Chapter 4:
Announcement
Well, this is it, Stephanie thought. No turning back.
She stood to the side, watching as the representatives of the press—from the major networks through Time magazine, Al Jazeera, and the more prominent online services, as well as a scattering of foreign and regional services—settled into their seats with an air of restrained excitement. The lid had been kept on—somehow—for the last two and a half days, and the President had green-lighted the conference only a few hours ago.
A few murmurs went around the room as President Sacco took the podium without any preliminaries. “Thank you, everyone, for coming on short notice. I think you will understand the urgency once we finish the briefing.”
She turned and extended a hand toward Stephanie. “I would like to introduce Ms. Stephanie Bronson, who will be conducting the main portion of this briefing; she and I will answer questions following the presentation. I must ask that all of you”—she looked particularly at Colbert Oliver, the comedian-turned-reporter—“restrain yourselves until after Ms. Bronson is finished.”
Chuckles rippled about the room, with Oliver grinning as widely as any before he nodded, made a zipped-lips gesture, and settled back into his chair.
“Then, without further ado . . . Stephanie?”
She took a deep breath and walked to the podium vacated by Sacco. She knew she didn’t present nearly so imposing a figure as Sacco, who stood nearly six feet in flats; she didn’t clear five foot six. But I think I’ll get their attention anyway once I start.
That had been one of the things the President and her advisors had warned about. She was going to be known after this, and who knew what that would mean in the long run? She’d seen people who became famous without expecting to, and a lot of them crashed and burned in pretty spectacular ways.
But . . . well, maybe it was really stupid pride, but this was her discovery.
“Good evening,” she said, and swallowed to get rid of the tension in her throat. The mike picked up the sound and echoed it around the room. Another flutter of mostly good-natured laughs followed it. Relax. After that first briefing in front of the President and the Joint Chiefs? This should be cake!
The presentation screen lit up. “I’ve prepared a presentation to summarize the current situation. As the President said, please try to keep any questions or comments until after I’ve finished.”
Won’t be easy, she thought; a flutter of whispers began and three or four arms did abortive raises as the first slide appeared, showing the title:
fenrir: approach of an extraterrestrial
vehicle to the solar system
The presentation was a modified version of the one she’d given the Joint Chiefs, updated with the latest information and guesses, as well as a summarized action plan. The code name of the object had come from Hailey Vanderman, showing the CIA chief had something of a sense of dark humor and more astronomical and historic knowledge than she’d expected.
She quickly discussed the initial discovery, immediate analysis, and verification that the target was no known type of astronomical phenomenon.
“Currently,” she said, moving to the next slide, “we have a refined diameter estimate for what we are calling the radiator disc: it is two thousand, one hundred and fifteen kilometers across, plus or minus about ten kilometers. We assume that the sail itself masses no more than ten percent of the entire vessel, and possibly far less. The presumed central vessel, which is not yet discernable, has an approximate mass of one billion metric tons—the size of a large city.”
She ignored hands already up, flicked to the next screen. “Fenrir is currently traveling at a velocity of slightly over twenty-eight percent of the speed of light, having been traveling at thirty percent of lightspeed when it . . . well, lit off its drive. It will arrive at relative rest to the Solar System in one hundred days, assuming that it does not change its acceleration in any way, shape, or form, at which point it will be at roughly two point nine billion kilometers from the Sun. That’s at the same distance as the orbit of Uranus.”
She looked up, seeing every eye locked on her. “After that . . . we have no idea what will happen. It’s not coming directly to Earth, but it’s not targeting any other specific object, either. Its course is apparently intended to match it to the plane of the ecliptic, or very near it, so it may be that Earth or one of the other major planets is its ultimate goal.”
Gerald Walters of NBC finally stood. “Ms. Bronson—is this straight? I’m sorry to interrupt, but . . .”
She glanced to the President, who stepped to the podium next to Stephanie. “Gerald, this is one hundred percent on the level. I had the same reaction a few days back when the file hit my desk, but it’s very real. Now please, let Stephanie finish, and if her presentation hasn’t answered your questions, then ask them.”
Walters sat back down, but he and most of the others looked like they were close to exploding. I can’t blame them. A thousand questions to ask, most of the answers likely being “I don’t know.”
“So, the takeaway from all this.” She went to the next slide. “First: Fenrir is an alien spacecraft. There is no other reasonable explanation for our observations, especially for the deceleration on approach to the Solar System.
“Second: Fenrir is using a drive whose principles are unknown to us; it appears to be reactionless—that is, it requires no, or very little, propellant to produce a very large change in motion.
“Third: its power source is almost certainly antimatter.
“Fourth: in addition to this reactionless drive, there are indications of at least one and possibly several technological advances that we cannot currently match.
“Fifth: they’re coming here to stay for at least some period of time. You don’t expend a hundred million tons of antimatter just so you can spend another hundred million accelerating back out the next day. They want something here, and it’s important enough for them to send something the size of a city on a journey of more than sixty light-years and two centuries.”
The next slide. “At the same time as we’re having this briefing, the United States has been sending all of the collected data we have to the other nations. This event is not a national problem; it is an event that concerns every nation on Earth. Moving forward, we expect to be working with the leaders of the other nations to determine our preparations and response to the arrival of Fenrir.”
She looked up as the final slide popped up—an image of the star field with Fenrir circled, and a big white “Q&A” blazoned across it. “Questions?”
Mack Henning, from Reuters, managed to get his in first. “I know you answered this briefly, but how certain are you of all of this? You understand, this is the biggest story of the century, at least.”
“Of the basic summary? As certain as anything gets,” Stephanie said, though as always she felt the little twinge of a scientist making a flat assertion in public. “We’ve got observations of Fenrir going back several days now. It’s not possible for this to be faked in any way we can imagine. There’s no other astronomical phenomena that can even really explain the temperature or speed of the thing. And so on. The details are still slightly subject to change, but it would be in small areas, not major ones.” She pointed to a hand up farther to the back—she thought it was the BBC representative, Bryan Mallory. “Yes?”
The accent and deep voice confirmed her memory. “Ms. Bronson, you mentioned a distance and time there. Does that mean you know where this ‘Fenrir’ came from?”
“Know would be too strong. We have a guess, a logical surmise from where we first spotted it. We currently believe that Fenrir came from a K-type main sequence star that is visible at a very small separation from Fenrir, and that is the only star anywhere near its course that would be a reasonable candidate for its origin. That star was catalogued but otherwise we have very little data on it—not terribly surprising, as until recently we hadn’t even found all of the K-type stars within a hundred light-years. But checking prior images of that area of the sky and comparing them, we were able to verify that it’s a K2 orange dwarf on the main sequence, and what little data we can gather on it indicates that it’s about the age of our Sun or a bit older, with a very similar metallicity. In short, even without Fenrir’s proximity, it would be a very strong candidate to support a habitable world.”
“Is it likely that they would know we are here? That is, could they have chosen our solar system specifically because of our civilization?” That was Noel Frasier, the New York Times rep.
Stephanie restrained the urge to shrug. “Fenrir itself has almost certainly detected us; we’re very bright in the radio bands compared to any planet of our type, and the RF signals we put out would be pretty obviously technological in nature.
“The people at their homeworld, that’s harder. Certainly they wouldn’t have known anything about our high-tech capabilities now—this ship was launched, if we’re right about its origin, about 1820 or so, and that launch would’ve been based on data sixty-one years older than that, so about 1760—before the United States even declared independence.” She did shrug now. “Honestly, we don’t know what kind of telescopic technology they had or what their assumptions about technological progress would be. If they had an absolutely amazing wide-baseline telescope array, they might have been able to pick up hints of structure on the ground, but I tend to doubt it.
“No, honestly, I don’t think they were sent here knowing we were here; it was probably just knowing that life was here—that this was a very much living world. Now, of course, they know someone is here.”
ScienceLine’s Marcie Amour caught her attention next. “What other technological advances have you deduced from Fenrir’s data?”
“I thought you’d be on that,” Stephanie said with a smile. “There are two we think are pretty likely and a few others that are vague guesses. The first one seems almost certain: a superconductor of heat. We can’t get a model of a radiator of that size and heat radiation capability to work without assuming some way of distributing the heat essentially perfectly. We are reserving the other technology guesses until we have more information.”
“Madam President,” Gerald Walters said, looking toward Sacco, “does the United States have any specific action plans at this time?”
“Mainly ones of research, Gerry,” the President answered. “We’re already planning on trying to transmit something to them, but first we have to figure out what. We have to assume that even if they did catch some of our transmissions, they still don’t really understand our language.”
More questions came thick and fast, but to a lot of them either she or the President had to answer something that boiled down to “we don’t know.”
Finally, it began to wind down, and it was the AP representative who asked the last question to get a decent answer: “So, Stephanie, why the name Fenrir? That’s from Norse mythology, isn’t it?”
“That’s right, Rick,” she answered, seeing “Rick Ventura” on her seating chart. “Maybe part of it will be obvious from this picture; it was an early model of what Fenrir might look like if we could really get a look at it.”
On the screen flashed a star field, the center of it dominated by a glowing disc, veined with hints of structure, and with something else at the center; the effect was of a huge, red-shining eye staring out of the night. There was a momentary ripple of people shifting uncomfortably, looking at that image with its imaginary yet undeniable menace.
“The constellation it’s in is Lupus—which means ‘Wolf.’ And in Norse legend, Fenrir was the great wolf that would battle Odin in Ragnarok.”
“Fenrir,” murmured Frasier. “Hell of a code name. I hope it’s not an omen.”
“So do I,” Stephanie agreed, and switched the image back to the innocuous Q&A screen. “So do we all.”