Chapter 3
“It was once said that if there was a World War Three, it would be fought with nukes. If there was a World War Four, it would be fought with sticks and rocks. We must consider ourselves fortunate that during the Third World War, nuclear bombs were not used. Not because of any sorts of honor among the combatants, but because of shear destructive power. Nuclear Research had accelerated to such a degree during the mid 21st century that any one modern nuclear weapon was too effective. The blast could damage neighboring allies, or in the cases of some European or Asian countries, the blast could end up having repercussions that came all the way into the country that set it off in the first place. It seems that the greatest savior of mankind was the arms race itself. If we had not improved on the weapons, and dismantled the older models, then we could have very well found ourselves sitting in the ruins of society.” – Professor B.R. Sandersen, lecture on the Third World War.
June 27th, 2157, 1630 Local Time
The Office of Colonel Jonathon Quincy Newton, ICOM, Bejing, China
Newton had called his command staff together again. It had been over 24 hours since the signal had arrived. More and more had been decoded. The truth of the Universe had almost in its entirety been laid bare to them. They now watched the wall-monitor as the Secretary-General made the announcement. Newton had wanted to keep the knowledge a secret for a while long but others in ICOM had disagreed. They felt that a controlled dispersal of knowledge at this time was safe to give out.
Newton had still disagreed. Didn’t they realize the implications this would have on society? The biological implications proving evolution a fact once and for all. The physical applications of the existence of faster-than-light travel. The engineering implications of architecture of orbital cities. The place where the earthquake would hit hardest, Newton had no doubt, was religion. How would they cope with this knowledge? Would the religions collapse, or go with it. No doubt the latter, as Newton himself was a religious man, but he still knew that there would be earth-shaking consequences to this action.
The staff stood in silence as the Secretary-General began his explanation on the TV, using the grace and prose that his speechwriters had written for him. As he went on, Newton realized something about Salieri. His body language, his voice, his tone. They all pointed to the identity of a man whose only concern was for his legacy. Newton realized that Salieri didn’t put much account into the actual implications of this knowledge, only the implications for himself. Secretary-General Costantino Salieri, the one who was there when the aliens made contact.
Salieri’s term was almost up, and it was doubtful that the aliens would show up anytime soon. Why prepare them for all this, and then show up when no one was ready.
They were still sitting there watching as Salieri dropped possibly the biggest bomb ever uttered in the history of the planet. We are not alone. The crowd broke out into a frenzy. Reporters jumped to their feet with questions completely overshouting Salieri even through the microphone. It was going down about the way one could expect. Newton was about to turn the monitor off when someone rapped on the door in a very non-reverent way. Newton, annoyed by the interruption made a gesture at Zamani to open the door, which he did.
Outside was one of the Senior Lieutenants over the government observational intelligence group. They used satellites. Watching the planet, watching the stars. The man was obviously panicked about something. Probably found some disturbing alien custom while sorting through the data. Newton wasn’t surprised to find that something alien had been discovered about aliens. Major Dubois went over to speak with the nervous Lieutenant.
The conversation was quite and short, but Dubois paused for a moment after a few words from the Lieutenant. After a few seconds he turned to Newton. “Permission to be excused, sir?”
Newton, now more than slightly confused answered, “Granted, but this better be good.”
Without another word, Dubois slipped out of a door. Majors Dubois and Garcia were the second and third in command behind Newton. They were fanatically loyal to him, supposedly having even gone to West Point with one another some decades back. They never spoke of their relationships with each other, but it was obvious that if Newton only had to trust two people on their words, it would be either Garcia or Dubois.
They continued watching the pandemonium on the monitor. By some miracle, the Secretary-General had managed to retain some semblance of order amongst the reporters, and now was at least able to be heard above them. He continued through with his speech as if nothing had happened, but he rushed through it slightly faster. He began detailing a few of the more significant finds while downplaying the less significant or the more threatening.
Dubois burst back into the room less than a minute after he had left. He looked at newton and nodded at him. “Sir, it appears we have a problem.”
Newton got up and followed Dubois out of the room. Garcia, Zamani, Roxanna and Saranya followed him out. All of them were thinking to themselves what it was that intelligence had found this time. They came into the main control room for Global Satellite Intellengence Command. A massive wall-screen dominated the far side of the wall. It showed a full-3 dimensional version of the planet as well as the location of all the satellites around it. A lot of the budgeting into the Sat-Com had been designed more recently. Numerous powerful automated satellites numbering in the hundreds orbited the sun at a wide range of intervals. They had been placed there not for some hope of watching for e-ts, but instead to watch out of meteorites in the region. This system kept track of several thousand solar bodies, each one capable of extinguishing life on the planet. It was also a very boring job. For anything to come close to the Earth was rare, and for something to actually hit it was even rarer. The majority of Sat-Com’s operations were directed planetside.
The planetside satellites could resolve a person in their back-yard picking flows in real time. However numerous government protocols prevented Sat-Com from doing activities such as that and instead kept them focused on watching for the occasional rebel faction or disgruntled insurgency. Even those were rare. However it seemed that Sat-Com’s long range satellites had picked something up.
The wall-monitor quickly switched to a location roughly 15 AU up-orbit from the Earth. Several objects were shown quite clearly moving in a pattern that left no suggestions to their destination. The display also showed several data-facts about the unidentified objects. Current readings showed that they were on a direct course for Earth and would arrive within 12 hours.
The Lieutenant was explaining to Colonel Newton, “They appeared about 3 minutes ago out of nowhere. Previous scans in that area, and even extending beyond that area back about 3 more AU, show there is nothing there. They are traveling at almost an AU every hour. It’s too fast even for an asteroid or for a meteor.”
“Well it seems that our friends may be showing up a bit sooner than we had thought before. How soon until they are in visual range?” Newton asked.
“At their current rate of travel, and with the current satellite locations, it won’t be for at least six hours.”
“Well keep an eye on it in the meantime. I need to contact MCOM as well as the Secretary-General. Things may be rushing out of our hands a little faster than I expected.” Newton walked off back to his office to place several more calls.
Saranya and Zamani walked off to go work on facilitating more discussions between the Colonel as well as the Generals in MCOM. Roxanna staid back, watching the display. It was still a relatively simple view. The satellites were watching for objects in the same way early planet hunters did. A simple eclipse of an object, a dimness in a star’s luminosity revealed things orbiting it. All there was on the screen was a representation of the solar system, and a box where the rough estimate of the objects were. Roxanna suddenly noticed something that perhaps others had missed.
“Lieutenant, could you turn the star-scape on for me?” She asked, as the Lieutenant who had brought them here was hunched over his desk writing things down.
He paused, but then did what he was asked. The stellar background appeared on the screen, covering up most of the background. It was far more stars than could be seen anywhere on the planet. In fact since Emmanuel Tam’s invention of the power-caster, seeing stars was more difficult than it ever had been. Broadcasting wireless power over the planet had the habit of generating powerful auroras everywhere covering much of the sky. All of these images were from high quality orbital satellites.
“Where did yesterday’s signal come from? Where was its original origin?”
she asked, looking at the monitor with an inquisitive look, one hand resting on her chin, the other folded across her chest.
“The analysts still haven’t figured out the planar location, but it came out of the constellation of Sagitarrius. The specific coordinates are…” he started, reading off a sheet of paper.
“Yeah yeah, I don’t care. What constellation are these objects coming from?” she asked, slightly distracted by plans formulating in her head.
The Lieutenant looked again at his charts. He stopped and then entered several commands into the main console. The wall monitor lighted up with activity again. The magnitude of the starscape dimmed, and the known constellations appeared on the screen again. A dot with a pulsing line appeared from another constellation. That had to be Sagittarius. The pulsing line started at an unspecified point and led to the Earth. The new objects were located roughly 60 degrees counter-clockwise from Sagitarrius. That constellation looked like a lbunch of random sticks tied together. Roxanna had no idea what it was, and asked the Lieutenant.
“That is Aquarius. It’s said that when the Vernal equinox occurs in Aquarius the planet will enter the age of freedom, technology and secularism.”
Roxanna stayed silent. New Age information wasn’t her concern. There was something about this that didn’t add up. She had remained suspicious of the intent of any e-t’s regardless of what they claimed, and thusly didn’t trust what everyone else took for granted. If they had sent a message from roughly the center of the galaxy, why are they showing up coming in at a perpendicular angle? It was almost as if… She paused. It was nothing. If they were really a galaxy spanning empire then no doubt they had fleets spread out anywhere. She shrugged it off and didn’t think about it for about 6 hours.
