Orbital Disruption Page 5

  Marie thought again about leaving the office to get dinner but there were more results so she kept reading. Near the end of the third page of results, Marie stopped scrolling. She stopped breathing. Time stood still.

  ------ Anomaly Report ------

  ID: 001-37

  Duration: 1486 days

  Status: IN_PROGRESS

  Asset Classes: [EQ, COM, FX, INS]

  Regions: [US, EU, APAC]

  Transaction Count: 43,701

  Estimated Profit: $28,302,818,549.33

  Confidence: 89.66%

  Classification: UNKNOWN

  Actors: UNKNOWN

  -----------------------------

  Marie opened the detailed results for anomaly 37 and did a quick summation of the results generated for each asset class. The total matched. She looked up a few of the individual transactions that had been flagged and they looked correct. She looked at the correlations between the different waves of transactions and they were solid. She swore again.

  If her algorithms were right, someone was in the middle of conducting a massive set of suspicious transactions all around the world and in virtually every market. They’d been preparing for over 4 years. And if the model’s estimates were correct, someone stood to make almost thirty billion dollars in profit. But whoever was responsible had been very good at hiding their identity - the system could see the commonalities between the transactions but couldn’t trace them to any individual or group. And the machine also couldn’t tell her what kind of fraud this was - it simply didn’t match any of the categories that it had been trained on before. That was going to make explaining this to her superiors far more difficult but infinitely more important.

  Marie rubbed her eyes and took a bottle of aspirin out of her desk drawer. She shook two tablets out onto her hand and dry swallowed them.

  There would be no pub food and this would be a very long night.

  Eight

  Ruben St. James kept his face neutral but his heart rate increased steadily. His eyes twitched. Finally his fingers clenched so hard that the artisanal reclaimed cedar pencil he held in his right hand snapped loudly. The sharp noise interrupted Diane and all eyes around the conference room table turned toward him.

  “Let me see if I can save us all some time, Diane,” Ruben said mildly. He didn’t even flinch as he realized he’d put a splinter from the pencil into his palm. “Three weeks ago something impacted asteroid 207302 and knocked out our communications craft and at least a few of the driveships on one side. The remaining drives were imbalanced but didn’t automatically compensate due to some… defect that we didn’t catch in testing.”

  “Yes, Mr. St. James, but...”

  Ruben silenced his new Director of Flight Operations with a brief wave of his hand. The splinter was starting to sting but he resisted the urge to look at it.

  “No, let me continue please. Once the asteroid began to rotate too quickly our drives detected the centrifugal acceleration and shut off.”

  Diane nodded silently. The others were as motionless as statues. And about as useful.

  “And we have now concluded that it’s impossible to recover the asteroid via remote command because we cannot make contact. The body is simply rotating too quickly for any of the ships’ antennae to stay fixed on a point in the sky long enough to receive a message.”

  Diane nodded again, barely perceptible.

  “So the only way to recover the asteroid and salvage the mission is to send new craft out to it, establish local radio contact and command a subset of the drives to turn on, slowing rotation. Once rotation has stopped we can attach new drives and a replacement communications point - or perhaps two, for redundancy - and resume the journey to Earth.”

  “Yes, sir. That’s the best plan we have,” Diane replied.

  Diane Miranda wasn’t much to look at, Ruben observed. She was short and thin and her dark brown hair was speckled with grey. A bit over the hill, in fact, but she seemed competent and knew her place. Ruben smiled in a way that the other executives around the table understood quite well did not indicate friendliness.

  “And finally, you’re going to tell me that it will take several months to launch new driveships and many more months before they can make their rescue. Is that right?”

  “Yes, Mr. St. James. We don’t have any spare tugs in orbit right now. We launched more than thirty in the past two years but sustained a very high attrition rate. The drives on 207302 were the only ones we had in operation.”

  “Yes, I know,” Ruben nodded. “I discussed our unfortunate attrition rate at length with your predecessor on several occasions.”

  Ruben looked around the table. Nobody made eye contact. Good, let them ponder how failures were handled at Excelsior.

  “What I want to know,” he continued, “is what precisely you are going to do to make this happen. How soon can we launch, how soon will I have my rock back and what are you doing to ensure this sort of clusterfuck never happens again?”

  Diane maintained eye contact. “Starting with the last point, we’re going to station an escort craft in the vicinity of the asteroid once its been recaptured. Close enough that it can relay instructions over short-range radio if we ever lose the main uplink again but not so close that it gets hit by anything that hits the asteroid.”

  “Ah,” Ruben chucked, “so we’re going to have one of our spacecraft ride shotgun, eh? Guard the stagecoach from bandits?”

  There were a few chuckles around the table but Diane didn’t join them.

  “Yes, sir. I’m confident that will give us much better options to deal with any similar mishaps in the future. It adds the cost of one additional ship but it’s worth it.”

  Ruben nodded and continued to smile. Yes, Diane was above average. He should have promoted her sooner, he observed quietly to himself.

  “And the timeline?” he prompted.

  Diane turned to her right. “Kyle, where are we with fabrication and prep.”

  Kyle Lamont, a broad-shouldered man with sandy blonde hair cleared his throat.

  “Well, um Diane, Mr. St. James, we’re looking at sixty-five days to finish fabrication of twelve new tugs and two survey craft. We could bring it down to around fifty days if we cut the number of tugs but we don’t know exactly how many were damaged or how many we may lose along the way so…”

  “Sixty-five days? I was told that there was another launch window from Vandenberg in forty-two days. Surely you can do better,” Ruben said.

  “Sir, the engineers insist that they’ve cut as much time out of the schedule as possible. If we cut further we’re bound to make mistakes and…”

  “So you’re telling me it’s impossible?” Ruben asked and tipped his head slightly to one side.

  “Well, no sir, but if we have any failures it’s bound to set the entire schedule back. It would be more prudent, I think…”

  “You’re telling me it’s impossible,” Ruben interrupted Kyle, “But we’re doing it anyway.”

  Ruben allowed himself a brief smug smile. He knew everyone in the room was familiar with that phrase. They had better be, it was the title of Ruben’s damn autobiography. And there it was, on a shelf near the entrance to the conference room stood a crisp hardcover edition. He glanced briefly over at his cover portrait, arms folded with the stars behind him and “You’re Telling Me It’s Impossible But We’re Doing It Anyway” in gold block letters. Ruben St. James understood what was needed. Why was it so hard for everyone else?

  “Kyle,” he explained slowly. “Your title is Director of Manufacturing. That means you’re a manager. And the reason we have managers is to manage. In particular, when the engineers tell you something can’t be done - that it’s impossible - it’s your job to see that they understand the importance. The vision. They need to hear from you that we’re doing it anyway. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Yes, sir. I will make sure the team understands the mission and we’ll hit the forty-two day launch window.”

/>   “See that you do,” Ruben said sternly. “Every week another piece of shit rocket company puts another batch of nanosats into orbit and half of them are thrusting for the asteroid belt. We’re out in front because we’re the best but if we lose momentum we could see someone else beat us to the prize.”

  “Jovian launched another flock yesterday,” Bertrand Bell pointed out. Bertrand was Excelsior’s Director of Public Relations and, in Ruben’s opinion, not the brightest guy around.

  “Thank you, Bert,” Ruben said with mock sincerity. “I wasn’t aware of that. I’m always pleased to hear that the idiots I once fired are managing to get back into the game.”

  “Sorry, sir, I thought you’d want to know,” Bertrand muttered.

  “I must say,” Ruben sighed and continued, “they are tenacious little cockroaches.”

  Turning back to Diane, he said, “And how soon after launch can we recapture the rock?”

  “The fastest trajectory puts us into a matching solar orbit with asteroid 207302 in 134 days, sir. The capture process will take another six to eight days depending on how many of the existing drives are still operational and can be brought back online.”

  “No chance to make it faster?”

  “No sir, it’s just physics.”

  Ruben shrugged his shoulders. “Yes, physics is physics. Let’s push the manufacturing window.”

  “Yes sir,” Diane answered and Kyle nodded his head vigorously.

  Ruben looked around the table and asked, “Are there any other items for discussion?”

  Bert looked uncomfortable. “Sir, there’s the matter of a press release. We still haven’t put out any statement since the incident.”

  Ruben sighed. “Ok. Draft a statement and send it to me for review. Point out the inherent hazards of spaceflight and how we’re already mounting a recovery mission.”

  “Yes, sir.” Bert responded and wrote in a small leather-bound notebook.

  “Prepare a second press release to go out at the same time announcing that Dr. Singh has left the firm to pursue other opportunities. We’ll wish him the best of luck, etc. The usual bullshit.”

  “But sir,” Bert looked confused. “We fired Dr. Singh…”

  “We did,” Ruben confirmed. “And everyone who reads the press release will understand it. If we came out and said it, we’d just sound like jerks. But if we say he’s leaving, we’ll sound more professional - yet nobody will fail to connect the dots.”

  “Ah, yes, I understand Mr. St. James.”

  “I’m glad I could help you do your job,” Ruben responded sarcastically. Turning back to the group he asked, “Does anyone else have anything to bring up?”

  Hearing no response, Ruben adjourned the meeting. He rose from his chair and started walking toward Barbara’s desk to inquire about some antiseptic rinse for his splinter. Just as he stepped out the door he glanced again at the cover of his book. His confident cover photo self met his gaze. It was all so obvious to him. He’d written it all down. Why could no one else understand?

  Ruben sighed.

  “Idiots.”

  Nine

  “Thank you, Dr. Renault.”

  Marie sat down in her chair and took a deep breath. She looked around the room and tried to judge the reaction. Her boss, Stuart McNeil, sat next to her. Stuart’s expression was neutral. He was probably waiting to hear what the bigger bosses thought. Even as the Director of the Systemic Risk Regulation department of the US Treasury, he was clearly outranked by the dozen other people in the room.

  This wasn’t the first time she’d been to the headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Investigation - she’d attended a seminar on money laundering here before - but she’d never been to the director’s private conference room. The walls were darkly panelled and sparsely decorated with photographs of former directors, some shaking hands with presidents. It had a large modern screen on one wall that she had just used to show some visualizations. But the conference table was clearly old - bearing a variety of small scratches and dents in its thick dark wood. Major political scandals and international incidents had surely played out across this table. Marie tried not to let herself be intimidated but she wasn’t very successful. Especially when the FBI deputy director was sitting on her other side and was showing no more reaction than her boss.

  “That was quite a presentation,” said a grey-haired man in a dark suit who Marie recognized from C-SPAN but whose name she could not remember. Someone in the Department of Homeland Security, perhaps?

  He continued, “I am not a mathematician so I’m going to need you to help me with a few things.”

  “Certainly, sir,” Marie nodded.

  “So, your algorithms… they look for patterns in financial data.”

  “Yes, financial markets, banking, tax records, news…”

  “I understand,” the man cut her off gently, “but how was it able to identify this rather dramatic new pattern if it hadn’t seen anything like it before.”

  Marie took a deep breath.

  “The neural network that we used is composed of many layers and each layer learns to recognize patterns in the layers below it. So the lowest layers recognize simple patterns like a rising stock price that correlate with the purchase of that stock by a hedge fund, a movement of cash that correlates with a tax payment, etc. A few levels up we may be recognizing things like a strategy to short the shares of several companies in a certain industry or a bet with options that there will be a disruption to the oil market. At the highest levels we’re recognizing patterns that correlate to specific kinds of fraud.”

  “But this event wasn’t recognized at the top layer like the others?”

  “Correct,” Marie nodded again. “It wasn’t recognized as a single event type. But it still matched the overall pattern for fraud. And it's magnitude was huge. So we looked a few levels down to find the components that it was made up of.”

  “And which components were these?” the man asked.

  “The strongest signals came from patterns that closely resembled armed conflict or natural disaster. There were strategies one would expect to profit in extremely chaotic markets. And there’s a strong long position in a number of aerospace and defense firms.”

  “Could this not just be a broad sense amongst many market participants that a downturn is looming? Just ‘market sentiment’ turning sour?”

  “No, sir,” Marie shook her head. “The actions are connected through a network of banking transactions that don’t reveal the instigators but do make it clear that this is a coordinated effort. The most similar historical example is from the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.”

  “Yes, that’s interesting,” the man said. “But back to this. How do you deduce the geographic concentration on the US East Coast?”

  Marie reached over to her laptop and opened the presentation again.

  “The visualizations starting on slide, um, eighteen should make that more clear. The first is the correlation of shorted stocks with the locations of the physical assets of those firms. These businesses have buildings and factories and pipelines everywhere but there’s a statistically significant concentration on the East Coast. Similarly, the model gives a strong indication that whoever is behind this expects oil refinery capacity in the northeastern US to fall sharply.”

  Marie pressed the right arrow key to advance the deck.

  “But the real kickers are the insurance policies. A web of dozens of shell companies has been buying up vast real estate holdings on the coast from South Carolina to Maine, insuring many properties for far more than they’re worth.”

  Marie gestured at the hundreds of red dots that traced the coast. “It’s as if someone knows there is a category-five hurricane coming. Or a tsunami.”

  Marie scrolled the image to the right. “And judging by the fact that we see some similar purchases in Bermuda, on the West Coasts of Ireland, Spain, Portugal and in the Canary Islands we can make a strong case for a tsunami caused by
a massive disturbance in the mid Atlantic Ocean.”

  The older grey-haired man in the suit turned to his right and addressed a colleague who was dressed in a sport coat and wasn’t wearing a tie. “Dr. Young, does this sound plausible?”

  Dr. Young clasped his hands together. “It would need to be a massive energy source, but yes, it’s plausible.”

  “Perhaps a nuclear device detonated underwater?” suggested a woman in a military uniform sitting on the other side of the older man.

  “No,” Dr. Young answered. He unclasped his hands and rubbed his chin. “No nuclear bomb that I’m aware of could create a tsunami large enough to reach both sides of the Atlantic and do any damage.”

  He rubbed his chin some more.

  “A massive earthquake or landslide along the continental shelf perhaps…”

  He stopped rubbing his chin.

  “An asteroid impact could do it, too.”

  There was a long pause.

  The old man coughed and replied, “Well, that’s an interesting scenario.”

  “Indeed,” Dr. Young continued. “Several firms are involved in asteroid capture and mining. And in some cases they plan to bring the asteroids back to Earth, correct?”

  “This sounds like something STETSON should be looking into,” the grey-haired old man said. “Caroline, are you aware of this?”

  A middle-aged woman who Marie hadn’t noticed before turned to answer.

  “Yes, Fred. STETSON’s had commercial space exploration on our radar for some time. It poses some unique risks, as you can imagine. But we hadn’t seen any signs that would point to something like this.”

  “Excuse me, but what is STETSON?” Marie interrupted. She saw her boss wince as she said it. Shit.

  “Is she cleared for STETSON?” the old man, who Marie now recognized as Fred Carr, Director of National Security, asked Marie’s boss.

  “No, sir.” Stuart replied in a clipped voice. “She has a security clearance but as a foreign national she’s not been brought in on STETSON, sir.”