[The Fear Saga 01] - Fear the Sky (2014) (2 page)

Est. Impact Location(s): Not Enough Data to Calculate

Incident ID: ColonelMiltonBlows

The shades were drawn against the sun, and McDonald’s breakfast wrappers were strewn across the coffee table. In the studio apartment the full bed doubled as a couch for Neal’s limited friends. Also in the room were two unmatched armchairs, one an upright, stately number with a detailed, if worn, light blue and yellow floral pattern, and the other a puffy Naugahyde La-Z-Boy, its oversized pillows overhanging each other like the layers of fat that probably adorned its original owner. Both had been neighborhood front lawn acquisitions of a younger, even poorer Neal, and both were now covered in jeans, college tracksuits, and old T-shirts of once-cool bands: the apparent standard issue uniform of every research student Neal had ever met.

The VOIP phone rang on the old laptop Neal used as a phone/stereo/TV resting on top of the slew of outdated and unread aeronautics and engineering magazines that cluttered his coffee table. It was 11:15am, and Neal had been sleeping off his Sausage McMuffin dinner/breakfast for two hours.

After a struggle to realign himself in bed so he could reach the PC and answer the phone, a red-eyed, unshaven Neal pressed
enter
. “Who is this?”

Out of his PC’s small speakers the stern voice of the Array’s site commander came, “Danielson, Colonel Milton, not a fan of that incident ID. Rename it. Anyway, it’s been a week and there is new data on our friend.”

Animating now, Neal swung his legs off the crumpled sheets and his mind’s eye tried to focus on the swathe of data and analysis he had prepared on the incident since its discovery. “Wait, so it is really coming? That is awesome. Is it as interesting as I have been telling you guys it would be?”

“We have several billion dollars of equipment up there that is about to come under assault by a hailstorm of interstellar rubble, I am glad this interests you.”

Neal frowned again. “Colonel, the chances of coming into direct contact with an interstellar object are phenomenally low. This is the first time we have ever detected, let alone crossed paths with one, and you’re worried about satellite TV. Scientists across the globe would kill to see what you are seeing right now.”

“Yes, well, wish granted. There is a small briefing at 1300 hours. Come in the main entrance by noon, a liaison will meet you there and bring you to the con so you can look at the numbers beforehand.”

“Wait … that’s in …”

“Be sure to bring your driver’s license and ANFPS ID, otherwise you will be denied entry, liaison or no.”

After objecting for a moment more about the short notice, Neal realized that the colonel had closed the call. “Fuck me,” he said as he stood up, and while sniffing for semi-clean clothes on the La-Z-Boy, he mumbled sullenly about the military, going into some detail about what Colonel Milton’s mother would apparently do if strapped for cash in Tijuana.

* * *

Neal looked around the large main control room and thought to himself that it was as far advanced from his cube in the civilian section of the building as Einstein was from George W. A single huge screen about twenty feet across showed a huge graphical representation of 3-D space. In many ways it was the same view Neal could see on the small screen at his desk only with vastly more information displayed, and in far higher resolution.

As with his view, this vast screen’s perspective could also be rotated to show the various views of the objects’ approaches and orbits, their trajectories and speeds. Tracked simultaneously were at least three or four dozen satellites currently in this section of Earth’s orbital plane, one basically functional space station, various USSR era million-dollar scrap heaps, and one impending meteor shower.

A female officer in her early thirties sat at the command console while her commanding officer, Colonel Barrett Milton, stood behind and to her left. He turned to size Neal up as he was escorted into the room, then the colonel turned back to the main screen as Neal walked up, staying focused on the screen as Neal was announced by the liaison. The colonel dismissed the thankless private without ceremony and waited a moment while Neal took in the information on the big screen.

The room was about the size of a squash court, oriented towards the inextricably cool main screen that no doubt cost more than Neal made in several years. Ten consoles faced the screen about fifteen feet back from it, in a room that clearly followed some military control center design standard: the walls were so as not to detract from the main screen, which in turn was faced by the array of computer stations in two banks.

At these stations sat grim-faced operators, waiting to respond to the commands of the two or three senior officers that could either sit at the central command console that none of them knew how to use, stand behind an unfortunate junior nominated to sit there for them, or bark orders from the balcony that ran across the back of the room about four feet above the main floor. Behind the balcony were two offices; both were glass walled so that the officers that typically sat in them could watch proceedings while pretending to do important things.

Neal neither noticed nor cared about the layout of the room, or the uppity way the colonel had greeted him, or rather, had not greeted him. He did not even see the somewhat elderly woman standing on the raised balcony, quietly watching the proceedings.

Despite his ignominious job and unimpressive resume, Neal was a surprisingly bright man. His downfall had been that he had always had trouble pretending to care what professors often stupider than he, always less intuitive, but nonetheless far more politically and socially aware had been speaking about. The fact that he had made it through his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in astrophysics almost in spite of himself demonstrated just how sharp he was. So when he was presented with a tool as impressive as this huge display and the computers supplying it, with such a plethora of information previously unavailable to him, he was, to say the least, engrossed.

After noticing several satellites he had notably not seen on his own views, he focused in on the object of his previous week’s hard work. It had now resolved into a hazy cloud of what was, according to the system, 156 chunks of varying size, but few larger than a Volkswagen. Basic information was presented in a list to the right of each object in a small semi-transparent table. As the cluster of debris moved across the screen, the table moved with it.

“Like I said on the phone,” the colonel began, still facing the screen, “we have a briefing at 1300 hours and I wanted you on hand to talk to the details of your report.”

Neal was still trying to digest just how much he hadn’t been privy to before, and which he had about thirty minutes to come to grips with before the briefing. Staring at the screen and speaking in a distracted tone, Neal said, “Yeah, I just wish you hadn’t called me so early, did I really need to be here this soon?”

The colonel turned his head, looking at Neal like he was a pestering child, and tried think of a response, but he was neither practiced in, nor did he enjoy, banter.

At a request from the colonel the view reoriented to show the impending shower’s approach on a cross section of the Earth and started scrolling to show each piece’s trajectory. Of the cluster, about twenty pieces were singled out as large enough to survive entry into the earth’s atmosphere, but very few of the estimated trajectories showed an entry, the rest all showed as bouncing off the atmosphere, due to their oblique angles of approach and limited mass.

Neal studied the figures and graphics. “Those trajectories are wrong, you haven’t correctly estimated the mass of the objects; they won’t all behave like that.” He turned to the lady at the console, “Didn’t you use the numbers in my report?”

Before she could speak, the colonel answered for her, “The computer estimated the weights based on data your civilian predecessors have compiled over the years. Were those numbers wrong?”

“No,” Neal braced himself for a long, laborious explanation, then seemed to change his mind. “Look, there are other factors to consider that appear here but have not been seen previously. Maybe I could just …” Neal started towards the central console, but was intercepted by the colonel.

“Hold on there, Mr. Danielson. If you could explain these ‘factors’ to me before we go changing our estimates, I would appreciate it,” the colonel prompted, standing in his way and turning, now, to face the scientist.

Neal sighed a moment, then elaborated, “The objects are behaving slightly anomalously. There is no larger, central mass, so some, if not all of them, must have been joined as a cohesive mass at some point. Some point not too long ago, in fact,” Neal postulated.

“Why does there have to be a central mass?” the colonel said, shrugging slightly.

Neal mimicked the shrug and said, “Why would they be so close together if there wasn’t? Listen, Colonel, these objects have come a phenomenally long way from whatever orbital mishap started them on their journey, if they were all separate objects then there would need to be something larger,
with enough gravitational pull
,” he emphasized, “to keep them all together as they travelled. Otherwise they would have separated over time. Heck, over the kind of distances we are talking about, they would be light-years apart by now. Unless they had had some proverbial glue binding them.”

“Well there clearly is no ‘glue’ now, so your theory must be incorrect.”

Neal shook his head at the remark, but summoning up his patience, he went on, “There is that, but still, despite the apparent lack of a large mass, it is very clear that the objects are, even over the last week, pulling apart from each other. It is slow, but they are more spread out now than they were when we first spotted them. Given time I could probably extrapolate the time they separated.” Neal was aware he was almost pleading, but this was the most interesting thing that had happened to him in a quite a while and he was so very desperate for anything in his life that might be termed interesting.

The colonel paused a moment, then said, “Mr. Danielson, this is all very well, but I still don’t see how this would affect the mass calculations.” In fact the colonel was wondering if he should be getting frustrated with Neal for wasting his time, or with himself for not getting it. He decided to remain passive until he found out, and by passive he meant obstinate.

The hitherto silent woman at the back of the room chose this moment to interject, stepping slowly down the steps from the balcony to the main floor and introducing herself as she went. “Neal Danielson, Laurie West, I’m an astrophysicist myself, on occasion.”

Neal whirled to her, momentarily sullen in reaction to the apparent additional assault on his expertise. But his wariness wavered when her name came to him, and he tilted his head inquisitively.

“Dr. Laurie West … of the Hubble Institute?” he said, his right hand starting to rise from his side to meet hers as she approached, but moving slowly, as if its cooperation were dependent on her response.

But she merely nodded and shrugged offhandedly, as though the title were a prank she had played in college which she hoped no one had heard about. They shook hands, Neal shaking hers with increasing enthusiasm as it sank in that he was talking to one of the premier physicists of this, or frankly any other time.

She returned the handshake in kind, not one to think that her title made her better than the clearly quite sharp man in front of her, and then said, “So your report posits that our estimate of the objects’ masses should account for their having recently been a part of a cohesive mass. I agree that it is almost certain that they were, until recently, part of a larger whole. Too close together, as you say, and diverging even now.” He nodded and she smiled, but then she frowned and carried on. “But why would this affect the mass estimates?” she asked, her hazel-grey eyes glittering with intelligence and curiosity as she released his hand but held his gaze.

Reticent at this rare opportunity to talk shop with someone that actually knew more than he did, Neal started in slowly, choosing his words carefully to try and avoid a misstep. “Well, it would seem to me that an object’s mass would probably be affected by its environment over time, therefore if these were previously, recently, even, part of a larger whole, then they would have been compressed into denser mass, giving them a higher mass to volume ratio. Their volatiles would also not have been exposed to as much freeze-cracking and UV bombardment.”

She didn’t hesitate for a second, “But the exposure to vacuum that they are having now would have the same effect on their volatiles as it does on any other meteor, probably more drastic due to their previous lack of exposure, so wouldn’t they have stabilized to something more like the mass norms originally estimated once separation occurred?”

Neal had had the benefit of thinking about this for a week versus her five minutes, but she was still only just behind him. “Well, that was my thought too,” he said, “but then I reviewed the imagery that the array had compiled and noticed that, well, there is surprisingly little debris.”

“And if there had been a sudden combustion of volatiles due to exposure, there would be a cloud, probably even a tail.” she continued his thought.

“Exactly. No tail, very little debris.” he said with satisfaction.

The colonel looked on, taking some small satisfaction in the knowledge that if she had needed to have it explained to her, then
his
ignorance was more than acceptable, and felt suddenly more comfortable interposing his own question: “Well, I guess I am still unclear why this would affect the estimates.”

Neal looked to Laurie as if to say, would you like to field this? But she chose to deflect the courtesy.

“Please, go on.” she prompted with a beneficent, almost parental smile.

He smiled in return and turned to the colonel, saying, “If they haven’t exuded volatiles it means they don’t, or rather didn’t, have very much of them, which means that unlike typical interstellar masses they may not have the, well, the holes and gaps that escaping gases would leave behind as they either combusted or froze under the alternate exposure to the freezing vacuum and the sun’s unfiltered barrage. Previous estimating tools assume that a significant proportion of an interstellar object’s total volume is, in fact, empty, nothing there: fractures and gaps left by escaping gases.”