Saving proxima, p.31
Saving Proxima, page 31
“Well, we might could move it with some high-ex compound, but it would probably collapse the tunnel or whatever else is on the other side,” Dr. Carol Ash, the New Zealand weapons and power expert, explained. “We might could cut it with a plasma cutter, but that would take a very long time.”
“So, ‘no go’ then?” Jones asked.
“No go.” Ash shrugged. “How the hell did ancient people move something that big?”
“I’m working on that.”
* * *
“You want me to do what with it?” Cindy Mastrano, chief engineer of the starship Samaritan, exclaimed.
“I want to take the spare WECAV and set it up here. We’d have to focus the projector in one direction and we’d need a means of tuning it to the right mechanical frequency. Mikey will explain.” Dr. Jones spoke to a virtual projection of Cindy, who was floating inside the engine room of the ship working at something. Alma directed the viewer at the large stone at the temple door. “Here is where it needs to be. Mikey?”
“Right, uh, Alma, I can explain it from here.” Dr. Michael “Mikey” James, somewhat the polymath with multiple doctorates and master’s degrees in physics, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, mathematics, and metaphysics, grabbed the virtual icon and tilted the view toward himself. “Dr. Jones has a brilliant idea here. I’ve done some ion and electron microscopy elemental analysis on this thing and you’d be surprised how crystalline it is. There’s a lot of shock quartz—how that got there who the hell knows—and there is a significant amount of various forms of granite intermingled with, get this, bismuth. I also found significant amounts of copper, yttrium, and barium. Can you believe that? Hell, I can’t.”
“You think it is superconductive?” the CHENG asked.
“No. I dunno. Probably not unless it were supercooled,” Mikey replied. “But it is very specifically chosen or constructed, whichever doesn’t matter. I think it has specific acoustic-based metamaterial properties. I think we could use the Weak Energy Condition Acoustic Violator in conjunction with a feedhorn and hit just the right resonance with this thing and reverse its mass.”
“You mean, just like the Samara Drive engine block?” The CHENG raised an eyebrow, cocked her head slightly in one direction, and then let out a large exhale. “That would be worth trying just to see what happened. I’ll have to get the captain’s permission to drop the spare WECAV box down to you.”
“Can you do that, Cindy?” Alma asked her.
“I’ll go right now. Do you need anything else from up here?”
“I don’t know. Mikey?”
“Yes, we need some sheet metal, projector acoustic tiles, and a joint melder. I’ll send you specs and a list.” Mikey started tugging away at virtual icons in front of him. Alma pulled the camera back to her.
“You might as well add a ton of duct tape to that. I have an idea that this is going to look klugey.” She laughed.
* * *
“So, this works how again?” Commander Rogers stood beside the other Mike, the smart one, watching the operation. It had taken the better part of three days to prepare the equipment, but the other Mike and Dr. Jones were very excited about what they were about to attempt.
“Uh, right, so, um, the big block of granite there is like a bell. It was discovered way back in the year 2020 by these scientists from Columbia University in New York, I think it was, that if you rang a bell in the right way, and if the bell were made of the right materials, that bell would reverse gravity or maybe shield it, or maybe become a different kind of matter that falls away from other matter. You see, all matter in the universe falls toward all other matter.”
“What goes up, must come down,” Rogers said.
“Right. Universal Law of Gravitation; Newton came up with it centuries ago. This is known to physicists as the so-called weak energy condition or WEC. Science fiction writers and scientists trying to invent star drives and antigravity machines have been trying to ‘violate’ this weak energy condition for centuries. In 1901, H.G. Wells wrote a story about a material that did this, allowing men to travel to the Moon. It wasn’t until 2020 that it was ever actually accomplished in an extremely specific and complex laboratory setting. The Russian team that invented the Samara Drive figured out a way to build a big chunk of special material that, when rang like a bell in the right way, would really change the properties of the matter and violate the shit out of the WEC.” Dr. James came up for air, it seemed, so Rogers did his best to get a word in.
“So, to make a long story short, you’re gonna try and make a Samara Drive out of this rock and lift it up from the tunnel entrance,” Commander Rogers said nonchalantly as if he’d understood all along.
“Uh, yes, Mike, that is exactly what we’re going to do.”
“Why didn’t you just say that, Doc, and avoid the college lecture?” Rogers did his best to maintain a straight face. He couldn’t tell if Mikey was stunned, hurt, nonplussed, or just didn’t care because the scientist just kept right on directing the ship techs with what had to be done.
“Pank, get me another two-meter-square sheet of ZK60 alloy here and meld it to this one. The feedhorn projector doesn’t have to be precise. Centimeter accuracy will do. We can manipulate the air flow to fine-tune the acoustic standing wave.”
“Right, Mikey. Can you hold that other end? This is a three-handed job.” Pankish Patel looked up from his welding mask and tossed a clamp at Dr. James. Rogers had to hand it to the other Mike on the ship. The guy didn’t mind getting dirty and sweaty and working his ass off.
“Anything I can do to help, Doc?” Rogers asked.
“Just stand over there looking pretty, Mike.” He laughed. “Besides, I’d rather you be watching to make sure more of those damned screeching panther things don’t jump on us.”
* * *
“Alright, Alma, here goes nothing,” Mikey James said as he activated the feedhorns to the WECAV projector system they’d constructed in the middle of an alien jungle light-years from any decent laboratory or machine shop. Mikey looked at various virtual slidebar controllers in his virtual field of view and adjusted them upward.
“The ground is shaking; do you feel that?” Pankish slowly stepped backward from the device and behind Mikey a couple of meters more. “Are you sure this is safe, Doc?”
“Don’t worry, Pank. If it kills you, it will probably be painful,” Mikey joked. “Just in case, everyone get their safety goggles and hearing protection in place now. Starting up in ten, nine, eight . . . ”
“You know, Pank,” Dr. Faruq, theoretical physicist who’d come down to help, joined in the fun, “the first team to experiment with the Samara Drive concept spent the first two months in the hospital with extreme diarrhea from the affects the acoustic signals had on their intestines.”
“Seriously?” Pankish stepped back another step or two. Commander Rogers was ten meters behind that. “Doc? Mikey? Seriously?”
“ . . . three, two . . . ”
“Odds on nothing happening?” Dr. Faruq elbowed Mikey.
“ . . . one. Dr. Jones, maybe you should stand back behind the acoustic shielding,” Mikey whispered to her. He watched the frequency spectrum of the signal coming from the monolithic stone and at first was seeing nothing but white noise, then a few spikes here and there, but once the AI saw the spikes various tracking filters zeroed in on the right frequency mix and suddenly there was a loud gong, like someone had struck a giant gong with a hammer. “I think we found it.”
“Hey, I’ve heard that on engine tests before!” Pankish shouted over the now very loud rushing noise. The air around them began to whirl about with eddies and tiny dust devils. Debris blew about almost to the point where it stung the skin.
“Alright, we’ve found the right resonance. Now we are fine-tuning it and looking for the WEC violation to start. Hopefully, we can couple enough energy into the stone!” Mikey shouted. Then suddenly the rocks started shaking violently. Several small stones of similar makeup lifted from the ground a few centimeters and then shattered like a crystal glass. Shards of granite stone and white dust flew in all directions. The large monolithic stone made a loud gong once again and then the noise dropped to almost zero decibels of detectable sound. The monolithic stone began to rise from its resting spot slowly. As it rose to about three meters from the surface it stalled, fell back about a half of a meter, and then rose again.
“Shut it down, Mikey!” Dr. Jones shouted louder than she needed to. “It worked!”
“Holy shit! Did you see that!” Dr. James exclaimed. “You should’ve taken Faruq’s bet, Pank!”
The energy dropped to zero when Mikey had all the systems shut down. He double-checked to make certain there was no energy being transmitted anywhere and then he pulled his earphones off. He turned to the rest of the team with a smile of triumph.
“We need some big-assed beams to hold that thing up or something.” Mikey shrugged. “I don’t think I’d trust walking in under that thing while the system is on.”
“Somebody must have if this is how they did it to construct the thing,” Alma said. “The rock was floating, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Could we push it with a long stick and just slide it out of the way and let it fall to the side?”
“Why the hell not?” Mikey liked the idea. Simple was always better in his mind. “Pank! Go find us a four-meter-long stick!”
CHAPTER 52
January 17, 2100 (Earth/Proxima timeline)
Proxima b, aka Fintidier
“Commander Rogers, are the scientists close to wrapping up down there?” asked Captain Crosby via audio link, interrupting Mike’s discussion with one of the scientists about which corridor they should explore next. The team’s incursion into the now-open underground chambers was going well. They had been exploring, sampling, photographing, and otherwise cataloging everything they found once the stone had been removed—and it was a mother lode. They were not even close to being finished.
“Uh, no sir, we are not,” Rogers replied.
“Well, you might want to either wrap it up and come home or start getting ready for company. There are three large aircraft headed your way. We’ve been monitoring their flight since they took off about two hours ago. They at first appeared to be following one of the flight routes around the ‘forbidden zone’ until they deviated and began moving toward your location about ten minutes ago.”
“What is their ETA?” asked Rogers.
“At their current rate of speed, two hours and eight minutes. I’m sending the live radar feed to you now so you can track them in real time.”
“Thanks, Captain.”
“Commander, Ambassador Jesus would like to speak with you as well. I am patching him in from the basecamp. Here he is,” said Crosby.
“Commander, I just want to remind you that our interaction with the Fintidierians is in its formative stages and we’ve gone behind their backs, going to locations other than those they requested we remain within and, I might add, to an area that may well be considered sacred to them for some reason. Your presence there might be perceived as more than just a violation of the initial agreement as to where we would remain. It might be sacrilegious or worse. It is imperative that this not escalate into violence,” said Jesus.
“Ambassador, I hear you loud and clear, but I am going to do whatever is necessary to protect my team and the scientists. That’s my job.”
“With all due respect, your job is subordinate to mine, which is to establish peaceful relations with the Fintidierians and render medical aid to help them solve their population, dare I say, extinction crisis. It might be necessary for us, for you and our security team, to make sacrifices to preserve that larger mission.”
“I understand, but I won’t know what I need to do until I need to do it. I will keep that in mind, but you will have to trust me. I am here and you are not. Signing off,” Rogers said as he cut the connection.
“Major Maksutov!” Rogers called out.
“Yes, sir!” said the Russian, trotting forward from the encampment where it looked like he had been grabbing some dinner and, knowing the Russians, probably a bit of vodka—even while on duty. He claimed it made him more “aware” of his surroundings.
“We have some incoming aircraft, possibly hostile. You and Lt. Kenosha need to break out the antiaircraft missiles, light them up with the radar, and get ready to take them out. The locals are sending in some aircraft and I don’t want them to get anywhere near this base. The folks who like to chat are going to try to get them called off, and I hope to God they do. But if they don’t, then we have to assume they are hostile and we will defend ourselves,” said Rogers.
“Yes, sir!” replied the major as he began to sprint toward the pallet where the weapons had been unloaded. They had brought them because, well, “just in case” they were needed. Good soldiers plan for contingencies, even unlikely ones, because those are often the ones that might kill you.
“Major, hang on,” Rogers called out.
“Sir.” Maksutov stopped and turned around.
“Set one of them to fly ahead and above its target for detonation. If the diplomatic approach fails, then I may want to fire a warning shot before we take any of the planes out. They might just get the hint and save their own lives in the process.”
* * *
“There’s another one, and this one appears to be coming toward the basecamp,” said Crosby, relaying the location of what appeared to be another aircraft, similar, if not identical, to the one that brought the Fintidierian ambassador the last time. “ETA at the basecamp in just a little over an hour and only about fifteen minutes before the planes headed toward the excavation team arrive at their location.”
“I’ll get ready,” Charles replied. He was expecting something like this. Somehow their excursion to the southern continent had been detected and now it was time to pay the piper. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. How did they possibly think they could literally walk onto another world, move around at will, and not be found out? We have better tech than the natives and that made us arrogant.
With well over half the complement of Earth humans somewhere else, either on the Samaritan or the southern continent, it was going to be difficult to make their compound look fully occupied. He alerted everyone else in the compound to get ready for visitors and prepared for it being decidedly unfriendly, whatever that might mean. He took a deep breath and tried to put himself in the shoes of the Fintidierians, or the moccasins of the ancient Mayans, as he contemplated how he might explain their blatant ignoring of the requested isolation—and explicit Fintidierian request that they remain at the basecamp. He had hoped to plead ignorance, but with so many people gone, that would not hold water. He decided it would be best to wait and see why they were paying a visit rather than worry. Worry would do no good anyway.
In the perpetual twilight that passed as daytime for the locals, Charles could hear the approaching plane before he could see it. As last time, it roared its way onto the landing strip and puttered to a stop before the side door opened, dropping the stairs. Immediately thereafter, Secretary General Arctinier and her two protectors descended, looking not very happy.
“Madam Secretary, to what do we owe the pleasure of your visit?” asked Charles, fingers mentally crossed. He was alone on the tarmac, having thought it would be best for no one other than himself to be visible rather than a few, which might prompt questions as to their whereabouts. He found himself wishing the SEALs were among those who remained. Both Captain Crosby and Commander Rogers were tied into the conversation, listening via his ear patch.
“Ambassador, I am here to discuss with you the blatant violation of our sovereignty, and our specific request that you and the rest of your team remain here until the requested isolation period is complete.”
“Madam Secretary, I am—”
“Ambassador, please spare us the unpleasantness. We know that some of your number are in Misropos and we must ask that you have them depart from there immediately. They are in grave danger.”
Misropos. That must be what the locals call the keep-out area with the ruins, thought Charles as he carefully constructed his next few words.
“Let’s dispense with the formalities and get to the issue. Yes, we have a small team there investigating the ruins. We thought long and hard about whether or not to go—whether to ask permission or forgiveness. We opted for the latter. We are here to help you and unless we know what has happened here, your history as well as your biology, we might not be able to help you. And when I say ‘here,’ I mean everywhere on the planet.”
“Ruins? In Misropos? That is news to me, but what is not news is that unless your team leaves immediately, they may die,” she replied.
“Are they in immediate danger, other than from the aircraft you have headed toward them?”
“I suspected you would know about the military flights headed there. No, whether or not they are in danger from us depends upon how you and they react to our request, our order, that they depart. That area is strictly off-limits for fear of contagion, fatal contagion. It has nothing to do with our current biological problems,” she said.
“Madam Secretary, please excuse me while I confer with my colleagues,” Charles said. He stepped to the side and turned away from her so he could speak without being overheard. “Commander Rogers, are you getting this? She says there is some sort of virus or something there that you might catch. I’m thinking we may need to evacuate you.”
“That’s a negative, Mr. Ambassador, we cannot leave now. If there is a disease here, then it is too late. Given how long we’ve been here, we are all exposed. If we leave now, then we might still get sick and not have all the information about this place that we want. We can have medical check us out when we get back and isolate at the basecamp until we know if we’ve caught something. And those military planes are almost on top of us. Are we about to be attacked?”
