Bright Moon
It was by the light of two moons that Senior Scholar Leylin mar Archen banked her hoverauto into the motor pool. The old sodium lamps washed the colour out of the fur on her muzzle as she headed for the entrance to the observatory she managed. Newer lights would have cost more and would spill less light into the sky. Here though the money was better spent on new detectors, because unlike a traditional telescope, light pollution from two of the three moons that circled the planet, or from the parking lot, were less of a problem than the mountain that sat above the sensors she oversaw.
Instead, inside a mostly decommissioned bunker sat one of the world's most advanced neutrino telescopes looking out through the mountain, and the entire planet, with equal ease.
With the use of the large bunker, once intended to hold whole infantry armies in the face of nuclear war, came military restrictions on access. Which is why the Senior Scholar had to check through security like everyone else at the facility.
"Evening Scholar Leylin," said the Ranker manning the security booth separated from the access pathway by a thick layer of bulletproof glass.
"Evening Lehir. How are the kits?"
"Oh, they're just great. Climbing all over their Dad, tails going like they're trying to take off." Lehir taking a moment while waiting for the computer to finish its biometric identification procedure to hold a small computer table up to the security glass to show a short video loop of her children tumbling over her current husband.
Leylin leaned in. "Aww that's adorable," she cooed.
"Sure, are until you have to be the one to herd them all up," agreed Lehir as an almost inaudible hum ceased, "And the access control computer is down. I'm going to need a Terpsichorus to come over and unlock the controls so we can reboot them. Sorry. Anything exciting I'm keeping you from tonight?"
"Every night is exciting," said Leylin, "Neutrinos, actually looking at them, is so new that we learn something new every time we pull another image out of the computers."
"Makes me wish that I'd been able to pass my science courses," complained Lehir.
"I've got nothing but time until you can open the door, want a quick lesson," offered Leylin as she set down her bag to wait.
"Sure, if you can simplify it enough for an amateur."
"Trust me. Politicians don't like to fund anything they can't understand and I had to get my funding from them somehow. First, what do you think you know about the Neutrino Telescope Project?"
"It mostly tracks processes deep within our sun and it's under this mountain because the best way we have to monitor neutrinos is to make something incredibly sensitive and then stop anything from hitting it. Since we don't know how to stop neutrinos that's everything left over."
Leyin's eyes had widened slightly at the summary, "Almost perfect, and pretty close to the brochures we handed out at the last time we had reporters through."
"I didn't pass the science course, but it's not like I stopped reading."
"Fair," conceded Leylin, "That gets you existence. We also track direction with a couple of different tricks. First, we time the detections very carefully. Since neutrinos move at light speed, we can line up the detections and get a heading from that, then look at the sky with optical or radio telescopes so that we can try and pin down the source."
"That makes sense. Kind of vague, but useful."
"Exactly, mostly these detectors work when the neutrinos smack into an electron, gives it a little more energy. Then the electron gives off radiation when it goes back to normal. Kind of the way it happens in a laser. Now a better trick to get directions is if we get lucky and the energy levels are low enough a neutrino can bump into an entire atom. If that happens, we can pick a direction off of that, long term we can even build a map of things like the neutrino cosmic background radiation or detect a supernova before the light from it has a chance to reach us."
"That sounds wrong," said Lehir looking confused, "You just said that neutrinos moved at light speed. How would they beat the light to us then?"
"It can take thousands, maybe millions of years for light to get out of a star like our Sun. Every time it leaves an atom it goes until it hits another one, and since the atoms in a star are packed closely enough to fuse, that doesn't take long. Then the photon gets emitted and it starts again in a different direction. Maybe even backwards. Neutrinos have so much trouble interacting with the rest of regular matter that they can skip out almost immediately, which means that we get a much, much faster view of what's happening."
"Huh. Science is weird."
"That's where the fun is."
The door behind Lehir clicked and unlocked, a head poking out, nodding at both Scholar and Ranker, sliding a plain key into a slot and opening the control cabinet at the security checkpoint. After that, it was a few minutes of careful work with tuning forks and a tone generator to re-synchronize the sonic encryption loop before pushing five buttons and shutting the cabinet again before leaving.
While the hardware began its handshake protocol Lehir continued, "Not long now, but why is it so secured then if the telescope is good at tracking are things like suns and stars?"
"And nuclear plants. The old detectors, the big ones that might take you ten minutes to walk across if you weren't in a hurry, they might get you a rough count to help pin down unreported nuclear reactors. The new directional ones? They aren't fast enough for targeting on something like a missile in real-time, but for doing things like tracking a sub? Or someone's attempt at a secret nuclear-powered base like a cheap thriller? That we can start to pin down."
"By measuring things that can fly through a planet. Science is crazy sometimes."
"Oh, that's all the time," said Leylin with a smile, "We're just careful what we publish."
-0-
It was maybe a sixtieth of the way into the shift when some of the more ominous words in science were uttered.
"Huh. That's unusual."
"What's up, Movli?" asked Leylin.
"Oh hey, Boss. Just got an unusual spike on the high energy neutrino detector. No double flashes on the nuclear detector satellite network, so it wasn't a deliberate criticality. No fluctuations in the power grid so it wasn't a civilian reactor."
"Go down the list of isotope only plants next?" suggested Leylin coming fully awake at the news.
"I guess yeah. Which is always the call that every nuclear certified person in the country wants to get in the middle of the night."
"Actually, hold up on that. Start getting a hold of the different seismology centres. Most of the things that could cause a problem we need to worry about first would have made a hell of a bang. I'll get Malsun heading a team to coordinate with the other neutrino observatories to see if we can pin an origin down."
"What do we do?"
"We do our job. And right now, that means that I have to wake up Secretary Lowwins and let him know that either a star exploded or there's a radioactive disaster somewhere on the planet and we can't tell which yet."
-0-
Senior Scholar Leylin had just finished getting past the cabinet secretary's night secretary, and explaining the situation ending with, "It's either going to be some interesting astronomy, in which case I apologize, or it's the first warning we have of a dramatic and otherwise unknown nuclear disaster."
"How do we tell the difference?" asked Secretary mer Lowwins over the speakerphone.
"Well, it depends. The inverse-square law-"
"-The what?" interrupted Lowwins.
"It's the same way that a light is dimmer when you're further away," explained Leylin, "Neutrinos are a form of radiation and follow it like all the other forms. So, either the source is pretty big and right next door or it's huge and it is light-years away, or it's the neutrino equivalent of a gamma-ray burst and it's in a different galaxy and just evaporated everything next to it."
"But can we tell the difference?" reiterated Lowwins.
"If it lasts long enough, sure. Once we get a direction, we can look that way and see if anything lines up. In the meantime, we keep measuring everything we can and look for anything else that glows or hums that the timing lines up with."
"And if it doesn't last?"
"Nothing we can do about besides knowing that this is another thing to look for and sigh about when conspiracy theorists point at it."
"Is there anything else we can do?"
"Give me a bigger budget and we can go looking with bigger and newer equipment. Give me more time and we can see if it happens again. Give me more freedom and we can try and crowdsource it across the planet and see if there's anything in different labs we can pull together."
"Hold off on that last one but start putting your information together. I'll put it before the High Warden once she's some type of awake."
"Understood," agreed Leylin.
The door to her office banged open and Movli barged in, printout in hand. "Good news Boss," he said, panting slightly, "We've got a directional fix."
-0-
The High Warden rubbed her face. She felt like she'd aged three years in the last six great months. Her predecessor had told her that disasters always happened at these sorts of hours, or at least they would if she was lucky.
"I was elected based on the economy, not space exploration. Break it down for me. Like I'm a kit."
"Yes Warden," said Lowwins before taking a deep breath and starting from the top, "There is a new high energy neutrino source off-planet. It is probably, but not certainly, a supernova or other astronomical event. We have no direct observation of the event because Monar is in the way at the moment. There is a small outside chance that the event could be caused by aliens, or an alien probe, having coasted into our system on low power and now hiding behind Monar, or some other event that we haven't thought of yet."
"Probability of risk to the country?
"Low chance that it is anything bad, but it might be very bad if we're wrong."
"Chance that it gives any other country an edge in the next," she closed her eyes and counted off the timeline for the next round of trade talks, "Call it six months?"
"None existent for practical purposes. No one has a rover or orbital monitor that can reach as high as Monar's orbit, which is the closest site where the event could be for at least a year. Longer if something has to be built. It might take decades to do anything with the information if this is something like a nova. The biggest danger if this is the first sign of something that could sterilize the planet."
"That's a risk?" asked the High Warden opening her eyes.
"Space has energy levels being thrown around in it that we can't really even think about," said Secretary Lowwins, "I've been assured that it is very unlikely."
"But more likely than aliens."
"Why would aliens sneak in? Also, I've been assured repeatedly that there is no such thing as stealth in space."
"Couldn't the aliens have some sort of camouflage that they could use to hide their ship?" asked the Warden as she reached for another mug of morning broth.
"If aliens were doing something like that, they would have to be aware that neutrinos go through little things that get in the way. Like moons. Any aliens that could do something like travel between stars and hide from the satellite telescope network have to know enough about physics to know that about neutrinos and that their craft is producing them."
"Too bad. It would have been a great story to tell the gradkits. Oh well. I guess we make some extra shelters just in case we have to get the country through some sort of radiation waves from space," she reached over to a pad of official paper and began writing the first draft of the instructions to follow on it as she continued, "Let the scholars know that the situation is declassified and that they can direct as many eyes and ears, or however the information comes out when you have an observatory under a mountain, as they want to try and figure it out."
"I'll pass that along."
-0-
Navigator's Log, Stardate 27312.4,
USS Pleezirra—Lieutenant Leonidas McNamara
Departure from Kosrith [Note: Local name for a prewarp planet in sector Charlie Dash Dash Six] complicated by an effort to confound planetary observatories while avoiding the outer moons.
System data and route attached for future reference and review.
Captain's Log, Stardate 27312.4, USS Pleezirra - Captain Maria Volkov
Disaster! It is a good thing we were tapped into the communication networks, or we might have missed our presence was being noted. It seems we underestimated how advanced their high-energy astronomy was, due to most of it being hidden underground. We intercepted chatter on academic channels that they had detected unusually strong neutrino returns, and someone had used a prototype sonic computer to calculate they were coming from a direction obscured by the moon -- in other words, our warp core. On one hand it is good because we have an idea how powerful these interesting computers are, on the other hand is very bad because our cover was blown to bits.
We made a quick exit, and our presence was not directly observed. Most academics suspected it was emissions from an obscured supernova, and only a few considered the possibility it may be from an extraterrestrial source. However, this is the danger of pre-warp cultures. For all we know our little anomaly will throw off science for decades, and they will waste telescope-time trying to find the source of these mysterious neutrinos. Or paranoid voices will say it was a God or angry aliens and they should institute some overreaction. A more cautious follow-up will be required.
Mostly I am disappointed in myself for assuming too little of these people. Never be overconfident!
A/N: Thank you once again to
@Iron Wolf and
@AKuz for betaing this, before it was submitted for marks for a Comparative Lit course. Dual use folks, that's the way to go.
