Animus Intercept Read online

  "So what's the secret?" Zane asked.

  Horace dropped his racquet in the wall rack and toweled off. His ramrod straight gray hair remained unmussed.

  "Did you ever get a chance to take a closer look at Animus?" he asked.

  "Not really. We were more focused on the AI-ND issue and mapping a course." Zane looked at him. "Why? What's there to see other than a big-ass mass of rock?"

  "Nothing about its composition struck you as odd?"

  "It's unusually dense. Basically a pockmarked steel ball."

  "You notice the similarity to the moon?"

  "Actually, I did."

  "And we now know the moon's artificial."

  Zane paused in wiping his brow with a forearm to stare at him. "You're saying Animus is artificial?"

  "Stands to reason, doesn't it? Do tungsten carbide and tungsten-titanium alloys exist in nature? Not to mention chromium, aluminum, and cobalt alloys?"

  "I don't know. Do they?"

  "Not in the percentages they've measured. That's according to Ken Mackey in Materials. We go back a ways and I just asked a casual question. Also, it's got a strong energy signature. Either has a molten core or something else is going on, but it sure as hell isn't just a chunk of rock."

  "Did Mackey think it's artificial?" Zane was beginning to get an uneasy feeling.

  "He wouldn't say. But the way he wouldn't say it didn't leave much doubt."

  "Why wouldn't they tell us?"

  "Come on, ZC, you know the score. Need to know and all that rubbish. They don't tell us anything unless our lives depend on knowing. And sometimes not even then."

  They both glanced over at the opening door. A couple of dudes in gym shorts and t-shirts peeked in and ducked out when they saw who was inside.

  "Someone built a planet that fucks us up every twelve thousand years," Zane murmured. "Not very thoughtful of them."

  "You're forgetting it collided with another planet at some unknown point in the past, altering its orbit. Which blew the planet apart and did only superficial damage to Animus. Classic tennis ball hits steel wall scenario."

  "So if it's artificial, it's following its new inertial fate. But what was the motivation in building it in the first place?"

  "Who the hell knows? We don't understand the Zetis after spending years talking with them. Ditto for the Alphas. And they're practically human. God knows how what the Luminates or the rest of them think."

  Zane drew in the recirculated air, which was two or three degrees cooler than on his ship. "So if it is artificial, what does this change? The NDs still eat it."

  "What if something's in that world that doesn't want to get eaten? Could lead to a bit of indigestion."

  Zane raised an eyebrow. "We've already hit it with two Proteus missiles. You'd think if someone or something was there to object, they would've."

  "Maybe so. But if we're on a mission to save terra firma we ought to have all the fucking facts."

  The older man's voice had risen to a raspy growl.

  "No argument there, Horse." Zane paused to let his old friend simmer down. "I take it you didn't bring this up with anyone?"

  Horace released a disdainful grunt. "Can you imagine a faster way to get shit-canned from this mission?"

  "I see your point."

  Zane joined his friend in helping himself to a cup of water from the wall recycle dispenser. He was surprised how much he was sweating from three minutes of exercise in the cool air.

  "I'm sure it won't make a damned bit of difference," said Horace, reading his face. "Just wanted to give you heads-up."

  "I appreciate it." Zane tapped his chin with his racquet, a frown forming. "I could always ask them now. It's not like they could do much to us out here."

  "Be my guest, kemosabe. We may be out of reach up here, but eventually what goes up must come down. And I'm nearing retirement age, in case you hadn't noticed."

  "I figured you'd be up here another twenty years."

  "With all the NDs in my blood, why not?" Horace's smile soured. "But even if you're perfectly preserved, they still believe it's a young person's game. With all our secret advances, the powers that be haven't evolved much from the old ways of thinking."

  Zane nodded. "Sometimes I think technology has leapfrogged beyond who we are as a people. Even the technology in the outside world, which is thirty or forty years behind ours. It could take us another hundred years to catch up psychologically."

  "I've given up trying to catch up." Horse smiled. "I'm resigned to being a dinosaur. A dinosaur who flies to the stars and gets laid a lot."

  "HOW DID it go with Horse? Did you properly trounce him?"

  Zane opened his eyes. He hadn't even been aware that he'd dropped off in his "captain's chair." Keira Quinn settled down in one of the two swivel chairs beside him.

  "We didn't even get past warming up." Zane rubbed his face, waiting for his head to clear. "He had something he wanted to talk about."

  "Something you want to share?"

  "Horace had the notion that Animus is artificial."

  Keira leaned back from him, surprise glinting in her widened eyes. "Really. Why?"

  "The composition – too many unusual metal alloys – and it has a strong energy signature."

  "Huh." Keira's tone fell just short of dismissive. But then she was their chief medical and psych officer, not an astrophysicist. "We've hit it with two MAME missiles. If someone's inside, they didn't make a peep."

  "I know," said Zane. "It's not as if it changes our mission. And of course it's completely speculative. Should I even bring it up with the others?"

  "I don't know. Why don't you have Dan and Malcolm take a look at it? I'm sure Dan would have an opinion."

  "That goes without saying."

  Keira's smile barely achieved lift-off. While the soft-spoken Malcolm Anders was liked by everyone, Dan Mueller was not one of her favorite persons. Dan wasn't anyone's favorite person except perhaps his own. And he seemed quite content with that. Arguably, the most brilliant member of the crew – perhaps one of the most brilliant theoretical engineers in Space Command if not the world. Only forty-two, he'd contributed several design improvements to the fleet, and might be heading up Engineering at Nellis or DARPA if he hadn't made it a condition of employment that he be an astronaut. Colonel Hurtle had once commented to Zane in private that the higher-ups considered his talents wasted in Fleet service, "but their loss is our gain, God help us."

  "How are you holding up, Captain?"

  Zane glanced into Keira's knowing green-blue eyes before directing his gaze to the constellations beyond the port window.

  "I'm okay, Doctor. I was kind of looking forward to getting in some trout fishing when they dragged me from my Dad's."

  "I know how hard you fought for your marriage, Zane."

  "Did I? You know what's funny? I never once considered giving this up."

  "Men almost never do that. "Can you guess how many times I've counseled guys whose wives wanted them to stop?"

  "No husbands that wanted their wives to stop?"

  Keira shook her head and laughed softly. "I could count that on one hand. Maybe even on two fingers. When the husbands asked, the women stopped."

  "But not the men?"

  "A couple who were near retirement age. You almost wonder if there's a great social truth in there."

  "Men are selfish bastards?"

  Keira laughed. "A great social truth besides that one. Men are what they do, Zane. That's where they ultimately find purpose. They might love their women and their children and trout fishing, but only work gives them meaning – it's the true measurement of their worth. I have two medical degrees and spent five years studying advanced evolutionary psychology and I just realized this a couple years ago."

  "I guess I should be thankful I'm alone so I can find true meaning in my manly deeds," he said.

  "Well, I say thank God for you selfish bastards. Without you, we wouldn't be here about save humankind."

&nb
sp; "Does that mean you're switching teams?"

  Their gazes met. Her smile crimped.

  "What – do I look crazy?"

  They both laughed. Zane noted that a few of the crew was looking up, taking note. David Mallory's smile was half-smirk. You had to be careful about "fraternizing" with the opposite sex in front of your crew. Not a great morale-booster or mark of a good leader. In this case it helped that Keira was gay. They could be friendly – even best friends - without sparking rumors.

  "How are you doing?" Zane asked quietly.

  "You mean Maryanne?" She offered a slumping shrug. "We're still friends. All very civil. In some ways that just makes it worse."

  "I wouldn't mind a bit more civil."

  "Valerie will get there. It's not easy to be second-best in a relationship."

  Zane started to protest, but then sighed. "Would you give up your career for the right woman?"

  Keira snorted. "Not a chance. I wouldn't trade anything for being where I am right now."

  SPACE LATITUDES. Even though they weren't adrift in a windless sea casting horses overboard, that was how Zane thought of the long, mostly uneventful moments and days between departure and arrival on a long journey. No real work but systems checks every few hours and confirming they were on course and time and no unforeseen obstacles lay in their path, as reported by the probe that preceded them by several thousand kilometers. They relayed critical information back to Control, and occasionally questions were asked and answered. Calls home were prohibited. The mission itself was classified Cosmic – a raise in security ranking for every crew member – and with one or two exceptions, no family or friends had a clearing at that level. And even if they did, only one ultra-secure communication channel existed between the ships and Earth, and that was owned by USSC's Control.

  What remained was conversation among crew members, reading, gazing out at the stars through the fore and aft port windows, regular exercise in the Multi-Resistance Module or on the All-Terrain Treadmill. And plenty of time lying in your bunk at night alone with your own thoughts.

  Both craft had the capability of reaching Animus in days rather than weeks using superluminal drive. Hyperdrive, as it turned out, was not quite the smooth-sailing method of transport portrayed on Star Trek or in other science fiction universes. First, routes had to be meticulously mapped out to avoid striking debris. In theory, even a minute object could collapse a space-compression bubble and potentially either destroy the ship or shower it with lethal radiation. That effect increased a magnitude from subluminal to superluminal space-compression. Second, the amount of particle energy accumulated during hyperdrive increased in proportion to the time spent in hyperspace and was theoretically capable of destroying a planet or even a solar system upon disembarking from hyperspace.

  Another fun fact about hyperlight travel: people not in suspended animation could only withstand an hour or two at a time in hyperspace before developing nausea and mental fog that progressed with frightening rapidity into a life-ending breakdown of bodily functions. The cause was not radiation but some mind-bogglingly complicated physical shifts at the quantum level that Zane grasped only as a Schrödinger cat parable: a person, the theory went, became stuck in a kind of halfway probability state between existence and non-existence which turned out to be not a good place at all for conscious human beings.

  Encapsulation in a SAC (Suspended Animation Chamber) prevented that damage but exacted a cost of its own: hours if not days of disorientation and physical weakness upon awakening, with the small possibility of various medical emergencies, including stroke. Containable risks but not worth chancing for relatively short journeys.

  Someone tapped on his door. Zane ordered it to open, setting aside his tablet and sitting up as Dan Mueller and Malcolm Anders entered.

  "We looked into Animus a bit more," Dan said as the door slid shut behind them. "I'm an engineer, not an authority on planetary composition, but speaking as an engineer, the planet looks constructed."

  Zane motioned for his Chief Engineer and Science Officer to sit. Dan occupied the tiny room's single collapsible chair, Malcolm one end of his bed.

  "The immediate aftermath of the Proteus detonations and JFK Cruiser were informative," said Malcolm. "If I may..." Zane nodded. "PAT, show video of the first Proteus impact, including full spectrographic analysis as sidebar, enlarged."

  "Yes, Dr. Anders."

  PAT's soft contralto fell somewhere in the male-female spectrum, much like the name itself. The crew made a point of playing along with the myth of her few moments of sentience, referring to it interchangeably as "she" and "he." Mallory snickered that PAT might be transgender.

  A two-meter square holographic image of Animus from four hundred kilometers out shimmered into existence. A tiny dot of light darted toward the surface and bloomed into a white dwarf star. As the blast faded, they eyed the spectrographic readout.

  "Tungsten-titanium-aluminum present in alloy percentages," Malcolm announced quietly. "Exotic alloys that theoretically could occur in nature but only under extraordinary circumstances."

  "Maybe there's a way to make this simpler," said Dan. "Compare Animus's Ultimate Tensile Strength with the strongest metal alloys we can conventionally create, which off the top of my head is tool steel around 5 GPa. PAT?"

  "The outer layers of Animus have an average approximate Ultimate Tensile Strength of 6.843 GPa."

  "What's the UTS of an average iron meteorite, PAT?" asked Dan.

  "400 – 500 Megapascals."

  Dan whistled softly. "So Animus is an order of magnitude stronger than that. Stronger than our best tool steel."

  Malcolm was clasping his chin in surprise. "PAT, what are the odds that alloys possessing this UTS would occur naturally?"

  "Using my default Bayesian analytics, I estimate the probability to be .14 that Animus is a natural object."

  "And there you have it," said Dan. He was smiling but Zane noted a flicker of what might've been concern in his eyes.

  "PAT, will the composition of Animus affect this mission?"

  "No, Captain Cameron. Nanodevice Z98 can consume any known alloy."

  "Can you estimate the probability of Animus being inhabited?"

  "I lack sufficient data for a substantive estimation, Captain."

  "How about your gut feeling?" Zane smiled at Dan. "Your best guess based on what little we know."

  "Based on fuzzy implication logic, I rate the probability of Animus harboring any life forms as 3%."

  Zane breathed out in relief. He hadn't even known he had any tension that needed relief.

  "Our deep neutrino probe revealed hollowed-out areas in the planet's outer layers," said Malcolm. "Your assessment of that, PAT?"

  "It is virtually impossible for any planetary body to form without pockets and to be more than 95% solid, Chief Scientist Anders."

  "How solid is Animus as a percentage?" asked Dan.

  "94%."

  "What's the source of the heat signature?"

  "Its molten core would be the most probable explanation, Chief Engineer."

  "Isn't its radiant energy greater than can be accounted for by the molten core?"

  "It's large but within statistically acceptable possibility."

  "How would you explain that our neutrino probes have only been able to penetrate the planet's outer layers?" Dan asked. "In theory, we shouldn't have any problem in penetrating to its core."

  "In theory, yes. The most probable explanation, according to my knowledge, is the powerful magnetic field surrounding the core."

  Dan relaxed back in his chair. Malcolm was nodding, his half-smile tinged with relief.

  "Thank you, PAT," said Zane. "That's all."

  The holograph vanished. The three men regarded each other.

  "I guess that settles it," said Dan. "For now. Good call by Horse, though."

  Chapter 3

  NO HOLOGRAPH COULD MATCH the sheer massive presence of the planet hanging in bleak semi-twilight darknes
s before them. From twenty thousand kilometers it was so large that through the port windows they appeared to be sitting on it. Behind them, the sun wasn't much more than a pinprick - just enough to cast a ghostly sheen over Animus.

  Zane's gaze traveled from the holograph of the planet, its features artificially illuminated to full moon brightness, to the pale giant that loomed in the port window. Since synchronizing their motion with the planet's speed and sluggish rotation, they'd been analyzing it non-stop for nearly twenty-four hours. Several probes already dotted the planet's surface, including at the bottom of the craters left by the two Proteus missiles. Ship's telemetry and the probes mixed and matched data, which PAT summarized for their convenience. Nothing new emerged, as expected. The tests were all pro forma.

  The word arrived from Control that the next mission phase was approved.

  "Operation Pac-Man is a go," Zane announced. "Any thoughts?"

  The crew exchanged shrugging looks.

  "Bon Appétit?" Mallory suggested.

  Zane smiled. "Okay. PAT, is the AI module ready?"

  "Yes, Captain."

  "Then release the hounds."

  "That is a metaphor for releasing the NDs, sir?"

  "Correct."

  The crew chuckled.

  "Module launched. Contact in five minutes, 23 seconds."

  "Tell us when the NDs have reached surface and are operational."

  "Yes, sir."

  The five minutes and small change dragged by.

  "Module is decelerating to dispersal speed of one hundred KPH," PAT announced. "Canister separating from module three hundred meters from surface." A pause. "Z98 nanodevices have reached the surface. 99.997% are operational. Consumption and reproduction have commenced."

  "Keep us informed of any changes in their projected growth."

  "Yes, Captain."

  "Andrea, let's back off another twenty thousand klicks."