“I want to invite you to come on a little mission with me, on my new ship.”
“Your new ship?”
“Yeah, I just got one. I am the commander of the fastest nuclearpowered space vessel in the solar system. Interested?”
The line was silent for a long time, but she knew he had not hung up.
“
WE HAVE IGNITION
, ladies and gentlemen. Nine nuclear battleships are on their way! In the lead is the UNSS
Phalanx
, the contact ship commanded by Aki Shiraishi. The UNSS
Rutherford
and
Chadwick
are now leaving orbit. Let’s go to a live image from Christmas Island. It’s 5:15 in the morning there, so we would appreciate it if everyone remained quiet.”
The laughter faded and was replaced by gasps of awe as thin bright streaks trailed across the horizon behind the three specks of light. The streams grew as halos formed around the glowing engine blasts. As the fiery spheres dipped below the horizon, the networks cut to following each of the three ships separately; around the world people could choose which feed to follow. The networks also broadcast speeches from various heads of state, followed by the Pope and other religious leaders, a number of celebrities, luminaries in astronomical studies, and Nobel laureates.
The media coverage and the quality of their images was a far cry from the fuzzy, monochrome video of the first moon landing that had been broadcast seventy years earlier. The live shots of the UNSDF battleships launching were shown from every imaginable vantage point. The images underscored the advancements that had been made in space technology and also in broadcast technology. The primary video was circumscribed by a number of constantly changing thumbnail images. The secondary images included still and video shots from dozens of sites on Earth and from various altitudes in orbit, as well as live feeds from the surfaces and orbits of the moon, Mercury, Venus, and Mars. Unless the viewer intervened by making a specific selection, the primary image feed was chosen by the content provider to best fit the audio. A Worldunity viewer could select from eight hundred different commentators speaking in any of a hundred languages or watch the channel that ranked the talking heads by their real-time popularity.
From her cocoon, Aki watched the sensor readouts during the fully automated launch sequence. Intermittently, she glanced at another monitor that showed the broadcasts from Earth. She switched her secondary monitor from a speech by the young Dalai Lama to a concert at Carnegie Hall. The conductor was leading the orchestra in a rendition of the
Star Wars
theme. Aki chuckled at the jingoistic irony.
Raul was watching the same channel and chimed in. “The doubters are rocking their victory song.”
“Check out the Vienna feed. They’re playing Beethoven’s
Eroica
. Maybe that’s more your speed?” suggested Aida Northgate, the ship’s systems engineer. She was always upbeat; Aida reminded Raul of a pixie, he had told Aki. Aki was pleased that the two of them got along well. Through Aki’s recent tumults, she had forgotten how powerful her intuition could be.
“Don’t be too sure. A lot of the aliens were friendly in
Star Wars
. You can’t say the same about Napoleon,” Raul said.
Aki changed to another channel. In London, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra was playing a triumphant march by Elgar. In Moscow, the Kirov Orchestra was playing the ballad
Stenka Razin
. According to the commentary,
Stenka Razin
was the story of a hero who led an uprising against the forces of bureaucracy. The music helped settle Aki’s nerves. She closed her eyes for a moment, took a deep breath, and tried to clear her head.
“Joseph, which feed are you listening to?” Aki asked the other member of her Contact Team.
“Berlin, ma’am,” the young Special Forces soldier replied. Joseph Turnbull was twenty-six years old, laconic yet well educated. Given his military background, handsome looks, and brave demeanor, Aki felt he was the best possible substitute for Mark Ridley. Captain Turnbull was assigned to protect Aki and Raul. During their speed and endurance training, Aki had been amazed by Turnbull’s agility. Having someone who reminded her of Mark made her feel protected even though it pained her to relive the memories of her last voyage in the
Phalanx
.
Thinking of how the upgrades made it seem like a different ship even though she had spent so much time on board on the previous mission, Commander Shiraishi switched to the broadcast from Berlin, which was playing orchestral music by Wagner.
“That is
Tannhäuser
, right?” she asked, trying to establish some rapport with the soldier.
“Yes, ma’am,” he replied.
The opera told of the struggle between sacred and profane love. Aki stayed on the broadcast coming from Berlin, audio-only. Despite being transmitted millions of kilometers, the sound quality of the Deep Space Network was free from static and ghost noises. Aki was intrigued by the fact that it was being performed live but several minutes in the past. She switched her monitor to one of the external cameras.
As she listened to the scene in which Elizabeth prays and then asks the returning pilgrims for news of Tannhäuser, Aki gazed at the pale blue half-illuminated dot and the smaller white dot next to it. She found the calmer state of mind she sought. All the battles she had fought were behind her. Humanity sometimes seemed both inhuman and inhumane, but she had found a path that brought her a chance to fulfill her dream. She felt that nothing would stop her from making direct contact with the Builders.
The waiting was finally over at the UNSDF Fleet Headquarters as well. The only questions left for them were when the war would start and how much they would be able to prepare before attacks started. Since the fleet had to depart five months before the Builders’ arrival, almost all tactical strategic contingencies had to be decided in advance. Once the ships were launched, nothing more than minor corrections could be implemented.
The difficulty came from the ships taking off while the Builders were still outside of Pluto’s orbit, nine billion kilometers away. Raul had once likened it to a soccer goalie trying to defend a net eight meters wide but having to pick a pose and stay frozen even though the opposing midfielders were still dribbling up from the opposite end of the field.
“Had the Builders shown something besides complete indifference, even acknowledged our presence, we wouldn’t be in this situation,” one of the UNSDF headquarter members had told Aki.
Despite the actions taken by people on Earth, the Builders never deviated from their original trajectory for even a second. The Builders gave no warnings to humanity. They had not shown any indications that they would attempt to thwart the attack. The possibility remained that life on Earth was insignificant to their plans. The Builders could not be bothered to acknowledge human existence. If the Builders wanted to eradicate humanity, they could have done so long before now. Sometimes, Aki wondered why they had not done so.
The deceleration of the Builders’ ship was constant at a force of 1/100 of a G. Normally, the deceleration of a slowing vessel increased as it burned off fuel and became lighter. Instead, the Builders modified their thrust to keep their deceleration constant. Six years earlier, when the first sightings were made, eight engines had been burning. Now the Builders were down to only one. The Builders, in their relentless commitment to achieving their goal regardless of the costs, had used matter from the engines they no longer needed as fuel for the only engine still intact. This was another achievement brought about by their mastery of nanotechnology. To be able to maintain constant deceleration while consuming their own vessel for its stored energy, they had to push their ship’s structural integrity to its limits. If the Builders continued to brake at the same rate of deceleration, the last of their speed would burn off inside the earth’s orbit and the remainder of their ship would enter into an orbit around the sun that ran alongside the inner planets. Before becoming an artificial planet, Aki presumed that the Builders would need to stop to replenish the resources they had converted into propulsion fuel during the years of their arduous voyage. The five potential candidates were, in order of likelihood, the Vert-Ring, Mercury, Venus, Earth, and the moon.
No one knew why the Builders were not stopping sooner. Destinations like the Kuiper Belt or one of the outer planets had seemed logical to Aki. The most plausible theory was that their nanotechnology was partially powered by solar radiation—Ring architecture forcing individual photons to interact with single atoms in order to produce energy. The Builders had located their Ring production plant as close to the sun as possible. Once the Ring had finally been constructed, a secondary fuel source appeared to include the antimatter generated by the Ring.
Eventually, precise observations of the Builders’ ship resulted in the surprising conclusion that it would not stop at the Vert-Ring. Projections based on the velocity and angle of the ship’s approach ruled out the possibility of docking at the Vert-Ring’s stationary position. It also appeared increasingly likely that their ship would pass by both the earth and the moon, which produced sighs of relief because the dangerous scenario of having an alien ship with an unknown agenda suddenly appear in the daytime sky would be avoided. Crime was still virulent and contagious in the post-Ring world. Aki shuddered to imagine the damage that would be generated by worldwide, large-scale riots.
When the Builders had reached a distance of eighty astronomical units from the sun, about twice as far from the sun as Pluto, their final destination became clear. They were traveling at an astonishing 1,500 kilometers per second on a direct course for Mercury.
It would take six months for their velocity to slow to forty kilometers per second; at that speed the Builders’ ship would reach its final destination. UNSDF Fleet Headquarters immediately went to work devising a plan of defense that was not dependent on where the Builders would be when they were attacked but instead was based on the velocity of the incoming ship. The plan was to target the Builders’ propulsion system before the ship dropped below the velocity required to escape the sun’s gravity and leave the solar system. If the UNSDF could disable the Builders’ deceleration capabilities soon enough they would pass through the solar system—never able to return—the way they would have if Aki had not been persuasive and if the Ring had not been restored with the Vert-Ring.
If, however, the Builders’ ship were not stopped in time, even if that ship were destroyed, its remnants would be trapped by the sun’s pull and would eventually enter a stable orbit somewhere within the solar system. A fear was that remaining in the solar system would allow the Builders to launch their invasive nanobots to transform one or several planets into the massive factory that Mercury had become.
The escape velocity at the likeliest point of contact, the decreasing speed of the Builders’ ship, and the velocity of any debris propelled away from their line of trajectory were used to calculate the plan’s execution. Once the calculations were checked and rechecked, the UNSDF analysts announced that the interceptive attack had to begin five days before the Builders would arrive at Mercury. More precisely: by 1 am GMT on July 29, 2041. In the highly probable event that negotiation by the Contact Ship failed, the UNSDF would commence its attack when the Builders were traveling at a speed of eighty-eight kilometers per second, thirty million kilometers from Mercury.
The UNSDF fleet was comprised of nine ships: the UNSS
Phalanx
(Contact Ship); UNSS
Rutherford, Chadwick
, and
Curie
(First Armada); the UNSS
Crookes, Einstein,
and
Millikan
(Second Armada); and the UNSS
Thompson
(Graser Ship) and
Becquerel
(Graser Support Ship).
As determined by Strategic Command, the
Phalanx
was the only noncombat ship and the only vessel authorized to attempt a rendezvous with the Builders. The attack would be executed in three stages, with twenty-four hours separating the waves. This allowed the ships to reconfigure themselves for the next stage. The First Armada would attack on Day 1 and the Second Armada would take over on Day 2. After launching its nuclear missiles and spiderwebs, each ship would retreat fourteen hours before impact in order to attain the reasonably safe distance of two hundred thousand kilometers.
The two remaining combat ships would be used, if needed, on Day 3. As a final resort, the
Thompson
would attempt to destroy the Builders with the graser. The
Becquerel
would transport the graser initially, then the graser would be transferred to the
Thompson
. The crew of the latter ship would board the
Becquerel
and the
Thompson
would use all of its fuel to propel the graser into position where it would then be operated remotely.
Aki and her Contact Team on the
Phalanx
traveled ahead of the combat ships to rendezvous with the Builders’ ship and, if all went well, board it. On a technological level, this would be an incredibly challenging feat. The
Phalanx
would need to match the Builders’ speed, direction, and position with meticulous precision. Moreover, to allow ample time for the planned attack, the rendezvous had to be completed while the Builders were still traveling at relatively high velocity. To achieve this, the
Phalanx
had been retrofitted with four nuclear-powered NERVA III engines and a massive liquid-fuel booster rocket that would be jettisoned after its use. Even though the UNSS
Phalanx
carried only five crewmembers, the ship measured an impressive 180 meters with the booster rocket attached, making Aki’s ship longer than any space station.