Chapter 3:
First Responses
“Roger, I know you like to lighten my mornings some days, but I don’t appreciate pranks that look too much like the real thing. Wastes my thinking time.” Seeing the hesitation on Roger Stone’s face, President Jeanne Sacco shook her head with a smile. “Not that I don’t appreciate the effort, it’s really impressive.”
Roger took a deep breath. “It’s . . . not a prank, ma’am.”
Jeanne blinked, then looked down at the slim folder in front of her again. “What?”
“I said, it’s not a prank, ma’am. The object was first spotted by SNIT less than a week ago. It’s a fairly faint object even in infrared, and apparently even dimmer in visible light. If the survey hadn’t been running right now, it might not have been spotted for a while.”
Jeanne didn’t answer at first. She was trying to get her worldview to accept what she was being told, and that wasn’t easy. Jeanne Sacco had always been a realist, sometimes even a cynic; you didn’t get ahead in politics if you were an innocent, and she’d done plenty of things in her time that involved pretending you agreed with something ridiculous, or even reprehensible, another person, or an entire political group, was saying. Playing the game involved balancing between the Scylla of corruption on the one side and the Charybdis of naïveté on the other.
But, she thought, staring at the pictures and dry annotations in the file, my training’s in law and political science and public performance. Not in astronomy. Unlike many politicians, she knew the difference. Scientific facts didn’t budge just because you found them inconvenient.
Or terrifying. And right now, terrifying seemed the more appropriate description. She read a thousand kilometers across and pictured something like a red-hot version of Star Wars’ Death Star barreling down on them at unbelievable speed. “How sure are we of this information?”
“As sure as we can be, at this point. Something is out there, and coming fast.”
When in doubt, get advice. “I want a meeting of the Cabinet . . . and maybe the Joint Chiefs, too, tomorrow, Rog. I’d rather have it in a couple hours, but I know we can’t get everyone we’ll need for this together in less than twelve. Get whatever scientific support we need for the meeting—NASA, anyone else you think should be in on it. This Bronson woman, the discoverer, if she’s up to the job. We need to go over all this right away. How long can we sit on this?”
“Crystal Nakamura at SNIT did a quick eval for us; a couple of weeks is pretty much all we can expect. Wouldn’t have even that if this thing wasn’t hard to spot, but people will notice silence really fast.”
Two weeks. The number was ridiculous. Less than fourteen days to decide how to address the most significant event in human history. She couldn’t decide whether to be thrilled that this was happening on her watch, or horrified.
In the end, I guess that depends on what our visitors want.
“One day, Rog. And yes, I know people will notice the sudden activity; let them.” She looked out the window onto the grounds, calm and sunny, deceptively ordinary. “Just as long as they won’t connect it to SNIT’s discovery for a while.”
“Director Haley, this is the President.”
Director Sean Haley’s voice was cheerful. “Good morning, Madam President. I was hoping to hear from you.”
“I suppose you must have, after the bomb your people dropped on us. I am putting together a meeting of the Joint Chiefs and possibly others for tomorrow. Can I count on you to attend and present your findings?”
“Well,” the director began, sounding thoughtful—with a touch of amusement, “I certainly could attend, President Sacco, but honestly, I’m not the right person for the job.”
She felt one eyebrow rise at that. “You’re the director, aren’t you? I would think that would make you the most qualified person.”
“Alas, not quite. I came up to this position through being a better, oh, mediator, I suppose. I’ve certainly gained knowledge of the appropriate disciplines, but I’m not nearly so much an authority as the people down there in the trenches, so to speak.”
“What I’m hearing is that you don’t want to give the presentation. Why, Dr. Haley? Is it the . . . controversial nature of the material?” She knew professionals—especially those high up in organizations—were often extremely wary of “disruptive” concepts that might reflect on their careers.
Haley’s deep laugh dispelled that theory. “Oh, my, far from it, President Sacco. I so very much want to give this presentation, and most of the ones to follow, so much I can practically taste it. But”—he gave a deep sigh—“I have responsibilities and principles in this case.”
Sacco felt her own smile start. “You have someone else in mind.”
“Absolutely. This is Stephanie’s discovery and I think she has every right to show it to the world. This is going to be the biggest thing ever, and one thing I am absolutely determined not to be is the man who took her credit. It’s happened enough times before.”
That’s . . . true enough. But . . . “Director, she’s . . . quite young, if I understand her position correctly. Are you sure she’s up to this?”
“Of course, the thing will scare her half to death, but I’m sure she can get through the presentation tomorrow if I push her.” A pause. “If I’m wrong, of course, I will apologize to both of you, and I’ll take over . . . but I’m willing to bet she’ll rise to the occasion. And in a few days I’ll have someone I know will backstop her—someone who doesn’t need any more recognition and doesn’t care about it.”
“Who would that be?”
“Dr. York Dobyns.”
There weren’t that many scientists Jeanne Sacco knew by name, but she knew that one. “You think he’ll be onboard for this?”
“Ha! Madam President, you’ll need a physicist for this, and a man who’s won two Nobels is just the kind of physicist you’ll want. If I didn’t invite York in, he’d kill me.”
“You know him?”
“For years; I was assistant director at one of the institutes he lectured at. Won’t be there for the first presentation, but I’ll guarantee he’ll be there in a week or two.”
“I’ll take your word for it, Director. Then we can expect Stephanie Bronson tomorrow at eleven o’clock?”
“She’ll be there if I have to drag her onto the plane myself.”
“Thank you, Director—and may I say, I appreciate very much your personal stance in this case?”
Haley’s voice was serious. “I was sure you would, President Sacco.”
Stephanie Bronson stared around the briefing room and tried to keep her heart from racing out of control. That’s the President, and Vice President Andrea Perez . . . crap, this is all of the Cabinet that’s in Washington right now, and those military guys have to be part of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The combination of adrenaline and the speed of events lent a cast of dreamlike unreality to the situation. I can’t believe the director just sent me out here on my own!
But he had, and done so with his typical breezy casualness. Quick summary, a sincere expression of his confidence in her, boom, she was on a plane headed for Washington . . . and now she was here.
President Sacco clapped her hands together once, snapping Stephanie back to the present, and the murmurs in the room immediately quieted down. “Thank you, everyone. I know this meeting was called with no warning and minimum time. I think you’ll all agree I was justified in doing so once you hear what triggered it.”
She smiled warmly at Stephanie, with her white teeth complemented by her black-and-gray hair and dark eyes. The President was striking-looking, with a strongly Sicilian face and a slender figure that made her look even taller than she was; the smile made Stephanie’s pulse go from frantic to merely fast. “Dr. Bronson—”
“Just Ms. Bronson, Madam President,” she said, then blanched, realizing she had just interrupted the President in her own meeting.
One of the dark brows rose. “You don’t have a doctorate yet, Ms. Bronson?”
“No, ma’am. I’m ABD right now.”
“‘All but dissertation,’” quoted President Sacco with another, milder smile. “Well, perhaps I’m out of my field, but I suspect you can rely on your degree coming. Ms. Bronson, I understand you’ve prepared a briefing for us?”
Spent hours last night, some of them on the plane, working on it! “Yes, ma’am.”
“Rog, is it all cued up? Good. Ms. Bronson, let’s not waste any of these people’s valuable time. Show us our problem.”
She swallowed, took the control, and clicked. The lights in the room automatically dimmed to make the screen easily visible, along with the projected title screen: discovery and initial analysis of an extrasolar object on a controlled vector.
Despite her deliberate attempt to make the title as nonobviously controversial as possible, she saw heads turn, silhouettes bend closer, a faint ripple of whispers run around the room. “At approximately 1:30 a.m. last Monday, the thirteenth, the Smyth-Nichols Infrared Telescope detected a previously unrecorded object near Gamma Lupi . . .”
The initial discovery didn’t take long to describe, just a few slides, but even so, the watchers could no longer stay silent. “Ms. Bronson!” said a deep voice that she thought belonged to Admiral Dickinson, the chief of naval operations. “My apologies, but how certain are these . . . conclusions?”
“Those were just the first observations and guesses, Admiral,” she answered, and swallowed—audibly enough that the sound echoed around the room. No one laughed. “We’ve refined the estimates some since then, but the basic . . . idea hasn’t changed.”
“Then what are your current estimates, Ms. Bronson? I think we’d all like the best guess as to what we’re dealing with?”
She skipped forward a couple of slides. “The radiating diameter of the object is approximately two thousand kilometers.”
“Your initial estimate said a thousand!” another voice said, one she couldn’t quite identify.
“Sir, it said on the order of a thousand. We had no clear information to be closer; that meant that a thousand was our current rough guess but it could be as much as ten times that size, or a tenth that size. Current work has refined that.” There was a grunt she took as agreement, or at least permission to continue. “As I said, our estimate now is that the object is two thousand kilometers in diameter, plus or minus about ten percent. Actual temperature appears to be approximately three thousand degrees Kelvin, or nearly five thousand degrees Fahrenheit.”
“Good God,” said Diane Truro, secretary of the interior. “What the hell is it made of? What’s solid at that temperature?”
“Our first, best guess is tungsten,” Stephanie said. “Melting point of tungsten is a thousand degrees Fahrenheit higher than that, so it’s a reasonable safety margin for a radiator.”
“Is that what you think this is? A radiator?”
“It seems a safe guess. We’ve now got a decent estimate of mass and energy output, too. It’s at approximately fifteen or sixteen light-days out at this point, radiating about five times ten to the twelfth megawatts.”
“Five times . . . Ms. Bronson, can you put that in terms that we can understand?”
“I’ll . . . try, ma’am, but it’s big. Bigger than big. That thing is radiating orders of magnitude more energy than the whole of humanity is using right now—something like a hundred-millionth of the Sun’s total output, which is just . . . ridiculous. If I tried to express it in, say, atom bombs per hour it would still be a ridiculous number, hundreds of millions.”
“You say you have an estimate of mass? How heavy this thing is?” the President asked, while everyone else was assimilating the sheer magnitude of the problem.
“Yes. It’s a very rough estimate, based on assuming their drive system is about fifty percent efficient and thus what we’re seeing radiated is the same as the energy used to slow the object down at about one gravity. If it’s more efficient then the object could be more massive, if it’s less efficient then the object is going to be less massive, but our rough guess is about one billion metric tons. Again very rough, but you can visualize that as a flying New York City or Tokyo.”
“But that’s far, far smaller than two thousand kilometers,” President Sacco said. “That’s why you call this a radiator?”
She seems to be pretty sharp on this for someone who’s not a scientist. Thank God. “Yes, ma’am. The amount of energy to slow something that big down from lightspeed would just vaporize your ship if you tried to dump your waste heat in any kind of reasonable space. So that two-thousand-kilometer diameter has to be something like a huge radiator fan stretching out.” She frowned. “How that could work we’re not sure, for various reasons, but that’s the only explanation we have right now.”
“Well, that’s something of a relief,” the President said. “I was imagining something like a moon-sized battle station. Still, I suppose if it can generate that much energy there’s not all that much difference from our point of view.”
“Well . . . yes and no, ma’am. Obviously we have to hope it’s not hostile, because if it is, well, we’re probably screwed. Pardon the technical term. But . . . we do have weapons that can damage or destroy objects a few kilometers long. I don’t think anything we have would do much to something two thousand kilometers across.”
“Where is it going to stop, assuming it keeps decelerating?” That was General Victor Rainsford, secretary of the Air Force.
“Right now it looks like at just about nineteen AU—that’s around the orbit of Uranus. With that kind of acceleration, we can’t tell for sure what orbit it might try to put itself into at the end, of course.”
“Do we have any idea what drive system it’s using?” asked Dr. Eva Filipek, secretary of energy. “That would allow you to refine your efficiency estimate and thus mass, correct?”
Stephanie spread her hands and shrugged, hoping she didn’t look ridiculous. “Ma’am, we haven’t the faintest idea. Any known drive system that could even theoretically produce that level of thrust should be blasting some form of exhaust at just immense volumes, and as mentioned, one of the things that set off our alarm bells is that we see no sign of heated gas of any kind. There should be absolutely massive amounts of reaction mass, or explosive by-products, or something shooting at us at fractions of lightspeed to slow this thing down, and we see nothing.”
“Then . . . we are dealing with some form of reactionless drive?” That was from the director of the CIA, whose name she couldn’t quite bring to mind. The question showed a surprising depth of knowledge, though—or that the director was a fan of nuts-and-bolts science fiction in his spare time.
“There doesn’t seem to be any alternative, at least not based on what we know. It’s just . . . expending energy and slowing down fast.”
The President nodded. For a moment, no one spoke.
Finally, the President took a breath. “So, to sum up: Our solar system is being approached by a city-sized something using more energy than we can easily imagine, and that is going to come to a stop somewhere in the outer system, in the next three months or so. We can’t keep this quiet?” She looked at Stephanie.
“No, Madam President,” she said, trying to be emphatic. “Leaving aside the fact that there’s already some people outside my group aware that we saw something, as it gets closer it’s going to become more and more obvious. By the time it’s about to shut off its drive, it’ll be magnitude two or so, and even brighter in infrared—easily naked-eye visible, even in pretty light-polluted skies. Long before then it will be so obvious to any astronomer that . . .” She shrugged. “No. Just not possible. I wouldn’t give odds you could keep it quiet for more than a couple weeks, really. It’s not that dim and with the hint that we saw something and haven’t followed up . . .”
The President nodded. “All right. Take that as a given, then. We need to be proactive. We don’t want this getting out as rumors and then having to play catch-up with the Internet. It’ll be bad enough once we do announce. We are not going to assume we have two weeks. I’m not assuming I have more than a few days before someone spills this one way or another. We need to know what line we’re going to take with this announcement, how we want to spin it, what actions we need to be taking.”
She looked around the table. “I want answers to those questions by tomorrow afternoon at the latest, and I want to do the announcement ASAP. Dr. . . . Ms. Bronson, you’ll be part of this, I want to be clear on that. But I would recommend you expedite your thesis, if you can. You’ll sound ever so much more authoritative if you’re Doctor Bronson.”
Stephanie returned the President’s smile. “I’d agree. It’ll be up to my defense committee, of course.”
“On that note, what about defense, Madam President?” George Green, secretary of defense, jerked his head at the screen. “It’d be nice if they were friendly, but what do you want us to do at the DoD?”
President Sacco sighed. “George, I guess we have to run as many scenarios as we can—and include assumptions about other countries helping or not. Investigate all the options we might have. I know”—she glanced over at Stephanie, who had opened her mouth and closed it again—“the chances that we can do anything against such a thing if it’s actually hostile are close to zero, but we’d be absolutely remiss in our duties if we didn’t at least consider the possibility.
“Byron, Hailey, Manny,” she said, addressing the heads of the DHS, CIA (Ha! Hailey Vanderman, that was his name!) and FBI, “I want you all to work closely. No interagency rivalry on this, and I mean that for the armed forces, too. This is too damn important for anyone to get twitchy over their little territories. Understood?”
There was a chorus of “Yes, ma’am” around the table.
“All right. Then let’s get to it, people,” said President Sacco. “Two days, three tops. And then we’re going to turn the whole world upside down!”