by Lee Brainard
THE ROGUE
PLANETS SHAKEN
by
Lee W. Brainard
Soothkeep Press
This book is a work of fiction. Apart from several mere mentions of actual people, the characters are fictitious. Any resemblance to people living or dead is purely coincidental.
If perchance my conception of events—geopolitical, political, astronomical, or prophetic—proves to be uncannily close to what actually transpires, let it be known beforehand that I do not have access to inside information, nor do I have the ability and wherewithal to hack into computers storing classified information, nor am I a prophet who enjoys special communication from God. The scenario portrayed is just an educated guess based on various factors: biblical prophecy, geopolitical trends, historical precedent, ancient history, ancient cosmology, electric universe cosmology, and a fertile imagination.
© 2017 by Lee W. Brainard
Soothkeep Press
Cover design: Bespoke Book Covers, Bedfordshire, UK
Formatting: Polgarus Studio
Table of Contents
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1
Los Angeles
Friday afternoon, November 23, 2018
Ariele stared at the package perplexed. The return address was Shadowchaser, 107 Walnut Lane, Mentor, KS. The cancellation stamp said Salina, KS. Nothing rang a bell. She had no family or friends in that part of Kansas. None that she knew of anyways. And none of her friends ever used the moniker Shadowchaser. She double checked the address. Ariele Serrafe, 420 Hancock St., Bancroft Apts., Unit F8, Los Angeles, CA 90031. That’s definitely me. She tweaked her mouth and raised her eyebrows. Weird.
She dropped the package notice into the trash receptacle stationed next to the wall of mailboxes, placed the parcel box key inside the parcel box, and shut the door. Then she turned her attention back to her mailbox, which was still sitting open, retrieved her mail, closed her box, returned her mailbox key to her purse, and headed toward her apartment, her eyes nervously scanning the area for the packs of youths that milled around aimlessly most afternoons and every evening. Her father—her dear papai—disliked her current living situation, an older, edgy neighborhood east of Chinatown. He constantly reminded her that she could afford better. True, she could afford better. But she had her life mapped out. And the first thing on her list was buying a homestead in the San Gabriels. She longed for an orchard with fruit trees, a garden, a few chickens, a hand-pump, and a woodstove. Living here was part of her plan to get there. Alas, things weren’t going quite like she had planned. Property values were climbing almost as fast as her savings account. She sighed.
To her relief, she saw none of the gang-looking types, who made her nervous, not even at the basketball court or the soda machine by the laundry room. She relaxed her pace and turned her attention from scanning for potential threats to surveying the monotony of her surroundings. The dreary exterior of her building near the southeast corner of the complex was indistinguishable from the other buildings. The three dozen time-worn brick buildings, one-apartment deep and three-stories high, were clustered around courtyards of trampled grass and aging concrete like gaunt elephants at withered waterholes. Though the scene was as familiar as the back of her hand, it was awkwardly foreign. She didn’t feel at home here and likely never would.
She turned up the sidewalk to her apartment, which was in the middle of the building on the second story, bounded up the stairs to her landing, and leaned against her door, pinning the package with her belly. While holding the doorknob with one hand, she inserted the key with the other and tried to turn it. Rats! Six calls to the manager and I still have to fight this door knob! If I ever have a guy in my life, he’s going to be a fix-it kind of guy.
Once inside she set the package on the kitchen table and inspected it. Who is this Shadowchaser? She opened her laptop and searched the White Pages for the return address. Nothing. She searched again for a Walnut Lane in Mentor, Kansas. Again nothing. She brought up a map of Mentor, Kansas and looked for Walnut Lane. There was no such street. In fact, there almost was no town. The address appeared to be bogus.
She examined the package once again, looking for tell-tale clues that she might have missed. Aha! There was no handwriting on the package. Both the address and the return address were printed on computer-generated mailing labels. She suspected that whoever sent the package didn’t want to be traced or identified. Shadowchaser probably didn’t even live in Kansas.
She removed the brown wrapping paper and uncovered a shoebox—Christian Louboutin pumps, size 7. Probably not a guy. She lifted the cover and peered inside. It was stuffed to overflowing with wadded pages from the Salina Journal. Under the wadding she found a folded manila envelope with the word “ROGUE” glued on—a single “R” and “OGUE.” They appeared to have been cut from the covers of women’s magazines. Probably Redbook and Vogue . . . that’s another one for a woman.
She opened the envelope with a scissor tip and dumped the contents. A single DVD and a several-page typed letter, neatly folded, spilled onto the table. Intrigued, she unfolded the letter and read the top page. It was a cryptic note.
The social was boring.
We sat on swings under the stars, swapping stories.
We laughed at conspiracy theories.
We talked about end-of-the-world scenarios.
We shared directions:
You were headed for sky time in the Golden State,
I for computer time in a cubicle out East.
We shared ambitions:
My pursuit was TNOs,
Your life focus was NEOs.
Here's an NEO you may wish you never heard about.
Ariele smiled. The who part of the mystery was solved—kind of. Shadowchaser had been a classmate at California Institute of Technology, Caltech for short. They had shared numerous classes starting with Astronomy 101 during their freshman year, but they had never been close friends. Both had a passion for astronomy and were exceptionally bright—straight As from junior high through their graduate work. Both had obtained a PhD in astrophysics.
She could see her face clearly, but she was drawing a blank. What was her name? . . . the name was trying to claw its way out of her subconsciousness . . . Irina . . . Irina Kirilenko. The memories came flooding back. Their differences went far beyond the fact that Irina had focused on trans-Neptunian objects while she had focused on near-Earth objects. They were different, like princess and
hippie-chick.
Irina was religious, some kind of evangelical. Ariele wasn’t religious, though she was culturally Jewish and attracted to Eastern mysticism.
Irina didn’t drink. Ariele did. Though she had grown out of the party scene before the end of her sophomore year, she had continued her little indulgence every Friday night with the Rat Pack, as they styled themselves. The five of them studied, laughed, and sipped bitter liquors, like retsina and vermouth, in emulation of their favorite intellectuals and authors.
Irina was a small town girl. She had been born and raised in Ostroh, Ukraine, where her father taught physics and mathematics at the National University Ostroh Academy. When she was fourteen, he moved their family to Yreka in Northern California, fleeing the growing specter of Russian hegemony before it was too late. He was now head of the mathematics department at the College of the Siskiyous. Ariele was a bona fide city girl having grown up in Los Angeles, where her father was a fairly well-known sound technician in the film industry.
Irina loved classical music, ballet, and ballroom dancing. Ariele’s tastes were more trendy—indie, reggae, and new age. Irina was cultured and classy. Ariele was fascinated with the hippie culture, old Mother Earth News magazines, and tiny homes.
. . . Earth to hippie chick. Ariele rolled her eyes at herself, reigned in her nostalgic reverie over her Caltech days, and returned her focus to the matter at hand. She flipped the page, walked to her favorite chair in the corner of the living room, settled in with one leg crossed under, and began reading the body of the letter.
Ariele,
You may recall my doctoral dissertation The Underestimated Danger Posed by Comets, which led to an invitation to join Dr. Goldblum in his TNO program at Cornell. In this paper I pointed out that there are over one million undiscovered comets in the vast expanse beyond the Kuiper Belt. I further observed that there could be thousands of comets lurking out there which will eventually interfere with Earth, whether directly or whether indirectly by altering the orbits of other bodies (like asteroids, Trojans, or Centaurs), sending them on new orbits that will eventually interfere with Earth. The solar system is a dangerous place and the odds are against us. It is only a matter of time.
My greatest fear is low-albedo comets. As you know, they can be so dark that they reflect almost no sunlight, making them difficult to spot with optical telescopes. These dark comets, like stealthy ninjas, can move deep inside our solar system before they are noticed.
I joined Dr. Goldblum at Cornell in June 2016, excited to pursue my dream, and began setting up my program to search for TNOs and comets using image sets from nearly two dozen sources. After months of tedious preparation, I began searching in Orion in February 2017. During the next eleven weeks, I discovered four asteroidal-size TNOs and two dwarf-planet size TNOs, one about the size of Makemake, the other about the size of Orcus.
In late April I turned my attention to Taurus. Several weeks later in mid-May, I discovered an occulted star above the Pleiades on a plate from April 2016. Further investigation revealed seven more occultations between March 2013 and January 2017. Initial analysis suggested, due to its apparent size and trajectory, that it was an exceptionally provocative comet, so we put it at the top of our priority list.
In September we enlisted the help of the Keck 1 at Mauna Kea, the Hooker at Mt. Wilson, and the MMT at Whipple in observing the occultation of a dim star just below the Pleiades. With their assistance, we were able to estimate the comet’s diameter using the time-of-transit methodology. We were shocked to discover that its diameter was far larger than we anticipated, between 900 and 1000 kilometers—fifteen times the diameter of Hale-Bopp, the largest known comet. The enormous size indicates that it has an extremely low albedo, maybe lower than .02, which is more than twice as dark as coal. Using the recent data we were also able to confirm our prediction that the comet’s orbit will take it through the asteroid belt and bring it dangerously close to Mars—within 25,000 miles.
Because the comet was extremely large and dangerous, reminiscent of an elephant gone rogue, I wanted to name it Rogue—a slight departure from the naming protocols employed by the Committee on Small Body Nomenclature.
On Monday, November 6, after six months of historical data collection and verification, we sent my report on the comet to the Minor Planet Center, along with the suggestion that it be named Rogue rather than Kirilenko. Dr. Goldblum was beside himself with excitement. This was the most tantalizing space story since the Apollo 11 Moon mission. A large comet was going to pass through the asteroid belt, potentially disrupting the orbits of several asteroids, and then pass terrifyingly close to Mars.
That afternoon we received the standard formal response from the MPC acknowledging the receipt of my report. The next day we anxiously waited for the confirmation email. We were a little surprised when the end of the day came and we hadn’t received it. Normally the confirmation letter is sent within twenty-four hours. In the previous year we had sent in six reports on new TNOs and all of them had been verified within that time frame.
The next day, Wednesday, Dr. Goldblum didn’t show up for work. His assistant informed us that he was attending a NASA function and would return in a few days. At the time I thought nothing of his absence.
I was on pins and needles all day, checking my email every fifteen or twenty minutes, hoping to find a confirmation letter. It never came. Instead, we received an email late in the afternoon telling us to hold off on all communication and publication about the discovery until the MPC had concluded its investigation—a very unusual request.
On Friday afternoon Dr. Goldblum showed up in his office. When I poked my head in his door and said “good morning,” he muttered “g’mornin” to me without looking up, turned his back to me, and began rummaging in a file drawer. He appeared to be ignoring me. I asked if he had seen the email. He shrugged and answered with a touch of exasperation, “Sometimes these things just take time.” He obviously didn’t want to talk about the discovery, so I left him alone. As I walked away, I began to wonder if the Rogue was no longer in his hands. A premonition of darkness in high places sent a shiver down my spine. Was something brewing in the cauldron—something conspiracy-theory nuts would drool over were they privy?
My mind raced. If the project had been wrenched from his hands, the deed had not been done by his colleagues or incompetent bureaucrats in the MPC or NASA. Most likely it was federal agencies with the authority and ability to control information flow. But why? There was only one possible reason. The government regarded the information we had given the MPC as dangerous. They were determined to keep it out of the hands of the public. And that implied that the Rogue posed a much greater threat to mankind than I had anticipated.
But the thought that I was embroiled in the early stages of a conspiracy of vast proportions seemed too preposterous to believe. I stepped back from my fears and determined to wait for further information.
The following week on Wednesday, November 15 we received another standby letter from the MPC reiterating the request to refrain from communication on the matter, apologizing for the unusual delay, and explaining that the extraordinary find demanded extraordinary verification. Dr. Goldblum vented a little steam at this procrastination, but his frustration seemed hollow. I suspected then—and am convinced now—that he knew a whole lot more than he was letting on.
We finally received the confirmation email on Monday, November 27. Though I had suspected that something was brewing and had prepared myself for disappointment, the letter was still bittersweet. My discovery, it insisted, was not a string of stellar occultations caused by a comet, but a string of refractions caused by the shock wave on the nose of a growing jet from a recently formed black hole. It defended this interpretation with several dollops of ad hoc physics. Then it banned me from communicating with anyone on the phenomenon until the federal government (the MPC, NASA, JPL, the Pentagon, etc.) had finished their investigation—they regarded it as a sensitive issue. Barry Naylor h
imself had signed the letter.
Needless to say, this letter left me crestfallen. Instead of receiving a confirmation that I had made an exciting discovery with an apocalyptic aura, I received a notification that I had made a boring discovery, of interest only to a handful of academics. At the same time, I was dumbfounded. While I felt uneasy questioning the experts, I found myself skeptical of their interpretation that the series of stellar occultations was caused by the shock wave from a black-hole jet. Perhaps this really is a viable theory that should be considered. But why wait until now to trot it out? Why wasn’t it brought up earlier with any of the dozens of comets that had been discovered earlier? Why bring this theory up for the first time with a comet candidate whose orbit would likely create havoc in the inner solar system? And why did the MPC involve the Jet Propulsion Lab if there was no potential threat to Earth?
When I questioned the interpretation that the occultations were caused by the shock wave at the nose of a jet from a black hole, Dr. Goldblum defended it and patiently explained the theory to me. While the stars appeared to be occulted by a body passing in front of them, what was really happening was that the light waves from the star were being refracted by the shock wave, which prevented them from reaching Earth. I was a little peeved at his condescending attitude, but I bit my lip. I had a little more education under my belt than freshman physics. I wasn’t questioning the legitimacy of the theory of shock-wave refraction, only its application in the present situation.
I asked him if he had any doubts at all about the black-hole interpretation. He replied that it didn’t matter whether he thought the interpretation was right or wrong. It is what it is, and there is no arguing with the MPC. When I glared straight into his eyes, he glowered back with lightning in his eyes and said firmly, “I don’t doubt their interpretation at all.”
When I continued to protest, Dr. Goldblum told me to let the matter rest. The experts had spoken. That should be the end of the matter. It was our business to find things. It was their business to decide what those things are.
