Exodus Earth: The Complete Series, page 47
“That would be a fair description,” Matt agreed with a hearty chuckle.
“That was the site of my first impression of you, buddy.”
“You know what they say. You can’t judge a book by its cover.”
I threw my empty beer can at him. He ducked as it passed through his holographic image.
* * *
Much to my amazement, Arty, Arequot, and Fitzy were able to dig through the Gatekeeper archives and find enough clues to the location of Pishon that we were finally able to construct a reasonable picture of its location. At least at the time of the archive’s creation. Now it was just a case of calculating the relative motions, stellar drift, gravitational interactions, and the occasional supernova’s impact on the former position of thousands of stars.
A piece of cake… especially if you have three powerful AIs working the project. With their combined efforts, we quickly arrived at another good news/bad news scenario.
“We’ve limited the potential area we need to search,” Fitzy announced.
As you might have guessed, this was the good news piece. If you guessed the bad news piece was the size of the area we had to search, then help yourself to a cookie… you’re a winner.
“So, how big an area are we talking about?” I asked with justifiable trepidation.
“Roughly thirty-one thousand cubic parsecs… give or take some change.”
There are two things you should note about her response. First, it was delivered with a completely straight face. Second, a parsec is roughly three and a quarter light-year. That means we were going to be searching a volume of space flirting with a million cubic light-years.
If you’re thinking that’s an impossibly large volume of space to search… help yourself to another cookie.
2
HEUR-WHAT?
I remember Mr. Yunke, my nineth grade calculus professor, teaching his class of miscreants (to include myself…) a general approach to solving impossible problems.
Basically, you developed what was called a heuristic. A ‘heur-what’ you ask? Just a fancy way of saying you need to find a way to limit the scope of the problem. Why? Because smaller problems are more manageable problems.
In this case, rather than trying to search a million cubic light-years for a single planet, I took advantage of a handful of heuristics.
First, artificially generated radio waves travel at the speed of light… the assumption being that the locals still used radio waves for communications. Second, the radius of a million cubic light-year sphere is only sixty-two light-years. If I assumed a technologically advanced race was producing radio waves, I only needed to search the shell of a sphere with a radius of sixty-two light-years. Even better, I only needed to map all artificial radio sources from three or four positions to get a good idea of where each radio source was emanating from within the volume of the search sphere.
“Impossible” quickly became very doable.
* * *
“Admiral on the bridge,” the Comms officer barked as I stepped out of the turbolift.
I gave an obligatory “As you were,” and took my seat.
“System three is a no go,” Catherine reported as she resumed her seat next to mine.
Standing just off to the right was Captain Dekker’s holographic avatar. He had taken to presenting his ship’s status when my bridge watch started. I nodded in his general direction, which he returned. Both he and I ran an informal bridge… a point not always recognized or accepted by some of the junior officers.
“Go ahead, Number One.”
“There are satellites in orbit around two of the planets and a few defunct mining colonies on several of the larger asteroids, but the planets are basically dead.”
Her statement was confirmed by what I was seeing. On the forward viewscreen a desiccated red-brown world slowly scrolled by as we orbited around it. By appearances, the planet was not too different from Mars before it had been terraformed by humanity in the late 21st century.
I could see what looked like ancient riverbeds and deltas. In several places it looked like there had been massive meteoroid impacts.
“Was there anything more interesting than sand down there at some point in its history?”
“It looks like somebody threw some big rocks at the surface. There isn’t much radiation beyond what you’d typically see on a planet this size and this close to its primary. There is one anomalous reading.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Do tell.”
“There is virtually no magnetic field and as a result what little is left of the planet’s atmosphere is being eroded away by the solar wind.”
“We see that all the time, Number One. Planets lose their magnetic fields as their cores cool. What makes this situation ‘anomalous’?”
“The loss seems to have taken place in the last several thousand years… about the same time as the kinetic strikes occurred.”
Now that was interesting. I turned my head to look back toward one of the library-computer stations. I had seen my daughter’s physical avatar sitting there on the way onto the bridge.
“Fitzy honey. Poke around the database. Are there any examples of planets losing their magnetospheres overnight… at least in geological terms?”
My daughter glanced up from her workstation which she cleared quickly. The brief flash of “whoops I’ve been caught” told me she had either been surfing social media or shooting the breeze with Steve. Likely she had been doing both. Frankly, as an AI her ability to multitask meant I had no concern whatsoever about her extracurricular activities while on duty… beyond the bad example it set for us meat-bag types.
The fact that she answered my question without being snarky worried me greatly. The trials and tribulations of being a mom.
“Gamma Nagora III lost its magnetosphere in roughly zero point four million years when its primary moon had its orbit shifted by a supermassive asteroid strike.
“The moon’s new orbit took it beyond its orbital Roche limit. Tidal forces between it and its primary caused the moon to tear apart.
“The sharply increasing and then decreasing tidal forces put inordinate pressure on the planet’s tectonic plates. The shifting tectonic plates released substantial amounts of the planet’s interior heat. The core hardened and no longer rotated enough to generate a sizable magnetic field.
“There are numerous other examples of planets quickly losing their magnetospheres, but nothing on the timescale of a few thousand years.”
I had a feeling that might be the case.
“Arty, have you been monitoring?” I asked.
The Jabesh AI materialized beside me. To her credit, Catherine only jumped a little bit. I tried to hide a slight smirk. I may have been successful… then again, maybe not.
“I’m going to take that as a yes. Question. Under what circumstances might a planet lose its magnetosphere in the timescales we’re looking at here?”
Arty waved a hand and a holographic display materialized about a meter away. A representation of the dead world floated in the middle of it. Suddenly, bluish magnet field lines erupted from near each of the poles and wrapped around the planet to embed themselves in the opposite pole.
“You are looking at the magnetic field lines normally associated with a planet with a molten iron core. The only way to remove the magnetosphere is to remove the magnetic flux associated with these field lines. There is no natural process for this to happen on a planetary scale over the course of only a few thousand years. Nor is there an artificial one to accomplish this over that time scale.”
“And yet we’re orbiting an example of exactly that,” my first officer pointed out.
“Respectfully, Commander, we are not. There are two mechanisms by which the field lines that support the magnetosphere could have been eliminated. The elimination would have been virtually instantaneous… not over the course of a thousand years… and more to the point, it would not be permanent.”
I snapped my fingers. “A magnetic flux switch or a magnetic shunt.”
“Exactly. I would speculate the first is more likely than the second,” Arty confirmed.
The holographic image of Matt leaned forward in his command chair on the Cesena.
“Somebody want to enlighten those of us who were catching up on our beauty sleep during physics class?”
I smiled. Any benefits he might have accrued from the alleged beauty sleep had long since been negated by both age and being on the wrong side of too many fists during bar fights. Still, he was ruggedly handsome in his own way.
“Magnet flux flows from north to south poles. Pretty much everyone knows this. Even those of us who sleep through physics,” I added with a wink. Matt nodded with a slight wink of his own.
“What people don’t often realize is that magnet flux behaves like an electric current and will take the path of least resistance,” I continued.
“Meaning?” Matt prompted.
“Meaning there are two ways to short a magnetic field. One is to provide a ferromagnetic bridge between the poles… and iron wire if you will.”
“That’s a lot of wire,” my former first officer remarked.
“Which is why option one seems more likely.”
Matt leaned back in his chair with a smile plastered on his face. My suspicion that he figured it out was confirmed a moment later.
“They used another magnetic field didn’t they,” he asked more by way of a statement than a question.
“That would seem likely,” Arty agreed.
“I started scanning the surface looking for magnetic anomalies,” Fitzy announced. “It’s not much, but there is a weak anomalous field near the equator within three kilometers of the magnetic midline between the poles.”
“Number One, I want an away team ready to deploy in the shuttle bay in thirty minutes. Make sure that Chief Teddy and Jack Carter are invited to join us.”
“Us?”
“You and I are going too. Matt, you up for a little trip to the planet surface?” I asked with a quick glance toward the holographic bridge of the Cesena.
“My team and I will meet you down there in thirty mikes.”
Now some of you may be asking yourselves why I felt the need to visit the planet’s surface. Clearly, if this planet was the sole source of the bdellium we needed, then we were well and truly screwed because there was not an abundance of trees… or for that matter, anything else growing down there.
That being the case, wouldn’t it make more sense to start looking into other possibilities for acquiring the biologics we were after?
The simple answer is, “Yes, but.”
The “but” piece comes down to this. We were here to stop some bad guys from doing some bad things. Our being sick, while unfortunate, was incidental to that.
Second, while it was highly unlikely that the bad guys we were hunting were the ones responsible for the destruction of this world, it was very possible the tech used was sourced from the same place. We needed to learn all we could about that tech. Even if it wasn’t from the same source, it was demonstrably dangerous, and again, we needed to understand it. The job of a galactic peacekeeper is never done.
* * *
I was thankful for our encounter suits. While there wasn’t much of an atmosphere, there was an abundance of ultra-fine dust that hung in what little air there was for minutes at a time, every time somebody scuffed their feet. You try walking around in an encounter suit without scuffing your feet.
“My LIDAR is useless in this crap,” Matt grunted on my private channel. “Switching to adaptive optics.”
A moment later, “Yeah, that’s a lot better. Recommend we all go A-OP, Admiral. At least until we get clear of this talcum powder-like stuff.”
I switched over to general comms. “Captain Dekker is recommending we utilize adaptive optics rather than LIDAR or radar until we get out of this soup. Those of you that haven’t made the switch already, do so now.”
“Ah, well that’s a damn sight better,” Jack said a moment later.
“Glad you approve, Doctor Carter,” Matt said with a slight chuckle in his voice. “Keep in mind, your suit’s AI is simply synthesizing a picture of the local environment from a number of different inputs, including sensors from the entire team. That doesn’t mean what you’re seeing is entirely accurate. It’s going to be easy to twist an ankle or trip on a rock that got missed by one of our sensors.”
“Translation, folks. Especially you civilians,” I added with a glance at Jack Carter, “watch where you put your feet.”
“I’ve got something on the magnetometer,” Chief Cochran reported a few moments later. “I make it about fifty meters ahead.”
“Rubicon, confirm we are approaching the magnetic anomaly.”
“You should be right on top of it, Mom.”
“Fitzy, widen your scans. Are you seeing any activity on any of your sensors?”
“Nope. All I see is you and of course the lingering bad memories of that two-week-old sushi you ate last night. I can’t seem to purge the sight from my optical sensor matrix.”
“I’ll have you know that Kombujime is a classic aging technique of Edomae sushi, and it was delicious.”
“Whatever you have to tell yourself to get up in the morning, Mom,” she said in a deadpan voice. “It smelled like rotten fish to me.”
“Fitzy, you don’t even have a nose.”
“Maybe not, but I have a boatload of onboard sensors designed to detect biohazards and I was working overtime last night suppressing their alarms.”
“What the hell is that?” Matt interrupted.
I turned to where he was looking.
The “that” in “what the hell is that” seemed to be a series of perfectly lined up metallic mushrooms… each a little over the height of a man and maybe a meter and a half wide.
“I swear by all that is holy… they weren’t there a minute ago,” Master Sergeant Gunther said in a challenging voice.
The “who” he was challenging was anybody’s guess. Suffice it to say, you challenged Master Sergeant Gunther at your own risk.
As we watched, a recessed door in each of the mushrooms opened up to reveal an elevator-sized chamber.
“Looks like we’re being invited in,” Jack said as he aimed his handheld scanner at one of the strange objects.
“The question is, are we going to accept the invitation?”
3
WITHOUT
I suspect that most of you understand at this point that there was a reason people called me Admiral Dare long before I ever held the rank of Admiral. That whole “Where angels fear to tread” thing… that was written about me.
The thing is, while I was quite comfortable taking “well-thought-out”… hush you in the back… risks with my own person, I was somewhat more loath to take risks with the lives of others. As it should be.
That simple fact was the only thing giving me pause. Every fiber of my being wanted to jump in one of these magic mushrooms, which I was assuming were turbo lifts of some type, and press the lowest button I could find.
“How do you want to play this, Admiral?”
It was Catherine who had asked the question on everyone’s mind. I looked at her and then briefly at the others. I had a good sense of where they all stood on the question.
I nodded, as much to myself as to the others.
“We’re here for answers. Any answers to be found will be found in there.” I pointed toward the open doors. “Any objections? Good,” I said without waiting for a response.
“Pair up. Master Sergeant Gunther and Arty are with me. The rest of you, two per… mushroom-tube-thingy. Stay on comms. Let’s make this happen.”
As the master sergeant and I entered what could only be called a lift, I couldn’t help but think of the spider saying, “Welcome to my den” to the fly.
The interior of the small chamber was some type of polished chrome. There were no control surfaces that I could see. A pleasant white light with just a tinge of yellow emanated uniformly from the ceiling.
Strangely, Arty’s holographic imagine seemed slightly translucent in the light. In hindsight, I should have pondered the hows and whys of that, but of course I didn’t.
The lift was constructed as a tube within a tube. This became evident because the door did not swish shut into some type of recess, but instead the interior rotated so that the opening became obscured by the wall of the exterior tube.
There was absolutely no sense of movement. A moment later the walls of the lift shifted from a metallic chrome that was completely opaque to a virtually transparent material that let the master sergeant and I see into… into… what? I couldn’t exactly tell.
We were underground. That much was certain. Again, there had been absolutely no sense of motion… at least until the very end, and even then, we felt only the softest of bumps. The inertial dampeners built into the lift were exquisite. We could have been ten meters or ten hundred meters below the surface.
This is where things got really strange. As I said, I knew in my head that we were underground, but based on what my eyes were seeing, they refused to believe it.
Outside the now semi-transparent walls of the lift, I could see the other members of the away team beginning to step out of their own metallic magic mushrooms… into what appeared to be the outskirts of a city on the surface of a planet. Again, based on what we were seeing, there’d be no reason to suspect we were underground other than the fact we knew what the surface was like, and it certainly was nothing like this.
There was a full atmosphere. The wind was rustling the local equivalent of grass… a very Earth-like green. The sky was a just a tad bluer than I was used to and there were wispy little clouds floating across a sky that seemed only a few minutes past dawn.
By all appearances, we were on the surface of a planet.
