Johnny Winger and the Great Rift Zone

Johnny Winger and the Great Rift Zone

  Copyright 2014 Philip Bosshardt

  “We are given to the cult of personality; when things go badly we look to some messiah to save us. If by chance we think we have found one, it will not be long before we destroy him.”

  Constantine Karamanlis

  PROLOGUE

  SpaceGuard Center, Farside Observatory,

  Korolev Crater, The Moon

  May 2, 2110 (UT)

  Nightfall at Korolev Crater came abruptly, too abruptly, thought Percy Marks. He stared out the porthole of the SpaceGuard Center and watched the shadows drop like a black curtain across the face of the crater wall. Korolev was a massive place, fully four hundred kilometers in diameter, with stairstep rim walls and a small chain of mountains inside. Like a bull’s eye on a target, the crater lay dead center in the rugged highlands of Farside, forever banished from the sight of Earth.

  Percy Marks watched the black creep down the crater walls and ooze across the crater floor like a spreading stain. Somehow, it seemed depressing…another two weeks of night with only the stars for company. Cosmic grandeur, my ass, he muttered to himself. Give me a beach in the South Pacific and some native girls and I’ll tell you a thing or two about cosmic grandeur.

  Marks was pulling late shift today…tonight…whatever the hell it was. Tending the radars and telescopes of Farside Array, scanning sector after sector of the heavens for any little burp or fart worthy of an astronomer’s interest. The High Freq array had just gone through a major tune-up last week and it was Marks’ job to give her a complete shakedown for the next few days.

  At the moment, she was boresighted to some distant gamma-ray sources somewhere in Pegasus…where exactly he’d forgotten.

  Marks took one last look out the nearest porthole and begrudged the final wisps of daylight before Farside was fully enveloped in the nightfall. At that same moment, he heard a beeping from his console and turned his attention back to the array controls.

  What the hell…

  Percy Marks looked over his boards, controlling the positioning of the great radars out on the crater floor and the optical and radio telescopes that accompanied them. He quickly pinpointed the source of the beeping…Nodes 20 through 24…the south lateral array…was picking up some anomaly.

  He massaged the controls and tried to focus the array better, get better resolution on the target. SpaceGuard didn’t beep without reason.

  A quick perusal made the hairs on the back of Percy Marks’ neck stand up. The system displayed a list of likely targets, based on radar imaging and known ephemerides. He scanned the list, mumbling the details to himself.

  “ Hmmm….right ascension 22 degrees, 57 minutes, 28 seconds. Declination 20 degrees, 46 minutes, 8 seconds---“ Just as he was about to consult the catalog, SpaceGuard threw up a star map.

  It was 51 Pegasi, in Pegasus. Over fifty light years away. A point source of energy had just spiked. Probably a gamma ray burster….

  Marks studied the details. “This one’s a doozy--“ his fingers played over the keyboard, bringing all of Farside’s instruments to bear on the new source. The energy spike was showing up in all bands now: X-ray, gamma ray, infrared, even optical.

  He stared for a moment at the brief flare that erupted on the screen in front of him. Must be one hell of a source.

  Before he could decide what to do next, Marks was interrupted by the sound of a door opening…it was Max Lane, the shift supervisor.

  “I heard SpaceGuard got something--“ Lane was short, big moustache, squat legs of a former weightlifter, now going soft in the Moon’s sixth-g.

  Marks showed him the readings. “I’ve got it designated Delta P. Big sucker, too. Blasting out on all bands. See for yourself.”

  Lane examined all Farside’s instruments. Whatever it was, Delta P was a big gamma producer. He twiddled with his moustache for a moment. “Maybe we got us a micro black hole. You know, Westerlund had that theory--black holes evaporating, Hawking radiation, and all that-stuff“

  Marks nodded. “I’ll pull up the spectra, see what kind of match we get.” The astronomer massaged the keyboard, calling up spectrographic profiles of presumed black hole radiation sources.

  “Anything in this sector before?”

  “Nada,” Marks told him. “51 Pegasi’s been dead as a doorstop for years. How many planets is it supposed to have now?”

  “Last I heard, at least two or three Jupiter-sized places. Check Planet-Finder…maybe we ought to run a radial velocity scan…see if anything’s happened in the neighborhood.”

  They put SpaceGuard to work and the results came back in less than an hour. Marks superimposed the current velocity scan over the last one Planet-Finder had made a decade before.

  Lane shook his head. “I don’t get it. Something’s missing--“ He fingered the absorption lines on the screen. “Should be a tick right there…that was supposed to be where 51 Pegasi B…,what was it called?…”

  “Bellerophon, I think--“

  “Yeah, that’s it. Wasn’t it here?”

  Marks swallowed. “Maybe the whole shebang got swallowed. Maybe a micro black hole ate it.”

  Lane stood up and went over to a porthole, which gave onto a constricted view of the nearest arrays of the Submillimeter Interferometer, and a shadowy backdrop of Korolev crater’s steep craggy walls beyond. A triangle of blazing sunlight still illuminated the upper rim, last gasp of the lunar day.

  “Maybe--“Lane shook his head, turned back to the consoles. “But 51 Pegasi’s been quiet for years…SpaceGuard’s not showing anything. Now, all of a sudden, BLAM! Energy spikes in all over the place. We should have seen something before…rising X-ray, rising gamma levels, something. Black holes don’t just appear out of nowhere.”

  Marks shrugged, staring at the velocity scans superimposed on each other. “If it’s not a micro, then what is it? What eats a whole planet?”

  The two astronomers both had the same thought at the same time.

  “Remember that report from UNISPACE a year ago?” Marks asked. “The one that speculated what effects we’d see if a massive nanobotic swarm starting plowing through dust and gas fields…and planets. What the absorption spectra might look like.”

  Lane nodded. “It was science fiction…just pure speculation, that’s all. I didn’t buy it then and I’m not buying it now. Go ahead, Marks, call it up. You’ll see. Run the spectra from UNISPACE against what we’ve got here. I’m betting Delta P’s nothing more than a garden-variety micro black hole.”

  Marks hunted in the database for the report and displayed the spectra against SpaceGuard’s results. Not a perfect match, but both men could see there were similarities.

  Lane shrugged. “Doesn’t mean a thing, Marks. It’s statistically insignificant. Run Statcheck…you’ll see what I mean.”

  Marks hesitated before running the statistical routine. “You really want to do this, Max? What if Statcheck shows significance? How do we explain that?”

  Lane ran a hand through his thinning hair. “We’ll make the numbers work out. This UNISPACE report is bunk…you know it and I know it. What do you want me to do: put out an alert: ‘Hey, guys, the Old Ones have arrived at 51 Pegasi and the Mother Swarm’s eating up all the planets.’ I don’t think so. I value my career too much. No, let’s get all the data we can and set up a vidcon. There’s some kind of weird anomaly going on out there, one with a perfectly reasonable explanation. We just have to find it. “

  Percy Marks started saving all of SpaceGuard’s data to a file called 51 Pegasi Anomaly.

  It was just before daw
n, right after the first call to prayer, that the initial tremors hit the city of Tabriz. The first tremor, a rupture along a twenty-mile strike-slip fault near the boundary of the Eurasian and Arabian tectonic plates, radiated out from the epicenter at six kilometers per second, engulfing all of northern Iran, Iraq and the southern Caucasus in seconds. Tabriz felt the first of the P-wave pressure shocks moments later, at an energy level initially estimated to exceed magnitude 8.

  In less than two minutes, much of the city was a pile of smoldering rubble. Jason Ernst, one of two Solnet reporters aboard Liftbird One, saw the alert coming in from UNIFORCE stations across the Middle East. Jesus H. Christ, this is a big one. He got on the voicelink, consulted with his editors in London, and inside of a minute, the lifter was winging its way northeast from its racetrack monitoring orbit near Cairo. The bird was in Iranian airspace in half an hour and before they could even descend to proper altitude, he’d already toggled two dronecams to launch, punching out of their capsules into turbulent, dust-laden air toward the ruins of the city.

  What he saw on the vidlink chilled him to the bone.

  The first dronecam, nicknamed Pigeon by the Liftbird crew, barreled in on the Pasdaran Expressway angling along the northern flanks of the city. It dived below the cables of the Eynali chairlifts and skirted the foothills of Yousef Mountain, before turning southwest into the heart of the city. Ernst consulted a map of the area and joysticked the dronecam to a course along Mardan Street, heading right for the Grand Bazaar and the Blue Mosque. Everywhere the dronecam turned, the scene was the same: piles of rubble, fires burning out of control, soot, ash and dust thick and billowing from collapsed buildings. And the people, thousands of people milling in the streets, running, stumbling. And then he saw the bodies, already being stacked like firewood outside.

  “Jeez, great vid!” he exclaimed to his colleague, Anna Kolchinova, who manned the other dronecam at her own console. “Edit can add sound effects and graphics later…just get the raw feed now--“

  “I’m heading down this street--“ she squinted at the nav header on the screen, “--says it’s Khayyam Street. Look at those buildings--“ The vidlink from the dronecam autofocused on two ten-story apartment buildings, leaning like drunken sailors against each other…their foundations nearly destroyed. “Hope there aren’t too many casualties from that--“

  The dronecams circled central Tabriz like vultures, zooming in on dramatic scenes of rescue and fierce gas-fueled fires raging out of control.

  It was the Blue Mosque, hard off Khaqani Park near the Grand Bazaar, that drew a faint gasp from both of them. Now obscured in dust, the dome had fallen in, like a cracked eggshell and scores of people milled aimlessly like ants inside. Toppled statues and overturned lorries littered the streets around the park, thick with rubble, water spray from burst water mains, scores of fires and smothering the whole area in thick, turbid, choking dust.

  “Better not go any lower…” Ernst decided. Power lines and cables drooped low and he didn’t want the dronecam to become snagged. He commanded Pigeon to gain altitude and was about to head further south toward the ruins of Takhti Stadium when Anna waved to get his attention.

  “Jason…look…look at that building over there--“ she pointed to her vidfeed, The second dronecam had been nicknamed Sparrow by the Liftbird crew and Anna had piloted the bird

  along Farabi Street, heading in the general direction of Tabriz University and its once-ornate mosque. Along the street, where the road crested a hill, an office building had imploded into a dusty mound of brick and rubble, hovering over a narrow chasm that had opened up on the far side of the hill. The remaining shell of the building leaned toward the chasm and seemed in danger of falling right into the newly formed gorge. Worse, dozens of people were caught clinging to the skeleton of the building frame, stuck like flies in a spiderweb of girders, and rebar. It seemed at any moment, the remaining frame would topple over and spill all its survivors right into the chasm.

  Ernst got up and came over to Anna’s station to watch. “Christ, they’re trapped…and is that fire inside the dust cloud--?”

  A flickering fog had formed around the mouth of the fissure. Streaked with pops and flashes of light, the fog did not cover any fires. Nothing burned among the rubble piles on the ground.

  “Maybe some kind of lightning?” Anna suggested. “Let’s get closer.” She steered Sparrow lower and zoomed in on the glowing fog, now billowing out of the ground fissure in great sheets. The fog spread and flowed over the hill, over the rubble, enveloping everything. Survivors had been working with ladders and pieces of furniture, trying to fashion a way to reach their trapped comrades. But when the fog approached, the survivors broke and ran, fleeing the ruins of the building in terror.

  “What the hell?”

  That was when Jason Ernst knew what the fog was. A cold chill ran down his spine again. He’d seen that kind of fog before. “Anna, get the dronecam out of--“

  But it was too late. Sparrow had dived to less than fifty feet and was in autohover, building its database with establishing shots before turning to focus on specific images, as it had been programmed to do. The fog had swollen to blanket the entire hill and most of the rubble pile that had once been an office building. Sparrow swept through the upper tendrils of the fog and the imager view careened out of control.

  “It’s a botswarm! Get out of there--“

  Anna tried to regain control but the tiny ornithopter had already been set upon by the outer fringes of the swarm. Sparrow shed rotors and wings and cartwheeled toward the ground, plowing into a mob of fleeing survivors.

  Jason Ernst had already returned to his own control station. He still had command of Pigeon, so he commanded the dronecam to wheel about and head for Sparrow’s last coordinates. The trip took less than twenty seconds.

  Pigeon arrived and went into autohover at a thousand feet altitude, just in time to see the skeletal remains of the building buckle in the midst of the billowing fog. It swayed for a few seconds, then toppled over and slid side-first into the fissure, shedding trapped survivors like a horse shaking off flies.

  And the fog, the swarm of bots, continued flowing up and out of the fissure, even as the girders and beams were still settling into the chasm.