Asteroid Crisis Read online

  “You cadets already know that I come from the future, where the worst possible things have already happened.” When he turned to look at them, he carried a weight of memories around him. “That’s why I’m so determined to make sure it doesn’t happen again—to your future, to your children and grandchildren. We have to plan now.”

  “We’re on your side, sir, don’t worry. The things we’ve already seen …” King shook his head.

  Zota took a seat behind the desk. He was very intense as he leaned forward, turning his haunted gray eyes on them. “It’s time I told you more about how I came to be here. I have given you only sketchy details before.

  “I thought my life was comfortable, and everything was normal. We didn’t have big dreams or ambitions, but not many worries, either. I was a university professor of engineering. I never gave a second thought to how small my classes were—that was just the way it had been for years. To be honest, I didn’t think about the space program often. I knew we had Moonbase Magellan, which was mostly empty. I knew we had the ISSC, but the news networks rarely featured any stories about it. None of my students dreamed of careers as astronauts or making a mark in the aerospace industry. We hadn’t sent space probes to the planets in a generation or two. Nobody really cared.”

  Zota blinked, and though he was looking at JJ and her friends, his gaze seemed far away. “The Kylarn sent secret scout ships to Earth over the years, but since we didn’t have anyone watching, our first visitors went unnoticed. They built their whole base on the far side of the Moon, and we never suspected a thing. Then, when the aliens finally attacked and destroyed Moonbase Magellan, the human race was so stunned we didn’t know what to do.”

  “But it’s different now—we changed it!” JJ said passionately. “We exposed the Kylarn base before it could be completed. We forced the squidbutts to move sooner than they expected.”

  “And the people on the moonbase got away,” Song-Ye added. “In your timeline, everyone was lost.”

  “Yes, you changed that part, but it was probably too little, too late. In my time, the Kylarn took over the space station, killed everyone aboard, then brought in their whole attack fleet. In my time, Kylarn drones—the tentacled fighters you met aboard the space station-swarmed over the cities and continents of Earth. They cut thousands of people to pieces with their laser shredders trying to shock us into surrender.

  “They had already diverted two small asteroids, which came in on a collision course with Earth, and because nobody was doing any sky surveys, we weren’t keeping an eye out for approaching asteroids. Those giant chunks of rock were upon us before we could do anything. One struck the Gulf of Mexico, and tidal waves swamped the coastal cities. The second asteroid hit China—I never heard an estimate of how many millions of people were killed there.

  “When the Kylarn swept in, all the nations of the world tried to fight back, but we were caught by surprise. Somehow, the Kylarn learned to communicate with humans—if only to provide instructions to slaves. The Kylarn queen commanded that we surrender, but we kept fighting. There were pockets of resistance everywhere.

  “Even so, what could we do? With laser shredders, the aliens mowed down all resistance. They rounded us up, put us in camps. My whole family was killed.” He paused, took a breath and fell silent. JJ could see a sheen of tears in his eyes. “My father, my wife, my two daughters—all dead. The Kylarn didn’t care. I stayed alive somehow in one of their prison camps. The aliens set cities on fire, drove people out who were starving. They had no medicine, no food, no shelter. More people died from the side effects than from the attacks themselves—diseases, untended injuries, exposure.

  “But I was saved because they considered me useful. I was assigned to maintain Kylarn machinery in various buildings. One building was off limits, though. They often took human prisoners there for experiments. According to the few survivors I met, the building held giant hospital wards and research chambers, where the Kylarn did horrible things—poisoning, dissecting, exposing captives to viruses. I learned everything I could about the Kylarn in hopes of helping those tortured humans, but it seemed impossible to escape from that nightmare!”

  “So that’s how you knew those Kylarn words you’ve been teaching us for the past couple of weeks,” JJ said.

  Zota gave a somber nod. “While I fixed machinery for the Kylarn, I met another man who sometimes translated for them—a man I got to know very well. He was also professor at the university, teaching linguistics and philosophy. Like me, he had lost his family and fervently wished to prevent further human suffering. We talked long into the night, while we shivered in our tattered tents, trying to imagine scenarios of how the war might end. Neither of us believed humans could defeat the Kylarn—not with what we had. Time and again I wished I could go back and change the short-sighted thinking that had left the human race incapable of defending itself.”

  “Who was this other man?” King asked.

  “His name was Toowun. Professor Toowun.” Zota looked up. JJ’s surprise was reflected on her friends’ faces. “He theorized that if human beings could show the Kylarn that we were no threat to them, they would leave more of us alive.”

  Commander Zota lowered his gaze, looking down at his desk. His eyes were drawn to the Challenger model. “Others, though, didn’t give up the fight. Some military commanders gained access to old nuclear missiles and launched them, destroying a Kylarn outpost. They took the aliens by surprise.”

  “Good for them!” Dyl said.

  Zota didn’t smile. “Because of that resistance, the Kylarn queen retaliated by massacring more than four hundred million humans.” He stopped, letting the words hang in the air. As the very idea sank in, JJ tried to grasp the magnitude of so many deaths.

  “Then one night Professor Toowun and I were taken to the experi-mental building. There were chambers dedicated to medical experiments, psychological experiments, even some high-tech physics experiments … one of which was a time machine.” Zota sat up straight. JJ’s pulse raced as they waited to hear what he would say next.

  “It’s a long story. I don’t know what they intended to do with Toowun and me that night. We heard enough of what they were saying to be convinced they intended to kill more humans, either quickly or by inches. And they expected us to help them.

  “Maybe because we seemed so docile, or because Professor Toowun acted completely submissive and helpless, the Kylarn let down their guard. I surprised them by fighting. It’s amazing how strong you can be once you make up your mind to act. When you take bold action, you must commit to it. I got one of the laser shredders away from the guards and killed them. Toowun was astonished. We tried to escape, but the laboratory building was crawling with other Kylarn. Alarms began to sound. They were going to find us soon.

  “We locked ourselves into a room with two time machines, each the size of a refrigerator. The controls were quite complex, but by this point I understood Kylarn controls and their written language. We could both have fled in the same machine, but we didn’t want to leave one for the Kylarn to come after us with. So, Toowun and I each activated one of the devices, set a destination back in time—and adjusted the field so it would encompass ourselves and the machines. I ended up here. I knew I had work to do.” He drew a deep breath and visibly slumped in the chair, as if merely telling the tale had exhausted him.

  “What about Toowun?” JJ asked. “We know he’s here.”

  “I do now,” Zota sighed. “You reported that he’s been training Cadet Mira—and who knows how many others? I thought Toowun and I were on the same side, but evidently we came to different conclusions. I never heard from him again. I thought he’d been lost in the transport process, or maybe he had his time set to a slightly different destination.”

  “We never thought this mission was going to be easy,” JJ said. “But it looks like Mentor Toowun and Mira are going to make it harder for us.”

  “As if fighting the Kylarn invasion wasn’t hard enough,” Dyl said
.

  King sounded disappointed. “I think Mira’s just brainwashed. She wouldn’t be fighting against us if she understood the real story.”

  Song-Ye gave King a wry look. “I’ll bet she’s thinking exactly the same about us.”

  Tony crossed his arms over his chest. “Believe me, it’s best to be optimistic about the future.”

  “Optimistic, but realistic.” Zota stood from his desk. “Are you ready to learn about your mission?”

  “More than ever,” JJ said.

  ***

  Four

  Zota ushered the Star Challengers from his office to the private briefing room where they got instructions for their missions. The ceiling sparkled with artificial stars.

  Considering the threat they had learned about at the end of their mission to the space station, JJ was not surprised when Commander Zota announced he would send the team forward on a mission to the asteroids. According to the astronomy studies King had done for Drs. Wu and d’Almeida, three of those cosmic rocks had been knocked out of their orbits and sent hurtling toward Earth.

  “In the future you’re going to this time,” Zota said, “the International Collaborative Space Agency will have run detailed calculations to map out their mission. I’m very curious to see how they plan to solve this crisis—and I’m sure you will help them to succeed. Let me give you some background to prepare you.”

  He seemed more subdued and grimmer than ever since recounting the horrors of the alien invasion and his own family’s death. Looking at the scar on his face, JJ could only guess at the terrible things the Kylarn had done to him—things even Zota wasn’t willing to talk about.

  “Before that, however, we need to continue your skill training,” Zota said.

  He spent an hour drilling the friends on simple Kylarn words and symbols before announcing that he had one more exercise for them. Though she knew that taking time to practice wouldn’t actually delay the mission—Zota’s time machine would send them to the correct time and place regardless of when they left here—JJ was impatient to get into the future.

  “Because space is such a hazardous environment, I want you to be familiar with remote controls and robotic assistance in order to complete operations.”

  “We used spacesuits on the Moon, and we trained for extravehicular activities at the space station. We can learn hands-on when we get there,” JJ suggested.

  “That isn’t always the best solution,” Zota said. “Not only are the risks greater to a person in a spacesuit outside the protection of a habitat, it often takes significant time and effort to put on a suit and exit an airlock. Robotic arms have been used for many work activities in space, ever since the ‘Canadarm,’ or the Shuttle Remote Manipulator System, flew as part of the second space-shuttle flight.”

  “You mean we get to play with the waldos?” Tony asked, referring to the nickname for the remote-control grasping arms. “Major Rodgers trained me to use a robotic arm on the ISSC to launch the Eye in the Sky satellite. I’m not too bad at stuff like that, if I do say so myself.” JJ hadn’t gotten to use the waldos on their school field trip to the Challenger Center and looked forward to it now. It would be fun to play with the joystick controls, moving the metal gadget on its three axes.

  The commander frowned at Tony. “Do you not wish to improve? To practice?”

  Tony flushed. “No, I didn’t mean that.”

  “Come on, you can be my partner,” JJ offered, smiling. “Since you’re so good at it, show me how it’s done.”

  Zota cleared his throat. Tony, JJ, and the other Star Challengers returned their attention to him.

  On the main screen on the front wall, the commander projected a diagram of the solar system. “I’m sure you’re all very familiar with the planets orbiting our Sun?”

  Tony spoke up. “My Very Elegant Mother Just Served Us Noodles. That’s the mnemonic I use to remember the names of the planets—Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune.”

  “Poor Pluto,” Dyl said, “it used to be considered a planet, but it got demoted. Now it’s called a ‘dwarf planet’—probably just a huge chunk of rock and ice in a long-term orbit.”

  Zota pointed to a large gap that separated the inner four rocky planets from the outer four gas giants. “What we’re most interested in at the moment are the asteroids, right here between Mars and Jupiter.” He touched a keyboard on the controlling computer, and all the planets in the solar system diagram began circling the Sun. The inner ones moved faster, while the outer planets crawled along. The asteroids, a flurry of tiny pinpoints, looked like a swarm of fireflies.

  “Unlike the major planets, asteroids cannot be seen with the naked eye. It wasn’t until 1801 that the first asteroid was discovered by the Italian astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi. At first he thought it was a new comet, but it moved more like a planet. He named it Ceres, after the Roman goddess of agriculture.” Zota indicated the blur of dots. “Amateurs, astronomers, and space telescopes have identified several hundred thousand now, many of them in stable orbits. Some asteroids, however, are erratic and the majority aren’t well cataloged.” The commander shook his head. “In your time, people don’t consider it a very high priority.”

  “I do,” King said. “That’s why I spent so much time scanning star charts with Dr. Wu on the Moon, and Dr. d’Almeida aboard the space station, sir. We detected three that had moved out of their known orbits. Asteroids are hard to find because they’re so small.”

  “Yes,” Zota said. “The large ones are usually fifty to a hundred miles in diameter, and perhaps thirty of them are larger than that. But the vast majority are only a mile or two across—barely a dust speck in the solar system. If we could gather all known asteroids together into a single lump, the total mass would still be smaller than the Earth’s Moon.”

  “If they’re so small, why are we worried about them?” Dyl had taken out his perennial note cards and was busily scribbling down the data Commander Zota recited.

  “Pfft! ‘Small’ is a relative term, Junior,” Song-Ye said. “I certainly wouldn’t want a fifty-mile-wide boulder hitting me on the head.”

  Tony gave a nervous laugh. “I wouldn’t even want a one-mile boulder hitting my head.”

  “You saw the craters made by falling meteorites on the Moon,” Zota said. “And those were tiny pebbles compared to these. The Earth is moving in its orbit, the asteroids are moving; all the planets are constantly circling the Sun. Over the billions of years since the solar system formed, occasional accidents have happened, orbits cross. We know some asteroids come very close to Earth, but even when an asteroid crosses our planets orbit, we don’t have to worry about a collision unless the planet and asteroid are in exactly the same place at exactly the same time.”

  “Right,” JJ said. “Just because two streets intersect, that doesn’t mean two random cars on those streets are going to smash into each other.”

  King pondered the diagram. “It’s like a cosmic chess game. Those altered asteroid orbits aren’t an accident or coincidence. The Kylarn specifically aimed the asteroids.”

  “And if no one was looking, it would be very easy for one of those rocks to slip through unnoticed,” JJ said. “We wouldn’t have any idea until it actually hit us.”

  “Didn’t an asteroid impact cause the extinction of the dinosaurs?” Song-Ye asked.

  “Yes, scientists believe that sixty-five million years ago an asteroid struck our planet, estimated to be only about ten kilometers, or six miles, across. A relatively small asteroid, and yet that one strike wiped out not only the dinosaurs, but three-quarters of all the species that were alive then. That should tell you how much energy is released even by a relatively small asteroid that strikes the Earth.”

  King gave a low whistle. “When we were on the Moon, Dr. Wu joked that the dinosaurs didn’t have a space program. They had no way of knowing what was about to happen to them.”

  “And the Kylarn want to do that to us! We’ll barely have a spac
e program when they arrive,” Dyl said.

  JJ felt both dismayed and determined. She thought again about the mysterious, irritating man in the grocery store, who had called the space program a silly waste of time. She told them all about her debate with the man.

  “There are many people like that—in your time and in mine,” Zota said. “Sometimes it’s hard to look at the big picture, to set your sights on the future and invest money for long-range goals, rather than something with an immediate payoff. But now that you’ve been to the future, you’ve seen for yourself how important it is to prepare now. That will be just one of the challenges you’ll have to face throughout your lives. It may be gradual, but attitudes need to change.”

  “Someone’s got to do it.” JJ stood up and looked around. “It might as well be the Star Challengers. We’re ready to go.”

  ***

  Five

  His discussion of the asteroids complete, Zota took the Star Challengers down a long hallway to another area of the center. There were two stations with a transparent window and a compartment that held a waldo along with several sample objects: rocks, calibrated weights, and a laboratory balance. Though she understood the simple physics and geology experiment, JJ discovered that performing the tasks was quite a challenge. Moving a waldo wasn’t as easy as operating the cockpit controls of the small aircraft her Uncle Buzz was training her to fly.

  For practice, she and Tony were told to figure out each type of sample rock; their guidebook offered several straightforward experiments. Apart from the appearance, texture, and color of the rock samples, JJ and Tony needed to determine the density, because some rocks were intrinsically heavier per volume than others.