“Plus you’ve got to worry about the total breakdown of society when people find out they’re about to get melted by space aliens,” Hawthorne added almost as an afterthought.
“Now, hold on,” said Dan Henning, the president’s chief of staff. “When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, there wasn’t panic. The country pulled together. Give people a common enemy and they’ll fight it in common. Why would this be any different?”
Hawthorne shook her head.
“Totally different. Everyone had been debating possible war with the Germans and Japanese for years. The specifics of Pearl Harbor were a shock, but the idea of war wasn’t. Plus, the mainland US was never really threatened. None of that applies here. Plus, you know, aliens.”
Lockerman swiveled back to General Linton, whose Air Force was in charge of satellite surveillance.
“General, how many other countries saw what happened in New Mexico? What would their satellites have picked up? Have we intercepted any chatter on this?”
Linton tapped a button on his tablet, scanning the info he’d already memorized.
“Maybe the Russians, maybe the Chinese saw some of it. Probably mistook the landings for meteors, as we did initially, if they noticed it at all. No one else had satellites close enough to pick it up. As for the global satellite blackout that followed, everyone definitely noticed that. The Chinese think we or the Russians were testing some experimental equipment. Russians blame us or the Chinese. Satellite TV providers, GPS companies, those guys noticed it, too. We had NASA put out a press release blaming a small solar flare. Seems to be working,” he said with a shrug. “A few astronomers are saying they didn’t notice a flare, but that’s not getting much press.”
“What about amateur astronomers, university observatories, that sort of thing? Lots of people are looking at the sky all the time.”
“True. The ships would have just looked like small meteors, though. The Russians and Chinese might suspect something was up, but not like they’re going to publicly claim aliens landed in New Mexico.”
Lockerman was quiet for a moment.
“We have a short window to decide if and how we go public. I think we do have to say something, soon.” He nudged the cup and saucer with his finger, unsure how to proceed. “I don’t think it will go over well. To your point, Miranda, there’s no Pearl Harbor here. We haven’t really even been attacked yet. We’re going to tell people they have to reorder the entire global economy against an enemy only one man has ever seen in person. I’m not sure they’re going to believe it. Shit, I’m not sure I believe it.”
Lockerman picked up the sheet of paper, stood up, and looked out the window, down at the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden. The sun was out, and the tulips bowed in the breeze. Lockerman looked back into the Treaty Room, his gaze caught on the painting The Peacemakers. Lincoln, his legs crossed, his right elbow resting on his knee and his chin on his palm, listened eternally as Major General William Tecumseh Sherman spoke, while General-in-Chief Ulysses S. Grant and Rear Admiral David Dixon Porter looked on.
The meeting in 1865 aboard the steamer River Queen had occurred in the final days of the Civil War, both sides exhausted and bled dry. More than 600,000 dead, the most lethal war in American history. By one estimate, 10 percent of all Northern men between the ages of twenty and fifty-four were killed, and 30 percent of Southern men between eighteen and forty. Lockerman tried to imagine tens or hundreds of millions Americans killed in an invasion, but the numbers were too big and he waved the thought aside. The figures on the paper in his hand were startling enough. Perhaps future generations would study it in a museum and be equally astounded at how such simple math could contain so much horror.
The president turned to his assembled advisers, folding the piece of paper and slipping it into his pocket.
“All right, let’s get this rolling. Eventually, we’ll have to tell the whole world. But for now, let’s start briefing the heads of state we trust and the ones we need to ramp up their satellite production lines.”
Lockerman looked again at the painting. He wondered if Lincoln had any inkling before the war started of the butcher’s bill he would have to sign to preserve the Union. The sharp corners of the folded notepaper in his pocket pressed against his thigh.
“God help us all.”
6
Bert Goldberg sank into his creaky office chair. He wiggled the grimy mouse to wake his wheezing Dell and gobbled a bite of his bologna sandwich. Berta, his wife—“the other ‘Bert’” as she liked to introduce herself with a meaty laugh—was out grocery shopping. He had to make some kind of progress on the job search if he wanted her to come home from the next shopping trip with more than bologna and macaroni.
He was already scrolling through job listings, but there weren’t a lot of openings for fifty-two-year-old electrical engineers with a background in aeronautics. Satellites, specifically.
He sighed and opened another tab in his browser to compose an entry for his blog, “To the Moon, Alice!”
Goldberg wasn’t much for gadgets, although he certainly understood them. Given a screwdriver and a few minutes by himself, he could disassemble and repair most everything, as his fingers just seemed to work on their own, gently prodding and turning. Most of the modern toys held little appeal for their own sake. He was more interested in how they worked than how he could use them. “If it ain’t broke, what’s the point?” he’d once explained to Berta. He did enjoy blogging, though. He’d developed a dependable audience of a few thousand readers who followed his musings on everything from space travel to medieval warfare.
Goldberg tapped at his keyboard. The old keys were getting squishy, and the letter “Q” often got stuck. Good thing he didn’t need that one often. Currently, he was trying to coax something readable from a previous draft post about the maintenance needs for “solar sails,” a theoretical propulsion system for interplanetary probes. No matter how many edits he made, though, he couldn’t seem to fix it. A few years ago, he’d dreamed of retiring and devoting himself to his hobbies. As it turned out, a hobby was much more fun as a diversion than a devotion. Particularly when you had credit card bills piling up in your kitchen.
He tabbed back over to the job listings.
He popped the last bite of sandwich in his mouth and banged out a few keywords, expecting the usual “no listings.” Instead, more than 100 openings spilled down the screen.
Whoa.
In the last 30 minutes, dozens and dozens of positions had opened up, all looking for experienced electrical engineers willing to relocate and begin work immediately. In addition to the old standbys—Thales Alenia Space, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Loral, Astrium, JSC—dozens of manufacturers that had gotten out of the satellite game years ago were now advertising, too.
Bert and Berta had already agreed that if they had to relocate from Denver for his job hunt, they’d do it. Lockheed Martin Space Systems had a big presence in the area, but the satellite division had been cutting staff due to the watery economy. Commercial and government clients had all been cutting their orders in the last year or so.
But you wouldn’t have known it from this job board. There were now openings from Colorado to California to France, Russia, Canada, the UK, Japan, and more. Goldberg backed out of his refined search and did a broader search across all job categories at satellite manufacturers. Thousands of listings filled the browser, page after page after page.
“What the hell . . .” He dipped into a bag of Fritos with his free hand. He smeared the chips into his mouth, dusted his hands, and fired off his résumé to every opening for which he was remotely qualified, more than thirty in all, then clicked back to his blog.
Goldberg deleted the limp entry he’d been composing and tapped out a new post about the surge in job postings. What was going on? He scanned the news headlines. Then a deeper search for any space- or communications-related news that would justify this overnight multi-billion-dollar surge. He’d already looked twice earlier in the day
, and he came up empty again. He refreshed the job listings page, just to make sure it hadn’t been some kind of glitch. Nope. This was beyond bizarre. It made no sense. This industry could crash fast, but recoveries were always slow, as clients were reluctant to make such expensive investments until demand was unmistakable.
He finished composing his blog post, hit “publish,” and opened his email to look through last night’s correspondence. All thirty-four of his job applications had already been answered. They’d all come through in the last twenty minutes, while he’d been writing the post. All were requesting phone interviews. Today. He slumped back. Could this be some kind of scam? Seemed unlikely. All the job openings had been cross-posted to the websites of the individual manufacturers. If it was a scam, then it involved some kind of global computer hack against a bunch of companies who employed some of the best security nerds in the biz.
Not a scam, but something was definitely . . . wrong.
A childhood memory burbled up, of his uncle describing how the US geared up for World War II after the Japanese attack. Literally overnight, the country mobilized. Factories trickling out small batches of cars and refrigerators for a sleepy economy were jolted to life in a war fever. Tanks and airplanes and millions and millions of bullets, artillery shells, and bombs poured out. By the time they’d pulled the bodies from the water, America was a different country.
Goldberg rocked back in his chair.
Mobilization.
He rolled the word around in his mind, turning it over like a broken radio, looking for the loose wire or busted transistor. Mobilize? But why? For what? Why would you crank up the global satellite industry? War seemed unlikely. Beyond the usual political squabbles, there wasn’t any kind of global confrontation brewing that would lead to World War III.
All those listings going live at the same time meant something. Couldn’t deny that. Whatever was happening was bigger than just one company winning a contract and opening its wallet. All these guys seemed to be responding to the same signal. Like they’d all just gotten huge checks and tight deadlines. But for what?
It must be some kind of natural disaster, then? Something to do with global warming? Hard to imagine all these new birds were just for one storm, as they took months or years to build and launch. And there were already a handful of weather-tracking satellites overhead, some of them a far sight more sophisticated than most people knew. The military funded a lot of the satellite industry, after all. Any US government satellite, even if officially built for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or some other civilian agency, eventually did double duty for the soldiers and the spies. It didn’t bother him. Every other country did the same. Just a fact of life, and he had no problem keeping an eye on the assholes of the world. The bottom line was that the US and the rest of the world had more than enough super-fancy birds watching the clouds, the oceans, and the surface of the planet for any near-term needs.
So if they weren’t looking down, these new birds must be looking . . . the other direction? Out into space?
Goldberg munched a few more chips. Steve, their aging lab, snored and whimpered at his master’s feet as his paws twitched. Goldberg dropped a handful of chips absently and the dog slurped them up with barely a glance, crunching them quickly and then drifting back to sleep.
An asteroid? A collision of some kind? What else could it be? He could imagine the gaggle of astrophysicists rushing into a White House briefing room, armed with maps and photos and laptops and coffee.
He sat up, crumbs and larger chunks of food tumbling to the floor. Steve vacuumed those up, too.
If it really was an asteroid collision, Goldberg realized he probably knew some of the guys who would be in those meetings, NASA PhDs and other big brains. For those guys, unemployment was just something economists studied. Windbags, most of them. But a few of the scientists didn’t mind talking to the grunts who actually machined and assembled their telescopes and rovers and antennas.
He rummaged through a drawer and removed a thick stack of business cards held together with a double-wrapped rubber band.
A few months ago, his wife had bought him a scanner he could use to copy the names and addresses to his computer, but the scanner was still in a box in a closet, gathering cobwebs.
“Dammit, Bert, get organized!” she had said, then laughed, when she was cleaning the closet last week.
He snapped the rubber band off and flung it aside. He thumbed through the stack, looking for the card he wanted, flipping the others back into the drawer.
“Where is it? Ah, Mark, there you are, you bastard.”
Mark Norris. Goldberg laughed, looking at the officious font on the card. Norris was an old friend from high school who loved pranks almost as much as Goldberg. Goldberg had wound up at community college, while Norris had gone to MIT.
Still, they’d shared a fascination with rocketry and space travel and had built a dry ice launcher out of metal pipe one Saturday afternoon and launched glow sticks into the principal’s swimming pool from a hundred yards away on a November night. Their friendship had survived distance and time. Norris now worked at Phoenix Aerospace, a startup company made up mostly of former NASA hardware engineers and software developers. A Silicon Valley billionaire was funding the startup, the latest trend among the nouveau riche. It had been months since Goldberg had talked to his old friend, and he wasn’t sure what to expect.
He thumbed the keypad on his cordless phone—the cell phone hadn’t been charged in days, and was currently serving as a drink coaster for a can of soda.
After nearly a dozen rings, he was about to hang up when a frazzled voice came on the line.
“Yeah? I mean, hello?”
“Mark, you son of a bitch, I nearly gave up. It’s Bert. You fall asleep at your desk again?” he asked with a snort. It was a joke, as Norris was the most tireless man he had ever met. Most meth addicts probably got more shut-eye.
He expected a good-natured rejoinder, but Norris’s voice came back with a strained intensity.
“Bert, hey, how’s it going, man?” he said, more statement than question. “Listen, uh, I’ve got a lot on my plate right now, and . . .” He trailed off. Goldberg leaped into the opening.
“Yeah, that’s kind of why I’m calling. Don’t know if you heard, but Lockheed laid me off a few months ago, and so I’ve been job hunting and came across something weird today.”
“Wait, what?” Norris’s voice had gained an electric intensity. “Holy shit, Bert, look, uh, how’d you like to come by the office tomorrow and chat? Hell, look, forget the meeting, how’d you like a job? The pay is $110k, and we need you to start yesterday.”
Goldberg leaned back in his chair, staring at the ceiling. A column of ants was marching along the plaster from the window frame. The exterminator had quoted them 200 bucks for the job. Not a chance. So now the Goldbergs had a few thousand roommates.
“Mark, what’s going on? I just searched through all the job boards, and yesterday there wasn’t squat and now there’s openings from here to Beijing. I’ll be honest, buddy, I was a little freaked out before I called you, and now I’m a little more freaked out.”
Norris let out a deep breath.
“Bert, I can’t really tell you anything right now. I barely know anything. But there’s something big going down, and we’ve been told to bring everyone onboard immediately. I’m sure you’ll have your pick of jobs by the end of the day, but I can offer you pretty much whatever you want right now. I’m serious, we’ll fly you out here to Arizona tonight, first class, and put you to work first thing tomorrow. We’re in a god-awful hurry.”
“Is it an asteroid, Mark?” He swiveled to look out the window as he heard Berta’s van huff and creak into the driveway.
“Honestly, I don’t know. Maybe. Nothing makes sense right now. I think . . . look, let me hold the chatter. If you take the job, I can fill you in on what I do know when you get here. You’ll need security clearance. Yours still current? S
ay the word and you’ll have a boarding pass emailed to you within the next five minutes for your flight. You in?”
Berta was singing the climax of “Nessun Dorma” from Turandot as she came in the door, swinging grocery bags from her ponderous arms. She marched into the office bellowing the final “Vincerò!” but stopped when she saw her husband’s tense face.
“Yeah, I’m in,” he said.
“Excellent. I’ll pick you up at the airport. No, scratch that, I’ll send someone to get you. I don’t think I’m going home tonight. Give Berta my love.”
Norris hung up.
Goldberg gently deposited the phone back in its cradle.
“Well, don’t keep me in suspense. These ice cream sandwiches are about to drip down my toes.”
“Looks like I’ve got a job,” he said.
“Congratulations and holy shit. Doing what?”
He was stunned, then laughed.
“I forgot to ask.”
7
Harry Campos looked up for the bus, shielding his eyes against the glare of the Detroit sun. Nowhere in sight. Dammit.
He fished his phone out of his pocket. He was going to be late for work again. His old Toyota pickup had broken down last Sunday on the way home from bailing his brother, Manuel, out of jail, and of course the lazy bum hadn’t even offered to chip in. So now he had to figure out how to come up with $600 to get the fuel pump fixed on top of the $300 bail. And the odds of the steel mill handing out bonuses right now was about as likely as PETA sponsoring a cockfight. So the cell phone might be the next thing to get cut off.
Campos had barely finished high school fourteen years ago, and college wasn’t even a pipe dream. Well, maybe a bit of a dream. Science had always intrigued him, and he’d taken second place in the state science fair as a junior for a model rocket festooned with a variety of sensors. He’d measured wind speed, temperature, and humidity at nearly 9,000 feet, and he’d built the device himself out of scrap metal and other scavenged parts. It was still sitting on a shelf at his apartment. And he liked to read science news whenever he got a chance.
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