Solar Express (19 page)

Alayna smiled. She had at least one answer as to why Chris wanted her to send copies of reports to him, and she couldn't fault it. She paused and then checked the rest of the message queue. There wasn't a reply from either the IAU or from the Foundation. She wouldn't have expected a quick reply, or any immediate reply from the IAU. In a way, the lack of immediate response from her own organization validated Chris's concerns—although she suspected the concerns were as much his superior's as his own.

Was she being fair about the Farside Foundation? Still, it had been twenty-four hours since she'd sent off the report …

Then she shook her head.
No one was working.
She'd sent the report early on Sunday, and it was still early on Monday, well before anyone came to work, since Daedalus was on UTC, and the Foundation on Eastern WestHem time, some five hours later. Of course, they hadn't replied.
Now … if there's no response by this afternoon or tomorrow …

She returned her attention to the rest of the message.

I can't resist calling your attention to another passage from
Observations on Politics.

Liberals always want to save the world on principle and worry about the costs later. Conservatives worry about the cost-accounting so much that they can never decide whether anything's worth saving, except for every single worthless project in their own district, including, especially, the bases and weapons the military says it doesn't need.

I wonder what Exton Land was like. There's very little about him, except he was a political appointee in the old U.S. government, and later a consultant of some sort. Gently cynical, and sometimes not even gentle. But what he wrote is as true today as it was then. People don't change, I guess.

Oh … you owe me a quote. Now, I need to close and get a good night's sleep. Until later.

Chris

Owe you a quote?
Then she realized that she'd been so concerned about the possible alien artifact that, for the first time in months, she had not included a quote in her last message.

Alayna couldn't help but smile, if momentarily, as she closed his message, thinking over the implications and meanings semihidden within his words. She quickly ran through the rest of the message queue. Once she made sure there was nothing else urgent, she settled herself to reply to Chris, at least as indirectly as he had messaged her.

The most frightening aspect of it all, she realized, although the tenseness within her had meant her subconscious had already made that conclusion, was the possibility that she had in fact discovered—or co-discovered—an alien artifact … and that the Sinese likely knew that it could be an artifact as well. And with the spectre of the possible militarization of space …

 

25

D
ONOVAN
B
ASE

16 O
CTOBER
2114

Tavoian was still considering the possible implications of Alayna's discovery when he settled into a seat at the officers' mess on Tuesday morning and took a slow sip of tea through the wide nipplestraw, necessary on a station where gravity was provided by rotation, a variety of tea that passed, if poorly, for English Breakfast. He especially wondered where it would all lead after the veiled references to his surveillance mission had turned up in most of the major news summaries. He carefully squirted syrup over the French toast and the protein strips that passed for bacon. He took one bite, and then another.

Moments later, Liendra Duvall sat down across from him. “You have a very serious expression for so early in the morning, Chris.”

Tavoian managed a rueful smile at the other captain, who had roughly the same seniority as he did, and who was always pleasantly low-key. She also tended to be almost shy, or at least retiring, which made her comment slightly surprising. “Just thinking. I probably shouldn't start before I have something to eat.”

“You were the one, weren't you?”

“The one what?”

“The one that the Sinese are making a fuss about. Every single pilot in … advanced training was here on Saturday and Sunday. Except you. Who else could it have been?”

“I'm certain I haven't been the first. Last week … you were gone. I doubt it was a transport run.”

“Behind that casual façade, you don't miss much.”

Tavoian grinned at her nonadmission admission in response to his ambiguous acquiescence to her assumption. “Nor you. What do you think of the current situation between us, the Indians, and the Sinese?”

Her amused smile vanished. “Tense … and getting tenser. The Sinese won't back down. The Indians certainly won't, and they've got enough Indra scramjets to take out most of the Sinese government.”

“The government won't be where the scramjets can reach them.”

“Unless the Indians strike first. Both of them know that.”

“Know what?” asked Major Martinez as he sat down beside Duvall.

“That the Indians have to strike first if their scramjets are to be effective,” replied Tavoian.

“Everyone has to strike first.” Martinez sipped his coffee, strong enough that Tavoian could smell it from across the table. “That's the problem. We're at a time in history and weapons when offense beats defense. It'll change. It always does.”

“Provided we all survive long enough for that to happen,” Duvall pointed out.

“We've done it before. The early atomic age and the Cold War.”

“That was different,” Tavoian said. “There were only two contending forces. Now there are three, and three's not a stable number in great power confrontations.”

“You've definitely got a pessimistic streak there, Chris,” replied Martinez. “It's not as though we can do anything about it.”

“Except show force to match force and hope that no one presses the issue,” said Duvall quietly.

“Isn't that what we've had to do for generations?” Martinez set his mug on the table, and began to eat the French toast, without syrup.

“Every advance in weapons technology raises the costs if someone makes a mistake.” Tavoian took another long sip of tea, then added, “Or just believes that God is on their side. Like the Taliban in Pakistan seventy years ago.”

“They deserved what they got,” Martinez said.

“They may have, but what about the Afghans, those few who survived? Or the Indians in Kashmir.”
Or the coast and the marshlands bordering the Arabian Sea.
Tavoian didn't voice the last because he doubted the others would know or care about the immense damage to the marine ecosystem there, not that the pollution from the Indus hadn't already created havoc before that.

“There are always casualties. All we can do is make sure the other side takes them.”

“Which other side?” asked Duvall. “Is either trustworthy? Do we want to pick sides?”

“If we don't they will, and it might be us against both of them.”

“That seems unlikely.”

“How likely did it seem that the Iranians and the Israelis ended up on the same side in the Middle East Meltdown?” Martinez smiled sardonically. “You can't count anything out.”

Even the possibility of an alien artifact?
Tavoian mused.
With the remnants of technology … or would that be expecting far too much?
Far too much, he decided. That was definitely wistful thinking.

Martinez said something, but Tavoian didn't really hear it. “I'm sorry. I was thinking about the next simulator session.”

“It wasn't important. I just wanted to know what you thought about the President.”

Tavoian wasn't about to offer an opinion there. “She's the commander-in-chief. What else should I think?”

“Anything but nothing.” Martinez shook his head. “You're too junior to talk like the political officers.”

“I'm too junior not to,” countered Tavoian.
Especially when every word is heard by someone you don't know.

“Playing it safe is the most dangerous course, you know.”

“You're suggesting that playing it dangerous is the safest course. I'm not sure about that logic.” Tavoian caught the glint in Duvall's eyes and the hint of amusement, as if she were watching two big-horned sheep position themselves. He immediately laughed self-deprecatingly and added, “I'm not sure about most logic. Could be because strong logic is necessary to overcome poor assumptions or insufficient facts, and insufficient facts are usually all the facts that junior officers have access to.” He smiled, then eased his chair back. “I need to do some prep.”

As he left the mess, Tavoian couldn't help contrasting Liendra Duvall with Alayna. Somehow, he couldn't imagine Alayna acting the way the other captain had.
You only talked to Alayna for less than an hour—once, ten months ago.
He shrugged ruefully. That might be, but he had the feeling he knew more about her than the people with whom he spent far more of his time.
Because you really don't have that much in common with the other pilots? Or because piloting is a solitary experience? Or because that's what you want to believe?

He wasn't certain he could answer his own questions honestly. He was certain that he wasn't prepared as well as he should be for his next session in the simulator.
That's something you can do something about, unlike determining what the Sinese or Indians will do or whether Alayna's comet or asteroid is really something more.
Except they both knew it was something more. They just didn't know how much more.

 

26

D
AEDALUS
B
ASE

23 O
CTOBER
2114

Almost a week after receiving a reply from Farside Foundation Director-Generale Braun, Alayna was still irritated. The Director-Generale had politely thanked her for an interesting report, congratulated her on discovering such a unique asteroid, and suggested that any further reports go directly to Operations Director Wrae. Director Wrae had sent an acknowledgment of the reclassification without comment, with the bulk of her message consisting of an inquiry about whether Alayna had been able to persuade the IAU to grant partial credit for the discovery to the Williams Consortium. Alayna's very polite reply had stated that she had made the effort and that the final decision rested with the IAU.

She'd heard nothing further from the IAU, but had received another message from Chris, to which she had replied. He had not yet responded, but since she'd only sent her message on Sunday night, and it was only Tuesday morning, she didn't exactly feel ignored, besides which, she was still working on trying to find another approach to discovering how she could discover more about the solar multi-fractal mini-granulations.

What about the last idea?
Alayna consulted her calendar. It had in fact been a month, or maybe a day less than a month, since she'd tasked Marcel with seeking out mini-granulation multi-fractal pattern matches. “Marcel … it's been a month. Have you been able to match any of those mini-fractal patterns?”

“There are similarities in quite a few instances, but there are no exact matches.”

“Let's see what you have, one at a time.”

The first set of images appeared before her. Alayna studied them. As the AI had said, there was definitely a similarity between the two.
But what?
She kept looking. Finally, she asked, “Marcel, could you rotate one of the highlighted multi-fractal images, as if it were a cylinder, just slightly, to see if that increases or decreases the similarity?”

“The multi-fractal only appears as a flat image, Dr. Wong-Grant. Any rotation of the multi-fractal would require extrapolation that would not necessarily have any relation to the actual shape of the multi-fractal mini-granulation.”

In short, that might or might not increase the similarity, but it wouldn't prove anything.
“There's nothing that might give even the faintest indication of what lies directly beneath? Besides the observed convective patterns?”

“No, Dr. Wong-Grant.”

Alayna went through the other pairs that represented instances where Marcel had found similarities. There were more than a hundred, of which perhaps thirty seemed to show remarkably close similarities, at least to Alayna's eyes. Given the distance, the size and scale, and the number of multi-fractal mini-granulations, those comparatively few similarities, even at the same positions on the sun's surface, could just as easily represent chance occurrences. At least, most astrophysicists and astronomers would want to know what proof there was that they weren't.
Correlation doesn't prove causation, especially when you have absolutely no idea why solar convection would result in the phenomenon of multi-fractals. Except the fact that the larger granulations are essentially regular and distributed in a Gaussian field. Why not the mini-granulations?
Except that had been the question for a century … one without an answer.

“Keep observing and continuing the process, but only when it doesn't interfere with other observations and processing.”

“Yes, Dr. Wong-Grant.”

Just to get one thing done and off her mind, she quickly began a message to her father, knowing that, if she didn't, before long, most likely in the next day, she'd have to write a much longer one.

Dad—

Nothing new here since the IAU decided my comet was an asteroid. It's unusual enough that I've been requested to supply updates. So far, it's not unusual enough …

She paused. She hadn't asked Marcel about her discovery in over a week because of the combination of the object's position, COFAR's position, and the commitment of the main optical mirror to other projects, but in the last day or two, there might have been a window …