“What about the bodies?” asked Jeppe. “We can’t leave them out there.”
“We can and we will,” said Concepcion. “The recovery effort could take weeks to conduct safely, and we’ve stayed here too long already. Under other circumstances I would agree, but these are not normal circumstances. We need to move now. I remind you that there are three members of my own family among the dead who have not been recovered. All of us are making sacrifices.”
She meant Toron, Faron, and Janda. The miners never found Janda’s body in their searches, and now that the search was over, no one ever would. Victor felt a pang of guilt as he pictured Toron in his mind, dying there on the pod, pleading for Victor to find his daughter.
Concepcion continued. “Our primary mission now is to warn Earth and Luna and everyone in the Belts that this near-lightspeed ship is coming. The pod is incontrovertible evidence that the ship is alien and that the species flying it has malicious intent. If we had a laserline transmitter, we could send a warning immediately, but at the moment, we have no reliable long-range communication. The radio is working, but without a laserline, I doubt we’ll send a message at this distance with any accuracy. I suggest we set a course for Weigh Station Four and try to hail them as we approach. We can then use their laserline transmitter to send a warning from there.”
“Agreed,” said Dreo. “But sending the warning via laserline isn’t a sure thing. We can’t count on our message getting through. We’re still a long way from Earth. Any message we send in that direction will have to pass through several hands and relay stations along the way before it reaches Earth. If the message isn’t passed on, if it stops somewhere along the chain, it dies there. It happens all the time. You know how these relay stations work. Corporates and paying accounts get top priority. Those are relayed first. The computers do that automatically. We’re free miners, the dregs of space, ignorant roughnecks. The station attendants would push our messages aside only to be sent out when the server space becomes available.”
“We’ll mark the message as an emergency,” said Concepcion. “We’ll tag it as high priority.”
“Of course,” said Dreo. “But that’s overused. Some clans mark all of their messages as emergencies in hopes of getting top placement and being quickly sent through. Believe me, when I worked for corporates, I had to deal with these relay stations all the time. Seventy to eighty percent of the laserlines they get every day are marked as emergencies even though most of them aren’t. ‘Emergency’ means nothing.”
“But we have an overwhelming amount of evidence,” said Father. “The helmet-cam footage shows that the pod had images of Earth. The Eye has given us mountains of data to suggest the ship is moving in that direction. We have eyewitness accounts of the pod attacking without provocation. We even have footage of the hormigas themselves. No one can refute this.”
“Yes,” said Dreo, “but no one will know any of that until they open the message. Which these relay stations won’t do. And even in the remote chance that someone does open the message, they might dismiss what little evidence they look at as either a hoax or simply a mistake of our equipment. And if they think that, they’ll do more than not pass it on, they’ll delete it.”
“You make it sound hopeless,” said Mother.
“I’m being realistic,” said Dreo. “I’m telling you how the system works.”
“We’ll get other clans and families involved,” said Father. “We’ll tell them where to look in deep space, something we should have done a long time ago. We’ll turn everyone’s attention out here to the alien ship. Whoever has a sky scanner as good as our Eye would detect the ship and send a warning message to Earth. Maybe if we build a swell of warnings, if we make enough noise, something will get through.”
“Maybe,” said Dreo. “Probably. But how much time do we have here before it reaches the Kuiper Belt? Six months? A year?”
“I’ve asked Edimar to give us a status,” said Concepcion. “She’ll update us on the ship’s trajectory and position. Edimar?”
The crowd parted, and Edimar stepped forward. It was the first time Victor had seen her since Toron’s death. She looked exhausted and small. Victor’s heart went out to her. She had lost her father and sister in a few short weeks. And now, with Toron gone, she had the overwhelming responsibility of being the family’s only sky scanner. Her face was expressionless, and Victor knew that Edimar was doing what she always did: burying her pain, holding everything in, closing everyone else out.
“As has been mentioned,” she said, “we now know with some degree of certainty that the ship is on a trajectory with Earth. It could change its speed at any moment, but based on its current rate of deceleration, it will arrive at Earth in little over a year.”
There was a murmur of concern among the Council.
“As for when it will reach the Kuiper Belt,” said Edimar, “we obviously have much less time. I’ve run through the data over and over again now and it looks as if the ship will be relatively close to us in less than four months.”
Everyone started talking at once, alarmed. It was loud and chaotic and Concepcion called for order. “Please. Quiet. Let Edimar finish.”
The talking subsided.
“We can’t even reach Weigh Station Four in that time,” said someone in the back.
“You’re probably right,” said Edimar. “I’ve done the math. The starship will likely pass by Weigh Station Four before we get there.”
“Pass by?” said Dreo. “You mean the two will be close?”
“They won’t collide,” said Edimar. “There’s little chance of that. Weigh Station Four will be a hundred thousand kilometers away from the ship’s trajectory. That should be a safe distance.”
“In relative space terms, that’s not all that far,” said Mother. “That’s only a quarter of the distance from the Earth to the Moon. That’s too close for comfort. We have to move now. Immediately. We need to warn the weigh station as soon as possible.”
“We need to be clear about our warning, though,” said Dreo. “We know plenty about the pod, but less about the ship. Such as its size. Do we even know how big it is?”
“Not precisely,” said Edimar. “It’s heading toward us, so we don’t know its length. We can only detect the front of it. But even that is big. At least a kilometer across.”
This time the reaction in the room was a stunned silence.
Victor thought Edimar had misspoken. A kilometer? And that was the ship’s width, not its length. That couldn’t be right. What could possibly be that big?
“Any of you are welcome to check my calculations,” said Edimar. “I hope you can prove me wrong. But you won’t. I didn’t believe it myself until I rechecked it the fifth time. This ship is big.”
And filled with creatures like those that killed Janda and Toron and the Italians, thought Victor. How many could fit in a ship that size? Thousands? Tens of thousands? And what about pods and other weaponized ships? How many pods could squeeze into a ship a kilometer across?
Sending a laserline wasn’t enough, he realized. Dreo was right. A warning might get through, but not as quickly as it needed to, if at all. Any number of things could go wrong, and then Earth would be caught off guard. We need a contingency plan, he told himself. We need a way to get the evidence to Earth and in the right hands as soon as possible. No delays, no middleman holding up or deleting the warning. We need a person on Earth presenting the evidence to people that matter, decision makers, political leaders, government agencies. That was the only way it was going to get noticed.
It all became clear to him then. He understood in that moment what he needed to do.
“A quickship,” said Victor.
Everyone turned to him.
“We need to send a quickship to Luna. The laserline is one approach we should pursue, but it shouldn’t be the only one. If Dreo is right, there’s too much of a chance the message won’t get through. We can’t risk that. There’s too much at stake. We have to have a second means of warning Earth.”
“What are you suggesting?” asked Concepcion. “That we put all of the evidence on a data cube and send the cube on a quickship to Luna?”
“If we just put a data cube on the ship, it probably wouldn’t get noticed,” said Victor. “All of the quickships go directly to the mineral docks. They don’t pass through human hands. And even if someone did notice the cube, we can’t be certain that person would recognize its significance and put it in the right hands. What I’m suggesting is that we send the data cube with an escort. Someone rides in the quickship to Luna with all the evidence and then gets passage to Earth to deliver that evidence to the people who need to see it.”
