The thing about that: once you knew you were looking for a needle, metaphorically speaking, the looking got a lot easier. You could toss out anything that was too long, or too broad, or too heavy, or that wasn’t made of metal, and so on. The astronomers had some idea of what this needle would look like. It would only be a matter of time, working their way back from the present through the archived data, before they found it.
It took less time than anyone would’ve guessed. Knowledge of the discovery hadn’t just gone viral, it was pandemic. An enterprising grad student at UC Berkeley whipped out a new code module for the BOINC-XV crowd-sourcing research network.
The download demands for it crashed the UC servers in short order, but before that happened it was already mirrored on seven thousand sites around the world. By the middle of the morning, millions of amateur astronomers were meticulously combing through the fodder. In Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 12:23 P.M. local time, a bedridden comet- and asteroid-hunter named Jenny Wright found the needle in an astronomical haystack dated February 9.
So much for the DETI protocols. The news blogs carried every known detail of the historic discovery. Real information being nowhere sufficient to satisfy the insatiable monster, the news conduits were replete with every imaginable speculation and hypothesis about the significance of all of this. Most of it, of course, was ignorant nonsense, but that didn’t stop every crackpot from trying to claim his fifteen minutes of fame nor inhibit some willing journalist from giving it to him. It was all that everyone, everywhere, wanted to hear about.
The interest was so intense and universal there was even talk of canceling a World Cup soccer match. Just talk, as it turned out.
The official statements that evening from every major government around the world were both terse and vague. The one-paragraph press release from Washington summed them up: “The President is consulting with top experts and advisers on this unprecedented and momentous discovery. It is engaging her fullest attention. As soon as we have a fuller grasp of the situation, we will keep you fully informed.”
It was bullshit, but the public didn’t know that and the press couldn’t be sure.
Until the following morning, anyway.
It didn’t take a rocket scientist—or even an astronomer—to figure out that the surprise U.S. announcement on February 11, just two days after the arrival of the mysterious starship, about joining the Chinese on their mission to Mars and repurposing U.S. Space Station Three for interplanetary travel hadn’t been a coincidence.
Nor, for that matter, the least bit honest.
It was all over the AM news coverage. The White House had no comment. The more hysterical pundits talked of a major diplomatic rift between the United States and China, maybe even the possibility of a war.
Their apocalyptic anticipations were dashed by the Chinese government’s press release. It merely expressed deep disappointment that the U.S. had acted in such bad faith and that given that behavior, they most sorrowfully had to withdraw from any cooperative efforts to explore Mars, as if there had been any in the first place.
Private diplomatic communiqués were more heated, but what they really boiled down to, once the oblique language and the political posturing were stripped away, was this: “You had a big secret and you didn’t tell us.”
“You would have done exactly the same thing in our shoes.”
“Fuck you.”
That was the end of it.
The other world political blocs had more predictable responses. The European Union, the Russian Confederacy, the Conclave of African States, India, Brazil, even the United Central American States, a staunch U.S. ally, condemned China and the United States for “attempting to monopolize alien technology.” They decried their exclusion from the planned missions and demanded to be allowed some measure of participation.
The United States and China had identical responses to these challenges. They ignored them.
Space watchers noted that activity around USSS3 abruptly increased, while construction efforts on the Chinese Mars ship just as abruptly ceased. Presumably Mars was off the table for the Chinese—hardly surprising when they might find aliens, and alien technology, at Saturn.
Within two weeks, construction activity resumed at the Chinese ship, but it appeared to be operating in reverse. Based on the boost and flight profiles of the Chinese cargo ships and orbital tugs, they were stripping their ship.
Anything related to colonizing Mars—hardware, landing and ground supplies, living quarters, and support for a decent-sized colonization party—all of it was going, stuck in an orbital dump several kilometers off the ship. Security had tightened up massively around both countries’ missions, so good firsthand information was impossible to come by, but this much was obvious to any observer with a decent telescope.
The Chinese were adding extra tankage both internally and externally to their ship. More reaction mass for their nuclear thermal rocket engines. That meant more velocity and a shorter trip to Saturn. How much shorter was still anybody’s guess.
Externally, the ship would not wind up looking a lot different. A bit beefier, a bit stockier with the additional tanks, but still pretty much the same deep space cargo hauler, refitted for speed rather than capacity. A smaller crew, but with longer-duration life support. Nothing radical or unpredictable there.
USSS3 was another matter. It was undergoing a major makeover. Beams and spars hundreds of meters long were being constructed in near-station space. The main axle of the station was being extended two hundred meters and there were several major construction sites along the length of it. The Americans were assembling new modules and adding reaction-mass tanks. Unlike the Chinese mission, the station had never been designed for space flight; it was a lot harder to guess what all these changes would mean.
Nobody outside the highest circles of the U.S. and Chinese governments was entirely sure what was going on. The activities were taking place in total public view and complete public silence.
All anyone could be sure of, and again, it didn’t take a genius to figure it out, was that the U.S. and the Chinese were in a race to Saturn and hell-bent on making sure the other didn’t get there first.
The Chinese launched first.
14.
On the day before Halloween, the image of the Chinese ship filled the wall display in the Oval Office, as Santeros, Vintner, Lossness, and Crow watched the broadcast. The ship was impressively large, massing an estimated ten thousand tons. Originally called Martian Odyssey, it had been rechristened Celestial Odyssey for its new mission—to beat the U.S. to Saturn’s rings and to whatever the alien starship had rendezvoused with.
The Odyssey had been designed to be a cargo hauler, intended for routine runs to establish and support a Chinese colony on Mars. The ship could haul nearly three thousand tons of payload and deliver it to Mars in less than four months, with round-trips happening at year-and-a-half intervals when the Earth-Mars alignment was most favorable.
The Chinese plan had been to run it to Mars, unload the first colonists and colony supplies, stick around for a bit to make sure everything was working, and then make a slower run back to Earth. After six months in Earth orbit being maintained, refurbished, and resupplied, the Odyssey would be ready for another trip out. As dramatic and history-making as the first trip would be, Odyssey would then settle into a routine of unglamorous but vitally important cargo runs for the nascent colony.