The Best Defense (near-future HFY) - One Giant Leap 10: Space Case
Sarah Chu
Date: March 24th, 2028
Location: Peterson Space Force Base, Colorado
Life in the US Space Force had changed a little over the last three weeks. Make that a lot, and double it for Delta 2, the Space Force unit specifically in charge of space domain awareness — and home away from home for one Sarah Chu, Spec-3, USSF.
“Space domain awareness” was a fancy term for “paying attention to orbital stuff,” which was a headache even before Leap Day. Technically, SDA meant way more than just immediate orbit, but Sarah’s job wasn’t to monitor space weather, electromagnetic events, or natural orbital debris. She gathered and organized data on manmade objects. Which was still a massive area of responsibility. The fact was, there weren’t enough radar and optical stations to constantly monitor everything in orbit. So instead, Space Delta 2 created tasking orders for each sensor so they could look where something was supposed to be, and if there were any anomalies it got passed up the chain, usually to the 19th Space Defense Squadron in Virginia.
Which meant, most of the time, Sarah’s job was to collect the weird returns and pass them on to someone far more experienced, not to do the analysis herself. It was less like air traffic control and more like a kindergarten teacher counting heads after recess . . . if the heads in question were hunks of metal that could ruin someone’s day if their orbits weren’t stable. Space might be big, but there were only so many useful orbits; a small deviation could result in a collision between two satellites, which would cost millions of dollars and create further hazards in the form of shrapnel threatening other satellites and, increasingly, crewed spacecraft. As orbit got more and more crowded, the possibility of a Kessler event got more likely.
But she was good at it, and even found the job a little fun. Sarah had intended to have a short hitch in the Space Force after college just to help pad her resume and get experience for her real career. She hadn’t expected to like it. It was all the best parts of working in space combined with the regularity of working in a corporate office, just with a uniform instead of a pantsuit.
Until Leap Day, anyway.
“It’s just make-work so DC looks like it’s doing something,” Sarah grumbled to Rick when they went to the canteen for a late lunch. “We just can’t do visual scans of everything in every possible orbit. No one has the resources for that. Even if something is up there, if it’s going orbital speeds we’d get at most a single blip that we’d never be able to confirm.”
“Not with the LGM’s radar cross-section, anyway.” Rick Dartnell, her fellow Spec-3, used the term that had seemed to have settled into place for the aliens in their delta. No one had any idea if the aliens were actually little, green, or even anything humans could call “men,” but the military sure did love their acronyms. “They’re pretty much immune to anything but visual scans. It’s worse than trying to find the Eagle in a moon-stack.”
Sarah nodded. Ever since she’d learned as a kid that no one knew what had happened to the Apollo 11 ascent module, she’d dreamed of being the one to find it. A while back someone had analyzed everything they knew and concluded that it might have fallen into a stable orbit around the moon, rather than impacting on the surface as expected, but no one had been able to find it so far. Lunar orbit was, by definition, a bigger area than the lunar surface. Only that was easy compared to searching Earth orbit for an LGM ship.
“It’s like we’re searching the whole ocean for a single ship,” she complained out loud, “except we don’t know how big it is, where it’s going, how fast it can travel, and oh yeah, it might not even be there. And we’re using a hand mirror to do it.”
“To be fair, we’re using a lot of hand mirrors, all over the world. And the first one was spotted visually.”
“By accident. And who’s to say it’s the first one? All those UFO reports from years ago — is this just the first time it happened on live TV?” Sarah sighed in frustration, knowing she wasn’t saying anything that wasn’t on everyone’s minds. She stepped up to a kiosk and started punching in her order with the ease of long practice. “We just don’t know enough, and the talking heads can’t stand admitting that. Except Tulson, I guess.”
“Well, even if it’s low probability, we still need to try. If we can’t use radar . . .”
“Yeah. I guess.” She swiped her card, hit the confirmation button, and then stepped back to let Rick put in his own order.
“What? I know that look.”
“What look?”
“That ‘I have an idea but it’s probably stupid’ look.”
“Well, it probably is stupid.”
“That doesn’t mean much with you. As long as it’s not your choice of boyfriends or music, you rarely have stupid ideas.”
“Hey, lay off my music. My ex bashed it too.” Sarah glanced at Rick. “Okay, fine. It’s about their RCS.”
Rick finished up his own order and glanced up. “Yeah, what about it?”
“Well, the radar cross-section we’re used to is physical, right? But their ship’s clearly not designed to have a low physical RCS, so it has to be something else. Some kind of jamming device, or a Star Trek shield or something. So I looked at the raw data, with all the stuff we filter out because of dust and debris and random chickens flying in front of the radar dish.”
“Chickens? Really?”
“Oh, you know. The little stuff that would clog up the screen if everything the radar detected came back to the operator. And I was just thinking about the implications of their stealth tech.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, if it’s some sort of active effect, then it’s either something steady or it’s working according to an algorithm. And there’s nothing steady in the radar data that’s going their velocity and trajectory. So what if they’ve got some kind of electromagnetic shield built to scatter radar? Not just deflect it, but to actively scatter it? If it works like that, then theoretically it could get the reflection extremely low, like scanning an aircraft carrier and only finding enough return for a basketball. Their RCS fluctuates because it’s an active effect that constantly changes how it deflects the return.” Sarah hesitated. “And . . . I think I found a pattern.”
Rick’s head snapped around. “What?”
“Hey, not so loud.” Sarah glanced around, but if anyone had heard, they weren’t obvious about it.
“And you didn’t report it?”
“I did! Logged my algorithm and sent it off to the 19th. But I’m just a Spec-3. Hell, I was a 2 just a couple months ago. I’m not an analyst. They probably didn’t even look at it. We’re just here to do information gathering and maintenance for them.” Of course, she’d been running her algorithm through the raw data herself when she had a chance. She wasn’t supposed to, and she couldn’t do that much with the computing power she had access to; but even so, it was frustrating to not find anything. “It’s just frustrating not knowing what we’re looking for, or even if I’m completely off-base. But I guess it’s really not that different from everyone else, right? Everyone’s combing through old UFO reports trying to find something that fits. It’s not like I’m going to notice anything they aren’t.”
“Maybe.” Rick sounded skeptical, but didn’t press her. “Besides, those other UFOs were all saucers and cigars, right? If they were the real thing, would they be so different?”
“Who knows? Maybe there’s more than one alien species out there. And besides, some of those old UFO sightings included triangles. And we know these LGMs had a triangle-shaped craft on the tail of their ship, and it matched some of the images people took around the world.”
“Stern.”
“What?”
“The rear of a ship is the stern, not a tail.”
“That’s for the Navy. This isn’t Starfleet. Space Force gets to handle terminology for space now.”
Stolen story; please report.
“I’ll await with breathless anticipation the results of your memo to USSPACECOM about their grammar.”
Sarah rolled her eyes. “Anyway, I was thinking about those different shapes. Saucers actually make sense now that we’ve seen a real LGM mothership. They spin to simulate gravity, so they have to be more or less rounded off. So why not design their smaller ships to fit into that cross-section? A saucer is round just like the mothership, so it won’t unbalance the spin when it docks at the stern.” She emphasized the word with a pointed look at Rick. “And triangle ships do the same thing because you can put multiple smaller ships there. This one was just offset because of the weight, so it could stay balanced during spin.”
“Mass, not weight.” Rick lifted one eyebrow at her expression. “That’s not a Navy thing. You should know that, what with your fancy physics degree.”
“Fine.” Sarah looked away. Before she’d enlisted, she hadn’t known how rare it was for a non-officer to have a college degree. It still seemed weird to her, considering the work they did.
“Also,” Rick said, as if to interrupt her thoughts, “technically, it would be a boat.”
“What?”
“Ships don’t carry ships, Sarah. They carry boats. That’s why subs are called boats, you know, not ships.”
“Oh, come on. Space Force, Rick.”
“Except you’re using words like ‘ship’ and ‘dock’ in the first place.”
Sarah glared at him. “And why didn’t you join the Navy?”
“Can’t swim.”
“Right.” Sarah snorted and took her food from the civilian behind the counter. “Anyway, it could make sense. At least for the triangles and saucers. The cigars are probably fake.”
“Except the saucers would have to be built for two different gravitational orientations, one for the spin of the ship and then one for landing on a planet surface.” Rick grabbed his own lunch and followed her to a table. There were plenty of options, what with it being significantly past the regular lunch hour. “Seems kind of inefficient to me.”
“Yeah, but the triangle craft was do– attached at the stern, so clearly if they did it once they’d do it again. Besides, how else would you build daughter ships to connect to a larger spinning cylinder? And don’t tell me they’re ‘daughter boats.’”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.” He glanced at her burger and feigned a shudder. “I know how cranky you get before you eat your daily monstrosity.”
Sarah looked down at her tray. It was her usual order, a double-patty burger with roasted onions, layers of pepperjack, and three mozzarella sticks, all doused in ketchup and habenero sauce. “What? It’s brain food.”
“Yes, we’ve established your brain is a monster.”
“Shut up.”
“With extraordinary wit.” Rick ducked the plastic fork she threw at him. “Hey, don’t litter, you’ll get written up. Anyway, to answer your question, I’d probably design those cigar ships for it.”
“Huh?” Sarah was confused. “How would cigar-shaped UFOs work for a spinning mothership?”
“Well, if part of the craft was cut out for docking bays, then you could just fill them with a bunch of Tic-Tac-shaped boats.” He quirked an eyebrow at her as he used the word. “Like bullets in a six-shooter. Then they’d be at the same spin level as the rest of the hull, but the boats themselves wouldn’t need to have variable interior layouts.”
“Damn.” Sarah chewed her burger thoughtfully, almost forgetting to enjoy the burning, cheesy flavor. “That makes sense. But wouldn’t that weaken the structural inte– no, wait, they’re using reactionless propulsion. And they’re not entering atmosphere. What about docking? Be hard to line things up like while spinning.”
“Not much more than the stern dock we already know they use. Besides, they probably slow or stop the spin for docking. Anyone who builds something like that and doesn’t follow zero-g protocols deserves what happens to their stuff.”
“Okay, that might work. I wonder why they don’t do it that way?”
“Who knows?” Rick shrugged, gathering up his wrap, which was stuffed so full of vegetables that it might as well have been a salad in a tortilla despite the lonely chunks of chicken that were supposedly somewhere inside. “We don’t know how their propulsion systems work near a planet’s surface, after all. Could be we just haven’t recognized a problem yet.”
Sarah opened her mouth to respond, but stopped as she noticed Master Sergeant Harris making a beeline for their table. He stopped next to her table, frowning, and growled, “Sarah, what the fuck have you done?”
“Nothing, Sergeant Harris.” She dropped her burger back on its wrapper and looked around, but the few people in the cafeteria hadn’t seemed to notice. Yet. Rick looked as startled as she felt. She thought furiously back on anything she’d done since the last time she’d seen him. “I-I was going to pick it up!”
“Pick what up?” His voice’s register dropped and somehow his frown deepened, giving her boot camp flashbacks.
“The . . . fork?”
Harris’ eyes followed her half-hearted finger and saw the offending black utensil. He turned his glare back on her. “I doubt the General wants to see you over a fork, Sarah.”
“No, Sergeant.” Sarah blinked. “Wait, what?”
“You’ve been ordered to report to General Franklin at Schriver. Immediately.”
Sarah’s own voice shifted at that, though hers went overly high. “What?” she squeaked. “Why?”
“If I knew, I wouldn’t have asked you,” Harris snapped. “I suggest you get your ass in gear and find out.”
Her mouth did a sudden and very accurate impression of the Sahara at high noon. Peterson Space Force Base was the hub for the Space Operations Command; but Schriever, ten miles away, was the home of a major section of DOD satellite control, the main control center for all GPS, and the National Space Defense Center. The latter being the domain of one General Janet Franklin, commander of the Joint Task Force Space Defense for the US Space Command.
And there were only two reasons for a lowly Spec-3 to get hauled before a general: a court-martial, or a Medal of Honor. And Sarah was certain she hadn’t done anything deserving the latter.
Sarah tried not to stammer as she went through the gate at Schriever. She half expected the Air Force SF guard to tell her that her ID had been flagged for immediate arrest for some unknown crime. Instead, she got waved through like it was normal business. Even getting into the NSDC was relatively painless. It was located in a Restricted Area, and normally one did not get into an RA without a verified pass issued days before. But the airmen on duty looked over her ID and just made a call. Then one of them got in the passenger seat of her battered old Ford to escort her to a specific parking lot, where a uniformed Space Force officer was waiting.
An officer. Waiting for her.
“Relatively painless” didn’t mean free of gut-wrenching, abject terror.
What had she managed to screw up? Sure, she wasn’t the most exemplary Guardian in the service — military bearing didn’t come easily to her, even by the very relaxed Space Force’s standards, and she got really nervous any time she did anything that involved interacting with people rather than computers — but she was good at following rules and regs. And if she’d somehow screwed up a satellite track, surely that would have come through the regular chain of command, right? The 18th or 19th would have just pinged back that there was a discrepancy.
Unless it was something really major. Something that resulted in a spectacular fireball and it all traced back to her getting two digits mixed up and the general noticed her name on the paperwork . . .
“Captain.” The SF airman saluted. Sarah managed to remember to do the same with only a little hesitation.
The officer, whose nameplate read Delvecchio, returned the salute. “Thanks for bringing her in, Airman. I’ll take it from here.”
“Sir.” The airman nodded, saluted one more time, and then turned to start walking briskly back to the RA gate.
“Good to meet you, Specialist.” Captain Delvecchio nodded at her. “We’re waiting on two other — ah, this must be them.”
Another car was passing the airman, and it soon came to a stop at the same parking area. The driver seemed particularly awkward as he did so. Sarah glanced up at the captain and was surprised to see him looking on with amusement.
Once the car was finally situated, two other officers got out, each wearing different uniforms. It took Sarah a moment to recognize the driver as Royal Air Force. What the heck?”
“You must be Captain Delvecchio,” said the passenger, a short brunnette woman in a Royal Navy uniform with commander’s stripes.
This time, as befit the lower-ranked, Delvecchio was the one to salute first. “Yes, Ma’am. I hope your trip wasn’t too stressful.”
“Not at all, Captain. Though Milbourne here could use a little practice driving.”
“Not my fault the Yanks put everything on the wrong side,” the RAF officer grumbled in a strong British accent, though he smiled as he did so. His insignia was confusing, but the stripes probably meant an O3 like Captain Delvecchio. He was tall, blond, square-jawed — if it weren’t for being so slim, he’d look like a stand-in for the latest actor to play Captain America.
Who was, of course, another Brit. Why did the Brits always play American icons?
“Excuse me, Specialist.”
Sarah blinked, then stepped back to let him get out from between his car and her own. She hadn’t realized she’d been blacking his access to the sidewalk. Stupid, stupid. Woolgathering while an officer, a foreign officer no less, needed to get by. Right, let’s just compound my list of failings, shall we? “Sorry, Captain.”
Commander Wilson smiled at Sarah, then at Milbourne, with a clear I-told-you-so expression. “Actually, specialist, this is Squadron Leader Milbourne.” Her accent was different from Millbourne’s — Irish, maybe? Scottish? Sarah wasn’t good at accents. “The RAF does like their unique ranks.”
Sarah’s eyes widened in horror. “Sorry, sir!”
“The Commander of course is aware,” Milbourne intoned, deadpan, “that the entirety of the reason for our ranks is that both the Army and the Royal Navy were unhappy with sharing, as older siblings often are. We had to improvise our own toys.”
“Don’t worry, Specialist–” Commander Wilson’s eyes flicked to Sarah’s own nameplate. “–Chu. It’s not the first time this trip, and I’m certain it won’t be the last. In fact, I have a bet running on the longest streak of ‘captains’ before we’re through. Almost there, in fact.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Sarah nodded. What the heck kind of rank was “squadron leader,” anyway? That was an MOS, not a rank. But she silently breathed a sigh of relief. At least whatever trouble she was already in would not get compounded by a complaint from a foreign officer on not giving proper honors.
“Wait — Chu?” Milbourne looked closer at Sarah as the elevator came to a stop and dinged. “Specialist Chu, yes! You’re the reason we’re here!”
The panic welled back up again. Why would the Brits come here for her? Did she accidentally crash a British satellite? No, she was sure that couldn’t be possible. There were too many redundancies. Pretty sure, anyway. Mostly. Crap, was it possible?
“Well, Commander, Squadron Leader,” Delvecchio said, nodding at both of them. “If you’ll come this way, the General is waiting for us. You too, Specialist.”
“Yes, sir.” Sarah followed numbly, wondering what the heck she’d done to get on the universe’s bad side.
