Endworlds - Nicholas Read [66]
A new voice now, old and shrill, maybe Austrian. “Our world is dying, General, and it’s more than ‘an inconvenient truth’. The problem is not ozone or fossil fuels or the disappearance of bees. It’s to do with a region of space our solar system is about to fly through.”
The projector beam flared with color and a short video played out on a whiteboard behind him. He swiveled to see a computer animation of the Earth and other planets orbiting the Sun in circular arcs, which pulled back until all were shown inside a blue bubble moving along a red dotted line within a spiraling arm of the Milky Way. Ahead of the oval was a hazy arc of orange and yellow stars, this one perpendicular to the dotted line, like a mill saw cutting into a plank of wood.
The Austrian continued: “Consider our solar system as a large bus and our galaxy as the autobahn we travel around. Within three years we will intersect another autobahn, a dwarf galaxy that our Milky Way is consuming. This is called the Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy15. It is dense with suns and planets of its own, moving in Helmi streams at right angles across our path. You must understand that this is not an intersection with any traffic lights or off-ramps. Do you understand the implication?”
Staring wordlessly, Kriegmacher saw it immediately. “If this is correct then the risk of collision, not to mention the tidal forces affecting our orbit . . . How many centuries until this happens?”
A number of heads bobbed at each other in the gloom, approving of his mental dexterity. They had selected well.
Boston answered: “Centuries? No, not even decades! We have less than three years until we hit the debris field. Our solar system already entered the outskirts several years ago. We have since seen a rise in sunspots and solar flares, plus new torque in the dark matter lattice we glide upon. We may not visibly observe our planet twist and groan as a result of these forces, but we do see the side effects.” The woman leaned forward through the dark, the tip of her nose and glass lenses catching the blue light of the projector while the rest of her remained in shadow. Colorless lips affected a cruel smile. “It will be biblical.”
The Austrian coughed for attention. “Not even Cecil B. DeMille himself could have directed the grandeur of this solar epic. Our planet’s core is convulsing. We’re about to see activity at the upper end of the Richter scale, creating tsunamis that will claim islands and coastal cities, while volcanoes fill the skies with corrosive clouds. God forbid any nuclear plants collapse and give us another Chernobyl. Above us we’ll see new asteroids and meteors not charted before, all extra-solar, in fact all extra-galactic material, flying sideways across Earth’s path through space. It’ll be like one giant cosmic game of Frogger.”
Kriegmacher shifted in his seat, a look of wry incredulity across his face. “It’s a story you could sell to Hollywood,” he said dryly.
Oxford joined: “Yes General, we’ve fed film producers a steady diet of disaster scenarios that has pushed discussion away from any serious forums and into film blogs where it will simply be lost in the noise. We can’t afford a panic so soon. Because unlike filmed entertainment, General, we don’t have all the answers just yet, and can’t simply walk out for popcorn. Even if our technology allowed a secret cache of spaceships equipped with biospheres and adequate fuel to take survivors away, where do you fly to when every star between Rigel and Polaris is about to be hammered? We can’t outrun this in any conventional direction, even if we had the engines to try.”
Kriegmacher asked what any of this had to do with him. It was then that they told him of Project Sidestep.
A thickly accented Belgian voice rang out in the darkness, female, as the projection changed to show two concentric circles, slightly offset. “General, you may be aware of the publicity surrounding the world’s so-called ‘black hole laboratories’: the Fermilab