Solar Express (42 page)

Belatedly, he realized that his eyes were blurring and burning. He checked the time. More than seven hours since he'd had anything to eat … and not much to drink either. Those would have to wait a few minutes longer. He turned the ISV over to the ship's AI with instructions to return it to the ship and dock it outside the lock.

Then he gulped down a bag-bowl of mushroom risotto, along with cool tea. He was so hungry he didn't even mind the fact that the tea was cool, neither hot nor cold. As he ate, he monitored the Sinese craft, and the occasional small device appearing out of or disappearing into the artifact. He had noticed that those devices did not interfere with the equipment he had deployed—except for stealing part of the one sample.
So far, anyway.

With each day that passed, Tavoian had found himself feeling more and more helpless, and that he just didn't know enough to find as much as he should be discovering. The sampling incidents had just reinforced that feeling.
You're a pilot, not a scientist.
But he'd thought he knew something about science, yet with each day around the artifact, he felt like he knew less and less.

When he finished eating, he immediately called up the feeds from the spy-eyes.

The first spy-eye followed the programmed route from beneath the hexagons out to a point paralleling the hull and then toward the “drive” chambers before slowing at the narrow hexagonal opening on the outboard side of the passageway. The spy-eye rotated slightly and entered the chamber. Once again, Tavoian was struck by the fact that the space was essentially rectangular.

The spy-eye immediately moved to the slightly curved bulkhead opposite the entry, where it scanned the ridges projecting a third of a meter from the bulkhead, ridges a third of a meter thick, situated a third of a meter from the deck and the overhead, suggesting to Tavoian that they did indeed form the outline of an enormous lock. The spy-eye followed the ridges the entire length of the space to where they ended—a third of a meter from the end of the bulkhead. The two ridges at the top and bottom, some thirty meters apart, were joined seamlessly by another ridge, indicating that the same ridge formed a huge rectangle. The spy-eye's light revealed more clearly that the material framed by the ridges was also a lighter green, possibly matching the shade of the hexagonal energy funnels in the drive chamber.
That's all supposition on your part.
There was little enough to support that supposition, Tavoian knew, and it was also based on what might well be excessive anthropomorphism, but the two areas that seemed to be possible openings directly to space were a different shade, and that was at least suggestive, and there was also no trace of any gray coloration, pointing to different functions for the two spaces.

From the first spy-eye's examination Tavoian could also find no trace of debris, frozen atmosphere, or anything else. He had the ship's AI examine the feed as well, but the AI could find no traces, either.

The missing spy-eye had actually been the second one, because the second feed that Tavoian watched showed a spy-eye ahead in the passageway, with intermittent thruster pulses causing it to waver from side to side. Then at a junction where the passageways between hexagons separated, the second spy-eye took the passageway not on its programmed route and began to accelerate into the darkness, its point of light soon vanishing.

Some mechanical failure, or did you somehow misprogram it?
Unless the spy-eye turned up somewhere on its own or another device from Recon three encountered it somewhere, Tavoian doubted that he'd ever see it again. All the devices had micro-locator beacons, but since the interior of the artifact didn't allow any signal transmission except line of sight, trying to track down the errant spy-eye would be a waste of time and thruster propellant.
Speaking of which …

“How much thruster propellant is left?”

SIXTY-NINE POINT TWO PERCENT.

That was assuming that the measuring systems were perfectly accurate and that Tavoian could draw everything that was in the tanks. Neither was a hundred percent likely; ninety-five percent was a far safer assumption of working propellant stocks.
Thirty percent used in eight days, with four weeks to go.

While he could explain and explain why he was going through the propellant stocks—for starters, the rotation of the artifact, the need for line-of-sight signal transmission, the sheer size of the artifact—the plain fact was that he couldn't keep operating the way he was.

That was emphasized by the fact that none of the last three spy-eyes found anything new or of import.

LARGE UNIDENTIFIED SHIP APPROACHING AND MATCHING SPEED TO THAT OF ARTIFACT.

“Ship characteristics?”

SHIP EXHIBITS DOUBLE-ENDED DRIVE CLAMSHELLS. SIZE IS APPROXIMATELY 295 METERS. ENERGY RADIATION INDICATES IT IS CREWED. EXTERIOR SHIELDING RESEMBLES ARMOR.

“Display what you have.” As another screen on the display bulkhead opened, Tavoian shifted his attention, watching as the vessel drew nearer and the image grew larger, clearly heading for the uncrewed Sinese craft. As it came to rest, relatively, anyway, beside the other Sinese craft, the disparity in size was more than apparent. Not only was the new arrival almost a hundred meters longer than the longliner, but it appeared to be half again as large in diameter. Tavoian didn't see anything resembling weapons bays, but a pair of circular exterior hatches strongly suggested torp ports. Given the size and mass of the ship, and the comparative speed of its arrival, Tavoian's first thought was that the Sinese had to have developed a better drive system. Then he realized that wasn't necessarily so. All that they had to do was add a second drive, and do turnover, letting one drive cool while using the other. Hel3 fuel constraints—they could only carry so much—limited how many hours they could accelerate or decelerate, but they could accelerate for longer and achieve higher speeds sooner.

And if they have achieved even modest drive improvements as well …

Tavoian kept his message to the colonel short.

Two hundred-ninety-five-meter ship taking station on artifact this time [1511 UTC] beside Sinese remote longliner. No visible identity, but has double-ended clamshell drive nozzles. Appears to have two torp ports. Radiated energy suggests crew aboard. No exterior activity yet.

He was certain he'd have to send more information before long, but his orders were to report the Sinese arrival immediately.

 

55

D
AEDALUS
B
ASE

17 N
OVEMBER
2114

Saturday morning Alayna woke up early, very early—and on purpose, not that she was all that enthused, but she had received a message from Director Wrae the day before noting that the Williams consortium had booked three straight hours of both the optical and radar arrays for a special galactic coordinated study, dealing with a recently discovered active galactic nucleus. That was all that the director had indicated. While Alayna was well aware of the schedule, the director's mention of the Williams consortium was just another indication to Alayna of the fact that nothing should go wrong, particularly after her “failure” to give credit to the consortium for the use of their time in discovering 2114 FQ5 … the alien artifact that the world now knew as the Solar Express. Considering that almost no one outside of astronomical circles had even mentioned her name or COFAR in talking about the artifact, she had her doubts about how much the consortium had lost. She did know how much she was likely to lose if
anything
went wrong with the Williams observations. So, even though there was very little more she could do in advance, she wanted to be ready in case something occurred at the last moment.

That was why she was up checking everything well before the consortium's observation program began. She could find no problems, but she sat with her coffee in the COFAR control center as the consortium observations started, ready to react if she had to, but her thoughts were actually on active galactic nuclei. Early on in her grad work, she'd thought about working on AGNs, and the mysterious way in which the massive black holes at the center of such galaxies balanced gas and energy outbursts over millions if not billions of years, regulating the energy radiated from that galaxy. She'd read something else about AGNs recently, not in any professional publication, but somewhere else. She just couldn't remember where. She began to search, and before long, she found what she was looking for—in her personal directory—from
The Passion of Science:

It's more than merely interesting that AGNs regulate their galaxies. That's like saying superheated steam is warm, or liquid oxygen is slightly cool.

In considering the words, she couldn't help but think about the artifact. While it had been following its orbit since before humans had been using metal tools, and possibly far longer, even that time span was nothing compared to the timespan on which galaxies and all the suns that humans observed as stars operated.
Does it all really just happen through the interaction of the mechanics of physics that we still don't understand fully?

She smiled ironically. Was that why she kept pursuing the idea that there had to be something behind—literally underneath—the multi-fractal mini-granulations?
Because you need more meaning in the universe, and if there isn't, you at least need to understand more of how it operates?

Was there really any question about that?

That was another reason why she had been working on—and had almost finished—a multiple correlation-regression-link program that analyzed the appearance and frequency of multi-fractal mini-granulations, high-powered ultra-thin coronal loops, inter-granular magnetic fluctuations, and the convective activity of “normal” granulations.

Alayna tried not to check the systems too often, but the tightness in her abdomen didn't go away until the three-hour window reserved by the consortium ended, and an hour block for the University of Nevada began.

She stretched and started toward the aeroponics section.

“There is an incoming message,” Marcel announced.

Her abdomen tightened again, almost painfully, as she sat down and accessed the message.

Just a word of thanks for the excellent service and support for the project. We appreciate it.

Alayna frowned. The message was from Jay Mehlin, the Director of the Williams Observatory, with a copy to Director Wrae. She'd never gotten a single message of thanks in the time she'd been at COFAR. She'd never heard of a postdoc getting something like the message she'd received, not directly and personally.

Where had that come from? Emma's doing? Or did Director Mehlin have something else in mind?
How could he? She'd heard of him, but never met him. In fact, she doubted that she'd ever been within a hundred kilometers of him.

She had to respond, but what exactly could she say? Too formal a reply, and she'd come off cold and uncaring. Too effusive, and she'd come off as an ambitious young postdoc.
Which is exactly what you are.
She just didn't want to show that to the entire solar system.

Almost an hour later and after who knew how many attempts discarded, she sent her acknowledgment.

Dear Dr. Mehlin:

Thank you for your kind words.

Director Wrae has always insisted that any of us at COFAR do our best to provide optimal services, and it is good to know that we could help in your project, especially since there is still so much to be learned about AGNs.

With much appreciation.

She just hoped she had struck the right balance, but without knowing Dr. Mehlin and having heard nothing about his character or habits, that was the best that she could do … and not to reply would definitely be a mistake.

Still wondering about why Mehlin had sent the message, and since there was little else she could or had to do for the moment, she hurried down to the lower level to finish the laundry she'd neglected for too long, which, thankfully, didn't require that much time to fold and put away.

With that done, she returned to the control center, where she sat down and reread Chris's latest message, again. She smiled as she read his self-deprecating comments about how, according to what little he knew about gravitation, the artifact shouldn't be speeding up as much as it was. Somehow that pleased her, as did the information he passed to her about there being no detectable reason for that acceleration.
But what could be causing that in an inert body?

Another thought struck, one that she should have considered earlier—much earlier. If the artifact was accelerating, was Chris having to accelerate to keep position on it? Because, if the increased speed was a result of something associated with the artifact, it shouldn't have affected his ship because the artifact certainly didn't have enough mass to bring the ship along with it.

She wished she'd thought to ask Chris that, and much earlier.

Either way, the logical answers boiled down to two. Either some outside force, beyond gravity, was acting on the artifact, or the artifact wasn't as inert as it appeared to be. The problem was that, according to what she knew, both answers were impossible. The next most obvious conclusion was that the object wasn't speeding up and that the calculations were somehow flawed, but she couldn't check those with observations from COFAR for another four days, possibly five, depending on the exact positions of the object and COFAR.

What if the impossible is happening? Who can you contact—Emma!

Alayna immediately composed a message, then read through it.

Emma—

I don't know if you've recovered enough from the cyclone/hurricane damage to determine this, but we've done some tracking on 2114 FQ5—yes, my Solar Express—and we either don't have enough data points or … it appears to be accelerating more than can be accounted for by gravitational forces. Because of COFAR's current position, we won't be able to check positions until the 22nd.