Orbital Disruption Read online

  “Predicted impact is twelve minutes after two o’clock which is… twenty-two minutes from now. Jessica says the wave would take another ten or fifteen minutes to reach the city. So you’ve got half an hour. If you can get away to higher ground, you should.”

  “Not much chance at this point,” Mike countered, “but we’re on top of a six story industrial building. I think we’ll be ok.”

  “Yeah, but the office is only on the third floor which might not… wait, on top? Are you guys watching this from the roof?”

  “Yeah,” Mike laughed. “Ricky’s even livestreaming and it!”

  “Hey Tony!” Ricky shouted upon hearing his name.

  “Ah crap, Mike,” Tony pleaded over the phone. “I wish you’d take shelter. The military’s having trouble tracking more than just a few of the largest chunks. There could be smaller chunks of this thing landing anywhere, still big enough to cause a lot of damage. It’s not safe to be out in the open!”

  “How long have you known me, Tony?” Mike asked rhetorically.

  “Yeah, yeah, right. Just promise you’ll get yourself and Ricky inside if anything crashes nearby, ok?”

  “Sure, Tony. Don’t worry about us. We’ll check in when it’s done.”

  “Ok, Mike. Take care.”

  “You too.”

  Mike ended the call and checked the time on his phone.

  “Tony says impact’s in about twenty minutes, Ricky. Things might get pretty dicey. You sure you want to stay up here?”

  “Wouldn’t miss it for the world!” Ricky replied and grinned into his phone before turning it back out so that it’s camera faced southwest toward where the towers of the Verrazano Bridge at the entrance to New York harbor rose behind the buildings of Brooklyn.

  Eight hundred kilometers above the Caribbean Sea a communications satellite received an instruction. The instruction had been beamed up from a ground station on Hainan Island to a different satellite passing high above the South China Sea. As that satellite was on the opposite side of the Earth from this one, the message had to be forwarded through a peer-to-peer network amongst a constellation of satellites. The satellite over Hainan had forwarded the message to another one passing over Fiji which in turn forwarded it through several more hops until it reached the satellite over the Caribbean. Recognizing the destination address as its own, this satellite’s onboard computer decoded the message. A header flag on the payload indicated that the message required an additional level of decryption using a key that was hard-coded into a rarely-used, tamper-resistant, read-only memory chip. Having confirmed the authenticity of the sender of the message, the computer performed the second layer of decryption and extracted the actual message. Being a machine, it felt no special significance to the instructions as it executed them. Concepts like significance were for humans far away to ascribe. It simply followed its orders.

  The satellite was very large by the standards of its peers. Most commercial satellites launched in recent years were smaller than a household refrigerator. Some were no larger than a toaster. This satellite was bigger than most SUV’s. It, along with dozens of identical siblings had been designed and launched by a large technology company based in Guangzhou, China. It provided high bandwidth internet service across the globe, a task that competing firms accomplished with substantially smaller craft. More than one western aerospace engineer had remarked in the press, with poorly disguised contempt, at the apparent lack of sophistication and vastly increased launch costs incurred. Outwardly the engineers on the team who had designed this fleet of satellites had humbly acknowledged the criticism or simply ignored it. They knew that the power regulators, computers, network switching electronics and radio communications components they had designed were state of the art and took up a tiny fraction of the satellite’s interior space. They may or may not have guessed what the large blank areas on the blueprints actually contained but they certainly understood that when a senior officer from the People’s Liberation Army told them it was for an exceptionally large fuel cell to provide backup power it was best not to ask further questions.

  Along the back of the satellite, facing away from Earth and unadorned with antennae or other protrusions, a seam appeared. As Cuba passed below, the seam widened and two large doors, more than four meters long slowly swung open. From the interior of the satellite a few puffs of compressed inert gas expanded into the vacuum. Corresponding puffs of gas were emitted from the opposite side of the satellite to counteract the shift in momentum. Moments later, a cylinder emerged, brilliant sunlight reflecting from its reflective foil-covered surface. More than three meters long and nearly a meter in diameter it didn’t look like a missile. Its nose was flat rather than streamlined and it had no fins. Only the rocket nozzle on its aft end suggested that it was meant for rapid acceleration. It would never survive contact with the atmosphere but it wasn’t designed for air. It was a weapon of the void. Against the pale coral shallows of the Bahamas far below, the missile gently drifted away from the satellite. Having reached a safe distance, its hybrid solid fuel / liquid oxidizer motor ignited and it leapt forward and away from the low Earth orbit of its mothership, streaking brilliantly northward.

  Seconds later and several hundred kilometers east over the mid Atlantic a similar sequence of events played out but this missile flew toward the northwest. And eight hundred kilometers over northern Maine a third missile launched from a third satellite, streaking directly away from Earth before arcing southward. All three missiles converged rapidly on a massive lump of rock, metal and ice that tumbled in a slowly expanding field of debris that had once been asteroid X.

  Mike and Ricky stood at the roof edge facing southwest and looked up into the sky. The sun was high overhead and they both shaded their eyes from the glare with their hands.

  “How soon do you think we’ll be able to see anything?” Ricky asked.

  “Any minute now,” Mike replied. “We should start seeing some of the smaller, faster-moving fragments enter the atmosphere and burn up. The bigger chunks will be right after that.”

  A minute passed with nothing moving but the breeze. A police siren sounded faintly in the far distance but the city was otherwise unusually quiet.

  “Ooh! There’s one!” Ricky shouted and pointed. A tiny bright pinprick of light streaked across a short arc of the sky, leaving a faint trail before being burned up.

  Mike looked where Ricky was pointing just as two more streaks appeared.

  “Yeah, those must be little ones. They’re burning up fast,” he reasoned. “Anything more than a few meters across will probably make it a lot farther, maybe all the way to the surface.”

  Ricky just nodded as several more streaks appeared, some of which were much longer than the others but none of which appeared to be reaching the ocean.

  Suddenly there were three brilliant flashes of light, separated by a fraction of a second and briefly outshining the sun in intensity.

  “Ow!” Ricky exclaimed and turned his face away from the dazzling sky. He kept his phone facing upward, though. More than a few skateboarding accidents had trained him to keep his filming hand steady even when the rest of his body was reacting to pain.

  “Damn, what was that?!” Mike explained, his eyes squinting despite the flashes having rapidly faded.

  “Maybe a piece of asteroid exploded?” Ricky suggested.

  “Maybe,” Mike answered, “but I never expected it to be that bright. My eyes hurt like hell.”

  “This is pretty intense!” Ricky agreed.

  “What the fuck was that?” Jessica shouted.

  On a screen on the wall of the conference room the afterglow of the explosions was just beginning to fade. The image from the high altitude surveillance drone jittered briefly and then resumed. Three overlapping and faintly expanding halos were now visible where the flashes had taken place moments ago. The image froze again briefly before resuming.

  “And why the hell is the feed glitching?” she added.

  A
young man in a light blue uniform replied while typing rapidly on a laptop, “We’re having some comms issues, ma’am. Rerouting the feed now.”

  A voice came over the speakers a moment later.

  “This is Creech Control - we’ve got numerous electronics glitches on vehicle one. Nav computer just rebooted and comms are on backup power. We’ll keep it on station as long as we can but recommend we bring vehicles two and three into the New York sector in case vehicle one fails.”

  Jessica’s eyes widened. She looked across the table at Caroline O’Rourke, the Director of STETSON.

  A different voice, came across the speakers. “Acknowledged, Creech Control. We confirm EMP wavefront. Will provide analysis shortly.”

  Caroline shrugged her shoulders.

  “Not ours.”

  “Then whose?” Jessica asked.

  “Wait, were those nuclear explosions?” an older man in a dark suit asked.

  Jessica turned to him. “That’s what it looks like, sir. The flashes were too short and intense to be atmospheric entry. An EMP would also be consistent with a nuclear detonation.”

  “EMP?”

  “Electromagnetic pulse,” Jessica explained. “In addition to heat and light, nuclear explosions produce intense pulses of radio-frequency energy that can disrupt electronics. That seems to be what interfered with the drone.”

  “Someone nuked the asteroid?” the man continued.

  “It looks that way,” Caroline interjected. “But we don’t know who.”

  The young man looked up from his laptop. “NORAD confirms an EMP signature consistent with three low-yield devices, initially assessed to be in the ten to twenty kiloton range. Radar detected fast-moving objects intersecting on the largest asteroid fragment just before detonation. They’re backtracking now to see if they can determine their origin.”

  Jessica spoke up, “What happened to the large fragment?”

  The young man typed a short message and a moment later answered. “It looks to have been blown apart - NORAD says they don’t see any large fragments on that trajectory anymore. Nothing above thirty meters, at least. It’s hard to resolve objects smaller than that within the debris field of asteroid X. But nothing big enough to cause widespread damage.”

  “Well, thank God for that,” Caroline replied and exhaled loudly. “We owe somebody a big favor,” she added.

  Mike observed dozens of small streaks across the sky as he scanned the horizon. So far he hadn’t seen any of the streaks reach the ground. One of the meteors had made a faint hissing sound as it crossed the sky but there hadn’t been any of the thundering explosions that he had expected. And the three bright flashbulb explosions that had momentarily blinded him several minutes earlier had produced no sounds at all. He knew the largest fragment was big enough to reach the surface and if it were to land just thirty kilometers from the coast, it would be impossible to miss seeing it. He took his phone out of his pocket to check the time and noticed that the signal strength icon at the top of his screen showed no bars.

  “Hey, Ricky - are you getting any signal on your phone?”

  Ricky looked at his phone and replied, “No, I’ve been buffering for a few minutes - I just figured it was due to everyone else streaming but now that you mention it… yeah, I don’t have signal either.”

  “Ok, I’m going to reboot and see if that helps. Maybe a fragment came down near some cell towers? Seems odd…” Mike mumbled and switched his phone off, waited a moment and then turned it back on. As the familiar logo of the phone’s manufacturer lit up the screen he resumed his surveillance of the sky.

  The sailboat formally known as NOAA autonomous research vessel 137 crested a gentle ocean swell and began to slide down into the trough, the wind pushing gently against its stiff Tyvek sails. The vessel’s expanded urethane foam hull was painted bright orange. Someone had decorated its stern, directly above its rudder with a nickname, “Ugly Duckling”.

  At three meters in length and with a mast of similar height, the Ugly Duckling was more suited to carrying its namesake than any human passenger. But it wasn’t a passenger craft, it was a sensor platform, one of several hundred that were deployed across the world’s oceans, recording wind, temperature and wave movements. A small solar-powered computer, informed by satellite navigation signals, controlled the rudder. Driven entirely by the wind, it steered the ship in a regular patrol pattern, counteracting the Gulf Stream current and avoiding busy shipping lanes. Far cheaper than any manned vessel, the Ugly Duckling and hundreds of similar vessels reported a regular stream of data for weather forecasting and climate modeling from a fixed grid of locations that covered the world’s oceans.

  An upgrade over previous versions, the Ugly Duckling also carried a small, rugged wide-angle camera and a specialized image processing chip that used machine learning algorithms to identify visual anomalies. This was normally used to count floating trash and spot occasional wildlife but today it detected something much more interesting.

  A bright streak of light filled the sky almost directly overhead. Within a few seconds, the light grew in intensity as a twenty-five-meter wide chunk of asteroid X entered the dense lower atmosphere at many times the speed of sound. Friction with the air burned away much of the asteroid fragment but this chunk was almost entirely composed of iron and a roughly spherical ball of superheated metal six meters across and weighing nearly eight hundred tons survived until impact with the ocean’s surface a few kilometers away from the Ugly Duckling.

  The camera mounted at the top of the small sailboat’s mast had a clear view of the meteor as it streaked down to the water. The camera took pictures, buffered them for review by the image analysis algorithm and then discarded the uninteresting ones to conserve space in its limited memory.

  The camera snapped pictures once per second:

  An image of a bright streak of yellow-orange light plunging toward the water, followed by a sooty trail.

  An image of the bright light near the horizon, the smoke trail a nearly vertical line rising from the water’s surface up to the heavens.

  An image of a brightly glowing ball of expanding water and steam.

  Several images of a growing wall of water more than ten meters high approaching the boat, streaked with foam as the air rushed over it at speeds rivalling a hurricane.

  A dozen images of near-total darkness, highly unusual in the middle of the day.

  A few seconds later, the Ugly Duckling bobbed to the surface. Only a few shreds of the tough fabric of its sail remained attached to its mast and its rudder was badly bent but the simple, lightweight foam and fiberglass hull was intact and extremely buoyant. The computer and batteries were sealed in watertight boxes embedded in the hull and the solar panels had been set flush with the deck when it was formed and remained in place. The dense concrete keel weight at the bottom of the hull ensured that the ship popped upright as soon as it reached the surface.

  The onboard computer noted that the rudder would no longer move and that the wind vane and anemometer weren’t reporting data (it was unaware, however, that these instruments were slowly drifting down to the seafloor). That was enough information to know it was gravely damaged and couldn’t safely navigate back to its home port. It composed a short distress call to its masters. The satellite antenna, safely embedded in the hull, dutifully transmitted the message. The message was not received by satellites overhead on the first or second try but on the third attempt it received a brief acknowledgement. Having notified its masters of its condition and being unable to navigate, the computer returned to its normal processing loop and examined the images it had recorded in the previous minutes. It compressed several that appeared anomalous and queued them for transmission. Once transmission was complete, and without once feeling sorry for itself, the Ugly Duckling switched its processor to low-power mode, rerouted the remaining output from its solar panels to flashing a number of bright LED lights embedded in its mast and resigned itself to waiting patiently for rescue.
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  Mike’s phone finished powering on. He looked at the display. Still no signal. He cursed under his breath and was about to try rebooting it again when a bright streak of light began to cross the sky, getting brighter as it fell.

  “Oh shit, Mike, look!” Ricky pointed south.

  Mike looked up as the streak fell ponderously into the distance, a thin smudge in its wake. It disappeared over the horizon well beyond the Verrazano Bridge. A moment later a brief flash lit the smoke trail from below.

  “Was that the big fragment?” Ricky asked. “I wonder how close it was?”

  “Seemed pretty far away,” Mike said, “but it’s hard to tell. If it was the big one then we should be seeing a tidal wave in a few minutes.”

  “Oh look, another!” Ricky shouted, gesturing north-westward toward the Manhattan skyline.

  Mike looked and there was another meteor streak, this time thinner and apparently faster moving. That probably meant it was closer, Mike considered.

  A moment later, the streak ended in a bright flash from somewhere just beyond the New Jersey Palisades. Mike couldn’t see exactly where it had impacted but thirty seconds later he heard a hissing sound that rapidly built up to a roar followed by a deep booming impact.

  “Aw crap - if we can hear it, it must have been pretty close, right?” Ricky asked.

  “Yeah,” Mike answered. “The sound was what, maybe thirty seconds delayed?” He did a brief mental calculation. “So that would be about ten kilometers, give or take. I think that would put it in the meadowlands of New Jersey.”

  “I hope it didn’t hit my Uncle’s place in Kearny,” Ricky said, suddenly much more sober. “Or East Rutherford. If it blew up Giants Stadium I’d be really pissed.”

  Mike tried not to roll his eyes as he turned back toward the southern horizon.

  “Let’s worry about that tidal wave, Ricky. Probably more important than a football stadium.”