Officially, the debris source was attributed to a failed NSA satellite deployment, but console operators at Houston were backchannel notified that the orbital debris was in actuality the aftermath of a classified antisatellite weapons (ASAT) attack performed against China by Russia.
In public, these space warfare operations were universally condemned for scattering dangerous space junk in low Earth orbit. Yet it was an open secret that since the 1960s every spacefaring nation had been enthusiastically experimenting with ASAT platforms—from simple kinetic kill warheads to more sophisticated reusable approaches deploying shaped-charge explosives.
The attitude determination and control (ADCO) officer, at Mission Control, Vandi Chawla ran a simulation on the USSTRATCOM-supplied data and confirmed the high likelihood of a conjunction in the orbital pathway. Because they were red threshold objects, not yellow, there was no debate about the primary response. She immediately authorized an emergency debris avoidance maneuver (EDAM), even though the orbital modification would result in several missed launch opportunities over the next months, none of them critical resupplies.
While the astronauts slept, commands for a prolonged thirty-nine-minute avoidance maneuver were issued from the trajectory operations manager (TOPO) console. The ISS’s four 220-pound control moment gyroscopes shifted rhythm immediately. Made of stainless steel, the circular flywheels generated the torque that leaned the ISS forward at a constant four degrees—keeping the station’s floor pointed at Earth’s surface and maintaining an Earth-centered, Earth-fixed (ECEF) diving orbit. The electrically powered gyros began to modify the station attitude in preparation for the maneuver.
Once situated, the next step would normally have called for an extended thruster burn from the robotic Progress cargo module attached to the Pirs docking compartment. However, due to the substantial translation needed, TOPO decided to authorize use of an experimental solar electric propulsion (SEP) device.
Electrical power gathered by onboard solar arrays was routed to a cluster of highly efficient electrostatic Hall thrusters, conserving precious supplies of traditional chemical propellant. On activation, the thrusters pulsed in perfect rhythm, ejecting a flickering plume of plasma exhaust. The resulting force pushed the ISS upward directly through its center of gravity, while also translating the bulky structure to a southward trajectory.
A typical reboost maneuver would change only the altitude of the ISS, but in this case the azimuth was also modified from fifty-four degrees to zero, resulting in a highly unusual equatorial orbit. The maneuver was completed within the allotted time, and a summary press release was issued, citing a routine debris avoidance maneuver and praising the success of the SEP device.
General Stern had managed to coordinate the entire effort without ever informing NASA, RNCA, or JAXA of the true underlying emergency.
And yet Sophie Kline knew right away the trajectory change had something to do with Andromeda. This was not surprising, since Kline was one of the very few people intimately aware of the true purpose of the International Space Station.
The full, unclassified transcript of her initial exchange is below:
ISS-KLINE
Houston this is Station, come in. Requesting status update. What . . . [unintelligible] Why am I seeing Brazil moving east west?
HOU-CAPCOM
Just, uh, had an EDAM, Station. Orbital debris. Good news, though. The SEP thrusters worked perfectly.
ISS-KLINE
That is good news. But, this is so far . . . listen, I’m initiating a special query request. Have you been contacted by Peterson Air Force Base?
[static—four seconds]
HOU-CAPCOM
I’m sorry, Station, we’ve got no record—
[transmission lost]
[static—eleven seconds]
PAFB-STERN
Kline. This is Stern. We are on a private channel. I’ve got an update for your to-do list.
ISS-KLINE
Go ahead.
PAFB-STERN
Your scientific mission is suspended as of now. Until further notice, knowledge of your reassignment is to be restricted from all space agencies, including NASA. Do you understand?
[short pause]
ISS-KLINE
Yes sir, General Stern.
PAFB-STERN
You’ve been placed in an equatorial orbit that passes over the debris field of the fallen Tiangong-1 space station. We . . . It, it’s been hypothesized the station may have triggered a ground contamination upon reentry.
ISS-KLINE
In the jungle?
PAFB-STERN
Something is down there. Some kind of anomaly. It’s already killed people, and it’s spreading.
ISS-KLINE
I see.
PAFB-STERN
Project Wildfire has been reactivated, Dr. Kline. Your role is orbital lab support. The other ISS crew members will monitor for any remnants of the Tiangong-1 that are still atmospheric, under the guise of an emergency scientific mission.
ISS-KLINE
Understood.
PAFB-STERN
You will also monitor our field team from above. Eyes and ears. Got it?
ISS-KLINE
A field team? You’re not sending people into that jungle? General, please, at least wait until I can—
PAFB-STERN
No time, Doctor. Report to the Wildfire Mark IV laboratory module. It’s already begun.
THE EXISTENCE OF the executive order can seem contradictory to democratic government. In times of emergency or in peace, the president of the United States may simply dictate national policy and have it executed in an instant—without review.
This act has been previously described as: “Stroke of the pen, law of the land.”
The first executive order was used by George Washington on June 8, 1789, to instruct the heads of all federal departments to create a State of the Union for the newborn country. In 1863, Abraham Lincoln issued one that became known as the Emancipation Proclamation—ultimately freeing three million slaves. And nearly a century later, Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued a 550-word executive order that called for the United States government to incarcerate over a hundred and twenty thousand of its own citizens and residents of Japanese descent in concentration camps constructed across the Western United States.
It is a great and terrible power to wield, and one that can lead to historic repercussions—if it is ever made public, that is.
The classified executive order NSAM 362-S (known as a “National Security Action Memorandum” at the time) was issued three weeks after the first Andromeda incident and the subsequent back-to-back losses of the American Andros V manned spacecraft and the Russian Zond 19 mission. Within government circles, the order was widely regarded as symbolic. Off the record, many politicians considered the task to be on par with the Pharaohs’ orders to erect the great pyramids of Giza.
A portion of the order read:
* * *
TOP SECRET/FORMERLY RESTRICTED DATA ATTACHMENT NATIONAL SECURITY ACTION MEMORANDUM NO. 362-S
April 10, 1967
THE PRESIDENT
Ordering the Creation of a Microgravity Laboratory Module to be Placed in a Space Station in Permanent Orbit.
By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, I hereby determine that it is vital for national security and the safety of our species itself to study the extra-terrestrial microparticle known as the Andromeda Strain in its natural microgravity environment, i.e., a state- of- the- art laboratory placed in low Earth orbit.
* * *
The estimated cost of the endeavor in 1967 was $50 billion, twice the cost of the Apollo program and (adjusting for inflation) approximately the same as the entire national military budget of 2018. In the upper echelons of government executives who were authorized to read the order, the president’s demand was met with derision and disbelief.
But the practical need to study th
e particle remained.
By the fall of 1967, the tiny town of Piedmont, Arizona, had been sterilized from top to bottom and the forty-eight bodies (including two US Army personnel) cremated. Every structure and vehicle was deconstructed and placed in hangar-like storage facilities built in the desert by the Army Corp of Engineers for this purpose. The task was accomplished carefully and with no casualties, thanks to the findings of the Wildfire team. The effect was so sudden, and the town so small, that within two decades the very existence of Piedmont was erroneously thought by many to have been fictional.
Once every splinter had been accounted for, the next step was to determine exactly what had happened. It was a multibillion-dollar question, and the world couldn’t know it was being asked without risking a civilization-ending panic.
As the Indian-born British historian Romila Chandra states in her classic tome, Fallen Empires of Man, “The instinct of the human being upon contact with a foreign civilization is to flee. If that is not possible, it is invariably to attack. Only after surviving first contact is there an overwhelming urge to learn more. But do not mistake this response for altruistic curiosity, rather it is simply a need to understand the other in order to protect oneself from it . . . or, more likely, to attempt to destroy it.” It is an apt description of how humanity behaved in the aftermath of Andromeda—especially after Russia and China learned of and responded to the events in Piedmont, Arizona, through their own spycraft.
The Russians were first, managing to push the Salyut 1 space station into orbit by 1971—only four years after the Andromeda incident. The United States attempted to catch up two years after that, but the Skylab launch was compromised by the “benign” plastic-eating strain of Andromeda still lingering in the upper atmosphere. During Skylab’s initial ascent, exposure to the AS-2 plastiphage resulted in a partially disintegrated heat shield, spewing debris that severely damaged the station.*
Skylab lasted six years. The Mir space station lasted longer, at ten years. Both failed to achieve their secret goal of studying Andromeda in microgravity. As it turned out, the problem was too big for one nation to solve alone—even a superpower.
In 1987, President Reagan called for the creation of an International Space Station, a joint venture between the Soviet Union and the United States, with more partner countries to come. Eyebrows went up around the world, as the Russians and Americans made for strange bedfellows. Privately, both nations were motivated by a mutual fear of allowing the Andromeda particle to go unstudied.*
Even then, a permanent space station was only the first step.
It was not until 2013 that the Wildfire Mark IV laboratory module arrived (disguised as a Cygnus automated cargo spacecraft), and docked to the nadir port of the Harmony node at the front of the station. Its activation coincided with the beginning of Dr. Sophie Kline’s scientific missions to the ISS.
The top-secret module was born in the depths of the original Project Wildfire facility beneath Nevada, constructed entirely by sterilized robotic arms. Those robots were teleoperated by on-site workers who were themselves in an ISO Class 1 clean room. The final laboratory enclosure was completely self-contained and launched aboard an Antares-5 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on January 17, 2013.
Once docked, the laboratory module constituted the only biosafety level (BSL) 5 containment facility ever created, much less placed in orbit. The Wildfire microgravity laboratory was self-irradiated every four hours with high-intensity ultraviolet light, and it contained no breathable atmosphere. It was instead pressurized with a combination of noble gases—odorless, colorless, and with virtually zero chemical reactivity. The cylindrical space inside the laboratory module was phenomenally clean and sterile, precisely because it was unoccupied.
There were only two potential organisms on board, and they were what the module had been built to study: material samples of the extraterrestrial microparticles known as AS-1 and AS-2.
The interior of the module had never been touched by a human being, and never would be. Every aspect of the laboratory’s functioning was remote-controlled via radio contact from outside. And this was exactly why Dr. Sophie Kline had been the first astronaut with ALS deployed to the International Space Station.
The wasting effects of Kline’s disease had made her the perfect recipient of a brain-computer interface at a young age. Years of training with the interface had given her the ability to control most computers as naturally as breathing—a crucial ability while handling highly dangerous samples through a remote connection.
Though there had been other operators, only Sophie Kline could control the Wildfire Mark IV laboratory module with her mind.
WITH GENERAL STERN’S orders to report to the laboratory module still ringing in her ears, Kline hesitated for one moment. Her left eye twitched almost imperceptibly as she activated the muscle groups necessary to communicate with her personal computer, which activated a monitor along the lower wall of the cupola.
A real-time camera feed of the Kibo science module appeared. There astronaut Jin Hamanaka, apparently also alarmed by the change in trajectory, was busily checking propellant levels on her laptop. On a feed of the Zvezda service module, the cosmonaut Yury Komarov was outside his sleep station, calmly stowing his gear and preparing for an exercise routine during the hour window before morning conference.
Kline watched both feeds carefully. As far as she could tell, the other astronauts were not panicking or behaving erratically.
Pushing herself backward, Kline floated away from the cupola and “up” toward the exit in the ceiling. As she floated away, she watched the sprawling rain forest hundreds of miles below. The vista was already rotating away, replaced by the Atlantic Ocean as the station continued its eastward orbit.
In another time, the young Sophie Kline would have been abandoned to a sanitarium, immobile and forgotten—assuming she survived her childhood. The sole reason she had transcended gravity was humankind’s ever-growing mastery over nature. Looking down on the planet from the perspective of a god, trapped in a body that refused to obey her orders, she was acutely aware of this fact.
But—as history has proven time and again—in the hands of human beings, increasing power is increasingly dangerous.
Heavenly Palace
THE COALITION OF COUNTRIES THAT FUNDED THE International Space Station (and hoped to share in its discoveries) had neglected to include one of the largest and most ancient civilizations in the world—a proud and capable nation with the strength to develop its own competing effort to study Andromeda.
Alone and forced to act unilaterally, the People’s Republic of China inevitably set out to do just that.
Suspicion, distrust, and competitiveness had fractured the international effort to understand the Andromeda Strain. Although the AS-1 microparticle had proven that it would kill any human with equal savagery, no matter their ethnicity, the vagaries of politics blunted what could have been a united response. And that enmity came to a head with the creation of a new space station.
The Tiangong-1, whose name meant “heavenly palace” in Chinese, was launched on September 29, 2011. It was an auspicious date for both travel and grand openings, according to the astrological predictions of the Chinese zodiac calendar, the Sheng Xiao. After a successful launch, the station was placed into orbit at a slightly inclined attitude of nineteen degrees—a trajectory that coincided perfectly with regular resupply launches from the Chinese Xichang Satellite Launch Center in Hainan Province.
Although the launch had not been advertised, American spy agencies watched intently and continued to monitor the station until its premature demise.
The end occurred in 2013, only two years into the multibillion-yen effort, when China suddenly announced that the project was over. Authorities there officially hailed Tiangong-1 as an “unmitigated success for the China National Space Administration and the Chinese people.”
However, around-the-clock observation from a series of earth-based imaging
assets revealed a narrative very different than that of the official reports. It seemed Chinese Mission Control had lost radio contact, including telemetry, with their station.
Without any means of control, the Tiangong-1 fell into a decaying orbit.
Thermal readings from multiple spy agencies determined that life support had been shut off, with the surface of the station as cold as the space around it. Abandoned, the station continued to orbit the earth for several years, engines offline and radios silent.
On April 10, 2018, the scant air particles percolating in the upper atmosphere finally managed to drag the station into destructive reentry. The metal cylinder was ripped to superheated shreds by atmospheric friction, reduced to a flaming confetti that rained down on the planet below—directly above the primordial jungles of the eastern Amazon.
Thus, the entire effort ended in a brief streak of light and heat.
The failure would likely have been deemed harmless were it not for a single, final bit of information. During the continuous monitoring of the space station—from launch, to resupply missions, to its last fiery reentry—operatives had noticed something the Chinese space agency never mentioned publicly.
The last crew of three taikonauts had never emerged from the Tiangong-1.
Code Name Andromeda
BARELY FIVE HUNDRED FEET ABOVE A JUNGLE CANOPY that itself soared a hundred and fifty feet high in places, a Sikorsky H-92 Superhawk helicopter thundered over shivering trees. The gray metal chopper was streaked with jungle mist, nose jutting out like the beak of a predatory bird. In its wake, bands of monkeys hooted in the treetops and colorful birds took startled flight.
James Stone didn’t remember falling asleep.
Even with the thudding of the rotors in his ears and the vibration of the window glass on the rolled-up jacket he was using for a pillow, he’d had no trouble nodding off.
The Andromeda Evolution Page 4
