Winter World (The Long Winter #1)(20)

“Within sixteen hours, we’ll begin launching the components of the Pax and Fornax. The first modules will be unmanned. They’ll contain food and some redundant equipment. We want to see how the entity reacts to the launches. Based on what we see, we may adjust our plan.

“I’m not going to go through the entire mission at this briefing. You all know the plan. And the risks. We’re going to talk about the unknowns, and plan for as many as we can.”

Fowler clicks a key, and the screen shows the same simulation he showed me back at Edgefield: the ships assembling while Earth floats away, then traveling to the alien artifact.

“Since the probe identified the artifact, ground-based telescopes have been monitoring it. It’s currently about midway between the orbits of Venus and Earth, roughly twenty million miles from Earth, or one and a half light-minutes away from Earth.”

Fowler moves to the next animation, which shows the two ships rendezvousing with the artifact.

“Okay. Our best guess is that it will take roughly four months to reach the artifact, which we’re calling Alpha. Once you get there…”

He just skipped over several of my questions. I raise my hand. I feel like a kid on the first day of class, but I have to ask.

“Dr. Sinclair?”

“Just curious. Is the artifact—Alpha—moving?”

“Yes.”

“Vector?”

“We only have twenty-four hours of data, but it looks as though it’s moving toward the Sun.”

“Is the object’s velocity increasing?”

Fowler nods slowly. “Slightly. But again, we don’t have much data.”

“Point taken. But let’s say for a moment you extrapolated that data. Where does the probe’s route take it? Does it rendezvous with Venus? Mercury?”

“No. Our estimates have it reaching the Sun, though we don’t know when.”

You could hear a pin drop in the room. Min eyes me. I think he’s figured out where I’m going with this.

“Because you don’t know its velocity. Not enough data.”

“Correct,” Fowler says. His eyes tell me that he knows where I’m going with this too. But he stands by the lectern and lets me finish my thesis.

“The rendezvous point in the mission briefing is based upon roughly twenty-four hours of observational data about the artifact’s velocity. My question is: what if we’re wrong? We could miss it by seven million miles.”

Grigory shakes his head. “The ship has thrusters. We can make course corrections en route.” He points to the binder. “And we have telescopes to monitor the artifact.”

Min, who is sitting between Grigory and me, holds his hands out. “Yes, but the ship’s telescopes aren’t as powerful as the ones here on the ground. The fact is, you’re both right. We can make course corrections—but what Sinclair is saying is that they won’t matter if we’ve misjudged Alpha’s acceleration ability.”

I nod.

Grigory considers this. “You believe it is solar-powered.”

“I think it’s a safe assumption. And if so, it stands to reason that its acceleration will increase as it gets closer to the Sun. Though without more data, it’s impossible to establish a model to predict that. And it could also have an alternative propulsion system that it could engage at any point.”

Chandler is like a rumbling volcano finally exploding. “Well it’s all moot anyway. You’re raising issues we can’t solve. We can’t decrease solar output—if that even is its fuel, which is pure speculation, I might add—and we can’t appreciably increase our own acceleration capability.”

“Of course we can.” Grigory seems almost insulted.

“Do tell, Dr. Sokolov.”

“Larger engine, more fuel equals more acceleration.”

“Will it delay the launch?” Chandler snaps. “Can you increase our speed tenfold? Twenty?”

“I could triple it, easily.”

“Well,” says Chandler, “I return to my thesis: this is all moot. Dr. Sinclair is raising issues to hear himself talk.” He nods to the group in the pit. “These people have spent their entire careers planning space missions. You’ve been doing this for fifteen minutes. And before the doctor was here, he was in prison, I believe. Most recently in a riot, of which he was the sole survivor. Let’s hope we fare better than his fellow inmates. I say let’s trust the mission planning to the team that does mission planning, while we focus on our job—which is determining what’s out there.”

I exhale as every eye turns to me, like a tennis match in slow motion. I’m not backing down. This guy has been pummeling me on TV for years. I couldn’t defend myself then—my lawyers forbade me, and after I was sentenced no one bothered to interview me. But now that I can fight back, I’m going to.

“It’s true,” I begin. “I was in prison until this morning. I have been on this mission for only a few hours. And this isn’t my field. But none of that means I’m wrong. And just because you’ve been doing something for a long time doesn’t automatically make you right. In fact, sometimes it makes you blind to all the possibilities. It hinders your imagination. You see patterns you’ve seen before, and you choose a solution without exploring all the possibilities.”