It was Rob’s role to gently remind them. And sometimes not so gently. There was hardly any politician who made it to power, anywhere, not just the States, without compromise. And that compromise always came with a price. NASA’s budget would be cut, and he knew where it would be cut from next.
A number of asteroids that NASA had not seen were on a collision course with Earth, and only a hundred and thirty days away. The asteroids had been manipulated so that they would not discharge, and thus be nearly invisible until it was too late.
At least that was the plan.
He’d been told the rocks wouldn’t destroy the planet; that wouldn’t serve their purposes. But it would be enough to cause fear, panic, chaos, collapse an economy or two, a government or three, and the populace would cede everything to the powers that be to protect them.
Recent cuts to NASA’s budget ensured that they would not be found, but they still had lots of computing power available to other astronomers, and there was always the chance that one of those infernal amateur types would see the rocks and spoil the surprise.
Rob had ways of dealing with them, if he caught them quickly enough.
“Fine, I’ll make it happen,” the Vice President sighed. Of course he would. He didn’t have a choice if he didn’t want to be disgraced in some public way. Buying politicians was easy; buying witnesses was easier.
***
Jack Weston had the misfortune of being a somewhat strident amateur astronomer. His custom built twenty five inch telescope sat nestled in his home-made observatory, situated a good two hundred feet away from his house to avoid light bleed. Not that it was too much of an issue; he lived thirty five miles from the nearest human, and was always sure to turn the lights off on the house when he was photographing the sky.
He had finished building this particular telescope only a couple months before, replacing the ten inch unit he had used for eight years, and was ecstatic at the images it was producing. More than four times the clarity he was used to. He’d had to upgrade his Nikon for the increased resolution.
Northern Arizona was ideal country for a telescope too, dry, high altitude. And skies dark enough that he could use the timed motor mount to track the motion of the sky and still get stunningly sharp images.
As any astronomer knew, only half the job was actually done with the telescope these days. The other half was done on the computer, and Jack’s day job was as a computer programmer. He’d written his own photographic analysis tool in the Python programming language, and was starting to rely on it heavily, becoming more confident in it’s accuracy every day, with every tweak of the code.
But he still loved the night viewing.
There was something transcendent about looking into a telescope and seeing the rings of Saturn with your own eyes, or the slowly fading Red Spot on Jupiter.
Seeing the images in the computer after the fact was still thrilling, knowing they came from your own telescope, but it wasn’t quite the same.
As luck, this particular night the clouds had settled in, and he was reduced to reviewing pictures taken the night before while his program ran.
Suddenly his iPhone beeped. A text message. His program had found something.
Jack looked at the identifiers of the two images showing the discrepancy, then quickly pulled them up on his screen, focusing on the coordinates the page had shown him.
With a key press he was able to swap between the two images, back and forth until he could see what his program saw. It was barely anything. In fact, it was the absence of something that the computer had found. Interesting because he hadn’t programmed it for that.
In one frame, an object identified as USNOA2 1050-01219719 was there, and the next it wasn’t. It wasn’t a nova, it just wasn’t there. He advanced to a third frame. It returned again, but slightly dimmer. He checked the fourth frame. It was there, and back to its original brightness.
Something had passed in front of 9719.
He quickly calculated the direction, then slid over to his computer running the scanning program and changed the parameters to scan for the path of this hidden object. Within seconds the program found it.
Another object in USNOA2, this one was 0555 though. The same thing, object disappears, then returns. This time it was longer though, as though it was growing in size.
Or coming closer.
Jack went back to his main computer and ran the expensive orbital calculator he’d purchased. It wasn’t much data, but the program was able to produce a range of results.
He whistled when he saw the range. Earth was in it.
He brought his email program up and started composing an email to his friend at AAS, the American Astronomical Society. He knew his friend knew someone at NASA, maybe Kepler could image this thing better than he could.
Right ascension 4 hours, 19 minutes, 54.45 seconds, declination 20 degrees and 44 minutes. Moving east-south-east. Something dark blocking stars in USNOA2.
Send.
He went back to scanning. Damn it, if only he could use his telescope tonight he could see where it might have gone next. Instead he did the next best thing and tried to track it back further.
Two days later Jack Weston died of salmonella poisoning. The email to his friend at AAS was never received, since it had been blocked by his friend’s email’s spam filter.
***
John stewed about it.
The minor tweaks he had made to the HAARP array were going to destroy it, eventually, perhaps in a matter of weeks. It had been running so long that a few more days wouldn’t have made much difference anyways.
But it still left the Earth defenseless. In ancient times there had been many more asteroids and comets in the solar system, and many of them had tried to strike the planet. They had been stopped, destroyed, by the Earth’s magnetic field. That massive electric belt literally shocked them to pieces before they could become a threat.
Every once in a while one large enough would get through, but as time went on they were getting rarer and rarer. Tunguska, in Northern Russia in 1908 was the last really big one, before that it was probably the bolide that caused the Great Chicago Fire in 1871, jokes about Mrs. O’Leary’s cow aside.
The planet’s ability to repel asteroid and cometary impacts was dwindling now though, not even a third of what it had been forty years before.
Any minor stone tossed its way was bound to have a far greater impact, and someone had loaded a proverbial shotgun of rocks and shot them towards Earth.
The problem for John was that he didn’t think the Key had enough power to repel all of them. A few certainly, but after that any available energy coming from the Sun was going to be spent.
He watched Chuck go about his business, monitoring the array, unaware of the seed of destruction eating away at it’s heart.
He was coming to understand that the government, or someone, had ulterior motives for this massive complex. It certainly wasn’t about testing defensive systems. They were pumping magnitudes more energy into the upper atmosphere than they had published, and there had to be a reason.
One thing was for sure, though, this Chuck didn’t know anything about it. It was time to dig deeper, because even if they could find a way to redirect all those meteors, they had to find a way to stop whoever was responsible for weakening the Earth’s field to start with.
The Final Frontier
Jessica could not have imagined how the Key of Location, or An-Cul as it had been named at the time of it’s creation, would have made travel so much easier.
She was getting used to the little tricks John had shown her, but the Key of Location made those tricks look, well, like the simple tricks they were. She could now envision any number of locations at once, and choose to be in just one, or overlap them and “listen” to them all at once. She found “listening” to more than two at a time troublesome, but it was something the Key was helping her with. The more she did it, the better able she was to absorb more information.
; And with this Key, there appeared to be few limits on the kind of travel she could achieve. She sensed that teleporting anywhere within the solar system would be trivial, but she wasn’t about to test that, not without borrowing a pressure suit first.
So she did.
She was sure NASA would miss suit serial number 1024, especially since they tended to cost upwards of ten million dollars. But that wasn’t the worst part. She also had to “break” into the manufacturers, Hamilton Sundstrand, to find a manual for the damned thing. That took longer than finding the suit.
At least John agreed to help her with it. She suspected he was a little jealous that she would be the first of them to go into space, and offered to let him go first. At least there was a pocket on the inside to keep the Key with her.
“No, you’re the one with An-Cul. It should be you.”
She agreed, but was glad he did too.
With the final clasp in place, she used the suit’s arm controls to check the pressure. And realized that she felt like she was wearing an Austin Mini. “They really have to come up with something better.”
John just chuckled at her.
The thing about being able to travel anywhere in the blink of an eye meant you didn’t have to worry about doing anything in one particular place. Jessica certainly wasn’t in the mood to have all this NASA gear knocking over everything at home, so she had decided to put it on at a remote location in Florida, surprisingly not far from Cape Canaveral.
Within seconds of putting the suit on, however, she realized the foolishness of that decision. It got very warm, very quickly.
“Hang on,” John said, probably reading her mind. He was much better with the toys than she was, and probably knew the manual backwards and forwards.
Then again, he’s a guy, so she couldn’t be sure he even cracked the manual.
He played with the arm controls for a couple of seconds and suddenly cool, merciful and refreshing air started flowing. “Oh thank God.”
“You’re welcome,” John said with a smirk. She tried to punch him with her Austin Mini outfit, without much success. He turned to her, more serious. “Be very, very careful out there. Ten seconds, no more. And don’t forget to try to block the radiation, it’ll be deadly out there.”
She nodded.
“Do you know where you’re going first?”
“I think the far side of the moon, just to see what I can see.”
“Good. See you in ten seconds.”
She smiled at him, then let herself through the dimensional doorway that deposited her on the far side of the moon.
Which happened to be in full sunlight.
She dropped the visor’s sunscreen. If she hadn’t been consciously reducing the amount of radiation reaching her, she would have been blinded, burned or worse.
Space was dangerous stuff, she realized.
But with the visor in place, her environment taken care of, she looked around. And had trouble closing her mouth.
The shear stark beauty of it was mind boggling. She had seen pictures of the Moon before, and expected to see endless vistas of grey. She did not expect to see colour, like thousands of broken rainbows reflecting off of shades of grey, beige, white and black, the terrain around her was filled with colour. The only colour she noticed missing was green, and even with the beauty of her surroundings she realized how important that one shade was.
That’s enough, she could feel John send her. Had it been ten seconds already? It seemed hard to believe, and she took one more short look around. With a blink she returned. Certainly he was able to read her mind, as she could his, and the smile on his face was a reflection of the sheer sense of awe she had just experienced.
John opened the helmet and lifted it off her head. She noticed Pan standing beside him. When did he get here?
“Well?” Pan asked her.
“It was incredible.”
“No, did you see anything?”
Now she understood. He was anxious. “Not yet, this was just a test flight. Though I have to admit I don’t really know where to go next.”
“I might have some ideas about that.”
It was then that Jessica noticed another man, apparently in his fifties, sitting nearby, wide eyed and watching them.
“Missing? How the hell does a twelve million dollar space suit go missing?” Sarah Jacobsen, deputy director of NASA, demanded of Frank, the engineer reporting the loss.
“I don’t know. It was there during inventory the night before, and by the morning the closet was empty.”
“And the closets are all secured?”
“Yes, and logged to the computer.”
“And nobody opened it?”
“No.”
Sarah was livid. Her budget was tight enough without having this kind of thing happen. Clearly it had to be a theft though, so maybe there’s an angle here she could use. Maybe insurance would cover the loss.
There was a knock at the door.
“Enter!” she shouted.
Another engineer, one she recognized as working with Frank, though she couldn’t remember this one’s name, opened the door and entered. He was breathless.
“There’s a problem.”
“What?”
“It’s not one suit missing. It’s three.”
Sarah felt like throwing her coffee at the wall.
***
It was almost too much for poor old Jack. At least that’s what he told himself. This Pan character had pulled him out of his life and faked his death because he said they were trying to kill him. And for what? Finding an asteroid? Was he even sure he could believe this character? He hadn’t, right up until Pan teleported him. That had been pretty convincing.
Well, it was an asteroid potentially headed for Earth, so he could kind of understand why they would want him dead, or at least he could if the world was run by absolutely insane psychopaths. He didn’t like what it meant.
Pan had shown him some absolutely incredible things in the last few hours, and here he was sitting in the grass, humid air and sun splashing over him, watching someone in a space suit flit in and out with the blink of an eye. He’d been told it wasn’t magic, just technology, but God, what technology!
And being teleported! It was nothing like he expected. It was just...one second he was one place, the next another. No sound, no special effects, no lights, just...the only thing to really betray the change was how it smelled. He wasn’t used to the smell of salt water, and had wrinkled his nose at it.
But it had also impressed the reality of it. He really was in Florida, as Pan had said they were going to be, the warmth and sun feeling like a wonderful change from his cool mountain home.
These people were using technology that was not only beyond his means, but beyond his imagination.
And they wanted his help?
***
The incident with the astronomer worried Arthur. The threat they were facing was bad enough, but that there were powers out there trying to kill regular people for having the misfortune of finding the truth? Frightening.
“Zack, best get cleaned up, supper will be in a few minutes,” his wife called from the kitchen. He watched her start to fill dishes from pots, ready to go to the table. It was something he had seen nearly every day for a thousand years. Yet now it seemed surreal, like a facade.
He sat at the dinner table trying to digest the information, and almost laughed at the pun in his mind. Almost. But he was in no mood.
“Would you give me a hand love?”
He got up and helped her bring dishes to the table just as Zack entered the dining room and sat down. Good kid, that one.
They had even set an extra place tonight, since they were having a guest. Arthur sent a message to his daughter. Dinner is served.
A few seconds later, Jessica, John, Pan and the astronomer, Jack, appeared in their little living room above the restaurant. Jack appeared a little bewildered, and who could blame him?
“Hi dad,” Zack greeted,
without getting up. John walked over and kissed his son’s head.
“Hey kiddo. I’d like you to meet Jack. He’s an astronomer.”
“Amateur astronomer, thank you,” Jack corrected, the grey at his sides betraying his years. “Professional programmer,” he offered as he shook Zack’s hand.
“What’s an amateur astronomer?”
“What’s a professional programmer,” Catherine said quietly to Arthur. He tried to ignore the comment, but a grin encroached on his lips.
Jack smiled. “If they’re like me, they’re someone who builds their own telescope.”
“Freaking cool!”
They all sat as Arthur and Catherine filled the table with the night’s meal. Pot roast, gravy, and broccoli. His favorite.
Arthur continued to think about the whole thing while they ate. The rest were trying to make casual conversation, likely for Zack’s benefit, but he couldn’t. The incident with Jack had confirmed that Pan was right to be paranoid all these years. There were powers at work so well hidden from public scrutiny that it was frightening.
At one point he looked down and saw an empty plate. He had finished his meal without remembering a single bite. Damn.
After dinner his wife shooed them out of the dining room so she could clean up, but not before putting a slice of treacle in his hands to take with him. He smiled. She knew him well. Treacle was his favorite dessert when he felt bothered by something.
Arthur felt outclassed. Here he was in the company of three bearers, between them seemingly limitless power, and they were asking for his help. It was ridiculous.
“Arthur, you there?”
He finally realized Pan had been trying to get his attention. “Sorry old man. What was that?”
“The Templars, you remember when they were wiped out.”
“Indeed I do.”
“You had a theory about that.”
He considered his words. He hadn’t talked about it for years. “Pope Clement the fifth ordered them murdered, and was going to steal their wealth. But when they arrested all the Templars, the wealth was already gone. Hidden, presumably. But you know at the time I did a little digging because it sounded a little too convenient. You know how they say follow the money? Well, it was no different in the fourteenth century. So I followed the money. It seemed to lead right back to Poitiers, where the Pope lived, right to a minor bishop who seemed to have access to the Pope himself.”
The World Keys (The Syker Key Book 2) Page 3