Frontier

by Patrick Chiles

  “Am I?” she wondered aloud, immediately regretting it. Marshall’s kvetching about “garbage duty” was starting to gain traction in her mind. “Sorry, Lieutenant.”

  He flopped into an empty chair beside her. “Look at it this way—if we don’t keep these orbits clear, we’re eventually going to end up with such a mess that nobody’s going anywhere for a long time.”

  “That’s what sidetracked me,” she said, deciding that it was time to share her concerns. She unwrapped a stick of gum and began chewing, helping her concentration. “It’s the big picture I don’t think anyone’s put together yet. Check this out.” She grabbed the trackpad by his keyboard and began slewing the view on a monitor, zooming out to a wide view of Earth. It appeared to be blanketed with satellites and orbital debris, an exaggerated but accurate depiction of the threat. “There was already enough junk in orbit to keep us busy for years, then that CME came along and created a real mess.”

  “Sure. More debris to move around or deorbit. But that’s just a better view of how big the problem is. We’ll be at this for weeks.”

  “That’s the forest. Let me show you a few trees.” Roberta began popping her gum more rapidly as she grew animated. She filtered the graphic for specific dates. “Look at this, three weeks ago. Random distribution, as you’d expect.” It was the usual cloud of discarded rocket parts and disabled satellites. “Compare it to right now.” When she scrolled ahead, more red dots appeared in the cloud of pixels around Earth.

  “Back where we started,” Ivey said. “Less random distribution because half of them were shielded behind Earth. It’s just a bigger mess.”

  “And that’s where I think people are losing the thread of the story. All you see is the mess. Look at this.” She filtered the data once more and the cloud changed. Suddenly two clusters of disabled satellites appeared in geosynchronous orbit.

  “Okay, that’s weird. So this is before the CME?”

  “Negatory,” she said, popping her gum again for effect as she grew more confident. “This was yesterday.” She scrolled back some more, and the angry red dots started to disappear one by one. “And this was three days ago.”

  “Wait a sec . . .” he said. “It’s expanding geometrically. One dead bird, then two, then four.”

  “All centered around specific bands of longitude,” Roberta noted. “No way this is random.”

  “Okay, maybe you’ve found something. So what’s common about those regions?” Jacob wondered. “Any ground stations report being hacked?”

  “Not a one,” she said dejectedly, and pointed to a catalog of satellite data along one side of the graphic. “These are the only commonalities I’ve found.”

  He studied the roster of dead equipment. “All commercial birds. Geospatial or communications. Only a couple weather sats, certainly nothing military. We’d have heard about it.”

  “I’ll bet that’s how it’s escaped anyone’s notice,” she said triumphantly. “Especially with the cover from that solar storm.”

  “Really good cover.” He realized they’d crossed a logical threshold by assuming these were deliberate events and not random chance. There could be a benign cause, but that grew less likely as more satellites went offline.

  “That’s what makes me question my own judgment. You can’t engineer a CME. We can barely predict them.”

  Ivey seemed to stare through her, thinking. “True, but a good tactician knows how to take advantage of the weather. That goes for on Earth or in space. My guess is the flare created enough chaos that whoever is doing this decided they were safe to ramp up their schedule. I’ll run this up the chain. Maybe the S-2 can make some sense of it.” He unfolded himself from the chair and clapped her on the shoulder. “Welcome to spook world.”

  With half of the ship’s complement gone, what was left of the crew had assembled in the control deck for departure. It hadn’t been ordered, or even suggested, it had only felt like the proper place to be for their first Earth departure burn.

  Being one of only three officers remaining aboard, Marshall had become keenly aware of the single task that had seemed to eat up most of Captain Poole’s and Lieutenant Wylie’s attention: recalibrating the guidance platform after their near-disastrous test run. It might not have been fair, but it had, by necessity, left Marshall in charge of most of the remaining pre-departure work with the NCOs.

  The only reason they were still proceeding was that, in truth, the nav program had performed exactly as it was supposed to if they’d in fact meant to execute it. That it hadn’t recognized it was in test mode, instead thinking it was supposed to orient the ship for an actual burn, was suspected to be the fault of an overworked programmer in a hurry. Flynn was no doubt turning over every rock in HQ, if only to find the moron ultimately responsible for getting him taken off the mission roster.

  If Poole hadn’t already gamed out this particular scenario ahead of time, he would have been rightly suspicious of the guidance upload from Ops. That the beginning and end state vectors almost precisely matched what he’d worked out on his own forced him to trust it, though he was wary of letting it run his ship on autopilot again. Time was never really on their side, and it was even less so now. Their departure was calculated for maximum efficiency, and each additional revolution around Earth spent troubleshooting software represented time not spent en route to their objective.

  It highlighted the risks of such a hurried mission in a way that had left a bad taste in his mouth. Simon Poole’s hand had been forced, a position he never enjoyed being in. Hovering at the computer-animated navigation and maneuvering board, Marshall could feel the tension emanating from him like heat from a radiator. He’d turned quiet, and when he did speak his words were clipped, his tone abrupt.

  “Mister Wylie, I show five minutes until EDI. Do we have final approval from Fleet Ops?”

  “That’s affirmative, sir. Control says we’re go.”

  “Any gripes with the ship?”

  “Negative. Board is green, sir.”

  “Very well. Chief Garver?”

  “Reactors and turbopumps are warmed up to operating temperature, Captain. Control rods checked nominal.”

  He looked up at Marshall. “Mister Hunter?”

  “All modules are secure, sir. I checked each one myself.”

  “Very well.” He checked his watch against the countdown timer and looked for the others to do the same. “Time hack at four minutes . . . and hack.” If all else failed, they could time their maneuvers using their own watches—highly unlikely, but an old habit he’d long ago insisted his crew adopt. If anything, it kept them ever mindful of critical events.

  Simon directed Marshall’s attention to the “Mo Board” with an affability in his voice that Marshall hadn’t heard in days. “I already assume everyone’s got their shit together, I just need to hear it one more time since the XO’s not here to bust your balls.” A thin smile crept across his face. “Now, look here.” He pointed at the circle of their orbit around Earth and the point where a long, graceful curve pulled away from it on a tangent: their path to asteroid RQ39. “This is where things get dicey. It might be a big sky up there, but it’s awfully crowded down here in low orbit. We’re going to be burning for almost two hours and I don’t want us inadvertently running into anything.” The white curve representing their trajectory was notably wider than their current orbit. “That’s our zone of uncertainty. It’ll get smaller as we burn and get our final plot nailed down.” He circled a finger above it. “For the time being, we could be anywhere in that path so we don’t want any space junk or wayward satellites crossing it. That’s why timing is everything—we put this off until the next orbit, the whole picture changes.” Poole looked up at him to make sure he understood.

  “I believe I get it, sir.”

  Poole smiled. “Good. You’re manning the board, Mr. Hunter. I’ll be up in the dome. Captain’s privilege.”

  Marshall went slack-jawed as he watched Poole disappear into the cupola.
Behind him, he heard a chuckle from Wylie. Soon after, the ship began to rumble with the ignition of its nuclear engines.

  The hunter had laid in wait, careful to keep any movement within its prey’s blind spot as it drew closer. It was now in position to strike, near enough to close in for its killing stroke in a single swift move.

  After perfecting its techniques on more obscure victims, the revived SAMCOM-3—now known as “Necromancer” to its new operators—had stalked its most prized trophy for days. Just as big-game hunters might exhaust themselves chasing pronghorns or mule deer up and down mountain slopes, so had Necromancer nearly exhausted itself chasing the American KH-13 Keyhole satellite uphill.

  While there were no physical mountains to be scaled in orbit, being inclined to a different plane on Earth presented a similar challenge: Necromancer had begun as a communications satellite, spent and left for dead in the graveyard orbit, out of the way above Earth’s equator. Its prey was much higher, being inclined nearly seventy degrees to the equator: three-fourths of the way to the North Pole. Thanks to Earth’s rotation, it took considerably more energy to launch a large satellite into such a highly inclined orbit compared to just going to the equator. Already being parked above the equator, it had taken a considerable amount of energy to move Necromancer into position. Its new operators on Earth had known this and planned its maneuvers carefully—its prior kills had been necessary practice, while they had hoarded its precious new propellant for this final, great hunt.

  Keyhole-13 would be quite the trophy. In essence a giant Earth-observing telescope like Hubble in reverse, its location in sun-synchronous orbit put it in a position to gather detailed images of any desired target on Earth with a massive three-meter primary mirror and electro-optical compensation for atmospheric distortions.

  The hunt’s goal was to do much more than disable the nuisance Keyhole. This prey was too valuable to simply kill and keep for a trophy. Killing satellites was easy, if messy, whereas disabling them undetected took more finesse and a lot of electromagnetic energy. Both were easily traceable to their source, which would not do outside of an actual shooting war.

  Repurposing a complex, billion-dollar spy satellite was an entirely different matter. It was far better to let your opponent do the work if in the end you could benefit from it instead of remaining its target. Rope-a-dope, as the Americans liked to say.

  Necromancer, of course, wasn’t doing this on its own. Its controllers had carefully planned every maneuver to bring it to this point, hovering fifty meters above its prey, away from the line of sight of its powerful cameras and massive primary mirror. Necromancer had gone completely passive, emitting no electromagnetic energy that might give it away, drawing as close as its operators had dared bring it without activating its own cameras and sensors.

  For two days it had stalked Keyhole from its orbital perch, watching its prey carry on completely unaware, like an unsuspecting buck at a poacher’s feed trough. Its giant solar wings constantly rotated to catch sunlight, and occasionally its dish antenna would turn to maintain datalinks, or the telescope’s large trap-door protective cover would open and shut as it engaged a target on the ground. And Necromancer sat and waited.

  That signal came as Borman left Earth orbit. Clear of any potential interference, Necromancer’s controllers began to bring the satellite back to life.

  Its operators turned on a forward-looking video feed. If KH-13 sniffed out this new electromagnetic smell, it didn’t show. No movement about the flywheels on its rotation axis, no puffs of maneuvering jets or reorienting of antenna. No doubt its controllers would notice the nearby EM emissions, but they would be barely distinguishable from random background noise. They would be slow to figure out there was a nearby threat, because how could there be? What they were attempting was impossible.

  Yet not according to the months of carefully executed rehearsals. In fact, the video feed from Necromancer was remarkably close to the computer-generated imagery they’d practiced with.

  With a gentle pulse of its thrusters, Necromancer moved from its perch. Its controller, an experienced spacecraft pilot, gingerly tapped a pair of joysticks at his station on Earth, watching the target grow on his screen. He waited until the last second to activate a lidar unit that Nick Lesko’s crew had attached to the former SAMCOM satellite, needing the laser-ranging data for what they called the “terminal” phase.

  Stopping at precisely two meters from the Keyhole’s support bus, Necromancer’s skeletal manipulator arms unfolded silently. Each grasped service railings mounted along opposite sides of the satellite, positioning it squarely in front of the Keyhole’s comm antenna. Soon it began emitting its own modulating signal centered on 60 gigahertz, ensuring it overwhelmed any competing traffic with the network of relay satellites used to control it.

  Necromancer’s operators were now in control of a KH-13 spy satellite.

  Roberta had been resisting the temptation to eavesdrop on the Borman’s control team, as she was becoming swamped with her own work. They could take care of their own problems without her shoving her nose in their business, she figured. It was dramatic, it was no doubt exciting for the people involved, but in the end this was why the ship had been commissioned in the first place: A couple of high rollers had gotten themselves into a fix, and ultimately it was up to the US taxpayer to come to their rescue. She wondered if they’d get a bill, like for an ambulance ride.

  It was an amusing mental diversion, but her concerns had been more numerous if not quite as dramatic. There were now fully one dozen ridiculously expensive satellites out of action in geosynchronous orbit, concentrated on two fairly narrow bands of longitude over both Western and Eastern hemispheres. All of them civilian, mostly communications with a few remote-sensing birds in the mix. While not leaving their customers completely blind, it still represented a loss of capability not easily replaced.

  Yet other than the comm angle, she hadn’t been able to determine a pattern. And she was becoming increasingly convinced there was a pattern. This was too much, concentrated in locations that were too specific. Somebody was disrupting GEO, and the solar flare event had created enough chaos to cover their tracks.

  Nobody could plan for that, she knew. They’d gotten lucky. If anything, maybe it had led them to overplaying their hand. Whatever their goal was, they’d gotten greedy.

  That was reflected by the latest satellite to go dark, which had finally gotten the brass’s attention: they’d lost control of a major asset over Asia, a KH-13 bird in a high inclination orbit that gave them access to high-resolution visuals of much of the world’s more interesting locales, at least from a military-intelligence perspective.

  They’d lost its telemetry, and it had not responded to repeated tasking orders. The Keyhole was, for all they could tell, dead in space. Roberta suspected it had not died of natural causes.

  Of course, she knew none of this through official channels. It had all been compartmentalized to the point of absurdity, as she could watch the reactions of the Keyhole control team and see that 13 had been lined out of the tasking order as if it were simply down for maintenance, like a software upload.

  Ivey pulled up next to her. “I don’t think we’re going to be getting any help from S-2,” he said, as if reading her mind. “It’s all hands on deck in there right now, trying to find out what happened to that Keyhole.”

  “So we’re supposed to stick with cleaning up trash in orbit and not ask too many questions,” she said, her irritation mounting.

  “You hear anything from your friend on the Borman?”

  Funny you should ask, she thought. “No, and I haven’t wanted to bother him. I was thinking about wandering over by their control team just to see what I can pick up.”

  “I’ll save you the trouble. Apparently their XO and half the crew are being sent back here so they can make weight for the sprint out to RQ39. Landing at Denver on a chartered Polaris Clipper. They’re keeping them down here on temporary duty until next month
.”

  “Interesting,” Roberta said, “but not very.”

  Ivey grinned, about to get one up on her. “You’re getting tunnel vision. Remember that rescue mission they did up in GEO? They’re putting the survivor in our base hospital. Something about treating him for radiation poisoning.”

  Her mouth twisted with skepticism. “That sounds like a load of crap.”

  “Exactly,” Ivey said. “Lone survivor of a GEO satellite repair gone bad.”

  Her eyes widened. “You’re right. I did have tunnel vision. What’s this guy’s name?”

  Ivey pulled up the mission manifest from the day’s tasking order. “Lesko. Nicholas Lesko.”

  Nick Lesko tugged at the tape around his IV, more annoyed by the adhesive’s effect on his skin than the 18-gauge needle in his arm. How much fluid could they pump into him anyway before he started looking like a puffer fish? They’d poked and prodded him enough to feel like one.

  A nurse covered in a thick paper gown, her face visible behind a plastic shield, had come in with more needles. Another round of blood samples, and another injection into his IV line. “Potassium iodide,” she said, “to help your recovery.”

  “Couldn’t I just eat a banana?” Lesko asked. “Don’t those have potassium?”

  She smiled with the bland condescension reserved for people who couldn’t know better. “Potassium iodide,” she emphasized, “to help your thyroid.” Finished, she pulled out another injector and plunged it into the port. “And this is a protein compound to stimulate white blood cell growth.”

  He saw the tray of tubes beside her and winced. “Maybe if you wouldn’t take so much of my blood, I wouldn’t need to stimulate growth.”

  “I’m afraid we have to, Mr. Lesko. It’s the only way we can monitor your white count. That will tell us a lot about how your bone marrow is functioning.” Her friendly grin disappeared. “The alternative is a marrow aspiration, where we have to drill into your bone.”