TOC:
1 - Space Toilet
2 - Attica
3 - Scobee
4 - Mr. Cool
* * *
1.
Báizhōu 3 died two days before reaching halo orbit near Io-Jupiter L1, though it would take three weeks for the monitors at Urumuqi and Beijing to even notice the failure. Another month would pass before the disappointed crews worked out a sane theory of her ignominious end. Barry Gold, on the other hand, knew exactly what had happened five hours after the disaster started. Two days later, he watched with some satisfaction as the People's Republic of China's first Jovian explorer smacked into Io's far side.
“And that's a wrap, folks.” Barry kicked up his feet as he watched the replay on the big screen. Lanny Ziegler, the TRW rep with Barry's team, was no more immune to euphoria than Barry. His project had performed brilliantly, stealthily maneuvering to intercept Io months before Báizhōu 3's egress into the system. Once there, her cryostat infrared telescope and onboard processor spent no more then four days hunting a 170 kelvin object over two light minutes away, but the truly fascinating thing was they'd succeeded. Fifteen years of work had finally paid off, the National Reconnaissance Office had just silently proven American dominance of deep space without firing a single shot.
What little pity the Americans expressed for the Chinese space program's greatest failure was more than made up for in schadenfreude. The Jupiter Icy Moon Orbiter was still more than six years away, thanks to the premature cancellation that had given the Chinese the head start they needed first place. It had taken an oil depression to force Americans to look back up at the stars--out of a desperate need for new energy if for no higher motive. So JIMO was reborn, put on a booster, and sent on her way. But even in the spendthrift days before space became The Answer, Project Scarborough proceeded unmolested--black as any NRO could devise. This no-holds bars testbed silently incorporated the then latest leaps in astrometry as well as power plant and engine design. Lanny Ziegler's team would take the lead in developing Scarborough's near-Earth cousins when the time came, a new regime of satellites swarms that would librate through the Earth-Lunar system. They'd deploy on complicated courses that demanded no more thrust than needed to lift a heavy knapsack a few feet off the ground, saving the taxpayers entire quarters on the dollar. By the end of the year, Northrop-Grumman would all but own half of the space reconnaissance industry. It had taken fifteen years, but Lanny finally had secured his place in engineering history.
And Barry Gold had his ticket into space. “Challenger, here I come.”
“Oh, it's official?” Lanny smirked, overhearing the NRO scientist's triumphant mumbling. “Bet you haven't even told Ginny.”
“She knows, she's just not too happy about it.” Barry managed to grin as he said it. In fact, Ginger Gold was far more than pissed. Now wasn't the time or place to dwell on that. He was on the cusp of his dream, and somehow the strain on his six-year marriage seemed to pale in comparison to that. “And yeah, it's official. CTS-81.”
“Woah, so you've got like..." Lanny paused to recall the latest launch schedule, "...two months, right? Just when the hell were you going to tell me?”
“I just found out for sure yesterday," Barry was grinning from ear to ear now. "Oh, and Ryan Krause's taking over for me.”
"Bastard." Lanny smacked Barry in the back of the head. He didn't much like Krause. Ziegler was ex-Navy--Gold was still on active duty--and both he and Barry were engineers to the core. Wonderboy Krause had come up on the admin side at what seemed like every single one of Northrop's competitors. When JIMO was back on the block, Krause had driven Boeing IDS into an expensive second place for the new contract. The bad blood dribbled into Scarborough even after Congress mandated subcontracts for the other placers. “If you're on your way up, then...”
“Yeah, looks like they want to fast-track Superman,” Barry confirmed.
“And it looks like I'm not taking over until February," Larry added. "Lisa wanted to see the prototype through 'til she retires. I'm on deck, though--thanks to you guys.”
“That's fantastic. You deserve it, man. So what's Lisa like”
“Oh yeah,” Lanny's tone dropped. Lisa Conti was technically his boss. “You've never worked with her. Let's just say you'll have a lot more fun when I get back to Boston.”
“Bullshit,” Barry whistled. “I ain't ashamed to say it, but I'd have the time of live regardless. I'm off to the fucking moon!”
“Good for you. I hope you like shitting in a vacuum cleaner.”
As it turned out, Barry didn't. Learning to do Number 2 like an astronaut had to be the most uncomfortable, disgusting (if uncompromisingly sanitary) thing he'd ever done in his life, and that included taking a few drunken dumps on his DKE big brother's bed after a fall formal. The Friday after squaring away his terminal leave orders with the Navy, Barry flew Continental business class into Huntsville and began three most irritating months of his life. Not more than twenty years ago, he would have endured half a years worth of grueling training and a hectic schedule that would've carried him across the country half a dozen times. These days, it was a six week program with a private contractor that offered even shorter courses for space tourists and the new “black-collar” laborers for the budding space solar power industry. After he was done learning how to relieve himself properly, NASA sent him to 30-day training for lunar mission specialists in the Mojave. He'd later recall that a stall at Reagan National was the last time for what turned out to be years he'd used anything resembling a normal toilet.
The unpleasant surprises didn't end there. CTS-81 lifted off on time at 8:39 AM on 2 November 2033, and Barry was nowhere near Cape Kennedy when she did. He was still at the United Space training site in the Mojave, along with five other men and women who'd received that dreaded flight surgeon's downcheck. Something about an outbreak of H6N2 at a nearby clearinghouse for foreign astronauts, which he immediately translated as “bullshit.” The next flight wouldn't be for three months, and the word was no one who wanted to be on that flight was to set foot outside of MHV. Another three weeks of misery passed until Barry received an unexpected visitor.
“Jesus, Lanny!” he met Ziegler at the Red Inn lobby. “Just what the hell's going on here?”
“Well you're a bundle of joy." Lanny took Barry's hand. "They don't let you out much, do they?”
“Don't change the subject.”
“Sorry, dude. You'll have to wait for tonight like everybody else. Good news, we've got time to hit Bakersfield right after. You game?”
“You hear me saying no?” Barry hadn't had a drink since he'd come here, and he hated the thought of leaving Earth without one last night under the sauce. “But c'mon. You've got to tell me something.”
“Truth is, I don't know myself, really. Hell, I didn't know you weren't already on the Moon until after they put me on the plane out here. Guess I can't blame you for not dropping a line.”
Barry frowned. “So you do know what's going on.”
“Like I said, you'll have to wait. Trust me, you'll love me for it.”
Barry didn't. They gathered in the motel reception center at 7 PM and got a roundabout explanation about how the whole flu story had been a bunch of bullshit--they'd figured that out on their own. They did learn that they were going up commercial instead of on CTS-82, which meant another long and boring stay at one of the orbital hotels—flimsy, inflatable shanties tied together like bolos, really--before one of NASA's two cislunar Orion-2 vehicles got around to picking them up. In the end, it all made a bit of sense. Scarborough was an extremely sensitive black project, and Barry had no doubt that some desk spook thought it really cute to play James Bond with the movement of her engineering team.
“Give me a break, Lanny,” he said some hours later, kicking back his third Flat Tire and wondering why in the twenty-first century he still couldn't find Sam Adams on tap in the Southwest. “Ophelia's nice enough, but she doesn't have a goddamned clue what's happening. So spill.”
“I'm dead serious,” Lanny pleaded as he chugged his beer. “I just don't know. Honestly though, you remember Noah Abel?”
“Yeah, wasn't he the mirror guy with Redlight?”
“No," Lanny shook his head. "That's Ben Sohl. Noah's optics alright, but not with missile defense. Helios 5 work. We did the RTG for that, too. I could've sworn you were in on that.”
“Nope, so what gives?”
“Well, he's on the Moon, too.” Lanny answered as he tried to flag down a bartender.
Barry briefly closed his eyes in thought. “I didn't remember that name on my list.”
"Hey doll, two more?" Lanny ordered another round of the swill that passed for beer in these parts, then turned back to Barry. “He's on mine, that's for sure. In fact, he's CC'd on my paperwork. I think we're going to be working him.”
“Working for him?” Barry protested. “Like hell. This is my team and--wait a minute. Your paperwork? What the hell are you doing here?”
“Finished training last week. I'm going up with you.”
Barry's jaw dropped. “Then what are--?”
“Here we go!” Lanny dropped two fives on the bar. “Salut! And I'll tell you what. If any of this has shit all to do with Scarborough, I'll drink the whole damned bar!”
After that, the two buddies agreed it was a bit too public a place to talk shop, so they settled for catching up. Barry's wife had filed for divorce shortly before he left Huntsville, and he'd almost managed to put it completely out of his mind before the brass had put him on ice for a month. Lanny, who'd been divorced for years and never gave a thought to remarrying, was literally living out of his suitcase now, having sold his condo only a few days before heading out to Mojave. When reminiscing got old, they'd struck up conversation with two San Joaquin nurses letting loose after a long shift. Neither one regretted passing up the fifty mile ride back to the motel that night.
Encounter
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RedImperator
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Re: Encounter
I like this a lot. Like, a lot. I'm always up for a no-bullshit space story.
A few things, though: I'm unclear what happened with Báizhōu 3. Did Larry Gold know because there was already an American recon sat in the Jovian system that saw the whole thing, or did Larry Gold know because there was already an American recon sat in the Jovian system and it killed Báizhōu itself.
The other thing is, I'd be more generous with the dialog attributions. I tend to do this a lot, too, and it makes it harder to follow conversations. "Said Barry" or "Said Lanny" are pretty much invisible, stylistically; they don't disrupt the flow of the sentence. They also serve to reinforce characters' names, for which I could always use all the help I could get.
A few things, though: I'm unclear what happened with Báizhōu 3. Did Larry Gold know because there was already an American recon sat in the Jovian system that saw the whole thing, or did Larry Gold know because there was already an American recon sat in the Jovian system and it killed Báizhōu itself.
The other thing is, I'd be more generous with the dialog attributions. I tend to do this a lot, too, and it makes it harder to follow conversations. "Said Barry" or "Said Lanny" are pretty much invisible, stylistically; they don't disrupt the flow of the sentence. They also serve to reinforce characters' names, for which I could always use all the help I could get.
X-Ray Blues
Re: Encounter
Thanks for the feedback, especially about the dialogue. I'll revise 1. and post once I finish 2.
I wasn't sure whether I should dwell on Baizhou too much, since it serves only to introduce Barry and Lanny, establish their working relationship, introduce the Scarborough telescope, and sort of set up why they're heading out to Mojave in the first place. Also, hadn't really thought what exact failure would cause Baizhou to simply fall out of halo. That said, the Chinese satellite is at least tangentially a gun on the mantle, and I won't just leave it hanging there for more than two or three chapters.RedImperator wrote:A few things, though: I'm unclear what happened with Báizhōu 3. Did Larry Gold know because there was already an American recon sat in the Jovian system that saw the whole thing, or did Larry Gold know because there was already an American recon sat in the Jovian system and it killed Báizhōu itself.
Attica
2.
By the time Doug Mancetti broke the Plant story (7 April 2084 St. Petersburg Times), all the key players and most of the secondary ones were dead. It took a year for the world's journalists to process enough of the sweeping changes that lay ahead before anyone even tackled the question of who, what, when, where and how. The why, as in why this secret had been kept safe for so long, was readily obvious, given that yet another world war surely lay ahead had events not overtaken the global panic. Doug didn't survive Invasion, nor did most Floridans, but even in the darkest months of the first Space War, there were thousands of journalists, historians, and investigators in the brutal race to uncover anything and everything they could find out about Encounter. Their efforts rewrote half a century worth of history, and the story is told with as much wonder as it is with bitter recrimination.
Cally Shu did survive, and thanks to her so did enough of Doug's research for a new wave of hunters to pick up the trail. Between 2094 and 2095, she'd coaxed more about Encounter out of the only three surviving witnesses than Doug did in the previous six years. What she'd learned, however, had been worse than third-hand. If not for Invasion, her work might have ended there, but with mankind's very existence on the precipice few if any public officials felt an urgent need to conceal the facts any longer. Bureaucratic inertia probably ensured the continuing classification of the official record for another decade at least, but by the end of Space War 1 all the essentials were already out. And so we have the what, the where and the when. The who, it turns out, are nine men and three woman. First is Lanzo Ziegler, whose journals ended up innocuously in the National Archives. We also have Ari ben-Zeev, Ilon Diedel, Lee Cobb, Judy Keaton, Daniel Portsmouth, Wanda Rice, Emmanual Fork, Ryan and Shouri Hayama, Barry Gold, and one more man who became a household name in his own right: Noah Abel. For better or worse, what this party started would end in nothing less than the birth of a nation, the full throated reach for the stars, a world war, and, of course, Invasion. And now, for the how.
It was late December of 2032, a good year before half of the principals had even met the other. Noah Abel rocketed away from Cape Kennedy aboard CTS-74, the last Constellation mission to the Moon for that year. This was his eighth flight into space, and second time to Challenger; or it would have been if his countless mission briefs bore any passing resemblance to reality. CTS-74 did arrive at the Moon, but only after picking up the fresh crew from the International Space Station and the B-team from Valencia Orbital. Noah's group, as it turned out, had been exposed to a parainfluenza that escaped detection ground-side, forcing NASA to scrub their half-year evolution while they were still in orbit. CTS-74 rendezvoused with the quarantine dock of what the astrogator said was Valencia (but what Noah and anyone else who could fix a star knew to be total nonsense). An hour later, she rocketed away, leaving five men and two women behind. Another flight surgeon met with them all in the infirmary shortly afterwards, signed B. Ross to seven clean bills of health, and disappeared into history.
For a full three weeks, they explored their solitary, sparsely segmented hold aboard what they'd come to call Attica. There were no portholes, although by some really rough dead reckoning they figured they were some 240 miles above what on the third Friday would be Australia on an orbit inclined thirty degrees from the equator. Unfortunately, there was no one else to check their math; the quarantine hold had been stripped of all radios or intercoms. Early on, they'd taken turns hovering around the exit hatch, but after a few days of hearing nothing they gave it up. There were a lot of cameras, which hopefully meant someone was keeping tabs on them. Eventually their initial curiosity and excitement turned to irritation, despondency and finally boredom. By Sunday, everyone was sick of dried food, fruit juice, and DirectTV.
To pass the time, Noah got to know the strangers in his company. Emmanuel "Manny" Fork was a hulking, Marine major who'd somehow managed to squeeze into an F-35 in his last job. Manny was the only religious one in the bunch, which made for a hilariously small services on Sundays followed by the far more inclusive ritual of football. Cowboys-Boston let Noah lose himself in the sorry state of his fantasy football team. Absent were Ryan and Shouri Hayama, who'd spent much of their first time in space learning to fart discreetly and exploring the carnal points of weightlessness. Just before the end of the first quarter (mid-coitus for some of them) an alarm sounded. At least Noah figured it was an alarm, for he'd never heard it before and had no idea what it meant.
"Whaddya know." Daniel Portsmouth had spent more time than anyone getting a handle on some of the displays they'd discovered, so he didn't sound to surprised. "I think somebody's trying to dock."
Noah and Manny looked up from the game at Dan, who was pointing to a wall mounted screen in the corner of the lounge cabin. A triangle somewhat shaped like an Orion-type capsule moved along a flashing arrow until it touched a bright red brick. Without a word, Noah pushed off the floor, bounded into the hallway, and went straight for the airlock. It took a moment before it dawned on him that he and his team might really be in quarantine. He turned around and flew off towards the sickbay's exit hatch. Ryan and Shouri, clearly annoyed with the timing, were already waiting for the others. Lee Cobb and Ivana Sokol emerged from an adjacent corridor moments later, and Noah noticed with some some amusement that Lee was clenching a three foot spar from a sleeping rack. "Really?"
Lee grinned sheepishly and released his grip a bit. Manny and Daniel came last, apparently of two minds as to whether football or meeting their captors was more important. The waiting that followed made it a pretty close call.
"Well, maybe it's not for us," Shouri suggested. "Here, give me that."
She took hold of Lee's makeshift club and rapped the hatch with it. It wasn't the first time they'd tried knocking, and Noah half suspected whoever was on the other side had gotten a good laugh out of their confusion. Or nothing of the sort.
The hatch swung open to reveal a kid. Yes, a barely legal kid in a set of unfamiliar black coveralls sporting a lance corporal's stripes and the eagle, globe, and anchor of the United States Marine Corps.
"Major Fork, sorry to keep you waiting, Sir." he said earnestly. "I'm Lance Corporal Simmons. Colonel Kopff would like to speak with you in private."
Noah sighed heavily as he peered through the hatch opening into Attica beyond. There had to be a dozen people in the next compartment alone, all whering the same black coveralls and looking as sharp as a battleship at general quarters. He could make out some stuff on the screens; mostly radar tracks of objects in orbit. On one, he could clearly make out enough to tell that Attica was somewhere over Europe...and on a trajectory clearly not thirty degrees off the equator. So much for dead reckoning. He caught the kid's eyes and their deep sense of disapproval, and to his surprise he felt a bit cowed by the unexpected authority that lay behind them. "What about the rest of us...uhm..."
"Lance Corporal Simmons, Sir," the kid's voice remained level and firm. "You're free to come out, now. I'll escort you to your quarters."
"Free" wasn't quite the right word, though. After seeing Manny off to an sealed off office compartment to the right of the what Noah decided was Attica's nerve center, he'd taken the rest of the lunar crew through an endless maze of shoots and ladders until they reached a cylindrical compartment--a rotating one at that.
"This what I think it is?" Lee asked. On the Moon, Cobb would be the civil engineer responsible for planning and executing the latest expansion to Challenger's increasingly cramped spaces, and he'd taken an almost obscene interest in what Noah still considered their cage. Attica, or Juneau as was written on the plaques that appeared every other segment, had to be one of the best kept secrets in American history: a military space station built in complete secrecy. There'd been rumors that the Air Force and Navy had cooperated on a number of permanent, stealthy space projects in the past, and admittedly they'd taken the shape of a space station numerous times. But no one expected anything on this scale.
"We've must've cleared something like five hundred feet just pushing forward," Lee continued as they all followed the corporal's lead and took hold of the rotating drum's side-bars. "But how do you hide something this big?"
"One part rock, two parts not looking," Dan muttered. "Think about it. We've moved in enough near-Earth rock this year that a decent size one wouldn't attract much attention. Liquid drop radiators ain't all that new either, so combined with heat sink of about a few dozen kilotons of asteroid--"
"Ladies, gentlemen. If you will?" The corporal cut Lee off, carefully "lowering" himself into a newly opened hatch on the drum wall. The tube dropped probably a good two hundred feet. Noah did some quick math in his head, whatever lay below his feet would have gravity--six to seven feet per second squared worth of it. Lunar gravity.
One by one, they filed into the ladder well. The corporal went last, shutting and locking the hatch above their heads. As he descended down the tube, Noah wondered if he really was a prisoner; at this rate, he had no intention of calling Juneau anything other than Attica.
Noah couldn't complain about their new accommodations. The living block had a full galley, mess, bathing compartment, gym and a real bathroom. On top of that, there was a huge hold divided into twenty utterly empty double-bunked quarters. After three weeks sharing a sleeping cubicle with a couple of newly weds, Noah felt as if he'd died and gone to heaven. After a brief tour, Simmons walked them back to the ladder well. "Major Fork will join you after his conference. Until then, I have to ask you stay right here. Mess detail will be here at 1700 to prepare dinner."
"When will Manny be back?" Ivana thought to ask.
"I'm not sure, Ma'am."
Noah piped in. "I assume we're to be read in as well. Right?"
"Sorry, Sir. I don't know anything about that. If you need anything, use your PDA or the bulkhead mikes."
Simmons pointed to a touchscreen panel near the ladder well. "There's one in each compartment. We have occasional problems with the radios, so try these if your PDA is out."
"Definitely a rock," Lee mused. Simmons just gave him a quizzical look before hurling himself up the ladder, leaving the group--minus one--to themselves.
"Well, I'm starved," Daniel started for the kitchen. "And half-time's gotta be over by now."
"Wait, don't you want to talk about this?" Ryan asked. Shouri looked just as worried.
Dan snorted aloud. "Talk about what? We've been stranded on some super-secret space station for three weeks. Big surprise, we're at the mercy of a whole mess of Army goons and there's nothing we can do about it. I say fuck it; let'em tell us when they're good and ready."
Lee snarled at the potshot, if only because he'd held an Army commission and hated the idea of anyone mistaking a Marine for a soldier. Noah, a civilian and (with increasing doubtfulness) the level-headed mission commander, just shrugged it off and headed off towards the mess, Lee, Ryan, Ivana and Shouri in tow.
They sat in silence for a few moments before Ivana opened up the discussion "Okay, so what do we know?"
Some more silence as they pondered their combined observations. An ever more despondent Ryan kicked off with the first, and most irrelevant, one. "Well, for one thing, I think Helios 5 just went out the window."
Noah simply sighed; he'd resigned himself to losing the Helios project the moment they'd received that bogus downcheck for the flu. He and Ryan were the JPL team members who'd built most of the next-generation VIRGO and MDI instruments for Challenger's new solar observatory. Helios 5 occupied a halo orbit around L2, in constant communication with a receiver at L1 which then forwarded the data back to both Challenger and Earth. The satellite was unique in that for the first time in history, a man-made object in a lunar libration point would be serviced almost entirely from a facility on the Moon. The mass driver team, to which Boeing IDS's Lee Cobb would also belong, would complete their work next March. Another team would arrive to stand up component fabricators shipped in from low Earth orbit. Within another year, America's--no, the world's--first independently supplied manufacturer in space would open for business.
Noah'd grimaced as the pain of losing his life hit home again, but with each passing day (and the millions of dollars lost as a result) he'd resigned himself somewhat to the likelihood he'd never make it to Challenger. But now. "Can't argue with you there, Ryan, but we're here for some reason. I'd like to think it's a worthwhile one for as long as we can. Anyways, what do you guys make of this place?"
"Like I said," Lee volunteered, "we're on a rock, or at least hugging one really close. Huge ass heat sink. No way they'd hide something this big otherwise. Also, I don't think they're using solar power."
"No?" asked Ivana. She was an ESA astronaut and Major Fork's first spaceflight, and Noah suspected she felt at least a little uncomfortable around so many nerds.
"Not a chance." Lee wrapped his hands behind his head, leaned back, and threw on the professorial airs. "These guys have to piss away a few megawatts at least. Did you see how many people there were in the control room alone? I counted at least two dozen. ISS only supports half that and they go through a couple hundred kilowatts like nothing. And you know you can the ISS panels from the ground with the naked eye? Attica? They'd be ten times bigger. Not very stealthy."
Ivana eyed him dangerously. Lee could come off as a condescending prick from time to time. "I know that, Lee. I fly the Orion for a living, you know." Lee waved his hands in peace and Ivana took a deep breath before continuing. "Still...my God. A megawatt?"
"Megawatts" Shouri mumbled. "What does that mean?"
"It means Attica's nuclear-powered," Lee answered. "Another reason to build on a rock. Drill a hole and send down the reactor. Maybe pile on with a couple water tanks. Shield and sink in one go. That's how I'd do it, anyhow. I'd love to see their radiator array, though."
"Why have any?" Shouri asked? "Why not just use a big enough rock?"
"This pinwheel right here." Lee pointed to the deck. "I wouldn't want to rely exclusively on a pipe to the rock to reject around the axis, and I'd like some sort of back up if say some meteoroid cut my station in half. Same reason we have multiple sets of panels on the ISS."
"Two rocks, then." Ryan dug in. "Maybe more."
Noah jumped in this time. "That much mass would snap or twist the structure--take your pick. Also, two co-orbiting thousand ton rocks in low orbit...I'd think somebody'd notice that."
The embarrassed astronomer in Ryan admitted as much. "Okay, it's big and stealthy. But something this big must've taken a long time to build. How old do you think it is?"
Lee smirked. "Oh, I can tell you that right now. She's fifteen years old. Sixteen, next June."
"Oh yeah, who told you that?"
"That thing" Lee pointed to a plaque just behind their table. "Actually, I think the folks I work for built it. These holds look a lot like HabStar modules from the inside. Different, but close enough that I'm willing to bet Boeing's behind them. And look, I've seen two of the names on that Plaque over there before. One of those guys almost certainly designed the galley and mess; probably the whole damned spin section. I'm guessing they brought this up in very small chunks over a number of years. Ray didn't work out all the problems with putting a mess in space until...hmmm...2026, 2027? Fifteen years, though...I'll be damned."
Ivana's eyes narrowed even further. The only non-American on the team was visibly distressed. Not that Slovenia was anywhere near the lead in space exploration, but as an officer in another country's Air Force it was only natural to feel some apprehension after stumbling on such a well kept secret. "I'd love to know how anyone could sneak a couple kilotons under everybody's noses?"
"Not all at once, that's for sure." Lee laughed out loud. "However we did it, we're here and that's a fact. So the question is why?"
"Maybe Dan's right," Shouri still sounded apprehensive, but at least she looked more relax. "Better to let the military guys figure out whether and when to tell us. After all, they might not want all of us."
"Interesting," Lee rested his elbows on the table and his chin on his hands. "You mean like they diverted us just to pick up Major Fork--I mean, Manny? Could be. Then again, I'd like to think my time is a bit more valuable than that."
"Such an egotist," Noah chuckled. "Let's assume they want all of us. What do we bring to the table?"
"Besides Helios?" Ryan asked.
"Obviously," Lee replied. "Honestly, this is my first outer space project. I'd consulted on the Brazilian habitat modules for Valencia, but most of the hard work was done before I got on board. Some work on asteroid capture and mining, but that's such a new field and doesn't really apply to lunar regolith. Twenty years in the Army, missile defense. By the way, whatever it is we're doing I think it's going to be on the Moon."
"Why's that?" Noah asked.
"'cuz we're at lunar gravity, and they seemed pretty hurry to get us down here as quickly as possible. Just a stab in the dark though."
For almost half an hour, Lee went on about his storied--in his own mind, at least--career. Ryan and Shouri genuinely acted as if they were interested, especially the part where he recalled Shouri had a brother who'd served in his missile defense battalion some years ago. Ivana looked bored, and it probably didn't help that she really didn't like Lee all that much. Noah was almost grateful when the blowhard finally shut up. "Anyways, that's my calling card."
"Well," Noah picked up where Lee left off. "Ryan and I've spent the last four years working on cryostat and high-energy optics. In fact, Ryan's spent his entire career on Helios, right?"
"Yeah, that's right," Ryan assented.
Noah continued. "And before that I headed up the nanomaterials lab in Copenhagen. I got my start; high ultraviolet astrometry, and that's pretty much where I've stayed for twenty years."
"Fork and I have backgrounds in astronomy," Ivana went next, "though I haven't done anything since my dissertation."
"And I'm an epidemiologist, just along for the ride," Shouri squeezed Ryan's hand. She hadn't been attached to the Helios project at all, but was going up to replace Dr. Mischa Mondrake at Challenger's general research center. Noah recalled the strings he'd pulled to get her newly-wed husband and his old colleague assigned to the first lunar-based Helios team. The position was well-deserved; Hayama had joined the mirror team straight out of grad school. In many ways, Helios was more his baby than Noah's.
"For the time being," Lee spoke, "we should assume we're all here for a reason."
"Well, maybe not you, Ryan," Noah joked at his friend's expense.
Lee continued, "Anyways, the military just doesn't decide to pluck people out of an orbiter out of the blue, and if I had to guess the Helios team selection was a cover all along. Even if one or two of us was just along for the ride, they've got something in mind for us all by now."
They talked for another good hour or so before breaking up, leaving Noah to his thoughts. A few minutes later Dan walked into the mess determined to figure out how to get a decent hot meal. "Noah, bad news. Pats are out. Twenty three fourteen."
"No shit." No wild-card team had advanced to the Superbowl in ten years, and the Pats seeded sixth this year. "Say, quick question. What did you do before you were tapped for Helios?"
"Nothing," Dan didn't even bother pulling his head out of the fridge. "This is my first gig out of grad school."
"Seriously?"
"Sandwiches it is, I guess," Dan pulled out some cold cuts and rye bread. "We really need to talk to somebody about the food around here. I know for a fact the ISS boys eat steak."
"Really, Dan." Noah ignored the aside. "You're like forty years old."
"Thirty three, thank you. I don't smoke that much."
Noah blinked.
"Damn, dude...relax," Dan tapped the butter knife on the counter. "I'm on the patch. Fucking military, think with all the money they sink into shit like this they'd figure out how to light up in space. Now where's the mustard?"
"So...what did you do?" Noah pried deeper. "Before school."
Dan ignored him for a moment, he'd just found a head of lettuce wrapped in the next fridge over. "Say again?"
"You're forty--er, thirty, Dan. You must've done something with your life. You wouldn't be here otherwise."
"Damn, no mustard...or mayo," Dan grunted, replacing the butter knife in defeat. "Oh, I was a nuke."
"Say what?" Noah stumbled over the unfamiliar term.
"A nuke." Dan repeated Nuclear reactors. Submarines. That sort of thing."
"Officer?"
"Nah, enlisted right out of high school. Got the college and grad school sweetheart deal. I get to go back after I finish my post-grad work, so I figured why not go to the Moon?"
For the life of him, Noah never did figure out how Dan ended up on the Helios team. Then again, neither has anyone else even after so many decades past. Everyone else on the team had a good reason for being there. Lee had come well recommended from his previous work with Boeing's lunar habit team--the folks who'd taken over the lunar lander project from Johnson Space Center. Noah personally knew Ryan and Shouri, and Ryan had been with the mirror team a good three years before Noah signed on. And for his part, Noah was probably one of the three best adaptive opticians in the entire world. Manny and Ivana were active-duty military, real astronauts and pretty much responsible for making sure the scientists and engineers didn't kill themselves on their way to or during their stay at Challenger. Then there was Dan Portsmouth, a whiz when it came to power systems but other than that a black hole in the resume department. He'd been brought in from Silas Wu's rocketry group only two months before CTS-74 launched, and apparently had done some damned good work on the new RTG going into Helios 5. That he'd scored the job at all that thousands of experienced professionals and academics must've fought tooth and nail to land was nothing short of astonishing. Yet even that mystery aside, Noah was still left with a larger one. His people had done well to deduce as much about their surroundings as possible, but none had a clue where they were headed or why. For the time being, he decided to spare the headache and avail himself of the (thankfully more generously placed) creature comforts provided.
Manny Fork didn't rejoin his companions until the next day, and by most accounts he was pretty tight lipped about whatever he'd learned. They ate breakfast together with only a modicum of small talk and an announcement. There was to be an all hands briefing that afternoon for every single one of them. He'd said as much with his eyes fixed almost the whole time on Ivana, and later it turned out she was the reason he'd been delayed for a whole day.
Ivana Sokol, the Slovenian helicopter pilot who had become her country's first astronaut, was Manny's second-in-command and closest confidante. She was also a foreign citizen. She'd seen much which no foreigner had a right to see, and presently Slovenia's ever closer relationship with Moscow was an ongoing concern for Washington. Later it was discovered that the Department of Defense planned to have her removed, under duress, from the Helios team with a fitness report that would have sunk her career in any service. Manny, obviously, had a dim view of that plan, and although the details are lost to history it's widely believed that our story would end here and now had he not refused to be read in without his entire team present: mission commander, specialists...and his foreign spaceflight.
For now, Noah, Ivana and the other had no idea what sort of hornet's nest Manny had stirred, so they simply let the announcement pass in silence as they finished their breakfast. The remainder of the day was spent in light activity. Ryan and Shouri apparently hadn't tired of each other despite the return of gravity. Dan lorded his fantasy playoff team over Noah's defeated Pats. Lee finally finished watching the entirety of a jazz documentary he'd brought along. Manny and Ivana pretty much kept to the gym.
Fifteen minutes to 1400, Lance Corporal Simmons opened the hatch, this time even sparing a few moments for a friendly grin. Noah and Manny gathered the rest of the team to head back up into the station. The briefing started only a minute or so behind schedule.
"Ladies, gentlemen. I'm Colonel Lawrence Kopff, United States Air Force. As you probably already know, the Attica--as you've seen fit to name her--is actually United States Way Station Juneau. I'm afraid you won't learn much more than that, since you're on your way elsewhere anyway."
"Do you use droplet--" Lee cut in suddenly, only to be shut up by a sharp glance from both Manny and the Colonel.
"Moving on, you're due to deploy to your new assignment at 2130 tomorrow night. Right now, Airman Lynn is handing out briefing packets. I don't think I need to tell you that everything you've seen, done, heard or do from now on is going to be classified at the highest level. Please sign the cover sheet once you've read the disclaimer."
In retrospect, Noah might have imagined the Colonel glaring ever so briefly, disapprovingly, at both Ivana and Manny. Unclear as the law may be concerning a foreign citizen's handling of sensitive information, at the time he had no doubt that each and every single American in the room could be held responsible if Ivana spilled the beans. The thought of federal prison replaced whatever remaining melancholy he might feel over the lost Helios opportunity with sheer fear and excitement. Whatever awaited him was bigger than catching x-rays from the Sun.
He cracked open the Top Secret seal to the packet and scanned the cover page. It read "SCAPEL" at the top. A quick glance over at Dan's revealed a different title, "SCRANTON." The canary trap hadn't been set for anyone in the room, but then again Noah doubted they'd be allowed to keep these particular briefs. A few other words in smaller script were common to each crew member's cover sheet. SCARBOROUGH was the only familiar one. FAMILY DONKEY was the most hilarious. He flipped the sheet and was rewarded with a terrain map of the far side of the moon.
"What's NSS mean?" Lee got the jump on Noah.
"Naval Space Station." Kopff explained. "NSS Shenandoah is your new home. You'll be arriving there in four days, after which you will report to Admiral Rice. You'll receive your detailed assignments at that time, but for now we will cover the main points of why you're here."
"Helios is, of course, a real project. Your B-team is proceeding to Challenger next month on CTS-76 while you ostensibly remain under close observation at Valencia. Dr. Hayama, I'll need your signature on the impact report in your appendix."
Shouri nodded nervously, having apparently noticed the forgery and attached instructions. Noah doubted he would've so easily caved under pressure to commit fraud, but his angels were not on the line.
"And this, Dr. Abel, is what we want you and your team to figure out." Kopff's aide fired up the big screen to show the same blown-up image that dominated the fourth page of the briefing packet. Noah looked on a gray-scale, infrared scan of the sky dated three months and focused on a portion of the sky inclined over Jupiter's orbit by twenty degrees. A white circle marked a white splotch at this intense magnification, which meant a telescope in the class of WISE or CORD at the very least. Even more interesting were the overlaid details. Albedo, mass and density consistent with cometary composition. Elongated, interesting for such a weakly coupled system. No rotation, weird. No radial motion relative to the Trojan barycenter, for that matter, also pretty odd. Noah's eyes widened when he got to the temperature measurement.
Ryan scoffed in disbelief. "That has to be wrong."
"As a matter of fact, it is." Kopff nodded again, and the slide changed. "This is 10312 WF today."
This time, the temperature was down to one hundred kelvin--down from over eight hundred. The slide changed again, this time progressing through an animation from 10312 WF's apparenty discovery to the present. Every few seconds, the object's brightness would spike. And the inset graph showed peaks in excess of 2000.
"What's the time scale for this data?" Ryan asked.
Lee answered for the Colonel. "Twenty years. Jesus. You'd have to go back to the the WISE survey to trace a track this far back. How'd anyone miss this?"
"Short answer is we didn't." Kopff replied. "When it was first discovered, 10312 WF was close enough and dark enough to...uhm...Helenos that whatever crunched the packet just assigned the same marker. Then SCARBOROUGH picked up this total unknown and we went back and checked. What's important is that this object appears for the first time when we look at the WISE data. It simply doesn't show up in any previous survey."
"But it's large and bright that COBE or IRAS should've seen it," Ryan argued. "Hell, they should've been able to spot this thing back in the 1800s! You don't just miss something like this over and over again!"
"Well, we did," Kopff was unimpressed. "That's not really the point. Something out there's radiating at or about above a thousand kelvin, and it's no star."
Noah shook his head. "And look at these error bars. At this resolution the only thing that could account for that much brightness would have to be--"
"Thermonuclear," Lee finished his sentence. "Colonel, I'm pretty sure Washington's already run this by every alphabet shop in the phone book. What's the verdict?"
"No estimate has been circulated as of this time."
"Bullshit," Lee's voice dripped with incredulity.
Noah saw ice in Kopff's eyes as they trained on Lee, but the Colonel was bound and determined not to walk down that road. From there on, the planned thirty-minute brief evolved into a two hour free-for-all. Noah, Lee and Ryan took turns commandeering the big screen to use as a whiteboard. Ivana asked some (probably inappropriate) questions about all the funny codenames in the brief, especially after Lee slipped and started talking about the Scarborough swarm. Manny and the Colonel cut her off at the knees each and every time, and later Noah would reflect that at least Manny'd done so out of genuine concern. Ivana was still an outsider, at least until they could clear up her status on the Moon. Shouri, for the most part, was disinterested--and for good reason. This simply wasn't her field. Dan on the other hand remained totally aloof, almost resentful, like he were a kid whose mom had pulled him away from his toys and video games to do homework.
Eventually, Kopff relented and let them leave the brief with at least the 10312 WF track massaged from the Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer's one and a half full sky scans, though he refused to let hold on to the take from Scarborough. What they did score almost made up for their previous imprisonment--well, for Noah and Lee and least. Even Ivana couldn't help but feel giddy about being the only non-American dropped into what might very well be the biggest game in space. Ryan was just as eager as the others to pester Attica's crew for more tidbits about their mission and this strange space station until Shouri put her foot down. They had only hours left to make use of their spacious quarters, and at the end of the day Ryan was a man. Dan remained incurious, abrasive and sulky, and his attitude was starting to wear thin on everyone, but Manny worried Noah the most. The Marine said little during the briefing, and even less afterwards. He even passed on Lee's offer to catch the replays from Wild Card Weekend.
By the time Doug Mancetti broke the Plant story (7 April 2084 St. Petersburg Times), all the key players and most of the secondary ones were dead. It took a year for the world's journalists to process enough of the sweeping changes that lay ahead before anyone even tackled the question of who, what, when, where and how. The why, as in why this secret had been kept safe for so long, was readily obvious, given that yet another world war surely lay ahead had events not overtaken the global panic. Doug didn't survive Invasion, nor did most Floridans, but even in the darkest months of the first Space War, there were thousands of journalists, historians, and investigators in the brutal race to uncover anything and everything they could find out about Encounter. Their efforts rewrote half a century worth of history, and the story is told with as much wonder as it is with bitter recrimination.
Cally Shu did survive, and thanks to her so did enough of Doug's research for a new wave of hunters to pick up the trail. Between 2094 and 2095, she'd coaxed more about Encounter out of the only three surviving witnesses than Doug did in the previous six years. What she'd learned, however, had been worse than third-hand. If not for Invasion, her work might have ended there, but with mankind's very existence on the precipice few if any public officials felt an urgent need to conceal the facts any longer. Bureaucratic inertia probably ensured the continuing classification of the official record for another decade at least, but by the end of Space War 1 all the essentials were already out. And so we have the what, the where and the when. The who, it turns out, are nine men and three woman. First is Lanzo Ziegler, whose journals ended up innocuously in the National Archives. We also have Ari ben-Zeev, Ilon Diedel, Lee Cobb, Judy Keaton, Daniel Portsmouth, Wanda Rice, Emmanual Fork, Ryan and Shouri Hayama, Barry Gold, and one more man who became a household name in his own right: Noah Abel. For better or worse, what this party started would end in nothing less than the birth of a nation, the full throated reach for the stars, a world war, and, of course, Invasion. And now, for the how.
It was late December of 2032, a good year before half of the principals had even met the other. Noah Abel rocketed away from Cape Kennedy aboard CTS-74, the last Constellation mission to the Moon for that year. This was his eighth flight into space, and second time to Challenger; or it would have been if his countless mission briefs bore any passing resemblance to reality. CTS-74 did arrive at the Moon, but only after picking up the fresh crew from the International Space Station and the B-team from Valencia Orbital. Noah's group, as it turned out, had been exposed to a parainfluenza that escaped detection ground-side, forcing NASA to scrub their half-year evolution while they were still in orbit. CTS-74 rendezvoused with the quarantine dock of what the astrogator said was Valencia (but what Noah and anyone else who could fix a star knew to be total nonsense). An hour later, she rocketed away, leaving five men and two women behind. Another flight surgeon met with them all in the infirmary shortly afterwards, signed B. Ross to seven clean bills of health, and disappeared into history.
For a full three weeks, they explored their solitary, sparsely segmented hold aboard what they'd come to call Attica. There were no portholes, although by some really rough dead reckoning they figured they were some 240 miles above what on the third Friday would be Australia on an orbit inclined thirty degrees from the equator. Unfortunately, there was no one else to check their math; the quarantine hold had been stripped of all radios or intercoms. Early on, they'd taken turns hovering around the exit hatch, but after a few days of hearing nothing they gave it up. There were a lot of cameras, which hopefully meant someone was keeping tabs on them. Eventually their initial curiosity and excitement turned to irritation, despondency and finally boredom. By Sunday, everyone was sick of dried food, fruit juice, and DirectTV.
To pass the time, Noah got to know the strangers in his company. Emmanuel "Manny" Fork was a hulking, Marine major who'd somehow managed to squeeze into an F-35 in his last job. Manny was the only religious one in the bunch, which made for a hilariously small services on Sundays followed by the far more inclusive ritual of football. Cowboys-Boston let Noah lose himself in the sorry state of his fantasy football team. Absent were Ryan and Shouri Hayama, who'd spent much of their first time in space learning to fart discreetly and exploring the carnal points of weightlessness. Just before the end of the first quarter (mid-coitus for some of them) an alarm sounded. At least Noah figured it was an alarm, for he'd never heard it before and had no idea what it meant.
"Whaddya know." Daniel Portsmouth had spent more time than anyone getting a handle on some of the displays they'd discovered, so he didn't sound to surprised. "I think somebody's trying to dock."
Noah and Manny looked up from the game at Dan, who was pointing to a wall mounted screen in the corner of the lounge cabin. A triangle somewhat shaped like an Orion-type capsule moved along a flashing arrow until it touched a bright red brick. Without a word, Noah pushed off the floor, bounded into the hallway, and went straight for the airlock. It took a moment before it dawned on him that he and his team might really be in quarantine. He turned around and flew off towards the sickbay's exit hatch. Ryan and Shouri, clearly annoyed with the timing, were already waiting for the others. Lee Cobb and Ivana Sokol emerged from an adjacent corridor moments later, and Noah noticed with some some amusement that Lee was clenching a three foot spar from a sleeping rack. "Really?"
Lee grinned sheepishly and released his grip a bit. Manny and Daniel came last, apparently of two minds as to whether football or meeting their captors was more important. The waiting that followed made it a pretty close call.
"Well, maybe it's not for us," Shouri suggested. "Here, give me that."
She took hold of Lee's makeshift club and rapped the hatch with it. It wasn't the first time they'd tried knocking, and Noah half suspected whoever was on the other side had gotten a good laugh out of their confusion. Or nothing of the sort.
The hatch swung open to reveal a kid. Yes, a barely legal kid in a set of unfamiliar black coveralls sporting a lance corporal's stripes and the eagle, globe, and anchor of the United States Marine Corps.
"Major Fork, sorry to keep you waiting, Sir." he said earnestly. "I'm Lance Corporal Simmons. Colonel Kopff would like to speak with you in private."
Noah sighed heavily as he peered through the hatch opening into Attica beyond. There had to be a dozen people in the next compartment alone, all whering the same black coveralls and looking as sharp as a battleship at general quarters. He could make out some stuff on the screens; mostly radar tracks of objects in orbit. On one, he could clearly make out enough to tell that Attica was somewhere over Europe...and on a trajectory clearly not thirty degrees off the equator. So much for dead reckoning. He caught the kid's eyes and their deep sense of disapproval, and to his surprise he felt a bit cowed by the unexpected authority that lay behind them. "What about the rest of us...uhm..."
"Lance Corporal Simmons, Sir," the kid's voice remained level and firm. "You're free to come out, now. I'll escort you to your quarters."
"Free" wasn't quite the right word, though. After seeing Manny off to an sealed off office compartment to the right of the what Noah decided was Attica's nerve center, he'd taken the rest of the lunar crew through an endless maze of shoots and ladders until they reached a cylindrical compartment--a rotating one at that.
"This what I think it is?" Lee asked. On the Moon, Cobb would be the civil engineer responsible for planning and executing the latest expansion to Challenger's increasingly cramped spaces, and he'd taken an almost obscene interest in what Noah still considered their cage. Attica, or Juneau as was written on the plaques that appeared every other segment, had to be one of the best kept secrets in American history: a military space station built in complete secrecy. There'd been rumors that the Air Force and Navy had cooperated on a number of permanent, stealthy space projects in the past, and admittedly they'd taken the shape of a space station numerous times. But no one expected anything on this scale.
"We've must've cleared something like five hundred feet just pushing forward," Lee continued as they all followed the corporal's lead and took hold of the rotating drum's side-bars. "But how do you hide something this big?"
"One part rock, two parts not looking," Dan muttered. "Think about it. We've moved in enough near-Earth rock this year that a decent size one wouldn't attract much attention. Liquid drop radiators ain't all that new either, so combined with heat sink of about a few dozen kilotons of asteroid--"
"Ladies, gentlemen. If you will?" The corporal cut Lee off, carefully "lowering" himself into a newly opened hatch on the drum wall. The tube dropped probably a good two hundred feet. Noah did some quick math in his head, whatever lay below his feet would have gravity--six to seven feet per second squared worth of it. Lunar gravity.
One by one, they filed into the ladder well. The corporal went last, shutting and locking the hatch above their heads. As he descended down the tube, Noah wondered if he really was a prisoner; at this rate, he had no intention of calling Juneau anything other than Attica.
Noah couldn't complain about their new accommodations. The living block had a full galley, mess, bathing compartment, gym and a real bathroom. On top of that, there was a huge hold divided into twenty utterly empty double-bunked quarters. After three weeks sharing a sleeping cubicle with a couple of newly weds, Noah felt as if he'd died and gone to heaven. After a brief tour, Simmons walked them back to the ladder well. "Major Fork will join you after his conference. Until then, I have to ask you stay right here. Mess detail will be here at 1700 to prepare dinner."
"When will Manny be back?" Ivana thought to ask.
"I'm not sure, Ma'am."
Noah piped in. "I assume we're to be read in as well. Right?"
"Sorry, Sir. I don't know anything about that. If you need anything, use your PDA or the bulkhead mikes."
Simmons pointed to a touchscreen panel near the ladder well. "There's one in each compartment. We have occasional problems with the radios, so try these if your PDA is out."
"Definitely a rock," Lee mused. Simmons just gave him a quizzical look before hurling himself up the ladder, leaving the group--minus one--to themselves.
"Well, I'm starved," Daniel started for the kitchen. "And half-time's gotta be over by now."
"Wait, don't you want to talk about this?" Ryan asked. Shouri looked just as worried.
Dan snorted aloud. "Talk about what? We've been stranded on some super-secret space station for three weeks. Big surprise, we're at the mercy of a whole mess of Army goons and there's nothing we can do about it. I say fuck it; let'em tell us when they're good and ready."
Lee snarled at the potshot, if only because he'd held an Army commission and hated the idea of anyone mistaking a Marine for a soldier. Noah, a civilian and (with increasing doubtfulness) the level-headed mission commander, just shrugged it off and headed off towards the mess, Lee, Ryan, Ivana and Shouri in tow.
They sat in silence for a few moments before Ivana opened up the discussion "Okay, so what do we know?"
Some more silence as they pondered their combined observations. An ever more despondent Ryan kicked off with the first, and most irrelevant, one. "Well, for one thing, I think Helios 5 just went out the window."
Noah simply sighed; he'd resigned himself to losing the Helios project the moment they'd received that bogus downcheck for the flu. He and Ryan were the JPL team members who'd built most of the next-generation VIRGO and MDI instruments for Challenger's new solar observatory. Helios 5 occupied a halo orbit around L2, in constant communication with a receiver at L1 which then forwarded the data back to both Challenger and Earth. The satellite was unique in that for the first time in history, a man-made object in a lunar libration point would be serviced almost entirely from a facility on the Moon. The mass driver team, to which Boeing IDS's Lee Cobb would also belong, would complete their work next March. Another team would arrive to stand up component fabricators shipped in from low Earth orbit. Within another year, America's--no, the world's--first independently supplied manufacturer in space would open for business.
Noah'd grimaced as the pain of losing his life hit home again, but with each passing day (and the millions of dollars lost as a result) he'd resigned himself somewhat to the likelihood he'd never make it to Challenger. But now. "Can't argue with you there, Ryan, but we're here for some reason. I'd like to think it's a worthwhile one for as long as we can. Anyways, what do you guys make of this place?"
"Like I said," Lee volunteered, "we're on a rock, or at least hugging one really close. Huge ass heat sink. No way they'd hide something this big otherwise. Also, I don't think they're using solar power."
"No?" asked Ivana. She was an ESA astronaut and Major Fork's first spaceflight, and Noah suspected she felt at least a little uncomfortable around so many nerds.
"Not a chance." Lee wrapped his hands behind his head, leaned back, and threw on the professorial airs. "These guys have to piss away a few megawatts at least. Did you see how many people there were in the control room alone? I counted at least two dozen. ISS only supports half that and they go through a couple hundred kilowatts like nothing. And you know you can the ISS panels from the ground with the naked eye? Attica? They'd be ten times bigger. Not very stealthy."
Ivana eyed him dangerously. Lee could come off as a condescending prick from time to time. "I know that, Lee. I fly the Orion for a living, you know." Lee waved his hands in peace and Ivana took a deep breath before continuing. "Still...my God. A megawatt?"
"Megawatts" Shouri mumbled. "What does that mean?"
"It means Attica's nuclear-powered," Lee answered. "Another reason to build on a rock. Drill a hole and send down the reactor. Maybe pile on with a couple water tanks. Shield and sink in one go. That's how I'd do it, anyhow. I'd love to see their radiator array, though."
"Why have any?" Shouri asked? "Why not just use a big enough rock?"
"This pinwheel right here." Lee pointed to the deck. "I wouldn't want to rely exclusively on a pipe to the rock to reject around the axis, and I'd like some sort of back up if say some meteoroid cut my station in half. Same reason we have multiple sets of panels on the ISS."
"Two rocks, then." Ryan dug in. "Maybe more."
Noah jumped in this time. "That much mass would snap or twist the structure--take your pick. Also, two co-orbiting thousand ton rocks in low orbit...I'd think somebody'd notice that."
The embarrassed astronomer in Ryan admitted as much. "Okay, it's big and stealthy. But something this big must've taken a long time to build. How old do you think it is?"
Lee smirked. "Oh, I can tell you that right now. She's fifteen years old. Sixteen, next June."
"Oh yeah, who told you that?"
"That thing" Lee pointed to a plaque just behind their table. "Actually, I think the folks I work for built it. These holds look a lot like HabStar modules from the inside. Different, but close enough that I'm willing to bet Boeing's behind them. And look, I've seen two of the names on that Plaque over there before. One of those guys almost certainly designed the galley and mess; probably the whole damned spin section. I'm guessing they brought this up in very small chunks over a number of years. Ray didn't work out all the problems with putting a mess in space until...hmmm...2026, 2027? Fifteen years, though...I'll be damned."
Ivana's eyes narrowed even further. The only non-American on the team was visibly distressed. Not that Slovenia was anywhere near the lead in space exploration, but as an officer in another country's Air Force it was only natural to feel some apprehension after stumbling on such a well kept secret. "I'd love to know how anyone could sneak a couple kilotons under everybody's noses?"
"Not all at once, that's for sure." Lee laughed out loud. "However we did it, we're here and that's a fact. So the question is why?"
"Maybe Dan's right," Shouri still sounded apprehensive, but at least she looked more relax. "Better to let the military guys figure out whether and when to tell us. After all, they might not want all of us."
"Interesting," Lee rested his elbows on the table and his chin on his hands. "You mean like they diverted us just to pick up Major Fork--I mean, Manny? Could be. Then again, I'd like to think my time is a bit more valuable than that."
"Such an egotist," Noah chuckled. "Let's assume they want all of us. What do we bring to the table?"
"Besides Helios?" Ryan asked.
"Obviously," Lee replied. "Honestly, this is my first outer space project. I'd consulted on the Brazilian habitat modules for Valencia, but most of the hard work was done before I got on board. Some work on asteroid capture and mining, but that's such a new field and doesn't really apply to lunar regolith. Twenty years in the Army, missile defense. By the way, whatever it is we're doing I think it's going to be on the Moon."
"Why's that?" Noah asked.
"'cuz we're at lunar gravity, and they seemed pretty hurry to get us down here as quickly as possible. Just a stab in the dark though."
For almost half an hour, Lee went on about his storied--in his own mind, at least--career. Ryan and Shouri genuinely acted as if they were interested, especially the part where he recalled Shouri had a brother who'd served in his missile defense battalion some years ago. Ivana looked bored, and it probably didn't help that she really didn't like Lee all that much. Noah was almost grateful when the blowhard finally shut up. "Anyways, that's my calling card."
"Well," Noah picked up where Lee left off. "Ryan and I've spent the last four years working on cryostat and high-energy optics. In fact, Ryan's spent his entire career on Helios, right?"
"Yeah, that's right," Ryan assented.
Noah continued. "And before that I headed up the nanomaterials lab in Copenhagen. I got my start; high ultraviolet astrometry, and that's pretty much where I've stayed for twenty years."
"Fork and I have backgrounds in astronomy," Ivana went next, "though I haven't done anything since my dissertation."
"And I'm an epidemiologist, just along for the ride," Shouri squeezed Ryan's hand. She hadn't been attached to the Helios project at all, but was going up to replace Dr. Mischa Mondrake at Challenger's general research center. Noah recalled the strings he'd pulled to get her newly-wed husband and his old colleague assigned to the first lunar-based Helios team. The position was well-deserved; Hayama had joined the mirror team straight out of grad school. In many ways, Helios was more his baby than Noah's.
"For the time being," Lee spoke, "we should assume we're all here for a reason."
"Well, maybe not you, Ryan," Noah joked at his friend's expense.
Lee continued, "Anyways, the military just doesn't decide to pluck people out of an orbiter out of the blue, and if I had to guess the Helios team selection was a cover all along. Even if one or two of us was just along for the ride, they've got something in mind for us all by now."
They talked for another good hour or so before breaking up, leaving Noah to his thoughts. A few minutes later Dan walked into the mess determined to figure out how to get a decent hot meal. "Noah, bad news. Pats are out. Twenty three fourteen."
"No shit." No wild-card team had advanced to the Superbowl in ten years, and the Pats seeded sixth this year. "Say, quick question. What did you do before you were tapped for Helios?"
"Nothing," Dan didn't even bother pulling his head out of the fridge. "This is my first gig out of grad school."
"Seriously?"
"Sandwiches it is, I guess," Dan pulled out some cold cuts and rye bread. "We really need to talk to somebody about the food around here. I know for a fact the ISS boys eat steak."
"Really, Dan." Noah ignored the aside. "You're like forty years old."
"Thirty three, thank you. I don't smoke that much."
Noah blinked.
"Damn, dude...relax," Dan tapped the butter knife on the counter. "I'm on the patch. Fucking military, think with all the money they sink into shit like this they'd figure out how to light up in space. Now where's the mustard?"
"So...what did you do?" Noah pried deeper. "Before school."
Dan ignored him for a moment, he'd just found a head of lettuce wrapped in the next fridge over. "Say again?"
"You're forty--er, thirty, Dan. You must've done something with your life. You wouldn't be here otherwise."
"Damn, no mustard...or mayo," Dan grunted, replacing the butter knife in defeat. "Oh, I was a nuke."
"Say what?" Noah stumbled over the unfamiliar term.
"A nuke." Dan repeated Nuclear reactors. Submarines. That sort of thing."
"Officer?"
"Nah, enlisted right out of high school. Got the college and grad school sweetheart deal. I get to go back after I finish my post-grad work, so I figured why not go to the Moon?"
For the life of him, Noah never did figure out how Dan ended up on the Helios team. Then again, neither has anyone else even after so many decades past. Everyone else on the team had a good reason for being there. Lee had come well recommended from his previous work with Boeing's lunar habit team--the folks who'd taken over the lunar lander project from Johnson Space Center. Noah personally knew Ryan and Shouri, and Ryan had been with the mirror team a good three years before Noah signed on. And for his part, Noah was probably one of the three best adaptive opticians in the entire world. Manny and Ivana were active-duty military, real astronauts and pretty much responsible for making sure the scientists and engineers didn't kill themselves on their way to or during their stay at Challenger. Then there was Dan Portsmouth, a whiz when it came to power systems but other than that a black hole in the resume department. He'd been brought in from Silas Wu's rocketry group only two months before CTS-74 launched, and apparently had done some damned good work on the new RTG going into Helios 5. That he'd scored the job at all that thousands of experienced professionals and academics must've fought tooth and nail to land was nothing short of astonishing. Yet even that mystery aside, Noah was still left with a larger one. His people had done well to deduce as much about their surroundings as possible, but none had a clue where they were headed or why. For the time being, he decided to spare the headache and avail himself of the (thankfully more generously placed) creature comforts provided.
Manny Fork didn't rejoin his companions until the next day, and by most accounts he was pretty tight lipped about whatever he'd learned. They ate breakfast together with only a modicum of small talk and an announcement. There was to be an all hands briefing that afternoon for every single one of them. He'd said as much with his eyes fixed almost the whole time on Ivana, and later it turned out she was the reason he'd been delayed for a whole day.
Ivana Sokol, the Slovenian helicopter pilot who had become her country's first astronaut, was Manny's second-in-command and closest confidante. She was also a foreign citizen. She'd seen much which no foreigner had a right to see, and presently Slovenia's ever closer relationship with Moscow was an ongoing concern for Washington. Later it was discovered that the Department of Defense planned to have her removed, under duress, from the Helios team with a fitness report that would have sunk her career in any service. Manny, obviously, had a dim view of that plan, and although the details are lost to history it's widely believed that our story would end here and now had he not refused to be read in without his entire team present: mission commander, specialists...and his foreign spaceflight.
For now, Noah, Ivana and the other had no idea what sort of hornet's nest Manny had stirred, so they simply let the announcement pass in silence as they finished their breakfast. The remainder of the day was spent in light activity. Ryan and Shouri apparently hadn't tired of each other despite the return of gravity. Dan lorded his fantasy playoff team over Noah's defeated Pats. Lee finally finished watching the entirety of a jazz documentary he'd brought along. Manny and Ivana pretty much kept to the gym.
Fifteen minutes to 1400, Lance Corporal Simmons opened the hatch, this time even sparing a few moments for a friendly grin. Noah and Manny gathered the rest of the team to head back up into the station. The briefing started only a minute or so behind schedule.
"Ladies, gentlemen. I'm Colonel Lawrence Kopff, United States Air Force. As you probably already know, the Attica--as you've seen fit to name her--is actually United States Way Station Juneau. I'm afraid you won't learn much more than that, since you're on your way elsewhere anyway."
"Do you use droplet--" Lee cut in suddenly, only to be shut up by a sharp glance from both Manny and the Colonel.
"Moving on, you're due to deploy to your new assignment at 2130 tomorrow night. Right now, Airman Lynn is handing out briefing packets. I don't think I need to tell you that everything you've seen, done, heard or do from now on is going to be classified at the highest level. Please sign the cover sheet once you've read the disclaimer."
In retrospect, Noah might have imagined the Colonel glaring ever so briefly, disapprovingly, at both Ivana and Manny. Unclear as the law may be concerning a foreign citizen's handling of sensitive information, at the time he had no doubt that each and every single American in the room could be held responsible if Ivana spilled the beans. The thought of federal prison replaced whatever remaining melancholy he might feel over the lost Helios opportunity with sheer fear and excitement. Whatever awaited him was bigger than catching x-rays from the Sun.
He cracked open the Top Secret seal to the packet and scanned the cover page. It read "SCAPEL" at the top. A quick glance over at Dan's revealed a different title, "SCRANTON." The canary trap hadn't been set for anyone in the room, but then again Noah doubted they'd be allowed to keep these particular briefs. A few other words in smaller script were common to each crew member's cover sheet. SCARBOROUGH was the only familiar one. FAMILY DONKEY was the most hilarious. He flipped the sheet and was rewarded with a terrain map of the far side of the moon.
"What's NSS mean?" Lee got the jump on Noah.
"Naval Space Station." Kopff explained. "NSS Shenandoah is your new home. You'll be arriving there in four days, after which you will report to Admiral Rice. You'll receive your detailed assignments at that time, but for now we will cover the main points of why you're here."
"Helios is, of course, a real project. Your B-team is proceeding to Challenger next month on CTS-76 while you ostensibly remain under close observation at Valencia. Dr. Hayama, I'll need your signature on the impact report in your appendix."
Shouri nodded nervously, having apparently noticed the forgery and attached instructions. Noah doubted he would've so easily caved under pressure to commit fraud, but his angels were not on the line.
"And this, Dr. Abel, is what we want you and your team to figure out." Kopff's aide fired up the big screen to show the same blown-up image that dominated the fourth page of the briefing packet. Noah looked on a gray-scale, infrared scan of the sky dated three months and focused on a portion of the sky inclined over Jupiter's orbit by twenty degrees. A white circle marked a white splotch at this intense magnification, which meant a telescope in the class of WISE or CORD at the very least. Even more interesting were the overlaid details. Albedo, mass and density consistent with cometary composition. Elongated, interesting for such a weakly coupled system. No rotation, weird. No radial motion relative to the Trojan barycenter, for that matter, also pretty odd. Noah's eyes widened when he got to the temperature measurement.
Ryan scoffed in disbelief. "That has to be wrong."
"As a matter of fact, it is." Kopff nodded again, and the slide changed. "This is 10312 WF today."
This time, the temperature was down to one hundred kelvin--down from over eight hundred. The slide changed again, this time progressing through an animation from 10312 WF's apparenty discovery to the present. Every few seconds, the object's brightness would spike. And the inset graph showed peaks in excess of 2000.
"What's the time scale for this data?" Ryan asked.
Lee answered for the Colonel. "Twenty years. Jesus. You'd have to go back to the the WISE survey to trace a track this far back. How'd anyone miss this?"
"Short answer is we didn't." Kopff replied. "When it was first discovered, 10312 WF was close enough and dark enough to...uhm...Helenos that whatever crunched the packet just assigned the same marker. Then SCARBOROUGH picked up this total unknown and we went back and checked. What's important is that this object appears for the first time when we look at the WISE data. It simply doesn't show up in any previous survey."
"But it's large and bright that COBE or IRAS should've seen it," Ryan argued. "Hell, they should've been able to spot this thing back in the 1800s! You don't just miss something like this over and over again!"
"Well, we did," Kopff was unimpressed. "That's not really the point. Something out there's radiating at or about above a thousand kelvin, and it's no star."
Noah shook his head. "And look at these error bars. At this resolution the only thing that could account for that much brightness would have to be--"
"Thermonuclear," Lee finished his sentence. "Colonel, I'm pretty sure Washington's already run this by every alphabet shop in the phone book. What's the verdict?"
"No estimate has been circulated as of this time."
"Bullshit," Lee's voice dripped with incredulity.
Noah saw ice in Kopff's eyes as they trained on Lee, but the Colonel was bound and determined not to walk down that road. From there on, the planned thirty-minute brief evolved into a two hour free-for-all. Noah, Lee and Ryan took turns commandeering the big screen to use as a whiteboard. Ivana asked some (probably inappropriate) questions about all the funny codenames in the brief, especially after Lee slipped and started talking about the Scarborough swarm. Manny and the Colonel cut her off at the knees each and every time, and later Noah would reflect that at least Manny'd done so out of genuine concern. Ivana was still an outsider, at least until they could clear up her status on the Moon. Shouri, for the most part, was disinterested--and for good reason. This simply wasn't her field. Dan on the other hand remained totally aloof, almost resentful, like he were a kid whose mom had pulled him away from his toys and video games to do homework.
Eventually, Kopff relented and let them leave the brief with at least the 10312 WF track massaged from the Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer's one and a half full sky scans, though he refused to let hold on to the take from Scarborough. What they did score almost made up for their previous imprisonment--well, for Noah and Lee and least. Even Ivana couldn't help but feel giddy about being the only non-American dropped into what might very well be the biggest game in space. Ryan was just as eager as the others to pester Attica's crew for more tidbits about their mission and this strange space station until Shouri put her foot down. They had only hours left to make use of their spacious quarters, and at the end of the day Ryan was a man. Dan remained incurious, abrasive and sulky, and his attitude was starting to wear thin on everyone, but Manny worried Noah the most. The Marine said little during the briefing, and even less afterwards. He even passed on Lee's offer to catch the replays from Wild Card Weekend.
Last edited by Paolo on 2009-12-29 09:12pm, edited 21 times in total.
Scobee
3.
Just after 9 PM, 6 December 2033, United Space 177 separated from her piggyback at thirty thousand feet, pitching up and banking north before lighting her main engine. Mojave Air & Space Port fell beneath the space-plane as she climbed furiously towards low orbit. Twenty minutes later, the insertion light flashed in the passenger cabin, at which point a flight attendant emerged from the rear galley to dispense pouches of overpriced domestic beer to the the only four people onboard. Lanny and the two Israelis passed, but Barry crankily fished out his credit card. No matter what came next, he had no intention of facing it sober.
Barry's tablet showed a sparse scattering of flimsy habitats dead ahead. They surrounded an all-but-rebuilt International Space Station, forming a man-made atoll we still call Columbia Field. One of the Americans' cislunar shuttles came calling twice a week, making port with one or two of the larger bubbles in addition to the ISS. Another other ship serviced hubs at the Valencia Field, which lay almost half a world away. Barry's inner environmentalist sometimes fretted over the price paid to sustain nearly 10,000 people (at a time, an astonishingly large number) in space. For one, Columbia was heavily littered with rock, so much so that orbiters these days had to top off at every port or risk drifting into a deadly storm of millimeter debris. Though her destination still lay three hundred miles away, safety demanded Flight 177 cut her closing speed to under 300 feet per second.
Early spaceliners typically did away with a divider between the cockpit and the passenger cabin, so the companies generally focus-grouped alerts and alarms and selected those least likely to unduly upset their guests. But Barry was no tourist, and knew a collision warning when he heard one. He leaned forward and tapped the captain on his shoulder. "What's up, Jim?"
"Sorry, Sir." The commander to pointed to a bare speck on his rightmost pane. "Not quite sure. Wait...if you'll excuse me."
"Control. Unknown 193, 15 under, distance 203," he spoke into his headset mike. "Please advise, United 177."
"United 177, unknown is Air Force 14. Skew flip and slow to 20 on current. Acknowledge. Control."
The pilot did the math in his head, frowned, then rephrased the order. "Control. Will come zero on lateral with Air Force 14, please confirm. United 177."
Traffic Control squawked acknowledgement. While Captain Nickles grumbled through the checklist, his copilot looked over his shoulder at Barry. "They're not about to do what I think they are? Are they, Sir?"
"I have no idea." Barry stared blankly out the porthole. "Air Force 14" crawled across the cockpit bubbles until she was over by the copilot. Nickles gently let out the throttle, holding it their acceleration to four feet per second squared for a full minute before cutting the engine off. Then, as nimbly as he could manage, Nickles lured the speck back across nose until it was nearly dead ahead.
Before long, the blinking dot had grown into the lines of a Block 2 Crew Exploration Vehicle, the canonical orbital taxi for NASA and the Air Force. This one was probably one of the three owned by Nelson SWP, and she performed a nearly identical maneuver, though she took a good fifteen minutes to cut her closing speed. The commander, visibly dumbfounded, tried and failed to weasel some more info from anyone--Control, the unknown, even nearby flights. The CEV closed to under two hundred feet before the speakers blared a curt order for Flight 177 to disengage her high power radio and switch to her microwave receiver. Nickle's unhappily complied; an equally brief set of docking instructions followed.
When Air Force 14 finally touched skin, Nickles unstrapped himself to join 177's stewardess at the exit. Barry watched with mild irritation as they went through the necessary rituals to verify the seal, but that didn't keep jaw dropped when the hatch finally swung up.
"The fuck, Jude?" Barry shouted from his seat. "What the hell do you think you're doing here?"
"Good to see you, too, Barry. " A woman in blue, Navy-issue coveralls swam into the passenger cabin. Four USAF airmen followed. She whispered something to the attendant, who then beckoned the four enlisted newcomers to follow her to the rear.
"You'll have to excuse him, Jude," Lanny said. "He's probably a little buzzed right now."
"The hell I am," Barry growled. "And one way or another I'm getting to Challenger. You can't stop me."
"Please, shut up," Judy patted him in the shoulder and floated back into the rear. The flight crew and passengers watched as she passed on directions to the attendant and her own men.
"Hush hush, huh," Barry tipped his head towards the two extras seated behind him. "I get it."
"You really don't" Judy said dismissively, "They're coming along, too. Now listen up everybody. I'd like to thank Captain Nickles for bringing you this far, but we'll be taking you the rest of the way. My men will stay here and take care of your belongings. You each can stow fifteen kilos of carry-on, but that's it. I've got a little ship and we've got a long way to go."
Captain Judy Keaton, USN, was kind enough to give the passengers half an hour to sort through their belongings. Barry rose to the occasion, wasting half that window damning everyone and everything in sight before finally trading his entire carry-on bag for the mini-bar. He spent is second fifteen minutes trying to rip it out of its drawer before Nickles relented and showed him how to disengage it it. It took ten more minutes than allotted to suit up and square away the passengers aboard the CEV. Judy shut the hatch, locked it, and passed the order to move out to her copilot. Lieutenant (JG) Eli Whitney, who Lanny apparently knew but Barry didn't, carefully rolled the spacecraft onto a retrograde course from 177. As Judy strapped herself in, Barry hoped to hell he'd stowed the fridge in a most irritating spot.
"So what gives, Jude?" Barry tapped her should not more than a minute after "Air Force 14" completed her burn.
"You're a natural nag, you know that Barry?" Judy never took her eyes off her instruments. "Stop whining and drink."
Judy passed back some syringes with Glenlivet on the label. Barry, Ilon, and Lanny all partook, but Ari said thank you and passed. "We've got a lot of catching up to do."
"Just remember. We got a deal. The fridge is mine, no matter where we're going or what we're doing."
As you probably guessed, Barry and Judy--and Lanny--had a history. Judy was Growler driver on the Reagan twenty years ago, and Lanny and Barry had each commanded Hawkeye Deltas on the same boat. Their paths crossed again when Judy signed on as mission commander for the Scarborough launch--that was three years ago. But with people like these, it didn't matter how much time had passed or whether they'd stayed in touch. They easily fell back into the comfortable habits cultivated by long friendship and good work. All of which apparently gave Barry license to act like an insufferable adolescent terror.
"Fine, fine!" Judy threw up her hands. "You keep that that piss away from my people, it's yours."
"You're damn right." Barry cracked the syringe and downed the contents in one go. Ari, still feeling queasy after the climb to orbit, passed on the round, so Barry helped himself to seconds. Lanny and Ilon had the decency to wait for the toast. "You know, they let me out once the whole time. Just once! Three months in a cage while some Deputy Assistant Secretary of Who-The-Fuck-Cares plays James Bond with my fucking life. You know, three months room and board? Goddamn it, you see this?"
Barry whipped out his United boarding pass. "This, yeah! My credit card! My money! Haven't expensed a damned thing yet! Think TRW'll pay me back, now? Wrong! And don't tell me the Navy'll take care of it, not when I'm still waiting to get paid from the three weeks this bastard--" he pointed to Lanny "--got us landed in Adak! Let's not forget I'm divorced now. I get reactivated, I lose my damn job, and now I can't even show up to court and get the damned alimony adjusted. That's why I get the fridge."
Barry took a deep breath. "I love you, Jude, but seriously. Fuck you."
"Fuck you...Ma'am," Judy twisted in her seat and tapped the eagles of a Captain in the United States Navy. She could give even the Devil a few lessons in needling.
"Whatever," Barry snorted and popped a third syringe. Judy looked back to check on Ari and Ilon, and probably felt pity for rudely cutting them out like a pair of strangers at a bar. "Forgive my friend here. He's a bit of a bore. The other one's way more interesting."
"And dumb enough to actually volunteer for this shit," Barry sneered.
"Anyways, introductions." Judy ignored him. "Captain Judy Keaton, United States Navy."
The taller of the two took her hand. "I am Ari. Dr. Ari Ben-Zeev. This is my good friend Dr. Ilon Diedel. The pleasure's mine."
"My, aren't you a sweet." Judy squeezed his hand slyly. "I can't apologize enough for the way my government's uprooted you from your lives and work, but I trust what you've learned so far makes up for it."
"If half of what we've seen is true," Ari answered, "then we have no complaints. I think I speak for the both of us."
Ilon nodded in agreement. As it turned out, Ari and Ilon were originally slated to join the JAXA-ESA tether group on the International Space Station. Like Barry, they'd been sequestered at the spaceport, though Ari hinted that they had some warning what was in store soon after arriving in the States.
"Good," Judy clapped her hands in approval, then pulled a briefcase from under her seat. "We've got some paperwork for the both of you. We've informed your government on the general terms of your condition, but as foreign citizens there are still a few more hoops to jump through. You understand, of course."
Judy placed the briefcase on her lap and popped it open. She whipped out two sets of documents and hand one each to Ilon and Ari. They took a few minutes to ensure they were perusing nothing more than non-disclosure boilerplate before signing. "Once we get where we're going, I'll be free to answer just about all your questions. Sorry, Eli's just not cleared for this. In the mean time, we might as well get to--Jesus, Barry."
"What?" Barry had unhooked himself and was thoroughly enjoying in his first time in freefall--buzzed to boot. He floated right above Judy's head and into her lap on a single-minded mission to raid the mini-bar.
"Behave yourself!" Judy rapped him on the head for good measure before chucking a shot of Scotch in his face. "I will cut you off, deal or no deal."
"No need to be bitch about it." Barry jackknifed back into his seat and sucked down his fourth. "So, Ari, is it? How'd you kill time in the hole?"
Ari blinked. "I am not sure I understand, Dr. Gold."
"Just Gold...Barry, actually. Jude here's the doctor. Lanny and I are just your run-of-the-mill engineers. You guys were trapped in that roach motel as long as I was. Don't tell me you ain't pissed about that."
"Oh, I see." Ari eyes lit up with understanding. "No, we were well treated. It is our first time to the US. We really liked Bakersfield. Vegas is even better, nice people, nice girls. If I ever come back in summer, I'd love to enter your World Series of Poker."
"Wait a minute?" Barry cocked an eyebrow. "Vegas? When did you have time to go to Vegas?"
Ilon laughed. "We went twice...um...first weekend after we come to the desert. Second time, we come back night before we take off. Ari thinks maybe he's a...how you say...a fish?"
"Cardshark," Lanny said.
"Yes. Ari's good in the morning and afternoon, when he drink not so much. We stay at Riviera. Very cheap, but very nice. Tournaments all the time. Then he really drink and goes to MGM. They wipe him out. I give him two hundred dollars, he makes a thousand more, then loses half of it in cab. I buy him money clip for next time. We even, no?"
"Are you fucking kidding me," Barry almost shouted. "How'd you get out of quarantine?"
"Quarantine? No. They tell us that Ari's name show up on no fly list. Big mix up, take long time to fix. No problem, our experiment starts in March, so we have plenty of time. Then they tell us about this...well, I won't say now. I'm sorry to hear you pay so much for motel. Your government was very nice to us. Arranged rooms and food and even a stipend for us. And Hebrew University pay as well."
Judy and Lanny...even Eli...were laughing out loud now.
"Cut me off my ass," Barry growled. "What gives?"
"I'm sorry, you're just priceless," Judy managed as she helped herself to a second shot. "I'd love to know who sold you that bullshit about being restricted to base."
"The doc, the day I got there."
"What he say?" Lanny asked.
"If I left, I risked losing my seat on the next Ares up. I would've checked out the next day if I thought otherwise. And I can't exactly talk it over with Spy Central over a land line from a tourist trap in the middle of nowhere."
"You can be real dumbass sometimes, Goggles," Judy rolled her eyes.
"Like I said, fuck you...Ma'am. Now drink."
"Last one for me. I'm on the clock."
"Biological clock."
"How're the kids, Barry?" Judy shot back.
"Ouch." Barry had wanted kids. Ginny didn't. In the end, that might've been one argument worth losing. "Relax. We've got plenty of time."
Judy shook her head. "You might. I don't."
"That's crap. Four days to the moon, and nobody sends up a Captain to play cabbie. You can live a little."
"Wrong again bucko."
"This is all very amusing," Ilon Diedel suddenly chimed in, "but Captain, is there anything more you can tell us about what exactly they want with us?"
Judy looked over her shoulder with an almost apologetic look. "Not much more than you've heard, unfortunately. I know how you feel; I don't like walking on to a job without a clue as to what they want me to do. But I don't think they just pulled your names out of a hat. So relax, we're almost there."
"There" turned out to be a good continent and a half away, and "soon" was half a day. Another a lonely patch of rocks floated in the distance, and Judy'd timed their arrival perfectly for a night rendezvous. Sunlight failed to the east, but there was still enough to see a nearby, dumb-bell shaped carbonaceous specimen growing the forward portholes. Squinting, Barry thought he could make out a dark gray, almost black, but sharply lined shadow against the asteroid's light side.
"Well, I'll be damned." Lanny hooted. "That's a Starfish!"
"A what?" Barry and Judy said at the same time.
"I don't know what a Starfish is, but that's the USS Scobee. She's a hunter-killer, and somebody's in big trouble if you've ever seen her."
"We called them interceptors," Lanny explained, "but nevermind? Don't worry, I was read into something like this back in '18 or '19. Well, the engine block work, anyway. Saw some of the centrifuge models as well. See, one, two, three, four, five of 'em. A Starfish. Wait, ten? No flywheel?"
"Nope," Judy said. "We counter rotate the spokes, double the habitable space. Flywheel is just as massive, so might well chuck it in favor of something useful."
"I don't know, at some point plain dumb steel is more economical than loading on more life support. She's nuclear electric?"
"Yeah," Judy beamed. "Four MPD arrays, two in the rear, two off on main outriggers. She tanks slush lithium in those four spheres. I had no idea you were ever with Bedrock."
Lanny shook his head. "Never heard of it, but I did see something called Beaker."
"Yeah, Gus --"
"Don't mean to break this up, guys," Barry interjected. "But what the hell are you talking about. And just what the hell is that thing?"
"That thing is my baby, asshole, and she has a name. Dick Scobee."
"Who?" Ari asked.
"Francis Scobee," Ilon volunteered. "He was mission commander on Space Shuttle Challenger. A sad name for such a pretty thing, but we have some experience with this."
"You might be right," Judy said. "Now he's a she, and she's all mine."
"Okay, Captain Kirk," Barry put a hand back on Judy's shoulder. "So you give us a tour of the Enterprise. Then what?"
"Then, my impatient friend," Judy smirked, "you go to the Moon."
Once aboard, it was clear that by the "Moon," Judy obviously didn't mean Challenger. And by "go," she really meant Barry would have another two weeks to stew uselessly in close (but at least comfortable) quarters. He'd figured out a few things. One, whiskey traded high in space. Two, his country now had something he could only think of as a Navy in space. The hunter-killer (or interceptor as Lanny insisted on calling them) was almost three hundred feet long with a twenty foot beam. She had two counter-rotating axial spin centrifuges a third of the way from the bow and stretching out about one hundred feet. She was a combatant, and in a fight Judy said she was basically acted like a mine-layer. Scobee would handle debris, rock, a bag of shot or whatever with one of her many robotic arms and set it in an intercepting orbit with some unsuspecting target. Nature did the rest. Fortunately, Washington hadn't called on her to perform such a mission, so Judy and her crew spent most of their time patrolling Columbia and Valencia with the occasional hop to the Moon. And when Scobee had nothing particular important to do, she found a nice sized rock like the dumbbell Barry found her nuzzling, dumping waste heat into dark side regolith. Gravity and something resembling (though, not quite) a normal toilet experience were a welcome change of pace, but until they'd spiraled into lunar orbit he'd have to contend with (real) restrictions on his movements and insufferable boredom.
The third thing Barry worked out was that Scarborough must have caught something everyone else had missed, although a couple thousand pages of reports about some weird asteroid named 10312 WF was probably his first hint. With his mini-bar almost tapped out, Barry started to regret leaving his processors on the plane. Given access to a shop, he could whip up a new set in a couple of a days. Too bad Judy said she couldn't spare the minders, and from the sound of it she was under strict orders to keep Barry and the others from wandering around. So Barry plowed through the 10312 WF data the old fashion way: with some Matlab scripts, a chart and a straight edge.
Afternoon on the Saturday after they left Mojave, Barry joined Lanny and the Israelis in the mess. A few times before, he'd brought along his work, especially since Ari and Ilon struck him as two of the sharpest material scientists he'd ever met. Lanny wasn't comfortable discussing Scarborough's technology around foreigners, so they'd saved that part of the task for when they were alone in their quarters. Not of them had an inkling that today's working lunch would be the most productive in their careers.
"This would go a lot faster if we knew what Scarborough was," Ari complained. It wasn't a new point, but it was still valid.
"I'm sure we can tell you everything after we get to the Moon," Lanny explained again, "but let's not get Judy in any more trouble than we already have. For now, just trust us on the Scarborough tracks, okay?"
"Okay," Ari unhappily assented. "So let me take a look at your work for first week in May again."
Barry flipped his charts to the requested page and slid them over to Ari. In another life, ben-Zeev had been a pretty gifted student of astronomy; the Israeli Air Force had changed all that. He wasn't as strong as Lanny or Barry, but he was earnest and asked a lot of the right questions. Likewise, he and Ilon had contributed a lot to their understanding of the object's make up. 10312 WF was, at first glance, of cometary composition--water and methane ice covered in soot. The density was right for it, but the spectroscopy was off in almost a third of the cases, and always near the temperature peaks. Then yesterday, Ilon threw out an extremely weird observation that had stuck in Barry's mind all night.
Despite the hundreds of millions of dollars that had gone into studying the debris problem, a lunar-obsessed NASA gave short shrift to selecting co-moving orbits for her pilot mining projects. The result were dense fields like Columbia and Valencia that frequently swept by vicious typhoons of high-speed micrometeorites. The cost to protect radiator panels skyrocketed immensely, almost to the point of breaking NASA's budget ten years ago. Fortunately, that same debris also threatened the emerging space tourism industry. They'd grabbed the problem by the throat and teased out an interesting solution: dump the waste heat into a spent rock. You still needed radiators for ships, which obviously couldn't tank the reaction mass to tractor a kiloton of silica and metal along with it, and panels did a better job at cooling extremities than piping the heat back down into the rock. Still, an asteroid made for a damn good heat sink. You could even coat the some of surface with photo-voltaic paint draw power. In fact...
"The albedo looks good for it here, here," Barry tapped on the Tuesday and Friday insets, then dug back into his print outs and pulled out the following week's tracks, "and here, too. But nowhere else. And here..."
"This cannot be right. This is eight times the incident sunlight."
Barry nodded. "Right, whatever these lines are, they're white hot."
The track didn't actually show radiation in the visible light spectrum and Barry couldn't fix the resolution below 200 nanometers, but he could guess at a lower bound peak frequency using Planck's law for black bodies. What was blatantly obvious is that 10312 WF was at bare minimum three hundred million miles too far out for natural reflection to account for max visible light she outputted. Barry spent an entire night chewing on alternative explanations, bringing to bear all the Scarborough data he and Lanny had not shared with the Israelis. After assigning some reasonable properties to Báizhōu 3, he'd ruled out lens flares, cryostat failures, smudges, pixel artifacts and flipped bits, and about a hundred other things that might have gone wrong. The whole exercise would've made Barry extremely proud of his previous work if this new mystery didn't bug him so much. The few remaining "mundane" factors that might account for the data were unlikely to the absurd.
Ari handed Barry back his print outs after a few minutes of scratching in his own notepad. "This is no good. I find all angles for methane-water composition, but no regular rotation to explain the spectral funny business."
Barry groaned in frustration. "And that doesn't explain why the material is backlit to over...what's the new peak?"
"I think five thousand, on January 3, 2021." Ari filled in.
"No, eight thousand kelvin, March 5, 2028," Ilon corrected. "At 300 gigawatts."
"We're stuck if we don't get our hands on some computer time," Lanny mused to no one in particular. At the present resolution, even six-sigma certainty blurred the line between visible light and gamma rays. For greater detail, they needed to process every highly detailed images along say a third of 10312 WF track history at an hour's resolution. Such a task would take his custom-designed cores under an hour to crunch, a general-purpose conventional grid a few days, or years using old-fashioned spreadsheets and manpower.
Barry grunted in agreement. "We nail something worth bringing to Judy, we'll get it and more."
"We have enough now, right?" Ilon asked. "We know whatever's heating the object, it must be nuclear. So we answer question. It's nuclear."
Lanny shook his head "I'm telling you, there's no way that can be possible. You know the exposure time for these shots. A Z-machine starts and finishes in a 100 nanoseconds. You'd either need something to put out fifty thousand times more power just to film one gigawatt."
"Or a couple hundred ITERs." Barry suggested.
"Which is even more unlikely." Larry waved his hand in dismissal. "I mean, yeah...we're looking at some sort of fusion, but there's no way in hell it's man-made. It's a microscopic black hole, or something else. I don't know; and I can't do the math to find out. But weird as it is I'd think Nature's a more likely culprit than the goddamned Chinese."
"Oh fuck it," Barry cleared his head as he took a bite out of his sandwich. "I'm not Stephen Hawking, and they didn't drag me up here to play him on TV."
"I do not want to give up yet," Ilon didn't look up from his copy of the print outs, "and we have nothing better to--oh?"
Ilon scanned back and forth a few pages, landing on another that had caught his attention earlier. He eagerly ripped it out of its binding. He repeated this ritual a few times while the others bewilderedly watched. He held up the liberated pages and flipped through them like a primitive animation.
"Not man made, you say?" Ilon said as it dawned on him what he was looking at.
"Let me see," Lanny reached for the pages. Ilon obligingly handed them over. Lanny aped Ilon's little trick, and his eyes suddenly narrowed. "Jesus Christ. We really need to talk to Judy."
"About what?" Barry asked. The explanation would take a few minutes, and even then he didn't really grasp the importance of what Ilon had discovered. An hour later, it would hit him like a ton of bricks.
#
"I'm leaving," Judy stood and made for the hatch. Barry reached out to stop her, but when she whipped around her eyes were like daggers. "Is this what you really think of me? I was the goddamned Chair at IAU for two years, you idiot. Did you really think I'd let you run wild on my ship for...for...this?"
"Listen, Jude--" Barry pleaded, but Judy wasn't having it.
"Don't," she snapped, but before she turned to leave again she took a look at Lanny, Ari and Ilon. She put her hands on her hips and took a breath. "I'm sorry..really. I didn't mean to bite you guys' heads off. It's been a tough couple days, and between no sleep and babysitting you guys...well, there you have it. But please, this has to be the most insane thing I've ever heard. And I've known you for years."
"Gee, thanks," Barry ran his hand through his mop. "But I'm being totally on the level. And if there were a better explanation, you would've told us by now."
"There is a better explanation. We just don't know what it is yet."
"Funny, now watch this." Barry turned to Ilon. "Show her."
Ilon demonstrated his little flip-book trick with the slides. The bow shaped light on each of the images moved back in forth in regular order four times before he reached the last page. He repeated the act a few times more until Judy took the bound sheets and played around with them herself. "You can't really see much at this resolution."
"We know that," Ilon explained. "But that doesn't change the fact that these are lines are identical. Identical, but different."
"Sixteen of them, too." Lanny added, unfurling the blow up they pulled from Scarborough's best take. "The swarm was never aligned right to get a good look at her, but we have a week's worth of good images."
Judy scowled skeptically. "And you've ruled out everything else? Mirroring at the lens?"
"Mirages, corruption, anything and everything we could think of," Lanny announced earnestly. "If there's an innocuous explanation at all, it's so obscure it hardly bears thinking about. This effect just has to be man-made."
"But you don't know what it is," Judy observed.
"Not a clue," Barry replied, "neither does anyone else, by the looks of it. But this is what we wanted, right? Proof one way or another that we're looking at something artificial. Well, here's your proof. It's crude and needs firming, but that's why we brought you in on it. So the question is what are you going to do about it?"
"Please, Barry," Ari started, but Barry waved him off.
"No. Like I said, I love you Jude, but you people have fucked with my life for three months now and you owe me this much."
"I know what you want me to say," Judy bit her lip, the same way Barry remembered when she had to sign off on a $3 million nosecone job back on the Reagan. "I have orders, and you people aren't to leave the crew quarters until we reach the Moon."
"And I'm telling you we've got a short window to make this happen. There's only two telescopes in the solar system we can use to image 10312 properly, and we'll need both of them. In another week, nothing short of an order signed by the President and countersigned by God himself will force Krause to pull Scarborough off of Báizhōu 4. How long do you think it will take to convince your bosses to read him in? Come on, you didn't get those eagles for being a cog."
"You're a bastard, you know that?" Judy spat. "Okay, here's how it goes down. I send this off to Shenandoah--"
"Judy." Barry started to protest.
"Seriously, Barry. Shut up. Like I said, I'm sending your data and proposal over to Shenandoah. Dr. Abel and his team will get until tomorrow to send us a reply. If he tells me your nuts, you can sulk all the way to the moon for all I care. But if he even looks like he's the tiniest bit curious, I'll cut orders to retask Scarborough myself."
"You can do that?" Lanny looked genuinely surprised.
"I'm fucking Sheba, Queen of Space, honey," Judy managed to crack a smile. "Just watch me."
Just after 9 PM, 6 December 2033, United Space 177 separated from her piggyback at thirty thousand feet, pitching up and banking north before lighting her main engine. Mojave Air & Space Port fell beneath the space-plane as she climbed furiously towards low orbit. Twenty minutes later, the insertion light flashed in the passenger cabin, at which point a flight attendant emerged from the rear galley to dispense pouches of overpriced domestic beer to the the only four people onboard. Lanny and the two Israelis passed, but Barry crankily fished out his credit card. No matter what came next, he had no intention of facing it sober.
Barry's tablet showed a sparse scattering of flimsy habitats dead ahead. They surrounded an all-but-rebuilt International Space Station, forming a man-made atoll we still call Columbia Field. One of the Americans' cislunar shuttles came calling twice a week, making port with one or two of the larger bubbles in addition to the ISS. Another other ship serviced hubs at the Valencia Field, which lay almost half a world away. Barry's inner environmentalist sometimes fretted over the price paid to sustain nearly 10,000 people (at a time, an astonishingly large number) in space. For one, Columbia was heavily littered with rock, so much so that orbiters these days had to top off at every port or risk drifting into a deadly storm of millimeter debris. Though her destination still lay three hundred miles away, safety demanded Flight 177 cut her closing speed to under 300 feet per second.
Early spaceliners typically did away with a divider between the cockpit and the passenger cabin, so the companies generally focus-grouped alerts and alarms and selected those least likely to unduly upset their guests. But Barry was no tourist, and knew a collision warning when he heard one. He leaned forward and tapped the captain on his shoulder. "What's up, Jim?"
"Sorry, Sir." The commander to pointed to a bare speck on his rightmost pane. "Not quite sure. Wait...if you'll excuse me."
"Control. Unknown 193, 15 under, distance 203," he spoke into his headset mike. "Please advise, United 177."
"United 177, unknown is Air Force 14. Skew flip and slow to 20 on current. Acknowledge. Control."
The pilot did the math in his head, frowned, then rephrased the order. "Control. Will come zero on lateral with Air Force 14, please confirm. United 177."
Traffic Control squawked acknowledgement. While Captain Nickles grumbled through the checklist, his copilot looked over his shoulder at Barry. "They're not about to do what I think they are? Are they, Sir?"
"I have no idea." Barry stared blankly out the porthole. "Air Force 14" crawled across the cockpit bubbles until she was over by the copilot. Nickles gently let out the throttle, holding it their acceleration to four feet per second squared for a full minute before cutting the engine off. Then, as nimbly as he could manage, Nickles lured the speck back across nose until it was nearly dead ahead.
Before long, the blinking dot had grown into the lines of a Block 2 Crew Exploration Vehicle, the canonical orbital taxi for NASA and the Air Force. This one was probably one of the three owned by Nelson SWP, and she performed a nearly identical maneuver, though she took a good fifteen minutes to cut her closing speed. The commander, visibly dumbfounded, tried and failed to weasel some more info from anyone--Control, the unknown, even nearby flights. The CEV closed to under two hundred feet before the speakers blared a curt order for Flight 177 to disengage her high power radio and switch to her microwave receiver. Nickle's unhappily complied; an equally brief set of docking instructions followed.
When Air Force 14 finally touched skin, Nickles unstrapped himself to join 177's stewardess at the exit. Barry watched with mild irritation as they went through the necessary rituals to verify the seal, but that didn't keep jaw dropped when the hatch finally swung up.
"The fuck, Jude?" Barry shouted from his seat. "What the hell do you think you're doing here?"
"Good to see you, too, Barry. " A woman in blue, Navy-issue coveralls swam into the passenger cabin. Four USAF airmen followed. She whispered something to the attendant, who then beckoned the four enlisted newcomers to follow her to the rear.
"You'll have to excuse him, Jude," Lanny said. "He's probably a little buzzed right now."
"The hell I am," Barry growled. "And one way or another I'm getting to Challenger. You can't stop me."
"Please, shut up," Judy patted him in the shoulder and floated back into the rear. The flight crew and passengers watched as she passed on directions to the attendant and her own men.
"Hush hush, huh," Barry tipped his head towards the two extras seated behind him. "I get it."
"You really don't" Judy said dismissively, "They're coming along, too. Now listen up everybody. I'd like to thank Captain Nickles for bringing you this far, but we'll be taking you the rest of the way. My men will stay here and take care of your belongings. You each can stow fifteen kilos of carry-on, but that's it. I've got a little ship and we've got a long way to go."
Captain Judy Keaton, USN, was kind enough to give the passengers half an hour to sort through their belongings. Barry rose to the occasion, wasting half that window damning everyone and everything in sight before finally trading his entire carry-on bag for the mini-bar. He spent is second fifteen minutes trying to rip it out of its drawer before Nickles relented and showed him how to disengage it it. It took ten more minutes than allotted to suit up and square away the passengers aboard the CEV. Judy shut the hatch, locked it, and passed the order to move out to her copilot. Lieutenant (JG) Eli Whitney, who Lanny apparently knew but Barry didn't, carefully rolled the spacecraft onto a retrograde course from 177. As Judy strapped herself in, Barry hoped to hell he'd stowed the fridge in a most irritating spot.
"So what gives, Jude?" Barry tapped her should not more than a minute after "Air Force 14" completed her burn.
"You're a natural nag, you know that Barry?" Judy never took her eyes off her instruments. "Stop whining and drink."
Judy passed back some syringes with Glenlivet on the label. Barry, Ilon, and Lanny all partook, but Ari said thank you and passed. "We've got a lot of catching up to do."
"Just remember. We got a deal. The fridge is mine, no matter where we're going or what we're doing."
As you probably guessed, Barry and Judy--and Lanny--had a history. Judy was Growler driver on the Reagan twenty years ago, and Lanny and Barry had each commanded Hawkeye Deltas on the same boat. Their paths crossed again when Judy signed on as mission commander for the Scarborough launch--that was three years ago. But with people like these, it didn't matter how much time had passed or whether they'd stayed in touch. They easily fell back into the comfortable habits cultivated by long friendship and good work. All of which apparently gave Barry license to act like an insufferable adolescent terror.
"Fine, fine!" Judy threw up her hands. "You keep that that piss away from my people, it's yours."
"You're damn right." Barry cracked the syringe and downed the contents in one go. Ari, still feeling queasy after the climb to orbit, passed on the round, so Barry helped himself to seconds. Lanny and Ilon had the decency to wait for the toast. "You know, they let me out once the whole time. Just once! Three months in a cage while some Deputy Assistant Secretary of Who-The-Fuck-Cares plays James Bond with my fucking life. You know, three months room and board? Goddamn it, you see this?"
Barry whipped out his United boarding pass. "This, yeah! My credit card! My money! Haven't expensed a damned thing yet! Think TRW'll pay me back, now? Wrong! And don't tell me the Navy'll take care of it, not when I'm still waiting to get paid from the three weeks this bastard--" he pointed to Lanny "--got us landed in Adak! Let's not forget I'm divorced now. I get reactivated, I lose my damn job, and now I can't even show up to court and get the damned alimony adjusted. That's why I get the fridge."
Barry took a deep breath. "I love you, Jude, but seriously. Fuck you."
"Fuck you...Ma'am," Judy twisted in her seat and tapped the eagles of a Captain in the United States Navy. She could give even the Devil a few lessons in needling.
"Whatever," Barry snorted and popped a third syringe. Judy looked back to check on Ari and Ilon, and probably felt pity for rudely cutting them out like a pair of strangers at a bar. "Forgive my friend here. He's a bit of a bore. The other one's way more interesting."
"And dumb enough to actually volunteer for this shit," Barry sneered.
"Anyways, introductions." Judy ignored him. "Captain Judy Keaton, United States Navy."
The taller of the two took her hand. "I am Ari. Dr. Ari Ben-Zeev. This is my good friend Dr. Ilon Diedel. The pleasure's mine."
"My, aren't you a sweet." Judy squeezed his hand slyly. "I can't apologize enough for the way my government's uprooted you from your lives and work, but I trust what you've learned so far makes up for it."
"If half of what we've seen is true," Ari answered, "then we have no complaints. I think I speak for the both of us."
Ilon nodded in agreement. As it turned out, Ari and Ilon were originally slated to join the JAXA-ESA tether group on the International Space Station. Like Barry, they'd been sequestered at the spaceport, though Ari hinted that they had some warning what was in store soon after arriving in the States.
"Good," Judy clapped her hands in approval, then pulled a briefcase from under her seat. "We've got some paperwork for the both of you. We've informed your government on the general terms of your condition, but as foreign citizens there are still a few more hoops to jump through. You understand, of course."
Judy placed the briefcase on her lap and popped it open. She whipped out two sets of documents and hand one each to Ilon and Ari. They took a few minutes to ensure they were perusing nothing more than non-disclosure boilerplate before signing. "Once we get where we're going, I'll be free to answer just about all your questions. Sorry, Eli's just not cleared for this. In the mean time, we might as well get to--Jesus, Barry."
"What?" Barry had unhooked himself and was thoroughly enjoying in his first time in freefall--buzzed to boot. He floated right above Judy's head and into her lap on a single-minded mission to raid the mini-bar.
"Behave yourself!" Judy rapped him on the head for good measure before chucking a shot of Scotch in his face. "I will cut you off, deal or no deal."
"No need to be bitch about it." Barry jackknifed back into his seat and sucked down his fourth. "So, Ari, is it? How'd you kill time in the hole?"
Ari blinked. "I am not sure I understand, Dr. Gold."
"Just Gold...Barry, actually. Jude here's the doctor. Lanny and I are just your run-of-the-mill engineers. You guys were trapped in that roach motel as long as I was. Don't tell me you ain't pissed about that."
"Oh, I see." Ari eyes lit up with understanding. "No, we were well treated. It is our first time to the US. We really liked Bakersfield. Vegas is even better, nice people, nice girls. If I ever come back in summer, I'd love to enter your World Series of Poker."
"Wait a minute?" Barry cocked an eyebrow. "Vegas? When did you have time to go to Vegas?"
Ilon laughed. "We went twice...um...first weekend after we come to the desert. Second time, we come back night before we take off. Ari thinks maybe he's a...how you say...a fish?"
"Cardshark," Lanny said.
"Yes. Ari's good in the morning and afternoon, when he drink not so much. We stay at Riviera. Very cheap, but very nice. Tournaments all the time. Then he really drink and goes to MGM. They wipe him out. I give him two hundred dollars, he makes a thousand more, then loses half of it in cab. I buy him money clip for next time. We even, no?"
"Are you fucking kidding me," Barry almost shouted. "How'd you get out of quarantine?"
"Quarantine? No. They tell us that Ari's name show up on no fly list. Big mix up, take long time to fix. No problem, our experiment starts in March, so we have plenty of time. Then they tell us about this...well, I won't say now. I'm sorry to hear you pay so much for motel. Your government was very nice to us. Arranged rooms and food and even a stipend for us. And Hebrew University pay as well."
Judy and Lanny...even Eli...were laughing out loud now.
"Cut me off my ass," Barry growled. "What gives?"
"I'm sorry, you're just priceless," Judy managed as she helped herself to a second shot. "I'd love to know who sold you that bullshit about being restricted to base."
"The doc, the day I got there."
"What he say?" Lanny asked.
"If I left, I risked losing my seat on the next Ares up. I would've checked out the next day if I thought otherwise. And I can't exactly talk it over with Spy Central over a land line from a tourist trap in the middle of nowhere."
"You can be real dumbass sometimes, Goggles," Judy rolled her eyes.
"Like I said, fuck you...Ma'am. Now drink."
"Last one for me. I'm on the clock."
"Biological clock."
"How're the kids, Barry?" Judy shot back.
"Ouch." Barry had wanted kids. Ginny didn't. In the end, that might've been one argument worth losing. "Relax. We've got plenty of time."
Judy shook her head. "You might. I don't."
"That's crap. Four days to the moon, and nobody sends up a Captain to play cabbie. You can live a little."
"Wrong again bucko."
"This is all very amusing," Ilon Diedel suddenly chimed in, "but Captain, is there anything more you can tell us about what exactly they want with us?"
Judy looked over her shoulder with an almost apologetic look. "Not much more than you've heard, unfortunately. I know how you feel; I don't like walking on to a job without a clue as to what they want me to do. But I don't think they just pulled your names out of a hat. So relax, we're almost there."
"There" turned out to be a good continent and a half away, and "soon" was half a day. Another a lonely patch of rocks floated in the distance, and Judy'd timed their arrival perfectly for a night rendezvous. Sunlight failed to the east, but there was still enough to see a nearby, dumb-bell shaped carbonaceous specimen growing the forward portholes. Squinting, Barry thought he could make out a dark gray, almost black, but sharply lined shadow against the asteroid's light side.
"Well, I'll be damned." Lanny hooted. "That's a Starfish!"
"A what?" Barry and Judy said at the same time.
"I don't know what a Starfish is, but that's the USS Scobee. She's a hunter-killer, and somebody's in big trouble if you've ever seen her."
"We called them interceptors," Lanny explained, "but nevermind? Don't worry, I was read into something like this back in '18 or '19. Well, the engine block work, anyway. Saw some of the centrifuge models as well. See, one, two, three, four, five of 'em. A Starfish. Wait, ten? No flywheel?"
"Nope," Judy said. "We counter rotate the spokes, double the habitable space. Flywheel is just as massive, so might well chuck it in favor of something useful."
"I don't know, at some point plain dumb steel is more economical than loading on more life support. She's nuclear electric?"
"Yeah," Judy beamed. "Four MPD arrays, two in the rear, two off on main outriggers. She tanks slush lithium in those four spheres. I had no idea you were ever with Bedrock."
Lanny shook his head. "Never heard of it, but I did see something called Beaker."
"Yeah, Gus --"
"Don't mean to break this up, guys," Barry interjected. "But what the hell are you talking about. And just what the hell is that thing?"
"That thing is my baby, asshole, and she has a name. Dick Scobee."
"Who?" Ari asked.
"Francis Scobee," Ilon volunteered. "He was mission commander on Space Shuttle Challenger. A sad name for such a pretty thing, but we have some experience with this."
"You might be right," Judy said. "Now he's a she, and she's all mine."
"Okay, Captain Kirk," Barry put a hand back on Judy's shoulder. "So you give us a tour of the Enterprise. Then what?"
"Then, my impatient friend," Judy smirked, "you go to the Moon."
Once aboard, it was clear that by the "Moon," Judy obviously didn't mean Challenger. And by "go," she really meant Barry would have another two weeks to stew uselessly in close (but at least comfortable) quarters. He'd figured out a few things. One, whiskey traded high in space. Two, his country now had something he could only think of as a Navy in space. The hunter-killer (or interceptor as Lanny insisted on calling them) was almost three hundred feet long with a twenty foot beam. She had two counter-rotating axial spin centrifuges a third of the way from the bow and stretching out about one hundred feet. She was a combatant, and in a fight Judy said she was basically acted like a mine-layer. Scobee would handle debris, rock, a bag of shot or whatever with one of her many robotic arms and set it in an intercepting orbit with some unsuspecting target. Nature did the rest. Fortunately, Washington hadn't called on her to perform such a mission, so Judy and her crew spent most of their time patrolling Columbia and Valencia with the occasional hop to the Moon. And when Scobee had nothing particular important to do, she found a nice sized rock like the dumbbell Barry found her nuzzling, dumping waste heat into dark side regolith. Gravity and something resembling (though, not quite) a normal toilet experience were a welcome change of pace, but until they'd spiraled into lunar orbit he'd have to contend with (real) restrictions on his movements and insufferable boredom.
The third thing Barry worked out was that Scarborough must have caught something everyone else had missed, although a couple thousand pages of reports about some weird asteroid named 10312 WF was probably his first hint. With his mini-bar almost tapped out, Barry started to regret leaving his processors on the plane. Given access to a shop, he could whip up a new set in a couple of a days. Too bad Judy said she couldn't spare the minders, and from the sound of it she was under strict orders to keep Barry and the others from wandering around. So Barry plowed through the 10312 WF data the old fashion way: with some Matlab scripts, a chart and a straight edge.
Afternoon on the Saturday after they left Mojave, Barry joined Lanny and the Israelis in the mess. A few times before, he'd brought along his work, especially since Ari and Ilon struck him as two of the sharpest material scientists he'd ever met. Lanny wasn't comfortable discussing Scarborough's technology around foreigners, so they'd saved that part of the task for when they were alone in their quarters. Not of them had an inkling that today's working lunch would be the most productive in their careers.
"This would go a lot faster if we knew what Scarborough was," Ari complained. It wasn't a new point, but it was still valid.
"I'm sure we can tell you everything after we get to the Moon," Lanny explained again, "but let's not get Judy in any more trouble than we already have. For now, just trust us on the Scarborough tracks, okay?"
"Okay," Ari unhappily assented. "So let me take a look at your work for first week in May again."
Barry flipped his charts to the requested page and slid them over to Ari. In another life, ben-Zeev had been a pretty gifted student of astronomy; the Israeli Air Force had changed all that. He wasn't as strong as Lanny or Barry, but he was earnest and asked a lot of the right questions. Likewise, he and Ilon had contributed a lot to their understanding of the object's make up. 10312 WF was, at first glance, of cometary composition--water and methane ice covered in soot. The density was right for it, but the spectroscopy was off in almost a third of the cases, and always near the temperature peaks. Then yesterday, Ilon threw out an extremely weird observation that had stuck in Barry's mind all night.
Despite the hundreds of millions of dollars that had gone into studying the debris problem, a lunar-obsessed NASA gave short shrift to selecting co-moving orbits for her pilot mining projects. The result were dense fields like Columbia and Valencia that frequently swept by vicious typhoons of high-speed micrometeorites. The cost to protect radiator panels skyrocketed immensely, almost to the point of breaking NASA's budget ten years ago. Fortunately, that same debris also threatened the emerging space tourism industry. They'd grabbed the problem by the throat and teased out an interesting solution: dump the waste heat into a spent rock. You still needed radiators for ships, which obviously couldn't tank the reaction mass to tractor a kiloton of silica and metal along with it, and panels did a better job at cooling extremities than piping the heat back down into the rock. Still, an asteroid made for a damn good heat sink. You could even coat the some of surface with photo-voltaic paint draw power. In fact...
"The albedo looks good for it here, here," Barry tapped on the Tuesday and Friday insets, then dug back into his print outs and pulled out the following week's tracks, "and here, too. But nowhere else. And here..."
"This cannot be right. This is eight times the incident sunlight."
Barry nodded. "Right, whatever these lines are, they're white hot."
The track didn't actually show radiation in the visible light spectrum and Barry couldn't fix the resolution below 200 nanometers, but he could guess at a lower bound peak frequency using Planck's law for black bodies. What was blatantly obvious is that 10312 WF was at bare minimum three hundred million miles too far out for natural reflection to account for max visible light she outputted. Barry spent an entire night chewing on alternative explanations, bringing to bear all the Scarborough data he and Lanny had not shared with the Israelis. After assigning some reasonable properties to Báizhōu 3, he'd ruled out lens flares, cryostat failures, smudges, pixel artifacts and flipped bits, and about a hundred other things that might have gone wrong. The whole exercise would've made Barry extremely proud of his previous work if this new mystery didn't bug him so much. The few remaining "mundane" factors that might account for the data were unlikely to the absurd.
Ari handed Barry back his print outs after a few minutes of scratching in his own notepad. "This is no good. I find all angles for methane-water composition, but no regular rotation to explain the spectral funny business."
Barry groaned in frustration. "And that doesn't explain why the material is backlit to over...what's the new peak?"
"I think five thousand, on January 3, 2021." Ari filled in.
"No, eight thousand kelvin, March 5, 2028," Ilon corrected. "At 300 gigawatts."
"We're stuck if we don't get our hands on some computer time," Lanny mused to no one in particular. At the present resolution, even six-sigma certainty blurred the line between visible light and gamma rays. For greater detail, they needed to process every highly detailed images along say a third of 10312 WF track history at an hour's resolution. Such a task would take his custom-designed cores under an hour to crunch, a general-purpose conventional grid a few days, or years using old-fashioned spreadsheets and manpower.
Barry grunted in agreement. "We nail something worth bringing to Judy, we'll get it and more."
"We have enough now, right?" Ilon asked. "We know whatever's heating the object, it must be nuclear. So we answer question. It's nuclear."
Lanny shook his head "I'm telling you, there's no way that can be possible. You know the exposure time for these shots. A Z-machine starts and finishes in a 100 nanoseconds. You'd either need something to put out fifty thousand times more power just to film one gigawatt."
"Or a couple hundred ITERs." Barry suggested.
"Which is even more unlikely." Larry waved his hand in dismissal. "I mean, yeah...we're looking at some sort of fusion, but there's no way in hell it's man-made. It's a microscopic black hole, or something else. I don't know; and I can't do the math to find out. But weird as it is I'd think Nature's a more likely culprit than the goddamned Chinese."
"Oh fuck it," Barry cleared his head as he took a bite out of his sandwich. "I'm not Stephen Hawking, and they didn't drag me up here to play him on TV."
"I do not want to give up yet," Ilon didn't look up from his copy of the print outs, "and we have nothing better to--oh?"
Ilon scanned back and forth a few pages, landing on another that had caught his attention earlier. He eagerly ripped it out of its binding. He repeated this ritual a few times while the others bewilderedly watched. He held up the liberated pages and flipped through them like a primitive animation.
"Not man made, you say?" Ilon said as it dawned on him what he was looking at.
"Let me see," Lanny reached for the pages. Ilon obligingly handed them over. Lanny aped Ilon's little trick, and his eyes suddenly narrowed. "Jesus Christ. We really need to talk to Judy."
"About what?" Barry asked. The explanation would take a few minutes, and even then he didn't really grasp the importance of what Ilon had discovered. An hour later, it would hit him like a ton of bricks.
#
"I'm leaving," Judy stood and made for the hatch. Barry reached out to stop her, but when she whipped around her eyes were like daggers. "Is this what you really think of me? I was the goddamned Chair at IAU for two years, you idiot. Did you really think I'd let you run wild on my ship for...for...this?"
"Listen, Jude--" Barry pleaded, but Judy wasn't having it.
"Don't," she snapped, but before she turned to leave again she took a look at Lanny, Ari and Ilon. She put her hands on her hips and took a breath. "I'm sorry..really. I didn't mean to bite you guys' heads off. It's been a tough couple days, and between no sleep and babysitting you guys...well, there you have it. But please, this has to be the most insane thing I've ever heard. And I've known you for years."
"Gee, thanks," Barry ran his hand through his mop. "But I'm being totally on the level. And if there were a better explanation, you would've told us by now."
"There is a better explanation. We just don't know what it is yet."
"Funny, now watch this." Barry turned to Ilon. "Show her."
Ilon demonstrated his little flip-book trick with the slides. The bow shaped light on each of the images moved back in forth in regular order four times before he reached the last page. He repeated the act a few times more until Judy took the bound sheets and played around with them herself. "You can't really see much at this resolution."
"We know that," Ilon explained. "But that doesn't change the fact that these are lines are identical. Identical, but different."
"Sixteen of them, too." Lanny added, unfurling the blow up they pulled from Scarborough's best take. "The swarm was never aligned right to get a good look at her, but we have a week's worth of good images."
Judy scowled skeptically. "And you've ruled out everything else? Mirroring at the lens?"
"Mirages, corruption, anything and everything we could think of," Lanny announced earnestly. "If there's an innocuous explanation at all, it's so obscure it hardly bears thinking about. This effect just has to be man-made."
"But you don't know what it is," Judy observed.
"Not a clue," Barry replied, "neither does anyone else, by the looks of it. But this is what we wanted, right? Proof one way or another that we're looking at something artificial. Well, here's your proof. It's crude and needs firming, but that's why we brought you in on it. So the question is what are you going to do about it?"
"Please, Barry," Ari started, but Barry waved him off.
"No. Like I said, I love you Jude, but you people have fucked with my life for three months now and you owe me this much."
"I know what you want me to say," Judy bit her lip, the same way Barry remembered when she had to sign off on a $3 million nosecone job back on the Reagan. "I have orders, and you people aren't to leave the crew quarters until we reach the Moon."
"And I'm telling you we've got a short window to make this happen. There's only two telescopes in the solar system we can use to image 10312 properly, and we'll need both of them. In another week, nothing short of an order signed by the President and countersigned by God himself will force Krause to pull Scarborough off of Báizhōu 4. How long do you think it will take to convince your bosses to read him in? Come on, you didn't get those eagles for being a cog."
"You're a bastard, you know that?" Judy spat. "Okay, here's how it goes down. I send this off to Shenandoah--"
"Judy." Barry started to protest.
"Seriously, Barry. Shut up. Like I said, I'm sending your data and proposal over to Shenandoah. Dr. Abel and his team will get until tomorrow to send us a reply. If he tells me your nuts, you can sulk all the way to the moon for all I care. But if he even looks like he's the tiniest bit curious, I'll cut orders to retask Scarborough myself."
"You can do that?" Lanny looked genuinely surprised.
"I'm fucking Sheba, Queen of Space, honey," Judy managed to crack a smile. "Just watch me."
Last edited by Paolo on 2009-12-13 09:21pm, edited 5 times in total.
Mr. Cool
4.
For writers and orators alike, few devices evoke popular passion as powerfully as a fact, idea or story condensed to a single date. 22 September 1862, the Emancipation Proclamation. 28 February 1933, "The Positive Electron." 7 December 1941, Pearl Harbor, followed by the 6 August 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima. 3 April 1996, the arrest of Theodore Kaczynski--the Unabomber. 19 April 1995, Oklahoma City. 9/11. Barack Obama's inauguration, 20 January 2009. The Fourth of July gas attack, 2016. Bangalore, 3 June 2035. The Day of Fire, 9 March 2074. Contact, 1/3/2085. 6 April 2086...Invasion.
In this narrow sense, 11 December 2033 is exceptional. One, two years would pass before the public had any inkling of what happened. Two, the events of the day only tangentially concerns Encounter--an event that defies convenient dating even today. Three, those events that did concern Encounter would not surface until decades later, long after 12/11/33 had been burned in the public's memory. Instead, the people were sold a murder story.
Special Agent Carly Lyle, Naval Criminal Investigative Service, and her partner, Angelo Minetti, arrived at Shenandoah the morning of 9 December 2033, and immediately met with the base JAG and medical examiner at a fridge in Charlie Barracks. For almost a month, this fridge had been the final resting place for the body of Cryoman First Class Pharrell Banks, awaiting final disposition before being shipped back to Earth.
People died in space, probably more often than people at the time realized. Such things were inevitable in such a harsh and unforgiving environment, and the Americans had been especially unprepared for the rapid expansion of the population living permanently in orbit. Pharrell Banks had died alone, ten miles from the base after suffering severe nitrogen narcosis. In a facility the size of a small industrial park, there was no way to keep a secret from three thousand closely quartered people. Admiral Rice had restricted all outside work details to groups of no less than five, and services were held early Sunday morning for those who wished to see off the Petty Officer's soul in the company of the only people who would ever know how he'd died.
But even then they were wrong. The detail chief uncovered evidence of O-ring tampering within an hour of discovering the body. That Admiral Rice managed to keep that much from leaking was nothing short of a miracle, buying NCIS enough time to arrange to send up two investigators.
Agents Lyle and Minetti met with Rice and her JAG, Commander Matt Updike, immediately after their latest rounds of interviews. At first, it didn't look too good. On any given day, hundreds of people passed through Charlie Barack's suit rooms and airlocks. But then Minetti had a brainstorm Lyle had been all to ready to dismiss. The autopsy report clearly pinned the onset of nitrogen narcosis during Cryoman 1/c Banks' pre-breathing exercises. Then, having slept on the idea, she had a complete change of heart.
"So where do we stand?" Updike asked.
"Well, if the original O-rings were good," Minetti continued, "then the bad rings must have been switched in here at the earliest."
Minetti unfurled a chart on the table and pointed to the rest station under Antenna 12. "That narrows our perp list down to sixteen suspects."
Rice massaged her temples. "But we know the bends set in before he left the Barracks. Commander Wang isn't in the habit of screwing up."
"No, Ma'am," Minetti conceded, "but you said it yourself, the rings we found were too far gone for Banks to have lasted as long as he did. That just means our killer tried once and failed, then met up with Banks in the field and finished the job."
"Then you can't assume the original tampered O-rings--if there were any--were good," Updike pointed out.
"No, Sir," Lyle tackled that one, "and I doubt we'll ever find them. The killer could have tossed them in the field, and we wouldn't stand a chance of finding them even if it weren't pitch black outside. That's not really important, though. While we can't be sure how badly the original pair failed, we know the range. Granted, that expands the circle in which our killer could've made the switch to anywhere between Dishes 8 and 18. But Minetti's assumption means we at least have some place to start looking."
Updike looked at the list the agents had given to him at the start of the meeting. "You did twenty or so interviews today, but only with...three on this list?"
Minetti cocked a half-smile. "We don't want to be obvious about it. As far as anyone outside of this room's concerned, we're just here to perform our due diligence before writing this whole mess up as an accident. Right, boss?"
"Something like that," Agent Lyle agreed. "We do want to look hard at three or four names on that list. We haven't talked with any of them yet."
Rice didn't like the sound of that. "You don't have a lot of time to waste, Agent Lyle. My people aren't stupid. They'll figure out what you're up to before long."
"I figured that," Lyle admitted. "Ma'am, the Moon's a long way to go to commit premeditated murder. Unless we uncover something highly irregular in Petty Officer Banks' history, we should assume that our killer is after something else. Whatever it is, I want him to lead us straight to it."
#
The message from Scobee arrived with only an general service PRIORITY header. Noah Abel didn't get his hands on it for forty five minutes, and only then because he'd habitually check with the radio room for any evening mail. He skimmed the cover letter and opened to the first image, at which point he flipped back to the cover letter and read every word, word for word. Twice.
He ripped the flash drive from the pouch in the appendix and tossed the hard copy into the incinerator outbin. Shortly thereafter, he was out of breath and banging on a hatch in the researchers' dormitory. "Lee! Wake up!"
Lee Cobb had gone out of his way to be a pain in the ass over the past year. There was no doubt the man was brilliant, but not more than two months passed before Noah started hearing half-jokes at mess about punching holes in Lee's skinsuit or--Noah grimly recalled Shenandoah's tragedy--fiddling with the gauges on his pre-breather.
And then there was Shouri. Noah bit back an ugly thought when she opened the door wearing little more than a proud declaration of her recent independence. He'd known about the affair for awhile now, but amazingly (given the tight living space) this was the first time he'd seen proof with his own eyes. Ryan Hayama, his right hand, was talented physicist and good friend, and Noah had given him a slot on the old Helios 5 team as a wedding gift. In hind sight, he wish he'd never dragged the poor kid up here. Then Lee, being Lee, just had to get involved. Shenandoah wasn't exactly overflowing with women, and the few there belonged to the military and didn't seem overly interested in fraternizing with the scientists. Apparently Lee thought that gave him license to move in on another man's wife, and for the last month or so the ever more ex-Mrs. Hayama hadn't had a problem with it either.
"Sorry, Shouri. Looking for Lee."
"No idea," she yawned. "What is it?"
Noah gulped hard, suddenly and uncomfortably aware of all the woman in front of him. "Something important. Really, I need to find him."
"You try the observatory?"
Noah shook his head. "Thanks."
Noah stopped by his quarters and grabbed his laptop, then made for dormitory garage. He checked with the Marine guard posted there and learned Lee had headed out for the night. The observatory, or more accurately the observatory's control room, was in a separate complex on the other side of the campus--a few miles away from the dorms. It took Noah a little over half an hour to arrange for the escort and lunar car to get here. He thought about bringing Ryan along--and felt terrible for deciding against it--but Noah had no intention of tossing gasoline on that fire. Bastard or not, it was Lee he needed to see.
The ride out was forgettable, the far side under the pall of a deep lunar night. The Van Der Graff crater formation lay dead ahead to the north. To east, a set of 12 "radio" antennas presumably owned and operated by the National Lunar Interferometry Array peered into the outer solar system. From time to time, Shenandoah would even humor that not so tiny bit of fiction. The Marine escort turned right at a T-intersection and drove for another mile. The bright floodlight on top of the lunar car spilled onto a flimsy-looking dome not more than a hundred feet away. They followed the road as it dipped under the surface and terminated at an underground garage, and soon afterwards Noah was stripping off his skinsuit and waiting for the airlock door to open.
"Admiral," he was surprised to see Wanda Rice on the other side. Lee Cobb stood behind her.
"Evening, Dr. Abel," Rice stood aside as he and the Marine exited the airlock. Noah's escort saluted and left his charge in his boss's care. "I assume you copied the latest from Scobee."
"And you didn't see fit to tell me," Noah answered levelly.
"Honestly, I thought you were sacked out for the night. To be even more frank, I'm not sure what to make of this. Mr. Cobb feels differently, of course."
"Guess we won't be need this then," Noah fished for the flash drive in his pocket and pulled it out.
"Come with us." Rice waved him towards the nearest stairwell. All three proceeded up three flights to the control booth. Outside, a dual train of red flashing lights stretched out for what looked like forever, demarcating the twin lines of antenna this facility controlled. A single Navy technician manned a computer station, and on rear wall hung a big screen with Scarborough imagery of the asteroid 10312 WF.
"Who's Barry Gold," Noah asked, the name had been on his mind for a minute.
"He's an analyst with the NRO," Lee replied. "He's taking over for Al Cordi; should be here Tuesday after this week. And this is just his first week on job. Judy--" Lee paused and looked at the Admiral. "--Captain Keaton, I mean, wants your opinion before we do anything."
"Why me?" Noah looked at the Admiral.
"Captain Keaton doesn't answer to me," Rice said flatly, "but I suppose it's just polite to get a second opinion before cutting someone's propellant budget in half."
"Admiral, I know you're not happy about this, but this is exactly what Scarborough is out there to do."
"I can't agree with you, Mr. Cobb," Rice shot back, but with not a hint of furor in her voice. "But as I said, it's not my call. Now if you'll excuse, I have something pressing to attend to."
Rice wasted no time making her exit. Lee just shrugged, then pulled Noah over to an empty station. "You have any idea what that's about?"
Noah really didn't feel like gossiping, especially with this man. "I don't see what that has to do with--"
"No, I'm serious," Lee insisted. "You haven't heard?"
"Heard what?"
Lee's voice dropped to a whisper. "NCIS flew in two nights ago."
"NCI-what?"
"Navy cops," Lee explained. "Arrived the day before yesterday. Something's going on."
"Not our business," Noah noted half-heartedly. "Can we get back to this?"
"Okay, okay!" Lee threw up his hands. "So the Admiral thinks the evidence is pretty thin. I have to admit, it's a bit of argument from incredulity, but take a look for yourself. Chip, can you bring up the blow-up again?"
The chief Rice had left with them threw an extremely fuzzy image of 10312 WF labeled "13-19 7 26." As promised, Noah was looking at sixteen almost perfectly crescent shaped lines across an artificially brightened face of an asteroid. "I think we're looking at radiators here."
"That's a bit of a leap, don't you think? And I don't like that we massaged the image this much to see it."
"Neither do I, which is why we need a better look."
A wave of dislike for Lee unexpectedly distracted Noah. The man hadn't said anything particular grating tonight, but then Noah's thoughts passed briefly over an image of Shouri in a nighty standing in Cobb's doorway. He filed it away, folding his arms and glaring ponderously at the big screen. "We're talking about gigawatt output--minimum--for a whole week. I'd love to know what you think can put out that much energy."
"The Hoover Dam, a thousand or so Ares boosters, a star," Lee picked up the gauntlet. "Look, we've always assumed that this object is a couple hundred meters in diameter at most. But that's just a theory built on a ton of assumptions. We know it masses on low side and the area projected is small, but that's all we've got. I've been saying for months that if this thing is bigger than we thought we can account for almost everything."
Noah grimaced, remembering the fights he and Ryan had had with Lee and the bitter taste of having to debate astrometry with a dilettante. But Lee knew his math, carefully kept to the things he knew, and when he strayed he even welcomed having someone tug on his reins. And Noah was honest enough to admit that tonight he'd taken the initiative in seeking Lee out.
Noah checked and double-checked each calculation in the summary, a task that took the better part of four hours. Half way through, Lee had given up trying to help him make up his mind. When it came down to it, though, Noah knew Lee was right. They needed a better look at 10312 WF, and Barry Gold had just handed them all the cause they needed to make it happen. By the time he'd fired off his reply to Scobee, it was coming up on midnight. Hungry and exhausted, Noah packed up his belongings and headed towards the garage.
"Dr. Abel?" Noah looked up to see a severe looking woman in plainclothes at the top of the stairwell. Something Lee had said earlier hovered at the edge of his thoughts.
"You're the Navy cop, right?"
"I see word spreads quickly," she deadpanned. "On your way back?"
"Yeah, just had to wrap up some things here."
"Well, all the cars are out right now. You don't happen to know where the cafeteria is?"
"Uhm, yeah," Noah figured he might as well eat himself. "Come on down. I'll take you there."
"Carly Lyle," the agent offered Noah her a hand. The galley was just spinning up to serve midrats. Lyle weaseled four slices of microwave pizza out of the duty messcook while Noah picked an empty table next to a window and far from the soon to be bustling entryway. The overheads cast too much light to see much of anything past the glass except for the familiar rows of red lights. Agent Lyle didn't seem to mind the piss-poor view as she took her seat.
"Should've come earlier, I guess," Noah eyed the stiff, plain slices in front of him with suspicion. "So you guys are here for Petty Officer Banks, right?"
"Did you know him?" Agent Lyle dove right into her share.
"No. Not at all. I don't usually work in this building."
"Okay," Lyle managed through mouthful. "Uhm...'scuse me. So not much mingling going on--between you guys and the base personnel?"
"Not much. Sometimes we go out into the field, but not all the often. And we don't spend a lot of time in the military areas."
"Except for Mr. Cobb, right," Agent Lyle noted.
"Lee? He's something of a special case--an engineering troubleshooter for Admiral Rice of sorts. You're pretty well informed."
"That's my job, Doctor. So what is it you do here?"
"Please, it's Noah, and well...uhm," Noah swallowed hesitantly, suddenly wishing he' recalled the fine print in his non-disclosure agreement. "I don't think I can talk about it."
"Anything you can tell me?" Lyle pressed
Noah thought about it for a second. "I guess I can say I head up a team conducting an experiment here."
"Scarborough?"
Noah's eyes widened before he knew what he'd given away. "You are well-informed. I can't talk about that, but no. Not exactly, anyway. Does this have something to do with Petty Officer Banks?"
"What makes you think that?" Lyle deadpanned, but then recovered with a chuckle when she saw Noah's eyes narrow. "I'm sorry. It's just a habit of mine. Asking a lot of questions."
"For a minute there I thought you were trying to trap me," Noah grinned. "Don't worry, I'm not in the business of spilling state secrets."
"That's probably for the best," Lyle took another bite. "So...Banks worked out in the field. Wouldn't that mean he worked for you in a way?"
"Not quite," Noah demurred. "You might say my team leases time on the interferometer--the dishes marked by those red lights out there."
"Yeah, kinda figured that out," Lyle said. "What about when you're outside?"
"Well, I haven't been out in a month." Noah replied. "Lee goes pretty often, come to think of it. You might want to talk to him. You sure this isn't about Petty Officer Banks?"
"Well, he did die out there," Lyle let Noah draw his own conclusions. "Do all the dishes operate together or do you do different things with different sets?"
"No, they're usually tasked together. You know what Very Long Baseline Interferometry means?"
"Not what it does, just what it is," Lyle pointed out the window.
"Yeah, well, each of those dishes gives us a piece of an image. When you put them together, it's as if you're seeing an image at a resolution you could only achieve with a telescope lens equal to the sum of all the antennas in the array."
"So they always work together," Lyle observed.
"At least as long as I've been here," Noah's eyes stayed on the red lit row. "It's possible a set or two is tasked to something else, but you can see that the resolution drops the more dishes you take out of the array."
Lyle rested her head on her hands and followed Noah's gaze out the window. "So Petty Officer Banks' work probably impacts--well, impacted--yours directly."
"Yeah, I guess it does to an extant." Noah admitted.
"You have any idea what his team does?"
Noah frowned, not quite sure where Lyle was going with this. "I know it has something to do with the cryostats, but like I said, we don't really interact with the military that much. They're the ones who service the antennas, not us."
"Cryostat, like a Dewar bottle?"
"We just call it a Dewar, and the cryostats we're talking about are a lot bigger. A lot of the take we want is in the infrared, and heat on the dish surface can be a real problem--especially during lunar daytime."
"Sounds like a lot of manpower for..." Lyle trailed off, thinking to herself.
"What does?" Noah asked.
"Excuse me," Agent Lyle apologized. "I mean, the thing I can't figure out is 'why so many people to service the cold tanks?' Sounds like something you could automate pretty cheaply. Probably more reliable, too."
"It's not that simple," Noah disagreed. "Those antennas are delicate equipment, so for the most part their support systems are independent. For example, we don't run slush lines to their tanks to avoid a cascades from say dirty liquid nitrogen in the main artery. We learned that at Challenger the hard way almost twenty years ago, and that was with only three deep space heat detectors. You don't rely on a unified rig for monitoring and control, either. Not with something this delicate. Banks probably spent his days checking off good flow numbers and clean parts, but if you wait until an alarm goes off to do maintenance, you've probably got irreparable damage to a vital component. On the moon, those things aren't that easy to replace."
"So," Lyle summarized, "you want 'eyes-on' in the field as often as you can afford to."
"Yeah, pretty much."
"What's the worst that could happen if Banks missed something?"
"I don't know. Depends on what broke. One thing's for sure, you'd end up with some pretty fouled up imagery."
"Anything worse than that?" Lyle persisted, but Noah had nothing.
"Sorry, you'd probably want to talk to the military. I don't really know much about the antennas or the support architecture."
Their conversation drifted back to small talk while they finished off their meal. Noah walked Lyle back to the garage, by which time a car had returned. Noah and Lyle were just suiting up when the airlock hatch opened.
"Sir, Ma'am I'm sorry, but we'll need this one," an Air Force lieutenant strolled in with a the four-man work crew.
Agent Lyle said nothing, offering the broad shouldered giant behind her just a cold, brief glance. Noah decided to intervene.
"There's more than enough room, Lieutenant...uhm..."
"Jalaluddin, Sir. But--"
"Could you at least give us a lift back to the--" Noah stopped and looked at Lyle. "I'm headed to the dorms. How about you?"
Lyle shrugged her shoulders. "Well, you suggested I talk to Dr. Cobb, so I guess I can keep you company a bit longer."
Jalaluddin rubbed his chin. "We can't take you straight back, I have orders to get out to 14 pronto. If you don't mind tagging along with us, we can drop you off afterwards. You'll have to stay in the car, of course."
Noah checked his watch; it was already getting close to one in the morning. "How long will you be?"
Jalaluddin talked as he snapped his helmet into place. "We're just collecting equipment left behind by the morning detail and running a spot check on the 14 cold tank. Shouldn't be more than five, ten minutes. Faster you suit up, the faster we can get this over with, Sir"
"Beats waiting for the next cab," Lyle said. "I'd actually like to see one of these antennas up close."
"We can arrange that, Ma'am," Jalaluddin smiled. "But like I said, you'll have to stay in the car."
"Works for me," Noah finally put on his helmet, then patted the Lieutenant on the back. "Let's go."
The drive to the west field took ten minutes, and when they arrived the Lieutenant lived up to his promise scanned the floodlight around the dish. The cold tank was huge, a building in and of itself, with man-sized pipes running in and out of it like some sort of humongous Rube-Goldberg machine. The sixty meter dish above was even large, and Noah explained to Lyle that right now that this one--like all the others--was pointed at the Asteroid belt. He'd probably said too much, but the NCIS agent was so easy to talk to that the thought never crossed his mind. The Lieutenant and his men exited the vehicle and began their quick march to the service station along a path revealed by the car's floodlight. A few minutes passed before Lyle broke the silence.
"I thought you said these dishes were isolated."
"They are," Noah replied.
"Then what are those pipes going into the ground?"
"That's for the service station, I guess. Life support."
"They don't tank air out here?" Lyle asked.
"Probably an emergency supply," Noah surmised, "but I guess there's enough people who work out here that it would be impractical."
"What do you mean?"
"We're in a self-sufficient, closed system," Noah explained, "We grow food here and breathable air is a byproduct. We can't very well put a farm in every building, so they run ducts from Atmo to the entire campus."
Lyle carefully examined the pipes, tracing them as far as she could before darkness wiped everything from view. "And this structure's too big to be supplied by tank?"
"Yeah, you'd need compressed air tanks as big as the ones on ISS for a building this big. That can be dangerous."
"They can explode," Lyle caught on quickly. "Okay, we can rule that out."
"Rule what out?" Noah asked
"Nevermind. So the entire array, and the base, share common life support."
"You want to tell me what this is about?"
Lyle sat in thought for a short while before responding. "I think I want to go inside of."
"What?" Noah looked at the station's entry hatch and the two men posted outside of it. "That? The guy told us to stay here."
"Last I checked, SecNav told my boss to order me to fly two hundred thousands miles to conduct an investigation. You better believe I'm going inside, and you're coming with me."
"What? Why?" Noah started to protest, but Lyle was already out the door. He bounced after her towards the substation hatch, where Lyle spent a minute arguing with the two men posted outside before brushing past him. Noah thought seriously about staying where he was, but Lyle grabbed him by the glove and pulled him into the airlock.
"What's going on, Agent Lyle?" Noah demanded as he removed his suit helmet. His question was rewarded with the sound of Lyle's round being chambered.
Lyle glared at the stunned researcher as she holstered her service sidearm. "There's a guy in here whose name is on my list, and I need somebody who knows something about this place."
"I've never been here," Noah spat back.
Lyle grinned devilishly. "You've been making a lot of sense up until now. Keep up the good work."
"Why do you need a gun?"
"I hope I don't. Let's go."
The substation was the size of a good three story office building, but divided into just four compartments. The airlock led out into the second largest of these, where an endless maze of pipes and wiring stretching across deck and deckhead alike. They walked the metal grate catwalk to a small anteroom which led to the dish's coolant tank housing.
"Je--" Noah almost heaved before Lyle slapped a hand on his mouth. Two bodies lay face-down, one atop the other, on the floor, blood pooling underneath them. The one on top had a knife lodged in the base of his neck, while the one on bottom looked as if he'd put up a fight after a taking a brutal slash to the neck, only to have something--Noah saw a bloody fire extinguisher thrown off to the side--smashed repeatedly into his skull.
"From here on out," Lyle's voice dropped to a deadly whisper, her sidearm already drawn, "not a word."
Noah nodded, ready to piss himself in sheer terror. He'd never seen anything like this before, and it took every once of strength he had not to run out the door and vomit.
Lyle crawled over to the hatch on the other side of the room, rising just enough to peek through the porthole. When she didn't see anything, she tried tapping the glass lightly with the butt of her gun. She fell back a couple of paces and watched the door for a few minutes. Nothing happened. The NCIS agent crawled back and repeated the confusing ritual twice more before placing her hand on the latch.
Just opening the hatch a little let in the thunderous roar of the huge blowers from the tank room. Noah should've expected that, but it startled him into almost losing his footing anyway. Lyle ignored him and scanned the chamber visible through the crack. She quickly found her target.
"Noah!" she hissed. "Get over here!"
Noah froze, not quite sure what the hell Lyle expected him to do. The agent waved him over again, this time her eyes locked on his as if she were contemplating putting a bullet in his brain. He crawled over the bodies as best he could and, at Lyle's direction, took a look through the opening.
"What's he doing?"
Noah's eyes trained on Lieutenant Jalaluddin's back from fifty feet away. He pulled his nose out of the doorway and turned to Lyle. "I'm not sure. I think those are the valve controls for the tank. I don't get it."
"What can he do from there?"
Noah thought about it for a second. "He can stop flow to the dish, that's for certain."
"Anything a bit more...deadly than that?"
"No, not like that!" Noah half snapped. "It's a fucking antenna, not a bomb! Who do you think we are? James Bond?"
"Keep your voice down," Lyle pulled him from the door before taking a look for herself. Jalaluddin was still at the terminal. "Think, what else sort of damage can somebody do here?"
"Well, if he had a bomb, he could blow up the coolant tank. That could do some major damage, but just to the dish."
"I don't think he killed two people just for the chance to die alone, Noah."
Noah glared at her angrily. "Well, how the fuck would I know? How many times do I have to tell you, I don't work--huh? Shit, the blowers!"
"What?"
"Wait a second," Noah pulled Lyle back and shut the door. "He's after life support."
Lyle's jaw dropped as it hit her. "He can pump coolant back into the base through the vents?"
"No, not exactly. But he can blow up a coolant tank. No, wait, that won't work. He'd compromise the walls. The shutters would seal this station off like that."
"Obviously he thinks he's got a way around that problem," Lyle said to no one in particular. "Okay, assume he can. How much damage can he do?"
"I can't say. Each building should be able to isolate from another."
"Well, we don't have time to figure it out, so here's what we're going to--"
The door suddenly opened. Lyle instinctively swung around and fired a double-tap in its direction. Unfortunately, she only caught the hatch itself, and Jalaluddin slammed it behind him. "Fuck! Noah, I want you outside and on a radio. Get the Admiral. Get my partner, Minetti. You tell them everything you just told me."
"Wait, what about you?"
Lyle pushed him away and bolted for the hatch. "I'm going to kill that son of a bitch. Get out of here!"
Noah nodded and did as he was told, too stunned and too hyped on adrenaline to disobey.
#
For most of his life, First Lieutenant Zahid Jalaluddin, United States Air Force, spared little thought for religion. His father had actually hated God, leaving behind a respectable life as an widowed engineer in Jalalabad to enjoy cheap alcohol and even cheaper women in a Sadūm called El Paso. Yet for all the hell his hated guardian had put him through in childhood, the old man had passed onto his son a leanness of thought and an talent for the maths and sciences that would serve God well today. The United States government had paid his way through Texas A&M, and in return he'd gratefully given his life and career to the defense of his adopted country.
The story that follows shamelessly apes all the familiar narratives. His government was still at war with people who looked like him--who believed like his grandparents, uncles and many cousins. His patriotism wore thin at the edges at first, and finally collapsed into whatever mess radicals make of the world. He endured bigotry real and imagined. He trolled the Internet--first curiously, then obsessively--for something to embrace him where blood had failed, and in his search he found a mosque, an imam, and God. His God was angry, angry at the West for killing Muslims. Angry at the injustice that left a majority of men, women and children living under the heel of a decadent few. Angry at his wife who was too independent, and who eventually divorced him after only two increasingly sexless years. Angry at father, at the choices Zadin himself had made in this life, and the idle, aimless existence of people Zadin never knew and never would. So one day, shortly after the Air Force cut the Lieutenant orders giving him what was once only a faint dream, his imam took him aside and showed the gun already in his hand.
The sheer satisfaction of that moment's manifestation sizzled into madness just as Agent Carly Lyle burst through the hatch. "Allahu Akhbar!" he screamed as he pivoted into the doorway, grabbed her by her skinsuit's collar, swung her over the catwalk guard-rail, and yanked down with all his might. With no weapon at all, he'd thrown an armed lawman away as if God himself had acted. From then on he knew he was invincible.
She wasn't moving. Lunar gravity or no, dropping almost two flights onto the deck below was serious business--especially given how hard Jalaluddin had thrown her. God's soldier watched for few more seconds to be sure, but already his mind was already racing through everything that could still go wrong. That Jew scientist who'd accompanied the bitch was still out there, if not running away to save his own skin then fleeing to warn someone--anyone--of the Lieutenant's imminent triumph. There was no way out for him, for sure, but he'd accepted that from the day NCIS arrived on base. The small skeptic that had survived his religious catharsis screamed that time was running out, and Zahid's mind narrowed until nothing but the urge to complete his final task remained. Soon, God willing, soon it would be done.
Zahid grabbed his unmolested satchel from underneath the control console and rushed back into the tank room. He slammed the hatch shut once again, this time sealing it from the inside. Drawing a crowbar from his satchel, he wedged it between the latch and the locking wheel before racing down the catwalk for the stair well. In lunar gravity, he vaulted down all three flights in single bounds, certain that today he would accomplish what no martyr for God had ever dreamed of achieving. Before him lay a hundred feet of catwalk surrounded by huge blower pipes and electrical boxes. Jalaluddin counted down from twelve until he arrived at the unlabeled Number 3 Bus to the blower shutters. Screwdriver in hand, he removed the panel and studied the wiring layout. The job took two minutes to complete, and all that was left to do was wait.
A wave of euphoria swept over him as he collapsed to his knees, repeating God's name in a prayer for himself and even (grudgingly) for the infidels he'd lived amongst and worked with for nearly two years. In the end, that's what killed him. He never heard Lyle groaning on the deck above, nor did he look up to see her hanging over the deckhead ledge, gun trained on the back of his head with as much hatred and fury as he'd put into his work.
Three shots rang out, finally reuniting Zadin Jalaluddin with his God.
#
"Sir, I need you to go back and wait with Corporal Loomis," Technical Sergeant Tommy Graves had been a close friend of Pharrell Banks, and it didn't take long for him to piece together what had happened. With murder in his eyes, he stalked into the coolant tank control room, pausing only briefly to acknowledge his two dead comrades on the floor.
Noah ignored him, half ashamed at how he'd fled so readily from danger and completely humiliated for leaving a friend--a woman, at that--behind in the process. He stepped over the bodies and went straight for the hatch. The latch didn't work, and the wheel wouldn't turn when he tried that. So Noah tried banging against the door as hard as he could, shouting Carly's name like a man gone mad.
"Sir, stand back."
Noah didn't listen, so Graves grabbed him by the arm and threw him to the floor. The scientist bounced back up and almost charged the man when he suddenly caught the airman's eyes. Biting back his pride, he stood back. But he did not leave the room. Sergeant Graves went to work on the door, and did so for a good ten minutes with no luck. He tried at the glass with the fire extinguisher, and succeeded in cracking it some. Graves was about to give it another go when he suddenly heard a muffled shout from behind the hatch. "Wait!"
Noah scurried to the hatch and peered through the glass. he saw nothing. He didn't care. "That's her! Carly! Carly!"
He heard the sound of steel slowly sliding against the door, then hitting metal grate. Graves tried the wheel lock again, finally getting some give out of it as he spun the bolts out of their holds. He tore the hatch open, and Noah rushed past him to see Agent Lyle bloodied and slumped on the catwalk.
"Jesus Christ," Graves looked over the railing down into the pit. "What the hell happened here?"
Lyle wheezed in pain, "Fucker...he did something. I don't know what. He finished what he started. I killed him."
"My God, Carly," Noah dropped to his knees, propping Carly up in his arms. "Are you all right?"
"No," she managed a grin, then turned to Graves. "What did he do?"
"I don't know yet, Ma'am, but we need to get you out of here."
"Fuck--" she coughed, spitting blood. "Damn it. Fuck that, get down there. Fix it. Just fix--"
Lyle passed out. Noah lifted her into his arms and carried her back to the airlock. He handed her off to Loomis, presumed to order her to get the NCIS agent back to the observatory, then raced back for the control room. Anger, terror and just plain shame bounced around in his brain as he hovered over the console, staring at the stew of controls and displays and trying to make sense of a system he'd never seen before.
"Graves," he finally managed to speak. "If you were going to kill a lot of people from right here, how would you do it?"
"Move aside, Sir," Graves commanded. Unlike Noah, he had a decent understanding of the console in front of him, and what he saw turned his skin white. He scurried back to the tank room catwalk, peering down at the Lieutenant's body. But his eyes were scanning the passageway below, counting the electrical boxes from the landing to the corpse. "Motherfucker."
"What?" Noah's head shot up.
"I think I'm going to need your help, Sir."
"Just tell me what to do, Sergeant." Noah volunteered.
"Okay, just listen. I think the...Lieutenant--" Even now it was hard to break habit "--was going to blow up the tanks at these six substations. Fucker, that's why he killed Pharrell. That motherfucker."
"Sergeant?"
"Sorry, Sir. Anyways--and this is totally out of my ass, Sir--we lay out the air lines at Shenandoah to prevent a breach in one place from spreading out elsewhere. It's a triple-redundant system to--"
"Yeah, I know that," Noah interrupted. "Get to the important part."
"Okay...so the thing is that we're in a vacuum, right? The seals are designed to prevent leaks, except the blower shutters--" he drew his fingers across all six fingers of the displayed duct section "--which are two layers of reinforced steel. See, we think about these sort of things."
"I'm not following," Noah groaned, "and I don't think we've got a lot of time."
"Okay, bottom line, these shutters are the only thing separating the rest of the campus from say a catastrophic coolant leak--a blow out, really. If the shock ever got past these, it'd tear a good number of compartment seals down the line. Probably the lines themselves. You see? That's why the bastard want to blow multiple tanks simultaneously, to destroy every fucking seal from here to clear to the other side."
"Wait a minute, multiple tanks?" Noah shook his head in disbelief. "Nevermind. How do we stop it?"
"Fuck, Sir, I don't know if we can."
"Sergeant, if we don't, everybody on this base fucking dies. You got me?"
"No shit, Pops," Graves snapped back. "You see this? He's fucked up the heat exchangers, too. That's how he was going to blow the tanks. When the pressure reaches--"
"How long?" Noah cut to the chase.
"Maybe fifteen minutes. Twenty tops."
"You can't be serious," Noah muttered, not expecting an answer. "Okay, how'd he disengage the shutters?"
"The Number 3 bus ties to the primary and backup pressure sensors. Cut that, and the shutters can't see the blow out coming."
"So..." Noah tapped his fingers on the console. "What else would close the shutters?"
Graves thought about it for a second. "Shit, Sir. How about a coolant leak?"
"What do we do?"
At this point, Graves made a decision. He may or may not have thought it all the way through, but it took a sort of physical and moral courage that defied the brevity with which he acted. To this day, no one is sure if Noah understood at all what he'd just tacitly agreed to risk.
Graves fiddled with the console for a minute, bringing up a screen that showed the layout of the piping in the room next door. Next, he forcefully dragged Noah's finger over over a bright red key to the left of the display. "Don't even think about hitting that until you hear me, but when I do--punch it."
The sergeant bolted into the tank room, slamming the hatch behind him. Noah watched the screen for five minutes, maybe ten; without a doubt it felt like forever. Suddenly, he noticed one of the tank icons flashing yellow. A minute later, it turned red. A sharp whine emanated through the hatch.
"Doc! Now!" Graves voice blared over the suit radio.
He jammed his finger on the key so hard it nearly snapped. Biting back the pain, he watched as the icon flashed red for a couple of seconds. He had no time to process what came next.
Graves had taken a huge gamble, both in terms of his own safety and that of the entire base. To force a coolant leak into the blower system, he needed to break through the huge regulators that governed air flow between the mixer-compressor assembly and the ducts themselves. In short, he wanted to do exactly what Jalaluddin sought to do, but on a far smaller scale. So he'd elected to relieve pressure in one tank by feeding coolant directly into the heat exchanger's mixer--an emergency procedure tailored for the unlikely event the heat rejection unit went completely south and heat build up started to run away. Left to its own devices, the entire process should have been harmless. But Graves had thrown the coolant pump wide open and held it there. The result was spectacular to say the least.
At the same time the mixer regulator went, the blower shutters for 14 slammed shut. As some coolant proceeded into the ducts past the shutters anyway, the other five substation's shutters slammed down in cascade. Likewise, the seal between the fields and the observatory closed, not strong enough to withstand a major blowout but more than capable of holding back the minuscule amount of overpressure heading its way. Noah and Graves had broken Jalaluddin's last play a full 6 minutes, 23 seconds before disaster struck.
Five seconds later, the compressor next to Graves ruptured, ejecting swimming pools worth liquid nitrogen in a matter of seconds. He'd never know whether Noah had actually pushed the button, as the 7 degree kelvin slush washed over him and started its deadly work on the rest of the substation structure.
Dr. Noah Abel had just enough time to turn to face his death roaring and tearing its way to the hatch. The supercool liquid sliced through it like paper, ending him before the main tank finally gave way and hurled a thousand ton plume of debris, dust and ice three miles high.
#
Carly Lyle lay beside herself in a hospital bed, her mind shutting steering away from the pain by playing out the report she had yet to write. Antenna 14 was one of six that lay at the end of independent return loops to general life support. The blowers removed a considerable amount of heat from the ambient which was then redistributed via the same system into the main campus. The system made sense economically, sharply reducing the amount of waste heat to be rejected that produced by the blowers themselves all while supplying a good fraction of the observatory's heating needs. That was all Zadin Jalaluddin needed to kill upwards 3,000 men and women. Had all six coolant tanks ruptured with the blower shutters open, the shock wave would've torn through any seal from the substations to the far side researchers' dormitories. The entire base would've been open to space, spilling atmosphere too quickly and from too many places. The patches would save a few, for a time, but the remaining air would last for only days. By the time help arrived, only a lucky few--and the bastard who'd killed everyone else--would be left.
The only thing Jalaluddin hadn't counted on was Cryoman 1/c Banks tagging out two of the blower control buses before he'd come to terms that his mission was a suicidal one. Had he accepted from the start that his own life was the price for success, in all likelihood he would have turned Shenandoah into a mausoleum. Instead, he'd killed Banks to derail the inspection detail, convinced he could get away clean with mass murder. But Admiral Rice's new instructions for the work crews--particularly the order for everyone in the now five-man team to keep independent logs--proved another stumbling block. Any follow on investigation would uncover his obvious hand in sabotaging the remaining buses. Jalaluddin decided he was going to die, and so he acted.
The name Noah Abel appears almost nowhere outside of research journals and press releases before June 2035. When AP finally broke the story, the public was reeling from the Flight 87 hijacking and the subsequent nuclear attack on Bangalore--at the time considered the first act of space terrorism. Nobody cared that Jalaluddin's plot had largely been foiled, or that the loss of life could have been considerably higher. Congress broiled with demands to drag the Administration forward to testify, but in the end the national security argument won the day.
Agent Lyle left the base hospital on 17 December 2033 and left Shenandoah with Angelo Minetti a week later. When the story broke two years later, the better informed in the media spent months hounding Lyle and her team. The circus didn't last long, though, as the latest flare up between India and Pakistan quickly drew garrulous minds from "Murder on the Moon." Noah Abel's name joined that of Andy Pu, the Rabins, and Daniel Pearl as time scrubbed clean the memory of Americans weary of extremism. After retiring, Lyle wrote a moderately successful book about her investigation at the Mare Ingenii Research Institute. Though Lyle mentions Abel only twice, Cally Shu pulled at this thin reed until she discovered the NCIS case file and the oft-handed mention of SCARBOROUGH.
For writers and orators alike, few devices evoke popular passion as powerfully as a fact, idea or story condensed to a single date. 22 September 1862, the Emancipation Proclamation. 28 February 1933, "The Positive Electron." 7 December 1941, Pearl Harbor, followed by the 6 August 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima. 3 April 1996, the arrest of Theodore Kaczynski--the Unabomber. 19 April 1995, Oklahoma City. 9/11. Barack Obama's inauguration, 20 January 2009. The Fourth of July gas attack, 2016. Bangalore, 3 June 2035. The Day of Fire, 9 March 2074. Contact, 1/3/2085. 6 April 2086...Invasion.
In this narrow sense, 11 December 2033 is exceptional. One, two years would pass before the public had any inkling of what happened. Two, the events of the day only tangentially concerns Encounter--an event that defies convenient dating even today. Three, those events that did concern Encounter would not surface until decades later, long after 12/11/33 had been burned in the public's memory. Instead, the people were sold a murder story.
Special Agent Carly Lyle, Naval Criminal Investigative Service, and her partner, Angelo Minetti, arrived at Shenandoah the morning of 9 December 2033, and immediately met with the base JAG and medical examiner at a fridge in Charlie Barracks. For almost a month, this fridge had been the final resting place for the body of Cryoman First Class Pharrell Banks, awaiting final disposition before being shipped back to Earth.
People died in space, probably more often than people at the time realized. Such things were inevitable in such a harsh and unforgiving environment, and the Americans had been especially unprepared for the rapid expansion of the population living permanently in orbit. Pharrell Banks had died alone, ten miles from the base after suffering severe nitrogen narcosis. In a facility the size of a small industrial park, there was no way to keep a secret from three thousand closely quartered people. Admiral Rice had restricted all outside work details to groups of no less than five, and services were held early Sunday morning for those who wished to see off the Petty Officer's soul in the company of the only people who would ever know how he'd died.
But even then they were wrong. The detail chief uncovered evidence of O-ring tampering within an hour of discovering the body. That Admiral Rice managed to keep that much from leaking was nothing short of a miracle, buying NCIS enough time to arrange to send up two investigators.
Agents Lyle and Minetti met with Rice and her JAG, Commander Matt Updike, immediately after their latest rounds of interviews. At first, it didn't look too good. On any given day, hundreds of people passed through Charlie Barack's suit rooms and airlocks. But then Minetti had a brainstorm Lyle had been all to ready to dismiss. The autopsy report clearly pinned the onset of nitrogen narcosis during Cryoman 1/c Banks' pre-breathing exercises. Then, having slept on the idea, she had a complete change of heart.
"So where do we stand?" Updike asked.
"Well, if the original O-rings were good," Minetti continued, "then the bad rings must have been switched in here at the earliest."
Minetti unfurled a chart on the table and pointed to the rest station under Antenna 12. "That narrows our perp list down to sixteen suspects."
Rice massaged her temples. "But we know the bends set in before he left the Barracks. Commander Wang isn't in the habit of screwing up."
"No, Ma'am," Minetti conceded, "but you said it yourself, the rings we found were too far gone for Banks to have lasted as long as he did. That just means our killer tried once and failed, then met up with Banks in the field and finished the job."
"Then you can't assume the original tampered O-rings--if there were any--were good," Updike pointed out.
"No, Sir," Lyle tackled that one, "and I doubt we'll ever find them. The killer could have tossed them in the field, and we wouldn't stand a chance of finding them even if it weren't pitch black outside. That's not really important, though. While we can't be sure how badly the original pair failed, we know the range. Granted, that expands the circle in which our killer could've made the switch to anywhere between Dishes 8 and 18. But Minetti's assumption means we at least have some place to start looking."
Updike looked at the list the agents had given to him at the start of the meeting. "You did twenty or so interviews today, but only with...three on this list?"
Minetti cocked a half-smile. "We don't want to be obvious about it. As far as anyone outside of this room's concerned, we're just here to perform our due diligence before writing this whole mess up as an accident. Right, boss?"
"Something like that," Agent Lyle agreed. "We do want to look hard at three or four names on that list. We haven't talked with any of them yet."
Rice didn't like the sound of that. "You don't have a lot of time to waste, Agent Lyle. My people aren't stupid. They'll figure out what you're up to before long."
"I figured that," Lyle admitted. "Ma'am, the Moon's a long way to go to commit premeditated murder. Unless we uncover something highly irregular in Petty Officer Banks' history, we should assume that our killer is after something else. Whatever it is, I want him to lead us straight to it."
#
The message from Scobee arrived with only an general service PRIORITY header. Noah Abel didn't get his hands on it for forty five minutes, and only then because he'd habitually check with the radio room for any evening mail. He skimmed the cover letter and opened to the first image, at which point he flipped back to the cover letter and read every word, word for word. Twice.
He ripped the flash drive from the pouch in the appendix and tossed the hard copy into the incinerator outbin. Shortly thereafter, he was out of breath and banging on a hatch in the researchers' dormitory. "Lee! Wake up!"
Lee Cobb had gone out of his way to be a pain in the ass over the past year. There was no doubt the man was brilliant, but not more than two months passed before Noah started hearing half-jokes at mess about punching holes in Lee's skinsuit or--Noah grimly recalled Shenandoah's tragedy--fiddling with the gauges on his pre-breather.
And then there was Shouri. Noah bit back an ugly thought when she opened the door wearing little more than a proud declaration of her recent independence. He'd known about the affair for awhile now, but amazingly (given the tight living space) this was the first time he'd seen proof with his own eyes. Ryan Hayama, his right hand, was talented physicist and good friend, and Noah had given him a slot on the old Helios 5 team as a wedding gift. In hind sight, he wish he'd never dragged the poor kid up here. Then Lee, being Lee, just had to get involved. Shenandoah wasn't exactly overflowing with women, and the few there belonged to the military and didn't seem overly interested in fraternizing with the scientists. Apparently Lee thought that gave him license to move in on another man's wife, and for the last month or so the ever more ex-Mrs. Hayama hadn't had a problem with it either.
"Sorry, Shouri. Looking for Lee."
"No idea," she yawned. "What is it?"
Noah gulped hard, suddenly and uncomfortably aware of all the woman in front of him. "Something important. Really, I need to find him."
"You try the observatory?"
Noah shook his head. "Thanks."
Noah stopped by his quarters and grabbed his laptop, then made for dormitory garage. He checked with the Marine guard posted there and learned Lee had headed out for the night. The observatory, or more accurately the observatory's control room, was in a separate complex on the other side of the campus--a few miles away from the dorms. It took Noah a little over half an hour to arrange for the escort and lunar car to get here. He thought about bringing Ryan along--and felt terrible for deciding against it--but Noah had no intention of tossing gasoline on that fire. Bastard or not, it was Lee he needed to see.
The ride out was forgettable, the far side under the pall of a deep lunar night. The Van Der Graff crater formation lay dead ahead to the north. To east, a set of 12 "radio" antennas presumably owned and operated by the National Lunar Interferometry Array peered into the outer solar system. From time to time, Shenandoah would even humor that not so tiny bit of fiction. The Marine escort turned right at a T-intersection and drove for another mile. The bright floodlight on top of the lunar car spilled onto a flimsy-looking dome not more than a hundred feet away. They followed the road as it dipped under the surface and terminated at an underground garage, and soon afterwards Noah was stripping off his skinsuit and waiting for the airlock door to open.
"Admiral," he was surprised to see Wanda Rice on the other side. Lee Cobb stood behind her.
"Evening, Dr. Abel," Rice stood aside as he and the Marine exited the airlock. Noah's escort saluted and left his charge in his boss's care. "I assume you copied the latest from Scobee."
"And you didn't see fit to tell me," Noah answered levelly.
"Honestly, I thought you were sacked out for the night. To be even more frank, I'm not sure what to make of this. Mr. Cobb feels differently, of course."
"Guess we won't be need this then," Noah fished for the flash drive in his pocket and pulled it out.
"Come with us." Rice waved him towards the nearest stairwell. All three proceeded up three flights to the control booth. Outside, a dual train of red flashing lights stretched out for what looked like forever, demarcating the twin lines of antenna this facility controlled. A single Navy technician manned a computer station, and on rear wall hung a big screen with Scarborough imagery of the asteroid 10312 WF.
"Who's Barry Gold," Noah asked, the name had been on his mind for a minute.
"He's an analyst with the NRO," Lee replied. "He's taking over for Al Cordi; should be here Tuesday after this week. And this is just his first week on job. Judy--" Lee paused and looked at the Admiral. "--Captain Keaton, I mean, wants your opinion before we do anything."
"Why me?" Noah looked at the Admiral.
"Captain Keaton doesn't answer to me," Rice said flatly, "but I suppose it's just polite to get a second opinion before cutting someone's propellant budget in half."
"Admiral, I know you're not happy about this, but this is exactly what Scarborough is out there to do."
"I can't agree with you, Mr. Cobb," Rice shot back, but with not a hint of furor in her voice. "But as I said, it's not my call. Now if you'll excuse, I have something pressing to attend to."
Rice wasted no time making her exit. Lee just shrugged, then pulled Noah over to an empty station. "You have any idea what that's about?"
Noah really didn't feel like gossiping, especially with this man. "I don't see what that has to do with--"
"No, I'm serious," Lee insisted. "You haven't heard?"
"Heard what?"
Lee's voice dropped to a whisper. "NCIS flew in two nights ago."
"NCI-what?"
"Navy cops," Lee explained. "Arrived the day before yesterday. Something's going on."
"Not our business," Noah noted half-heartedly. "Can we get back to this?"
"Okay, okay!" Lee threw up his hands. "So the Admiral thinks the evidence is pretty thin. I have to admit, it's a bit of argument from incredulity, but take a look for yourself. Chip, can you bring up the blow-up again?"
The chief Rice had left with them threw an extremely fuzzy image of 10312 WF labeled "13-19 7 26." As promised, Noah was looking at sixteen almost perfectly crescent shaped lines across an artificially brightened face of an asteroid. "I think we're looking at radiators here."
"That's a bit of a leap, don't you think? And I don't like that we massaged the image this much to see it."
"Neither do I, which is why we need a better look."
A wave of dislike for Lee unexpectedly distracted Noah. The man hadn't said anything particular grating tonight, but then Noah's thoughts passed briefly over an image of Shouri in a nighty standing in Cobb's doorway. He filed it away, folding his arms and glaring ponderously at the big screen. "We're talking about gigawatt output--minimum--for a whole week. I'd love to know what you think can put out that much energy."
"The Hoover Dam, a thousand or so Ares boosters, a star," Lee picked up the gauntlet. "Look, we've always assumed that this object is a couple hundred meters in diameter at most. But that's just a theory built on a ton of assumptions. We know it masses on low side and the area projected is small, but that's all we've got. I've been saying for months that if this thing is bigger than we thought we can account for almost everything."
Noah grimaced, remembering the fights he and Ryan had had with Lee and the bitter taste of having to debate astrometry with a dilettante. But Lee knew his math, carefully kept to the things he knew, and when he strayed he even welcomed having someone tug on his reins. And Noah was honest enough to admit that tonight he'd taken the initiative in seeking Lee out.
Noah checked and double-checked each calculation in the summary, a task that took the better part of four hours. Half way through, Lee had given up trying to help him make up his mind. When it came down to it, though, Noah knew Lee was right. They needed a better look at 10312 WF, and Barry Gold had just handed them all the cause they needed to make it happen. By the time he'd fired off his reply to Scobee, it was coming up on midnight. Hungry and exhausted, Noah packed up his belongings and headed towards the garage.
"Dr. Abel?" Noah looked up to see a severe looking woman in plainclothes at the top of the stairwell. Something Lee had said earlier hovered at the edge of his thoughts.
"You're the Navy cop, right?"
"I see word spreads quickly," she deadpanned. "On your way back?"
"Yeah, just had to wrap up some things here."
"Well, all the cars are out right now. You don't happen to know where the cafeteria is?"
"Uhm, yeah," Noah figured he might as well eat himself. "Come on down. I'll take you there."
"Carly Lyle," the agent offered Noah her a hand. The galley was just spinning up to serve midrats. Lyle weaseled four slices of microwave pizza out of the duty messcook while Noah picked an empty table next to a window and far from the soon to be bustling entryway. The overheads cast too much light to see much of anything past the glass except for the familiar rows of red lights. Agent Lyle didn't seem to mind the piss-poor view as she took her seat.
"Should've come earlier, I guess," Noah eyed the stiff, plain slices in front of him with suspicion. "So you guys are here for Petty Officer Banks, right?"
"Did you know him?" Agent Lyle dove right into her share.
"No. Not at all. I don't usually work in this building."
"Okay," Lyle managed through mouthful. "Uhm...'scuse me. So not much mingling going on--between you guys and the base personnel?"
"Not much. Sometimes we go out into the field, but not all the often. And we don't spend a lot of time in the military areas."
"Except for Mr. Cobb, right," Agent Lyle noted.
"Lee? He's something of a special case--an engineering troubleshooter for Admiral Rice of sorts. You're pretty well informed."
"That's my job, Doctor. So what is it you do here?"
"Please, it's Noah, and well...uhm," Noah swallowed hesitantly, suddenly wishing he' recalled the fine print in his non-disclosure agreement. "I don't think I can talk about it."
"Anything you can tell me?" Lyle pressed
Noah thought about it for a second. "I guess I can say I head up a team conducting an experiment here."
"Scarborough?"
Noah's eyes widened before he knew what he'd given away. "You are well-informed. I can't talk about that, but no. Not exactly, anyway. Does this have something to do with Petty Officer Banks?"
"What makes you think that?" Lyle deadpanned, but then recovered with a chuckle when she saw Noah's eyes narrow. "I'm sorry. It's just a habit of mine. Asking a lot of questions."
"For a minute there I thought you were trying to trap me," Noah grinned. "Don't worry, I'm not in the business of spilling state secrets."
"That's probably for the best," Lyle took another bite. "So...Banks worked out in the field. Wouldn't that mean he worked for you in a way?"
"Not quite," Noah demurred. "You might say my team leases time on the interferometer--the dishes marked by those red lights out there."
"Yeah, kinda figured that out," Lyle said. "What about when you're outside?"
"Well, I haven't been out in a month." Noah replied. "Lee goes pretty often, come to think of it. You might want to talk to him. You sure this isn't about Petty Officer Banks?"
"Well, he did die out there," Lyle let Noah draw his own conclusions. "Do all the dishes operate together or do you do different things with different sets?"
"No, they're usually tasked together. You know what Very Long Baseline Interferometry means?"
"Not what it does, just what it is," Lyle pointed out the window.
"Yeah, well, each of those dishes gives us a piece of an image. When you put them together, it's as if you're seeing an image at a resolution you could only achieve with a telescope lens equal to the sum of all the antennas in the array."
"So they always work together," Lyle observed.
"At least as long as I've been here," Noah's eyes stayed on the red lit row. "It's possible a set or two is tasked to something else, but you can see that the resolution drops the more dishes you take out of the array."
Lyle rested her head on her hands and followed Noah's gaze out the window. "So Petty Officer Banks' work probably impacts--well, impacted--yours directly."
"Yeah, I guess it does to an extant." Noah admitted.
"You have any idea what his team does?"
Noah frowned, not quite sure where Lyle was going with this. "I know it has something to do with the cryostats, but like I said, we don't really interact with the military that much. They're the ones who service the antennas, not us."
"Cryostat, like a Dewar bottle?"
"We just call it a Dewar, and the cryostats we're talking about are a lot bigger. A lot of the take we want is in the infrared, and heat on the dish surface can be a real problem--especially during lunar daytime."
"Sounds like a lot of manpower for..." Lyle trailed off, thinking to herself.
"What does?" Noah asked.
"Excuse me," Agent Lyle apologized. "I mean, the thing I can't figure out is 'why so many people to service the cold tanks?' Sounds like something you could automate pretty cheaply. Probably more reliable, too."
"It's not that simple," Noah disagreed. "Those antennas are delicate equipment, so for the most part their support systems are independent. For example, we don't run slush lines to their tanks to avoid a cascades from say dirty liquid nitrogen in the main artery. We learned that at Challenger the hard way almost twenty years ago, and that was with only three deep space heat detectors. You don't rely on a unified rig for monitoring and control, either. Not with something this delicate. Banks probably spent his days checking off good flow numbers and clean parts, but if you wait until an alarm goes off to do maintenance, you've probably got irreparable damage to a vital component. On the moon, those things aren't that easy to replace."
"So," Lyle summarized, "you want 'eyes-on' in the field as often as you can afford to."
"Yeah, pretty much."
"What's the worst that could happen if Banks missed something?"
"I don't know. Depends on what broke. One thing's for sure, you'd end up with some pretty fouled up imagery."
"Anything worse than that?" Lyle persisted, but Noah had nothing.
"Sorry, you'd probably want to talk to the military. I don't really know much about the antennas or the support architecture."
Their conversation drifted back to small talk while they finished off their meal. Noah walked Lyle back to the garage, by which time a car had returned. Noah and Lyle were just suiting up when the airlock hatch opened.
"Sir, Ma'am I'm sorry, but we'll need this one," an Air Force lieutenant strolled in with a the four-man work crew.
Agent Lyle said nothing, offering the broad shouldered giant behind her just a cold, brief glance. Noah decided to intervene.
"There's more than enough room, Lieutenant...uhm..."
"Jalaluddin, Sir. But--"
"Could you at least give us a lift back to the--" Noah stopped and looked at Lyle. "I'm headed to the dorms. How about you?"
Lyle shrugged her shoulders. "Well, you suggested I talk to Dr. Cobb, so I guess I can keep you company a bit longer."
Jalaluddin rubbed his chin. "We can't take you straight back, I have orders to get out to 14 pronto. If you don't mind tagging along with us, we can drop you off afterwards. You'll have to stay in the car, of course."
Noah checked his watch; it was already getting close to one in the morning. "How long will you be?"
Jalaluddin talked as he snapped his helmet into place. "We're just collecting equipment left behind by the morning detail and running a spot check on the 14 cold tank. Shouldn't be more than five, ten minutes. Faster you suit up, the faster we can get this over with, Sir"
"Beats waiting for the next cab," Lyle said. "I'd actually like to see one of these antennas up close."
"We can arrange that, Ma'am," Jalaluddin smiled. "But like I said, you'll have to stay in the car."
"Works for me," Noah finally put on his helmet, then patted the Lieutenant on the back. "Let's go."
The drive to the west field took ten minutes, and when they arrived the Lieutenant lived up to his promise scanned the floodlight around the dish. The cold tank was huge, a building in and of itself, with man-sized pipes running in and out of it like some sort of humongous Rube-Goldberg machine. The sixty meter dish above was even large, and Noah explained to Lyle that right now that this one--like all the others--was pointed at the Asteroid belt. He'd probably said too much, but the NCIS agent was so easy to talk to that the thought never crossed his mind. The Lieutenant and his men exited the vehicle and began their quick march to the service station along a path revealed by the car's floodlight. A few minutes passed before Lyle broke the silence.
"I thought you said these dishes were isolated."
"They are," Noah replied.
"Then what are those pipes going into the ground?"
"That's for the service station, I guess. Life support."
"They don't tank air out here?" Lyle asked.
"Probably an emergency supply," Noah surmised, "but I guess there's enough people who work out here that it would be impractical."
"What do you mean?"
"We're in a self-sufficient, closed system," Noah explained, "We grow food here and breathable air is a byproduct. We can't very well put a farm in every building, so they run ducts from Atmo to the entire campus."
Lyle carefully examined the pipes, tracing them as far as she could before darkness wiped everything from view. "And this structure's too big to be supplied by tank?"
"Yeah, you'd need compressed air tanks as big as the ones on ISS for a building this big. That can be dangerous."
"They can explode," Lyle caught on quickly. "Okay, we can rule that out."
"Rule what out?" Noah asked
"Nevermind. So the entire array, and the base, share common life support."
"You want to tell me what this is about?"
Lyle sat in thought for a short while before responding. "I think I want to go inside of."
"What?" Noah looked at the station's entry hatch and the two men posted outside of it. "That? The guy told us to stay here."
"Last I checked, SecNav told my boss to order me to fly two hundred thousands miles to conduct an investigation. You better believe I'm going inside, and you're coming with me."
"What? Why?" Noah started to protest, but Lyle was already out the door. He bounced after her towards the substation hatch, where Lyle spent a minute arguing with the two men posted outside before brushing past him. Noah thought seriously about staying where he was, but Lyle grabbed him by the glove and pulled him into the airlock.
"What's going on, Agent Lyle?" Noah demanded as he removed his suit helmet. His question was rewarded with the sound of Lyle's round being chambered.
Lyle glared at the stunned researcher as she holstered her service sidearm. "There's a guy in here whose name is on my list, and I need somebody who knows something about this place."
"I've never been here," Noah spat back.
Lyle grinned devilishly. "You've been making a lot of sense up until now. Keep up the good work."
"Why do you need a gun?"
"I hope I don't. Let's go."
The substation was the size of a good three story office building, but divided into just four compartments. The airlock led out into the second largest of these, where an endless maze of pipes and wiring stretching across deck and deckhead alike. They walked the metal grate catwalk to a small anteroom which led to the dish's coolant tank housing.
"Je--" Noah almost heaved before Lyle slapped a hand on his mouth. Two bodies lay face-down, one atop the other, on the floor, blood pooling underneath them. The one on top had a knife lodged in the base of his neck, while the one on bottom looked as if he'd put up a fight after a taking a brutal slash to the neck, only to have something--Noah saw a bloody fire extinguisher thrown off to the side--smashed repeatedly into his skull.
"From here on out," Lyle's voice dropped to a deadly whisper, her sidearm already drawn, "not a word."
Noah nodded, ready to piss himself in sheer terror. He'd never seen anything like this before, and it took every once of strength he had not to run out the door and vomit.
Lyle crawled over to the hatch on the other side of the room, rising just enough to peek through the porthole. When she didn't see anything, she tried tapping the glass lightly with the butt of her gun. She fell back a couple of paces and watched the door for a few minutes. Nothing happened. The NCIS agent crawled back and repeated the confusing ritual twice more before placing her hand on the latch.
Just opening the hatch a little let in the thunderous roar of the huge blowers from the tank room. Noah should've expected that, but it startled him into almost losing his footing anyway. Lyle ignored him and scanned the chamber visible through the crack. She quickly found her target.
"Noah!" she hissed. "Get over here!"
Noah froze, not quite sure what the hell Lyle expected him to do. The agent waved him over again, this time her eyes locked on his as if she were contemplating putting a bullet in his brain. He crawled over the bodies as best he could and, at Lyle's direction, took a look through the opening.
"What's he doing?"
Noah's eyes trained on Lieutenant Jalaluddin's back from fifty feet away. He pulled his nose out of the doorway and turned to Lyle. "I'm not sure. I think those are the valve controls for the tank. I don't get it."
"What can he do from there?"
Noah thought about it for a second. "He can stop flow to the dish, that's for certain."
"Anything a bit more...deadly than that?"
"No, not like that!" Noah half snapped. "It's a fucking antenna, not a bomb! Who do you think we are? James Bond?"
"Keep your voice down," Lyle pulled him from the door before taking a look for herself. Jalaluddin was still at the terminal. "Think, what else sort of damage can somebody do here?"
"Well, if he had a bomb, he could blow up the coolant tank. That could do some major damage, but just to the dish."
"I don't think he killed two people just for the chance to die alone, Noah."
Noah glared at her angrily. "Well, how the fuck would I know? How many times do I have to tell you, I don't work--huh? Shit, the blowers!"
"What?"
"Wait a second," Noah pulled Lyle back and shut the door. "He's after life support."
Lyle's jaw dropped as it hit her. "He can pump coolant back into the base through the vents?"
"No, not exactly. But he can blow up a coolant tank. No, wait, that won't work. He'd compromise the walls. The shutters would seal this station off like that."
"Obviously he thinks he's got a way around that problem," Lyle said to no one in particular. "Okay, assume he can. How much damage can he do?"
"I can't say. Each building should be able to isolate from another."
"Well, we don't have time to figure it out, so here's what we're going to--"
The door suddenly opened. Lyle instinctively swung around and fired a double-tap in its direction. Unfortunately, she only caught the hatch itself, and Jalaluddin slammed it behind him. "Fuck! Noah, I want you outside and on a radio. Get the Admiral. Get my partner, Minetti. You tell them everything you just told me."
"Wait, what about you?"
Lyle pushed him away and bolted for the hatch. "I'm going to kill that son of a bitch. Get out of here!"
Noah nodded and did as he was told, too stunned and too hyped on adrenaline to disobey.
#
For most of his life, First Lieutenant Zahid Jalaluddin, United States Air Force, spared little thought for religion. His father had actually hated God, leaving behind a respectable life as an widowed engineer in Jalalabad to enjoy cheap alcohol and even cheaper women in a Sadūm called El Paso. Yet for all the hell his hated guardian had put him through in childhood, the old man had passed onto his son a leanness of thought and an talent for the maths and sciences that would serve God well today. The United States government had paid his way through Texas A&M, and in return he'd gratefully given his life and career to the defense of his adopted country.
The story that follows shamelessly apes all the familiar narratives. His government was still at war with people who looked like him--who believed like his grandparents, uncles and many cousins. His patriotism wore thin at the edges at first, and finally collapsed into whatever mess radicals make of the world. He endured bigotry real and imagined. He trolled the Internet--first curiously, then obsessively--for something to embrace him where blood had failed, and in his search he found a mosque, an imam, and God. His God was angry, angry at the West for killing Muslims. Angry at the injustice that left a majority of men, women and children living under the heel of a decadent few. Angry at his wife who was too independent, and who eventually divorced him after only two increasingly sexless years. Angry at father, at the choices Zadin himself had made in this life, and the idle, aimless existence of people Zadin never knew and never would. So one day, shortly after the Air Force cut the Lieutenant orders giving him what was once only a faint dream, his imam took him aside and showed the gun already in his hand.
The sheer satisfaction of that moment's manifestation sizzled into madness just as Agent Carly Lyle burst through the hatch. "Allahu Akhbar!" he screamed as he pivoted into the doorway, grabbed her by her skinsuit's collar, swung her over the catwalk guard-rail, and yanked down with all his might. With no weapon at all, he'd thrown an armed lawman away as if God himself had acted. From then on he knew he was invincible.
She wasn't moving. Lunar gravity or no, dropping almost two flights onto the deck below was serious business--especially given how hard Jalaluddin had thrown her. God's soldier watched for few more seconds to be sure, but already his mind was already racing through everything that could still go wrong. That Jew scientist who'd accompanied the bitch was still out there, if not running away to save his own skin then fleeing to warn someone--anyone--of the Lieutenant's imminent triumph. There was no way out for him, for sure, but he'd accepted that from the day NCIS arrived on base. The small skeptic that had survived his religious catharsis screamed that time was running out, and Zahid's mind narrowed until nothing but the urge to complete his final task remained. Soon, God willing, soon it would be done.
Zahid grabbed his unmolested satchel from underneath the control console and rushed back into the tank room. He slammed the hatch shut once again, this time sealing it from the inside. Drawing a crowbar from his satchel, he wedged it between the latch and the locking wheel before racing down the catwalk for the stair well. In lunar gravity, he vaulted down all three flights in single bounds, certain that today he would accomplish what no martyr for God had ever dreamed of achieving. Before him lay a hundred feet of catwalk surrounded by huge blower pipes and electrical boxes. Jalaluddin counted down from twelve until he arrived at the unlabeled Number 3 Bus to the blower shutters. Screwdriver in hand, he removed the panel and studied the wiring layout. The job took two minutes to complete, and all that was left to do was wait.
A wave of euphoria swept over him as he collapsed to his knees, repeating God's name in a prayer for himself and even (grudgingly) for the infidels he'd lived amongst and worked with for nearly two years. In the end, that's what killed him. He never heard Lyle groaning on the deck above, nor did he look up to see her hanging over the deckhead ledge, gun trained on the back of his head with as much hatred and fury as he'd put into his work.
Three shots rang out, finally reuniting Zadin Jalaluddin with his God.
#
"Sir, I need you to go back and wait with Corporal Loomis," Technical Sergeant Tommy Graves had been a close friend of Pharrell Banks, and it didn't take long for him to piece together what had happened. With murder in his eyes, he stalked into the coolant tank control room, pausing only briefly to acknowledge his two dead comrades on the floor.
Noah ignored him, half ashamed at how he'd fled so readily from danger and completely humiliated for leaving a friend--a woman, at that--behind in the process. He stepped over the bodies and went straight for the hatch. The latch didn't work, and the wheel wouldn't turn when he tried that. So Noah tried banging against the door as hard as he could, shouting Carly's name like a man gone mad.
"Sir, stand back."
Noah didn't listen, so Graves grabbed him by the arm and threw him to the floor. The scientist bounced back up and almost charged the man when he suddenly caught the airman's eyes. Biting back his pride, he stood back. But he did not leave the room. Sergeant Graves went to work on the door, and did so for a good ten minutes with no luck. He tried at the glass with the fire extinguisher, and succeeded in cracking it some. Graves was about to give it another go when he suddenly heard a muffled shout from behind the hatch. "Wait!"
Noah scurried to the hatch and peered through the glass. he saw nothing. He didn't care. "That's her! Carly! Carly!"
He heard the sound of steel slowly sliding against the door, then hitting metal grate. Graves tried the wheel lock again, finally getting some give out of it as he spun the bolts out of their holds. He tore the hatch open, and Noah rushed past him to see Agent Lyle bloodied and slumped on the catwalk.
"Jesus Christ," Graves looked over the railing down into the pit. "What the hell happened here?"
Lyle wheezed in pain, "Fucker...he did something. I don't know what. He finished what he started. I killed him."
"My God, Carly," Noah dropped to his knees, propping Carly up in his arms. "Are you all right?"
"No," she managed a grin, then turned to Graves. "What did he do?"
"I don't know yet, Ma'am, but we need to get you out of here."
"Fuck--" she coughed, spitting blood. "Damn it. Fuck that, get down there. Fix it. Just fix--"
Lyle passed out. Noah lifted her into his arms and carried her back to the airlock. He handed her off to Loomis, presumed to order her to get the NCIS agent back to the observatory, then raced back for the control room. Anger, terror and just plain shame bounced around in his brain as he hovered over the console, staring at the stew of controls and displays and trying to make sense of a system he'd never seen before.
"Graves," he finally managed to speak. "If you were going to kill a lot of people from right here, how would you do it?"
"Move aside, Sir," Graves commanded. Unlike Noah, he had a decent understanding of the console in front of him, and what he saw turned his skin white. He scurried back to the tank room catwalk, peering down at the Lieutenant's body. But his eyes were scanning the passageway below, counting the electrical boxes from the landing to the corpse. "Motherfucker."
"What?" Noah's head shot up.
"I think I'm going to need your help, Sir."
"Just tell me what to do, Sergeant." Noah volunteered.
"Okay, just listen. I think the...Lieutenant--" Even now it was hard to break habit "--was going to blow up the tanks at these six substations. Fucker, that's why he killed Pharrell. That motherfucker."
"Sergeant?"
"Sorry, Sir. Anyways--and this is totally out of my ass, Sir--we lay out the air lines at Shenandoah to prevent a breach in one place from spreading out elsewhere. It's a triple-redundant system to--"
"Yeah, I know that," Noah interrupted. "Get to the important part."
"Okay...so the thing is that we're in a vacuum, right? The seals are designed to prevent leaks, except the blower shutters--" he drew his fingers across all six fingers of the displayed duct section "--which are two layers of reinforced steel. See, we think about these sort of things."
"I'm not following," Noah groaned, "and I don't think we've got a lot of time."
"Okay, bottom line, these shutters are the only thing separating the rest of the campus from say a catastrophic coolant leak--a blow out, really. If the shock ever got past these, it'd tear a good number of compartment seals down the line. Probably the lines themselves. You see? That's why the bastard want to blow multiple tanks simultaneously, to destroy every fucking seal from here to clear to the other side."
"Wait a minute, multiple tanks?" Noah shook his head in disbelief. "Nevermind. How do we stop it?"
"Fuck, Sir, I don't know if we can."
"Sergeant, if we don't, everybody on this base fucking dies. You got me?"
"No shit, Pops," Graves snapped back. "You see this? He's fucked up the heat exchangers, too. That's how he was going to blow the tanks. When the pressure reaches--"
"How long?" Noah cut to the chase.
"Maybe fifteen minutes. Twenty tops."
"You can't be serious," Noah muttered, not expecting an answer. "Okay, how'd he disengage the shutters?"
"The Number 3 bus ties to the primary and backup pressure sensors. Cut that, and the shutters can't see the blow out coming."
"So..." Noah tapped his fingers on the console. "What else would close the shutters?"
Graves thought about it for a second. "Shit, Sir. How about a coolant leak?"
"What do we do?"
At this point, Graves made a decision. He may or may not have thought it all the way through, but it took a sort of physical and moral courage that defied the brevity with which he acted. To this day, no one is sure if Noah understood at all what he'd just tacitly agreed to risk.
Graves fiddled with the console for a minute, bringing up a screen that showed the layout of the piping in the room next door. Next, he forcefully dragged Noah's finger over over a bright red key to the left of the display. "Don't even think about hitting that until you hear me, but when I do--punch it."
The sergeant bolted into the tank room, slamming the hatch behind him. Noah watched the screen for five minutes, maybe ten; without a doubt it felt like forever. Suddenly, he noticed one of the tank icons flashing yellow. A minute later, it turned red. A sharp whine emanated through the hatch.
"Doc! Now!" Graves voice blared over the suit radio.
He jammed his finger on the key so hard it nearly snapped. Biting back the pain, he watched as the icon flashed red for a couple of seconds. He had no time to process what came next.
Graves had taken a huge gamble, both in terms of his own safety and that of the entire base. To force a coolant leak into the blower system, he needed to break through the huge regulators that governed air flow between the mixer-compressor assembly and the ducts themselves. In short, he wanted to do exactly what Jalaluddin sought to do, but on a far smaller scale. So he'd elected to relieve pressure in one tank by feeding coolant directly into the heat exchanger's mixer--an emergency procedure tailored for the unlikely event the heat rejection unit went completely south and heat build up started to run away. Left to its own devices, the entire process should have been harmless. But Graves had thrown the coolant pump wide open and held it there. The result was spectacular to say the least.
At the same time the mixer regulator went, the blower shutters for 14 slammed shut. As some coolant proceeded into the ducts past the shutters anyway, the other five substation's shutters slammed down in cascade. Likewise, the seal between the fields and the observatory closed, not strong enough to withstand a major blowout but more than capable of holding back the minuscule amount of overpressure heading its way. Noah and Graves had broken Jalaluddin's last play a full 6 minutes, 23 seconds before disaster struck.
Five seconds later, the compressor next to Graves ruptured, ejecting swimming pools worth liquid nitrogen in a matter of seconds. He'd never know whether Noah had actually pushed the button, as the 7 degree kelvin slush washed over him and started its deadly work on the rest of the substation structure.
Dr. Noah Abel had just enough time to turn to face his death roaring and tearing its way to the hatch. The supercool liquid sliced through it like paper, ending him before the main tank finally gave way and hurled a thousand ton plume of debris, dust and ice three miles high.
#
Carly Lyle lay beside herself in a hospital bed, her mind shutting steering away from the pain by playing out the report she had yet to write. Antenna 14 was one of six that lay at the end of independent return loops to general life support. The blowers removed a considerable amount of heat from the ambient which was then redistributed via the same system into the main campus. The system made sense economically, sharply reducing the amount of waste heat to be rejected that produced by the blowers themselves all while supplying a good fraction of the observatory's heating needs. That was all Zadin Jalaluddin needed to kill upwards 3,000 men and women. Had all six coolant tanks ruptured with the blower shutters open, the shock wave would've torn through any seal from the substations to the far side researchers' dormitories. The entire base would've been open to space, spilling atmosphere too quickly and from too many places. The patches would save a few, for a time, but the remaining air would last for only days. By the time help arrived, only a lucky few--and the bastard who'd killed everyone else--would be left.
The only thing Jalaluddin hadn't counted on was Cryoman 1/c Banks tagging out two of the blower control buses before he'd come to terms that his mission was a suicidal one. Had he accepted from the start that his own life was the price for success, in all likelihood he would have turned Shenandoah into a mausoleum. Instead, he'd killed Banks to derail the inspection detail, convinced he could get away clean with mass murder. But Admiral Rice's new instructions for the work crews--particularly the order for everyone in the now five-man team to keep independent logs--proved another stumbling block. Any follow on investigation would uncover his obvious hand in sabotaging the remaining buses. Jalaluddin decided he was going to die, and so he acted.
The name Noah Abel appears almost nowhere outside of research journals and press releases before June 2035. When AP finally broke the story, the public was reeling from the Flight 87 hijacking and the subsequent nuclear attack on Bangalore--at the time considered the first act of space terrorism. Nobody cared that Jalaluddin's plot had largely been foiled, or that the loss of life could have been considerably higher. Congress broiled with demands to drag the Administration forward to testify, but in the end the national security argument won the day.
Agent Lyle left the base hospital on 17 December 2033 and left Shenandoah with Angelo Minetti a week later. When the story broke two years later, the better informed in the media spent months hounding Lyle and her team. The circus didn't last long, though, as the latest flare up between India and Pakistan quickly drew garrulous minds from "Murder on the Moon." Noah Abel's name joined that of Andy Pu, the Rabins, and Daniel Pearl as time scrubbed clean the memory of Americans weary of extremism. After retiring, Lyle wrote a moderately successful book about her investigation at the Mare Ingenii Research Institute. Though Lyle mentions Abel only twice, Cally Shu pulled at this thin reed until she discovered the NCIS case file and the oft-handed mention of SCARBOROUGH.