Fenrir: Chapters 4 and 5

[seawasp]

Let's see what happens when they push that publicity button, eh?

 

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 towards 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 and made a zipped-lips gesture before settling 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 codename 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 starfield 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."

     "Madame President," Gerald Walters said, looking towards 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 that 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 starfield, 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."

 

Chapter 5: Preparations for a Visit

     "How certain are your people that Fenrir is using antimatter for its energy generation?" asked Alyosha Volkov. "I mean, it's an exciting thought, especially given that we can only create and store nanograms of antimatter ourselves."

Volkov was a special scientific envoy for the Russian President, and Sacco had found him unexpectedly cheerful and energetic. So much for stereotypes of the gloomy Russian, she thought. "They seem quite certain, but I'm not one of the scientists. York?"

A big, barrel-chested man stood up at the end of the conference table; he, too, was a breaker of stereotypes. As far as Jeanne Sacco was concerned, Dr. York Dobyns certainly didn't look like a man twice-awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics – in fact, he looked more like an outdoorsman, with his close-cropped beard and mustache and rather less-than-formal khakis and hiking boots. "Well, we can actually do much better than nanograms, we just generally don't. In any event, they either are using antimatter, or they've got some really science-fictional technology that can convert matter direct to energy. Doctor Bronson, did we get those slides in time?"

Stephanie Bronson nodded – not bothering, Sacco noted, to correct the mode of address. "Just a minute, Dr. Dobyns." After a moment, two graphs appeared on the presentation screen.

"Ah! Yes, that's it. See here, this is the curve of radiated energy from Fenrir, and this is its acceleration. Now, you'll note that the acceleration has remained constant – very much so – but the energy expended is falling gradually. Now from this, we can deduce that the mass of Fenrir is slowly decreasing. This mass, of course, has to be, for want of a better word, their fuel, whatever they're using to provide them with the power we see.

"So if we compare the radiated energy and the calculated mass reduction and the deceleration, we arrive at the conclusion that they are using some method of total energy conversion. The only such technology we know exists would be matter-antimatter annihilation. It is of course possible they have something entirely outside our knowledge, but for now Occam's Razor suggests that we assume they're making use of the method we at least theoretically understand."

     Alyosha nodded, as did most of the other seven representatives around the table – from China, India, the United Kingdom, the EU, Japan, Brazil, and Canada. Larger briefings would include as many countries as possible, but President Sacco knew that it would be hard to get clear direction even from a group this size, let alone one far larger.

     That wasn't helped, of course, by the fact that Fenrir was a problem unlike any the world had ever faced.

     "Unpleasant though it may be to consider," Osamu Kuramada said, "but have we any data on what sort of weapons Fenrir may have, if it is hostile?"

     Stephanie Bronson glanced at her team, especially at York, who simply nodded, then shrugged. "I have a small presentation on our various guesses, but we really don't have much information on which to make any realistic assessment. Worst-case, they could have missiles that make use of the same drive the ship does, and could drive them with higher accelerations, so in theory they could hit us with impacts at significant fractions of c."

     "Which would be absolutely devastating," Dr. Dobyns said. "To give you an idea, a single two-ton projectile at the same speed as Fenrir was traveling – thirty percent of lightspeed – would deliver an impact of two gigatons. They could have gamma-ray lasers that would carve through mountains or …" he waved his hands to indicate and pretty much anything else. "Seriously, though, if they're determined to be hostile, we are absolutely screwed. Hell, all they have to do is get within any reasonable distance of Earth and turn on their drive. It'd bake us all in very short order. So, Steph and I – and the rest of our team – are pretty much agreed that it's a moot point. I mean, by all means, go ahead and work on your doomsday scenarios, but these guys are playing with more energy every second than the entire human race has ever used."

     There was silence around the table for a moment, then Alyosha chuckled. "Ah, well, we are all used to things on so much smaller a scale. Let us go on."

     "Very good," said Olivia Davies, the United Kingdom representative. "Can we focus on our response, then? We've all been supplying information for communications strategies. Where are we with that?"

     Sacco was pleased to see that despite everyone looking at Dr. Dobyns, York subtly nudged Stephanie Bronson to respond. She's still adjusting to being the face of everything, but at least her team's supporting her.

     "Well… the idea of communicating with an alien intelligence is a pretty old one, and we've been going over not just the information and messages that the various countries would like to send, but the protocols for establishing communication. That's really the most crucial, after all, since until they know how to talk to us, it doesn't matter what messages we send."

     "That assumes they can't figure out how to talk to us from what they're receiving," pointed out Adriana Suarez, the Brazilian representative. "They will have months of everything we've been broadcasting to analyze. Surely they will be able to understand us by the time they stop?"

     Kurumada shook his head. "My apologies, but I do not believe so, Dr. Suarez. Perhaps our think-tank will feel differently, but it seems to me that there are so very many obstacles in the way of understanding our words from such transmissions."

     "That's our feeling, yes," Stephanie said after a brief discussion with the others on her team. "First, we're transmitting on many bands, with multiple languages, in different modes and encoding schemes. How do you determine that what you're receiving is someone's voice? Maybe they don't even have a concept of 'voice' the way we do. Maybe they don't see the way we do. Written symbols are effectively arbitrary; they would need context to even try to interpret them, and they'd have no more context for us than we do for them. We're pretty sure that they'd need to receive a systematic teaching transmission, one that's clearly directed at them and that works through mathematical and scientific expressions before we attempt anything more complicated."

     Dr. Dobyns nodded. "Oh, if they were studying our transmissions ever since they could have picked them up, maybe, but at thirty percent of lightspeed I'm thinking that most of their sensors were shut down to protect them. A micrometeorite impact that you wouldn't care much about at, say, twenty kilometers per second you will be really worried about at a hundred thousand kilometers per second."

     "But I thought space was basically empty," Li Xiu Ying said. "Are impacts that common?"

     "I'm afraid so. Oh, it's emptier out between the stars than near our planet, but there's still some gas and dust out there. The gas probably wouldn't pose too much of a problem, but even very small particles of dust would be extremely dangerous," Dobyns replied.

     "Here's an example," Stephanie said. "If an average grain of sand – which masses less than point oh-five grams – were to hit this room at that speed, it would blow us and most of this building out of existence; the impact energy is about fifty-seven tons of TNT. From one grain of sand. So even very, very small pieces of dust could be chipping away pieces of your ship, and would certainly destroy any sensors you had out."

     "That sounds like over a hundred years it would do much damage, even if space is almost-empty," Alyosha said. "How did they survive?"

     "Most designs for that kind of interstellar travel assume that the front of your ship is… well, ablative mass. A big, thick coating of rock or metal or ice that wears away, probably with embedded sensors to let you know if it takes a really big hit. I would not be surprised if, once Fenrir drops below a significant percentage of lightspeed, we'll see a pretty large chunk of it just get ejected," Stephanie said; she'd researched a lot of these questions as soon as she realized she was going to be the one in the spotlight.

     She went on, "Exactly when they drop their big shield will tell us a lot about them."

     "Ah," said Kurumada. "How tough their main ship is, yes?"

     "Basically, yes."

     "All right," Dr. Suarez said with a nod, "that makes sense. So, they've only had a short time – since they started slowing down, and probably had to at least take some readings on us to make sure everything was as they expected – to study our transmissions, so they won't understand us. When will we be ready to transmit to them?"

     "We're working on that," Dobyns said, "but honestly? We'll want them to be a lot closer, otherwise we won't be able to get any response data in reasonable time." He pointed to another slide that showed transmission times. "Right now, turnaround time is something around two weeks, maybe a bit less now. Fenrir's going to stop about two light-hours out, which is a lot more reasonable. Means we could expect several exchanges per day."

     "True," Sacco said, studying the slide, "But it strikes me that we could get a head start simply by transmitting what amounts to the basic alphabet or whatever, constantly, in their direction."

     Kurumada nodded. "Yes. I agree. It would give them time to, first, sense that we were transmitting directly to them, and then learn whatever they could on the way in."

     "And also give us more time to find out if they want to talk," Alyosha said with a wry grin. "Even with long delay times, they could still send us signal of 'enough with the baby talk,' yes?"

     "Oh, certainly!" Stephanie said. "Which would tell us more about them. How fast they detect our transmission, how long it takes to decode it, and so on."

     Neysa Deshpande, the Indian representative, smiled briefly. "Not to be repetitive, but we are certain they have detected us? Because if they have not, then sending such a transmission will absolutely alert them, will it not?"

     President Sacco saw Stephanie and York exchanging glances, and understood what they were thinking.

Stephanie grimaced. "Dr. Deshpande, there's very little certain at this point; all we can do is make our best educated guesses, based on what we would expect we would, and could, do. And this close to Earth, there's basically no way we would have missed noticing that Earth's radiating in so many bands of the E-M spectrum in a way that just can't be natural. So we have to assume they have seen us."

     Deshpande gave an apologetic shrug. "Our various citizens will all want us to be cautious. But I agree with your guess, for what it is worth. Let us start transmitting as soon as we have the, how should we say, lesson plan well mapped out."

     "I agree," Kurumada said, and the other representatives echoed the sentiment.

     "Pending the agreement of our superiors, of course," Alyosha added. "Admittedly, any of us could begin transmitting on our own, but if we are to be coordinated…"

     "Absolutely," President Sacco said. "We do not intend to take any unilateral action at this time – but remember that time is limited, so I would hope you can get agreement from your governments quickly."

     "We will certainly try," Olivia Davies said. "The issue of more direct contact will require a bit more discussion, I think."

     "That's Wednesday's conference," Sacco said. "And yes, I think deciding if, how, and when we could launch something to physically greet them will take more discussion. But for now, I think trying to start a dialogue will be enough."

     And they'd better damn well want to have a dialogue, she thought as the representatives rose for a break.

     Because if Fenrir didn't want to talk, she doubted they'd be rolling out the welcome mat for a visit.

    

 



Yeah, there's really two possibilities here and you don't want the second...