The thing about that: once you knew you were looking for a needle, metaphorically speaking, the looking got a lot easier. You could toss out anything that was too long, or too broad, or too heavy, or that wasn’t made of metal, and so on. The astronomers had some idea of what this needle would look like. It would only be a matter of time, working their way back from the present through the archived data, before they found it.
It took less time than anyone would’ve guessed. Knowledge of the discovery hadn’t just gone viral, it was pandemic. An enterprising grad student at UC Berkeley whipped out a new code module for the BOINC-XV crowd-sourcing research network.
The download demands for it crashed the UC servers in short order, but before that happened it was already mirrored on seven thousand sites around the world. By the middle of the morning, millions of amateur astronomers were meticulously combing through the fodder. In Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 12:23
P.M
. local time, a bedridden comet- and asteroid-hunter named Jenny Wright found the needle in an astronomical haystack dated February 9.
So much for the DETI protocols. The news blogs carried every known detail of the historic discovery. Real information being nowhere sufficient to satisfy the insatiable monster, the news conduits were replete with every imaginable speculation and hypothesis about the significance of all of this. Most of it, of course, was ignorant nonsense, but that didn’t stop every crackpot from trying to claim his fifteen minutes of fame nor inhibit some willing journalist from giving it to him. It was all that everyone, everywhere, wanted to hear about.
The interest was so intense and universal there was even talk of canceling a World Cup soccer match. Just talk, as it turned out.
The official statements that evening from every major government around the world were both terse and vague. The one-paragraph press release from Washington summed them up: “The President is
consulting with top experts and advisers on this unprecedented and momentous discovery. It is engaging her fullest attention. As soon as we have a fuller grasp of the situation, we will keep you fully informed.”
It was bullshit, but the public didn’t know that and the press couldn’t be sure.
Until the following morning, anyway.
It didn’t take a rocket scientist—or even an astronomer—to figure out that the surprise U.S. announcement on February 11, just two days after the arrival of the mysterious starship, about joining the Chinese on their mission to Mars and repurposing U.S. Space Station Three for interplanetary travel hadn’t been a coincidence.
Nor, for that matter, the least bit honest.
It was all over the AM news coverage. The White House had no comment. The more hysterical pundits talked of a major diplomatic rift between the United States and China, maybe even the possibility of a war.
Their apocalyptic anticipations were dashed by the Chinese government’s press release. It merely expressed deep disappointment that the U.S. had acted in such bad faith and that given that behavior, they most sorrowfully had to withdraw from any cooperative efforts to explore Mars, as if there had been any in the first place.
Private diplomatic communiqués were more heated, but what they really boiled down to, once the oblique language and the political posturing were stripped away, was this: “You had a big secret and you didn’t tell us.”
“You would have done exactly the same thing in our shoes.”
“Fuck you.”
That was the end of it.
The other world political blocs had more predictable responses. The European Union, the Russian Confederacy, the Conclave of African States, India, Brazil, even the United Central American States, a staunch U.S. ally, condemned China and the United States for “attempting to monopolize alien technology.” They decried their exclusion from the planned missions and demanded to be allowed some measure of participation.
The United States and China had identical responses to these challenges. They ignored them.
Space watchers noted that activity around USSS3 abruptly increased, while construction efforts on the Chinese Mars ship just as abruptly ceased. Presumably Mars was off the table for the Chinese—hardly surprising when they might find aliens, and alien technology, at Saturn.
Within two weeks, construction activity resumed at the Chinese ship, but it appeared to be operating in reverse. Based on the boost and flight profiles of the Chinese cargo ships and orbital tugs, they were stripping their ship.
Anything related to colonizing Mars—hardware, landing and ground supplies, living quarters, and support for a decent-sized colonization party—all of it was going, stuck in an orbital dump several kilometers off the ship. Security had tightened up massively around both countries’ missions, so good firsthand information was impossible to come by, but this much was obvious to any observer with a decent telescope.
The Chinese were adding extra tankage both internally and externally to their ship. More reaction mass for their nuclear thermal rocket engines. That meant more velocity and a shorter trip to Saturn. How much shorter was still anybody’s guess.
Externally, the ship would not wind up looking a lot different. A bit beefier, a bit stockier with the additional tanks, but still pretty much the same deep space cargo hauler, refitted for speed rather than capacity. A smaller crew, but with longer-duration life support. Nothing radical or unpredictable there.
USSS3 was another matter. It was undergoing a major makeover. Beams and spars hundreds of meters long were being constructed in near-station space. The main axle of the station was being extended two hundred meters and there were several major construction sites along the length of it. The Americans were assembling new modules and adding reaction-mass tanks. Unlike the Chinese mission, the station had never been designed for space flight; it was a lot harder to guess what all these changes would mean.
Nobody outside the highest circles of the U.S. and Chinese governments was entirely sure what was going on. The activities were taking place in total public view and complete public silence.
All anyone could be sure of, and again, it didn’t take a genius to figure it out, was that the U.S. and the Chinese were in a race to Saturn and hell-bent on making sure the other didn’t get there first.
The Chinese launched first.
On the day before Halloween, the image of the Chinese ship filled the wall display in the Oval Office, as Santeros, Vintner, Lossness, and Crow watched the broadcast. The ship was impressively large, massing an estimated ten thousand tons. Originally called
Martian Odyssey
, it had been rechristened
Celestial Odyssey
for its new mission—to beat the U.S. to Saturn’s rings and to whatever the alien starship had rendezvoused with.
The
Odyssey
had been designed to be a cargo hauler, intended for routine runs to establish and support a Chinese colony on Mars. The ship could haul nearly three thousand tons of payload and deliver it to Mars in less than four months, with round-trips happening at year-and-a-half intervals when the Earth-Mars alignment was most favorable.
The Chinese plan had been to run it to Mars, unload the first colonists and colony supplies, stick around for a bit to make sure everything was working, and then make a slower run back to Earth. After six months in Earth orbit being maintained, refurbished, and resupplied, the
Odyssey
would be ready for another trip out. As dramatic and history-making as the first trip would be,
Odyssey
would then settle into a routine of unglamorous but vitally important cargo runs for the nascent colony.
Plans had changed.
The ship looked much the same, externally, as it always had: chunky and solid. American intelligence said the Chinese engineers had stripped every bit of unnecessary weight and filled most of the cargo bays with water and liquid hydrogen tanks, which would make up additional reaction mass for the lightbulb reactors.
The reactors would heat the reaction mass to nine thousand degrees Celsius exhaust plasma. Ten of those reactors collectively provided over ten million newtons of thrust. As big as that was, it was only one-third the size of the historic rockets that had landed humans on the moon
nearly a century before; even so, they were by far the most powerful engines flying in space in 2066.
All in all, the reaction mass and reactors provided enough power and water to get the
Odyssey
to Saturn—but they weren’t enough to get the ship there and back, not quickly. The expectation was that the Chinese would harvest water from the moons and rings of Saturn.
The audience in the Oval Office was mirrored by seven billion other human beings, planet-wide. With all pretense of secret missions gone, the whole world was watching the final launch preparations for China’s Saturn mission. Someone in the Politburo with an excellent sense of Chinese history decided his nation’s thrust into an uncertain future needed solid traditional roots.
There were fireworks.
Earth had never seen a show like the one the Chinese put on. State-of-the-art hypergolic engineering was married to pyrotechnic expertise that stretched back fifteen hundred years. A thousand kilometers above the earth, a round of chrysanthemum bursts three kilometers wide blossomed in gold, pink, and white.
People didn’t need vid feeds. Everybody on Earth within line of sight of the ship got a clear view of the display of Chinese history, culture, and power. Even with unaided eyes, earthbound humans on the night side of the planet could see multicolored pinpricks and puffballs of light as the ship passed overhead. With simple binoculars, they could see intricate starbursts, fountains, and sculptural fireballs. The show went on for nine orbits of the earth. Nine times, as the ship passed into sunlight, the fireworks ceased; nine times, as the ship passed into Earth’s shadow, they resumed. Over eighteen hours, seven billion people saw a show of glorious and unprecedented scale.
In the President’s office, Crow conferred quietly with the others.
“Ten minutes,” somebody said.
American intel had projected the likely ignition time. Intelligence had been right about the launch date, and they were pretty sure of the tech, but nothing else was certain. Until the Chinese actually launched,
nobody in the U.S. had a solid handle on the Chinese’s target arrival date at Saturn. The best guess was two years and change.
Whatever they had planned, the Chinese were confident enough to be broadcasting live from orbit. Not that it would have done them much good to try to keep the launch secret, but usually they maintained a polite fiction of silence until after a launch. This time, the Chinese had a full professional broadcast crew in orbit, not far from the
Odyssey
, and they were letting the whole world watch from fifty-yard-line seats.
The
Odyssey
was roughly over Beijing, bathed in midday sun. The running commentary from the announcer on board the broadcast ship was interrupted by another voice: subtitles on the Oval Office display identified it as that of the
Odyssey
’s commander, Captain Zhang Ming-Hoa. He reported to Beijing that all final checks were complete and launch would commence in 10 . . . 9 . . . 8 . . .
Seven seconds later, the monitor flared white for a fraction of a second until the cameras could compensate. For a fleeting millisecond, Crow wondered if the ship had exploded, even half hoped it had. That would solve a lot of problems. But, no, it was those ten massive nuclear engines coming online, their fiery blue-white exhaust much more brilliant than the surface of the sun. The ship started to move away, steadily picking up speed. Within a minute, it was nearly two kilometers away from the cameras, receding at two hundred kilometers an hour. By space travel standards, it was a snail’s pace, but it looked impressive on the big screen.
The status display from U.S. tracking reported that the
Celestial Odyssey
was accelerating at a tenth of a gee, adding one meter per second of velocity each and every second. That was pretty much what DARPA had expected, or at least hoped. The Chinese hadn’t souped up their engines. They seemed to be more or less the same as they had been for the Mars mission. The big question was, how long would they keep firing?
“All right, everybody out,” Santeros said to the watchers in her office. “I’ll stop down at the situation room every once in a while.”
Crow, Lossness, Vintner, and top military and congressional
personnel shuffled out of the office, and walked down to the situation room for the waiting game. In an hour, the
Odyssey
, now on the night side of the earth, had reached escape velocity.
“No surprise there,” a general said. “Christ, I could use a drink.”
The Chinese engines needed to burn for at least two hours to send the ship to Saturn. The tracking status predicted that if the Chinese cut their engines after two hours, it would take them over seven years to reach Saturn. No one in the situation room expected that to happen, and no one was disappointed.
Three and a half hours after launch, the engines were still firing. Vintner and Lossness looked at each other and then at Crow, who shrugged. Trajectory status reported a velocity of nearly twenty kilometers per second and a transit time to Saturn of under two years. This was shorter than what the ostensibly knowledgeable experts had predicted.
Santeros walked in, talking on a handset, spotted Crow, and her eyebrows went up. Crow nodded toward a monitor. The ship was too far away to be anything but a searing blue-white pinpoint of light, but there was no sign of an engine shutdown. The
Odyssey
continued to accelerate away from the earth.
“Where are we at?” Santeros asked when she got off the handset.
“Still moving,” Lossness said. “They’re gonna get there in a hurry.”
“How big a hurry?”
“Can’t tell yet, but they’ve already exceeded our projections.”
Santeros lingered, watching the screen, then, after two minutes, said to Crow, “Call me.”
With every passing minute, the
Odyssey
’s ETA to Saturn dropped. The five-hour mark passed. Suddenly, the blue-white speck disappeared; it took the cameras a second to adjust, but then, distantly and dimly, a tiny image of the ship could be made out on the monitor. The
Odyssey
had completed its ejection burn and was free-falling toward Saturn. Status numbers completed their final update. The Chinese nuclear thermal engines had imparted an extraordinary twenty-kilometers-per-second delta-vee to the
Odyssey
. The projected transit time to Saturn was a year and a half, with an ETA in late April of 2068.
Crow pulled up the timeline for the
Nixon
. If they stayed on schedule, they’d be launching by the end of 2067, which would have them to Saturn just about the same time as the Chinese. Not good. He called Santeros, and five minutes later he, Vintner, and Lossness were back in the Oval Office.
“This isn’t acceptable,” Santeros said. “Best case, we and the Chinese are there at the same time, and that’s a powder keg waiting to blow up in our faces. Worst case, our schedule slips and they beat us to whatever’s out there. We need to get there faster. I don’t care how you make it happen, but make it happen.”
She looked up into thin air and said, “Gladys, tell the kitchen to send fresh pots of coffee to Vintner’s office, then meals for Crow, Vintner, and Lossness.” The White House computer pinged acknowledgment. “Jacob, Gene, figure this out. Call in whatever resources you need. Crow, I want you in on this so you can report back to me and in case any of their ideas have security implications we need to be on top of. By the morning briefing, I want to know how we’re going to beat the Chinese to Saturn.”
Crow had been running on catnaps for two days, trying to stay on top of last-minute intelligence about the Chinese launch. More stim pills.
Two hours later, in Vintner’s office, the three of them were well-caffeinated and fed, but they weren’t any happier. Crow massaged his forehead. “So, really, there’s no way to speed up the trip? Neither of you geniuses can come up with anything?”
Lossness grimaced. “Not enough to matter. Constant-boost trajectories eat up energy like a son of a bitch. If we could figure out how to up the ship’s power by fifty percent, it wouldn’t trim more than a month off the travel time, and that’s still too close for comfort. And, anyway, we can’t do it.”
Vintner looked up from his third cheeseburger—Crow marveled, where did the man put it all?—“Gene, any chance your guys didn’t optimize the trajectory for the shortest trip?”
“You’re kidding, right? Fastest is what we asked for—fastest is what we got. But if it will make you happier . . .” Lossness checked the time.
“It’s the middle of the night in California . . . he should be home. I could call our orbit maven at JPL.”
“Do it,” Crow said.
A few minutes later, a sleepy-looking David Howardson peered at them from a vid screen. “This is Dave. Hey, Gene . . . Ah, let me guess. The timetable’s shot.”
“In spades. Any chance in hell that you didn’t pull together the fastest trajectory for our ship?”
Howardson gave him a look.
“I didn’t think so,” Lossness said.
“I take it there’s no possibility of making the ship significantly faster, right?” Howardson asked. He was pulling up ship’s specs and orbital simulations on his slate while he talked.
“Not in the time we have left,” Lossness said. “Sorry to wake you. We need to get back to brainstorming before Santeros has us dismembered.”
“Hold on a sec.” Howardson was reading through his logs. “I’m looking at the simulation optimization you requested six months back. It’s the right answer—it gets you there fastest, which is what you asked for. You wanted the fastest trip because it reduces the expenditure of life-support supplies.”
“Yeah?”
“But now you’ve changed the question. Implicitly, anyway. You don’t want to get there fastest, you want to get there soonest. Right?”
Crow interjected, “What’s the difference?”
Dave was dragging orbital curves around on his screen, fiddling with launch dates and noting arrival times. “The difference is that you’ve got so much delta-vee in this ship that you’ve got a huge launch window. It’s like the better part of five months. The fastest trip is at the end of that launch window, sometime in December of next year. But you could launch as early as, mmm, July? I’ll have to do some numbers to nail it down. You’ll still get to Saturn. It’s just that the trip takes longer. But let me see . . . mmm, it’d only take about a month longer. If you’re able to launch in July, that’d buy you four months on the ETA. You get to
Saturn for Christmas—that’s a rough guess, of course. I’d need to run a finer-grained simulation.”
Gene said, “Get on it.”
Howardson grinned. “There is one catch, though.”
Crow asked, “What?” in a tone that suggested he didn’t want to hear about catches.
The grin disappeared. “The ship’ll be doing a flyby of the sun. If you launch in late July, Saturn will be on the far side of the sun. You don’t launch out, you launch in, right toward the sun, swing past it and let its gravity bend the ship’s trajectory so that it’s on target for Saturn on the far side.”
“How close are we talking?” Lossness asked.
“Couldn’t say quite yet. Looking at my pictures here, I’d say somewhere inside the orbit of Mercury, maybe as little as 0.2 AU.”
“Thanks. Get back to me when you’ve got the refined model.” Lossness logged off the connection.
Vintner looked at Lossness. “Can we advance the schedule that much? Launch in nine months instead of fourteen?”
Lossness nodded. “Pretty much got to, pending Dave’s finished simulation. And we’ll need a design mod for close solar operations.”
Crow: “I’m guessing your engineers are gonna love that.”
Becca got a call from Vintner just before dinnertime. From the background, she could tell he was in his private office, which was little more than a cubbyhole. He used it for private conversations.
“Hey, Becca. Is this a good break point?”
“Hiya, Jacob. As good a time as any,” Becca said. “We finished another control simulation. We’re doing good here.”
“You may not feel that way in a minute. I’ve got news you’re not gonna like.”
“Santeros scrubbed the mission?”
“That’d make life simpler, not harder. She’s advanced the launch date by five months. You’ve got nine months to get ready.”