The Wall: Eternal Day

by Brandon Q Morris

  ESA – European Space Agency

  EU – European Union

  EVA – Extra-Vehicular Activity

  FST – Far Side Telescope

  HUT – Hard Upper Torso

  ISS – International Space Station

  IV – IntraVenous

  JAXA – Japan Aerospace eXploration Agency

  JPL – Jet Propulsion Laboratory

  KARL – Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter

  LCROSS – Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite

  LCVG – Liquid Cooling and Ventilation Garment

  LISA – Laser Interferometer Space Antenna

  LK – Lunniy Korabyl (Russian Lunar Craft)

  LOK – Lunnyy Orbital’nyy Kosmicheskiy korabl (Russian Lunar Orbital Spacecraft)

  LRV – Lunar Roving Vehicle

  M3 – Moon Mineralogy Mapper

  MIP – Moon Impact Probe

  MPC – Minor Planet Center

  MPK – Marsianskiy Pilotiruyemyy Kompleks (Russian Martian Piloted Complex)

  NASA – National Aeronautics and Space Administration

  NOAA – National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

  OKB-1 Opytnoye Konstruktorskoye Buro (Russian Experimental Design Bureau)

  RSC – Rocket and Science Corporation (Russian design bureau)

  SMART-1 – Small Missions for Advanced Research in Technology-1

  TMK – Tyazhely Mezhplanetny Korabl (Russian Heavy Interplanetary Spacecraft)

  UTC –Universal Time Coordinated

  WLAN – Wireless Local Area Network

  Metric to English Conversions

  Length:

  centimeter = 0.39 inches

  meter = 1.09 yards, or 3.28 feet

  kilometer = 1093.61 yards, or 0.62 miles

  Area:

  square centimeter = 0.16 square inches

  square meter = 1.20 square yards

  square kilometer = 0.39 square miles

  Weight:

  gram = 0.04 ounces

  kilogram = 35.27 ounces, or 2.20 pounds

  Volume:

  liter = 1.06 quarts, or 0.26 gallons

  cubic meter = 35.31 cubic feet, or 1.31 cubic yards

  Temperature:

  To convert Celsius to Fahrenheit, multiply by 1.8 and then add 32

  Excerpt: The Wall: Eternal Night

  Prologue

  January 2, 2034 - USS Jeremy Brandt, North Celebes Sea

  “Sir, a message from NASA just arrived.”

  On the bridge, Captain John Dillinger rolled his eyes. He rose from his chair to look over the shoulder of the specialist at the communications console.

  “What do those eggheads want from us now?”

  “They’ve marked an object in LEO. It’s approaching us at high speed,” Specialist Cooper told him, as he pointed at the telemetry data that had appeared on the screen below a NASA logo. “Eight meters long, one meter across. According to the trajectory, NASA has calculated the object should appear on the AMDR in a few minutes.”

  “Just another one of their little meteorites,” Dillinger growled as he pulled his Navy baseball cap from his head. “Couldn’t they at least have waited for nightfall? Then we would have gotten to see it as a shooting star, anyways.”

  “Negative, Sir,” the specialist in front of him countered with a shake of his head. His fingers danced over his touchscreen, and the display changed to a confusing mass of diagrams, lists, and vectors. “The object has an electronic signature. It’s weak, but the space twerps detected it.”

  Dillinger started to pay attention, as did the rest of the people on the bridge. All of the various hushed conversations fell silent.

  “Another North Korean missile test?” he asked, alarm in his voice, but to his relief the specialist shook his head.

  “I don’t know, Sir.”

  “Burke, do you have anything on your screen?” Dillinger asked, looking over at the young cadet monitoring local airspace.

  “Aye aye, Sir! We’re starting to get data from the air and missile defense radar. The radar signature corresponds pretty well with the data from NASA.”

  “So?”

  “It’s not an ICBM, Sir,” she said, and a sigh of relief went through the bridge.

  Another North Korean test missile would have made things difficult for him, an unwelcome event such a short time before his retirement. “Are you sure, cadet?”

  “Aye aye, Sir. The object is decelerating.”

  “It’s slowing?”

  “Aye aye, Sir. You should be able to see it with binoculars by now, four klicks northeast.”

  Dillinger walked between the sailors at their consoles to the bridge’s front window and took a position between his officers sitting there. He then grabbed binoculars from the hook on the wall beside the door to the exterior ladder, opened the door, and was immediately hit by the equator’s humid tropical air. It was so thick that breathing it felt like sucking in steam, and he felt sweat break out on his brow.

  Maybe this was one of those new Chinese suborbital drones? He raised the binoculars to his eyes and used their electronic zoom to look up at the deep blue sky, where little clouds were slowly floating by like a flock of lethargic sheep.

  “Further to the east, Sir,” came a voice from beside him, that of his adjutant, Lieutenant Solheim. Dillinger lowered his binoculars and looked at the blond officer, who was indicating the correct direction with an outstretched hand. “I just checked the exact bearing.”

  “Ah.” He should have thought to check that for himself before entering the small space at the bottom of the ladder. These little reminders had started to annoy him, because they meant that, just like his ship, he was on the way out. He would soon be at the fleet academy, explaining to young cadets how to chart courses with a ruler and pencil. Still, each little reminder was a compliment—or so he tried to tell himself.

  Dillinger searched the sky, spiraling with the two small circles of his view as he zoomed gently with the small wheel below his right index finger. Then, between two cotton ball clouds he saw it, at first just a reflection of the sun, dimmed by the binoculars’ electronics, then—with enough zoom—a cone-shaped object. A moment later, a small sun ignited out in front of his bow.

  “A braking thruster,” he thought aloud.

  “What do you think, Sir?”

  “I think that we are here to make sure that the Treaty of Incheon isn’t broken. If the Chinese think they can provoke us out here with their tech, they’ll have to think again.”

  “Do you really think the Chinese—” Solheim started to ask.

  Dillinger interrupted him by pushing the binoculars against the lieutenant’s chest. “Yes, I think so. They are constantly provoking us with new maneuvers and weapons tests. We cooperate at a political level, but we still keep rattling our sabers, giving each other a scare. That there,” without looking, he pointed in the rough direction of the object, ‘is a suborbital drone, or I’ll be damned.”

  “Aye aye, Sir.” Solheim nodded, took the binoculars at his chest from Dillinger, and looked through the eyepieces for himself. “Distance, thirty klicks. Oh! I think you’re right, Sir.”

  “What is it?”

  “A wing. It just extended or unfolded a wing.”

  Dillinger snatched the binoculars away from his adjutant and looked for himself. The rocket-like drone had now turned into a small aircraft. Four wings, now—astonishingly large and long for the narrow flank of the object—brought it onto a new flight path, which was no longer a steep dive but instead a flat vector, heading directly for the ship.

  “Activate Aegis, full combat readiness!” he yelled without hesitation, but he could sense Solheim tensing up beside him. “Get moving, man!”

  “Aye aye, Sir,” the lieutenant said, voice high, as he ran through the door back onto the bridge.

  Dillinger took another breath of sea air and gazed forward. In front of him, the sharp bow of his guided-missile destroyer knifed through the wave
s of the deep blue Celebes Sea between the Philippines and Indonesia. The gray paint of the Jeremy Brandt reflected the merciless sun intensely enough that he had to squint. Even though he was looking in the direction from which the drone was approaching, he couldn’t see anything. A heartbeat later, he heard the general quarters alarm.

  A week before my damn retirement, he thought, and shook his head. This area of sea was patrolled every two weeks by Chinese, Japanese, European, and American warships to protect the new oil fields that were causing so much friction between the Philippines, which was supported by America, and Indonesia, which was under Chinese protection—in fact, half the country had been bought up by the Chinese. A tedious, simple job, which had been made easier for everyone involved by the amicable settlement of diplomatic trouble by the Treaty of Incheon. At least up to now.

  And now this.

  “Contact!” he yelled the moment he was back on the bridge.

  “Object approaching at approximately six hundred kilometers per hour, Sir,” Burke said from her radar station. Her voice had a tone of cold professionalism, something it only had when she was under lots of pressure.

  “Course steady?”

  “Aye aye, Sir. Bogey’s adjusted course. It’s heading directly for us.”

  “Target acquired?”

  “Aegis combat system has acquired the target, Sir,” reported the fire control officer, Lieutenant Myers, from his console by the door.

  “Sir!” yelled Specialist Cooper. “The bogey is transmitting a radio signal!”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. Aegis is jamming. The signal lasted about a minute before it got shredded.”

  “Distance?”

  “Twenty-five klicks, Sir!” Burke called out.

  “Switch off the jammer. Establish radio contact.”

  “Aye aye, Sir,” Cooper confirmed with a wave of the hand as Dillinger grabbed the radio handset from the ceiling above his command chair.

  “Let’s find out if anyone’s listening,” the captain said. “This is Captain John Dillinger of Destroyer Jeremy Brandt, United States Navy. Your presence is in violation of paragraph two of the Treaty of Incheon. Turn to the north and leave this sea zone immediately. This is your final warning.” He clicked the fist-sized handset back into its holder and looked through the bridge windows. He still thought he could see a reflection in the distance.

  “No reaction, Sir. The object is holding course and still transmitting.”

  “Okay. Reactivate the jamming. Lieutenant Myers, shoot it out of the sky!” Dillinger ordered. He moved a little closer behind the sailor at the console to get a better view through the window.

  “Launchpad one, fire!”

  Dillinger watched as, between the bridge superstructure and the bow below him, the right multi-cell missile launcher swiveled as fast as lightning to point forward. One of the square hatches opened, and a rapidly expanding cloud of smoke roiled around the cell as an elongated missile emerged. The plume of superheated gas from its rear was intensely bright as it shot forward, and the hiss was deafening, even on the bridge.

  “Sea Sparrow has acquired the target. Splash in thirty seconds.”

  The RIM-162 Evolved Sea Sparrow missile hurtled away like lightning, then inclined upward and started to rapidly gain altitude. It was soon so small against the horizon that Dillinger could only see the missile’s bright tail.

  “Ten, nine, eight, seven... wait,” Myers said, interrupting his own countdown.

  “What?”

  “The Sea Sparrow has lost its target lock... now I’ve lost contact with the Sea Sparrow!”

  “What have they set on us?” Dillinger muttered as he licked his lips. “Distance and speed?”

  “Speed reducing, distance thirteen klicks. Aegis still has a lock on the target.”

  “Not important,” Myers commented from his place at fire control. “R2-D2 will make mincemeat of the thing in a second.”

  A snicker of agreement spread through the ten sailors on the bridge. Dillinger shook his head. Only inexperienced sailors released their tension with such boasts. Because the close-in defense system was directed by its own radome and not by the networked target acquisition of Aegis, all they could do was wait for the drone to cross the target threshold of the air defenses.

  He went outside again and grasped the forward railing. He could now see the drone with his naked eyes, approaching two klicks to the northeast, as the two Phalanx CIWS rotary cannons mounted on the bow came to life. They were called R2-D2s in the Navy because, despite the gun having six barrels in a circular mount and a sizeable magazine drum below, the large radome looked like the famous movie character.

  The two Phalanx mounts rotated lightning fast to face forward, their guns twitching upward, and suddenly there was a wave of deafening noise.

  Hundreds of 20mm armor-piercing tungsten penetrator rounds were spat from the rotating barrels of the M61 Vulcan toward the drone at a muzzle velocity of 1,050 meters per second. The whir of the weapon was so loud that it made Dillinger’s ears ring, but it sounded like sweet music to his old Navy soul.

  It took less than three seconds for the drone to be turned into a glittering shower of debris and shrapnel falling to the waves in the distance. The two Phalanx systems retracted their cannons and swiftly returned to their starting positions as if nothing had happened. Then there was silence, followed almost immediately by cheering from the bridge.

  “When you sent that shit over from Beijing, you didn’t reckon with Phalanx,” Dillinger said, grinning contentedly to himself before opening the door and going back onto the bridge. “Message to Fleet Command. We have shot down an unknown bogey. Send them all the recordings. Don’t forget the time stamp.”

  Chapter 1: Putra

  January 10, 2035 - Bunaken National Park, Indonesian Celebes Sea

  Putra steered his boat toward the east with the outboard motor, heading for the south point of Bunaken, and peered over the small wooden spike at the bow. The sea was calm, glittering peacefully in the first sunlight of the day, and most importantly, there were no other boats around. That meant less competition, and no Coast Guard to chase him from the protected waters of the national park, or maybe even arrest him.

  Near the long white line of the coast of the east island he saw the numerous stilt houses of the luxury hotels that had been there since the 90s. They were built deep in the sea, each a cube of dark wood torn from Sumatra’s rain forests where the palm oil plantations stood cheek by jowl. He sold his usually sparse catch at the market in Manado every Friday after the second morning prayer. There he saw the large transport ships docked to unload the massive logs that were technically illegal cargo.

  The hotels’ well-connected owners could build their luxury resorts in the national park, but he wasn’t allowed to fish here. Of course, the reason was simple. He was a fisherman, which meant he didn’t have the connections or the necessary money to bribe the Coast Guard.

  Putra turned swiftly as soon as he could almost make out the first pale-skinned figures sunning themselves on the terraces of the luxury bungalows, and breathed a deep sigh of relief when the resort disappeared behind a small spit of land. He asked himself, not for the first time, why tourists always got up so early. If he ever had a holiday he wouldn’t get out of bed before midday. But perhaps he only had this fantasy because his alarm got him out of bed at four every morning.

  He had once heard that Westerners didn’t go to work until ten in the morning and then only worked for four or five hours. It sounded like a fairy tale—he didn’t believe they even had to work that much. Who would work four hours per day when they had so much money, consistently enough to eat, and free school for their children?

  His son, Rudy, and his daughter, Binta, would perhaps one day find out if he could send them to their uncle in Jakarta. It was almost like in the West there, at least that was what he had heard. Bulan, his older brother, had gone there and become a used car dealer. He lived in a house w
ith running water and electricity. He would know the best path for his children to take, to one day live the way he did.

  But first he had to catch enough fish to pay for flights to Jakarta, which was as good as impossible in the over-fished coastal waters of East Sulawesi. Every morning, he came out here and hardly had time to cast his net before the numerous dive boats left the resort. If he got in the way of their excursions the diving base owner would make his life difficult, and the tourist police would most likely get involved. He didn’t have a license, after all, so they would undoubtedly confiscate his boat.

  He looked up with a sigh, and his eye was caught by spray that made the sea around densely jungled Bunaken into a glittering and bobbing mass with his boat dancing among the waves. The noise of his ten-horsepower outboard motor, sitting at the back of the boat and directed to the left and right with a short handle, mixed with the smell of gasoline to form the melody of his life.

  It was monotone, that was true, but it was the melody he knew, and it was somehow comforting. He felt almost relaxed out here, far from his wife, who every night put pressure on him to make more money, and the wide eyes of his children when he had to tell them that they couldn’t go to Manado to the Great Mosque. The relief didn’t last long, and was usually limited to the morning, but it was there.

  He steered his yellow and blue wooden boat further into the narrow strait between the two southern islands and oriented himself by the white sandy beaches a few hundred meters to the left and right. He took a few last drags on his cigarette, then stubbed it out and stuffed the butt in the sliced-open soda can between his bare feet.

  Putra hated that many of his compatriots polluted the ocean by throwing whatever they wanted to get rid of into the water. The currents perhaps gave them the feeling that everything would be carried away—out of sight, out of mind. But as a fisherman he saw the junk caught in his net every day, the garbage that was slowly choking the seas around his home.