Prologue

  On the outskirts of our solar system there is a ring of broken lumps of rock and ice. They form a roughly spherical border marking the outer reaches of the sun’s influence, a loosely strung fence around our stellar home. Against this backdrop, a meteor the size of Central Park flies past.

  Not that its size is particularly unusual.

  Size, like speed and distance, can only be judged as usual or unusual when taken in context. So as we consider this particular meteor, even though it is the size of Central Park, or about three times the size of the largest aircraft carrier on earth, it is dwarfed by the multitude of extra-stellar debris relegated by chance to the cold, distant reaches of our sun’s gravitational well, which, in turn, are made minuscule, negligible even, by the unfathomable expanse of the void beyond.

  All that said, no human eye could compare them in order to judge the disparity. For even if someone happened to be in the vicinity as this particular meteor came by, its passing would be so fantastically fast as to be imperceptible, and would do little to break what would be a phenomenally boring existence for this lone stellar observer. For this is a place that any vessel we could build would take more than a lifetime to reach, and it would probably be even less interesting up close than it has been in the glimpses we have snatched by telescope. No, to travel from this point to the earth in the two months it will take this meteor to get there, you would have to be going at the blurringly astonishing rate of two thousand kilometers every second, at which speed you could circumnavigate the Earth twice in less than a minute.

  Of course, this meteor’s seemingly incredible speed is also not that exceptional, for an interstellar body, which, though rare, are not unheard of.

  No, the only truly exceptional thing about this meteor is that spread out behind it by a complex, invisible web of magnetic forces is a vast, atom-thin surface, so thin that matter passes through it unhindered, leaving it unharmed by the cosmic dust that would otherwise tear anything so huge to shreds. Its delicate mesh reflects only a small wavelength of plasma. Catching and resisting this particular wavelength, however, in this ocean-sized parachute, means that the very sun the meteor is rushing toward is filling the thousand-mile-wide radiation chute with solar wind.

  Indeed the only exceptional thing about this meteor is not its size, which is puny compared to its neighbors, or its spectacular speed, which, though rare, is far from unique. No, what would have astonished any spectator that could see this particular meteor is that this particular meteor is slowing down.

  *

  One month after passing the proxy border to the solar system, the meteor passes Jupiter. As it does so, the magnetic fields that form and control the vast sail behind it shimmer almost imperceptibly with the first hints of the active deep space detection systems coming from its destination. After a few hours of final adjustment, the magnetic ties holding the entire solar sail together collapse. In an instant, any possible hint of the parachute they had caused to form vanish like a puff of smoke in the wind.

  Under the steadily increasing wash of radar signals, the meteor then begins to slowly and deliberately disintegrate.

  Part 1

  Chapter 1: Under the Radar

  The walls of Neal’s cube are the type that can be torn down and rebuilt, reconfigured to a hundred different formats, the quintessential faceless, formless walls that enclose millions of office workers across middle-class Eur-merica. You would not know from its creative shades of grey that this cube, and its dated Compaq PC, sit less than a quarter of a mile from the US Air Force Phased Array Antenna.

  The magnificent and complex phased array was designed for deep space object tracking back in the 1960s by the finest minds in the world, when the finest minds in the world were all working on either looking into space, or getting into it. Four months before its completion, it was appropriated by the Air Force that had discretely facilitated its federal funding. They had covertly helped drive its completion in order to use it to track satellites, specifically Russian satellites.

  In return for everyone’s hard work a team of civilian scientists were allowed to monitor non-military targets with any unassigned bandwidth during off-peak hours. Sixty years later, with the finest minds now working at Apple, the once extensive civilian team had been whittled down to four doctorate students from a nearby technical college in Phoenix.

  This is due, in part, to the fact that “unassigned bandwidth during off-peak hours” translated to being on site from 11pm to 6am every day for perhaps two or three hours of highly interruptible system access.

  The only upside of the job was that Neal got to tell the young students at the university bar that he monitors space for the next planet-killing meteor. Unfortunately for Neal’s love life, however, was the fact that while Armageddon may have made them all seem like superheroes, between each earth-shattering stellar event there are several million years of thoroughly unsexy peace and quiet, and it felt like he spent roughly that at the observatory each night looking up porn on the government’s PCs, usually in a vain search for a photo of a doppelganger of one of his female PhD students doing unspeakable acts with a slightly balding 39 year-old like himself.

  Interspersed amongst this carpel tunnel inducing work, he would somewhat diligently log the trajectories of random debris in the solar system, most of which would never come closer to Earth than our nearest planetary neighbors. Every few months he would track an incident, typically a cluster of rock and ice that would come close enough to be pulled in by our orb’s mass, only to be consumed in the atmosphere like fireworks. So Neal was not particularly excited when his computer automatically shifted his view to the system monitoring control screen, interrupting his typing into Google search so that “…orority web-c…” appeared in the control field before he stopped his left-handed typing and looked at the data on the screen.

  The screen was now filled with two windows. The largest one contained an inverted triangular graphic, which was an interpretation of the 3-D space in the hemisphere viewable by the array. To its left was a scrolling list of data apparently designed to be as unintelligible as possible, but which conveyed vast swathes of information to the educated eye.

  The graphic showed the various objects being tracked by the system, at least those not denoted as ‘classified’ by the system’s all-seeing military operators in another part of the building. At the extreme range of the device, a small cloud had resolved itself, highlighted in red as a new/unidentified/unclassified object.

  The list of information on the cluster was lengthening as more data became available. Speed, estimated origin, estimated volume, estimated track; the last of which was bolded, and was the reason the system had automatically flagged the record and notified Neal’s team. Collision potential: 16%. Neal was intrigued.

  Clearing the command field, he typed “execute collision parameter analysis” and sat back. A new box overlaid the last with the automatically assigned number of the incident, the date, and the title of Neal’s request at the top. The rest of the window remained blank while the system gathered more data. Normal turnaround time would be about forty-five minutes for something this far away, so Neal decided to get some shut-eye while the system worked.

  After thirty-five minutes the phone rang. Neal started, it was now nearly four in the morning, and the only noise in the cramped space was the whirring of his antiquated hard drive and some Kings of Leon playing through his media player.

  Neal put his circa 1975 brown office telephone to his ear: “Yup?”

  “This is ANFPS85 control, please confirm identity.”

  “Errr, I don’t mean to be a dick here, my friend, but didn’t you call me.”

  “We have a system request from your terminal, please confirm identity.”

  “Neal,” he said, then, “you need my number, wait, err…ID number: ANFPS85…err…65239.” ANFPS85 Control waited a moment while Neal figured out that there was something else missing. “Oh, right, the cool part, right, yeah. My clearance ID password thingy is eleanorrigby66.”

  “Identity confirmed, please state the reason for your bandwidth request.”

  “The object …” he waited, expecting them to see what he was talking about, then continued, “it’s kind of big and it’s heading our way. Well, I think it is, at least the system thinks it could be, and I thought it best to get more data.”

  “I have the object record now, sir. At this range this would require more bandwidth from the array than is assigned to your program.”

  “Are you using it for something else?”

  “You do not have clearance for that information, sir.”

  Neal sighed: the joys of working with the military. “Well, when will it be available?”

  “Details of the availability of the array are classified, sir.”

  “Can I use the system when it becomes available … please?”

  “I can neither confirm nor deny that the system is currently unavailable, sir.”

  “Wait, let me get this … you know … clear: you cannot tell me whether the system is in use, so it sounds like you are telling me that whether it is or not, you wouldn’t let me use it, in case me using it somehow informed me as to its being previously … unused … because you think that info would be useful to me in some way. My friend, I think this conversation is actually making me stupider.”

  The slight delay on the line was the strongest display of emotion from control that he woul

d get.

  “Your request is being reviewed by the site commander, sir. Would you like to stay on the line, or have us contact you when there is a confirm … putting the commander online, sir, hold the line, please …” a new voice came on the line, older, stronger, “Hey, Neal is it? This is Colonel Milton. I see from your file that you’ve been here for six years, huh?”

  Neal frowned at this new turn in the conversation. “What, on this call?”

  The colonel’s skin was proverbially thin from years of having his ass unsubtly kissed by his subordinates, but also because of that his awareness of when he was being mocked was accordingly poor and the swipe passed over his head. “Yes, well, you’ve been given P5 clearance so I have the authority to decide whether you should see this.”

  “And …” Neal said, expectantly.

  “Yes, Mr. Danielson, we’ve run the full collision potential analysis you asked for, I’m sending you the data now.”

  With that, the Collision Analysis box populated with a string of data: number of objects in cluster, estimated trajectory, estimated entry time/point/angle of insertion. To get this much data this far out would take most of the array’s huge number of individual antennae focusing on the object.

  “So you don’t have bandwidth to analyze the incident, huh?” said Neal.

  “I wanted to see the results before releasing them to a civilian,” replied the colonel.

  “To get this much detail must have taken pretty much all the nine thousand antennae in the array, I guess you had some availability.”

  “Hey, like you said, it’s 3:48 on a Tuesday morning, what else were we doing with the system?” The colonel laughed.

  “Ah, facetiousness, wonderful. Why didn’t your boy just tell me it was running?”

  “Sergeant Cyr wasn’t at liberty to tell you that, you are need-to-know on these things, and I decide what you need to know. Deal with it, son.”

  Son … really, so we’re doing this now.

  “Well, pops, now that I can see the file, this looks pretty significant, what do you say you give me file edit rights and I can start an analysis and write-up.”

  The colonel paused a moment, then said, “The full data shows it isn’t as large as it seemed at first, just a bunch of debris. We are downgrading to potential atmospheric incident. Assigning file to your team now, you can have it.”

  “So if it isn’t going to kill people then you aren’t interested, is that it?’

  “Yes, son, that’s pretty much it.”

  And the line died.

  He was right, of course. It had potential: plenty of small pieces to burn up and create a bit of a show, but for the fact that they would probably be spread all over the place. Bits and pieces would slide in all over the globe, as its arrival was so oblique as to give all the random chunks of ice and rock long, arching trajectories. The few pieces that didn’t bounce right off our ionosphere would burn up all over the stratosphere like a handful of pebbles hurled, en masse, across a lake.

  Neal got on with typing up the entry:

  NOTICE OF ANTICIPATED ATMOSPHERIC PENETRATION

  Time logged: 0344 MST

  Date logged: September 20

  Location: AMFPS85 Radar Array

  Noted by: Neal P. Danielson

  Note Type: First Contact [He just loved typing that]

  Est. Date of Atmospheric Penetration: October 4

  Est. Volume: 2.5 km3

  Est. Mass: Not Enough Data to Calculate

  Impact Probability: Limited, some debris

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

  Incident ID: ColonelMiltonBlows

  Chapter 2: Rude Awakening

  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.

 

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