found on Phobos to the discovery of structures which might hold the key, finally, to successful commercial fusion, and a completely intact alien vessel whose drive system and purpose was a mystery.
But the Odin had a secret agenda, and within the mass of scientific data one of their people—astronomer Anthony LaPointe—found indications of another alien installation on Enceladus, a moon of Saturn known to have many strange characteristics indeed. Keeping their discovery secret, the Odin prepared for departure, even as a meteor impacted the IRI-Ares base and took out her main reactor.
Except that it hadn’t been a meteor, and A.J. Baker had been able to show that it was almost certainly a projectile from a coilgun, a magnetic acceleration cannon concealed—against all international and established space travel law—within the mass-driver elements of Odin. There was no proof of this, and neither the IRI nor Ares could afford to accuse the European Union of such things without ironclad evidence. The action showed that their worst fears had been true; the security officer of Odin, Richard Fitzgerald, was an old adversary of Madeline Fathom’s and was just as willing to use extreme methods to assure the completion of his mission.
Ares and the IRI had, in the meantime, discovered the principle behind the alien vessel’s drive system—something called a “dusty plasma” drive which acted like a solar sail combined with a magnetosail, requiring no physical “sail” to capture much of the sun’s incident energy to propel it—and using the most advanced nanotech sensor and effector motes had restructured the key elements to work again. For various reasons the Ares personnel decided to attempt to beat the Odin to the now-known base on Enceladus, and revived the sixty-five million year old vessel, launching it as the IRI vessel Nebula Storm.
The modified alien vessel had performed well and the Nebula Storm caught up with Odin near Jupiter, where both vessels were expected to perform an “Oberth Maneuver” to increase their speed and change their course to send them on a rendezvous with Saturn and Enceladus. The situation had been tense but Nicholas had felt that it was under control. Madeline’s terse but informative final report had indicated that they had preliminary evidence that the Odin was indeed armed with up to four coilgun-based cannons concealed as part of the main mass-beam drive system, and thus was virtually certainly the cause of the apparent meteor strike that had temporarily disabled the Ceres base and almost killed Joe Buckley.
She had also stated that they were going to be able to obtain proof during the Oberth maneuver. From the specific way the former secret agent phrased her report, he suspected they were planning some actions which he, as Director, would be better of not being aware of since he would be then required to advise against it, but he couldn’t be sure. Still, he trusted…had trusted…Madeline Fathom (Buckley) to take no unnecessary risks four hundred million miles from home.
And in the normal course of things, he still would have at least known what happened. While professional astronomical instruments, both land and space-based, had more important things to do, WASTA would have been focused on the most exciting space travel event in history. The World Amateur Space Telescope Array had been a project started shortly after Meru, the Indian space elevator, had become fully operational, to deploy an inexpensive array of optical telescopes which would be able to be synchronized and controlled from the ground for amateur astronomers to use. It had been an ambitious and ultimately surprisingly successful project, with its multiplicity of smaller aperture space telescopes sometimes nearly matching the performance of some of the professional telescope arrays.
Unfortunately, only minutes before Odin and Nebula Storm had passed out of sight around Jupiter, WASTA’s control system had crashed due to an adaptive virus infection which had taken a day and a half to eradicate, and another twelve hours had elapsed before the multiple elements of WASTA could be realigned properly; even a very small element of uncertainty in the positioning of the several dozen WASTA telescopes would eliminate their tremendous light-gathering capacity and resolution.
So instead of pictures of the ships down to less than a meter resolution—almost enough to read the Odin’s name on the hull—we lost them entirely for a few days. Odin’s a shattered hulk,front half severed from the rear and most of two of its drive spines shattered, and Nebula Storm…is nowhere to be seen.
Even radar had been misled, because whatever had happened, the two