Beyond the Event Horizon (4 page)

As we know,
the space intruder had been told in the form of an ultimatum to
take the dialogue to the political level. When it continued to
evade specific answers, the group of military negotiators demanded
that it leave the Solar System and withdraw beyond the heliosphere.
The incomer had asked for 30 hours to consider this demand, on the
grounds that it was obliged to have its actions approved by its
superior command structures. With only a few hours left before the
ultimatum expired, E1 had somehow become cocked and ready to
fire.

The system of
subordination within the strike group was such that the command was
unable to take complete control of the weapon remotely. The command
could only take a weapon off safety and issue a command to the gun
crew on site, but firing a shot or preventing one could only be
done through physical access to the weapons.

Without any
information on the capabilities of the alien civilisation, the
military did not want to risk activating remote access to their
weapons. After all, the incomer might break through the protective
perimeter and seize control of the space fleet. It was this
shortcoming in the system that played a dirty trick on the fleet
command. When E1 stopped subordinating itself to Rohas, he had no
other way of putting it out of action except by destroying it.

General Rohas
had unsuccessfully tried to make contact with the gun crew. At that
precise moment, the alien ship was outside E1’s zone of visibility.
Rohas then ordered the ships of the second echelon, attack ships
intended to prevent strike weapons from this very sort of
independent activity, to fire a warning shot.

There had been
no reaction. Unfortunately, it would never be possible to find out
whether the gun crew had lost its nerve at that moment, or if
sabotage had taken place, or if they had gone out of their minds or
were even dead. Since the incomer was quickly entering E1’s strike
zone, the decision was taken to neutralise the combat-ready gun
together with its crew.

The second
echelon command ship fired, but missed. It tried again and again,
each time without success. It then fired a volley from every weapon
under its command. Ten powerful ships let loose a storm of fire on
Europa to compensate for any excessive targeting error.

As a result of
the explosion, the satellite lost about one per cent of its mass. A
huge quantity of ice, dust and rock was ejected into space, the
temperature of Europa’s ocean rose by several degrees over an area
of several thousand square kilometres, and the celestial body
changed its angle of rotation around its own axis and its orbit
around Jupiter.

Nevertheless,
E1 had had time to fire at the alien ship. The delay due to the
targeting error of the second echelon command ship turned out to be
enough for the shot to be fired.

The incomer,
caught at a tangent by the explosion, had been ejected from its
former orbit, after which it rapidly accelerated and disappeared
into the depths of space.

The command
was concerned with three questions, on which the investigation
concentrated. Why had the random cocking of the weapon taken place?
What had happened to the crew, since there had been no reaction
either to attempts to contact it or to the warning shots? And why
had the attack ships of the second echelon not been able to put E1
out of action with the first shot?

When it is a
matter of military operations on Earth, there always remains the
possibility of concealed agents, ‘sleepers’, who can undertake a
sabotage operation on the enemy’s instructions. But the idea that
Earthlings could be recruited by the aliens seemed absurd, and was
not considered credible.

They did not
succeed in finding a sensible explanation for the behaviour of the
crew of E1 in the minutes before it fired. There was constant
monitoring of the atmosphere in their living accommodation, so
poisoning by some kind of gas, or loss of seal, could be
discounted. The motion sensors did not register any foreign
objects. No non-standard activity was recorded. The behaviour of
E1’s gun crew directly before it was destroyed remained a mystery.
The only thing that was known for certain was that the order to
take the weapon off safety must have been given from within. E1 did
not receive any order remotely.

There is
rarely one single reason for a catastrophe of technical origin.
More often than not, a whole chain of circumstances lies behind it,
and what happened to E1 was no exception.

The situation
in which E1 escaped from the command’s control had been considered
possible, so in this case, the strike group blockading the alien
ship had included the second-echelon ships. The second echelon had
the specific task of destroying weapons not responding to orders,
as a last resort. Unfortunately, however, even these safety
measures had proved insufficient.

When it became
clear that control over E1 had been lost and it would be impossible
to restore it within an acceptable time, a shot was fired at it by
one of the second-echelon ships. The anti-matter charge missed the
target and struck the surface of Europa hundreds of metres from the
targeted point. Since the charge had been fired from a distance of
only a few tens of thousands of kilometres, a distance from which a
miss was not expected, its energy had not had an excess reserve.
But it would have been enough to put E1 out of action and possibly
to save the lives of its crew.

As was
discovered later, the reason the charge deviated from its
trajectory was an anomaly that had been discovered a few days
earlier by Professor Shelby’s team. At the time of the events
surrounding E1, the existence of this anomaly was already known to
the Space Fleet High Command. Unfortunately, the facts known about
it at that time and the brief time interval had not been enough to
work out an effective strategy for counteracting it. The situation
was complicated by the fact that the greater the energy of the
anti-matter charge, the more the anomaly distorted the trajectory
of the space weapon. Not having come across such a phenomenon
before, the aiming computer was unable to recognise the distorting
factors. The only solution programmed into it was to use excess
strike energy.

Using enough
force to produce a huge crater in the surface of Europa, E1 was
finally destroyed. But by turning the disobedient weapon into fine
dust, the second echelon had buried forever the last hope of fully
explaining the reasons for the control failure. The Space Fleet
High Command had no option but to be content with theories.

The first of
these assumed a technical failure of E1’s built-in computer.
Obviously, any such failure would have to have affected not only
the targeting module but also the communications module, which had
made it impossible to establish contact with the command ship. The
gun crew might have been trying to restore control, and for that
reason did not react to the warning shots, knowing that restoring
control was the only thing that could save them from being
destroyed. There was simply not enough time to contact the command
ship by any other means.

Another theory
assumed that E1 had been acted on from outside. Looked on as a
false flag operation, loss of control over it followed by a strike
at the alien ship made sense, but raised a series of problems of a
technical nature.

To break
through the defences of E1’s computer would require profound
knowledge of its internal structure. Such information could be
acquired by re-engineering after infiltrating the weapon system on
site or while it was being transported to its place of
deployment.

Since mankind
had long since mastered the technology of manufacturing and using
nano-robots, E1, like any other modern weapon, had the means to
protect and counteract the penetration of nano-machines into it,
protecting not only its internal electronics, but also living
personnel.

For successful
and imperceptible penetration, the means of infiltration would have
to be smaller than nano-objects, yet possess considerable computing
power. The creation of such robots came up not against technical
difficulties, but a theoretical threshold. Such unimaginably small
devices could not possess such unimaginably great computing power.
In this case, the re-engineering and subsequent control of the
weapon would require an incredibly impressive computing
apparatus.

There also
remained the possibility of infiltration at the production stage.
This theory also had many weak points. For example, how would the
incomer know precisely what weapon would be used in the blockade?
It was logical to assume that it could not know this, and therefore
would have needed to infiltrate numerous arms factories. If they
had, it would mean that most of Earth’s military production
capacity was compromised. Furthermore, if the alien civilisation
had such means of infiltration at their disposal, what was stopping
it from extending its influence to the military infrastructure?
With such control over the human race, there was no sense in
staging such an incident.

After long
discussions, the military investigators were divided into two
groups: those who supported the theory of a chance failure, and
those who were convinced there had been interference from outside.
In spite of the difference in their assessments of past events,
their view of the future was identical: the alien civilisation had
come to stay. Consequently, we should expect subsequent visits.

After several
days of a sedentary way of life, Steve really missed his bicycle.
As some compensation for the lack of movement, he wandered around
the ship, looking into every corner with interest.

He spent most
time in the engine room, where he bombarded the engineer with
questions. The sight of the mighty thermonuclear reactor booming
along at 90 per cent power won Steve’s admiration. He, like many
other students of the exact and natural sciences, had always been
fascinated by massive power plants.

Standing with
the engineer on the upper floor of the engine room and looking
down, the reactor remotely resembled a seven-pointed star.
Thousands of fine tubes were interwoven into an immensely
complicated tangle, each one fulfilling its own unique function in
the general cause of generating electricity. Cables twice as thick
as an arm extended out from the reactor. Immersed in channels
filled with liquid nitrogen and cooled to a temperature close to
absolute zero, their superconductor cores carried vast amounts of
electrical energy from the generator to the engines.

The heart of
the ship was the apotheosis of contemporary engineering thought.
The reactor itself differed in principle from its predecessors,
particularly from the first-generation ones. It had no heat engine,
yet the reactor had an efficiency coefficient of almost one.

Mankind first
discovered electricity in the 17th century. During the industrial
revolution, it learned how to generate electricity on an industrial
scale to electrify cities and factories. But for several hundred
years, power stations remained the same in principle, although they
changed externally, and more and more sophisticated engineering
decisions were incorporated into their design.

They used a
large boiler to heat water which was fed under pressure to turn a
turbine, which in turn turned a dynamo-type machine and thus
produced electricity. This principle, dating from the Middle Ages,
endured through the era of atomic power generation based on the
fission of heavy elements. Nuclear power stations of this period
still had the same steam boilers and furnaces, albeit atomic ones.
The price of such a number of stages in the electricity generation
cycle was low productivity. The old power stations irretrievably
lost two thirds of the energy of the fuel burned in them in heating
the nearby lakes and rivers, when water from the cooling circuit
was ejected into them.

It was only
towards the end of the 21st century that mankind finally mastered a
technology that managed without heat engines. This simple step had
taken about 500 years. Steve involuntarily recalled the words of
the messenger from another planet: we judge the level of
development of a civilisation by the type of energy it has
assimilated. After all, it was true; all the achievements of a
civilisation were based on energy. Take away mankind’s power
generation capability and it would immediately find itself back in
the Middle Ages.

Having looked
around the ship, Steve finally reached the bridge. After some
hesitation, he knocked and opened the door. In general, there was
an unwritten law on the ship that members of the team should only
appear on the bridge in the course of their duties or by order of
the captain. It was not the done thing to ‘pop in for a minute’, to
call in for a chat with the ship’s commander. Steve only had
limited space flight experience, but he still intuitively
understood the rules of subordination within the crew of a space
ship. Nevertheless, his curiosity got the better of him. He
subconsciously justified his actions to himself by believing that
he was not just a member of the crew, he was also a commander, if
only of the scientific part of the expedition.

“Good day,
Captain Kimble,” said Steve as he entered the bridge. As usual,
Kimble was sitting in his chair reading. Hearing the greeting, he
raised one eyebrow slightly on seeing his uninvited guest. That was
how it seemed to Steve anyway. Oh, to hell with it... Let Kimble
think that he simply didn’t understand their customs.

“Hello, Steve.
What can I do for you?”

The captain
put down his tablet and indicated that Steve should sit in the
empty first pilot’s seat. Kimble turned it away from the console so
that it was facing him, and Steve obediently sat down.