Invaders (a sequel to Vaz, Tiona and Disc) (24 page)

She wished she could take him with her, but there’d been tremendous wrangling over who got the five slots on the saucer. General Stoddard hadn’t even wanted Tiona to go. Essentially, he wanted to go himself, taking four mission specialists to help him fight the aliens if it became necessary. Tiona had the distinct impression that Stoddard would have phrased it “when it became necessary.” The president had told the State Department to send a diplomat. At first they hadn’t been able to find anyone who was both fit enough
and
willing to go. Then, when they’d finally found an undersecretary, he wasn’t thrilled and refused to go if he couldn’t have at least three underlings to assist him. NASA had insisted on sending a team to evaluate the scientific capabilities of the aliens.

What they had for a team at present included General Stoddard and one of his men, a Lt. Nunez specially trained in space work who had his own military spacesuit. NASA had one man, a Dr. James Kline trained in astrophysics. The State Department’s Undersecretary, having been told he couldn’t
take
his minions was sending one of those minions rather than going himself.

Tiona opened the airlock doors at the back of the saucer and stepped outside. “Mr. Shapiro?” she said to the nervous looking young man standing there.

He nodded nervously and picked up a couple of large suitcases.

“You can’t bring those!” Tiona said, appalled. She calmed herself, “Sorry, we don’t have much room. You can bring one small overnight case, but that’s it.”

“But… what if the negotiations continue for an extended period? Besides the second case has document printers for any agreements we come to.”

“We’ll be lucky if we can communicate at all! There’s no way we’re going to be signing printed agreements.”

It took another 15 minutes for Shapiro to go back in and repack into one small case. They headed back to GSI to pick up the rest of their team. On the short trip to North Carolina, Tiona got to know “Kurt” as Shapiro preferred to be called. He seemed to be a nice fellow with a good handle on Earth politics, but was
completely
clueless about spaceflight. Once the introductions were completed, he looked around and said with some concern, “Where’s the room we’re going to meet with the aliens in?”

Tiona stared at him for a moment, wondering if he’d been listening when she’d said they’d be lucky to communicate at all. Finally, she said, “This is it. That’s why you guys can’t send a whole team—we
only
have seats for five people.”

He stared, “I know you folks have some huge saucers; why aren’t you sending one of them?!”

Beginning to regret having demanded that they send along a diplomat, Tiona tried to explain the issues with getting a big saucer back in time, but met a disbelieving stare. Thinking that the guy might turn out to be worse than useless, she nonetheless set out to explain some of the physics of the situation to him.

He waved that away, “Sciencey stuff has never been my strong suit. You handle that stuff and
I’ll
do the talking.”

By the time they landed at GSI to pick up Stoddard, Tiona was dreading the trip. Sure enough, during the trip to LA to pick up Klein, Stoddard and Shapiro managed to thoroughly rub each other the wrong way. Tiona spent the time teaching them how to get into their spacesuits. Then, while Stoddard rolled his eyes, she had to try to convince Shapiro that he couldn’t wear his designer suit over the space one.

Dr. Klein proved to be pleasant, excited to meet the aliens, and holding very reasonable expectations about the trip and how limited their ability to communicate might be. He seemed most excited about inspecting the alien starship in hopes of understanding how they’d traveled the immense distances between the stars. However, when Tiona forwarded her dad’s deep gravitational wormhole hypothesis, Kline merely lifted an eyebrow and shook his head to discount it. Tiona felt pretty certain that he didn’t know who either she or her father was, but decided it would be petty to bring it up.

When they stopped at a small military space habitat in LEO to pick up Lt. Nunez, Tiona was pleasantly surprised to find that the Lt. was
not
a man, but a small, no-nonsense woman who Tiona immediately liked. The Lt. went by her initials, “J. J.” and, after seeing the general’s reaction, Tiona had the feeling that Stoddard hadn’t known Nunez was a woman either.

Stoddard wanted to travel at 2G acceleration and no one resisted the suggestion so Tiona had the AI plot them a trajectory and start them out. 2G’s wasn’t intolerable, but it did inhibit people from doing much.

Tiona insisted on decelerating briefly to 1G for meals and bathroom breaks.

Even traveling at two gravities, it was nearly 17 hours before they’d accelerated up for the trip and then decelerated back down to zero and started accelerating toward the Earth again. The daughter-ship was coming toward them at 47 km/s so they had to start accelerating back toward Earth in order to match the daughter-ship’s velocity and vector and reach a zero-zero intercept.

***

Aboard the lander, the second officer turned to the ships brand new captain and said, “An object is on a near intercept course for us.”

Balan turned irritably to look at the screen herself, “Is it going to hit us or not?”

Timidly, Second Officer said, “I don’t think so, but it’s decelerating. If it changes its rate of deceleration, it might.”

Despite her attempt to damp the reaction, Balan’s wings lifted slightly in alarm. “Decelerating?” she asked, turning to the radar screens.

“Yes ma’am.”

Balan saw the object displayed on the meteoroid detection system. The system displayed objects in higher frequency colors according to the degree of threat they posed. With a frisson of fear, Balan saw that this one was far into the ultraviolet. Even meteoroids that were calculated to hit them were usually only blue, but most of them were tiny. “How big is it?”

“Its diameter is 21 fargs (8 meters).”

Balan blinked,
That’s huge!
“Its velocity?”

Second Officer looked over at his screen before answering “8340 kilofargs per milliday (one renda milliday = 1.5 Earth minutes).”

“You didn’t
know
?!”

“It’s
decelerating,
” Second Officer reminded her patiently.

Embarrassed that’d she’d forgotten, Balan merely asked, “How fast?”

Sounding awed, Second Officer said, “5.4 Gravities (2 Earth Gs)!”

Astonished by the acceleration’s magnitude and wondering how it could
possibly
be achieved, Balan said, “Wait! Does it have a plasma exhaust?” Realizing that a plasma drive could never produce that much thrust, she said, “Or nuclear?” Then, thinking that the natives of this system couldn’t be advanced enough to have nuclear rockets said, “Or chemical?” Then she wondered how a chemical rockets could have sufficient specific impulse to travel interplanetary distances at such high accelerations.

None of these thoughts prepared Balan for Second Officer’s answer of, “No… No exhaust at all.”

Balan blurted, “How’s it decelerating?” Then she realized that, of course, Second Officer couldn’t have an answer to that mystery.

Second Officer replied, “I don’t know.” Balan heard a tremble in Second Officer’s voice—as if he was frightened.

Balan realized she felt alarmed by the implications herself. “How much longer until it hits us, if it does?”

“If it maintains its deceleration, about two centidays (one renda centidays = 15 Earth minutes).”

“And its relative velocity at impact?”

“Zero. Or very close to it.”

The aliens are intercepting us!
Connect me to Captain Levon…”

When the connection had been made Levon seemed irritable. Balan proceeded to explain the decelerating object to Levon.

“You’re calling me because something
might
hit you?! Have you even
tried
to deal with it yourself?”

“Well… it probably won’t hit us…” Balan said, wondering if Captain Levon had missed the implications of the object’s deceleration. Did she not understand that this was an alien ship? “At the rate it’s
decelerating
it may just come to rest near us.” Balan slightly emphasized the deceleration to be sure Levon didn’t miss it. “Should we…” Balan was going to say, “attempt to communicate,” but Levon interrupted.

“Use your meteorite deflection system.”

Balan got the distinct impression that Levon was about to disconnect the call so she quickly said, “It’s too big to deflect! Shouldn’t we attempt to com…”

“Fire your deflection system
and
make an evasive maneuver,” Levon said as if speaking to an idiot. This time the call did disconnect before Balan could say anything further.

Balan’s second officer said, “What are we going to do?!”

“You heard the Captain. Evasive maneuver.” Balan turned, “Third Officer. I assume the deflection system is ready, go ahead and fire it.”
The deflection system’s laser doesn’t have enough power to move an object over 20 fargs in diameter!
she thought. In fact it didn’t have enough power to deflect a rock much over half a farg.

Balan heard the firing of the deflection laser, then the maneuvering thrusters began to rotate the lander for the evasive maneuver.

***

Tiona checked the countdown for the zero-zero intercept. Twenty five more minutes. She was sick of two Gs and couldn’t wait to match up with the daughter-ship and go weightless for a while. She glanced at the screen displaying the image of the daughter-ship, hoping to get some idea of what it looked like. It was still much too far away to pick up significant detail since the camera had no telescopic magnification. Blowing up the image didn’t manufacture detail that wasn’t present to begin with.

Suddenly a loud bang behind her put her heart in her throat. She spun, thinking that someone had fired a gun. As she turned she felt surprise, since Stoddard—in her mind the most likely person to discharge a weapon—was sitting beside her in the front row. He’d insisted on it. Stoddard was spinning to look behind himself as well. Shouts were erupting in the cabin.

The saucer lurched. It felt like it was tilting to the side and Tiona’s heart spasmed.
Are we having a breakdown?
She spun back to the front to look at the status screens barking, “Cut thrust!” at her AI.

They were suddenly weightless.

A diagram on the screen popped up showing the hexagonally arranged 2.66 meter thruster discs. One of them was flashing red.

With the thrumming thrusters quieted, the sudden silence made the hissing of an air leak suddenly evident.

Her ears popped and her AI said, “Cabin pressure is dropping.”

We’ve been hit by a meteorite!
she thought. As she grabbed for her helmet she shouted, “Helmets on!” As she put on her own helmet she wondered why the radar system hadn’t given them a warning and the AI at least
started
evasive maneuvers before the meteorite hit. As her helmet locked into place she released her harness and grabbed the armrest, pulling herself up and over it, then shoving off toward the patch locker. She wondered if she should be checking everyone else’s helmets, but decided that patching the hole in the cabin should be priority number one.

Pulling the patch-kit out, she thought,
Thank God the meteorite didn’t hit the fusor!
Without power they’d be in serious trouble.

She turned back toward the cabin, wondering where the hole was and realizing that with the helmet on she no longer had any directional sense to the sound of the leak. She’d thought it was behind her when she was in the front row of seats, but that was about all she knew.

To her consternation she saw Stoddard was struggling with his helmet. Nunez was helping Kline with his. Kurt Shapiro had evidently passed out. He lay flopped back in his seat without his helmet even near him.
Shit!

Wondering again if she should prioritize the helmet over the hole she scanned the cabin for a perforation.

It wasn’t evident.

Tiona pushed off for Shapiro.
If it’s going to take a while to find the perf, I should get him in a helmet, then look for the hole.

As she coasted toward Shapiro, Nunez cast off from Kline toward Stoddard. Kline’s helmet looked sealed and Stoddard was still struggling with his, but Tiona was surprised that Nunez was ignoring Shapiro who didn’t have
anything
holding his air in.
Maybe she saw me heading that way?
“Lieutenant, did you see where we’re holed?”

“Under Shapiro’s chair,” Nunez said tersely.

Tiona’d grabbed Shapiro’s helmet and started maneuvering it toward his head. She stopped to stare at the diplomat’s face in shock.
Oh,
that’s
why Nunez wasn’t putting his helmet on,
she thought, taking in Shapiro’s bulging lifeless eyes with a sense of horror. Then Tiona focused on tendrils of smoke drifting away from a spreading mass of goo beneath Shapiro’s head.
That’s odd,
she thought. During their incredibly rapid passage through objects, meteorites didn’t cause all that much heating. She tore her eyes away from Shapiro and looked up at the roof of the cabin.