She smiled softly. “Listen to yourself, Gordon. You’re talking about an alien rocketship. Even if I accepted your data, there’re still too many holes. What are the odds of our closest, truly compatible star having a decent solar system? And if it could support life, what are the odds they would be technologically advanced enough to notice us and come for a visit, a visit that would take nearly a century of continuous thrust if I’m doing the numbers right? How could they possibly carry enough reaction mass to make the engine work from there to here? And why wouldn’t they just send a message? That would only take 40 years round-trip.”
“Precisely! There’s no good reason for them to come here physically. If they were benign, they would call. If they wanted to just kill us, they wouldn’t ever have bothered to turn around. They could have cracked the planet in half with velocity alone and we’d never see them in time. So why are they coming here? That’s the big question. That’s NASA’s mission.”
She ran a hand through her hair, brushing its billowing strands from her face in her own matching frustration. “No, it’s not. It’s not because there is no alien ship coming here. You wonder why you got put in the crackpot category? Because the crackpots are the ones who’d rather believe in the unbelievable than consider things with a skeptical eye.”
“Damn it, Lydia! Where’s the imagination and wonder you used to dazzle me with? You and NASA have the exact same problem these days. You’re all so worried about conservative budgets and little missions, about appearing respectable and professional to the world at large, that you reject anything that has the air of the fantastic or unusual. God forbid the agency that makes science fiction fact take a cue from science fiction. Find me a scientist in there who’s read the “Mote in God’s Eye” and I’ll show you the person who should be backing me up.”
Lydia crossed her arms and regarded him quietly. She gave a glance to the sidewalk along E street and saw that the angry driver was gone. Shaking her head, she began to walk back toward the headquarters entrance, speaking loudly enough for him to hear as she left him behind. “I’ve read Niven and Pournelle, and a host of others. The thing you don’t seem to understand is that comparing your speculative observations to some whiz-bang space opera doesn’t make your case more believable. It makes you look like a fanatic who’s lost his touch with reality.”
Gordon looked at her in dismay, but hurried forward to join her. He locked eyes with Lydia for a brief moment, finally catching sight of the pity she now viewed him with. He wanted to yell at her, to tell her how and why she was wrong, but it was pointless. She was closed to him, his last bridge burned. “Is it as bad as all that?”
“Well,” she smiled. “You’re an idle-rich tech wizard with an over-funded amateur astronomy bug, so some eccentricity has to be expected, I guess. The tantrums are a bit much, though. Listen, Gordon, it’s just too crazy, too ambiguous, and too soon. No one’s going to worry about something ten light-years away and forty years down the calendar right now. But, if it happens, you may reserve the right to say ‘I told you so,’ and I’ll owe you a beer or something.” She held out his briefcase to him.
He took it and closed the top. This was goodbye. “Actually, I figure you’ll be proven wrong in about 33 years, what with 43 years to slow down and ten years for the light from the half-way point to get here.”
They reached the sidewalk along E street. Lydia came close and gave him a gentle squeeze on his arm. “Thirty three years then. Plenty of time.”
Gordon smiled tightly. He looked over at the two cars that had kissed fenders when he had thrown out the BlueROMs. The drivers stood by the side of the road, exchanging information and casting baleful glances in his direction. “No, not nearly enough time, Lydia. I don’t know why they’re coming, but if it’s to do us harm, we haven’t got a chance in hell of stopping them, not without the government’s support anyway. To face what’s coming on any sort of equal footing, we need to play catch-up in a big way. A single generation is way too short to do that, not without a little faith and a whole lotta luck.”
“I’m sorry, Gordon.”
He smiled back, the anger and frustration supplanted by melancholy in his eyes. “It’s all right. If the Air Force won’t have me, and NASA won’t have me, and you won’t have me, I can go it alone. It won’t be the first time. Take care of yourself, all right?”
Lydia Russ nodded and watched him as he walked away. He did not get far before his car drove up to meet him. The driver opened his door, and Gordon gave one last long look to her and the building behind her, then he entered and the sleek black car drove away. She turned slowly about, taking in the city, the flowers, the trees, and steadily increasing throngs of tourists and travelers.
Gordon’s car turned the corner and she smiled, her frustration and wistful regret fading away. It was hard to stay worried about so distant a threat as Gordon Lee and his alien rocket. After all, it was springtime in Washington DC.
2: “DEATH FROM BELOW”
March 29, 2031; USS Rivero (DDG 1004); Sea of Japan, 150 nm from North Korean coast, STLAM Launch Basket S2
In the dusking skies of evening above USS Rivero, the sharp boundary of the eastern horizon had already merged with the night, while to the west a wash of orange and red still set the water afire. The deep blue waters around the destroyer were empty, livened only by the occasional flash of a whitecap blown into spray by the chill, rising wind.
Lieutenant Nathaniel Robert Kelley, Rivero’s Weapons Officer, or Weps, nodded and turned the forward and aft cameras away from the scene and back toward their respective missile decks. Nathan, who sat in the hot seat as Tactical Action Officer in Rivero’s Combat Information Center (CIC), keyed his microphone. “Bridge, TAO. Captain, line 26 and 27 complete, no surface or air tracks within safety range and clear visually. Line 28 also complete, forward and aft VLS visually clear. Pass the word, ‘All hands remain within the skin of the ship while launching missiles.’”
“Tac, Captain. Bridge concurs. Passing the word,” came his CO’s tinny voice. A moment later, the announcement was made all over the lethal, elongated pyramid shape of the Zumwalt-class destroyer. Between the announcement, the internal net he listened to in one ear, the radio circuit to the Strike Group TAO he guarded in the other ear, another three radio circuits he listened for on speakers, the checklist he was completing, and the different tactical chat rooms he was involved with, Nathan was dividing his attentions between ten different, equally vital conversations, not including the internal debate on the impending strike package he also worried over. His ability to multitask was stretched just about as far as was humanly possible.
But that did not stop Senior Chief David Edwards from adding his own sidebar to the jumbled mess. “‘DDM’, Weps. What the hell does that mean?”
“I have no idea, Senior.” Nathan keyed his mike. “Strike, TAO. Lines 29 through 32 complete.” He flipped the page of his StealthHawk launch checklist.
Across the space, and in his ear, Nathan heard the young Strike Officer respond, “Strike, aye. Five minutes until primary package launch.” The CIC was one of the largest non-engineering spaces within Rivero. Fitted out with the standard light blue and gray bulkheads, a multitude of pipes and cableways leapfrogging one another through the overhead, and dark gray false decking, the space’s most striking features were the tightly packed ranks of bulky, militarized computer consoles through which the combat watchstanders interacted with the destroyer’s weapon systems and the world outside the ship. The dim lighting left only the monitors and large screen displays to provide their ghostly illumination upon the grim faces of the sailors, who were all dressed in either coveralls or Navy digital-patterned camouflage utilities. Each person was identically bundled in a thick blue jacket as proof against the cold, conditioned air, the temperature at which the combat computer system worked most efficiently.