John Sandford: Saturn Run

Crow stirred, as if about to say something, but then he didn’t.

“But not so incompetent that he couldn’t recognize a starship when he saw it,” Santeros said. “And not so irresponsible that he didn’t know enough to bring it to you, am I right?”

“The computer did most of that,” Fletcher said. “What he did was, he walked down the hall with a piece of paper in his hand.”

Santeros: “Okay, so what is it doing right now? This starship?”

“We don’t know. Not in detail. The best we can determine, it’s settled into orbit within Saturn’s rings. We think it may have rendezvoused with something. There’s a moonlet about there, embedded in one of the rings. Whatever that is, it’s too small for us to make out any details. We see a few flickers in the images, just pixels in size, which make us think that maybe there’s some activity going on there.”

“What about the moon it rendezvoused with?”

“We don’t know much about that, either,” Fletcher said. “The Saturn ring system is lousy with these little moonlets. There are hundreds of them, maybe thousands. Most of them we’ve never looked at in detail. This is a pretty typical one, dim and not perturbing the ring system too much, so it’s pretty small and low mass, not something particularly interesting that we’d be paying attention to.”

“Either that, or it’s something big, hollow, and painted black,” Emery mused.

“And that’s what you got?” A wrinkle appeared in Santeros’s forehead, which was not usually a good thing for people speaking with her.

Lossness spoke up. “Madam President, we’re looking across more than a billion kilometers of space and we just can’t see details that small. This thing is huge by human engineering standards, but on the astronomical scale of things it’s almost insignificant. If we hadn’t accidentally caught it in a calibration run, we’d never have even noticed it.”

Santeros nodded: “Which means that nobody else knows about it?”

“Very likely not,” said Lossness. “We know how big and how good the best telescopes in the world are, and what they can see. We still put more money into astronomical research than anybody else, we have the best instruments, and we got very, very lucky. There’s always a chance somebody else got lucky, but the odds are a thousand to one against.”

Santeros turned to Crow and asked, “What’s our security status?”

Crow said, “We’re off to a decent start. Dr. Fletcher told his working group that if any of them spoke a word of this to anyone, including husbands, wives, significant others, or any one-night stands they were trying to impress, he’d run them out of the astrophysics community,” Crow said. “He apparently succeeded in shutting them down until I got there. I rounded up the same bunch, told them we’d given this the highest military and civilian classifications, and if they talked about it, they would be charged with treason and executed. I was not funny about it.”

“Were they impressed by the threat?” Santeros asked Fletcher. “Shutting up academics is like trying to herd cats.”

“They were… quite impressed,” said Fletcher. “Mr. Crow scared the shit out of them.”

“Good. That’s one of the reasons he works here,” the President said.

Crow said, “I have to tell you, ma’am—it’s gonna leak. It’s too big. There are lots of Chinese working at Caltech and they are patriots. Chinese patriots. They are far beyond smart. Sooner or later, one of them’ll get a whiff of this and it’ll wind up in Beijing. We’ve got some time, but not an unlimited amount.”

“Give me an estimate,” Santeros said.

Crow looked down at his hands for a moment, calculating, then said, “Anything between tomorrow and a year from now. Unless something unusual happens, I don’t believe it’ll be close to either end of that line. If we put our smartest security people on it—guys who won’t go out there waving their guns around trying to shut everybody down and drawing a lot of attention because of that—I’d give you either side of a bet on seven months. Assuming that the aliens don’t call us up.”

“Huh. That… uh…” The President turned to Emery, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs. He was a mild-looking man wearing old-fashioned glasses, with short, sandy hair. He looked more like a college professor than a man who’d directed the early glory days of the Argentine Incursion. “Richard, what’s the military’s assessment?”

“Gene and I ran this past a couple guys at the think tanks, and, amazingly, people have already considered scenarios like this and looked into their implications.”

“Which are?”

“They’re pretty scary, ma’am.”

“Ray guns?”

“No. Bad movies notwithstanding, they wouldn’t need them. The geniuses aren’t scared by ray guns, they’re scared by the ship itself.”

Fletcher started, and muttered to himself, “Oh my, yes.” Vintner nodded and, surprisingly, so did Crow.

Santeros glanced around the room, settled her gaze on her science adviser, and asked, “Jacob, what’s making all of you twitch?”

“Ma’am, what I said earlier about how big this thing was and how fast it could go… If it ran into something, it would pack a monstrous wallop. You remember about that asteroid that hit the earth sixty-five million years ago, down by the Yucatàn, and wiped out all the dinosaurs? If that starship were to hit us at the speed we know it’s capable of, intentionally or accidentally, it would be like that. Worse than that.”

Santeros’s eyebrows went up: “You’re serious. That thing could wipe out all life on Earth? Just by running into us?”

“Well, no, it probably wouldn’t wipe out all life on Earth. Just the majority of all living organisms, and about 99.9 percent of all individual land animals. Most land species would go entirely extinct. We might be one of them. The best we could hope for is that we’d only be bombed back into the Bronze Age. That’s all assuming that the mass is what we think it is. If the mass is radically different—if it turns out to be a big hollow shell—then the impact would be much different. But we don’t think it’s a big hollow shell.”

“We couldn’t deflect it or blow it up?”

“We might be able to figure something out if we had a lot of time… but we probably wouldn’t have a lot of time, if it was aimed at us deliberately. We can barely see this thing at Saturn. If we got lucky enough to detect it right at that range… and that would be saying something… we’d have a little less than four days to figure out what it was doing, and to get ready for it. That’s if it never went faster than what we’ve seen. But we don’t really know how fast it can go—we’ve only seen it decelerating. So, if it could go, say, four percent of c, we’d only have a day to get ready. If it can reach twenty percent of c, we’d only have a few hours.”

They all thought about that for a moment, then Santeros said, “So, to sum up, the simple existence of a starship constitutes an essentially unstoppable threat to human survival. We don’t know how real or how likely that threat is. Is that correct?”

Everybody nodded.

“We need to find out,” she said.

White, the chairwoman, interjected, “Let’s not forget for a moment that whoever these aliens are, they’ve got some tech that we don’t.”

Lossness, the head of DARPA, said, “We don’t have it, but we can see it from here. A hundred years out, we could build that ship if we had the funding.”

Emery said, “That’s fine, Gene, but we don’t have it now, and that’s the trouble.” He turned to the President. “The problem isn’t with the aliens. The big problem is, if the Chinese get there first, they may wind up in possession of hard technology that’s a hundred years ahead of ours. In terms of soft tech, biology, chemistry, who knows? They could be a thousand years ahead or ten thousand years. That would not be good. You get advanced-enough technology, and there’s always a way to turn that to a strategic advantage. Always. Imagine the situation if the Chinese had our current computers, and we were stuck with a bunch of old Microsoft Inquirers.”