, Val added, “We aren’t unlucky, Doctor Petrova. We’re targets.”
* * *
Isaac Newton, through his laws of motion and theory of gravitation, remade mankind’s understanding of the Universe. The motions of planets, moons, and comets became, for the first time, explicable. His influence extended to popularizing the metaphor of a clockwork universe: every part of creation moving, predictably and inexorably, according to immutable rules.
And we, Val thought, are in a literal race against just such a clock. A race we’re losing ….
Quit that! she commanded herself. Focus!
Into stunned silence, the spymasters had introduced Marcus and Yevgeny; each man, looking haggard, peered down from one of the giant wall screens. Gaunt, disheveled, exhausted: those larger-than-life visages perhaps added verisimilitude to their account of lunar discoveries. They did nothing for her ability to concentrate.
Except Yevgeny no longer stared impassively from the bridge of the Russian shuttle. He had not moved, or even blinked, in minutes. He must have frozen his camera feed when Marcus took over speaking. Their script, such as it was, to the extent she knew about it, was coming up to the next big reveal: the recovered holostream of the Chicxulub impact. Slaughter on an unprecedented scale. Demonstration that the Titans—and also, one had to presume, the ancient technology that had somehow survived the aliens—would not balk at genocide.
And there was so little time to stop it! So much improvisation. So many shortcuts to be taken. So many details doubtless glossed over in their haste, forgotten, neglected—
And overlooked by her, too! Frantically, she texted Yevgeny. August 20. Anything unusual in your shuttle’s comm log.
Faster than the pilot could respond, Tyler signaled Val to resume her briefing.
“Still skipping over the math, my colleagues and I have struggled to understand the Hammer’s recent trajectory. Out of the many”—hundreds—“of simulations we ran, only a few credible scenarios can move the Hammer from where it was last observed in its historical orbit and the recent, subsequent sightings of it on its new path. In none of these scenarios do natural phenomena account for what we’ve seen.”
And only one scenario correlated with an anomaly on the Moon. Three weeks earlier, a long-range antenna on the Russian shuttle had slued more or less toward the Sun. That brief repositioning had been captured by the motion-sensitive security camera atop the mast of Marcus’s original igloo. The vid was too low-res, however, to determine the dish’s aim point. If there had been a target, she cautioned herself. The dish had jiggled around many times before returning to its original position. Those motions might have been glitches, might signify nothing. As she took a deep breath, wondering how best to continue, a text arrived.
I found something. May I.
Reviewing something, working through the implications, would take time. All the while, the cosmic clock would keep ticking. But Yevgeny’s question turned out to be rhetorical, his image unfreezing even as she hesitated.
“On August 20,” Yevgeny declared, “a comm session was remotely initiated through this lunar shuttle. The security log indicates me as the user. I know I was asleep, underground, and offline at the time. During that session, the dish antenna was repositioned. The frequency selection and modulation scheme were nonstandard. The communications protocol is unfamiliar. As for the content, I can say only that the transmission repeated after each repositioning of the dish.”
Val said, “Text me the coordinates and times, please.”
The dataset arrived: forty-seven records. Tuning out the din of speculations, doggedly, she keyed the direction and time of one transmission into her simulation. Record by record, the simulation rejected those inputs as irrelevant to their dilemma. Because these data meant nothing? Because an alien … whatever, after circumventing FSB security protocols, had failed to accomplish anything further? Or because, over the eons, that entity had lost track of where its target might be found?
All that motion. Randomness? Or seeking?
And then a time-and-coordinates pairing almost aligned with the Hammer on its original orbit. Making allowance for how the beamcast would diverge with distance ….
Val pulled her mic close to her mouth. “It’s more certain than ever. Someone—or something—on the Moon sent the Hammer hurtling at Earth.”
* * *
An aide bustled into the CIA conference room. Marcus could not imagine anything so important, but whatever had been whispered drew Tyler from the meeting. Seconds later, a si
milar interruption claimed his Russian counterpart.
Maybe they did not expect to be gone long. More likely, the chief spooks didn’t want the next topic brought up in their absence. Whatever the reason, once Valerie finished no one still present seemed to know what came next.
So people speculated. About the Hammer coming from such a minor and remote asteroid population. (Because the Olympians were mining the Main Belt, and were more likely there to detect any Titan presence? Or because—as NASA and Roscosmos had discovered—this rock was hard to detect against the Sun as background?) About the physical composition of the Hammer. (Almost certainly, nickel-iron.) About how an ancient antenna could have survived on the Hammer’s surface to receive a modern-day order, when on the lunar surface micrometeoroids and solar wind had eroded away most traces of the aliens. (Perhaps there was no need. Perhaps the entire mass of the asteroid, being nickel-iron, had been made to serve as an antenna.) About an energy source that could have kept the Hammer listening for millions of years, because space weathering would also have worn away any solar panels there, and—
“Enough!” Long seconds passed, the debaters continuing unflappably, until Marcus remembered to unmute his mic. He thumped that mic until, on his console screen, the blathering stopped and people looked up at a distant wall display. Toward his scowling image.
He said, “We can obsess about how the Titans accomplished this until the Hammer strikes. Until they obliterate us, and maybe sterilize the planet. Or, and this is my suggestion, we can try to do something about their damned rock.”
Chapter 45
Marcus’s challenge was met with silence, then muttered protest, and, intriguingly, knowing glances exchanged among the uniformed people. In both rooms.
Marcus texted Yevgeny. The military types know something. Do you know what.
Sorry, no, came the quick reply—not that Marcus took the denial as conclusive. Yevgeny was FSB, after all.
Several seats down from Val, a civilian with a ragged mustache and tortoiseshell half glasses perched far down his nose cleared his throat. (From NASA, was what Marcus remembered. Not his name.) “Well, of course, the traditional way to deflect an asteroid is with a gravity tractor. A gravity tractor is ….”
Traditional? A gravity tractor had successfully captured one rock, Phoebe, the asteroid steered to Earth orbit. Or, to give tractor technology the benefit of the doubt, twice. The second instance involved the as-yet nameless carbonaceous chondrite that, if it were to complete its long, slow diversion to lunar orbit, might revolutionize construction (and what a distant memory from a bygone era that seemed) of the Farside Observatory. But overpowering Marcus’s own pedantic thoughts—suddenly, irresistibly—came the traumatic flashback. The harrowing flight, clutching the engine core salvaged off a crashed gravity tractor, from Phoebe to the terrorist-controlled powersat. Defying death from the skies? Was not once in a lifetime enough?
“Nyet!” a woman (Petrova, from Roscosmos, he remembered) interceded, cutting through Ragged Mustache Man’s droning, didactic narration—and for the moment, vanquishing Marcus’s adrenaline-spewing flashbacks. “Hammer will be upon us much too soon for any gravity tractor to help.”
“Well, yes, but to be thorough—”
Petrova snapped, “Do not waste our time.”
Without Tyler and Kirill to herd the cats—where the hell were those two?—the shocked silence following Petrova’s rebuke lapsed into talk of a solar-powered, electromagnetic mass driver. Once installed, a mass driver would deflect the Hammer by hurling away metal chunks of the asteroid itself.
Indeed, a mass driver would redirect the Hammer sooner than could a gravity tractor. And so what? That alternative approach entailed constructing the mass driver, packaging it for flight, transporting it to the Hammer, landing it, unpacking it, and assembling it. A stream of precision-engineered metallic payloads—hundreds, or maybe thousands of them—must be manufactured on site for the mass driver to launch. Long before all that could happen, humanity’s ghosts would be commiserating with their dinosaur precursors. All as Petrova dispassionately critiqued.
“Explosives,” someone else in Moscow offered. “Or a collision to deflect it. Hammer is a far larger target than an incoming warhead, and we each have systems to take out one of those.”
“Too dangerous,” a man from Homeland Security countered. His long sideburns and wide necktie alike were decades out of date. “What if the Hammer isn’t a rock? What if this is a rubble pile loosely held together by its self-gravity? We could turn it into a hail of merely big rocks, collectively as devastating as though intact, but all the more unstoppable.”
Val shook her head. “The Hammer is cohesive. We know what kind of shove it took to alter its orbit. A rubble pile would have come apart. And we know the Hammer is metallic. Any asteroid whose orbit came so near the Sun would have boiled away anything but metal. Spectroscopic data shows us nothing but nickel-iron.”
“That’s good,” Long Sideburns said. “Then as Anatoly in Moscow suggested, we use explosives or a collision to deflect it.”
“Let’s get serious.” Jay Singh stopped twirling his laser pointer to poke with it at his datasheet. “The Hammer is twelve miles across. It’s not quite a sphere, but to simplify the math we’ll call it one. By every indication the Hammer is nickel-iron, and nickel-iron meteorites have densities in the range of seven to eight grams per cubic centimeter. That comes to what? In round numbers, two trillion metric tons? What the hell do you foresee exploding on, or colliding into the Hammer to make it as much as twitch?”
All the while, the military types remained silent.
Where are the adults. Yevgeny texted.
Dunno, Marcus answered. As an afterthought he added, yhey’d better return soon.
Marcus was ready to try again to focus the discussion when Tyler strode back into the conference room. “Right,” Tyler said. “Dr. Clayburn, where are we?”
Val straightened in her chair. “We’ve gone through all the conventional approaches. I think we can all agree none of them is up to the challenge.”
Right,” Tyler repeated, briskly rubbing his hands, not bothering to reclaim his chair. “Then we’d best move on to the unconventional approach.” And that, Marcus sensed, is what the spooks had not wanted raised in their absence. And why the military were involved. “General?”
At the end of the table opposite Val, a one-star Air Force general nodded fractionally. Her expression was grim, her eyes narrowed. “Rodriguez, Space Force. They, it, whatever is there on the Moon, underestimated our abilities. Barely. We still have, we think, a chance to head off this rock … if we act fast. It won’t be easy.
“Given the Hammer’s estimated mass, we need to hit it with a nuke. A big nuke. The shock wave of a standoff detonation produces some of the necessary deflection. Mostly, we leverage the storm of neutrons and soft X-rays the nuke unleashes. All that radiation vaporizes a fair chunk off the facing side of the asteroid. The blasted and boiled-off mass makes a short-lived rocket engine. Debris flies one way; the rock recoils in the other.”
Message delivered, Rodriguez leaned back—and chaos erupted.
“You can’t use nukes in space,” the loudest voice broke through. “It’s against the Outer Space Treaty. Both our countries are signatories.”
Kirill laughed. “And if we observe the niceties, who will be left to object?”
Petrova, frowning, offered, “If the payload can be delivered to the launch site in secrecy, no one will know until after. Any disclosure before that will unleash worldwide panic.”
Tyler perched on an edge of the table. If his pose were intended to convey confidence, it failed to convince Marcus. “About that. Laying the groundwork in anticipation that we all will reach concurrence, Space Force started transporting warheads. We’ll come to where.
“Our observant MSS friends”—intonation suggesting anything but a
mity—“inquired rather urgently about that activity. That’s why Krill and I stepped out. To make clear why going nuclear looks to be in everyone’s best interest. They’re taking the matter under advisement—and raising the alert level of their strategic forces—while their own astronomers get into the act.”
MSS. The Ministry of State Security. Yup, Marcus thought, doubtless Chinese intel did monitor nuclear depots, or wherever the warheads had been withdrawn from. They would not have been happy about the unexplained movement of nukes. For that matter, quite a few Russians on the link looked displeased.
“Hold on,” said the NASA guy with the scruffy mustache. “Warheads. Plural. How large an explosion are we talking about?”
General Rodriguez leaned to her right, and an aide whispered in her ear. The general nodded, then said, “That’s a work in progress. It’s a function, among other things, of how soon we can deliver the package. Given when we now know the alien order was sent, and how soon thereafter the asteroid was observed in its new orbit, the rock’s propulsion system gave it a serious shove. Maybe our blast will take out their propulsion system, but we can’t rely on it. That means our bomb has to deliver a big enough kick that the rock can’t recover with corrective maneuvering.” She glanced at the aide’s datasheet. “Best guess at the moment is at least eighty megatons.”
At which datum Marcus, and pretty much everyone onscreen, twitched.
The largest H-bomb ever tested was 50 megatons, Yevgeny texted. In 1961. Tsar Bomba, it was called. The king of bombs.
Marcus shuddered. That yield was insane. Why would anyone have a bomb that big?
No one does anymore. Given any delivery accuracy at all, there’s no reason.
Then how …? Never mind, Marcus thought, he could ask faster than he typed. “We’re not talking about some standard warhead from the Air Force inventory, are we?”
Déjà Doomed Page 34