A Time to Die (12 page)

“Did you find anything?” one of the passengers asked in halting English.

“I hope so,” Andrew answered. He went to one wall, found a recessed ring and pulled. A tape closure resisted so he pulled until it broke. The section of wall came away as a panel and the room was flooded with the much louder roar of the plane’s engines. “This crawlway leads to the amidships cargo hold. From there to the forward galley storage, then into the forward bar. There’s a spiral staircase that goes to the middeck, and accesses the flight deck as well. About sixty meters forward from us.”

“That’s a bloody long distance,” Dr. White, having finished calming the attendant while Andrew studied. The man handed him a couple bottles of water.

Andrew took one and drank half of it in one long series of swallows. Sitting the half-drunk one on a cabinet he stuffed the other into a pocket on his uniform. “It’s not that bad. I crawled two hundred meters under barbed wire through mud while some crazy Marine shot over our heads in survival training. This can't be that bad.”

“Was anyone trying to eat you during that training?”

Andrew had to admit the doctor had him there. “I can’t say that they were. But those leathernecks are mean dudes.” He knelt at the opening and looked inside. It was all but black with only a few intermittent clusters of red LED lights. There wasn’t much room and it was obviously intended to only be used on the ground. “Wish me luck.”

“Best of luck,” the doctor said, and Andrew was off into the dark.

* * *

Jeremiah looked at the computer display and scratched his head. The main machine shop of his Oceanic Orbital Enterprises on Long Beach’s Pier 11 was completely taken over by Osborne’s best and brightest engineers. He’d rode them the last twenty-four hours like a taskmaster of old, personally stripping powerful computers from orbital operations and moving them down to the ex-machine shop and turning them over to material science teams who’d once helped craft ultra-high tech alloys on his SSTO rocket. All those millions he’d spent were completely forgotten now, washed away in his prize from the desert.

“So you are saying there are anomalous chemical analysis data coming back on the metals?” he asked the team leader, a man who’d worked for OOE since Jeremiah created it. He’d stolen the man from NASA when it had been gutted by a certain president back in 2008.

“Well,” the scientist explained, “we didn’t really do a proper test because we couldn’t get a piece of the metal cut off.”

“You said the melting point was too high and it’s acting like the whole piece was part of a matrix?”

“Yes,” the scientist said and pointed at a screen. “You see the way the molecular structure is linked? This is a hypothesis, of course. It distributes energy almost like a superconductor mixed with a Prince Rupert’s drop. Anyway, we got some spectral analysis from a tiny amount of spall we got by hitting it with a laser and that’s where this came from.” He touched the corner of the screen and the display changed. It was a typical chemical analysis from a mass spectrometer. Each element was represented by a line in a linear graph. The higher the line, the higher the content.

“I understand this better,” Jeremiah said.

“You see here what you’d expect from a terrestrial metal. This is an analysis from the titanium, chromium, molybdenum alloy we use on the primary bell housing, coating with ablative ceramic of course.”

“I know, I helped design it, Ed.”

“Oh, sure, sorry. Anyway,” he said and tapped the screen, “this is from our little craft.”

The spectral analysis was principally similar. The majority of it was an iron alloy. It had small percentages of manganese, aluminum, copper, and higher or titanium. But there, far to the right, were three little red bars. “What are those?” Jeremiah asked and pointed.

“We have no idea,” the scientist replied. “It has an atomic weight similar to that of tungsten, but properties closer to diamond. The alloying principle may be imbuing this superconducting quality. Quite amazing.”

Jeremiah left him and visited his electronic and electrical engineers. They were busy examining the interior of the craft with tiny flexible cameras. It was far too small to allow anyone to get inside who was larger than a small dog. Inside the cabin were tantalizing indications of interfaces of unusual origin. “Any ideas?” he asked the team leader.

“We’re guessing their systems use a touch contact of some sort, possibly close proximity like a Bluetooth. We’ve been running the electromagnetic spectrum but haven’t gotten a bite yet.” Down the little hull a pair of technicians were slowly passing a bulky instrument connected to a laptop by clearly improvised connections. The lead noticed his gaze. “The only noticeable RF pings we’ve been getting are this little blips all along the hull.” He took Jeremiah to where the computer was making a 3D image of the craft. Every time their sensor picked up a ping the computer noted the location and signal quality.

Jeremiah watched them work in silence. He noted the regularity of the readings and how they were arranged on the hull. His engineer’s mind came to a quick conclusion. “Rivets,” he said.

The electrical engineer supervising the readings looked up at him. “Rivets?”

Jeremiah looked back at him for a moment before remembering he was talking to an electrical engineer, not mechanical. “Yes,” he said, went to a workbench, found one of the prototype models of this ship and brought it back. Be pointed to the lines of little points showing rivets. “You have to assemble body panels to the superstructure in some way.”

The man looked at his display, then back at the model. The resemblance was undeniable. “Okay sir, you have a point. But why would rivets be giving off an EM signature?”

“I don’t know,” Jeremiah admitted. “Have you tried communicating with them?”

Several of the technicians started laughing, until they saw their boss was serious, then the laughing stopped. “I don’t see how that is possible,” one of them said.

“Well,” Jeremiah said and turned to his material science team, “is there a process of welding that might give off an EM signature like that?”

The woman heading the group examined the readings for a second then shook her head. “No sir. I could see some sort of radioactive residue from a radical welding process giving off EM, but it would also be emitting other waves or particles. The only radiation we’re getting is from the aft of the craft.”

Jeremiah glanced at the ship. They erected a series of heavy lead plates around the rear section to shield the working teams from any stray radiation. There wasn’t much of it, but it was enough that he didn’t want to have a lawsuit if someone got a melanoma or some such.

“So that must mean there is a control to release the plates,” Jeremiah told his bemused mechanical team.

“Sir,” the man said, “a control on every single rivet? Isn’t that extremely wasteful?”

“We get more detailed with computer controls every year,” Jeremiah reminded him. “Think of how complicated car braking systems have gotten in the last twenty years. What used to be a simple hydraulic line is now a complicated feedback system using multiple inputs and computers to create a dynamic feedback loop from the wheels. Traction control too. Hell, my car even has fly by wire for the damned throttle!”

“He has a point,” the electrical team agreed. They all exchanged looks and some heads nodded.

An hour later Jeremiah returned from getting a cup of coffee to find the teams working together to finish improvising an EM transmitter/receiver device capable of a range of frequencies.

“We jury rigged this from a backup telemetry reporting module off our ship’s aileron controls,” the mechanical engineer told him.

“Let’s see what happens,” Jeremiah gestured. A volunteer took the transceiver, connected to a laptop buy a long USB cable and ran it along the hull slowly until he found a rivet point just behind the cockpit entrance.

“There!” a tech called out. “Back a millimeter…over a smidge…got it!” The laptop screen displayed the EM signature, recorded it in extreme detail, and expanded on it. It wasn’t just a simple EM spike. It was a repeating signal with structure.

“Check another,” Jeremiah said, and they did. It looked identical but when signal analysis software was commandeered from the communications department, it became obvious that there were tiny differences. “Can we see if the signal is a data set of some sort?” More analysis followed.

At first there didn’t appear to be real structure, just random noise. That was until a computer tech who was linking another pair of PCs for them to crunch numbers with looked at the analysis of the data. “That’s cool,” he said, “What does it say?”

“Nothing that we can tell,” a commo tech said.

“You deciphered it?”

“It’s not binary,” the tech said.

“No, it’s ternary.” Blank stares. “Base three? You know, zero, one, and plus one?” More blank stares. “You guys never studied Soviet computer history?”

Jeremiah laughed and went for more coffee. He’d spent years gathering eclectic minds at OOE like some people gather strange posters or bad Christmas sweaters. It could be it was beginning to pay off.

When he returned, the computer guy had three of his buddies and they were nearly done writing a quick translation program. An ex-MIT professor who’d stepped on a lot of toes and landed at OOE came over when Jeremiah returned. The man had taken over his programming department and gotten it in line, writing all their operating systems from scratch when NASA refused to help. “Jeremiah, this is fascinating! What has NASA said about our screwing around with that thing?”

“Not a word,” Jeremiah said and took out his smartphone. There was no reply still, and he’d sent two more emails and left a voicemail for Al as well. “I couldn’t wait to get rid of it when I first found it. Now…” he gestured at the ship, “I hope they don’t sweep in and take away my toy before I finish playing with it.”

“So you believe this is a real, honest to God, alien space ship?”

Jeremiah went over and turned a monitor around so the other man could see the high resolution of the desiccated body he’d brought back from the Texas desert. “Yeah, actually I do.”

“Mr. Osborne?” Jeremiah turned to see the comms specialist and the computer crew waving to him. “We’re ready to try to transmit as well as receive. We’re curious what might happen.”

“Sure,” he said and nodded to them, “let’s see what happens.” No one noticed that Jeremiah took a few steps further back by a thick Plexiglas shield. He watched as they began be echoing the signals back at the rivet points. There was no response. Next they tried variations of the other signals from different bolts with similar results. Finally, after two hours of watching them work, Jeremiah quietly left them to their task and went up to his little apartment above the main vehicle assembly floor.

The SSTO craft sat there like it had for almost a month. Fully assembled, ready to fly. The Azanti, tail number OOE01. It was the culmination of his life’s dream. Single state to orbit, capable of an eleven-ton payload with a crew of four, fourteen tons in automated mode. Its linear aerospike motors were completely revolutionary, based on a design abandoned by NASA decades ago. If the design proved out, it could be turned around to fly again with only a hundred man hours of labor.

Years of work and innovation all into a single lifting body prototype about two thirds the displacement of a 747, with hundreds of thousands of moving parts. One reporter had called the Azanti ‘the summation of all the best developments of manned space flight to date’. And in a little room deep in his warehouse was a tiny ship that made his achievement look like a soapbox racer sitting next to a Grand Prix racecar. Jeremiah went to sleep with mixed feelings and slept fitfully.

In the morning he found hot coffee and Danish waiting in his outer office, a present from one of the interns. He took a few minutes to shower and the coffee was the perfect drinking temperature when he was dressed. Down in the machine shop he found all the same people still working. “You people haven’t stopped?” They scarcely noticed him. “Okay,” he said and moved over to look at various computer displays over their shoulders.

Aerospace engineering was his primary expertise; the computer programming and results he was looking at was almost incomprehensible for him. What little background he had in programming was useless in this new ‘ternary’ language they were using.

“Did you ever ascertain why ternary?” he asked one of the computer techs.

“We think it’s using a quantum level processor,” was the reply.

“That’s… pretty advanced,” Jeremiah said.

“You could say that,” his MIT professor said, coming over with a day’s growth of beard and a big mug of coffee. “Our lab at the Institute produced some prototype quantum processors. Our biggest problem was realizing what we could do with them. It was like handing the Red Baron an F-22. If we’re right, this uses quantum processors as well as quantum memory.”

Jeremiah nodded to cover the fact that he didn’t know what that really meant. The professor glanced at him and chuckled. “You see; a quantum processor could be capable of operating at nearly infinite speeds. And quantum memory nearly infinite storage.”

“Oh!” Jeremiah said. Now that made sense. “So no luck with the rivets?”

“I’m not sold that’s what we’re working with,” the professor said. “Could be these are just transmitters or something.” Jeremiah noted that a few people nodded, some shook their heads, while still more just looked noncommittal. “But on the chance you’re correct, Gilbert there has been writing what you could call the first human-written quantum program.”