Monument

By Philip Bosshardt

In the 32nd century, Humanity lives in settlements spread across the solar system. To boost the output of the Sun and extend her warmth across space, a project is born to seed the Sun with nanobots. It doesn’t work. In fact, it has the opposite effect. Now the Sun’s on an accelerated aging track. Only creating a second sun by bulking up Jupiter and igniting it will save Mankind.
Architect Pieter Delano is commissioned to oversee this effort. But Jupiter’s losing mass and Delano recalls from history that a distant ancestor in the 23rd century, Philippe Dugay, also had designs on Jupiter, to siphon material from the King of Planets and build a ring of habitats between Jupiter and Saturn. This mass loss is interfering with Delano’s plans. Delano makes a hazardous trip back in time to confront his famous ancestor.
Now the battle is joined as the two architects battle for supremacy, their own legacy and personal glory over the huge planet and the love of a single woman. For Delano and the people of the 32nd century, it’s an existential threat. For Dugay, it’s a chance to atone for a disastrous project earlier in his career.
Conflicted by two grand but bickering alliances and sponsors that have their own agendas, Delano and Dugay must come to a mutual understanding of what matters most to each. For thousands of years, Man has designed and built great structures for vanity, profit and worship. Now, Man can build and re-arrange whole worlds. But his motives are unchanged.
In the end, Delano shows Dugay how to achieve his great ambitions, not with Jupiter, but with Saturn. Will this destroy one of the greatest wonders of the night sky? The two architects wrestle with this question, and with massive egos and soaring legacies that must be protected.
Only one person can bridge the divide between the past and the future, between two monumental egos and an existential crisis that threatens the very future of Mankind.
Her name is Kate Lind.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Philip Bosshardt
• Release date: Jul 2, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005175757

Philip Bosshardt

Philip Bosshardt is a native of Atlanta, Georgia. He works for a large company that makes products everyone uses...just check out the drinks aisle at your grocery store. He’s been happily married for over 20 years. He’s also a Georgia Tech graduate in Industrial Engineering. He loves water sports in any form and swims 3-4 miles a week in anything resembling water. He and his wife have no children. They do, however, have one terribly spoiled Keeshond dog named Kelsey.For details on his series Tales of the Quantum Corps, visit his blog at qcorpstimes.blogspot.com or his website at http://philbosshardt.wix.com/philip-bosshardt.

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Monument

Published by Philip Bosshardt at Smashwords

Copyright 2020 Philip Bosshardt

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Chapter 1

Helios Station

In Parker Orbit around the Sun

Solix 6.3.3155 CE

It was Aditi Surat who first noticed that the Sun was acting strangely. The young Indian astronomer was standing the late watch aboard SunWatch’s Helios Station when she heard a chime coming from her console.

Night time never came to Helios Station. Not when you’re approaching perihelion at over six-hundred thousand kilometers an hour. Helios Station was in a modified Parker orbit around the Sun, a great ellipse varying in distance from eighty million kilometers down to a hair-raising plunge through the Sun’s outer corona, inside six million kilometers.

Surat was pulling the late shift today…tonight…whatever the hell it was. Tending the huge instruments of the Main Pyrheliometer Array, a key node in the Sunwatch System that scanned the Sun like an unblinking eye for anything out of the ordinary.

Surat had taken one last look out the nearest porthole, studying the well-filtered blemish of multiple sunspots on the huge disk, when her console beeped again.

What the hell….

Aditi Surat looked over her boards, controlling the position of the great scopes at the far end of the station’s main truss, the heliometers and photometers and bolometers that kept a close watch on anything happening on the Sun’s surface. She quickly pinpointed the source of the beeping: Nodes 20 through 24…the portside lateral array of the MPA…was picking up some anomaly.

She massaged the controls and tried to focus the array, to get better resolution on the target. Sunwatch didn’t beep without reason. Somewhere in its nearly infinite memory were luminosity and illuminance data on nearly every burp and hiccup the Sun had displayed for the last few hundred years. Like an overprotective mother, Sunwatch knew where every sunspot and spicule and prominence and magnetic field line was supposed to be, right down to the nearest centimeter.

Sunwatch only beeped and chirped when something was out of whack.

A quick perusal made the black hairs on the back of her neck stand up. The system was showing a high-rate drop in overall luminosity of the solar disk, far below baseline values. The Indian astronomer swallowed hard. In her two years, ten months and fourteen days since being assigned to Helios Station, she had never seen anything like this before.

Straight away, her watch partner Carlos Tromelin came back from the canteen with some drinks and snacks. His eyes widened at the chaos now unfolding.

Tromelin was a heavy-set bear of a man, who appreciated the one-third Earth gravity of Helios Station more than most. He had thick eyebrows and a perpetual scowl.

What gives? Sunwatch’s sending out anomaly alerts like crazy. What’s on the board? Tromelin sat down at a console next to Surat and began tapping at his own keyboard.

Surat shrugged. MPA’s showing intrinsic luminosity below baseline but that doesn’t make any sense. We haven’t had any more swarm drops or seeding runs in months…everything’s been right on schedule…unless Sunboost has pulled a quick one on us.

Won’t be the first time that’s happened, Tromelin muttered. Aren’t they due to start Phase Four pretty soon?

Not for another week, according to the schedule I have. By now, luminosity’s supposed to be up over one percent. Didn’t Apollo Station just report the first measurable increase in neutrino flux lines?

Tromelin shrugged, frowning at his board. I think so. That plus the positron lines and gamma ray flux. The whole purpose of Sunboost is supposed to be improving the fusion process. If Sunwatch is right, if MPA’s seeing something real, the reverse is happening. That can’t be…check your instruments. Run diagnostics…a full set.

Surat did that. The results from the Main Pyrheliometer Array came back unchanged.

Somehow, some way, the intrinsic luminosity of the Sun had fallen off and the rate of decrease seemed to be accelerating.

We’d better get Sunboost on the line right away, Tromelin decided.

The telecom spanned several hundred million kilometers in a three-way hookup: Lagrange Sentry Observatory patched in with the Sunboost center at Caloris Basin, Mercury and Helios Station.

Kaoru Nakamura was the Caloris Basin chief of Sunboost operations. He was emphatic on the screen, as he scrolled through Helios’ data.

People, you’re sure of these numbers? I mean, I know the data’s good…but believe me, we’ve got no seeding runs or swarm drops going on.

Lagrange Sentry, in high orbit around the Earth, was represented by a sleepy, rather morose Max Lane, the assistant Director-General.

Any evidence of instrument failure? Have you corroborated with Apollo and Amun-Re Stations?

Aditi Surat was emphatic. There’s nothing in the data. All stations are showing the same anomaly. We ran diagnostics until we were blue in the face. It’s not the instruments. The data is real. The question is—

—what’s causing this, completed Max Lane. The blond engineer was a borderline anomaly herself, IQ almost beyond measure, enhanced with too many uploads to count. She stared back at all of them like a mother hen about to corral her wayward chicks. Can’t be Sunboost, people. We thought through every scenario. Every seeding run has been simulated and examined from every possible angle. Every variable has been analyzed. The swarms we seed the Sun with accelerate the fusion process and make it more efficient. It’s been proven too many times to be an issue here.

Tromelin sniffed. As long as your nanobots work right, Director. Was bot failure ever simulated?

Lane just shook her head. More times than you can count, Carlos. The whole process is quad-redundant. There are fail-safes for the fail-safes. Error modes have been followed to the last detail and probabilities calculated to the level of one chance in a quintillion. I’m telling you that whatever your sensors think they’re seeing, it’s not Sunboost. Maybe that big ball of flaming gas is just throwing you guys a curve. Nature does that sometimes.

Nakamura wasn’t quite so quick to dismiss the findings. "Helios’ sensors are telling us something. Max, your own scenarios list all the indications we should be seeing: neutrino flux increases, gamma ray increases in the sectors you’ve doped, luminosity flares right after the seeding runs, magnetic field lines twisted a certain way…and we have seen some of that. But I think we have to entertain the possibility that there’s some kind of unexpected phenomenon going on with your bot swarms. Maybe a second or third-order effect you didn’t calculate. Some kind of weird interaction, maybe."

Lane shook her head. Not possible, I’m telling you. Sunboost is on schedule.

Then what’s causing this luminosity drop? It’s way beyond anything we’ve ever seen. This can’t be normal variation. Historical data doesn’t show this…unless it’s a really long-range cycle we’ve never seen before.

But Lane wasn’t buying any of the explanations. Natural variation, Kaoru. It can’t be anything else. Our seeding bots are essentially foolproof.

Nakamura winced at that. When you were head of operations for something as big as Sunboost, you couldn’t afford to ignore anything. Dealing with something as complicated as controlled seeding of the Sun to carefully raise its energy output required more than a little humility, something Max Lane didn’t have. He took a deep breath.

Okay, Max, I do appreciate your unbridled enthusiasm and optimism for the program, but we need to accept that the Sun’s trying to tell us something. We need to suspend any further seeding runs and investigate this anomaly. To Surat and Tromelin, he went on. I want Helios to fab and send out a small fleet of Sundiver probes into the Sun, just like we’ve done in the past. Program them to drop through the corona and into the convective zone, to take measurements and determine what’s going on. Send at least three probes. Once we have data from Sundiver, we should have a better handle on what’s going on.

Lane interjected, Just be sure they don’t interfere with my swarms. The seeding depends on controlled replication to a certain level. Anything that interferes with that… she held up her hands, it’s out of my pay grade.

Nakamura added, Keep Sundiver on a tight leash, Helios. But we need that data as soon as you can get it.

Will do, Tromelin looked over at Surat. Their eyes met and both knew they wouldn’t be getting much sleep for the next few days.

As directed, Helios Station fabricated, programmed and launched three Sundiver probes. The tiny craft departed the station on a descending trajectory that would take them deep into the convective zone of the Sun, blasting through its million-degree corona and dropping through the chromosphere and photosphere layers until they leveled off below two-hundred thousand kilometers, inside the three-thousand degree region of gas cells bigger than Earth, an inferno of seething, blazing turbulence where much of the visible light of the Sun was created.

As Sundiver data came streaming back, there were frowns and head shakes and dark mutterings aboard Helios Station, for what the data showed could no longer be so easily discounted as normal variation in solar output.

For reasons not yet fully understood, the Sun’s fusion process had become measurably less efficient and her energy output was dropping—fast. Though no one was yet willing to point fingers at the Sunboost Project—an effort to cautiously expand the Sun’s warmth deeper into the solar system, warming the growing horde of settlements around Mars, the Main Belt and Jupiter by doping and seeding the Sun with swarms of nanobots to boost the fusion reactions—there were more than a few comments across Solnet that somehow the seeding process had gone haywire and the nanobots were to blame.

Sundiver provided indirect evidence that at least some swarms of bots were no longer boosting the fusion process but actively banking it, interfering with the joining of hydrogen atoms to create a helium atom and giving off energy, neutrinos and gamma rays as a result, a process that had been going on for well over four billion years.

As the data flowed in to Sunboost centers at Caloris Basin, Lagrange Sentry, Farside on the Moon and UNISPACE Headquarters in Paris, a swelling volume of rumblings could be heard that the nanobot configuration controllers had somehow failed. Instead of making the fusion more efficient, the bots were now busily engaged in obstructing the process and preventing the very reaction that was the engine of the Sun, destroying the hydrogen nuclei that the Sun needed to continue fusion.

When Sunboost was finally forced to admit that, yes, there were some anomalies in the seeding operation but that a fix was well understood, the simulations had been run and no show-stoppers found and soon, very soon, new seeding runs would be initiated and the Sun doped with corrective botswarms, there came a chorus of loud and vigorous opposition to any further fiddling with the mother star of the solar system.

By nearly unanimous consent in joint council at Copernicus City on the Moon, the Inner Federation (InFed) and the Concordance issued a stay injunction against Sunboost, forbidding the Commission from any further seeding operations until further notice.

The Sun now seemed to be on an accelerated aging track.

Accordingly, UNISPACE was forced to declare a Class 1 Emergency.

Chaos City

Europa

Solix 8.1.3155

Over a time span of two solices, an emergency contingency plan had been worked out through multiple sessions of the Concordance Ultrarchy. On paper, the plan was simple enough to explain. An extensive network of electrically conductive cable would be orbited around Saturn, in effect wrapping the planet in a vast electric motor. Wrap the planet in a spool of electric cable, pump current into it and speed up the rotation to once an hour. The Ringed Planet would unravel at the equator like a ball of thread.

That, at least, was the theory. Once the unspooling was underway, the stream of material would be siphoned off and sent in collimated streams off to Jupiter, to bulk up that planet. Concordance scientists and engineers believed that if enough material could be deposited onto Jupiter, the King of Planets could be ‘ignited’ to begin fusion and become a second sun.

Called Sol Secundas, the controversial plan had unknown and perhaps unknowable effects and was widely and firmly condemned by the hundreds of settlements in and around Jupiter space that would have to relocate.

But the possibility of the Sun declining and possibly going dark to a glowing ember or a white dwarf was seen as an existential threat and the Ultrarch of the Concordance overrode all objections to get the project started.

The famous architect and visionary developer of worlds Pieter Delano was offered the job of heading up the project, for it was felt that having such a well-known name at the head of Sol Secundas would quiet much of the concern over the feasibility of such an audacious undertaking.

After much discussion, cajoling, bribes and threats, Delano agreed to take the commission, viewing the project as his grandest effort to date, a legacy project that would leave a lasting name for future generations to revere and admire. Delano admired architects of the past, from the pyramid builders of ancient Egypt to his own illustrious ancestor Philippe Dugay, creator of the terreta concept, which enabled widespread settlement of the solar system, beginning initially in the 23rd century.

But as plans were being developed and scoopships assembled around Saturn to begin the Project, Delano received disconcerting news from a Concordance station in high Jupiter orbit, in fact on Europa. The news: Jupiter was in trouble too. It was shrinking, losing mass somehow.

Astronomical observations and atmospheric probes confirmed a suspicion: there seemed to be a sink or a wormhole at the core of the planet. Somehow, it was losing mass into this sink. How did the sink develop? Historical research on Jupiter’s past revealed multiple episodes of this cyclic loss of mass occurring in recent centuries.

It all seemed to start around the year 2249 CE.

Delano had come to Chaos City at the invitation of the Sol Secundas Council to look over the latest data and make some hard decisions.

He never went anywhere without a critical architect’s eye

Chaos City, located on and just below the ice surface of Europa’s Connemara Chaos region, hadn’t always been called Chaos City, though no one remembered or cared about the early history of the settlement.

He strolled across the main promenade of the Ice Plaza, the domed surface level of CC, as the city was known to the locals. Situated nearly dead center in the floor of a crater, the Plaza was the topmost level of a cylindrical structure buried in ice, some eleven levels deep, and anchored nearly four hundred meters below the surface. From orbit, CC appeared to be a winking eye set among the central peaks of a steep ravine. Inside the dome, with its spectacular views of Mount Rathmore to the west and Mount Prospect to the east, the funiculars arrowing off toward the peaks like spiderwebs, the shopping district known as the Blocks sloped down to the Galileo Fountains, and was jammed with throngs of gawkers and sightseers surging forward against the barriers toward the gaiety swirling about the Fountains and pool.

Delano wrinkled his nose. Too much symmetry, he told himself. No sense of texture. No sense of how to blend in with the environment. He granted that the Europan surface was a harsh world, with hard radiation and shifting ice floes. But, still--

The Galileo Fountains were a sunken pit in the center of the Plaza. Stepped all around were the Blocks, the Voyager Terraces—meant, he supposed, to reflect the slopes of the ice mountains outside, though poorly executed—and a bevy of circular streets and paths, like Linea Street, that encoiled the Plaza like a snake squeezing its prey. East and West Observatories and scenic overlook platforms hung like chins below the attach points of the dome, right at the ice surface level outside.

It just doesn’t flow, Delano muttered, shaking his head as he meandered off the lifts and around the shores of Lake Dundee, looking for his contact from the Council. Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication…Delano smiled at da Vinci’s words from fifteen hundred years ago. They tried too hard to reflect Europa’s icy terrain in man-made shapes and forms. Better to have brought the ice itself inside the dome and build from that. That notion had long been one of Delano’s key principles of design. Hadn’t someone at Ganymede/Jove Designs said the same thing?

On Europa, there was only ice…to the naked eye. Ice cliffs and ice valleys. Ice ravines and ice canyons. Ice bergs, buttes, badlands. Ice continents. Above the ice was the vacuum of space. Below the ice was a vast ocean, black as night. Normally, the two didn’t mix.

And in its current design, Chaos City would never fit in with the cracked billiard ball of a world that was Europa. It was just a blister on a once-pristine surface, an open wound that would never heal.

Delano was an outworlder native of CC and like any native, he had long had a love-hate relationship with his former home.

Shoving his way through thickening crowds gathering around the Fountains, he soon spied a pair of waving arms.

His contact. Kaiser Izmit V9, Prime Councilor of the Sol Secundas Council. Delano and Izmit closed the distance between them and embraced firmly below the baleful gaze of Galileo.

Izmit was bald, short, with a gnome-like, ghostly pale face, a face of soft, doughy features, except for a white pencil of a moustache (looking incongruous on an otherwise bland, almost featureless countenance). V9 meant Izmit had already completed his ninth upload, quite an accomplishment for the old buzzard.

So glad you made it, Izmit beamed, holding Delano out at arm’s length. The Council’s waiting down below. You had a good trip, I trust? You look fatigued. I heard you were moving down-sun. Tell me that’s not true.

Delano shrugged, preferring not to elaborate on any rumors. You know how it is. Heraklion Station to Callisto, then boost up here. I’ll live. He spun around taking in the spectacle of the Ice Plaza. I see nothing’s changed around here.

Izmit chuckled. What can I say? It’s CC. Nothing changes without the Ultrarch’s approval. And what do machines know of art and beauty anyway? Come, come…let’s go down.

The two of them went to the lifts and descended into the bowels of the City, to Level 3. A few twists and turns through an unending labyrinth of corridors and gardens brought them to the Council chambers.

The chambers were vaguely oblong, with a longish oval table in the middle. The walls were a poor simulacrum of CC’s ice valley outside, ice-textured, complete with funiculars creeping up and down their courses to the summits of Mount Rathmore and Mount Prospect.

A scattering of members gathered around the table. Most were present in the flesh, though several were avatars, piped in from places far away.

Izmit introduced Delano and greetings and pleasantries were exchanged.

Pieter’s here, Izmit went on, to look at all our plans and schematics for the project. He’s accepted the commission. The Ultrarch has— here, Izmit waved at the blinking eye of a nearby terminal, the Ultrarch’s terminal, scanning and studying everything done and said in chamber –--approved his contract and we’re meeting today to go over final details before we get started.

A beefy councilor named Bashir waved at Delano. "Maybe our guest would like to see the latest vid from Saturn. Just came in. Brasilia’s making another trial run tomorrow. By end of next week, we should have a tenth of the cable network laid down."

Delano sat himself down, availed himself of a drink from a servbot that trundled up. I would like to see the run. I’ve been studying all the elements of the project since I accepted your commission. There are a few things I’d like to change—

Bashir snorted. A true architect…always fiddling. Here, watch this— He pressed a button and instantly a 3-d globe materialized over the table and they were all cruising in the upper atmosphere of Saturn, as if the entire council chamber had been transported up-sun hundreds of millions of kilometers in a second….embedded in the small fleet of test ships….

The entire fleet had settled into orbit half a million kilometers above the cloud tops. By now, the planet filled nearly a third of the sky and hundreds of frothing spicules and cells of gas swept by beneath them. Faint partial arcs of the rings hovered over them like torn curtains. The speed of its rotation flattened Saturn at the poles and widened it to a bulge at the equator. Ferocious winds resulted and they smeared the columns of gas into all sorts of grotesque and beautiful shapes. Delano found himself transfixed by the ever-shifting palette of colors and shapes. He could well imagine the planet’s visible face as a giant’s palette, where Nature worked as the artist to create an ever-changing panorama of colors, forms and brush strokes.

The cableships set to work laying down the grid that would feed current directly into the conducting layers of the atmosphere. With their billowing shroud lines and enormous dirigible bags full of heated hydrogen, they were ungainly craft. Cablers were not without propulsion, but engines were almost worthless in the maelstroms of Saturn. Each one had a crush depth of five thousand kilometers below the topmost cloud layers and the tension in Brasilia’s command center increased to an unbearable silence as the ships found and settled into their cruising altitudes.

Jenkins, the pilot, rubbed his bald head and muttered, This is going to be tricky. Any lower and those ships’ll crumple like paper.

I just hope the winds don’t stress the pressure skin too greatly, his chief engineer replied. They looked at each other, saying nothing. Jenkins studied the monitors from each ship, finding the views much the same. He picked one and switched it to the big viewer behind them.

The cabler had reached its operating altitude and for the moment was cruising in the clear. Resolution wasn’t sharp at this depth; instead of everything being bathed in a pale yellow-white, the dominant colors tended toward a deeper reddish-brown. There were no lazy twisting columns of gas here either. Winds were stronger, more directional. For several hours, they drifted through cataracts of blood-red, until the ship found its position.

Abruptly, the scene shifted to another view, looking aft. At first, nothing seemed different. The same sinuous filaments of clouds streamed behind, undulating tubes of red, brown, orange and scarlet. An occasional wispy patch floated by the imager. Then, something foreign inched its way into the picture, starting at the bottom.

It was the cable. Long, thin, copper-gold in the dim light, it snaked its way from the bottom of the picture slowly toward the center, whipping leisurely from one side to the other as it receded into the distance and was soon lost. To a casual observer, it seemed as though the imager had grown a tail and was dragging it across the cloudscape. The winds twisted the cable about and set up standing waves. Delano watched the oscillations carefully.

By the end of the third day, the operation was substantially complete. Minor mishaps had occurred, such as when a cabler had veered too close to a small cyclone and had been sucked into the vortex before the cable could be severed. The boiling oval of wind and ammonia rain had given the crew quite a thrilling ride before they managed to pull loose. Beyond that, the expedition had been fortunate. The trickiest part was over and no lives had been lost.

Bashir collapsed the vid and the globe twinkled into nothing and vanished.

Delano was impressed. People liked to see things grow, come to fruition. Whether a plant or a flower, a city or an atmosphere for the Moon, a new planet or even a failed continent like Athalonia back on Earth, people were always thrilled at the sight of something new being built. Man, the toolmaker, triumphs again, bringing order and beauty to an ignorant cosmos. It was a spiritual thing, this feeling, a sense of pride that men could still mold the elements to their wills. They felt it when fire was tamed, when the first huts were strung up—it was sheer ego. Men were vain. What they built with their tools were reflections of themselves. Tools were simply different kinds of arms, only now they were more powerful, now they could shape worlds. And there would come a time when they would make stars too.

Delano had a million questions. Your prospectus indicates the technical side of the Project has been simulated many times. You have results?

Bashir pointed to a screen set in the desk, right before Delano. It’s all there. All we’ve done is take what your ancestor, Philippe Dugay, did nine hundred years ago and improve on it. Unspooling is well understood. That’s the easy part. Streaming material off Saturn, collimating it into a controlled stream and sending it off to bulk up Jupiter enough to ignite fusion, that’s trickier.

Heads nodded and murmurs circled the chamber.

Over the next hour, point by technical point, Delano went over the details of the Sol Secundas project.

There were three phases:

Unspooling—unwrapping some of Saturn’s atmosphere gases by the Dugay technique

Transfer – guiding the gases into collimated supply ‘beams’; and focusing the beams to send the materials along a trajectory to Jupiter

Deposition – depositing the unspooled gases from the supply beams into the atmosphere of Jupiter.

Phase 1 required the laydown of the cable around the outer atmosphere of Saturn, whose atmosphere was 96% hydrogen and 3% helium. Once the cable was laid and electric current beamed in (from power plants in orbit), gases would begin to stream off. A fleet of scoopships would gather the initial stream of gases and ferry them to focusing stations in Saturn orbit. Here, the supply beams would be initiated and loaded with gases. Later, the unspooling would focus the removed gases directly onto supply streams with only minimal help from scoopships, whose main purpose was to ‘prime’ the supply beams.

Phase 2 involved the formation of a continuous belt, called a supply beam or supply stream, leading from focusing stations in Saturn orbit, across trans-Jovian space and into high orbit around Jupiter. This effort would require dozens of focusing and controlling stations all along the trajectory. The process was complicated by the fact that source and target were independent worlds moving around the Sun at different speeds. Thus, the work of the focusing stations and their guidance systems would be ongoing. Also important was that the Phase 1 supply beams did not cross or interfere with normal commerce supply beams or passenger ships and cyclers plying the spacelanes between the two planets. Obviously, strictly controlled paths had to be maintained to avoid disaster. There would be dozens of such focusing and control stations.

Phase 3 involved receiving the supply beam of unspooled Saturnian gases, shaping and focusing the materials for deposit into the atmosphere of Jupiter and the actual seeding and laydown of said gases into Jupiter’s atmosphere. This had to be carefully controlled and monitored, especially in its latter stages. The whole purpose of Phase 3 (and indeed the whole project) was to achieve stellar ignition…which was crucially dependent on mass, gravity and having the right conditions and proportions.

Nothing like this had ever been done before and Delano knew that Sol Secundas engineers and scientists had to understand intimately what happens during the birth of a star. Moreover, they must not make the same mistakes made in the SunBoost project.

There were several other considerations involved.

Human settlements around Jupiter and its moons had to relocate. They had to relocate far enough away from Jupiter to avoid being incinerated or irradiated when second sun went live and ignited. This was controversial and contentious and both InFed and the Concordance had their hands full solving this problem. There was a lot of sustained opposition…there had been numerous rallies and protests even in Chaos City lately. Delano had seen them.

Timing was crucial. Sol Secundas engineers had to have enough knowledge to know when to shut down their own stations and facilities and evacuate the area. The plan was to start a carefully controlled ignition nanobotically using swarms of boosterbots, which would take trace elements in the atmosphere, transmute them into hydrogen and helium and give Jupiter a final ‘kick’ toward Ignition. The engineers had to be able to control this process with exquisite timing.

Monitoring and observation of Second Sun was crucial in its early years, to determine if it was stable, if its internal fusion processes were working properly and if it would endure for a sufficient period of time to allow normal development and evolution of human communities to proceed, in the outer solar system. This would take years of observations and quite possibly some nanobotic boosterbot tweaking, which (after SunBoost), understandably made many people nervous. They asked: Can we initiate the process? Can we control the process? How well do we understand the process? To Delano’s mind, these were all excellent questions. But with the first Sun clearly dying and seemingly not amenable to further modification (the solar boosterbots having escaped configuration control and mutating into something that didn’t seem to be manageable), Sol Secundas had to succeed.

Most heliophysicists believed that First Sun, with its growing horde of boosterbots out of control, would eventually run out of hydrogen fuel, then it would expand to become a red giant, puff off its outer layers, and settle down as a compact white dwarf star, slowly cooling down for trillions of years. Clearly, the SunBoost Commission wished to alter this evolutionary path somewhat, by short-circuiting the red giant phase…otherwise much of the inner system would be destroyed.

Thus, Sol Secundas and SunBoost had complementary mandates: to bulk up Jupiter and ignite it into a second sun for Mankind and to manage the inevitable decline of first sun so that it didn’t become a threat to Earth or the inner system. SunBoost had always been predominantly managed for and by InFed interests. Sol Secundas had a Concordance heritage. InFed and the Concordance would have to put aside their centuries-old differences and work together to keep Mankind from becoming extinct when its original star died.

This was proving even harder than igniting Jupiter into a second star.

Kaiser Izmit leveled an even gaze at Delano. There’s just one problem in all this.

What kind of problem?

Izmit cleared his throat, gestured for another vid to be racked up. A new spherical image formed in mid-air. We can’t explain this mass loss phenomenon we’re seeing at Jupiter. There are dozens of theories…some kind of strange sink at the planet’s core…maybe even a wormhole….

Bashir interjected. There are processes we don’t understand. Until we get to the bottom of this problem, Sol Secundas can’t begin. If Jupiter’s losing mass through some kind of natural process we haven’t seen before, any material we stream in from Saturn will just disappear, like water down a drain.

Izmit agreed. Pieter, frankly our scientists are stumped.

Delano studied the data, graphs and imagery. You’re saying you can trace this mass loss back in time?

All the way to around 2249 or 2250, in the old time-keeping system.

Delano’s face darkened visibly. The date had been burned into his memory for years. He sat down heavily in a nearby chair.

Izmit was concerned. Pieter, you don’t look so good. Are you ill? Can I get you anything?

Delano waved it off. Nothing. It’s just that date. It’s my family…we have long memories—

Izmit’s face was a question. Then: Ah, I understand now. That was the year your ancestor—Philippe Dugay—began the Outer Ring project, wasn’t it? The unspooling of Jupiter to gain material for another ring of settlements. Perhaps this is just a coincidence.

I wish I could believe that. It’s odd, isn’t it, that you’ve been able to trace episodes of this mass loss all the way back to that time, and other times afterward. Let’s just say the data makes me suspicious.

Bashir interjected. "What you’re implying is nonsense. A logical fallacy. Dugay’s project is history. It’s already been done. Jupiter didn’t lose that much mass anyway…it’s well documented."

Delano just shook his head. Yet your own data shows continuing episodes of mass loss. If the Outer Ring project is history, how can this be?

Izmit shrugged. Some other phenomenon. It has to be that.

Bashir had an idea. Unless something has happened to the time line.

The councilors looked at each other for a long moment. Izmit cleared his throat, then said what others were thinking. Maybe we’d better get someone from Time Guard in here to explain things.

Her name was Jump Lieutenant Evelyn Kasongo and she was an officer in the Concordance Time Guard. Kasongo was an ebony-black Cameroonian woman of striking beauty, with fierce warrior eyes and bristly conical hair, adorned by an ivory and bone hairpiece that rattled when she turned her head. Her black and gold uniform accented her black hair perfectly.

Kaiser Izmit explained what the Council had been discussing. "We believe the initial data on mass loss at Jupiter can