[The Fear Saga 01] - Fear the Sky (2014), page 2
![[The Fear Saga 01] - Fear the Sky (2014)](https://picture.bookfrom.net/img/stephen-moss/the_fear_saga_01_-_fear_the_sky_2014.jpg "[The Fear Saga 01] - Fear the Sky (2014)")
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.”
He took a breath and continued, walking around the colonel to the console as the junior officer seated at it leant to one side to allow him to reach the keyboard. “Sooo, if these guys don’t seem to have many of those gaps,” he said as he typed into the machine, looking up at the screen as the mass estimates changed under his fingertips, and the computer began to recalculate the way the objects would react to the earth’s atmosphere, “they may have a higher mass to volume ratio, they may be denser, in which case they … might … do … this.” he said as he clicked enter on the last of the reconfigured estimates.
They all looked at the screen as the alternate entry statistics appeared.
The colonel’s obstinacy was not born of ignorance or stupidity, as it turned out, but of long practice of authority, and he was just as quick as his neighbors to see the implications of the new numbers.
“Yes, this would make it more interesting,” he said quietly.
Revised: NOTICE OF ANTICIPATED ATMOSPHERIC PENETRATION
Time logged: 0344 MST
Date logged: September 20
Time Last Modified: 1257 MST
Date Last Modified: September 27
Location: AMFPS85 Radar Array
Noted by: Neal P. Danielson
Note Type: First Contact [never gets old]
Est. Date/Time of Atmospheric Penetration: October 4, ~10am GMT
Est. Volume: ~1.35 km3
Est. Mass: ~116k tons
Impact Probability: Scattered debris
Est. Impact Location(s): Multiple sites: all oceanic,
- North Atlantic, two impacts possible near Outer Hebrides, Scotland, and the Channel Islands
- Northern Pacific, two impacts possible across northern Pacific near Bering Strait
- East China Sea, impact possible northwest of the Okinawa archipelago
- Indian Ocean, two impacts possible: one in the Bay of Bengal near Sri Lanka, one southwest of the Kathiawar peninsula in the Arabian Sea
Incident ID: ColonelMiltonBlows
Chapter 3: Well-Lit Corridors
The colonel walked behind and to the right of the pair of scientists down a long, neon-lit beige corridor, herding them to turn left or right as required. Neal had tried to let the colonel go first as the man knew where they were going better than either Neal or Laurie did, but the military man’s training would not allow him to have civilians walking behind him in the high-security facility, out of sight, as it were.
As they walked in relative silence, Neal noted that unlike himself, Dr. West had not tried to argue the point with Colonel Milton, and had simply started walking in the direction indicated by the colonel’s outstretched hand. As she was clearly not one to blindly follow societal gender mores, it was obvious that she was simply more aware of which arguments could and could not be won with men like the colonel. The point was not lost on Neal, and he decided to try and follow her lead in the upcoming military briefing, noting with satisfaction that he was not as pigheaded as his ex-girlfriends typically said he was.
“We’ll be taking this next left.” the colonel interjected from behind them, continuing as they turned onto another uncomfortably well-lit beige corridor, “We’ll be meeting in Teleconference Room B526 up here on the right.”
As they approached Barrett Milton stepped to the door before them and, pausing as he clasped its handle, spoke in an aside to Neal, “Before we go in I just wanted to confirm that you changed the Incident ID on that report, I had meant to mention it in the control room but our conversation went a bit long and it slipped my mind.”
“Yes,” said Neal in a similarly low voice, remembering the report’s less than diplomatic name, “about that.” The colonel froze at Neal’s hesitation and frowned very sharply at the scientist, apparently considering bringing his not inconsiderable martial training to bear on the man.
The colonel spoke quietly but sharply, “I like a joke as much as the next man, Mr. Danielson, but this is going in front of important…”
“No, Colonel, no. You misunderstand. I tried to change it, I really did,” Neal held his hands up to placate Barrett, remembering his very real and quite frantic attempts to edit out his quip once the incident came into the spotlight as ‘requiring further investigation.’
“But apparently once you submit a report,” Neal continued, “you cannot edit its ID, something about ‘tracking’ and ‘validity of data.’”
The truth was that Neal didn’t dislike this Colonel Barrett Milton guy nearly as much in person as he had after their initial phone conversation. Plus the ‘guy’ in question was roughly six foot, his angular jaw and rugged features emphasized by a clearly enthusiastic athletic regime, and it was obvious to Neal that the man could happily beat the younger, but somewhat flabbier, scientist to a Tropicana pulp if the inclination grabbed him.
Like before, Laurie saw an opportune moment to interpose herself between the two men, this time physically as well as metaphorically, and as she pushed past them toward the door, she said, “We need not mention the title as we introduce the topic, Colonel, nor, I’m sure, does anyone read that part of the report.”
As she said, this she remembered, with a well-hidden smile, the name of the incident, and hoped her analysis of the reading habits of the room they were about to enter was accurate. The colonel contemplated the number of far worse things he had baked into official reports as a lieutenant to spite his fellow junior officers and calmed himself. After a moment’s pause, he released his grasp on the door handle so the doctor could enter the conference room, his sheen of professionalism and authority rising over his anger, like rising water snuffing a flame.
Neal followed Laurie into the room, apologizing silently to the once again unflappable colonel as he passed. The room contained a long table with about five chairs along each side, and one at the end nearest the door. An extremely large flat screen was at the other end with a camera mounted above it, and flat, omni-directional microphones were arranged intermittently along the table’s length.
An air force technician sat about midway down the table at a small touch screen console, setting up the link with the meeting’s other participants at the Pentagon. The screen itself simply said “WAITING FOR PARTICIPANTS” with the kind of infinite, machine patience that sentience simply won’t allow.
Standing to one side was the colonel’s aide, who had left the control room ahead of them to make sure the conference room was set up. As Laurie took a seat, the screen came to life and a gathering meeting showed on the other end. It was full of highly decorated senior officers and a couple of more expensively dressed, if less well-decorated civilians who were busy sitting their suited selves down, arranging their papers while they arranged their thoughts.
“The link is muted,” prompted the technician as he went to leave, “the sound control is here,” he said, pointing at a small button and volume control next to the microphone in front of the colonel.
The colonel looked at the button and nodded, but did not look up from his seat at the head of the table as the technician left. The colonel’s aide went to the door and confirmed it was securely closed, per procedure, and then took one of several seats arranged around the outside of the room, leaving eight empty chairs at the large, immaculately polished conference table itself. Neal watched her sit on the outside, and was unsure whether he was happy to be at the grown-ups table, or annoyed at the triumph of hierarchy over practicality. Then he thanked the gods that he wasn’t in the military himself, and took the seat opposite Laurie, with the colonel between them at the table’s head.
“The meeting will be led by General Pickler of Air Force Intelligence,” the colonel said, indicating the man at the head of the table on the big screen. “So you know, Mr. Danielson, they can see several other conference rooms from their screen. My report will be one of several that will be made at this meeting, and the objects of your report will be one of several I will be reporting on. You will speak only when asked to, and only on the topic of your report. This meeting will be classified level P5 based on the presence of you and some other low-level civilians. So you know, I checked and confirmed that your Armed Services Secrecy Act Agreement is up to date prior to approving your attendance here today. Consider yourself informed that this meeting most definitely falls under the auspices of that contract.”
Neal noticed the colonel was looking specifically at him as he said this. He nodded seriously, but inside him he felt two conflicting emotions coming to the forefront as the colonel spoke: firstly, how damn cool it was to be attending a classified meeting, but secondly, it was also dawning on him that he had clearly just signed up for what was probably going to be two hours of serious tedium. This would be a thorough test of his inherent allergy to monotony, delivered as only the military can deliver monotony. He only hoped he didn’t actually fall asleep as he had so often in class. No, that would be bad, he thought. Shit, have to stay awake, he thought. Shit, what am I doing here, he thought.
