Page 11 - Unlikely Stories 3

Recall Mission

“Yes, thank you, Senator,” acknowledged Corncracker. “Our best
and brightest concluded that the risk was too great to ignore the
potential threat from an adversary in our own galaxy. We decided on
a pre-emptive strike, a massive nuclear bomb that would detonate in
Proxima b’s atmosphere, creating an electromagnetic pulse destroying
all unshielded electronics.”
The professor was visibly distressed, but held his tongue.
“Given the time lag—8.5 years to get any feedback from a
message, we concluded that we could dissemble enough to convince
the presumed enemy that no hostile action was being taken. Satellites
are being launched every week or two, and our retreat from manned
exploration of the solar system can be interpreted as our having
already reached the limits of our capability in space travel. Our fastest
means of propulsion would get our rocket to Proxima b in thirty-five
years. I will not burden you with how we accomplished this; suffice it
to say that the vehicle was externally indistinguishable from our
largest ships carrying men and materiel to the international space
station.”
“I would love to know the method of propulsion you employed,”
said Dreyfuss. “But I suppose you will not tell me.”
“Quite right!” It was Hawke again, emphatically nodding.
Corncracker was pacing within the available floor space, impatient
to resume. “The thing to focus on is twelve years. That is when our
ship will arrive in the region of Proxima Centauri. And we have to
stop it before it gets there.”
“You can’t send instructions to its guidance system?”
“There’s the rub. It cannot be recalled. We built it to be impervious
to external commands. It is running silent, and it has no means of
being interfered with electronically. Our policy was set, and once the
bomb had done its job, we would know about it four years later and
decide whether or not to make the whole thing public. That is a
political decision none of us will be around to influence.”
“But why change your mind now? Why must it be stopped?”
“By the time it took to develop powerful software and hardware
tools able to extricate meaning from the static we had a huge backlog
of recorded signals. As of this week we are certain that our
gamesmanship was inadequate: the aliens had anticipated contact, and
undertook to pre-empt just the sort of attack we decided upon.”
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