Diamonds in the Sky (22 page)

“Reset simulation to starting positions and go,” Kevin commanded.

Again, the radiation lobe shot out from the newly-formed black hole and speared through the galaxy. One by one, each of the four systems
Procyon
had visited was tagged by the jet.

Everyone stared at the holo before Bob said with a deliberately-exaggerated Tharsis backcountry drawl, “Yup. There’s your problem…”

After the laughter died down, Pamela continued, “Let’s not relax just yet,” Dr. Mathews interjected. “Is that thing pointed anywhere toward Sol?”

Carmen eyeballed the holo and replied, “Not a problem. It’s in plane but fifteen degrees antispinward. The only reason we came across the aftereffects was that we were cutting across the direct bearing between Sol and the Coalsack to head for Beta Crucis.”

“Which would explain why we never saw anything from home space,” Kevin added.

Bob turned to Pamela and asked, “Do we need to stay around here any more?”

“No. Case closed.”

“Good. Ms. Sanchez, have Lt. DeMarco plot a minimum-time course to the minus four gradient and resume our previous course from there…” As people stood up to leave Bob added, “…but before you go…. I need to say something. You all have no idea how relieved I am right now. As a man of both science and faith, I will also admit to being … embarrassed. We’ve all been guilty of tunnel vision, ignoring an obvious answer for what we’ve witnessed, instead seeing Malzurkians, or worse, laying in wait behind every moon and planet. Perhaps it’s understandable, given our recent history, that we’re still a little shell-shocked. The irony in this case is that, consciously or otherwise, we were overlooking a force far more frightening than any alien race could ever be. This was never the action of any alien race — it was an act of God.”

Bob paused to let that thought sink in, then continued, “A wise man once noted that WE are all made of stardust. Every atom in your body was once in a star, and many of those were created in the cataclysm of supernova billions of years ago. But as we venture out into space, surrounding ourselves with increasingly more sophisticated technology, we’ve tended to forget how fragile our bodies, our race, and our planets truly are. The Universe is a very inhospitable place; and as we continue on our mission we would be wise to reflect upon that, and how rare and blessed is our existence. Dismissed.”

6 NOVEMBER 2191
35 LIGHT-YEARS FROM BETA CRUCIS

Kevin entered the bridge to stand evening watch and found Bob absently fiddling with one of his station’s repeaters. “What are you doing, sir?”

“Evening, XO. Just playing with Dr. Davies’ gamma ray burster sim.”

“Still? It’s six light-years behind us. Let go of the past.”

“You deal with it in your way, XO. I’ll deal with it in mine.” Bob levered himself up from his usual slouch and sat up straighter. “The ship is normal in all aspects. The watch was completely boring. We’re holding course and speed for system entry during midwatch tomorrow.”

“Boring,” Kevin mused. “Haven’t been able to say that for a while.”

“I know. I got so bored I seriously considered bending mission rules, foregoing the next stop, and ordering a course change to Beta Crucis from here.”

“I wouldn’t, sir. Our crew needs the downtime after the past month.”

“Hence why I didn’t do it.”

“So, still being bored, you then resorted to randomly sterilizing thousands of star systems throughout the galaxy by playing with Science’s GRB sim.”

“Somebody’s having issues about letting go,” Bob teased. He swiveled the repeater toward Kevin and continued, “I was actually playing with the initial conditions of the neutron star collision to see what would happen with the beams.”

“Anything interesting?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. Did you know that a difference of two kilometers in lateral separation during initial orbital capture yanks the beam fifteen degrees to spinward?”

“So?”

“On a direct heading to the Solar System?” Bob prompted further.

After a long pause, Kevin simply said, “Ah.”

“There but for two kilometers and the grace of God goes Humanity. With that humbling thought, I bid you good night.” Bob stood, stretched, and yawned before continuing, “This is the Captain, the Executive Officer has the conn.”

“Bridge aye,” the crew chorused.

“This is the Executive Officer, I have the conn,” and Kevin sat down at the captain’s station.

“Bridge aye.”

Kevin ran some quick status checks across the station repeaters as he got himself settled in the captain’s chair. He then looked at the simulation Bob had been running for a long moment. Curiosity fought with “letting go” and the more practical impulse to clear the repeater.

Curiosity won.

Afterword:

Comments from Kevin Grazier:
When I was asked to consider writing a science fiction story that also served as an astronomy lesson, my thoughts instantly bifurcated with both paths eventually re-converging to create “Planet Killer”. I had recently had lunch with Phil Plait, author of
Death from the Skies: These are the Ways the World Will End.
One of the topics we discussed, because wholesale death and carnage always makes a Denny’s lunch more palatable, was what would happen to planet Earth were we in one of the polar “beams” of a nearby gamma ray burster. “Nearby”, in this case, means “anywhere within the Milky Way Galaxy”. In short, life on Earth would be largely exterminated in less time than it took us to finish our lunch: a mass extinction that would put to shame anything that has happened in Earth’s history to date. As we discussed the gory details, I couldn’t help but think that the scenario was so dramatic that Hollywood has overlooked the ultimate in disaster flicks.

At the same time, my mind also raced to “I have got to include Ges!” Ges Seger and I met as undergraduates at Purdue University, and had written several things together over the years. Most notably, we wrote a script for the series Star Trek: Voyager that resulted in an invitation for us to pitch story lines at the Hart Building — the Star Trek offices at Paramount Studios. We work very synergistically and often come up with ideas and scenarios together that are better than what either of us come up with independently. I also really quite enjoyed the characters from his novel,
The Once and Future War
, and thought that it would be a whole lot of fun to let the crew of Procyon tell us the tale of a murder mystery of planetary proportions.

Comments from Ges Seger:
Kevin and I have been friends since we were in the same residence hall at Purdue University, and writing partners for almost as long. This generally means I sometimes have access to writing opportunities of which I would not normally be aware.
Planet Killer
was one of those opportunities.

About the same time Kevin approached me for contributing to the book
The Science of Dune
, he mentioned he had been invited to contribute to an anthology that would consist of science fiction stories based on specific concepts in modern astronomy and astrophysics. We kicked some ideas around for a couple of emails before he made the inspired simultaneous choice of both concept and story seed — an astronomical “murder mystery” which would serve as either a prequel or sequel to
The Once and Future War
.

As I read that email I realized that of the two possibilities (prequel or sequel), the prequel made far more sense. The backstory of the Martian starship Procyon, her first crew, and her first mission were very well-developed in my fictional universe thanks to an aborted attempt to write a novel on it in the early 1990’s. As I realized this, I got this vivid mental image of Bob Keith looking at a holotank showing the path of the gamma ray burster’s beam and saying, “Yep, there’s your problem.”

That’s when the Muse hit. Hard.

The first draft of Planet Killer literally wrote itself in three hours, spread over seven nights hammering away at a laptop between shuttling children back and forth to dance class. I was a bit afraid I hadn’t left Kevin much to do, but those fears proved groundless as we co-wrote/co-edited the second draft together and added a lot more material. Kevin and I just seem to mesh as a writing team in ways that I can’t explain easily, and that came through in spades as the final version of the story got hammered into the form you see now.

And truth to tell? It was kind of fun having him play in my universe with my characters and ships. No pressure, Kevin, but I hope we can do it again.

©
Ges Seger and Kevin Grazier

Acrophobia. It always hit him here, midway on the catwalk. He let his gloves slide along the guidewires. Within the bulky gloves his palms sweated profusely. Ahead of him and even higher up, the catwalk ended at the antenna suspended on the convergence of three sets of immensely long cables. There was nothing under the antenna. Nothing. Hard vacuum, underlined with a thin, curved shell of material that gleamed coldly in the downward periphery of his vision. He dared not look down. If he did he would freeze.

The antenna’s present position left too much slack in the catwalk for his liking. Every step caused a ripple to propagate up the catwalk ahead of his boots. In the confines of his suit helmet, his breathing sounded too quick and ragged. He tore his eyes away from the alarming frailty of the catwalk and fixed them on the motionless horizon, the tangle of crater rims on the dark gray edge of the world. The horizon reminded him that this was the Moon. It had only one-sixth of the gravity of Earth. Fact: the catwalk was rated to carry twice the mass represented by himself plus spacesuit. Doggedly he kept going.

The antenna resembled a large leggy spider, hanging upside down on flimsy strands of web. Appearances were deceiving on the Moon. The cables could easily support the antenna plus a work crew in spacesuits. Had done so during the construction phase. Making the structure sturdy enough for Earth gravity would have been over-designing to a ludicrous extent. Nevertheless, he was acutely aware of the vertical vacuum under the antenna, exceeding the height of the towering rocket that brought the first men to the Moon five decades ago. He made a quick and rather morbid mental calculation. You could stack one and a half Saturn Fives under the antenna.

His mouth felt very dry. And he detested the scratchy inorganic tang on his tongue. He could taste the gray indifference of this world. The acrophobia had never been this bad before. But then he’d never gone up to the antenna alone. At night. Stars, unsympathetic, icily burning, filled the black sky. Starlight thousands of years old rained down, and it pooled far below his feet. He resisted the urge to look down into the vast, cold, mesmerizing shimmer of it. People could freeze up here, in such a paralytic state of fright that somebody had to come up and retrieve them. He could, and probably should, turn around, go back to the habitat, and not mention this abortive excursion. No. Take another step, another, another: he was not going to let the acrophobia get to him.

This trip up to the antenna seemed to be taking a lifetime, as if the catwalk were as long as his life span. In a way, it was.

The catwalk began in the fifth grade, to be exact, with a report card that included a glaring D in Science. Bright and bored in classes taught by mediocre teachers to pupils of average intelligence, he had been indifferent to grades. But the D stung. The class started an astronomy unit. Reports were assigned, prepared, presented. The others read silly little pages about The Moon or The Planet Jupiter — childish, inept transcriptions from the encyclopedia. But he really researched his topic, at the public library. In front of the class, he drew a line down the whole length of the chalkboard to represent the electromagnetic spectrum; he showed them the small fraction of the spectrum taken up by visible light, and the far greater span of radio. He explained how radio telescopes revealed the invisible mysteries of the universe. He showed them. The next report card featured an A-plus in Science. And he had done astronomy ever since, from the backyard telescope to the vast machine on which he treaded now.

He checked his position. Fifty feet from where the catwalk ended at the antenna. The antenna was mobile within a volume of space of some hundreds of cubic meters. And when it moved, the end of the catwalk moved with it. Of course he had put the safety switch on. Hadn’t he? He should not have thought about that. He froze. The moonsuit had a radio. Maybe he should tell someone what he was up to. His throat constricted. He felt his motor muscles congealing too.

With an angry act of will, he started going again. He reached the antenna platform.

Then he let it happen, impulsively looked down, through the grate of the platform floor, and past the wide wheel with the azimuth arm hanging on it; down, into the crater full of radio telescope. The edge of it marked an immense circle like an inverse horizon. Triumphant and vertiginous, he clung to the platform’s guard rail. The last steps were the hardest. It was just that simple.

There had been dreary years of delay, constipation of funds, and design compromise. And then the last and hardest part. Construction. The fact that the site was on the far side of the Moon had amplified every difficulty, every mistake, by at least an order of magnitude. But now it was finished, real, and ready to be tested, first thing tomorrow. He had come up here tonight to make sure that one last detail was put right before the big day. As a manager, people said, he was too detail-oriented.

In the center of the platform stood a dog-house sized metal box which housed the equipment, which contained the detail that he was after. Making himself let go of the rail, he strode toward the housing. There was nothing to hold onto between the guardrail and the equipment housing.

Then he noticed the lights on the corners of the platform. They flashed a red warning strobe.
The antenna was being repositioned.
Shocked, he stared. It wasn’t supposed to happen with someone up here! But the structure slewed under his feet. He made a panic lunge, launched himself toward the equipment housing.