The Ouroboros Wave (11 page)

“I thought this chunk of rock wasn’t revolving. What’s the deal with it starting now? Can you see anything, Seiya?”

Barbara and I were facing opposite directions. The core block was, structurally, the safest place on
Dragonslayer.
It was where everyone would head in an emergency. Most of the equipment was well shielded against radiation. It wasn’t exactly roomy with all twelve of us crammed in, but we could fit. It wouldn’t have been much use otherwise.

“What’s to see? It’s a standard S-type asteroid. She’s about as garden variety as they come.”

Rapushinupurukuru’s rotation was just revealing its far side. I thought it was kind of cool that even an object this small would have a horizon. It was roughly potato-shaped, twelve hundred meters on the long axis by six hundred by four hundred meters. A wedge with a regolith jacket, pulverized rock acquired over millions of years of tiny impacts.

“That’s not what I’m talking about.” Barbara’s face, upside down, was suddenly close to mine. In the weightlessness of the narrow space it was easier to get face-to-face this way than to swivel the jump seats. Still, I got the feeling she liked the acrobatics in the narrow confines of the ship. She always wore her red jumpsuit and kept her blond hair cropped just a few millimeters past skinhead length.

“I mean, the robot finishes the antenna array without a hitch, and then, before we can even finish testing, Rapu starts rotating. What I was asking was, did you see anything that pointed to a cause?”

Barbara was still wearing her goggles. I had no idea what she was looking at, but the image I sent her must have been totally off target. My agent talking to her agent wasn’t working so well.

“It might not be something we can extract from a visual,” I said. “But there is something strange. I don’t know if it’s connected to the rotation.” I sent the data to Barbara’s goggles.

“Strange like how? Particle contamination… what the fuck?”

“Yeah. Weird, huh? It’s a thin layer, but there’s some kind of material on the antenna mesh, probably regolith. No way that could’ve accumulated in the six months since Rapu started rotating.”

“Hmm… something must’ve kicked up a cloud of regolith. Maybe some kind of small impactor? Some of the particles would’ve been recaptured gravitationally. Collision-induced rotation. Simple explanation.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure.”
Dragonslayer
’s captain floated in through the core hatch. Rebecca’s job was to shape the crew’s input into decisions, but we called her captain for convenience. Her long brown hair floated in a halo. She placed a fingertip against the wall, rotated 180 degrees, and settled into one of the jump seats. This kind of maneuver was simple for veteran astronauts; Rebecca was proud of her lack of bruises despite the generous expanses of skin she tended to expose for our benefit. She also insisted that leaving her hair to float free helped make her more aerodynamically stable.
I kind of got the idea she was bullshitting us.

“Any impact with enough energy to shred the array and spin Rapu like a top would’ve left a crater somewhere. It might be no more than a few meters across, but our sensors wouldn’t have
trouble picking it up.”

“You’re right, Captain.” Barbara nodded earnestly. For some reason she agreed with whatever Rebecca said but always criticized whatever I came up with—even if she had to make something up to do so. Not only that, but Barbara seemed to have gotten the idea that finding fault with others was something only I did. Well,
I guess diversity of viewpoints is a good thing.

“Something else bothers me,” said Rebecca. “This particle contamination.”

“You mean its origin?” I answered.

“The origin, sure, but also the timing. I mean, look. Say a meteor—or something else—hits Rapu. It throws up a bunch of regolith. The impact starts Rapu revolving. Centrifugal force shreds the array but the central module stays intact. That means the impactor hit Rapu’s far side. So how did the regolith contaminate the array? It was twenty klicks away, which would’ve shielded the central module
from contamination.”

“What if the impact itself destroyed the array?”

“Then how come the central module’s intact? Anyway, a hit big enough to destroy the array directly should’ve left traces, but we’re not seeing any. And there’s another problem—the telemetry data. What do you make of that? Can’t explain that away with a meteor strike.”

UNTIL RECENTLY,
Rapushinupurukuru had been known as Asteroid 2143SF, meaning it was the sixth S-class object to be discovered last year, 2143. Its orbital elements were quickly determined and, once it became clear that it had an orbit unlike any known object of its type, a proper name seemed appropriate.

By now we’d pretty much mined all of humanity’s major myths and legends for names, so we’d been taking names from some of the more obscure cultures. Rapushinupurukuru was a dragon god of the ethnic Ainu of Hokkaido in the north of the Japanese archipelago. The name meant “feathered god with magical powers.” According to our database, Rapushinupurukuru’s realm was Lake Toya. The god was active in summer, dormant in winter. Since everyone living in Japan, regardless of where they came from, was referred to as Japanese, I seriously doubted anyone there had a clue that Rapushinupurukuru was the name of a legendary dragon. The fact that the name was in our database could indicate colonists with Ainu ancestry on Mars, or maybe one of the asteroids.

AADD had already moved Kali into orbit around Uranus. At the same time it had been moving ahead with construction of the facilities for the artificial accretion disk. Actually it would be more accurate to call the whole thing a Dyson sphere. Kali’s accretion disk threw off energy, mostly in the form of electromagnetic emissions; this energy was trapped by the sphere surrounding the black hole. The energy could be distributed anywhere in the solar system via microwaves or laser, depending on where it needed to go.

The antenna on Rapushinupurukuru was meant to prove the distribution concept as well as the construction process, which was totally carried out by robot. Basically it went like this: Once the best site for the antenna was identified, the core relay module was anchored to the surface. Then piles were driven in around it and the central section of the microwave receiver was built overhead. This section was structurally the strongest part of the whole antenna. The rest of the antenna unfolded outward from the central section like flower petals. Each section was about a thousand meters across, with the whole antenna extending out about twenty kilometers. Each section was joined to the others by threadlike joints. Something this big and fragile could only be deployed in a
weightless environment.

The designers had incorporated an unbelievably precise, dynamic leveling system. Any little tremor reaching the antenna was automatically offset, guaranteeing an absolutely flat surface—a single, gigantic antenna precise enough to put a signal into a hundred-meter circle at a distance of one AU. This level of accuracy was
critical to the whole concept.

Rapushinupurukuru’s orbit was almost vertical to the plane of the ecliptic—its inclination was eighty-seven degrees. Perihelion was three AUs, aphelion thirty, and it took about sixty-seven years to orbit Sol. At first astronomers assumed it was a short-period comet, till observations showed it was composed mainly of the metal-silicate compounds typical of an S-type asteroid. In terms of planetary physics, it was a pretty interesting object given its orbit, but AADD had another reason for paying attention to this particular asteroid. Not only was it sharply inclined to the ecliptic plane, it also had a very high orbital eccentricity at 0.82. If Rapushinupurukuru could be used as a transmission node, delivery of energy to almost any part of the solar system would become practical. The high orbital eccentricity meant that energy could be relayed by pointing the array in a fixed direction. Of course, Rapushinupurukuru’s antenna could also be used to beam energy to the planets, but a more important goal was providing power to spacecraft traversing the solar system. With an external power supply, spacecraft could be made much simpler and yet travel faster. As long as the craft’s position was known at all times, power could be supplied with lasers, with guidance data piggybacked on the energy transmission. That would let us move
cargo more efficiently, with automated bulk carriers.

Of course, this was the ultimate goal. Getting there was going to take some time. Kali was still moving into position around Uranus and the accretion disk was still being tweaked. In the meantime we’d been working on getting the kinks out of the energy transmission
system.

Things had gone pretty smoothly at first. The robot had successfully completed the antenna array, and microwave power generation with the accretion disk was achieved for the first time. But then the array had started sending some strange telemetry, indicating that Rapushinupurukuru was beginning to rotate, at first very slowly. The signal began dropping and recovering intermittently, with indications that the rotational speed was picking up. Then we lost
the signal completely.

Telemetry analysis didn’t tell us much, but it did point to a mystery beyond that of the asteroid’s anomalous rotation. The array had been receiving faint signals unrelated to the control signals for the construction bot. All we knew was that the signals were not some natural phenomenon. And their connection with Rapushinupurukuru’s
anomalous rotation? Equally unknown.

There was just too much going on here, and you never know until you go. The Guardians—that’s what we are—were set up for
just this kind of problem.

The Guardians were AADD’s security enforcement arm. We dealt with just about everything connected with security. We helped keep the peace. But mostly what we did was get people out of trouble. And sometimes, if AADD’s progress was at stake, we
carried out investigations.

The origin of the Guardians went back to the early days of space colonists forming their own security organizations. As the space cities grew, these police forces became more specialized and professional. After AADD was formed, it took all these scattered
groups and unified them into the Guardians.

We were the closest team to Rapushinupurukuru when the problem was detected.
Dragonslayer
was our ride.

ABOVE OUR HEADS
the ship seemed to be moving slowly, but of course it was Barbara and I who were actually moving. Although the asteroid’s rotation made it useless as a microwave relay node, on the surface the motion didn’t seem so noticeable. Farthest away from the axis of rotation the centrifugal force was a mere 0.03 G. Close to the axis it was barely perceptible, though a misstep could send you off on a short trajectory.

“Hey, Seiya, what’s the deal with these supports? Were they designed to be this short?”

“Not likely,” I answered. I looked at the surface. Some of the little craters must have formed before life even began on Earth. Most asteroids, except for the densest, were covered in regolith—especially the big ones where distances were measured in kilometers. They usually had enough gravity to hold on to a blanket of fine material.

Asteroids like Rapu had so little gravity that the finer particles created in collisions usually traveled fast enough to escape into space. This left a regolith blanket of coarser rock. I could tell just by looking that the layer under my boots wasn’t very thick. I felt its granules crunch under my feet like gravel. If there’d been an atmosphere, I would have heard it too.