The Best Defense (near-future HFY) - One Giant Leap 02: Actions and Reactions
Carlos Perez
Date: February 29th, 2028
Location: (Temporary) StarTran Mission Control, Lubbock County, TX, United States
It was the moment of truth.
Carlos Perez had waited for this day for decades. He’d built his first prototype using whatever he could scrounge on a shoestring grant, but he’d used it to refine his hypothesis about the unity of gravity, electromagnetism, and the weak nuclear force; if he could just refine it to include the strong nuclear force — well, a Nobel prize would be nice, but he wasn’t going to be greedy. Mostly he just wanted to take people to the stars. Or just other planets.
That first prototype had produced a gravitational effect equal to 0.01% of Earth’s gravity. Not enough to be useful for his goals, but enough to get a lot more funding and even found his own company, StarTran. Sure, it operated on a budget skinnier than a runway model; but a viable reactionless drive, even one with only enough power to work outside Earth’s gravity well, was enough to attract both government grants and private investment. Including two billionaires wanting exclusive rights for their respective Mars goals. Fortunately, he had Stan playing them off against each other, which was part of why he had managed to . . . borrow a preexisting control room.
After ten years of development and preparation, StarTran was finally ready to test a prototype in cislunar space, far enough away from Earth to control for the planet’s own gravitational field. The test craft was almost in position. The gravity generator was ready to begin its charging sequence. The monitoring satellites were active and transmitting the live feed all over the world.
Which of course meant that if this all failed spectacularly, everyone would know it instantly.
“What the fuck is that?”
Stifling a surge of panic, Carlos checked the system readout from the test flight. Everything was normal. He looked around to see who had said that, ready to jump on him for scaring him. Today was not the day for sudden outbursts. Carlos didn’t know how many thousands of people were logged in and streaming already, and he didn’t want to know. Leave that and other media concerns to the people he’d hired for it. Well, that Stan had hired, technically. All he wanted was a simple, boring, uneventful test of —
“You seeing this, Dr. Perez!?” One of the younger techs pointed at the main monitors. “Is that . . . is it? I mean, is it?”
“Enough!” Carlos snarled. “We’re all excited, fine, but the only words I want to hear coming out of anyone’s mouth are science and engineering terms, not frat house swearing! Is that cl–”
He broke off as he caught sight of one of the main monitors, tracking a moving object passing through his test area. It was vaguely cigar-shaped, covered in odd protrusions and visibly spinning along its axis.
An object much larger than his prototype.
“. . . holy shit.”
Specialist Sarah Chu
February 29th, 2028
Peterson Space Force Base
“Listen up, people!” Major Schumacher’s raised voice cut through the chatter in the room like a knife. He wasn’t yelling so much as just shoving every other voice aside in that skill good officers always seemed to perfect. “The General’s on his way in, and he’s probably already on the phone with the President! Let’s get answers! Are we talking Chinese? Russian? Little green men?”
“The object has already left orbit.” Master Sergeant Harris adjusted one of the displays to show a preliminary track. “If it’s Chinese or Russian, I have no clue what it’s doing or where it’s going. And we can’t get a radar lock on it. Right now we just have the StarTran satellite feeds and ground-based telescopes. Visual confirmation only.”
“Have we got anything on it?”
Sarah looked around the room, but everyone else was as silent as she was. Finally, hesitantly, she raised a hand.
“This isn’t English class, Specialist!” Major Schumacher barked. “Spit it out!”
“Sir, yes, sir.” Sarah winced as she said that. Contrary to what movies often showed, the “sir sandwich” was not typically used outside of boot camp, and even then the Space Force wasn’t particularly uptight; she was just so nervous it came spilling out. “It’s definitely an alien spacecraft. Sir.”
Yep, couldn’t help it.
“Reasoning?”
Sarah looked at the master sergeant for permission; he nodded, so she moved to his computer to manipulate the display. “Look, sir. There are no visible drive plumes. No chemical thrust. See this? That looks a lot like –”
“The StarTran sail projector,” Master Sergeant Harris finished for her. The Space Force Orbital Control Center had been waiting for the prototype’s maiden voyage in just a few hours. It was more than just another civilian project to track for orbital safety; if successful, it would change space travel forever — and make the Space Force’s job both easier and harder. “Could it be a hoax? A way to drum up publicity?”
“Not unless they managed to bribe NOAH and the NSA,” Sarah pointed out. “They confirmed it. NASA’s still moving satellites to track. Amateurs were already set up to catch a glimpse of the GravTek prototype and they’re confirming, too. This is all over. Whatever it is, sir, it’s real. If StarTran could build that, they wouldn’t need the prototype test.”
“So why not Russian or Chinese?”
“I can get a better measurement from parallax later, but that thing is way too big to have been launched in secret, and it’s too big a project for them to build it in pieces in orbit without being noticed.”
“Even if they have some new radar stealth?” Schumacher asked.
“They’d still need rockets to get it off the ground,” Sarah pointed out. “IR plumes are easy to spot.”
“And if they have a massively more advanced gravity drive that doesn’t need chemical thrust to get off the ground?”
Sarah hesitated. It was impossible to guess that kind of thing; it was like asking if Santa could exist if he had a faster-than-light sleigh. At a certain point it was just pointless, so she took another route.
“Sir, if the Chinese or Russians could build something even half that size, they’d have showed it off already, never mind the gravity drive. If anyone could have one-upped StarTran or any other American company, they would have made a big announcement.”
“Good, Specialist. Keep tracking and let me know if you have any other conclusions.” Schumacher raised his voice again. “Keep an open mind, people! Little green men are not off the table! Now someone get me ST-Sci and find out what the delay is. I want the Hubble and James Webb on-target before the General asks about it, and if anyone gets uppity about messing up their observation schedule, remind them it’s for science!”
Special Projects Directorate, Main Centre for Missile Attack Warning
Date: February 29th, 2028
Location: Solnechnogorsk, Moscow Oblast, Russia
“Opyat‘?” Again?
“Da, General-Polkovnik. Opyat’.” Yes, Colonel-General. Again.
Joshua Collins
Date: February 29th, 2028
Location: A&M University, Texas, United StatesHelp support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.
The day had been insane. The news about the alien craft had taken over everything. Some of his professors had tried to insist on an orderly class, but everyone seemed to be checking their phones for the latest news — or trying to out-meme their friends. Really, there were so many memes.
His phone let out some New Orleans jazz. Josh accepted the call on his earpiece without looking at the ID. “Hi, Mawmaw.”
“Evenin’, cher. I gots a question for you.” Maw Gerty had a strong and unusual accent, a relic of a much older Louisiana than the one Josh had grown up in. It was part bayou, part Black English, part I’m-too-old-to-care-what-you-think. “I was tryin’ to watch the news, and them idiots is goin’ on and on about some kinda spaceship. I figure you’d be able to explain that kinda thing better than them talkin’ airheads.”
“Sure, Mawmaw.” Josh had to suppress a laugh.
Gertrude LeCroix wasn’t his real grandmother, but she’d helped raise him and taught him everything he knew about a kitchen, and she’d insisted on him calling her that. She was the picture of a Louisiana bayou matriarch, the unquestioned queen of an extended family so large he honestly couldn’t keep track of it all, and somehow he and his parents got swept into that umbrella just because they’d moved in next door.
She’d spent his childhood teaching him the importance of cooking, good manners, and classical literature, and she had a heart the size of the Mississippi, but she had one flaw: zero patience for the foolish. That meant she had no respect for reporters of any kind, especially after her name got leaked as one of the subjects for Project Mnemosyne. Josh didn’t know why she still watched the news, but his mom just said it was a generational thing; when Maw Gerty was a girl, everyone watched the nightly news. Josh had tried to teach her how to look up details online, but she said she had “no head for digital junk,” and “it’s easier to call them as know details.” Josh suspected it was partly an excuse to check up on various people without seeming like she was being nosy or hovering.
“The short version is that someone sent the biggest spaceship ever seen through the testing area for the new StarTran drive. Looks like it couldn’t be anyone on Earth, so that just leaves aliens. Which explains why it’s invisible to radar.”
“Wait, radar done go that far? Don’t that need air none?”
“No, that’s sonar. And yeah, radar goes that far. We can bounce radar off of Venus and Mars to measure how long their rotational periods are.” That had actually been a physics lab project the previous semester. “Apparently the entire ship is invisible in the radio spectrum.”
“I gather that’s a special thing.”
“Well, yeah. Stealth technology like that is pretty much a holy grail of military engineering. I bet people are really freaking out about that. Some of them even more than about the aliens themselves.”
“Then that just gone and made it worse, no?”
“Most likely.” Josh sighed. He walked over to his dorm room window, looking out over the campus. There was a lot of activity, more than normal. Probably a lot of alcohol tonight. Celebrations, at least to start. “People don’t react well to sudden change even if it isn’t looking like a threat. And if the rumors about abductions are true, then it is a threat.”
“Cher.” Maw Gerty paused a moment, as if trying to find the right way to phrase something. “You think this thing in my head be like to help out soon?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.” Josh’s eyes shifted to the darkening sky. “Depends on whether it works.”
“My maw done told me every day that things happen for a reason,” Maw Gerty declared. “No coincidences. Maybe she be right. She always was a smart ‘un, even if she didn’t graduate eighth grade.”
Josh smiled again. Maw Gerty’s mother had grown up in the height of segregation, and from all accounts was the first in her family with functional literacy. She might never have graduated eighth grade thanks to racist shenanigans with school funding, but she’d read every book she could get her hands on and worked those same hands to the bone to send her kids to good schools. According to some of Maw Gerty’s children, Gerty was just like her mother.
“Now, tell me, what’s goin’ on at that fancy school of yours?”
“Well, ROTC was canceled for tonight because of all the activity. There are some parties going on. I’m just in my room studying.” Trying to study, anyway. It was hard to focus, today of all days.
“You get a girl yet? What about that one you was talkin’ about last week?”
“Maw-Maw!”
“You need to ask a girl out, cher, or she ain’t gonna wait around. You cook her dinner, that’ll do her right.”
Yes. From all reports, exactly like her mother.
r/ufology_real
Date: March 1st, 2028
Location: Reddit, the Internet
Hot Topics:
> [Theory] Proof tehy sent the Wow Signal!
> [News] Collating All Sightings In the Last Month (READ POST BEFORE CREATING NEW TOP COMMENT)
> [Theory] They’re NOT green, people!
> [Discussion] Why Do You Think They Didn’t Contact Us?
> [Discussion] What should govs do now theyr secrets is out
> [News] Links 2 all raw footage, pls pin!
> [Theory] MEN IN BLACK AT LANDING SITE W/ BLACK OPS TEAM READ BEFORE DELETED!!
> [Theory] I calculated the rotation to get approximate gravity on the ship
> [News] Vatican collusion! I predicted this!
> [Meme] I bet I know what they expect to find at Jupiter lol
Cmdr. Olivia Wilson
Date: March 1st, 2028
Location: 10 Downing St., London, United Kingdom
“How did it even get close without us seeing it? It’s huge!”
“Space is still big, sir.” Commander Olivia Wilson, Royal Navy, resisted the urge to yawn. She’d been up all night with the analysis. “It’s not detectable in radar, so we’d have to be looking at just the right spot at just the right time. Which is what happened. Once we knew it was there, of course, we could track it easily. As you know, it didn’t respond to radio signals, but it’s possible their stealth tech makes them as invisible to radio as radar. It’s the same part of the spectrum, after all.”
“Where is it now?”
“Crossing Mars orbit, sir,” Olivia answered. “Still headed straight for Jupiter, so visuals are difficult, but we have it on infrared. The Americans are making the feed from the James Webb available to everyone in NATO.”
“What does it want at Jupiter?”
“Unknown.”
“Then what is known, Commander?”
“The ship is a symmetrical cylinder with various minor protrusions, which appear to be instrumentation of some kind. As you can see in these images from Hubble, it is slowly rotating along its axis, indicating that it is manned. Well, perhaps I should say ‘crewed.’ This section here –”
“Why does that mean it’s manned?”
“Because spinning at that speed in a cylinder of that size would produce between one-fourth and two-thirds Earth gravity. We’re having to estimate the diameter of the cylinder, so the exact amount of simulated gravity is unknown, but the only reason we can think of to spin like that is for the comfort and health of a crew.”
“If they already have a gravity drive, why do they need to spin it? Can’t they just, I don’t know, turn the gravity on its side?”
“There’s a physics problem with that, sir. In a nutshell, that’s only something that works in science fiction. Generating internal gravity like that would be like trying to levitate by lifting your own belt, which is why the gravity drive works in the first place. On the bright side, sir, it shows they have to obey the laws of physics.”
“I’ll take your word for it. What were you saying about that section?”
“This part is the only thing that breaks up the outline.” Olivia highlighted a section of the photo and zoomed in on a triangular element on the rear of the craft. “We believe this to be a smaller hull, possibly a landing craft. It’s unconfirmed so far, but this may have been at the center of a UFO sighting several days ago.”
“On British soil?”
“No, sir. This one was in Korea. We’re getting unconfirmed reports of possible visits in India, Brazil, Mexico, and the United States.”
“Wonderful.” The Prime Minister took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. “It’s a bloody international incident and the Yanks will insist on being in charge again.”
“Yes, sir.” Olivia remained noncommittal.
“Alright, Commander. Give me the basics. His Majesty will be awake soon and I need to brief him and the Prince. We’ll need a public address from them to head off panic. When I get back, we’ll have a full briefing with the entirety of the Cabinet. Ask my aide about a cot if you need it. You look like hell, pardon my saying so. Sorry to keep you going like this.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Xi’an Satellite Control Center (PLASSF Base 26)
Date: March 1st, 2028
Location: Xi’an, Shaanxi Province, China
“Wǒmen bìxū jiākuài wǒmen de jìhuà.” We must accelerate our plans.
White House Situation Room
Date: March 1st, 2028
Location: Washington, DC
“Well?”
“Definitely alien, Mr. President. The object seems to have been trying to avoid notice, but they screwed the pooch when they practically buzzed the StarTran satellite monitoring their new gravity sail test. The craft proceeded to accelerate to greater than seven times Earth escape velocity into the outer system on a direct course to Jupiter, and it continued acceleration until it was well beyond Mars orbit. Radar didn’t detect anything, but the James Webb’s infrared was able to track it until it disappeared in a flash of energy. No idea as to the cause, but it included visual, infrared, and radio wavelengths.”
“Analysis?”
“The apparent landing craft’s configuration matches viral videos that supposedly showed an alien abduction in Colorado last week. There was another one in Oklahoma, which also matches another missing persons timeline. A few other countries are reporting sightings around the same time, but it’s unknown if they included abductions. The mothership was able to get from Earth to Mars orbit in less than eight hours; for comparison, conventional rockets would take months, and the StarTran prototype might be able to do that in a few weeks, if it even works at all. Based on the ship disappearing from our telescopes, the burst of light and radio static may indicate a jump to a speed faster than light.”
“Shit.”
“Yes, sir. These aliens appear to have FTL, gravity drives that make StarTran’s prototype look like a Tinker toy, and radar-stealth technology far superior to anything we’ve ever dreamed of. On top of that, they’re apparently kidnapping American citizens.”
“No, not that. I mean, that’s bad enough, but why now?”
“Sir?”
“It’s an election year.”
