Orbital Cloud

  Upon entering the room, Madu had stopped in place, taken a step to one side, and come to attention with her feet apart and her hands behind her back. Ricky hurried to adopt the same pose.

  Colonel Daniel Waabboy, their commanding officer as of yesterday, was sitting on the bench. Beside him were two cream-colored cardboard folders full of papers. When Ricky saw the air force’s eagle seal and the words operation command printed in fat letters on the cover of one, he felt his fists tighten at the small of his back above his belt. Operation Seed Pod was about to begin at last.

  Waabboy picked up the two folders and motioned to Ricky and Madu to sit down on the bench opposite him.

  “Ground-run test?” he asked. “How’d it go?”

  “No difficulties, sir.”

  “The same, sir.”

  Waabboy nodded. He was flipping through the papers in one of the folders. Ricky could make out some of the small text on the cover. No mistake: the colonel was holding the papers for Operation Seed Pod. Orders had come through at eight that morning. The decision must have been made based on Judy’s broadcast the previous night. It wasn’t often you saw a response that quick these days.

  “Operation Seed Pod is currently scheduled to begin at 1700 hours tomorrow,” Waabboy said. “There is a possibility that our target will move, though, so you will be on standby starting tonight. We’ve included a flight plan for breaking the altitude record. Make sure you’re up to it.”

  “Yes, sir.” Ricky thrust his chest out and pulled his chin in. This meant that he and Madu would be sleeping in the scramble waiting room next to the hangar tonight, along with the maintenance crew.

  Waabboy clasped his hands together and leaned in closer to the two of them, lowering his voice. “I suppose you already know this, but Operation Seed Pod is in contravention of the COPUOS guidelines, to which the United States is a signatory.” He gave them a meaningful look, as if to remind them that this was a top secret mission. Ricky nodded. After a beat, Waabboy returned to his original tone of voice. “Three ASM-140s have been prepared, but you’re to get it right the first time.”

  Waabboy extracted a weather chart from the bundle of papers and handed it to Madu. Ricky caught sight of the pressure fronts and closely packed isobars and shivered. A blizzard. By tomorrow, the whole northern end of the western seaboard would be buried in snow.

  “The operation will take place completely in US airspace,” said Waabboy. “Actually, I’m not sure if we can call it ‘airspace,’ but above those clouds, at any rate. It’s an operation that would not be possible without your all-weather F-15 and F-22 to launch the ASM-140 out of the stratosphere. If we were to repeat this two or three times on a clear day, even an amateur might notice. The CIA’s efforts to get Russia and China to keep quiet would go to waste.”

  Waabboy took the weather map back from Madu and returned it to its folder, then handed one of the folders to each of them.

  “Operation Seed Pod. Your formal orders. Make sure you read them.” Waabboy’s face was grim.

  “Is something wrong, sir?” asked Ricky.

  Waabboy shook his head. “We’ve never been asked to knock a satellite out of orbit before. Not this base, not the whole US armed forces. There’s a lot I don’t understand in these folders.”

  Flipping through the pages, Ricky came across the sheet about the ASM-140 antisat weapon his Eagle would carry. He gave it a quick once-over, but there were some figures he couldn’t work out. Then he realized the problem: the units of measurement. “Sir … this sheet …”

  Waabboy flapped his hand as he rose to his feet. “It’s in metric, right? That’s one of the things I don’t understand. Go through and find everything that doesn’t make sense to you. Colonel Lintz from NORAD will be providing a separate briefing about the ASM-140 later.”

  Waabboy left the locker room with a wave, pausing only to look back at them with a final warning: “No slacking off!”

  Ricky and Madu rose to their feet and saluted as he left.

  “Hey, Madu,” Ricky said, once Waabboy was gone. “You use metric in India, right?”

  “Don’t look at me. I’m going to have my hands full operating the external photography pod. I told them the Raptor isn’t a surveillance plane, but do they listen?” Madu frowned and paged through their orders. “A seventy-degree climb, side by side, to seventy thousand feet?”

  Madu glared at Ricky. His F-15 was supposed to have been the only one challenging the altitude record. She wasn’t happy about getting caught up in that initiative. It had been their former commander, Major Sylvester Fernandez, along with Waabboy himself, who had authored that part of the mission plans.

  “Not my fault.”

  “I know, I know. Listen, I’m going to visit the simulator. See whether I can actually get that high with something on the side of the plane dragging me down.” Madu started to tie her hair back. “Why don’t you drop by too, Ricky? The ASM-140 fires automatically. You’d do well to learn how it behaves after release.”

  “What’s that you say?”

  Ricky pulled a nine-page flight plan from his copy of their orders. Target velocity: 7.7 kilometers per second … Shit! Even the parts that mattered were in metric.

  Tue, 15 Dec 2020, 14:12 -0800 (2020-12-15T22:12 GMT)

  Western Days Hotel, Seattle

  Bruce chose the chair nearest Chris and pulled it toward him. This action brought the central display to life and displayed a list of accounts Bruce could use. A reader screwed into place under the table was detecting the name card Akari had made for him.

  “Who built this setup?” Bruce asked.

  “Daryl built the hardware, Akari the software,” Chris said. “They put it together yesterday—only took them one evening. You can connect it to a CIA desktop too. Headquarters is going to fail their security audit for sure.”

  If you wanted to display your laptop’s screen directly, you simply inserted it below the display and plugged in a few cables.

  “Amazing,” Bruce said. “Very different from headquarters. You practically have to show your health insurance just to buy a keyboard there.”

  “I have no interest in US national secrets,” came another voice. “You are safe with this system.”

  “Huh?” Bruce said. “Oh, that’s fine. I trust you.”

  The third speaker was Akari, currently on her hands and knees attaching Nichrome wire to the picnic mats Bruce had gone out and bought for her. Conversation with her wasn’t always smooth, but he appreciated the effort she made to communicate. Anyone who could make themselves this useful after being chased to a foreign country was a cut above the rest.

  Bruce logged in to his CIA remote desktop and inserted a flash drive into one of the ports lined up beneath the monitor. A frame from a high-res video immediately appeared on the display, showing a man with a tightly wound air pushing his silver-framed glasses up the bridge of his nose with his middle finger. This was the man who had convinced Jose Juarez to draw the illustration of the Rod from God. Kirilo Panchenko, a forty-one-year-old Ukrainian. He had actually existed once, but thirty-eight years ago, at the age of three, he had gone missing. The profile for Kirilo in the video chat system was presumably an example of what people in Bruce’s line of work called a “legend”: a false identity backed by real documents.

  Bruce thought back on the videoconference between the man calling himself Kirilo and Jose that he’d pulled from the NSA archives. They had spoken in English, Kirilo with a phony-sounding Russian accent. Once Jose had accepted the proposal to draw the illustration, Kirilo had sent him the plans.

  Bruce was sure of one thing. Whoever this liar was, he had been at the center of the effort to muddy the waters around the Rod from God. The image that had come through on the videoconference had been doctored, thwarting the automatic facial-recognition engine. Not bad work for North Korean cyber command. The agent who’d proc
essed the video at the CIA had been just as surprised.

  “Pretty good-looking guy. Looks a bit uptight, though.” As he cropped the rest of the image out to send the face to headquarters, Bruce saw a human form reflected in his display. Turning, he found Akari staring at the screen in disbelief. “What’s wrong, Akari? Friend of yours?”

  Bruce followed this up with a friendly chuckle, but Akari didn’t react. She just gaped at the screen, not even blinking.

  “Ageha Ojisan … ”A mumble in Japanese escaped her lips as her trembling hand reached toward the monitor.

  Bruce felt his body tense. “Akari, do you know this man?”

  Slowly, Akari nodded. Her fingertips made contact with the screen, tracing the frames of the man’s glasses. Haltingly, she began to speak.

  “Yes. He’s my uncle. Ageha Shiraishi … He changed his glasses.”

  Bruce felt someone poke his shoulder and realized that Chris was now standing directly behind him. She put her finger to her lips and jerked her chin toward her own laptop to signal that she would send out the request for information on this Ageha Shiraishi.

  Akari spoke in English, clearly and carefully, eyes glued to the monitor. “Where did you find him? This is cropped from a video frame, right? Can I see the video?”

  Akari obviously had strong feelings for this man. How would she react if Bruce showed her the video of him gleefully deceiving the illustrator? With anger? Dismay?

  “This still was all that headquarters sent,” Bruce said. This was a lie. He had the whole video on his flash drive. “Was he an engineer too?”

  “He was my mentor,” Akari said.

  Now Bruce understood how a regular civilian hacker had managed to figure out so much of what the North Korean spies were doing. Akari had been able to see through the SIM reuse, the translation-engine corruption, and the trip wire ads because she thought the same way as Ageha Shiraishi, the man behind it all.

  Bruce’s experience as an intelligence agent whispered to him: You can use this. If Akari stuck with them on the team, they’d have someone who knew how Shiraishi thought. Who could read him.

  “It seems he’s the man who gave the plans for the Rod from God to the illustrator,” Bruce said. “He’s mixed up in this somehow. Are you sure that’s your uncle?”

  “Yes … Maybe the North Koreans are putting him up to this.”

  “Maybe so.” Bruce quietly pulled out the flash drive with the video on it.

  2020-12-15T23:00 GMT

  Project Wyvern

  We’ve had an absolute flood of inquiries and information since yesterday.

  Thank you so much, everyone.

  I know much more about the Rod from God now.

  If we could get a photo of it, we could try zooming in, but unfortunately it’s not yet visible to the naked eye. According to the orbital hotel’s debris-detection radar, it’s following us quietly at a distance of ten kilometers. We’re correcting our orbit as necessary to make the planned rendezvous with the ISS, but the Rod from God’s speed relative to us has stayed at zero.

  In other words, that object can move as freely as we can, not to mention observe us.

  What does it want? If there’s someone out there who’s mastered such advanced technology, why don’t they have anything better to do? It’s a bigger waste than this hotel’s Showerpots.

  Because, really, there’s so much that needs to be done.

  “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” Neil Armstrong’s first words after stepping onto the moon, 380,000 kilometers from Earth, as you know. It’s been fifty years now, and no one has made giant leap number two yet. No one has gone any farther out than he did.

  In fact, these days we can barely make it four hundred measly kilometers up—so low there are still atmospheric effects. And only a handful of people at a time, too. Six in the ISS, three in Tiangong-2, and two here in Wyvern. A grand total of eleven human beings in orbit.

  And now someone’s launched something into that same practically deserted orbit just to cause trouble. How petty and pathetic can you get?

  Ronnie’s acting tough, saying, “Let the idiots do what they want. We have our own work to do.” But if something doesn’t change, we’ll be leading that Rod from God right to the ISS.

  That would be no way to repay their hospitality.

  Judy Smark

  10 Riot

  Tue, 15 Dec 2020, 15:10 -08:00 (2020-12-15T23:10 GMT)

  Western Days Hotel

  “It’s been a long day, my Right Stuff crew,” said Chris. “You’re all doing great.”

  Kazumi stopped rubbing his eyes and hurriedly sat up in his chair. It was eight in the morning, Japan time.

  “But please hang in there for another two hours. Then we’ll have something to eat, and Kazumi and Akari can get some sleep. I imagine your sleepiness is peaking right now, but just hang in there a short while longer, please. A workout at the gym tomorrow morning will work wonders for your jet leg.”

  “These two aren’t as, ahem, mature as you, Chris,” said Bruce, who was sitting at the edge of the table. “They’re still young. A quick shower should do the trick.” He winked at Kazumi. This black CIA agent was already fitting into the team nicely.

  “Who are you calling ‘mature’?” said Chris with a laugh. She wrote a short list on the whiteboard.

  1) Analysis of space tether observational information

  2) Discussion/information exchange: space tether

  3) Op. Seed Pod

  4) North Korean spies

  “What’s Seed Pod?” Kazumi asked, before Chris had even finished writing.

  “I’ll explain later,” said Chris. “Is the analysis of Cunningham’s observational data complete?”

  Akari nodded. Kazumi noticed that she had faint circles under her eyes, though they were difficult to spot behind her display glasses. It was no surprise she was tired. Being the only programmer on their team, she had put together everything by herself, from the observational data and wardriving system to the operations center structure.

  “You want to see it now?” asked Akari. “This is the data captured from the observation point on Desnoeufs Island two hours ago.”

  When Akari tapped at the keyboard on her left arm, a projector lit up and an ocean horizon appeared on the whiteboard. A single streak of cloud floated in a sky that darkened from light green to dark blue, and near the center of the image was a white dot labeled SAFIR 3. Akari’s planetarium had been modified since Kazumi had seen it in Tokyo. The sky now had gradations, and the ocean was covered in ripples. Daryl and Bruce both let out a sigh of admiration. The game engine Akari was using endowed the planetarium with a certain aesthetic appeal that Kazumi supposed was missing from the schematic representations space professionals were used to seeing.

  “Akari, that’s beautiful,” said Bruce pointing to the whiteboard. “You even drew in the clouds.”

  “Clouds?”

  “Yeah, the streaks overlaid on SAFIR 3.”

  “Those aren’t clouds.”

  Akari stretched her arms out in front of her, lined up her index fingers, and spread out her arms, making the display zoom in on SAFIR 3. Kazumi noticed a strange camera attached above the whiteboard: a mounted motion sensor for gesture control. He supposed being able to enter commands without bringing any unnecessary devices into this already equipment-filled room was handy, but there was no denying that Akari was taking the opportunity to indulge her eccentric tastes to the hilt.

  “That’s a point cloud representing the space tethers,” she explained.

  “What?” cried Daryl, standing up to go around the table to examine the whiteboard.

  SAFIR 3 had been enlarged on the screen. Around it were faint dots indicating space tethers that were concentrated within a diameter of five … no, a range of about ten kilometers. Th
ese were the ones being used to kick SAFIR 3 along.

  “The hell …” said Daryl. “How many of those things are there?”

  “Only counting the ones revolving around SAFIR 3’s location,” said Akari, “Twenty thousand tether pairs.”

  “Twenty thousand?!” Daryl exclaimed.

  Kazumi gasped in surprise. When Akari had analyzed Ozzy’s data in Tokyo, she’d estimated ten thousand, but now she was saying double that number. Pointing to the brain of their operations center piled by the window, the mountain of self-assembly Raspberry Pi computers, Akari explained that it was counting the number of objects that were revolving, as this was the distinctive behavior of the space tethers. The Pis performed this task using the observational data from the Sampson-5, which was noise filled and only able to record 1,024 objects at a time.

  “Akari,” said Kazumi. “Did you just say something weird like ‘only counting the ones around SAFIR 3’?”

  “Yes. There are others.”

  “So there’s another group?”

  “Two other groups of about ten thousand each. Should I superimpose them on the globe? I saved the orbital information from when they passed over Desneoufs Island.”

  With her index fingers sticking up, Akari brought her hands closer together and then pointed downwards, making the sky zoom out rapidly until it became a 3-D globe. She then rotated the Earth so that Europe was in the center. There appeared three cloud-like streaks, two running east-west and one tilted on a sharp angle. Kazumi couldn’t take his eyes off it, now that he finally grasped the true scale of the space tether phenomenon.

  “Forty thousand space tethers …” said Chris, shaking her head slowly from side to side. “It’s like an orbital cloud.”

  Daryl and Bruce, who were frozen gazing at the projected globe, both echoed Chris: “Orbital cloud …”