Diamonds in the Sky (20 page)

Heater rolled her eyes. Cato was very good at his job, but in most social settings he had difficulty suppressing his inner geek.

“Easy,” Bob answered, “Because it was there.”

Heater couldn’t help herself. “Oh, you’re kidding me. You’re what Cato here is going to turn into in twenty years.”

Bob’s eyebrow raised.

“Sir.”

It was now Cato’s turn to be annoyed. “Hey!”

Bob raised a hand and halted both of them. “Early in
Procyon
’s design process, I specced out two separate designs. One was a fast battleship, and the other was optimized for long-range galactic exploration. You have no idea how surprised I was when both specs turned out to be nearly identical. As for our destination, a scientific advisory panel was given a choice between the Pleaides and the Coalsack as potential destinations for this mission. The panel, almost unanimously, chose the Coalsack.”

“But the Coalsack is 200 light years farther away,” Cato said plaintively.

“Distance was not a mission selection criterion. Scientific merit was, and the Coalsack was simply … more interesting … than the Pleaides.”

Heater considered a comment concerning the military merit of either destination but wisely left it unsaid. It didn’t matter anyway, as something on Bob’s wrist started beeping. He looked at it, made a face, and said, “Physical Training time. So that, boys and girls, concludes today’s history lesson.”

Cato stood up with Bob. “A pleasure, sir.”

Heater also stood. “Sir.”

After Bob had strode out of the wardroom, Cato said, “So that’s why we’re going to the Coalsack.”

Heater looked at the blast shield over the forward window. “Yeah, but we still can’t see where we’re going.”

17 OCTOBER 2191
230 LIGHT-YEARS FROM THE COALSACK

The planets were much easier to find at the next stop.
Procyon
dropped sublight half a second ahead of schedule when it hit the superjovian’s minus three gradient just before the K0 subgiant’s minus three gradient. After that excitement, it was a simple matter of scanning the plane described by both gravititation vectors to find the planet responsible.

“Beautiful system,” Carmen said as
Procyon
leisurely approached the gas giant. The planet itself had just enough methane in its atmosphere to add a bluish tinge to its white- and rust-colored cloud belts. The space around it was lit with multiple rings, two terrestrial-planet-sized moons, several smaller icy satellites, and dozens of icy “rocks”.

Bob looked at the main viewscreen, then did a double-take. “JEDI, zoom on the second moon to the left.”

The screen blurred, then stabilized. Ugly brown clouds roiled across the surface of the moon.

Kevin caught the significance immediately. “Woah. Deja vu.”

“Exactly, XO. Bridge to Science.”

“If it’s about the gas giant, we’ve noticed it and we’re already on it,” Pamela snapped. The uproar down in the main science lab could clearly be heard on the bridge end of the connection.

The entire bridge crew turned to face Bob.
Uh-oh…

It was Kevin that broke the ‘Oh, Crap’ moment. “Let me guess. The gas giant has the same whopping huge helium-3 line in its spectrum that the one in the last system had, right?”

Pamela flinched almost imperceptibly, relaxed, squared her shoulders, and started, “The commander is right about the presence of helium-3 in the jovian’s atmosphere, even if his use of scientific nomenclature leaves much to be desired. The gas giant also has a strong radiation spectrum consistent with carbon-14 decay as well. That would be similarly consistent with the methane we detected on our way in.” There was a slight pause before she continued, “Did you have something you wanted to report?”

“Um, yes. You might want your crew to take a look at the large moons when you get a chance. Their atmospheres may look familiar. Bridge out.” After the connection died, he turned to Kevin and with a raised eyebrow asked simply, “Whopping huge?”

“I panicked.”

“Given the situation, XO, you’re allowed. I want this ship on yellow alert two minutes ago. Equip all Remoras with deep recon packages, I want two in space at all times on a six-hour rotation. Nothing moves in this system without us knowing about it first, understood?”

“Yes, sir.” After Kevin relayed orders to the appropriate people, he turned back to Bob and said, “I thought you didn’t believe what we saw in the previous system was caused by enemy action.”

“I wasn’t convinced that it was caused by Malzurkians, XO. To be honest, I’m still not convinced it’s Malzurkians, even after seeing this system.”

“Well, if it wasn’t Malzurkians, then…” Carmen trailed off.

Bob finished the thought grimly, “Then who? Someone who could crush the Malzurkians like a bug.”

18 OCTOBER 2191
230 LIGHT-YEARS FROM THE COALSACK

“Remora Three, DSO. Docking clamps cleared and retracted. Confirm independent. Good hunting…” The Docking Signal Officer gave final instructions, and an editorial comment, to the departing Remora, “…and when I say ‘good hunting’, I mean I hope you find
nothing
.”

“Roger that, DSO,” Heater chuckled, “
Tom Servo
, departing.” She pulsed the Remora’s underside RCS thrusters to separate from
Procyon
, then spun the ship around to its assigned patrol heading and smoothly brought the main engines online.

When they were docked,
Procyon
’s four Remoras appeared to be mere streamlined extensions of her hull. Unlike their oceanic counterparts, these Remoras had much sharper teeth. They had an impressive assortment of weapons and, given the current situation, Heater was not afraid to use any of them. Something about this star system had their command staff rattled, and it was their job to find out what it was.

“Gotta agree with the DSO today,” Cato chimed in from the right-hand seat. Cato was the Remora’s WESO, the Weapons/Electronics Systems Officer. After his initial scan of the threat board, he continued, “Yo Heater, we got scads of moons here. Why do the planets and moons with air get all the attention?”

Cato got on Heater’s nerves at times.
Great, it’s gonna be one of those patrols today…
“If you want to scan the ice moons, there are plenty of ‘em. Knock yourself out.”

Cato turned the visible light camera towards a moon just entering into eclipse. “Aye sir. If nothing else, this one’ll be worthy of blowing up, framing, and hanging on the wardroom…” His words trailed off as the image appeared on his screen.

“What?” Heater asked impatiently.

“Wait one.” Cato tended to chatter while he worked. “I can’t believe what I think I see. The detector on this camera is sensitive to light a lot fainter than what the eye can see, but if I stretch the image…”

On Cato’s monitor, the computer-processed image clearly revealed a faint haze surrounding the moon. “Heater, about face! This moon has an atmosphere. It’s tenuous, but it’s there.”

“Thought you had a bug up your behind about things with atmospheres,” Heater chided as she brought
Tom Servo
about.

“You don’t understand,” Cato said, no longer in his normal “playful banter” mode. “Moons like this aren’t massive enough to have atmospheres, and when they do they don’t have ‘em for long. This means that something heated the snot out of this moon, and recently. Could have been a meteoroid strike, a stellar flare….”

“…weapons fire,” interrupted Heater.

“…weapons fire,” Cato confirmed. “I want to get multispectral images of the moon, I bet I know what that gas is. Mapping IR bands to RGB, and…”

“And?”

“Frak me!” blurted Lt. Perry.

“Frak? You’ve been hanging around O’Byrne too much,” Heater said. “Whatcha got?”

“See for yourself. I’m sending the scan to your monitor.”

Heater saw the image of the moon on her viewscreen. Exactly half of the moon appeared gray-white in the false color image, the other half a brilliant blue — as if somebody had sawed both a pool cue ball and 2 ball in half, and glued one half of each ball together.

“What do you say now, Heater?”

“Frak me!”

* * *

“Even today,” Dr. Davies lectured in Main Briefing hours later, ”scientists disagree on the ‘correct’ material state of glass. At room temperature it has no crystalline structure and will flow over time. On the other hand it’s brittle, will support shear, and is certainly very hard. Amorphous ice is similar in this respect: it’s hard, but lacks a crystalline structure. What we have here,” she said gesturing to the viewscreen, “is a moon where one hemisphere is amorphous ice, the other is ordinary crystalline ice.”

Bob didn’t like where this was heading. “So how do you turn one form to the other?”

“I’m getting to that,” offered Davies, “but bear with me a bit longer. The Remora crew first noticed a rarified atmosphere around the fifth moon. The WESO speculated, correctly I might add, that the atmosphere was atomic oxygen. A large pulse of energy, like gamma rays for instance, would vaporize some of the ice, and melt much of the rest…” Davies searched for a word, then just made one up, “… of the ‘pulseward’ side. The vaporized ice would be photodissociated into hydrogen and oxygen by the UV radiation of this planet’s star. The lighter hydrogen escapes the system rapidly; the oxygen hangs around a bit longer. That explains the tenuous atmosphere. We’re far from this planet’s star; it’s cold out here. The ice that melted to liquid refroze almost instantaneously, yielding the amorphous ice hemisphere.”

“Talk about being two-faced,” Kevin quipped.

Bob, on the same page, added, “Too bad the name Janus is already taken at Saturn. But why this ice moon?”

“Oh it wasn’t just one ice moon,” Davies said as she changed the display on the viewscreen, “
all
of the icy moons in this system are altered in this fashion.” On the holoviewer now was a computer-generated graphic of the planet and its system of moons, each moon displayed as a fusion of two very different halves.

“
Madre Dios,
” Carmen murmured.

“In fact, it gets even better,” Davies continued, “JEDI, bring up simulation Davies 13-bravo.” The onscreen image was replaced by a similar image, but with only 8 moons. “We determined the state vectors — positions and velocities — for each of the moons, as well as their spin orientations. We then eliminated moons with chaotic orbits or spin states, and then JEDI integrated their trajectories backwards. JEDI, run simulation 20 years per second.”

The simulated two-faced moons orbited backwards on the holoviewer. After half a minute, Kevin asked impatiently, “And we’re looking for…?”

Dr. Davies, in her best military impersonation, said, “Wait for it…. There! JEDI, pause.”

The simulation stopped. The amorphous ice hemispheres of all the moons were facing the same direction.

“Okay, that’s interesting,” Kevin replied with only a hint of nervousness in his voice.

Bob leaned forward and adjusted his glasses to try to read the frame index of the simulation. “How long ago was this, doctor?”

“About one thousand years ago.”

“Wasn’t that when the damage happened in the previous star system?” Carmen asked.

“Roughly, yes,” Pamela answered.

There was a long, silent pause. Bob finally said, “Two systems twenty light years apart receive the same types of damage at about the same time. Dr. Davies, please tell me it’s a coincidence. Lie to me if you have to.”

Pamela shrugged her shoulders helplessly. “A supernova or hypernova would explain the evidence perfectly, but we’re right back to the question Commander Sanchez posed the last time we discussed this. Which star exploded?”

“There’s always the ‘invincible alien armada’ theory,” Kevin offered none too helpfully.

“Show me how damage on this scale can be done to an entire star system by an invincible alien armada and I’ll consider it,” Bob shot back waspishly.

Bob and Kevin glared at each other across the table for a moment before Bob continued, “Ms. Sanchez, nav platform status?”

“Nominal. Recalibration should be done in six hours.”

“Good. Mr. Duncan, drive status?”

“Port drive check should be complete in twenty-four hours, barring the unforeseeable.”

“So we’re here at least another day. XO, can we keep the Remoras on deep recon deployment for that long?”

“Yes. I’ll need to borrow all our relief helmsmen so I can rotate my dedicated crews into rest breaks — with Ms. Sanchez’s permission?”

Carmen nodded, and Kevin continued, “If I have to, I’ll take one out myself and stand patrol.”

“Do what it takes, Mr. O’Byrne. Dismissed.”

2 NOVEMBER 2191
185 LIGHT-YEARS FROM THE COALSACK

“We really have to stop meeting like this,” Pamela said as both senior scientists and
Procyon
’s senior officers filed into Main Briefing. “Even my crew is getting jumpy.”

“At least it wasn’t radioactive planetesimals in chaotic orbits this time,” Kevin replied. Their previous maintenance stop had been particularly harrowing.

“Yes, did the science staff ever figure out what happened?” Bob asked, “They’ve had JEDI running some pretty extensive sims all week.”

“Staff agrees that the belt was not the result of a planetary breakup. What happened, happened to a previously-stable planetesimal belt. Even twentieth century planetary scientists could have understood the theory, if not the sheer scale, of application we witnessed.”

“That’s a relief,” Bob said as he sat down. Almost as an afterthought, he added, “Sort of.”

“How’s that, sir?” Carmen asked, “You’ve still got something out there capable of kicking very large rocks around like soccer balls.”

“Anything that could convert a planet into a planetesimal belt has to deal with its gravitational binding energy. For the Earth, the amount of energy works out to about a week’s worth of energy from the entire Sun…”

“How do you KNOW stuff like that off the top of your head?” Pamela interrupted with disbelief, “Some government program you can’t talk about?”

Bob allowed a slight smile to cross his lips. “Actually, it was a rather memorable homework problem in undergraduate physics. Fortunately, it looks like we won’t have to worry about that particular scenario.”