Chapter 11:
Anomalous Event
Audrey Milliner stopped Stephanie as she was approaching the FMCC—Fenrir Monitoring Control Center. “Hold on, hold on, Steph,” said the publicist and what York had referred to as the “image-control specialist.” She gently took Steph’s elbow—careful to not make her drop the donut and coffee she was carrying—and guided her toward a side room.
“What’s wrong?” Stephanie asked, puzzled. “I just wanted to watch Fenrir’s final parking maneuvers.”
“Of course you do,” Audrey agreed emphatically. “And so do a lot of other people. Which means a lot of them—including the press—are in that room right now, so you can’t just walk in there like this.”
Stephanie opened her mouth to argue, then shut it. At a science-fiction convention, or the monitoring room of SNIT, no one gave a damn what you wore. But Steph knew that this was nothing of the sort. “Ugh. I suppose I should have thought of that.”
“You probably should,” said Audrey, “but fortunately for you that’s actually my job. Go ahead, finish your coffee, I’ll get you a change.”
Stephanie realized the little side room, which had been a storage area when they first moved in, had the mirrors and lights of a dressing room at a theater or television station. “When did—”
“About two weeks ago, hon. Told them I had to be prepared for this kind of thing.”
She took a bite of her donut, glanced at her watch. “Audrey, it’s only about two hours to stop-time!”
“Relax, Steph. Clothes to fit you are already here—remember when you filled out that form and got measured for a uniform for the task force? Well, they’re still debating on that idea, but the measurements were still good. We’ll get you dressed, get you cleaned up a bit, and you’ll be ready to be the star of the show.”
Stephanie rolled her eyes. “Show? It’s cool to us, but mostly it’s going to be watching pixelated dots that don’t do much until, well, it almost disappears. If we calculate right, at the end she’ll drop from a visible magnitude of about two—around what most of the stars in the Big Dipper are like—to about fourteen or fifteen. If they furl the sail at that point, it’ll become almost invisible, down in the mid-twenties. So basically it’ll just be watching the dots until they disappear.”
“So,” Audrey asked reasonably, “why are you so excited to go in and stare at the pixels?”
She laughed. “Okay, I suppose you got me. It’s blurry pixels of history. And we’re going to be watching because then we can all say we saw it when the first alien ship actually arrived here, in our Solar System.” She paused, then shook her head in a recurrence of amazement. “Alien ship arriving,” she repeated softly.
“That!” Audrey said triumphantly.
“What?”
“That! That expression! That’s exactly why we’ve got to make sure you look your best. My God, Steph, if you go all awed and misty-eyed like that when they’re filming you’ll be on the cover of Time—and who knows, maybe a fashion magazine, too.”
“All right, I surrender, do whatever you have to!” Stephanie fought off the embarrassment. I’ve decided to be the “discoverer of Fenrir,” might as well look the part. She stuffed the rest of the coconut-flake-covered donut into her mouth, chewed, and washed it down with the rest of the coffee. “Just make sure I’m out of here fast, I don’t want to miss any of those dim pixels!”
Hour and twenty minutes to go, she saw with a sigh of relief as she finally entered Fenrir Monitor Control. The huge room was—she was pretty sure deliberately—reminiscent of the old Apollo control stations, combined with media depictions of big military command stations: rows of seats with people looking very serious, staring at various displays in front of them in between looking up to the immense main screen, on which was displayed the star field centered on a bright, very small circular object: Fenrir.
“Dr. Bronson!” One of the reporters, cameraman in tow, had spotted her. She recognized Susan Ingalls, science reporter for one of the most popular cable news channels, and one of the few that seemed to get at least some of the science right. “Ready to watch our visitor find its parking space?”
She grinned. “Sure am, Susan. Of course, Fenrir finished its maneuvers more than an hour ago. The images we’re seeing there”—she pointed up to the screen—“actually are from more than two hours ag—”
Fenrir flashed brilliantly, then faded—with a hint of asymmetry—from view.
Stephanie froze, her finger still pointed at the now-dark part of the screen, then spun around to see the rest of the room also still, everyone staring at the vacancy. She remembered seeing an equally shocking event, the explosion of a rocket at launch, with everyone speechless except a single calm voice saying, “We have an anomaly.”
“What happened?” she demanded. “York?”
Dobyns had a thoughtful expression on his face but shook his head.
“Jerry?”
The dark-haired, dark-skinned younger man on the left-hand set of consoles started. “Right,” said Dr. Jerry Freeman. “Um . . . wow. Wasn’t expecting that.”
“None of us were! Did we get anything on that flash?”
“Instruments were running, so . . . Yeah, there’s actually something there!” Jerry’s excitement was understandable, Steph admitted; Fenrir’s peculiarities had made spectroscopic analysis almost totally useless. Jerry had been tuning his instruments to hopefully catch whatever faint traces of gas or wastes might be vented by the ship.
“Preliminary analysis will take a few minutes,” Jerry said after a moment. “But that wasn’t just a reflection or the thing heating up normally.”
“Is it still there?” York asked with a calm curiosity.
“We’re trying to adjust the orbital telescope feeds . . . Yes, they’re seeing a very dim object at the right location, but if the magnitude’s right, it looks like she’s pulled in her entire sail.”
“Pulled it in,” Stephanie repeated, “or lost it? Was that an unexpected maneuver, or did something happen to Fenrir? If she stopped accelerating there, where’s she going to end up?”
“Not sure, that’s for the orbital mechanics guys. She was doing about forty-one kps when it happened, but since we knew she was stopping no one was doing long-range extrapolations,” York said.
“Working on it,” said Dr. Francine Everhardt. “Quick guess is that it has to be an accident. I don’t think there’s anything anyone would consider interesting on that path, and I’m quite sure they wouldn’t want to be cutting inside the orbit of Venus if they could avoid it, which is where I think they’re going now.”
Jesus. Did Fenrir come all this way, dozens of light-years, only to die in the moment it arrived?
She tried not to let the existential horror of that thought, of the incredible achievement failing literal minutes before its final victory, touch her face as she straightened.
Susan Ingalls was speaking into her mike. “I’m here at Fenrir Monitor Control, where—”
“Susan!” Stephanie cut in. “Are you live?”
“No, but we were getting ready for a live feed. Didn’t expect this much excitement!” Stephanie quashed the spark of irritation at the enthusiasm in the reporter’s voice; after all, this was the kind of thing a reporter hoped for—not the routine, but the unexpected.
“Can we possibly ask you to not go live?” she asked.
Susan stared at her. After a moment, she raised an eyebrow. “Convince me. I have permission to do this live, and a very eager audience.”
“You’ll have to convince all of us,” said Anthony Reggiano of CBS. “Why shouldn’t we?”
“So you can get the best story out,” Stephanie said after a moment. “Look, we don’t know what happened yet, but we had every instrument you can imagine pointed at Fenrir. Give us a little time—maybe as little as an hour—and we’ll be able to answer a lot of questions. Right now, you’ll just be reporting that ‘something happened.’”
“She has a point,” said Rick Ventura, the AP representative she remembered from her first big press conference. “It’s not like we’re getting anything people in other countries’ command centers aren’t. Can you give us that last bit of footage? Fenrir brightening and then disappearing? That will be at least something worth running to keep interest until you’ve got something to report.”
She looked to York, who nodded. “We can give you that. Just a couple of minutes to pull the feed and copy it for you all. Then you can all stay here and wait for updates, if you want.”
The members of the press conferred, then nodded. “Agreed,” Susan said. “We’ll all send out the imagery and the ‘something happened’ with a promise of more shortly.”
Thank goodness. She didn’t want to deal with the live version right now—a live event that would have just been reporters asking questions whose answers weren’t known. That would have just made her look stupid.
Instead, they had a little time to find out what had happened to the biggest story in human history.