Chapter 2:
Impossibility
“Oh you stupid motherf . . . udger,” Stephanie growled at her computer. “I’ve done this same work in the same directories every day for the last two years, why are you telling me I don’t have permissions?”
“Oh, that’s the network,” came a woman’s voice over the office divider that split the room into two separate workspaces.
“Again, Ronnie? I thought it’d just tell me it couldn’t find the drive!”
Ronnie Hartnell, her office mate, poked her extremely curly head around the corner. “Oh, it’s been coming up with all sorts of new and interesting ways to deny us access to our data. No memo from IT as to why, though.”
“Well, they’d better get it fixed or I’m going down there myself, with a hammer.” More out of habit than anything else, she clicked again, and this time the directory came up without a moment’s hesitation. “Ha! Threats do work!”
“Told you. Put fear into your machines, they’ll behave.”
“That’s so dark.”
“I wear black only because I can’t find anything darker, hon.”
Her phone buzzed; the two quick rings that meant it was an internal call. “Hi, Steph here.”
“Stephanie.” There was an odd tone to Dave’s voice. “Would you come to Conference Three, please?”
Conference Three? That one had the built-in presentation setup. “Did Sunny get back to us with the spectrum data? We were expecting it, like, yesterday morning!”
“Yes. That’s what we’d like to discuss.”
“Okay, I’ll be right there.” She switched off her monitor and grabbed up her tablet in case she needed to take notes.
Conference Room Three was a moderate-sized room, with a long table pointing toward a screen-equipped wall. There were four people already in the room: David; Sunny Andui, who was the best spectrum analyzer in their department; Barton Kalam (Wait, why Bart? He’s a planetographer type, mostly interested in Oort cloud objects); and—even more puzzling—Crystal Nakamura. Nakamura’s the Director’s right hand.
What made it really strange was that all four people had the same doubtful, confused expressions.
“All right, David, I’m here, so what’s up? What’s the spectra showing?”
“Nothing,” Sunny said.
Steph blinked. “Wait. What do you mean nothing?”
“There are no spectral lines I can detect—neither interference lines from a surrounding nebula nor emission from excited atomic or molecular species in the target itself.”
“That’s . . . that’s . . .” She blinked. “That’s impossible. There isn’t a star ever seen that didn’t have hydrogen lines or others in their spectrum.”
“No mistake. That’s why it took an extra day, we were checking the data and our results. The target is not a glitch, we’ve confirmed that, but still, there’s no spectral lines. No hint of composition.”
“So what could do that?” Stephanie tried to figure out something that could be causing such an apparently impossible result. “Not the extreme redshift?”
“No, that would just put the lines far out of their default locations, but easily detectable.” Sunny looked over at Barton.
Bart grinned, though there was still disbelief on his face. “What we’re seeing here is a straight-up blackbody emission.”
“Stars emit as blackbodies.”
“But as gaseous blackbodies. That’s why you get spectral lines. The only way I know of you can get this kind of spectrum is if it’s a solid object that’s radiating. One not in any kind of detectable atmosphere.”
“A solid object?” She tried to wrap her thoughts around that. “But a solid object that far away would be . . .”
She trailed off as the truth struck her. The target could not be tremendously far away. A radiating solid object large enough to be seen from extra-galactic distances would be too large to exist; even made from the lightest materials it would easily exceed the TOV limit and turn into a black hole. She didn’t think even science-fiction concepts like giant Dyson Spheres could reach the required size, and if they did, why would a Dyson Sphere the size of a galactic cluster be glowing hot?
No, this only made sense if . . . “It’s not far away. It’s near us.”
“Near is a relative term, of course, but yes. Our first very, very crude guess puts it somewhere less than twenty light-days out. If so, it’s probably somewhere on the order of a thousand kilometers in diameter.”
“Wow. Holy crap. I mean . . . wow. So we have a solid planetoid-sized object that suddenly heated up?” She tried to imagine a process that could do that. “Natural nuclear process? But what could trigger it?”
Bart ran a hand through his spiky black hair and its frosted tips. “Um, Steph, it’s . . . well, stranger than that. See, I took another blackbody measurement today, just to check against the other data, and it looks like . . . Well, at first I thought it might just be cooling, but the initial plot of the first four days has really the wrong curve, and I could be wrong, but”—he drew in a deep breath—“I think it’s slowing down.”
“Slowing— WHAT?”
“My best guess is that it’s actually cooler than we thought, about three thousand degrees Kelvin, and the temperature we thought we were seeing, well . . . that’s because it was moving at about thirty percent of lightspeed.”
Stephanie stared at Bart, then looked around at the others. For a long moment no one said anything.
Suddenly, she understood, and she couldn’t help but start laughing. “Oh . . . oh, God, you guys, you got me good! I was taking this seriously!”
Her laughs trailed off in silence as none of the others cracked a smile. Holy shit. “You . . . you are serious?”
“I assure you,” Crystal Nakamura said, as precise and controlled as if she were delivering a report, “if there was a jest involved, I was not in on it.”
“No joke, Steph. I know it seems ridiculous, but it’s all straight,” Bart said.
“Jesus.” She looked at the whole situation again. “So we have a solid object—how large, again?”
“Handwavy estimate puts it on the order of a thousand kilometers, based on our first-cut guess of distance and then calculating how much energy you’d need to radiate to be seen at that distance.”
Stephanie was speechless for a moment. “A thousand kilometers?”
“Very roughly.”
“We have a thousand-kilometer something hot enough to melt steel coming in at almost a third of lightspeed and slowing down?”
“That’s what you seem to have given us, yes,” David said.
Stephanie looked around, seeing once more that all of them—Sunny, David, Bart, and Crystal—were deadly serious. Then she took a breath and said what all of them were thinking.
“That’s not natural. That’s artificial. We’re looking at the first known extraterrestrial ship.”
Crystal winced. “That’s . . .”
“We can’t dance around this issue!” Stephanie heard her own voice, sharp and a little frightened. “We’ve all spent our lives studying every astronomical phenomenon there is! There isn’t a natural process I can even imagine that would give me a white-hot glowing ball of something flying around at a percentage of lightspeed and then slowing down. If anything, it should be speeding up as it gets closer to the Sun. That thing out there is coming in under control.” She looked back to Bart. “If it keeps slowing down the way it is, how fast will it be going when it gets here?”
“Rough guess? It’s going to stop, or close to it.”
“Wait a minute.” She did rough calculations in her head. “Are you saying it’s not only slowing down, it’s slowing down at something like one gravity of acceleration?”
“Something like that.”
“Jesus. I can’t . . . how much energy is that?”
“We haven’t done those calculations yet,” David said. “Partly because we need to get other estimates first, like how much mass we’re dealing with. We know how much it’s radiating, but how efficient is the drive? What is the drive?”
“These are all important questions,” Crystal said, “But first I think I need to talk to the Director.”
“Well, sure, that’s your job—”
“And until I do, nothing gets sent out from here.”
“Now, wait—”
Crystal’s glare made Stephanie’s protest stop dead in her throat. “Ms. Bronson, I am not a scientist myself, but I can understand enough to tell that this falls directly under ‘national security concerns.’ Maybe planetary security concerns, but that’s not my job.
“I know, I know—we can’t keep this secret for long,” she said, and her expression softened. “And believe me, I know how much you’re going to want to talk about this, to announce this to the world. Biggest thing ever in anyone’s career. Just give me a little bit of time to talk to the Director and some of our partners in the government before we do it, okay?”
Stephanie looked over at David, who nodded. So did Bart and, reluctantly, Sunny. “Okay. But like you said, this won’t keep long.”
“Then I’ll go see the Director now.”
Stephanie watched her leave, and turned to look at the single image on the screen, a star field with a tiny, circled dot.
A tiny dot that was a moon-sized something, blazing at the heat of a forge, hurtling at the Solar System at impossible speed.