Of all the fleet’s ships, the
Phalanx
had the greatest capability to change its velocity. Nonetheless, the
Phalanx
would wait until the Builders’ ship decelerated to less than ninety-five kilometers per second before attempting to dock. This allowed twenty hours of negotiation before the UNSDF attacked the Builders. During that time, the Contact Team hoped to board the alien vessel and communicate with the beings presumed to be on board. If the Contact Team were not able to ascertain the Builders’ intentions, or if the Contact Team concluded that the Builders were intractably hostile, the attack would be launched as scheduled, whether Aki and her team were still on board the Builders’ ship or not. Without any reservations, Aki was ready to consider that worst-case scenario and accept the potential consequences of her actions. After plotting the
Phalanx
’s voyage, Aki felt that she had analyzed her ship’s contingencies. Her only task left was to hope the computers functioned properly and that, above all, the Builders did not change their course.
THE
PHALANX
BEGAN
its long voyage in the invisible current of the sun’s gravity. Heading toward the blazing star, on the 120th day, the ship passed perihelion. The eight combat ships fired their nuclear engines one by one to enter their deceleration phase, placing them into a solar orbit that nearly matched Mercury’s. Since Mercury’s orbit is elliptical and the fleet’s was circular, Mercury would approach the fleet from behind, temporarily pass and then retreat as the two met a second time. That point in space was where the Builders’ ship was projected to arrive, which placed the fleet in the best possible strategic position to launch their attack. The
Phalanx
used Mercury’s weak gravitational pull to shift its trajectory outward, causing the ship to decelerate slightly just before reaching perihelion. When the
Phalanx
reached Mercury’s orbit again, the
Phalanx
would point itself toward Mercury and accelerate, propelling itself toward the planet with as much speed as it could muster.
In such close proximity to Mercury, with the Vert-Ring production facilities still operating, the ships were likely to come in contact with ring material being ejected from the surface. For protection, each ship was coated with a prophylactic coating immunizing the hulls to the corrosion that resulted from contamination. Advances had been made in decoding the inner workings of the messenger cells. Messenger cells had been reprogrammed to deactivate ring material when the messengers touched it. The reprogrammed cells were replicated and applied to the hulls of the fleet’s nine ships. If the retardant functioned as planned, the fleet would avoid a recurrence of the situation that led to Mark Ridley’s heroic sacrifice.
Another concern was that real-time communication within the fleet was impeded. Since transmissions were delayed due to the distance between the four groups, decisions that required precision and needed to be made within a few seconds would have to be made individually.
When the fleet reached perihelion, the Builders were between the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn. Though the arrival of alien entities still seemed nigh impossible to the crews of the ships and to everyone on Earth, the Builders would reach Mercury in fifty-five days. One of the senior technical engineers likened the Builders to Edmund Hamilton’s 1940s hero Captain Future because he felt such a sense of cosmic awe when he contemplated their advanced technology. On July 19, the alien vessel passed through the earth’s orbit around the sun. Since the earth was on the opposite side of the sun from the ship, the many panicked reports of sightings by amateur skywatchers of the ship as it flew by were discounted. The high-powered telescope on the
Phalanx
was the first to establish visual contact, providing the first glimpse of the alien vessel’s shape.
The telescope’s image was processed to remove the glaring light of the nuclear pulse engine. That process of sampling and smoothing revealed an object that looked like a wheel turned sideways, or a doughnut that measured three hundred meters across with a massive engine filling the hole in the center. It bore a resemblance to some of the earlier designs of Earth’s space stations. The telescope did not reveal much surface detail except for variations in shading around the outer edge that confirmed the craft made one revolution every forty-three seconds. The object rotated at a speed that created artificial gravity on the inside of the tube equivalent to one-third of a G.
“Wow. Look at that thing. If we rendezvous, the seventy billion dollars spent will seem like a bargain,” Aki said from her cocoon, faking enthusiasm because she felt it was her job as commander and that it best fit the circumstances to play the role of a brave leader. Internal doubts and her awareness that a great deal could go wrong were best kept hidden. The core objective of her mission was to make contact, establish communications, and determine whether the attack should proceed within an extraordinarily small window of time—but that thought, along with the doubts of the last few years of her life, was also best relegated to the back of her mind.
There had been much speculation regarding the design of the Builder ship. The various hypotheses of what was contained within the ship included artificial life-forms, simple robots, nanomachines, capsules of microorganisms, frozen embryos, and even bodiless brains existing in liquid-filled pods. Because of the wildly imaginative ideas that had surfaced, the actual image of the ship seemed rather anticlimactic.
“Could anything besides biological life-forms require artificial gravity? If they are alive and mobile in one-third of a G, they are probably not too different from us in size,” Aki said.
“That’s the good old undying optimism we need, Aki. I’m sure they’ve been sitting around playing poker and making up drinking games to pass the time, just like we have,” Raul responded. “We’re just going to ring their doorbell, walk on board, and then hug them without speaking until we all start weeping.”
“Do you have to be flippant?”
“I’ll be disappointed if they look too much like us. I’m hoping they’re so different that we have to coin neologisms in order to describe them. ”
“Who knows? Maybe they are so different we will not even be able to make up new words to describe them.” Aki could tell that Raul knew how nervous she felt.
“They’ve mastered nanotech and interstellar travel. It’s hard to believe they need physical bodies. Compared to what they’re capable of creating, fleshy organic bodies seem inefficient and limiting. I bet they can upload their consciousness to computers.”
“If that were true, their voyage would have ended when the nanomachines first arrived on Mercury. I mean, if they can convert themselves into software and data, they should have been able to program themselves into the nanites,” Aki said. “Even if that was beyond them—not that much seems beyond them—they would construct a data receiver on Mercury and transport their consciousness via radio communication, Mr. Computer Genius.”
“Maybe the brain can’t be converted into data that easily. Maybe the quantum state of each constituent atom in the brain is significant and necessary for the brain to function as a whole. If that’s the case, an organic medium like a brain is necessary to store the information. Builders might be able to do it, but the process would take ages to transfer that much data at a rate of one corresponding atom pair at a time. That explains why they sent a big ship to come after the nanomachines had landed—which, of course, would mean that their ship is stuffed full to overflowing with piles and piles of brains.” Raul laughed at how outrageous his own theory suddenly sounded. “Well, at any rate, that’s what I was hoping to uncover. Thinking it through, they wouldn’t need artificial gravity to transport brains and computers. Maybe consciousness
does
require a physical body after all.”
Twenty years earlier, when research had revealed how massive the Builders’ ship was, Aki had felt certain that the ship would contain physical life-forms. She believed her theory was confirmed when it was discovered that the gases emitted from their nuclear engines contained traces of carbon.
“It seems right that consciousness needs to be integrated into a physical form,” Aki said.
“That might hold for humans, but mental activities are, pure and simple, nothing more than information. Reaching a higher stage of evolution might allow the two to separate.”
Aki had often pondered whether consciousness could be converted into digital data. Her best comparison had been how ants excreted pheromones for many different purposes including the building of networks on the ground that indicated the optimal path for the rest of the ant colony to follow. Individual ants wandering randomly laid a trail that dissipated over time. Once a specific path had substantially more traffic, the odor of the pheromones became concentrated. Ever more ants would follow that path, further concentrating the pheremonic potency so that path would be followed by even more ants. If this pheromonal chemosignaling system were sufficiently developed, the system itself could be considered a form of consciousness.
How does one identify where consciousness resides?
Aki found herself thinking. The intellectual conundrum seemed almost safe compared to the actuality of the Builders and the imminence of contact.
Is it found among the ants, in the pheromone, and on the ground? Despite the elements that comprise the simple system, pinpointing the consciousness becomes unanswerably complex.
The cylindrical tube that composed the bulk of the Builders’ ship became known as the Torus. Confirming that the alien vessel had artificial gravity was good news for the UNSDF. If the Builders required gravity and a pressurized atmosphere, a puncture to the Torus’s hull could potentially kill off whatever life lurked within the ship.
Several days later, as the Torus came closer, higher resolution images were obtained. The Torus and the center part of the ship were connected by six support structures reminiscent of spokes on a bicycle wheel. The center area was blocked from view by the glare of the nuclear pulse engine, but analysts were able to discern a protruding three-way nozzle that appeared to be a heatexhaust system.
The Torus was forty meters thick, giving it the same internal volume as three hundred jumbo jets or a small space colony. The interior volume of the Torus could contain an expansive amount of space difficult for three people to traverse in less than twenty hours. Considering how much larger the ship had originally been, it was likely that any remaining life-forms would be packed tightly, which raised Aki’s hopes because overcrowding implied that it wouldn’t take long for her crew to find one of the Torus’s passengers.
ACT III: JULY 25, 2041
THREE DAYS BEFORE RENDEZVOUS
THE
PHALANX
POINTED
its bow toward where Mercury would be in nine days, then fired its booster rocket at full thrust. The Builders’ ship was already inside Mercurial orbit, quickly gaining on the
Phalanx
from thirty million kilometers off its stern. There was some concern that orienting the propellant stream from the
Phalanx
’s nuclear engine toward the Builders might be mistaken for an attack. Given the great distance that remained between the two ships, the risk was assessed as minimal. Musing on the process in her cocoon, Aki pictured the
Phalanx
receiving the baton in a relay race, running ahead in the same direction as the person handing off the baton, ensuring that both runners would be traveling at the same speed when the runners met. Since the Builders were seasoned spacefarers, the prediction was that the Builders would ascertain that the
Phalanx
was attempting a rendezvous.
With the
Phalanx
’s engines pointed at the Builders’ ship, the glare made maintaining visual contact with the vessel impossible. In place of visuals, all major observational equipment arrayed in local space and not blocked by the sun became critical, even though the information arrived intermittently. The alien vessel continued to show no change in trajectory or rate of deceleration.
Thirty hours later, when the booster engines had burned their liquid fuel, the boosters and their massive fuel tanks were released. Once the engines on the main body of the
Phalanx
were fired and the ship’s velocity increased, the
Phalanx
pulled past its jettisoned booster unit.
“Wave goodbye to the most expensive piece of equipment humanity has ever built,” mumbled Igor, who had helped design and build the booster. “I should celebrate that I didn’t screw up. Going outside and exposing myself to radiation to fix that complicated booster would be godawful. As long as the Builders don’t eat our ship and we don’t get blown up by our own weapons, we’ll survive another day.”
Despite his lapses into negativity, Aki knew that Igor felt a part of himself had been ejected along with the booster unit. He was a man who liked playing to an audience.
Two days later, amid the gas from the engine blast, a white light appeared as the glare of the Builders’ nuclear engine became visible. The light looked stationary to the naked eye but was actually approaching the
Phalanx
at a frightful speed. The
Phalanx
launched an unmanned hound to see what would happen when a probe approached the Builders’ ship. Three days later, when the distance between the two ships had diminished to a hundred thousand kilometers, the UNSS
Phalanx
turned around 180 degrees to face the approaching vessel head-on.