Image credit: ESA & MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/RSSD/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA. License CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO. Modified from original image.
True solitude is a rare thing.
It must have felt odd to be one of the few who have experienced it — to be, quite literally, thousands of miles away from any other human. But it was a reality for the dozen inhabitants of the gray building. Its walls were austere and rectangular, made of plain metal, the only adornment an engraving of the United Nations Space Agency logo. It towered above an equally plain gray ground — the floor of the crater Ezinu.
Ezinu was curiously named. Out here, in the middle of the asteroid belt, it seemed that everything conspired against the existence of life. It was only after much effort that humanity was able to establish a foothold here, and a tenuous one at that. In this land, there was no greenery except for a few small plants brought kicking and screaming into a world that they had no business being in, lined up in monotonous rows in an indoor lab. Yet the crater was named after a grain goddess who hadn’t been worshiped for millenia, and it was found on the dwarf planet Ceres, christened in honor of another ancient goddess of agriculture. These were strange names, but they were the names.
If you were to count nonhuman visitors, this place would not be entirely alone. Every once in a while, a fleet of small, bizarrely‐shaped robotic probes would fly by — microsats, as they were called. They were the very epitome of the “quantity over quality” philosophy: small, ludicrously cheap, and the go‐to way to complete a simple job, be it collecting information, transmitting data, or repairing a space station — you name it. Their lifespans were abysmally short, but they were frequently used nonetheless.
Microsats were common passersby. As they approached the solitary building, the one sparsely‐populated human outpost in this vast expanse, they sent short messages. Their origin, ID, position, trajectory, fuel reserve status, and destination were all dutifully logged by an automated receiver for space traffic control purposes.
Every once in a while, a microsat would be destroyed and would fail to send its scheduled message. This was to be expected. Space was littered with debris moving faster than a bullet that could make short work of a fragile microsat. Any disappearances would be noted and promptly forgotten.
At this particular moment, in an empty room with plain gray walls lit only by a dim red lamp, in an isolated corner of an isolated building on an isolated world, a receiver recorded one such disappearance. It cross‐checked all of the information it had and determined that, as far as it could tell, the disappearance was just like any other. It was a perfectly routine event. Normally, it would be no cause for concern.
Normally.
⁂
Dr. Davis Chen hated sleeping.
Well, that wasn’t completely true. More to the point, he hated falling asleep. He hated counting scores and legions and hordes of sheep and still being wide awake by the end of it all. But despite his disgruntlement, it was just another thing that had to be done. Davis had been a diagnosed insomniac ever since his childhood, and no medicine or treatment worked for him.
Tonight, like every night before, Davis stared blankly at the ceiling. He had decided that instead of counting sheep, he would let his mind wander a bit. Maybe, for once in his godforsaken life, his mind would let him drift off peacefully.
It would not. It was roughly 03:10 in the morning in his Denver residence, more than five hours after he had gone to bed, and he was still very much awake.
“To hell with this,” he muttered to himself, abruptly sitting up. He felt a pang of total exhaustion, but he knew that he would have better odds of walking from his home on Earth all the way to Mars than he would of sleeping tonight.
With a sequence of tiny, deliberate eye muscle twitches, unnoticeable to anyone but himself, he turned on his retinal implants — miniature computer monitors embedded in his eye. If he couldn’t sleep, he figured he might as well try to do something productive.
Immediately, he was bombarded by the space traffic log. He would have unsubscribed from the annoying thing and its constant pestering by now if it weren’t related to his work. Usually, it was filled with tedious descriptions of uneventful occurrences, detailing how such‐and‐such with a long alphanumeric jumble of an ID was, in fact, going exactly where it was supposed to be going. This time, though, the first item was something mildly interesting: a microsat disappearance. Such events happened daily, but — well, he was bored, and he had nothing better to do than peruse the report. As he did so, he saw that the microsat involved here was passing through a clear stretch of space. There shouldn’t have been any debris that could destroy it, and indeed, the other microsats traveling in its fleet hadn’t detected any debris.
Something about this disappearance was off. Davis knew it was probably nothing significant. But he was still maddeningly tired despite his inability to sleep, and he figured that investigating the matter might help him rid himself of his exhaustion.
He began by looking at the observations of the other microsats in the fleet. Their radar suggested that the disappearance had occurred between 10:05 and 10:20 UTC, but again, the very same radar hadn’t detected any fast‐moving debris that could have struck down the vanished microsat. And the gravimeter readings only made things even more baffling. The microsats were equipped with very precise meters that could feel the subtle gravitational tug of any nearby object. Although the radar showed an empty space where the vanished microsat should be, the gravimeter readings unanimously agreed that something was still there.
Davis stared at the information, unable to make up or down of what he was seeing. After a while he said simply: “That’s … strange.”
⁂
The Spire was visible for miles. It was the tallest structure in the flat landscape of Hellas Planitia, one of the great Martian plains, and its carbon‐nanotube makeup colored it so deeply black that not even shadows were visible against its surface — it seemed like a void in the fabric of space.
It was a reminder of Mars’s very recent past — the days when Mars, being so isolated from the rest of humanity, had no government of its own, no place where its voice would be heard. Its various nations had been ruled from abroad by the United Nations and the Congress of Luna, both of which cared more for their homeworlds — Earth and its moon, respectively — than for the distant Martians they also happened to govern.
Many battles were fought before the creation of an independent Martian Coalition, encompassing both the planet proper and the port cities on its two moons, Phobos and Deimos. Many lives were lost too — a fact that was never far from Martian minds, what with this towering memorial to the fallen. Those days of war were when the UN and Luna put aside their differences and joined forces to create the Greater Tellurian Commonwealth. Mars and Telluria had been bitter rivals ever since.
Estimates varied, but it was generally agreed that, even without any maintenance, the Spire could remain standing for centuries. But with every passing month, it seemed that the Coalition would be lucky if it could continue standing united for even half that time.
⁂
Pale Blue Grand Station was often called the crown jewel of Telluria — and for good reason. A massive, bustling disc floating above Earth, functioning as a spaceport, a research station, and a home for the Martian embassy, it easily took the title of the largest manmade object put in space. But that was somehow not the most impressive part. No, the most impressive part was the series of carbon‐nanotube cables stretching from the disc’s underside all the way down to the bedrock of the seafloor in the western Pacific Ocean. Thanks to these, long gone were the days of having to burn millions of pounds of fuel to send things into space. Instead, Pale Blue served as the upper floor of an elevator to the heavens — the only such elevator humanity had yet built.
This city in the skies was also the heart of Telluria’s space traffic control network — much like air traffic control, except over interplanetary distances and with the added stress of dealing with random micrometeorites that were more than happy to smash things to bits. It was a fitting place for Davis to call with his news.
“Tellurian Space Traffic Command. Pale Blue Grand Station, Astro–Pacific Federal District, UN, callsign U‑BLU. 11:36 UTC. Denver?”
“Denver Spaceport–Observatory,” replied Davis’s slightly anguished voice. “Ahm … Denver, US, UN, callsign U‑DEN. 04:36 local time.” Of course, all of this information was sent automatically as well, but this odd greeting ritual was maintained out of mildly paranoid concerns for safety and security.
“04:36 in the morning,” mused the space traffic controller. “When do you even sleep?”
“Never. Uh, look, there’s a fairly urgent matter here. A highly anomalous microsat disappearance. Bear with me for a minute.
“So at 10:12 UTC,” Davis began after a dramatic inhale, “a microsat fleet was passing the Ezinu UNSA Research Station on Ceres when one of the microsats suddenly flashed with a brilliant light.” This new information had been gathered by the Denver Observatory team using raw data from Ezinu. “By the time the flash was gone, all radar systems indicated that the microsat had vanished. But gravimeter systems still detected the microsat’s mass. As if that weren’t odd enough, then there are the spectrometer readings.” With these readings, it was possible to find the chemical elements that made up any objects in view of Ezinu’s impressive high‐definition spectrometer array. “Ezinu detected a very small point, right where the microsat used to be, moving along exactly the same path at exactly the same speed. Except … this point had no recognizable spectral lines.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“No recognizable spectral lines. None whatsoever. This dot doesn’t contain any chemical elements that we can reasonably expect.”
“Impossible.”
“I thought so too. But the entire Denver Observatory team has been working on this for about an hour. Hell, I’ve spent every waking second today thinking about it — well, except for the five minutes I needed to feed my fish, but that’s —”
“Your what?”
“Never mind the fish! What I’m trying to say is that we’ve only come up with one explanation. It’s preliminary and honestly hard to believe, but given that it’s relevant to space traffic control and public safety and whatnot, I have to share it with you. Somehow, the entire microsat was transformed into a very dense dot that’s small enough to escape radar and isn’t even made of atoms.”
⁂
Many eons ago, two corpses danced.
They were much more than corpses. They were born of death — the deaths of magnificent stars, to be exact — but they were still as lively as celestial bodies could hope to be. They were, to use the technical term, neutron stars. Millions of years before the dance had even begun, two massive stars reached their last breaths and went out with a bang — literally. When the dust had settled, their remnants formed these neutron stars, so heavy and dense that at their centers lay exotic physics not known anywhere else in the cosmos. Inside one of them, the unusual conditions created a substance called — fittingly, as you’re about to see — strange matter. Yeah, physicists have never been good at naming things.
For eons, the neutron stars drifted through space until they eventually found each other. Gravity did the rest of the work. For the remainder of their lives, they would be doomed to a long, entrancing dance, spiraling around each other increasingly quickly. When the dance reached its climax, its participants performed a maneuver that human dancers have never quite been able to replicate: they rammed into each other at incredible speed and blew themselves to smithereens.
There was another explosion, sending shockwaves throughout the very fabric of space. Pieces of the neutron stars were thrown outwards in all directions. Some of them, which would eventually be named “strangelets,” were made of this exotic strange matter.
One of these strangelets was sent careening along a course that would someday take it into the neighborhood of a star called Sol, around which floated a beautiful blue ball called Earth, upon which would eventually grow a race of intelligent (or so it’s said) beings called humans. The long countdown had begun.
Many, many years passed. The strangelet flew; the humans evolved. Before long the humans had developed technologies so advanced as to be unfathomable to any of the other Earthling species. They cast their eyes and minds to the skies, spreading slowly beyond their homeworld, living and dying on grander scales. All the while, they remained blissfully unaware of the strangelet hurtling towards them.
They didn’t really have a reason to be aware of it — it was, after all, incredibly tiny. The strangelet didn’t care much for humans, either — it was, after all, a thoughtless blob. The humans and the strangelet didn’t want anything to do with each other. But fate had made up its mind — they would meet.
⁂
“Our request is quite simple.” Tellurian ambassador Sofía Algardmontes’s voice was deliberate and flowing — almost calming, as if she weren’t aware of the gravity of the situation. In reality, she was not at all calm as she surveyed the glares from the unimpressed Martian delegates — but she had to put that aside for now; this speech was important. “We, the governments and people of the Greater Tellurian Commonwealth, ask only that you acknowledge reality.
“The Commonwealth is a large place. Our citizens under the United Nations and the Congress of Luna number several billion strong. Our economy bustles with diversity. Our forays into the heavens have brought a few hundred brave explorers to remote research stations in the craters of Ceres and the clouds of Venus. Yet something important is still missing: our Deimian brethren.
“Of course there is some history to consider. Deimos and Phobos have been moons of Mars for countless millennia, and we fully recognize that. But no amount of natural astronomy can change the present state of things. Look to the Phobos Colony and you will see a state that exists in harmony with your Martian Coalition. But Deimos is a different story. The Coalition officially claims it, but do your people agree? A Deimian will tell you they are being treated unjustly, and whether or not that is true, we cannot ignore the violence and bloodshed. Just hours ago, the dispute over Deimos cost the lives of thirteen innocent Deimian civilians who were brutally massacred in a hijacked ship. As delegates of the Martian Coalition, you have a difficult situation to handle.”
She swallowed nervously. Next would be the hard part. “And that brings us back to our request,” she heard herself say. “I ask that you look at yourselves and see the right that you and I take for granted — the right to self‐determination. And I ask that you extend this right to the people of Deimos. Let them decide, through a free and fair referendum, whether they wish to remain in the Martian Coalition, leave and join Telluria, or become unaffiliated with either. As the founders of your Coalition once proudly proclaimed, let the people speak.”
At this Sofía stopped, surveying again the expressions of the crowd of assorted diplomats and leaders gathered before her.
Their utter silence was harsher than any words could possibly be.
⁂
There was something mystifying about the fish. It was so easy to get lost in the swirling and twisting of its colorful fins, its unpredictable sprints through the water … and yet it somehow seemed perfectly logical, beautiful in its intricacy and randomness —
Davis’s train of thought was cut short by an intriguing bit of news on his retinal implant.
“Well, let’s hear it,” he said to no‐one in particular as he opted to listen to the recording.
It began with some static, followed abruptly by a deep, resonant voice. “This is a live transmission. Marstraffic United. Nergal Station, Olympus Republic, Martian Coalition, callsign M‑NER. Intended recipient: Tellurian Space Traffic Command. Pale Blue Grand Station, Astro–Pacific Federal District, United Nations, Greater Tellurian Commonwealth, callsign U‑BLU. 15:52 UTC.
“Hello. Speaking is Sir Wolfgang Leuonn, Director‐General of Marstraffic United and Chancellor of the Martian Coalition.” His Classical English was exquisite and unusually polished, even for the most formal varieties of the international tongue, with only a slight accent that evaded identification. “For future listeners, I am in Nergal Station a few days after Mars resolved to send a scout probe to investigate an unusual microsat disappearance. Trailing behind it is a smaller secondary one, but we concern ourselves with the primary probe.
“As I speak, the probe is approaching a dot. It is believed that this dot was previously the ‘vanished’ microsat before something happened to it.” A faint commotion could be heard in the background, after which the voice announced: “Our scientists appear to have confirmed Denver’s findings. The dot does not contain any known chemical elements. It is much smaller than the microsat ever was, but nevertheless, it has precisely the same mass. We have here a very remarkable object, and we are incredibly fortunate to be able to witness this historic moment — oh, the probe is about to make contact!” A chorus of excited voices started counting down: “10 … 9 … Are we using Martian seconds or international seconds?” A few faint chuckles followed. “3 … 2 … 1 …
“Contact has been made! Our probe reports that — hm.” The confident, sonorous voice floundered for a moment before saying, “We have lost transmissions from our primary probe. The secondary probe appears to report that the primary one has … vanished with a brilliant flash of light. Gravimeter readings indicate that the dot has somehow absorbed the newly‐vanished probe’s mass.”
The recording continued, but Davis didn’t pay much attention to it. His mind was racing, flooded with a thought he’d had many times before. He had always ignored it, but it was no use now — all clues pointed to that one terrifying possibility.
⁂
A much younger Davis was very nervous. What would happen in the next few hours — or minutes — would determine the outcome of years of work.
“That said,” he heard one of the examiners say, jolting him back to reality, “please explain your findings.”
“My work … ahm … provides evidence for the metastability —”
“In simple terms, if you wouldn’t mind. Your paper already has all the technical information we need. We need not a recitation, but an explanation.”
“Right.” Davis loosened his shoulders, exhaled, and began. “Neutron stars are one of the places in the Universe that push the boundaries of proven physics. For example, it has long been thought that the extreme circumstances in some of their cores may have created an incredibly dense substance known as ‘strange matter.’ There is a reason behind its name, but I like to think that it was named for just being generally strange. It’s unlike anything we humans have ever seen. Until now, though, the existence of strange matter in these places had not been proven. My work is the first to show, with extraordinary certainty, that strange matter does exist in some neutron stars.”
“But I understand that is not all?”
“It’s not even the beginning. There has also been another unproven idea — that once strange matter is forged in incredible conditions, it can continue to exist without them. And that, if given an opportunity, every bit of ‘normal’ matter — your desk, the air, our bodies — would prefer to be strange matter. This opportunity could be just touching a piece of strange matter. In other words, strange matter would be … well, infectious. It would infect everything it touches with its strangeness in a brilliant flash of light.”
“But that was unproven.”
“Right. Was unproven. But now, my work has not only found that strange matter exists in some neutron stars, but it’s also discovered one specific group of neutron stars where there’s much more of it than you would expect. The only reasonable explanation is that the originally‐created strange matter has infected the neutron stars through and through. I have provided the first real evidence for this idea.”
The examiner nodded, seemingly satisfied. “Groundbreaking work, Mr. Chen. Or, more accurately now, Dr. Chen.”
⁂
Sir Wolfgang remembered little about his childhood. It all seemed so terribly distant. There was one feeling, though, that he remembered distinctly — the feeling of wonder he’d so often experience when looking up at the night sky. He’d seen many big things, from mountains to cities, and each time he felt the same sense of awe. But he remembered the feeling of looking at the sky because of how … naïve it was. He remembered pondering how far away those lights in the sky were, so foolishly thinking that they could have nothing to do with him. But now, from the wide sunroof of his rover, he was gazing at one particular light that was suffocatingly near: Deimos.
He remembered the first time he visited Deimos. It was a splendid city, and indeed it was Mars’s main point of contact with the rest of the Solar System. It was also a perfect showcase for the Martian Coalition’s biggest problem: itself. The Coalition was a weak union to begin with, an uneasy truce amongst former colonies that rebranded themselves as “republics” and wanted to savor their new independence. But now, it was truly beginning to fall apart. There were talks of leaving the Coalition, and nowhere were these talks louder than on Deimos. If Deimos left, or even tried to leave, the entire Coalition might crumble. And if Deimos were bold enough to join Telluria — well, that would be a disaster of unthinkable proportions. The Tellurian militaries would never waste a chance to set up camp there and perhaps finally settle their scores with Mars.
As Sir Wolfgang stared pensively at the stars overhead, he resolved that Deimos would not leave the Coalition. He would ensure it.
The only question remaining was how to stop them.
⁂
The Denver Spaceport–Observatory seemed to always be in a flurry of activity, but now things had gotten even more frantic.
The dot was hurtling through space, headed for Cape Copernicus on the surface of Mars. If it really was a strangelet — the question the Observatory was now trying to answer — the moment it grazed the Martian atmosphere would be the moment the Red Planet would be completely and utterly wiped off the face of the Universe.
The Sun had just begun to slip below the mountain peaks when the scientists at the Observatory announced their results. Based on Davis’s past neutron star research and the scarce information they had regarding the mysterious dot, they concluded:
The anomalous phenomenon […] is beyond reasonable doubt a strangelet. As the object is headed towards Martian astrospace, the onus now lies on MASC [the Martian Aerospace Commission] and affiliated institutions to avert catastrophe.
To Mars, its honorable chancellor Sir Wolfgang, its eminent aerospace researchers, and its admirable people — we wish you, sincerely, the best of luck.
⁂
The plan was simple, really: smash a heavy sacrificial object into the strangelet to throw it off its course so that it would harmlessly fly past Mars without hitting and obliterating anything. Everything had been worked out already — MASC had a system to divert deadly asteroids with the same method, and now it was only a matter of repurposing it to eliminate a different threat. It was time to put that plan into action.
“All systems go.”
Sir Wolfgang watched from his perch in the control room at Nergal. He had done everything he could, and now he had but to watch.
“Ignition engaged.”
He remembered the promises he made when he ran for Chancellor. The promises to keep the Coalition together. To make it a stronger, more prosperous union. To defend against any and all threats to those goals — from inside and out.
“T minus 10 … 9 …”
He tried to focus on the countdown, but it was drowned out by the voice in his head. It was not his voice, but that of the ambassador. They weren’t her words, either, but rather words spoken long before her: “Let the people speak.” A wonderful sentiment, but perhaps sometimes it was better to let the people watch in silence.
“Impactor deployed successfully.”
He sighed softly, silently praying for forgiveness. He had made a promise to his people, a promise to himself, and now he would have to follow through no matter the cost.
⁂
The impactor made no noise as it rammed into the strangelet. There was no sound in the vacuum of space, after all.
With a flash of light, the impactor, too, was infected and merged into the strangelet. It had been moving fast enough to throw the strangelet off its course, just as expected. No longer was the strangelet headed towards Mars.
Originally, the agreement was that the strangelet would be diverted away from the Solar System altogether. Its new path would let it travel harmlessly through empty space, without hitting anything important. But as the strangelet sped along its new trajectory, it was apparent that when MASC had planned the impact, they’d had different ideas.
⁂
There was no way to describe the dome other than breathtakingly beautiful.
There were many others like it, of course. Terradomes littered the Martian surface, filled with a human‐friendly atmosphere, stocked with greenery, and lined with transparent radiation shields. They allowed people to enjoy the outdoors without inconveniences like suffocating in the Martian air or acquiring cancer from cosmic rays. But no matter how common terradomes were, there was always something magical about them.
The sky was darkening over this particular terradome where carefree children played. It was small compared to some of the flashier ones, but it was still large enough that the children weren’t constantly reminded of the walls overlooking them. The air was pleasant to an extreme, crisp and cool and slightly breezy; the flowers growing from engineered silica soil added a few pops of color. Overhead, just like on any other night, you could spot the stars and the two Martian moons. It was, by all measures, a perfectly normal evening, a perfectly normal time for the children to enjoy themselves.
“Look!” cried one suddenly, pointing to the heavens. The others looked, and an awed silence settled over the dome as they watched something they had never seen before. For in the skies, where once Deimos proudly stood, there was now a brilliant flash of light.