“Tell them we need that confirmation on LZ coordinates I asked for,” he replied. “As fast as possible.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Before he could fight the enemy, he would have to find out where he was.
AI 929 Farstar
Kuiper Belt
2234 hours Zulu
Farstar was not pleased at the interruption of his work.
Though not technically capable of feeling emotions such as irritation or chagrin, the new orders that had arrived by laser fifteen hours ago had generated conflicts and interfered with Farstar’s maximum operating efficiency to the point that he believed he knew precisely what those emotions were.
He had been, with a mounting allotment of processing cycles and storage that might have been defined as excitement, observing a new-found world circling the F8 star 94 Ceti, only fifty-nine light years away. Spectral analyses of the atmosphere had already proven the existence of oxygen and, therefore, life…while other scraps of spectra stripped from captured light revealed the presence of a chlorophyll analogue staining broad swaths of the world’s continents with patches of blue and green. Oceans of liquid water gleamed beneath the harsh white light of the F8 sun.
And here, too, as on Alpha Centauri A II, were the remnants of a vanished civilization—towers of glass and mirror-polished crystal smashed and scattered; squat, conelike structures blindly ripped open; whole cities reduced to blast-scoured rubble and debris; craters, some a hundred kilometers across, sprinkled across the face of a devastated world.
And, in infrared wavelengths, some of those craters still glowed, proof that the destruction had been visited upon this world a few centuries ago at most.
The Institute for Exoarcheological Studies was keenly interested in this newest addition to the list of archeological treasure troves within a handful of light years of Earth. It suggested that whatever power struck down technic civilizations as they emerged upon the galactic stage was still present, still active.
Why, then, this sudden and completely incomprehensible change in the scheduled observation itinerary?
Fifteen hours ago, an urgent request from the American Space Command at Colorado Springs had directed Farstar to shift away from 94 Ceti and focus his receiving dish on a part of the sky alarmingly close to distant Sol. Farstar had to use extreme caution here; optical circuits could be damaged by direct sunlight, even this far out. Light-gathering equipment designed to resolve objects as small as fair-sized islands at a distance of a hundred light years were trained on a target six and a half million times closer—Europa, where a tiny, glittering constellation of objects was falling into orbit around the glistening, ice-surfaced moon.
Farstar had observed the region around Europa for some hours before detecting the ship. An adjustment of magnification and resolution had brought the vessel into uncertain focus, a two-hundred-meter toothpick scattering eight tiny motes into the stellar wind. Farstar had watched for hours more, observing and computing orbit, velocity, and the descending trajectory of the eight motes as their plasma drives burned hot against his infrared sensors.
At this point, Earth and Jupiter both were approximately equidistant from Farstar’s position—a little over six light hours. It would take that long for the information gleaned here to make it back at light’s crawl to the humans who needed it.
With no instructions to relay to the U.S. force already on Europa, he began transmitting the information to Colorado Springs. If the humans on Jupiter needed the information, Space Command HQ would see that they got it. In any case, the information was already six hours old by the time Farstar recorded it, and six hours older still after his transmission had crossed the long, deep emptiness back to Earth.
Farstar just hoped they would let him get back to the job he’d been designed for. Observing humans’ spacecraft from only fifty astronomical units away was a colossal waste of resources and observing time.
ELEVEN
17 OCTOBER 2067
Chinese People’s Mobile
Strike Force
Asterias Linea, Europa
1517 hours Zulu
The refueling was almost complete.
General Xiang stood on the barren ice plain, watching as the line of men filed aboard the craft known only as Jiang Lie Si, Descending Thunder No. 4. It had been thirty-six hours since the People’s Army Mobile Strike Force had set down on the Europan ice cap close by the gently swelling ridge called Asterias Linea. During that time, the troops had been busy setting up the main base, using zidong tanke and APC crawlers with attached plow blades to dig trenches in ice pulverized by explosive charges, then burying habitat cylinders deeply enough to shield the men living there from the particulate radiation sleeting across the Europan surface.