***
Trent drove to a motel and got a room. After letting Kim in and retrieving his laptop from the vehicle, he hooked up to the internet and began scouring news and space exploration sites looking for any trace of the event. He searched for hours, reviewing recent posts on astronomy message boards and hinting around in chat rooms, while Kim sat and glared at him. Nothing was found, not even on the official Cassini Mission website.
He began to cautiously propose his theory to Kim: “Look, keep an open mind here, but just assume for a moment that this thing was made by something and purposely shot at Cassini. What if the same thing happened to the Saturn-3 probe, and why would there be any need to hide that?” he asked.
“Before you answer...” he held up a hand, “...how do we know that intelligent life couldn't evolve on Saturn? You said yourself that we know next to nothing about the outer planets. Who's to say what is possible in that kind of extreme environment? What if life is there, but it's not like Clarke's benevolent, 'hand of god' beings. What if they're so advanced that other fledgeling life forms seem hopelessly primitive from their perspective, even insignificant? What if they've been watching us the entire time, and based on our past and present, now hold us in contempt? What if they are just plain mean?”
Kim leaned forward slightly as her mouth opened to interject, but Trent continued on before she could, “Now, stay with me here... What is a common metal in the solar system that would be strong enough and readily accessible in the outer parts of the system to make something like that rod?”
Kim frowned in thought for a moment, “Iridium?” she pondered aloud.
“That's right. And what did they just find in vast amounts in and around the Tharsis Bulge region?” he asked, waiting for her to make the connection.
Her eyes lit up, “No way man!” she exclaimed.
“Think about it...” he told her, “...Saturn pulls asteroids and comets in all the time. Who's to say that if there are beings on that planet that they couldn't take advantage of them?”
After some thought and quiet mumbling, Kim began to piece together the theory to which he was hinting. “It almost makes sense,” she began, “A solid iridium rod, accelerated to speed by whatever means, possibly gravity-assisted along the way, traveling through frictionless space. I guess it is theoretically possible. But why?”
“What if, whoever they are, they aren't friendly? What if they're so advanced, which is what I'm leaning towards, that we are just annoying bugs to them. What if we pissed them off by getting too close to their planet?” he hypothesized.
“A rod like that, if it was big enough and moving fast enough, it could essentially destroy a planet,” Kim said.
“Like Mars...” Trent finished for her.
Kim ran with the insinuation, “Punched a hole deep into the center of the planet. Right down into the central core of the world, with billions of tons of lava expelled from the hole in the crust. Olympus Mons is the impact site, and the other volcanoes in the region, they could be from slivers of the projectile broken off during entry, or just the result of upwelling magma from the initial strike. Valles Marineris could have opened up from the resulting tectonic chaos, and the planet's surface was most likely dancing around for thousands of years after...” she theorized, “...wiping out any evidence of life, if there was any present before the event.”
“If it punched through to the inner core, that could explain why Mars lost its atmosphere and most if its internal heat. The disruption to the motion of the core, and the likely slowing of the planet's rotation, eventually led to the loss of the magnetic field. The planet's inner heat was being expelled onto the surface, and then into a thinning atmosphere that over time was stripped away by the solar wind, allowing more and more of the planet's heat to escape into space,” she concluded.
“Leaving it cold and geologically dead...” Trent added.
Kim sucked in a rush of air, and her mouth hung open for several seconds. “What if the hit was hard enough to push Mars out of its original orbit, leading to the impact that created the Borealis Basin? She sprang up from her chair, “We've got to tell people about this. It all makes perfect sense. We've got to tell everyone!”
“No, no... wait. We can't do that, we're sort of wanted right now, remember? First of all, we need to know why this is being suppressed in the news,” Trent told her.
“Well, let's stop it from being suppressed and see what happens,” Kim said, as a mischievous grin slid across her face.
Trent smiled, “Now you're talkin'.”
He turned his attention back to the laptop and began to compose a message for the board he was currently perusing. He attached a couple of the images from the thumb drive and was refreshing the page to see his post and what reactions followed. The screen went completely white. Trent tried to refresh it several times, then tried to reload the page manually by retyping the website address, only to be met with a screen informing him that the page he was seeking was no longer available. He navigated back to another of the message boards he had been searching for news and repeated the process. To his chagrin, the results were exactly the same.
“What's up?” Kim asked, moving to stand behind him and look over his shoulder at the computer screen.
After watching the process again, they looked at each other and Trent said, “Oh no...” just as the door exploded off its hinges, bounced off of the bed and landed on the floor. Two large bangs, accompanied by flashes of light, stunned them both as Kim instinctively grabbed onto Trent for safety. Another sound, a dull thud, and then the sound of hissing. Trent couldn't see a thing, but he could feel his throat and lungs tingling. Kim began to cough and wheeze. He could feel her sliding down his back, holding on to one arm desperately, dragging him off of his chair and onto the floor with her. He was losing his motor functions and realized they must have been gassed. I hope it's not poison... he thought, as unconsciousness took him.