They’d been the ones who spotted the food problem on Alwa. Who knew what they’d spot here?
Captain Drago dropped in from his bridge as the meeting got underway; Kris never held a meeting that didn’t have a spare chair for him.
Professor Labao led off by projecting pictures of both sides of the ravaged planet on one of Kris’s screens.
“This planet had been bombarded so heavily that very little of the original surface remains for us to study. In some places, the bombardment sparked volcanic eruptions that added to the remaking of the surface. About the only places not hit are in the low-lying areas that have been suggested as ocean areas although they present no evidence of water, liquid or otherwise, at the present time.”
“Is there any evidence of wandering clusters of asteroids in the system now that would put the planet at risk?” Kris asked.
“No,” the professor said. “We will be better able to date the bombardment once we are on the ground and have samples; however, at the moment, it appears to have all occurred in the same approximate time frame. The two planets nearest its orbit show no such bombardment in recent times. There are also no more than the usual number of orbit-crossing asteroid bodies than you would expect to find in any system. This bombardment appears to be unique to this planet.”
“An attack,” Captain Drago growled.
“That assumes intent not yet in evidence,” the professor said, refusing to rise to the Navy officer’s bait.
“Not an attack, Captain,” Jack said, “but an annihilation. An eradication. Way more than a mere attack.”
Captain Drago nodded agreement.
“We are developing our plan of study,” the professor said, attempting to regain control of his meeting.
“We have been provided with a most interesting set of devices for our ground examination. The engineers back at the Alwa fabricators have presented us with exploration probes used in the Old Earth system. It is part balloon, part powered craft, and all that is needed to transport a rover equipped with a laboratory for sample taking and analysis. This planet has just enough of an atmosphere to allow the balloon to support this kind of device during the daylight hours. We plan to deploy them from longboats, say cruising at ten thousand meters. When the balloon probe finds an interesting area, we will have them settle to a landing. The rover will do its survey and return to transport for the night. At early dawn, we will reheat the hydrogen on the balloon, lift them off, then the propeller system attached to the balloon will take the assembly to the next area for examination. A brilliant bit of engineering design, don’t you think?”
“If it gets us what we need to know fast, then that’s great,” Kris said. She’d learned long ago that if she gave the boffins the slightest chance, they would bend her ear for hours.
“Have you got anything to tell us yet?” Jack asked, ever vigilant to protect Kris’s body, or in this case, ears.
“We do think we may have found one thing you will find of interest,” Professor Labao admitted. Cautiously.
“And that is?” Kris said.
“This,” he said and turned back to the screen. Now it showed a view of deep space. There were the usual stars in the background. It was what was in the foreground that puzzled Kris. It appeared to be a long bar. Maybe a string. It had something at each end and a large sphere in the middle.
“What is that?” Kris asked.
“We don’t know,” the professor said flatly.
“Give me your best guess,” Jack growled.
“Hey, that could be a sling,” Jacques la Duke said.
“A what?” Amanda Kutter asked before Kris could.
“How big is that hummer?” Jacques asked the professor.
“We are not sure, but it appears to be several tens of thousands of kilometers long.”
“And is it in an orbit that intersects this planet?”
“Yes,” the professor cautiously admitted. “In say another twenty thousand years it would likely collide with it.”
“Right. I wonder how many of those were once sharing this orbit?” Jacques said, standing and going to peer more closely at the screen.
“So, Jacques, since you seem to know what you’re looking at,” Amanda said testily, “let the rest of us mere mortals in on the secret.”
“Okay, there’s a lot of guessing going on here, but we anthropologists do it a lot, professionally, and if we guess right, there’s a good paycheck in it for one of us. Anyway, here’s my guess. That’s a space sling.”
“A space sling?” came from everyone in the room, Kris included.
“A space sling,” Nelly said more slowly. “Yes, it most definitely could be one.”
“Quiet, Nelly. Let Jacques have the fun of telling us what he thinks he’s found,” Kris said.
YOU HUMANS WANT ALL THE FUN.
YES. NOW HUSH, GIRL.
“Pulling a lot of stuff out of a deep gravity well,” Jacques began, “is not cheap. Most developed industrial planets have a space elevator. A beanstalk. You want to lug up something big like a reactor to install in a ship, you don’t lift it in a shuttle, you send it up the beanstalk. It’s faster, cheaper, and easier. Designing a shuttle to take a battleship-size reactor is, well, just nonsense.”
“They understand the point,” Professor Labao said, dryly. Clearly he was not happy to have lost control of his meeting.
And Kris thought it was her meeting.
“So, if you want to drain an ocean or suck a lot of air off a planet, you do something like this. I assume they didn’t care where the water and air went, they just wanted it gone. You put this thing in orbit. That center bulge is a counterweight to hold it stable in orbit. The ends swing around the center. When one end is down, it scoops up water. I’d guess there’s a pipe that sucks air when it’s down and holds it until it’s up, then spews it out. The same with the water. It freezes as it comes up into orbit. When it’s all up, the sling throws it out, and it zips off into space.”
Jacques paused for a moment. “Tell me, Professor, is there a ring of gases around the sun in this orbit?”
“I don’t know,” Professor Labao said, stiffly.
“You don’t know, or you do but don’t yet have enough information to make an official, scientifically accurate to the thirteen–decimal place statement?” Kris said. Her temper was starting to boil, and she was missing Professor mFumbo, God rest his soul. Why hadn’t he stayed on the Wasp instead of spreading himself and his scientists around the battleships that didn’t make it back from Kris’s first run-in with the aliens?
Mentally, Kris shook herself. She knew she was heading into a black hole of her own making. Too many had died while she had lived, and, no doubt, too many more would die. If she continued to be the lucky one, she’d survive. The emotions boiling up inside her now would not make it any better for those she’d lost.
The professor just stared at Kris.
Jack stepped in. “Jacques had a good question. Do you have any evidence at this time of an outgassing from this planet being left in its orbit? If there was water, air, and other material on that planet, it had to go somewhere.”
The professor nodded. “We do have some evidence that this particular area of space is rich in nitrogen, oxygen, water vapors, and carbon compounds, including amino acids. We wanted to check these out on our approach to orbit before we said anything, though. I mean, why would anyone scatter this planet’s, ah, lifeblood, so wastefully?”
That left the room in a dead silence.
“When the Romans conquered Carthage, they sowed the ground with salt so that it could not grow anything and never recover from the defeat,” Nelly said, and fell silent.
“If someone really hated the people of another planet,” Penny said slowly. “If they wanted to make sure life never grew up again on a planet, they’d take away the air, water, everything. They’d pound it to a pulp, and they wouldn’t care where what they ripped off went.”