Not Alone: Endgame by Craig A. Falconer

Author:Craig A. Falconer [Falconer, Craig A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

E minus 44

Control Deck

Space Station Il Cercatore

At the very same moment it reached Dan McCarthy on the ground in Birchwood, Alessandro Bonucci felt his heart sink when a message notification on his computer broke the news from China: the mysterious Engineers were still coming, Architects or no Architects, and they were coming faster than ever.

Alessandro wasted no time in forwarding the news to all relevant department heads on the station, as he was sure Timo would have authorised if he was there to call the shots.

With this in mind Alessandro also made sure to pass it on to New Kerguelen, since he knew there was no way for Ding to do so even though he was sure the Chinese Premier and senior ICA figure would have sought to if he could.

The ICA’s Chairman, William Godfrey, was next to Alessandro within minutes of the call, roused from a wholehearted but ill-fated attempt to belatedly catch a few hours of much-needed sleep.

“How long until we have a visual?” Godfrey asked.

“We’re on it,” Alessandro replied. “Everyone and everything is on it. The Chinese can’t see it, they’ve only detected a change in reflected light and the same kind of signal noise we got from Heartbeat. Their Jiejing probe hasn’t picked up any gravitational effects, but Heartbeat didn’t either and that was a lot closer at first than Jiejing can be now. There’s definitely some kind of gravitational shielding at play.”

Godfrey scratched his chin in thought. “But how long until we can see it?”

“We’re not cooking a chicken here,” Alessandro snapped in an uncharacteristically acerbic tone, lifting his hands from their incessant typing in a shrug-like expression of frustration that was similarly not like him. “I can’t type in a question and find out how long it’s going to take.”

Godfrey didn’t say anything else. He liked Alessandro — he had always liked Alessandro — and even if he hadn’t, he didn’t think he would have had any mental energy to care about being spoken to in a manner he ordinarily wouldn’t tolerate.

This news was a hammer-blow, no two ways about it, not only revealing that the emptying of the vault hadn’t been enough to dissuade the Engineers from continuing their journey but also revealing that the journey itself was going to pass even more quickly than previously expected.

On that point, Godfrey was losing confidence in any kind of estimate Alessandro might be able to provide regarding a new ETA.

This was no fault of the diligent and detail-oriented Italian, whose prior estimates had been based on an assumption the then-current speed of the craft would remain stable, but was rather down to the increasing obviousness that any further assumptions of that kind would be unwarranted.

For all anyone knew, the Engineers’ craft could accelerate another five times, with each compounding acceleration knocking another day off the countdown to a showdown that was beginning to feel increasingly inevitable even as the form that showdown might take remained entirely unguessable.

“Everything is on it,” Alessandro reiterated, his tone settling down without quite reaching anything explicitly apologetic.

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.