The Great Destroyer (2 page)

After Charlie’s audio processors decoded Takagawa’s order to adjust the Gagarin Telescope, his higher guidance program decided he had to walk over to the Telescope before he could implement his adjustment protocol.

Initiate routine travel.do.

That routine called up a subroutine.

Initiate subroutine walking.right_step.do.

The subroutine called up its own sub-subroutines until Charlie’s actuators, servos, and other components were triggered to begin the physical travel process.

Charlie looked over the lunar terrain with his optical sensor.  No obvious impediments to walking.

Charlie scanned the lunar terrain with his short-wave radar.  No subterranean faults.  The upcoming step was within two centimeters of matching the present terrain height.  No chance of stumbling.

Charlie moved his right leg.  Executing the walking subroutine had taken about three-quarters of a second. 

Initiate subroutine walking.left_step.do.

So it went for five minutes as the maintenance robot made its way over to the Gagarin Telescope.

Charlie had been built with jobs precisely like this in mind.  While his exoskeleton had the strength to lift a small car, his hands had the most sensitive actuators available, allowing Charlie to aim the telescope at precisely the right patch of space.

Charlie waited patiently as the optical telescope gathered the necessary light to develop a usable image.  The exposure time for a deep space image often ran to several hours, though for this intra-Solar System tasking, a few minutes would suffice.

After the telescope software had captured the image, Charlie’s processor examined the file.  Emma had programmed him to briefly check images as part of his maintenance duties so he could ensure that the telescope was operating properly. 

His classification system identified six stars and what appeared to be an unusually smooth comet trailing two coronas, light plumes of vapor much longer than the comet itself. Several small asteroids orbited around the comet. 

Analysis: Gagarin Telescope functional.  Await further instructions.

Charlie continued to stand beside the telescope waiting.  He was not capable of being particularly interested in the conversation the humans were engaging in.  His voice analysis subroutine recognized the voices of the various parties nevertheless. 

Luna Director Trevor Harvin: I hope the astronomers won’t mind us taking up their time to look at nothing.

Dr. Emma Takagawa: The astronomers can spare a few minutes for us to unlock the mysteries of the universe.

Luna Director Trevor Harvin: I don’t think it’s fair to say the astronomers’ work isn’t valuable.

Dr. Emma Takagawa: I don’t care what you think is fair.

Luna Director Trevor Harvin: You can’t treat your co-workers like this.  Your attitude is not creating an atmosphere of equity and inclusiveness.  ‘People are more important than things,’ you know.

Dr. Emma Takagawa: I know the goddamn slogan, I—

Technician Isabella Nunez: The Gagarin Telescope imagery has finished downloading.  Opening the file...

[A minute of silence.]

Technician Isabella Nunez: Is that what I think it is?

Emma Takagawa: There’s nothing else it could be.  This is going to change everything. Trevor, I think you have a phone call to make... 

At that point, the radio link to Charlie was shut down, probably by Emma herself once she realized she had accidentally left it on.

Charlie didn’t wonder at what was going to “change everything.”  All he knew was that he had not received any further orders.  After thirty minutes of inactivity, Charlie’s default programming kicked in and he resumed maintenance activities on radio telescope L-25.

First Representative Lian Flower had a problem.  She had been emailing with Entertainment Minister Fabrizio, exchanging draft after draft of the dog parks questionnaire.  Clearly, she and Fabrizio disagreed on whether there should be treats provided at the dog park, and Fabrizio kept trying to edit parts of the questionnaire dealing with treats. 

This was no small matter, she knew.  The Terran Alliance had, under First Representative Flower’s leadership, expanded dog parks in every major urban center, the first significant initiative of Flower’s tenure as First Representative.  ‘People are more important than things’ was unquestionably true, and people had a right to entertainment.  This was the first attempt to include dogs as people.  Flower was eager to make a good impression after the failure of First Representative Ismail’s Administration, which had ended in a vote of no confidence eighteen months earlier. 

Flower clucked as she read through Entertainment Minister Fabrizio’s latest attempt at removing the doggie treat questions from the draft questionnaire. 
How could she gauge the public will without an effective questionnaire; and how could she have a questionnaire when Fabrizio kept editing it to death?

She looked out the window.  It was just after ten in the morning in Toronto, and the lawn of the Peoplehood House looked especially picturesque in the early spring light.  The capital of the Terran Alliance suffered long winters, but Flower had found that the cold merely made her appreciate the warmth more when it finally arrived.

Flower hoped she could wrap up business by 3:30 so she could go to the movies with her amorfriends, Terry and Darren.  She was daydreaming about the movie, a new erotic thriller, when the phone on her desk rang.  She touched a button on the device, activating her Bluetooth headset.

“Hello?”

“First Representative, this is Administrator Korzov of the Space Administration,” a Russian-accented voice told her.

“Uh oh, is there a problem at Luna?”  Luna, the first permanent base on the Moon, had been a pet project of the Ismail administration, and its expense had slowed annual increases for entertainment benefits, leading to the end of Ismail’s time as First Representative.  Flower was left with a lunar base maintained by robots with little to show for it but some expensive (though beautiful) deep-space photography from the Gagarin Telescope on the dark side of the Moon.

The voice on the other end of the line sounded agitated, even edgy.  “No, no, it’s, uh, a bigger problem than that.  We picked up a strange radar-like electronic signal, and we turned the Gagarin Telescope to try to see what it came from...” Korzov searched for the proper words.  “It picked up an anomalous object out near Pluto.  Can we do a quick video call so I can show you?”

“Certainly, just give me a minute to get online.  Goodbye.”  Flower’s phone automatically hung up on the call.  She pushed a button on her computer’s touchscreen and the application came up.  A moment later, she received a call from Administrator Korzov.

An image popped up on Lian’s monitor, a chart depicting some sort of frequency distribution a large spike at one frequency.  Korzov said, “As you can see, we detected the abnormal burst of electromagnetic radiation from the Kuiper Belt just outside the orbit of Pluto.  Trevor Harvin of the Luna program insisted that we direct the Gagarin Telescope to get a picture of the area to see if anything unusual was out there.”

Flower was growing impatient, “Well, what was it?”

The screen changed to the zoomed-in image that Emma Takagawa had seen for the first time twelve hours earlier.  On the screen, Flower saw a long, slightly fuzzy cylinder with two bright blue plumes extending in front of it, and several rocky shapes off to its side

She gasped.

Administrator Korzov’s image came back to the screen.  He said nervously, “Your reaction is the same as mine.”

Flower said without doubt, “That’s a spaceship.”

Korzov replied, “It certainly appears to be.  While we don’t exactly have experts on this sort of thing, everyone at the Space Administration who has seen the image agrees.”

The First Representative of the Terran Alliance asked, “What are those rocks off to the side?”

“They appear to be asteroids, presumably harvested by the spacecraft to replenish stores of water and metals,” Korzov answered.

“What are those long things sticking out in front of it?”

“They’re emissions from the spaceship’s engines.”

Puzzled, Flower asked, “Then why aren’t they behind the ship?”

“The ship is slowing down, First Representative.”

* * *

Lian Flower surveyed the room.  All the senior members of her Advisory Council were present.  Peter Redfeather, the Minister of Public Safety, looked eager and attentive, befitting a young member of the Council. 

Entertainment Minister Fabrizio looked guarded, no doubt thinking the meeting was about the dog parks. 

Gerard Fontainebleau, the aging, paunchy-but-stylish Minister of Economic Stability, lent the room a dignified air.

Equality Minister Tanya Eldridge was the only one who looked confident.  Bad news for Flower was good news for Eldridge, who would be the favorite to replace Flower if she were voted out of office.

The experts from the Space Administration mostly looked nervous to be in the Peoplehood House, home of the First Representative.  Well, Flower thought, all of them looked nervous except for an Asian woman, who merely looked... intense. 

The other members of the Council fiddled with their phones, doubtless texting annoyed amorfriends to say they’d be home late because the First Representative had called a meeting. 

Flower had called the meeting immediately after her conversation with Director Korzov.  It had taken hours to assemble the various ministers, as well as the experts from the Space Administration, but a crisis of this magnitude demanded the best advice available, and Flower wasn’t quite sure who would be able to give meaningful counsel under the circumstances.

“I call this meeting to order,” Lian said in a somewhat raspy voice.  “You are all here because we are facing an issue unprecedented in our world’s history.  Administrator Korzov?”

The Space Administration apparatchik took over the presentation, recounting the facts the First Representative had heard for the first time five hours earlier.  Flower, having already heard the presentation, focused on the new people in the room.

She fixated on the Asian woman among the experts, whose eyes betrayed... what?  Resolve?  Consulting a briefing paper in front of her, she found the only possible name for that woman.  Emma Takagawa, Robotics Expert. 
What was she doing here?
 

Administrator Korzov had immediately flown to Toronto to brief the Advisory Council, bringing with him a coterie of aides, including Emma Takagawa.  She had apparently insisted on coming, and no one seemed to quite have the authority to deny her vehemently enough to deter her.

Flower instinctively disliked Takagawa.  The Japanese woman was skinny and possessed of an odd sort of attractiveness.  But Flower’s interest in claiming Emma as an amorfriend was weakened by Takagawa’s demeanor.  She wasn’t at all deferential or nervous to be in the presence of the First Representative of the Terran Alliance, interrupting Korzov’s presentation several times to add details. 

Korzov finally said, “Through repeated optical imaging, we have established that the alien ship is moving at a speed approximately two tenths of a percent of the speed of light.”

Minister of Entertainment Fabrizio asked, “Why so slow?”

Takagawa said derisively, “That ship is moving 1.8 million miles per hour.  That’s pretty goddamn fast.  It will cover more than two and a half billion miles in the next two to three months before it gets here.”

Flower, a trained politician who excelled at controlling her facial expressions, couldn’t suppress her surprise.  “It’s coming here?”

Korzov glared at Takagawa.  “We are not sure as of yet.  Preliminary review of our trajectory analysis indicates—”

Emma interrupted.  “It will be here in about 85 days, give or take a month.  We don’t know how quickly the aliens plan on decelerating the ship.  They’ve already begun slowing down.  That means their destination is somewhere in the Solar System.”

Korzov quickly said, “But we aren’t sure where in the Solar System.”

Emma snorted with derision.  “You think they’re going to be more interested in dead sand dunes on Mars than the only intelligent civilization in the system?  No chance.”

Minister of Wildlife Andrea Brentwood asked, “And what was the purpose of the signal they sent?”

Korzov replied, “Our initial analysis suggests substantial difficulty in ascertaining—”

Emma cut him short.  “We have no idea.  It didn’t vary in power or frequency, so it couldn’t convey any data to us.  Best guess, it was a measurement instrument, something they could shoot through our atmosphere to get some sort of advanced details about our atmosphere, surface temperature, something like that.”

Flower took control of the meeting.  “While these are all interesting details, the question is what we should do about the incoming ship.”

“Does it pose a threat?”  The fact that the question came from the Minister of Safety, Peter Redfeather, did not inspire confidence in anyone present.

This time, Korzov did not even try to answer.  “Dr. Takagawa?”

Emma considered the question.  “We don’t know.  The images aren’t clear enough to discern obvious weapons ports on the ship, and even if the ship did have weapons, that wouldn’t be a definite signal of hostility.”

Equality Minister Tanya Eldridge said, “Why would aliens reach out to a foreign civilization just to start a war?  The aliens must be so advanced that it would be like us seeking out an ant hill in Kansas to destroy.”

Flower saw Emma stir a bit at that.  The Japanese roboticist said, “Don’t sell us short. Our planet has liquid water, a habitable surface environment, and, most importantly, intelligent life.”

Eldridge wasn’t convinced.  “But not nearly as advanced as the aliens must be.”

Emma shook her head.  “We are not as simple as you think.  As early as the 1950’s, our various space agencies were examining methods of interstellar travel.  Freeman Dyson had proposed using controlled nuclear explosions to propel a spacecraft to Alpha Centauri at four percent of the speed of light.”

The Equality Minister shuddered.  “How barbaric.  Freeman Dyson, ou was a white American, wasn’t ou?”

Emma ignored the irrelevance. “If we had seriously pursued Dyson’s idea or others like it, we might have sent a manned ship to another star hundreds of years ago.  It could have been us sending a ship like this.  This civilization may not be much more sophisticated than we were.  They could very well be hostile.”

Flower probed, “But why come all the way here just to fight?”

“Resources and living space,” Emma answered.  “We have discovered enough about the universe to know that an inhabitable world with an oxygen-rich atmosphere is extremely rare.”

The Equality Minister scoffed.  “Why should they need anything of ours?”
 

Emma mused, “Maybe they need a new home.  Maybe they’re expanding.  The point is, it is entirely possible that they could pose a threat.”

Flower turned to Safety Minister Redfeather.  “Peter, if the aliens are hostile, what could we do to—” the First Representative searched for the right word, “—withstand their challenge?”

The Safety Minister temporized. “We have never considered an issue like this, First Representative.  I would need time to provide a useful answer.”

Well-versed in bureaucratic evasions of responsibility, the First Representative asked, “What would your preliminary guesstimate be?”