Invaders_a sequel to Vaz, Tiona and Disc by Laurence Dahners

Author:Laurence Dahners [Dahners, Laurence]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: UNKNOWN
Published: 2016-09-05T23:00:00+00:00

Her thoughts in turmoil, Tiona went to her office at GSI so she’d have a place to think. Then, worried that she might forget, she sent a message to Rob Marshall out at the asteroid, asking him to disengage from the asteroid and return to Earth. “I know this will be a big disappointment,” she said, “but trust me, it’s important. Many lives could depend on it. We need the saucer back here at earth ASAP.” It was almost 13 light minutes to the saucer’s location, so Tiona figured she had about twenty-five minutes before she got a message from Rob bitching about it. However, even though he wouldn’t be happy, she expected he’d already be disengaging the saucer.

Tiona spent some time using the special orbital mechanics package in her AI to try to figure out how long it would take the aliens to get to Earth. Fortunately, most of the orbital parameters for the main alien ship had been uploaded as public knowledge on the net while it was still classified as a simple NEO. She didn’t have much information on the movements of the newly separated ship which she’d begun calling a daughter-ship in her own mind. She could approximate its thrust from the size of the ionized hydrogen exhaust plume which Dr. Singer had given her. If she knew how fast the daughter-ship was accelerating away from the mothership she’d be able to calculate its mass. Unfortunately there wasn’t even any information on the net to indicate that the separation had happened, much less the velocity of its departure. She sent a tersely worded query to General Stoddard asking about its mass. She phrased the question in such a way that it would be obvious how the mass could be determined.

Returning to the information she had and using wide ballparks she came up with numbers from three to nine weeks for the daughter-ship to arrive at Earth, depending on actual accelerations and when and how much they decelerated before they got here. She realized that that meant even NASA’s saucer that was way out at Neptune could make the sixteen day trip back to Earth before the daughter-ship arrived.

She rubbed her temples, hating to think that these aliens could have traveled from another star to start a war, but deciding that if that was their intent, failing to recall the saucers that Earth might need to defend itself would be far worse than just regrettable. She sent messages to GSI’s two saucers out at Saturn and the one that was tracking a comet, telling them to return. She sent another message to General Stoddard, this time suggesting that he might want to request that NASA bring back the saucer from Neptune.

She was sitting with her mind churning when she got a call from Stoddard. “Why do you think we need NASA’s Neptune saucer?” he said without preliminaries.

Heavily, she said, “I don’t even want to think that these aliens are here to attack us, but if they are—and we need to fight—the saucers are going to represent our best weapons.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.