Solar Express (56 page)

He calculated a bit more and came up with figures. If …
if
he could recycle twice, saving the third time for an emergency, that would bring the immediate level down to five point three percent. If on the other hand he used the lithium hydroxide canister, it might bring the level down to five percent over the next six hours, if it operated as it should.

Lithium hydroxide it is.

“Activate the lithium hydroxide emergency CO2 removal system.”

THAT WILL TAKE THE NORMAL REMOVAL SYSTEM OFF-LINE.

“Override. It's not working anyway.”
It can't be.

EMERGENCY CO2 REMOVAL SYSTEM IN OPERATION.

At that moment, Tavoian's uneasy stomach reminded him that he hadn't eaten, which just might be contributing to the headache, or at least its severity. Before he started to rummage through his supplies, of which there were plenty, he took several more long swallows of water. Then he began to look for something appealing. That was harder. There were more than enough instant oatmeal packages, but oatmeal was perhaps Tavoian's least favorite breakfast food. He finally settled on a Mexican omelet burrito, which tasted almost as good as the bagel omelet sandwiches, meaning that the burrito actually resembled its description.

He hadn't heard anything back from Alayna, but that might have been because of the SPE and CME, and whatever they did to communications systems. Earth had been hit by small CMEs before, but never by a large one, at least not in the time where there had been a high-tech civilization to notice.
If not as high-tech as the ancient aliens.

He still found it hard to believe that the massive and seemingly indestructible artifact was gone. It had seemed so large.
But something two kays in diameter is still tiny compared to the sun.
His lips quirked as he considered that the sun was something like a million four hundred thousand kays in diameter compared to two.

Of course, that did leave the question of why a massive solar prominence and flare had happened on a quiet sun just as the artifact reached perihelion. Tavoian didn't believe in those kinds of coincidences. The problem was that if it hadn't been a coincidence, exactly what had it been?

He wished he could talk it over with Alayna, but talking face-to-face with her wasn't something that was going to be possible for quite some time, not the way things were going—all across the solar system … and even in Recon three, which suddenly felt very, very small.

The CO2 problem still nagged at him.

Then there was always the emergency space suit, which supposedly was good for two to two and a half hours. “Is the emergency space suit standard, with the same oxygen levels?”

THE EMERGENCY SPACE SUIT IS RATED FOR A MINIMUM OF TWO HOURS OF USE.

Maybe, just maybe, between the emergency CO2 removal system, the reserve air supply, and the emergency space suit, he could get to Earth orbit, decelerate, and reach Donovan Base before he expired from CO2 poisoning.

He checked the time. It had been almost half an hour since he'd activated the emergency system. “What is the CO2 level now?”

THE CURRENT LEVEL IS SEVEN POINT TWO PERCENT.

Good.
If it kept going down for the six hours it was rated for, and even if it didn't do all it was supposed to, it was better than the alternatives.

He turned his attention to the screens and monitors, not that they showed anything out of the ordinary.

 

82

D
AEDALUS
B
ASE

3 D
ECEMBER
2114

Although the Lunar L2 relay had been operating for more than twenty hours, the first incoming message that Alayna received was at 1032 UTC, and it was from Director Wrae. Alayna studied the second paragraph, not quite shaking her head sadly.

 … request immediate report on operational status of COFAR, including but not limited to the number of hours and time slots which were rendered unusable, the number of events that will be required to be rescheduled, those entities whose events were disrupted, and the status of rescheduling …

Alayna frowned as she considered the list of what the director wanted, because everything she requested was also in the Foundation databases.
She either can't access that data or the effects of the CME have destroyed those records, possibly even the entire system.
There had to be backups somewhere, but if the power outages were widespread, who knew how long it might be before they could be accessed?

A second thought struck Alayna.
If the damage is that great, who's going to care about observation slots at the moment?
The third thought was one that had occurred to her far earlier—her father's safety. She'd sent a message as soon after the L2 relay had reopened, but had received neither an acknowledgment nor an indication that the message was undeliverable. And then there was Chris … and there had been no word from him, either.

She tried not to think about it, but it was still there in the back of her mind. Rather than dwell on what she could do nothing about, she forced her thoughts back to the message from the director and began to compose a reply, which was more reassuring than Wrae deserved, noting that COFAR itself was fully operational and continuing scheduled observations, listing the times and entities that had been preempted, and explaining the reschedulings already made and pending, as well as the interim storage and retention of observational images and data until they could be retransmitted to the organizations that had contracted for those observations and times.

All of that took almost an hour, and by the time she had finished, two other messages had come in—one from Emma and a news summary. Alayna immediately read the news, which dealt entirely with the impact of the “Carrington Effect” on Earth and the various orbital installations, even though what had happened had been the result of more than just a CME. From what she could piece together from the reports, something like two-thirds of Noram was without power, although it was estimated that half of that would be restored within a week. No one was even guessing at how long repowering the remaining third of the country would take. Matters were far worse in Sudam and in Northern Africa. The EC was the least affected thanks to a century of emphasis on decentralized and renewable energy—except in Russia, which was as bad as Noram.

Again, Alayna kept worrying about her father. So when she finished reading the news, she immediately turned to Emma's message, hoping for some distraction.

Alayna!

Thank you so much for the warning! Everyone thought we were crazy, but they listened. They actually listened. The locals even physically disconnected some of the main transformers. The big island mostly has power as a result. It also hasn't hurt that Hawaii has always stored a few transformers because of the problems and shipping difficulties.

Can you send any images? You must have been watching just at the right time. I won't ask how you managed getting the slots. I'm just glad you did. We've been able to follow up. That prominence associated with the CME is the biggest on record! It's a good thing Earth only got the edge. A direct hit, and we'd have been back in the Stone Age. Some of Noram may be before it's over. Sticking to the old ways and having a lot of oil and coal to burn doesn't help much when you don't have operating power lines and transformers …

Hope your friend the pilot wasn't somewhere that got slammed by the associated SPE …

Alayna winced. She'd tried not to think about Chris, even more than she'd tried not to think about her father.

 … at least fifteen satellites are out, that we know of right now. Mostly older ones … going to make communications and travel and a lot of things very hard for a long time …

When Alayna finished the message, she sent a warm but short acknowledgment. Then, rather than dwell on all her worries, she thought about working on continuing analyzing the solar images and data that the arrays had captured before and after the CME … but her thoughts kept drifting back to the alien artifact.

What had happened with the artifact was impossible, according to present theory. But it had happened. Since it had, some aspect of current theory wasn't either inclusive enough, overlooked a possibility, or was wrong.
Or the theory is right, but we don't know how it could apply to the artifact.

If general and special relativity were right, if incomplete as formulated, then mass deformed spacetime, while still following the curvature of the spacetime it had deformed, which was why gravitational lensing and other effects existed. Although deformation by great mass essentially created gravity, no one had ever either found a way to quantize gravity or to replicate gravitons. Alayna wasn't about to consider dilatons. She began to compose her thoughts, writing them down as she went, along with some very tentative equations. She had the very definite feeling that what she was trying to formulate needed to be written out and sent, before someone else came to the same conclusions.

And she would send it to Chris and Emma as well, if in time. That might help in establishing her provenance in the matter.
You hope.

First came her general thoughts, put down quickly.

Effectively mass is energy, but energy confined in defined fields, patterns existing in space-time. Concentration of those patterns creates mass, and the tighter the pattern, the greater the mass. BUT … that pattern is also a concentration of energy, and when too great a concentration occurs, the standard patterns of matter collapse … and release “free” energy in the process, some of which is manifested in the photons comprising sunlight. That's what happens at the center of a star. In essence, fusion is the forced collapse of hydrogen nuclei into helium, and from there, a star in time builds up heavier and heavier elements.

Gravitons are analogous to photons, in that they are massless, although that's not quite correct because, while photons have a zero rest mass, they do have a relativistic mass determined by their velocity. Gravitons have momentum, in effect never been detected, although gravitational waves have been, but in a crude analogy, that's like trying to describe a water molecule in the ocean by the behavior of waves. The assumption behind gravitons is that they “operate” under the same constraints as photons and other quantum forces/objects. What if they don't? What if they're a property of space-time, and space-time is not an affect of quantum operations, but quantum mechanics, i.e., our universe, is an affect of spacetime?

If this happens to be so, then gravitons, assuming they exist, would have properties outside the limits of quantum mechanics. One of the other nagging questions raised by general relativity is time. Experiments have shown that clocks run more slowly in the presence of greater mass. Why? What property of mass causes this? If gravity is a function of spacetime deformation, and gravity waves are the manifestation of that deformation, with gravitons as the quantized components of gravity waves, then the concentration of gravitons would have the same effect as “conventional” mass. That would explain the acceleration of 2114 FQ5, i.e., the Solar Express. That would also explain why the Noram and Sinese research spacecraft were carried along by the artifact as it accelerated.

What is not so obvious is how a theoretically unpowered artifact accelerated toward the sun … and why there was such a solar reaction when it neared perihelion …

A slight understatement, Alayna.

One of the early theories dealing with gravitons held that gravity was the weakest of the four fundamental forces because its greatest effect was in another dimension. That idea would also hold true if one regards space-time as the fourth dimension. And … if space-time is not fully part of, or fully manifested, in our universe, that would explain several of the oddities involved with the artifact and the solar reaction. Entropy—or time's arrow, if you will—exists because of quantum entanglement. If gravitons do not entangle, and as energy that is massless their entanglement potential in our universe is minimal or nonexistent, then essentially time's arrow does not exist within space-time, assuming as I have that the bulk of space-time is “beneath” our universe. In addition, as a function of space-time, gravitons, or some fraction of them, would always be partially present in any area where they had ever manifested … which would also explain the attraction without apparent surface gravity on the artifact. It may also be that time as we think of it does not exist in the “underside,” for lack of a better word, of space-time.

All this isn't something that can be laid out fully, but the equations that follow constitute the basis of a possible theoretical approach to the phenomenon displayed by 2114 FQ5 as it approached perihelion and that theoretical basis is consistent with the failure to definitively observe gravitons and the inability to consistently measure gravity waves, not to mention other nagging factors about gravity. This postulate may not be entirely correct, but it would explain the speed increase of the artifact relative to the sun. Assuming that the artifact is in fact the remnant of a larger craft, and that is a very reasonable assumption, and assuming that the artifact used gravitons, which is a definite possibility, as described below, those “residual” gravitons, or the equivalent, exerted the gravitational attraction commensurate with a far more massive body.

The problem with traveling between stars is that we are quantum creatures, and the technology we employ consists of, if you will, quantum structures. All matter, while it is in the quantum universe, is subject to quantum constraints. We can't travel faster than light. In fact, we can't even get close, because at speeds close to that of light, our mass becomes almost infinitely great. That makes sense, because accelerating to the speed of light takes energy, and on the quantum level, energy is mass. That is an oversimplification, but essentially true.