1
History is often nothing more than a chain of events connected in unforeseen ways, set in motion by individuals who would much rather be somewhere else at that moment.
The young captain of the Russian Aerospace Defense Force could have charitably been called ambivalent about his present moment, having just left his young wife and baby in their small Moscow apartment for his turn as watch officer at the Sofrino Missile Defense Complex. After driving far beyond the outskirts of the city, he parked his rattle-trap Lada sedan in a lot carved out of the forest. Trudging around mounds of dingy slush, he made his way toward an immense slab rising above a remote clearing in the predawn gray. The building’s trapezoidal facade was covered with the circular panels of phased-array radars, its roof was a thicket of antennae. There were no windows, only a single door centered at the building’s base which looked cartoonishly small in comparison.
The captain mechanically returned the salutes of unsmiling sentries and made his way through the first bank of security gates, thankful to be out of the cold. Following a circuitous route of corridors deep into the building with more security at every turn, he finally arrived at a single reinforced door. He swiped his ID badge across the digital lock, steeling himself for another twelve-hour shift of monitoring satellite traffic.
He hung his wool uniform cloak on a worn coat stand behind the door and settled into the watch officer’s desk, returning a nearby junior officer’s greeting with an acknowledging grunt. His station overlooked a small auditorium with rows of identical dull-gray consoles, all facing a wall full of oversized monitors that tracked every known satellite and piece of space debris transiting the skies above Russia.
As he rubbed the sleep from his eyes, the aroma of black tea insinuated itself into his nostrils. He looked over to the senior watch sergeant. The man always seemed to know what he needed almost as well as his wife did, as a good NCO should. “Thank you, Sergeant.”
“And how is your little one, sir?” The sergeant had already been through the travails of newborns now three times over. Popov had thought he’d been tired while standing alerts in Ukraine; he was learning that combat tours were sometimes easier than parenthood.
“He started walking last month,” the captain yawned, “and climbing last night.”
The sergeant laughed. “It doesn’t get any easier as they get older, I’m afraid.”
The junior watch officer next to him, unattached and oblivious to the old-timer’s banter, handed Popov a canvas-bound notebook. “The watch log, sir.”
As he skimmed through the usual mundanities, his eyes were drawn to specific instructions highlighted for his personal attention and initialed by the commanding general: He was to retrieve a particular set of orders from the safe in the commander’s office prior to 0530 Moscow time.
He glanced at the digital clock above the situation displays: 0524. Six minutes. The old combination lock on that safe was already meant to be difficult and years of use had left it temperamental. If the orders were that important, why not just brief the previous watch officer? He called for the senior sergeant to follow him; the one man he could rely on to coax the thing open in a hurry.
With a few careful spins and a deft touch on the release lever, the sergeant cracked the heavy door open on the second try. A manila envelope bound with red tape sat inside an otherwise empty safe. Curious. “You have my thanks once more. That will be all.”
As the sergeant excused himself, the captain tore the envelope free and closed the safe. It was labeled with the current date and addressed to the Duty Officer, A-135 Battery, 9th Aerospace Defense Division. He checked his watch: 0528, two minutes until whatever deadline had been imposed on him.
He untied the string clasp and shook the contents into his hand. While the outer packaging was clearly new, the inner packaging was clearly not: Another, much older envelope fell out. He drew the blade of his pocketknife across a seam that had been yellowed and softened by the years to find a single sheet of paper within.
The message began with an otherwise unremarkable string of numbers and abbreviated prefixes. Even without the prefixes, the captain recognized them as a table of orbital elements and astronomical coordinates. Right Ascension, Declination, Altitude, Bearing . . . a targeting solution.
His cell phone began ringing at 0530 sharp, startling him. Even more startling was the incoming caller: Commanding General, 9th Division.
“A-135 Battery, Captain Popov.” He felt like an idiot, snapping to attention for a telephone call.
“I believe you have a fire mission, Captain.”
“Yes sir,” he swallowed, contemplating the intercept orders which appeared to be older than he was. “It appears that the vectors and release sequence have been programmed for some time.”
“Yes, I found that hard to escape notice as well.”
The younger officer studied the intercept vectors as he returned to his station in the operations center and scrolled through a catalog of known objects. “But there is nothing there, Comrade General,” he whispered into the phone, meaning that of course nothing occupied that point in space at this particular time; rather, there was nothing in their database of potential threats that should be anywhere close to that region of space in the next twelve hours. Not with the approach angle these numbers implied. Where did they think this phantom target was coming from?
“You have your orders, Captain,” the general said, “and I have mine. If you are for any reason unable to carry them out, then my orders would be, let us say, regrettable. Do you foresee any difficulties?”
He didn’t, yet the thinly veiled threat frightened him anyway, as unspecified dire consequences from a flag officer tended to do. Why wouldn’t he carry out his orders if it was just to intercept old space junk? If the general hadn’t called, he’d have just assumed it was a long-planned live-fire exercise.
“Captain?”
“No, sir,” he insisted. “There will be no difficulties.” He looked back at the specified countdown sequence and then up at the chronograph above the control center’s giant wall screens. “If that will be all, sir, I must see to my duties.”
“Good man.” The call ended at the other end with a firm click.
The target emerged on the Siberian early-warning net within seconds of the predicted time. Popov saw it appear on his own monitor before the watch chief notified him of a new target. “Very well,” he answered, and noted the new velocity vector now flashing above as it began continually updating. “Designate target Zulu-One and track to intercept, Sergeant.”
“Intercept, sir?”
He was taken aback at how rapidly the tracking solutions were changing. The target had appeared at the very edge of their deep-space network’s range and it was nearing a firing solution, just as the countdown sequence had instructed. No wonder he’d been instructed to spin up the ABM interceptors an hour ago.
“You heard me, Sergeant. That object has been designated a threat and we are to eliminate it. This is why we are here. Remember Chelyabinsk.” Whatever this thing was, the memory of a meteor whose effect had been indistinguishable from an airburst nuclear bomb could be counted on to motivate them to protect their homeland.
“Of course, sir. It is moving rather fast but tracking radars are keeping up.”
Popov watched the intercept solution unfold. As the sergeant had noted, it was moving improbably fast. He’d made certain to mark the time it had appeared in order to deduce its orbital elements when this was all done. With enough data points, reconstructing the object’s trajectory would be simple.
“Sir?” the sergeant interrupted his thoughts. “Target Zulu-One is emitting a coded signal on S-band.”
“What?”
“Very faint, but the time lag and doppler shift are consistent with the target’s relative motion. It’s a transponder beacon, sir.”
Deep inside the object dubbed Target Zulu-One by the Aerospace Defense battery, an electronic brain had sprung to life for the first time in decades. Weeks earlier the vessel’s solar wings had felt the Sun again after years of darkness, recharging its batteries and triggering an automated countdown sequence that had been programmed decades before.
As once-frozen thrusters rippled to life with bursts of hypergolic fire, the antennas that fed its primitive nervous system registered a sudden bath of laser and radio energy washing over them. Being nothing the vessel hadn’t been programmed to expect, it returned the electronic greeting by activating its transponder in reply. It couldn’t know that it had just marked itself as prey, a yelping pup lost in the deep woods.
Had the vessel’s occupants still been alive, they would have registered alarm at the salvo of anti-satellite weapons rising to meet them: wolves emerging from the shadows of the forest. If the little ship’s brain could have seen and felt and somehow reasoned beyond the limits of its simple arrangement of magnets and silicon, it might have flinched as the first of a half-dozen fragmentation warheads bit into it. The solar wings—its fragile limbs—were first to succumb. It was not long before the rest of Soyuz TMK-1 was ripped apart by the mechanical wolfpack of the Kosmicheskie Voyska Rossii.
It would be many days later before the event was reported in popular media and soon forgotten as yet one more obstinate Russian display of force. American
early-warning satellites registered the unexpected ASAT launch, followed by a series of bright flashes high above the Russian steppes. The official line was that they had intercepted a previously uncatalogued Near-Earth Object that threatened the Motherland. Professionals among the various national space programs publicly accepted their explanation and congratulated the Russian Aerospace Force for its dedication to planetary protection.
Amateurs knew better. As fanatic and dogged as HAM radio operators, the global network of amateur astronomers and satellite sleuths may not have seen the approaching NEO but some had noticed the odd EM noise from a point in space that should have been dead quiet. After a sudden anonymous data dump from a Russian IP address that just as suddenly went dark, the group’s social media eruptions had been epic:
OMG DID U GUYS SEE THAT! IT WAS A SPACECRAFT!
WTF? I MEAN WHAT THE EFFING EFF?
LOL UR HIGH DUDE. CHK UR DATA.
CHK UR MOM. IT’S A SOYUZ TM TRANSPONDER.
Soon after, the Russian government was forced to admit it had been the culmination of a long-planned exercise to hone their NEO intercept skills.
Owen Harriman, casually interested internet lurker and full-time NASA project manager, had come to a different conclusion after his own perusal of data he’d developed on his own. What the radio sleuths hadn’t seen was the object’s approach angle and initial velocity. Too crazy to believe, he’d run his numbers by a trusted trajectory planner in The Trench, the front row consoles in Mission Control where frighteningly clever mathematicians worked their spells of trajectory analysis.
Owen was shocked when the math wizard agreed. “You’re certain? There’s no way I could have messed this up?”
“Only if your initial conditions were off, which they weren’t. It’s solid, bro.”
Owen chewed his bottom lip as he worked through the implications. “A Russian spacecraft . . .”
“Soviet,” the wizard corrected. “That was an old TM-model freq.”
“Soviet spacecraft, forty years after the fall of Communism, appears out of nowhere aimed at their LZ in Kazakhstan,” Owen said.
“Don’t forget the part about interplanetary return velocity from Pluto’s orbit.”
Owen rubbed his eyes with his palms. “You’re not helping.”
The trajectory wizard laughed nervously. “Ivan was not screwing around, bro,” he said, tracing a finger along the reconstructed orbit. “If you don’t call APL, I will.”
“You never saw this,” Owen warned him. “All for the good of the program, of course,” he ended with a wry grin.
The wizard mimed zipping his lip.
As the digital images were dusted off—that is, pulled from whatever compressed file they’d been stored in and processed anew—the few managers from Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab briefed into Owen’s scheme reminisced over their own unlikely but hugely successful project.
After nine years of sailing across the solar system, faster than any other machine NASA had yet hurled out of Earth’s gravity well, the robotic probe New Horizons had finally entered Pluto’s fragile sphere of influence for a fleeting encounter back in 2015. Despite carrying the hopes and career expectations of so many, the event itself amounted to not much more than a cosmic one-night stand.
“Would’ve been nice to put that little guy into orbit,” one mused while the images compiled.
“Only way to do that would’ve been to keep it slow enough that we’d all be retired or dead before it got there,” an engineer retrieving the data scoffed. “You forget how hard it was to get it out there in the first place.”
“Neither one of you knows how hard it really was,” the lead scientist said. “I was there for the budget hearings.”
Owen wished he could have just brought up a couple of good backroom techs for this. He knew how these guys could ramble. “I remember that,” he said. “I still can’t believe you got it past Congress.” After a whirlwind of begging and pleading, a small yet determined group of scientists had prevailed upon D.C. politicians to fund their little mission before it was too late.
At almost the eleventh hour they had managed to convince the Budget Committee that Pluto’s tenuous atmosphere, barely detectable from Earth, would freeze into ice crystals and collapse onto the tiny planet’s surface within the next decade as it migrated farther away from the Sun.
“It got me to praying for the first time since forever,” he continued. “You wouldn’t believe how hard it was to convince them this was going to be our last chance for a couple of centuries.”
“How many times did you have to repeat the same answer?” Owen asked.
The scientist slid his glasses down to the end of his nose as he relived the moment, mimicking a dullard senator who’d tormented him during the budget hearings. “Exactly how long until it reappears?” he said, mimicking the senator’s exaggerated drawl. “You had to see his body language. It just shrieked ‘and why should we care?’ I kept telling him two hundred years, give or take a few decades. I guess he was suspicious that we somehow couldn’t precisely model atmospheric phenomena for a dwarf planet forty AUs away that no one had ever laid eyes on.”
Almost no one, Owen thought to himself.
“But I’m just a planetary geologist,” the scientist continued. “Took just enough physics to screw my GPA good and hard. Funny how they can never find any actual English speakers to teach it.”
“Should’ve gone to UC,” the engineer teased. “We didn’t have that problem. Not much.”
The other scientist laughed. “But then you’d have been in, you know, Ohio.” His wrinkled-up nose unambiguously telegraphed how he felt about the benighted Midwest.
The engineer rolled his eyes. “At least people can afford to live there. Baltimore rent is more than my parents are paying for a mortgage on an actual house with a yard, not just some renovated motel that slapped a ‘condo’ sign up front.”
Owen started thinking about finding those techs again. More work, less drama. “So, you said you were a planetary geologist . . .” he prodded.
“Yes. But since I was a geologist, the senator was compelled to ask the physicist seated next to me,” he said, and jerked a thumb at his partner, “who in turn had to produce a meteorologist to verify our assumptions.”
“An actual, working meteorologist,” the physicist interjected. “No PhD, just a grad student interning at NOAA while he worked on his masters. The kid protested that he didn’t know squat about extraterrestrial climatology, which is what the senators were really asking about. We explained to the kid that they’re too bloody stupid to know the difference. He finally agreed that, yes, Pluto’s thin excuse for an atmosphere would indeed freeze and fall to the surface as the planet moved farther away from the Sun. And no, we couldn’t know when for certain because we didn’t know the complete makeup of the atmosphere.”
“It won’t matter once you’re within a few degrees of absolute zero,” the engineer joked.
“And no, it would not become warm enough to reappear for another two centuries,” the geologist concluded. “Only after the kid dazzled them with sophomore-level physical science did we finally get the funding.”
And so, New Horizons had been slapped together largely from off-the-shelf components and dispatched to the edge of the solar system. It had resembled nothing so much as an ambitious gradeschooler’s vision of what a deep space probe should look like: about the size and shape of a grand piano wrapped in gold foil and topped with a massive dish antenna.
Launched from Earth in 2006, after a quick pass by Jupiter to steal some energy from the gas giant’s gravity well—which it wasn’t going to miss all that much—the little probe went into hibernation until being awakened by its masters back on Earth. That this golden radioactive piano, the first to encounter the solar system’s most distant planet as it zipped past at forty thousand miles per hour, would be in a position to see what it did, and that what it saw was in a position to be seen in the first place, was difficult to describe as anything other than miraculous.
Owen flipped through the reams of observation notes. “And these gamma transients didn’t get your attention back then? I mean, to have something that hot . . .”
“Like you said: transients.” The physicist pointed at the thick printouts in Owen’s lap. “We were drinking from a firehose. We’re still correlating images against observational data. What are we looking for, anyway?”
Owen was afraid to voice his suspicions, lest they laugh him out of the room. “Not sure.”
“Whatever. Can I see the coordinates again?” the engineer asked. “Need to make sure I’m in the right grid here.”
Owen slid the top binder over to him. “Are you sure there’s imagery?”
“LORRI was slaved to RALPH during approach. If there was something worth seeing, it would’ve snagged it.”
“English please,” Owen said. “I can only keep one center’s acronyms in my head at a time.”
“Sounds kinky if you don’t know the lingo, right?” the engineer smiled. “LORRI’s the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager,” the engineer said deadpan. “RALPH’s the infrared spectrometer. No idea where the name came from.”
“Because the UV spectrometer was named ALICE,” the physicist said.
The engineer entered one final command. “Got it. We have imagery correlated to that radiation transient.”
He pointed at a mass of gray and white pixels suspended in the center of a black frame. “Looks like you found a new moon, Mr. Harriman.”
Owen perked up. “How’s the resolution?”
“At that distance? This thing’s maybe the size of a boulder. I can’t believe you even had a clue where to look.” If likened to a game of cosmic billiards, they’d just hit a blindfolded double-reverse bank shot.
“Irregular shape,” the geologist noted, “consistent with it not being big enough for gravity to make it spheroid.”
The physicist leaned in for a closer look. “If it were a shard from a larger body then I might expect that much residual heat, but it would’ve had to be recent to be that energetic.”
“Maybe energetic for a sheared-off planetoid,” Owen muttered, just loud enough to be heard. “So it would have to be something else.”
The scientist’s latent skepticism flared, which the engineer ignored as he kept working to refine the image. “What ‘something else’ explains a localized source this warm?”
“Could be volcanism. Like Io,” the geologist said, “but without Jupiter-sized tidal forces? I don’t see how. It’s too small.”
“I agree,” Owen said, not meaning what they were thinking. “Remember how everyone was convinced that Mars was devoid of water? The atmosphere was too thin. Then we discovered a naturally occurring antifreeze below the surface. Just because a phenomenon doesn’t agree with what we’ve come to expect doesn’t make it impossible.”
The now wide-eyed engineer raised his hand warily, as if it might get snapped off. “Umm, yeah. About that.” The image had taken on a more definitive shape: symmetrical, if somewhat irregular.
The geologist leaned forward. “It’s almost like a . . . dragonfly.”
The physicist was unconvinced. “You’re delusional. Seeing what you want to see.”
“Speak for yourself,” the engineer shot back, silencing them by shifting the image into the visual spectrum. The object resolved to a washed-out olive green with dull highlights of bare metal and a cluster of bulky gray protuberances ending at a battered disk.
“Is that writing?” Barely discernible in faded Cyrillic letters was the acronym CCCP: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
To a chorus of groans, the engineer glibly summed up their discovery: “That’s no moon. That’s a space station.”