seawasp | Fenrir: Chapter 12 (Reply)

Well, SOMETHING had happened...

Chapter 12: Call to Action

"You're sure you want me to do this, Madame President?" Stephanie asked, finding stage fright trying to overwhelm her again.

President Sacco nodded. "Again, I'll introduce you – not that anyone will need the introduction now – but I want you to do the presentation exactly as we've discussed. Especially the end."

"Why not you, though? You're more in the position to –"

"Because," York broke in, then smiled apologetically. "Sorry. But Steph, because if she does it, it's the United States trying to make a decision for everyone. If you do it, it's an appeal to everyone."

Stephanie closed her mouth at that. Okay. I understand that. "Right. I'm ready, I guess."

"Don't guess. Be ready. You've done this before. You can do it again." York Dobyn's voice was calmly reassuring.

The President was already out of the room; they could hear the murmurs of the press as she walked to the podium.

"Sorry for keeping you all waiting," she said; Stephanie could envision Sacco's trademark brilliant smile accompanying the apology. "It took Dr. Bronson's team quite a while to put everything together after the very unexpected incident yesterday, but we believe we now have enough to make it worth discussing. So without further delay, Dr. Stephanie Bronson, head of the Fenrir research team."

The President stepped aside with practiced ease; Stephanie concentrated on walking to the podium with the same confidence. "Thank all of you for your patience," she said. "I think you'll find it's worth the wait, and I won't waste your time rehashing the lead-up: we expected Fenrir to just park itself out near Uranus' orbit, and instead… it didn't. So let's talk about what happened.

The room dimmed and the screen showed the image of Fenrir momentarily flaring brilliantly.

"At 14:26:54 GMT, Fenrir momentarily tripled in brightness and then immediately faded to magnitude 23.5 – effectively invisible to any except very large telescopes. Unlike all of Fenrir's prior maneuvers, this one showed evidence of plasma – heated elemental materials. We detected tungsten, carbon, yttrium, and a number of other elements in lesser concentrations." A slide showing the various spectral lines seen. "To an extent this confirms some of our guesses about Fenrir's design and composition, but the process is – obviously – not what we expected."

The next slide showed an animation of their best guess of Fenrir's actual appearance – the gigantic, glowing, sail-like radiator encircling the comparatively tiny, double-pointed tapering cylinder of Fenrir itself. A section of the sail abruptly erupted into gas and the remainder faded, pulling in.

"Our best guess as to what happened is that for some reason a portion of the sail experienced a surge exceeding its ability to radiate. As the sail temperature is not all that far from the material's melting point, when that happened it quickly overheated, melted, and likely then lost whatever metamaterial structure allowed it to so evenly distribute and radiate heat; instead, it vaporized. This damaged the sail and, likely, portions of Fenrir itself. From our very limited observations, we believe that the sail is mostly, but not entirely, retracted, as shown here." Fenrir was shown with a moderately wide "ruff" around the core ship.

"The question, of course, is why this happened. Did something happen inside Fenrir which damaged its energy radiation system? If so, it could have been catastrophic to any part of the ship anywhere near that location; you could liken it to a large ship taking a missile in a vital location."

"Are you saying Fenrir is … destroyed? A derelict?" asked Susan Ingalls. It was a planned question, but Susan made it look spontaneous.

"We don't think it's entirely a derelict, no. Infrared readings combined from multiple sources show that after the expected reduction from the sail, its temperature loss has evened out." Another set of images showed, this one illustrating an internal explosion on Fenrir, one on its surface, and one on the radiator sail which was also burning the hull of Fenrir. "Since at this distance we cannot make out any details we cannot tell if the problem started inside the ship, at the surface at the interface between the radiator and Fenrir proper, or in the sail itself.

"However, Dr. York Dobyns, Dr. Jerry Freedman, and several others on our team are of the opinion that whater the cause, Fenrir is seriously damaged. We have seen no changes in behavior since the incident, and given the consistency of Fenrir's behavior throughout its approach we are convinced that if it was capable of doing so, Fenrir would be attempting to stop and put itself in orbit about the Sun as soon as possible."

"Where is it going now?" That wasn't a scripted question, but one she'd expected, this time from Marcie Amour of ScienceLine.

"That we were able to get good data on, with the help of our other observers around the globe. If it doesn't change orbit, Fenrir will proceed on a hyperbolic trajectory that will take it slightly inside the orbit of Venus – passing very close to it, by the way – and then back out of the Solar System into interstellar space. It will require slightly over two years to reach perihelion – closest approach to the Sun – and will take the same amount of time to end up back out near Uranus' orbit. Its course doesn't take it near any major objects, so there's no chance of a collision."

A new slide, this one showing the Sun, Fenrir, and various symbols for heat intake, generation, and radiation. "We're afraid that Fenrir is still in trouble, however. Based on the records we were able to find of Fenrir before she lit off her drive, she was still generating a significant amount of energy – somewhere around the level of a major city.

"In interstellar space, that's not a huge problem to radiate away, especially if you're carrying around a gigantic chunk of ice you can use as a heat sink when necessary and have a sail that's made to radiate heat over an enormous area. But as Fenrir gets closer to the Sun, she'll be taking in more and more energy and having to radiate it away. On Earth, we can dump extra heat three different ways – convection, by having air move around us and take it away; evaporation, which is having a liquid, usually water, take the heat onto itself; and radiation, which is the heat transmitting itself away through space. In space, they really only have radiation as an available method, and as they get closer, half of the ship is always going to be taking in more and more energy, making it harder to radiate away."

"Couldn't they use their radiator sail? Even if part of it's damaged, surely it could deal with the relatively tiny amount of heat from the main vessel?" Susan asked.

"First, we don't know if they can extend it partially; if our observations are correct the retraction wasn't complete and that may indicate that the entire radiator sail's controls are damaged." She tapped the Sun in the middle of one diagram. "The other problem is that as they get closer to the Sun, the sail will be picking up more and more heat, and would have to radiate that away before it could get rid of any interior heat. Since they apparently can't control the ship, they can't maneuver to keep the sail edge-on to the Sun, which would make that a practical approach."

"And they dropped their ice shielding a while ago, right?" asked AP's Rick Ventura.

"Yes, so they don't have that option any more – assuming all their internal systems are working."

"But they could get it working soon, right?"

Stephanie pursed her lips. "Could, yes. The problem is that there's, oh, four levels of problem we could be dealing with when you see something like this.

"The first's an acute, immediate, but limited problem; say, a big meteor hit the radiator far enough out that mostly it just fried the sail and control elements, forcing them to pull it in, for example. Something like that they probably have repair protocols for, and once they cut away the damaged radiator and patch the control runs, they can go back to almost full operation. If that's the case, we should see Fenrir pop back to full brightness, finish the last few minutes of deceleration, and get into a decent orbit in a couple of days, a week at most.

"Second would be if the damage is more extensive, but local to a particular area of the ship – if a meteor hit them at the linkage area, a local generator or power distribution transformer blew badly, something like that. If they were modular enough to just cut out that area, we'd have expected to see them already back up, and they're not, which means that kind of damage might take a couple of weeks to repair – if it doesn't also cause more trouble from added stress."

She blew out a breath and continued. "Three and four, though… that's if something really serious happened to Fenrir. For example, a problem with the antimatter generator sending a serious surge through the entire power grid that we just happen to only see from the outside because it overloaded a part of the radiator. Internal strife, maybe, deciding how to deal with the fact that they're in an inhabited system. Any of a thousand things. This leaves Fenrir in a state where repairs may take anywhere from months to never. In most of these cases, though, at least some of Fenrir's people – call them the Fen, perhaps – will still be alive. They've got to have just an amazing number of backups to keep the crew alive; they took decades to fly here, after all."

"That's… a pretty frightening thought, Dr. Bronson," said Mack Henning, a worried expression on his face. The Reuters representative went on, "If that's happened, they've drifting through space, maybe not even seeing what's outside very well after that flare, on an orbit that could bake them alive. Slowly."

Stephanie could have kissed Henning. That was the best lead-in she could have asked for. "Yes, Mack, that's the problem. Up there are… well, maybe thousands of people – not like us, but still, people, who've flown through interstellar space to reach here, an achievement we've only dreamed about until now… and at the very last moment, suddenly they're heading straight for a terrible slow death."

She paused, just a moment, to let the idea sink in. "But we don't have to let that happen."

A collective intake of breath told her she'd said it just the right way. "The leaders of all the countries of Earth have already been working on what was going to be a first-contact embassy ship, Welcome Wagon. But things have changed. We're not going to be facing a giant, frightening unknown.

"We're seeing people that need help, people who came a long, long way to meet us, to see our worlds. We've been afraid of that, some of us. Why did they come here? What do they want?

"But right now? They're stranded, and afraid, and this is the best possible opportunity for humanity to stand up and prove who we are: we're the people who have risked our lives again and again to save whales stranded on beaches, sometimes killed ourselves to get a beloved pet to safety, sent out a thousand rescuers to look for one lost hiker. This is who we are. We may fight and squabble and do all sorts of terrible things, but in our hearts we really want to help."

She pointed up, where the image of Fenrir glowed softly. "They need our help. No matter what they wanted on their way here, they need help, and there is no one and nothing in the universe that can help them…

"… except us. So let's prove ourselves. Finish Welcome Wagon, make it not an embassy but a rescue mission, and bring our visitors safely to harbor!"

Sounds like ... well, not a plan, but an idea, anyway.