CHAPTER 2
Space Resources CEO Jim Moorman looked impatient and worried. Standing just under six feet tall, Moorman didn’t look even close to his biological age—which was seventy-one. Clearly the beneficiary to the best anti-aging treatments his wealth could buy, Moorman looked more like a man in his mid-thirties. His brown hair, only slightly receding, showed not a single sign of grey, and wrinkles were limited to a few minor ones on his forehead. It was those minor wrinkles that now stood out as his patience at not being informed of what his team had discovered was starting to wear thin.
“Okay, what do we know about this thing?” asked Moorman.
“And who have you told about it?” added a voice from Moorman’s right. The speaker was Space Resources’ Legal Counsel, Tamika Marsee. Chris knew that Marsee was good at her job and he respected that. Even if she sometimes overstepped her authority and tried to assert company control over his publications and speaking engagements, he knew she was just trying to look out for the best interests of the company. He respected her, but he didn’t particularly like her.
All eyes turned toward Chris. It was his team that made the discovery using his spacecraft.
“All that you are going to see was prepared by Chandra and me. No one else is in the loop. First of all, we know that it isn’t an asteroid. It’s clearly artificial. It’s what we call an Inner Earth Object, meaning that its aphelion is about zero point nine eight astronomical units. Its closest approach to the Earth’s orbit is about point zero two AU, and that only happens once in a dozen years or so. It’s shaped like a sphere and almost four hundred feet in diameter. It’s black, and from what we can tell, it hasn’t been there very long.” Chris paused to make sure Moorman was following him.
“Do we know who launched it? China? The Europeans? India?” asked Marsee.
Trying to be patient with those who didn’t have the technical background he had, Chris picked up his ’net goggles from the table next to him and put them on like a pair of old fashioned eye glasses. He motioned for others to do the same, which most did. Those who didn’t activated their corneal implants. All fifteen people in the conference room were now looking at a very realistic three-dimensional view of what appeared to be a black sphere that was barely discernible against the background of stars. The sun was not in view; it appeared to be behind the viewer, in this case the spacecraft’s camera, providing the illumination of the eerie looking ball.
“Take a look at the object and imagine a soccer field next to it. They would be the same size. No nation on Earth can launch something that large. So, no, the Chinese didn’t launch it.
“Now watch it as we get closer. The scout is designed to fly within one hundred feet of its target and that’s what we did.”
The image in the ’net goggles grew larger and larger until it was no longer possible to see it in its entirety against the backdrop of the stars. Instead, all one could see was a curved surface extending out of the field of view on every side of the viewer that at one time must have been fairly smooth across its length—but not anymore. Instead, the surface was marked by numerous craters and scorch marks.
“The object is mostly smooth but looks to be severely damaged. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say the ship was at one time a perfect sphere. But it looks like it’s taken some pretty heavy damage.”
“Could meteors do that?” asked Moorman.
“No. The meteor flux is mostly composed of relatively small particles. They could account for some of the much smaller blotches here and there, but these large craters had to be caused by something a lot more energetic than a micrometeor traveling at eighteen kilometers per second or so. Also, if you look closely in quadrant three, you’ll see extreme surface ablation. In my opinion, the ablation was caused by a nuclear weapon.”
“You can’t be serious,” exclaimed Marsee.
“Whatever this is, it was savagely attacked by someone, or something, at about the time our ancestors were walking the savannahs in Africa and thinking of moving to other parts of the globe. And that’s not all.”
“Keep going,” said Moorman.
“The object is mostly smooth, but every so often you can see relatively small hemispherical bumps on the surface. God only knows what they are. And, as the camera panned across the surface flying by, we saw this.” The goggle image now had an oval highlighted section, visible within the field of view of the camera as a circle with an iris-like pattern within it.
“Is that an . . .” started to ask one of the engineers in the audience.
“It looks like it might be a door or an airlock,” replied Chris, cutting the engineer off before he could steal his carefully planned dramatic moment.
“A door?” Moorman cocked his head to the side as he asked the question and peered more closely at the image.
“That’s right, but only a guess. Who knows what an alien mind might design into a spacecraft?” Chris replied.
Chris had just acknowledged the elephant in the room and was waiting on some sort of response. It was the moment of the meeting he’d been waiting for.
“Aliens? Space war? And now an airlock? Is this April first and I missed the memo?” The comment was from Jin Gearhart, Chris’s long-time, pain-in-the-ass nemesis who seemed to question every decision, request and idea that Chris brought to the table within the company. Gearhart, who had less than half the number of peer reviewed publications as Chris and who had never been written up in the journal Nature, was an unnecessary pain in the ass.
“I’m not kidding. We’re looking at an alien spacecraft for the first time in human history. First contact. This is a big fucking deal.”
The room erupted with conversation. Chris, feeling pleased with himself, took off the ’net goggles and sat them on the table as he first looked around the room at his colleagues, then directly at Gearhart to whom he couldn’t help but give a condescending smirk, and finally to Moorman.
Moorman, clearly fully engaged and activating his “CEO personality,” took charge.
“Chris, this is amazing news. I want you to capture as much data as you can about the object and put it into a holo-presentation that I can use when the news goes public. I assume the spacecraft is on-station and monitoring it?”
“Not exactly. We flew by at about ten feet per second to take these images and now we’re well past it. Remember a solar sail can’t really stop. You can’t turn off the sun. I’ve got Julianna working on a return trajectory instead of retargeting to the next asteroid. I haven’t filled her in and she thinks we just need more data to complete the assay. We should be back at the target in about two weeks for another slow flyby.”
“Tamika, I want to know our legal options and responsibilities. Can we claim it? Is there some sort of space equivalent to the law of the sea that allows us to claim a derelict spacecraft?”
“Yes, sir, there is. But those laws imply that the derelict is a spacecraft launched from Earth. I’m not sure about us legally claiming an alien spaceship that’s been adrift for a million years.”
“It can’t have been there for more than a hundred thousand years or so,” Chris interjected.
“How do you know that?” asked Gearhart, looking incredulously at Chris.
“Because the undamaged surface of the ship is still relatively smooth. It hasn’t had time to be pockmarked by too many micrometeors and it doesn’t have a noticeable layer of dust. It would be much more pitted and dirty if it’d been there for a million years.” And this is so completely obvious.
Moorman replied, sounding more than a little annoyed, “I don’t really care if it’s been there for five minutes or fifty million years. I want my property rights respected when we go public with this. Can you imagine the technology behind such a ship? I realize we’re likely to lose control over what happens next with this thing, but I won’t give up my claims without a lot of noise and, if it comes down to it, a lot of money. Make it happen, Tamika.”
“I’ll try.”
“And one last thing. Keep this quiet. I don’t want this to leak to the press or anybody until we have a plan. You all signed NDAs and I expect you to abide by them.”
With that, the meeting was adjourned and Moorman walked out. Chris took a deep breath, walked over to Vasilisa and grinned.
“Now you know why I walked out of our lunch date.”