“No. We were badly damaged at the end of the war. The Orseggans saw this ship escape,” he said, “but they clearly didn’t know where we’d gone.”
“They’ve been hunting for you since,” I finished for him. Any question of who was the good guy and who was the bad guy vanished from my head. My allegiance was dictated by the fact that I stood on the defenseless ship.
“Yes,” he said, looking back at the illegible data. “Now we need options, not distractions.”
Anger and shame burned me, but he was right. What did a high-school physics teacher have to offer aliens who’d mastered physics to the point that their space travel broke all the rules as I knew them?
Unless.
Data I’d picked up from the morning’s internet space-weather blog to present to my students flashed into my head. They would know this stuff already, right? Or was it too much to hope that space aliens would keep up on internet blogs?
“Do your enemy’s sensors work the way yours do?” I demanded, meeting Carrollus’s hard look. “You told me you thought Earth was more technologically advanced than it is because of the electrical interference at the poles.”
“Yes,” he said.
“Would the energized thermosphere obscure your enemy’s sensors, too?”
A light went on in his face. “The Orseggans? Yes.”
Grisham was already shaking his head. “It does us no good—”
“Solar-flare activity spiked a day and a half ago,” I said, as if the old man hadn’t spoken. “The aurora should be lighting up the northern half of the planet as we speak. Take the ship down under the Northern Lights. Blind the Orseggans with neon.”
“Do you think we haven’t already considered and discarded the option as unworkable? Exposing us to the people of your planet will not get you sent home,” Grisham snarled at me.
“You’re smarter than I am. You have interstellar space travel. But this isn’t about any one earthly phenomenon protecting your ship. This is my planet. Maybe you’ve studied it, but it’s clear you don’t understand it or the people who live on it,” I retorted.
I turned to Carrollus. “Can you land this thing?”
“We can,” he rumbled, striding down the stairs to the center of the oval. He gestured at me to join him and brought up a three-dimensional hologram of Earth. “It isn’t a trivial task, and if I read you right, you mean to complicate it further. Give me details.”
As I descended to the pit floor, nerves fluttered in my stomach. I wobbled down the steps in my heels.
“You’ll be seen. The US military doesn’t like being blindsided. The phased array systems are going to spot us. I know of a few in Alaska, but if this solar storm packs the punch the data suggests it does, their communications systems will be useless. The danger will come from spotting stations south of the storm.”
“Beale?” Carrollus guessed, naming an Air Force base in California. “They’ll scramble fighters.”
“F-15s out of Elmendorf if they can get a call through,” I agreed. “If they can’t, they’ll move south until someone hears them. The fighters will get coordinates for first point of contact and a vector for our trajectory. Then they’ll fly into the Alaskan wilderness in the dead of night, in the middle of one of the hottest solar storms to hit in two decades.”
Carrollus flashed a grin at me that nearly stopped my heart.
“Meaning they’ll be deaf and blind.”
“Their navigation systems will go Tango Uniform,” I agreed.
Amusement and anticipation lit Trygg’s blue eyes. Okay. So he not only knew the names and locations of military bases, he understood my reference to TU. Clearly, he’d spent time inside the US military. What did that mean?
“Their communications will be dead, too,” I said. “Without radar or GCI to talk them in, they’ll have no hope of vectoring on the ship.”
“We’ll have to leave the planet surface before the atmospheric disturbance dissipates,” he said.
“The minute we’re on the ground,” I added, “you’ll have to power down the ship’s systems.”
“Are you mad?” Grisham barked, stomping down the stairs. “We’ll have no oxygen generators!”
“We have hours of air without them,” Carrollus answered before he glanced at me. “You propose we run silent?”
“To hide the ship from ground observation, we have to look like part of the landscape. That means no heat signature and no engine vibration,” I said. “Come into atmosphere mimicking a meteor. Leave behind some space rocks for the government types to find after the fact. You’ll get written up in a document so classified not even the president will see it. The official news story will say ‘meteorite’. To avoid casual observation, we’ll look for a wind storm. Preferably, a really strong one. We want blowing snow that will cool and coat the surface of the ship.”
“Physical camouflage?” Trygg said, his tone dubious.
“We call it hiding in plain sight.”
“It’s a recipe for genocide,” Grisham huffed.
Carrollus spun on his captain and snapped, “We have no shields, no weapons, and no other, viable ideas, sir. Ms Selkirk is trying to offer us the opportunity to finally stop running.”
Is that what I was doing?
“As Ms Selkirk has so charmingly reminded us,” Grisham retorted, “we drugged and kidnapped her.
What makes you think she’s remotely interested in helping us?”
I stared at him. “One: do you really think I blame every man, woman and child on this ship? Two: I can’t help but notice that if I sit on my ass doing nothing to help, it gets vaporized, too!”
“Finlay, what else?” Carrollus prompted.
I turned my attention to him. “Do you have a topographical map?”
A lieutenant with spiky brown hair and green eyes manned the table’s controls. “Lieutenant Vran, ma’am. And yes. We do.”
The map appeared.
“Can you make this section bigger?” I asked.
Carrollus reached past me and expanded the map where I’d indicated.
I hoped no one detected the tremor in my hand as I gestured at the image suspended above the black table. “This is an aerial topography map of the region where I propose you put down.”
Captain and commander came closer, peering at the lines and colors hovering in the air before them.
“Alaska,” Carrollus said.
Pointing out a broad swathe of the interior of the state, I said, “We’d aim for this region. Low population density, violent winter storms, intractable wilderness. There’s one added element in our favor.
Lieutenant? Do you have access to magnetic anomaly data? I’ll also need current weather conditions for this region.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The map lit up with color.
“Alaska aligns low population density with high-intensity magnetic fields at the mountainous regions best able to hide the ship. It makes landing trickier, because the magnetic disturbance will wreak havoc with shipboard instruments.”
“Our technology doesn’t rely on magnetic fields,” Carrollus replied.
“Good,” I said. “Earth-based technology does. Our navigational instruments are impacted by both magnetic anomalies and by the electrical noise produced by a strong aurora event.”
He nodded.
I pointed to a mountain range on the map. “Right here, we have both things going on at once. That’ll make life tough for anyone trying to navigate there, except us. Weather reports indicate winds in the region blowing snow and ice in excess of twenty-five miles per hour. That’s not as strong as I would like, but given the snow-pack reports, we should find the blowing snow adequate to our needs.”
The captain peered over her shoulder at the map.