Invaders (a sequel to Vaz, Tiona and Disc) (21 page)

Stoddard’s jaw twitched a couple of times, then he sighed, “Okay. This is all covered by the official secrets act. You can’t tell
anyone
else without my permission,” he glanced at Tiona, “not even stuff you learned from whoever told you about the NEO separation and plasma drive. Now, we first learned…” He stopped because Tiona had put up a halting hand.

“Don’t even bother telling me. I won’t be able to help you without asking for help from my people, and I can’t talk to them if I constantly have to be going to you for permission first. I’ll just figure out what’s happening myself, then try to decide whether I
want
to help you and
how
I can best help you after I’ve done that.” She turned and started for the door.

“Guards!” The general barked.

Tiona stopped and turned. Lifting an eyebrow again, she said, “If you’re about to tell them to arrest me, I can pretty much guarantee that that will be the end of any help
I
give you. You see, I’ve dealt with an amped up general before. One who’s since been court-martialed for the way he handled the situation. Now, if you’d like some
help
dealing with us irritating civilians, I might suggest you call on General James Cooper—he’s got a real talent for it.”

The guard had opened the door and looked in, “General?”

The general gave a dismissive wave, “Never mind.” As the guard let the door swing closed, the general said, “Sorry. You’re right, we
do
need your help. I’m going to tell you what’s going on, but ask you not to tell people you don’t think have the ‘need to know.’ Does that sound reasonable?”

Tiona nodded, and waved at the small conversational group of chairs in front of Dante’s desk, “May we sit?”

The general nodded and they settled into seats. True to his word, the general explained what he knew. Unfortunately, though the NEO had separated into two fragments eight days ago now, he’d only been notified about this four days ago when someone decided that the small fragment looked like it was going to pass much closer to the Earth than the large fragment. Then when they’d turned more observational resources on it to evaluate this possibility yesterday, they’d not only seen the ionized hydrogen suggesting a plasma drive, but they’d also begun picking up radio transmissions of a digital nature.

To Tiona’s surprise, Stoddard’s knowledge had come from an obscure military program which followed NEO’s because of the
possibility
the military might be called upon to try to prevent Earth impacts. Though they’d obtained a great deal of their data through a streaming agreement with the Near Earth Object Program at JPL, they’d analyzed it themselves rather than being told about it by Dr. Singer.

“So what is it you’re hoping that GSI’s saucers can help you do?” Tiona asked.

“Evaluate the threat,” Stoddard said as if it were obvious. “We need to get out there and get ‘eyes on.’ We’ve got to try to determine whether either of these objects are weaponized. If so, we need to assess the possibilities for countering the threat. It’s been suggested that the separated object is being maneuvered toward an Earth intersection by its plasma drive. We need an accurate evaluation of how big it is so we can know whether it’s a planet buster.”

Tiona narrowed her eyes, “An object large enough to fracture our planet is
not
going to be moved by a plasma drive.”

Stoddard shrugged his shoulders, “Yeah, I just meant something big enough for an extinction event.”

She shook her head, “The Chicxulub impactor was estimated to be ten kilometers in diameter and mass 3 trillion metric tons.
Still
not going to move it with a plasma drive.”

“Chicxulub?”

“The asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs.”

“Okay, so, something smaller, but still big enough to wipe out a country or something!” Stoddard said, sounding irritated.

“It doesn’t matter, anything small enough to be moved by a plasma drive over the distance they’ve got won’t even make it through the atmosphere.”

The general glanced at the major as if wondering what he thought, but then turned back to Tiona. “And why are you so sure of this?”

She shrugged, “It’s my job. We’re moving asteroids to the Earth and people are constantly panicking that we’re going to wipe them out. We routinely move objects in the range of 3000 metric tons from the belt to here with a saucer that can exert 4 million pounds of thrust. But even an object of 12,000 metric tons, the Chelyabinsk meteor in Russia a while ago, didn’t make it all the way to the ground in one piece. Admittedly it did a significant amount of damage and caused some injuries, but no one was killed.”

The general looked over at Major Vincent again, “Do her figures sound reasonable to you?”

The major nodded and Tiona got the impression he’d been telling the general something similar to this. Focusing her eyes on the major, she said, “From the reported size of the exhaust plume and assuming a very high exhaust velocity, I’m estimating that their drive generated 250 pounds of thrust. Is that in the range of what you’re getting?”

The major glanced at Stoddard as if wondering whether he was allowed to answer, but then nodded.

Tiona turned back to the general, “That’s a lot of thrust to get out of a plasma drive but I suppose they could be multiple smaller ones. However, even if true, it would exert less than 1 ten thousandth of a G of acceleration on an object the size of the Chelyabinsk meteor, much less something that would be big enough to hit the ground and kill millions of people. Moving something massive a significant amount with a so little acceleration takes years. Thankfully, orbital bombardment is
much
more difficult than a lot of people believe.”

The general glanced at Major Vincent again and received another nod as confirmation of this assessment. “So how
would
they be attacking us then?”

Tiona tilted her head, “Maybe they’re just coming by to say ‘howdy’?”

Stoddard shook his head, “I hope so, but my job is to prepare for the possibility that they might be coming to wipe us out. Again, how could they do that?”

Tiona looked at Major Vincent as she mused a little. “We’re forced to make a number of assumptions based on far too little data. However, if those hydrogen ions are really coming from a plasma drive, and they’re using it to push the smaller object somewhere, it must be light enough that they can move it readily. I would assume it’s a hollow object like a ship.
I
wouldn’t want to be riding in it.”

Stoddard said, “Why not?”

Tiona shrugged, “Too light to be carrying any significant radiation protection and there’s a
lot
of radiation near the sun…” She stopped and laughed, “Well, strike that stupid assumption. They could be using some form of electromagnetic shielding like we do.”

“Or maybe it’s a robot?”

“No, for it to present that large an image in our imaging systems, but have a mass low enough for a plasma drive, it’s got to be mostly hollow. No reason to make a robotic ship have a lot of empty space in it, so it has to be carrying some of the aliens.”

“So, if it’s carrying some aliens, maybe it’s got some super weapon on board they’re going to use to wipe us all out?”

Tiona rubbed an ear thoughtfully, “Maybe? Nuclear weapons? They almost certainly didn’t come from this solar system and if they’re capable of interstellar flight they’re
way
more capable than we are. Who knows what kind of weapons they might carry, though all the weapons we know about deliver energy in some form or other and it seems unlikely that a spaceship small enough to be pushed by a plasma drive could generate and control the kind of energy it would take to wipe out an entire planet.”

General Stoddard studied Tiona for a moment, then shrugged his shoulders, “Well, this is all very interesting, but the first order of business is to get out there and have a look at them. When can you get us a saucer?”

Tiona stared at him for a moment, thinking about whether she wanted to stonewall him for being such an arrogant jerk.

The general, apparently deciding she might be thinking exactly that, said, “Please.”

Tiona thought there was a silent, “or else,” that had come just after the, “please.” She said, “I’m pretty sure I can have one back from the asteroid belt in four days, but I have a condition.”

Stoddard narrowed his eyes, “I don’t think you’re in a position to dictate terms, but I’ll listen to them.”

“You need to send a diplomat too.”

The general snorted, “Fat lot of good that’ll do. We aren’t going to be able to speak their language!”

“Still, we need someone with skill and authority to carry out negotiations if they’re possible and they’re needed.”

“No. Not open for discussion. How many men will I be able to put on the saucer you’ll have for us four days from now?”

Tiona narrowed her eyes again, “When I ask the president about this, is
she
going to say she doesn’t think we should send a diplomat?”

The general stared at her for a moment as if trying to decide whether she had the traction to call the president. Apparently deciding that she might, he said, “If the president wants us to take a diplomat, we’ll take a diplomat.”

Tiona stood, “My AI’s forwarding you diagrams of the living space in the seventy-five meter saucer. That’s what’s going to be coming back from the belt. I’ll leave it to you to figure out how many personnel you can stuff into the available space.” She walked out, half expecting the general to stop her so he could make further demands, but he didn’t.

Her thoughts in turmoil, Tiona went to her office at GSI so she’d have a place to think. Then, worried that she might forget, she sent a message to Rob Marshall out at the asteroid, asking him to disengage from the asteroid and return to Earth. “I know this will be a big disappointment,” she said, “but trust me, it’s important. Many lives could depend on it. We need the saucer back here at earth ASAP.” It was almost 13 light minutes to the saucer’s location, so Tiona figured she had about twenty-five minutes before she got a message from Rob bitching about it. However, even though he wouldn’t be happy, she expected he’d already be disengaging the saucer.

Tiona spent some time using the special orbital mechanics package in her AI to try to figure out how long it would take the aliens to get to Earth. Fortunately, most of the orbital parameters for the main alien ship had been uploaded as public knowledge on the net while it was still classified as a simple NEO. She didn’t have much information on the movements of the newly separated ship which she’d begun calling a daughter-ship in her own mind. She could approximate its thrust from the size of the ionized hydrogen exhaust plume which Dr. Singer had given her. If she knew how fast the daughter-ship was accelerating away from the mothership she’d be able to calculate its mass. Unfortunately there wasn’t even any information on the net to indicate that the separation had happened, much less the velocity of its departure. She sent a tersely worded query to General Stoddard asking about its mass. She phrased the question in such a way that it would be obvious how the mass could be determined.

Returning to the information she had and using wide ballparks she came up with numbers from three to nine weeks for the daughter-ship to arrive at Earth, depending on actual accelerations and when and how much they decelerated before they got here. She realized that that meant even NASA’s saucer that was way out at Neptune could make the sixteen day trip back to Earth before the daughter-ship arrived.

She rubbed her temples, hating to think that these aliens could have traveled from another star to start a war, but deciding that if that
was
their intent, failing to recall the saucers that Earth might need to defend itself would be far worse than just regrettable. She sent messages to GSI’s two saucers out at Saturn and the one that was tracking a comet, telling them to return. She sent another message to General Stoddard, this time suggesting that he might want to request that NASA bring back the saucer from Neptune.

She was sitting with her mind churning when she got a call from Stoddard. “Why do you think we need NASA’s Neptune saucer?” he said without preliminaries.

Heavily, she said, “I don’t even want to think that these aliens are here to attack us, but if they are—and we need to fight—the saucers are going to represent our best weapons. I’d hate to think that Earth might die because we didn’t want to disturb NASA’s Neptune mission.”

Stoddard snorted, “My God, you’re even more paranoid than I am. Would that saucer actually be back in time to make a difference?”

“Probably, but it depends on those daughter-ship velocity and acceleration figures I asked you for.”

“Daughter-ship?”

“We need to have some name for the aliens’ two ships besides ‘the big one’ and ‘the little one.’ To myself I’m calling them the mothership and the daughter-ship, but if you’ve already got designations for them I’ll start using whatever you’ve assigned.”

“Mothership and daughter-ship it is. I’ll have Major Vincent send you those acceleration figures. Get back to me with your interpretation of what they mean.”