Swallow the Sky: A Space Opera, page 29
Something was coming.
SOL
Aiyana sat at the galley table dabbing her eyes. Carson, seated opposite, reached out, squeezed her hand, and poured two glasses of brandy. Aiyana gulped hers down and started crying again.
They had been listening to the voices of the last human beings trapped in the solar system. Captured by the colonists on New Earth eight thousand years ago, Carson did not know recordings existed until he gained full access to the Archives. The Commonwealth had decided that they were too distressing to be released to the general public.
The basic story of the Melt was learnt by every child. Simple nanotechnology had been in use on Earth for over a century, but the glittering prize was a self-reproducing nanotech device. Just as a tree grows from a tiny seed, an invisibly small nanobot could, in theory, make enough copies of itself to build a house, a power plant, an entire city using nothing but atoms as raw material. Unlimited wealth beckoned.
But somewhere in the western section of the Asian landmass – a region called Europe – an experiment had got out of control. Instead of building a precise, controlled structure, a nanotech device had begun endlessly reproducing itself using the atoms of whatever material was around – its container, the laboratory, and the bodies of the researcher workers.
Such a disaster had long been anticipated, and all self-replicating nanobots had a failsafe that halted production after a limited number of generations. Whether the safety mechanism had been sidestepped or the system had somehow mutated would never be known. Regardless of the cause the result was immediate and devastating. Within days a two kilometer-wide area had been transformed into a seething formless sludge of furiously reproducing nanomachines. A desperate attempt to sterilize the site was made using a primitive explosive device called a nuclear bomb.
At first the drastic act appeared to have succeeded but the explosion blasted a few surviving nanobots, smaller than bacteria, into the stratospheric winds of the upper atmosphere. Within weeks outbreaks were occurring around the globe. Horribly, living tissue with its abundant atoms of nitrogen, carbon, and oxygen proved to be an ideal source of raw material for the microscopic machines. Recklessly, nuclear bombs were used again, each time stopping the immediate infection while ultimately spreading it still further.
In the final act the Melt accelerated and began spreading across the face of the entire Earth. This was the moment when Adhiambo Cissokho, watching from the Chu Jung Orbital Facility, had crammed every willing human being into the Yongding and fled the system.
“That’s where the official story ends” said Carson. “What’s rarely mentioned is the fate of the people living off-planet. There were thousands in orbit, and small colonies on the Moon and Mars, plus some research stations in the outer solar system.”
The orbiting sites were the first to go. By now most of the landmass below had been transformed into a featureless sea as the Melt, having destroyed all life, began to eat the earth itself. Somehow spores reached up into the vacuum, possibly propelled by the nuclear bombs. More explosions occurred in orbit as power systems became unstable, scattering the nano-devices still further.
Forty-six days later the Moon succumbed. The absence of carbon in the crust initially slowed the spread but again the Melt adapted and within weeks Earth’s satellite was once more a dead world.
Mars took much longer to die. Fearful that they would share the Moon’s fate the colonists desperately sent out messages for help. They knew it would be ten years before their radio signals reached the Eridani system but hoped that the Yongding had returned to the edge of the solar system and would hear their cries.
For three years they begged for rescue, then the moment they dreaded arrived.
‘Oh God, the observation satellites are showing something strange on Mons Olympus…”
‘The Melt is spreading across the Tharsis plateau. Why don’t you hear us, why don’t you come?’
‘Please please save us. There are more than three hundred people stranded here, twenty-two children. Please don’t let us die, please…’
But, terrified that the plague would be carried to New Earth, the Yongding never returned.
The last survivors in the solar system were six scientists living in a research station on Callisto, the outermost of Jupiter’s giant moons. The Melt never reached them but their lonely outpost was not meant to be self-sustaining and finally the supplies run out. Having witnessed the fate of the Martian colony they had no illusions about being rescued but for five years, true to their calling, they continued to dispatch their observations.
They sent out one last message:
‘All the food has gone. We are disabling the fusion reactor’s safety mechanisms and then we will trigger it to go critical. It will be over in milliseconds. This is a matter of no importance. Thirteen billion people have already died – what do another six matter?’
‘The Melt appears to have stopped in the inner planets and we pray that it never spreads beyond the solar system. We hope with all our hearts that the people who fled in the Yongding have survived and that the human race continues. Even so, you were right not to return. Learn from this terrible tragedy, never let it happen again.’
“We did learn, didn’t we?” Aiyana said to Carson as he poured another round. “I mean the Covenant has protected us all these years…”
“Yes honey, we learned. It’s easy for people like Juro to sneer and say that we’ve been too cautious, but God knows what might have happened if we’d started experimenting again. The Melt is the ultimate anti-life, the exact opposite of a harmonious ecosystem. It’s like an ancient disease called cancer but a trillion times worse.”
“Do you think the Techs kept developing nanotechnology?”
“Yeah, I guess so” Carson said rubbing his face. “Hopefully they learned too, at least to be incredibly cautious. Or maybe they didn’t, and there’s another planet thousands of light years away that’s just a big blob of nanomachines.”
He cast around for something to take Aiyana’s mind off the recordings.
“Hey Tallis, how’s our fake Repository?”
“We have made excellent progress nest-mates. Come and experience it for yourselves.”
“Great idea”
“Oh God, that’s perfect!” Aiyana cried.
They were standing in Tallis’s improvised workroom. In front of them was one of the empty storage modules plucked from cometary orbit. It was so well preserved they had been able to power it up and open it without forcing an entry. Now the interior contained row after row of dense black arrays. As they watched twelve of Tallis’s workers crawled up the sides and inserted another cuboid unit.
“This is what we think the module holding the Repository was like” Carson said.
“We found traces of the memory medium on the inside surface of the container struck by the meteor” Tallis explained.
“Interestingly, it’s a nano-device.” Seeing Aiyana’s alarm Carson added “don’t worry, there’s no self-replication involved. Tallis was able to duplicate it using standard manufacturing techniques.”
“It is a ferrous nanoparticle shuttle”
“Oh that explains everything!” Aiyana said.
Carson laughed. “Sorry, too much jargon. The basic component is an incredibly tiny particle of iron – no more than a few dozen atoms – that’s magnetically pushed to and fro along a hollow carbon nanotube. It stores binary numbers: one end of the tube signifies zero, the other end one.”
“You’re kidding!”
“I know what you mean. It’s one of those crazy ancient machines that actually worked, like rocket engines, and physically it’s extraordinarily stable; as Samuelson said, it was built to last a billion years.”
“So when we find the real Repository we’ll transfer the data to our fake and say we found it in orbit around Orpheus”
“Roger that, just practice saying it with a straight face.”
“YOU ARE ENTERING AN ABSOLUTE EXCLUSION ZONE!”
“DO NOT APPROACH! YOUR VESSEL WILL BE DESTROYED”
“UNDER AUTHORITY OF THE COMMONWEALTH SECURITY CODE THE PENALTY FOR PENETRATING THE SOLAR SYSTEM IS TOTAL PERSONALITY RECONSTRUCTION”
“I don’t think they want us to come any closer” Aiyana said with a smile.
They had stopped for a navigation fix half a light year from Sol. The moment the ship launched its periscope it picked up a tsunami of warnings beamed from the monitoring stations that surrounded the solar system.
“It’s nothing personal” said Carson, “those messages are transmitted on an endless loop; they have no idea we’re here. The main purpose of the outposts is not so much to prevent people getting in, but to make damn sure nothing gets out.”
“The theoretical limit to the spread of the Melt is the Heliopause” the ship said
A translucent raindrop shape encompassing a schematic of the solar system materialized in the cabin, the Sun glowing at its center.
“It’s the boundary where the pressure from the interstellar medium matches the outward pressure of the solar wind, so even the lightest particle can go no further.”
“We’re approaching the leading edge” Carson said. “Thank God it exists, otherwise the Melt might have drifted all the way to New Earth.”
“But all the time we’re inside we could encounter a nanobot and get infected”
“Yeah, ain’t that a lovely thought?”
“If you say so darling” said Aiyana. “But the Melt didn’t spread beyond Mars. You said it was too cold in the outer system.”
“So it’s thought. Nano machines use ratchet turbines to extract energy from the random movement of molecules. So lower temperatures mean less power for the little critters.”
“I’m getting worried by how much you know about this stuff.”
“Believe me honey, it wasn’t easy. As long as the Covenant exists they’ll never be a manual called ‘Build Your Own Nano Device.’ Me and the ship had to puzzle it out. I just pray we got it right.”
“I’ve got our position” the ship said. “We can go any time you like.”
Aiyana floated up behind Carson, circled her arms around his waist and rested her chin on his shoulder. She stared at the glowing image of the Heliopause.
“Next time we stop we’ll be inside” she whispered.
“What happened to the buggy?” Carson yelled. “It looks like it’s caught some ghastly ancient disease.”
It was twelve hours later. The ship had announced their arrival in the solar system and everyone was waiting for shell spin-down so that the periscope could be launched. In the interim they had gone to the shuttle bay to see how Aiyana and Tallis had tackled the problem of recovering the Repository without getting infected
“So what are all those black spots?”
“They’re uni-directional inertial field generators.”
“And you complain about my jargon!”
“Each generator creates a field that pushes outward, away from the buggy, like a clean room maintaining a higher atmospheric pressure than its surroundings. Any nanobot floating in the vicinity will simply get shoved out of the way without touching.”
“Very smart, and we need to be fast; the longer we stay the greater the chance of contamination.”
“Periscope launching in three minutes” said the ship.
They hurried to the control room.
“Oh my God!” they shouted in unison as they floated in.
On the main display was an image of Saturn. They were three million kilometers away and slightly above the equatorial plane. From their vantage point the planet appeared as a gigantic yellow crescent bifurcated by its ring system.
“The rings seem so solid” Aiyana said. “I feel I could just grab them and send them skimming across space.”
“Yeah, pretty amazing, and right our own back yard.”
“Where is it?” Aiyana asked the ship.
“Where’s what?”
“You know”
The view panned away from Saturn until the flare of the solar corona appeared at the edge of the display, then it zoomed forward. A brown dot materialized out the void. Aiyana floated forward and gently touched the screen. Carson followed her and laid his hand on hers. The birthplace of the human race glowed between their fingers.
“Poor thing, it used to be blue.”
“I’ve deployed the interferometer; want to take a closer look?” The ship said.
The image on the display was replaced by a fuzzy circle.
“Hold on a moment”
Both of them cried out as the Earth snapped into focus. The image resembled a topographic map where everything – oceans, atmosphere, rivers and forests – had been stripped away to reveal the shape of the bare rock. The harsh outlines of mountains and mid-ocean ridges scarred the surface. The picture moved in closer and panned across a large continent.
“You can even see the remains of a city” the ship said as the image paused at the eastern edge of the landmass.
It was right: the faint outlines of streets ran between shapeless mounds. Deprived of most of its atmosphere, the world’s mummified face would stare into space for a billion years.
Sobbing, Aiyana buried her face in her hands.
“Turn it off” Carson said.
They floated through the darkened cabin in silence.
“Are the nanobots still alive – I mean active?” Aiyana finally said.
“Damn good point – what does a self-replicating system do when there’s nothing but copies of itself around?”
“Cannibalism is my guess” said the ship.
Carson pictured what would happen to a naïve traveller landing on the surface. He would be consumed within seconds. The horror of the Melt reached across eight thousand years.
“Come on” he said. “Let’s find that Repository and go home.”
“It would help if we knew what it looked like” said Aiyana.
They were examining an image of Titan. Mimicking its parent, the satellite appeared as an orange crescent glowing in the distant sunlight. Behind it, the impossible grooved plain of Saturn’s rings curved to infinity.
“There can’t be much in orbit around it – maybe the hulks of a few research satellites, possibly some small asteroids – and I reckon they did something to make it stand out.”
“Well let’s get going!”
“Honey” Carson said, “please don’t get upset but I’m going out alone.”
Aiyana tried to say something but Carson pressed on.
“Darling, the ship reckons we’re safe in here protected by the shell. But suppose the worst happens out there and I get infected by the Melt. At least you and Tallis will be able to take everything we’ve found to New Earth.”
“I thought we were in this together…”
“We are darling, but it’s senseless to risk both our lives.”
Before Aiyana could object Carson hurried off to the docking bay, pulling on his environment suit as he moved through the ship. Five minutes later he emerged from the shell’s pole. To his right Saturn floated in surreal magnificence. Directly ahead Sol was a tiny blinding disk.
“Let’s see how easy they made this” Carson said as the buggy accelerated towards Titan. He leaned forward as the image of the giant moon grew on the globular display. The Book offered just a hint of what lay under the opaque atmosphere, saying that the satellite was the only other body apart from Earth that had lakes and seas. But seas of what? The temperatures of the outer solar system ruled out water; perhaps it was methane.
He stared longingly Saturn’s rings, a quarter of a million kilometers wide and no thicker than a sheet of pack ice. God, I wish I had time to explore it all properly.
Carson opened a channel to Aiyana. “Hey, I think I just worked out why they left the Repository here. If you were a visitor to the solar system wouldn’t you want to check out Saturn? And once you were in the vicinity you would say ‘What is that wacky moon?’ and check out Titan. Then bam!”
“Very smart darling, so is the radar picking anything up?”
“Not so far” said the buggy.
Eventually it was a visual identification. At first it appeared to be a twinkling star, but that was an impossibility in the vacuum of space. As the buggy closed it began picking up a faint radio signal.
“It’s a large string of binary numbers, repeated every two seconds. Maybe the ship can puzzle it out” the buggy said.
The ship had no trouble decoding the message.
“It’s a two-dimensional array. Here’s a schematic.”
A line drawing of the Saturn system appeared on the buggy’s display. Titan was highlighted with a surrounding circle.
“Pretty smart diagram, although Tallis wouldn’t have made much sense of it”
Carson guessed that the signal had originally been much stronger and designed to entice visitors into the solar system. The fact that it was still transmitting after eight thousand years was a tribute to the builders.
The buggy’s display zoomed in on the twinkling object which was now only a few kilometers away. It could have been a seed designed to float away on the breeze. At its center was a red sphere from which sprouted a dozen long, thin solar arrays. Sunlight glanced off the shining surfaces as it tumbled through space. As he drew closer Carson could see that many of the arrays had deteriorated over the millennia, reducing power to the transmitter.
He came to a halt fifty meters away and sent an image to Aiyana. “That explains the weak signal. Do you guys have any suggestions how to get at that red ball in the middle? That has to be the Repository, but I don’t want to get clobbered by those sails.”
“Sorry, all we can think of is that you’re going to have to go out there and cut them away.”
Carson swore to himself. Well at least he had put on his environment suit. He rooted around in the buggy’s tool kit and pulled out a suitable tool, then jamming on his helmet he told the little vessel to open the hatch. For five seconds he poised like a diver waiting for an opening in the spinning arrays, then he leapt. He slammed into the red ball and desperately clung on while the universe whirled about him.
