Battleship

DEEP SPACE

They have been moving at a steady velocity as they plummet through the emptiness of space, but now that emptiness is coming to an end. A solar system is hanging in front of them. Nine worlds, or eight if one doesn’t count the planetoid in the outer rim. In any event, it does not matter, for the incoming vessels have no interest in any of the worlds save one.

They move toward the object of their attention.

They are fully aware that their target will know they are coming. There are likely to be some manner of early warning systems available to them.

Let them know. Let them be fully aware. It’s not as if there is anything they’ll be able to do about it.

THE HIMALAYAS

It had been six years for the scientists of the Beacon International Project. Six long years of watching space, of monitoring the equipment, of waiting and seeing whether their messages-in-a-bottle would ever garner some manner of response.

Yet even after all that time, once the moment that they had been waiting for finally arrived, at first they had no clue what it was they were looking at.

One of the main monitor screens was tuned to CNN, as it typically was, since that had become the major lifeline for the scientists to the outside world. No one was paying any attention to it, however. Instead they were glued to their individual monitors, trying to make sense out of the readings they were getting.

“Speed is consistent with meteors. Trajectory?” called out Carlson.

Doctor Abraham Nogrady, wearing the nice sweater of local weave that he’d been given for his birthday the previous week, was standing in front of a monitor, tracking the blue line that represented the incoming object. “Oh my.” He leaned close to the monitor, typing on the keyboard. “Whatever this is, it’s tracking our message path. Bring up Hawaii. Get me Cal on the line.”

He’d never blamed Doctor Calvin Zapata for “abandoning him,” as he had laughingly put it two years earlier. Who could blame the younger man, really? The Hawaii offer was too good for him to pass up. He would actually be in charge of the location, something that wouldn’t happen in the Himalayas, since Nogrady wasn’t planning on going anywhere. That alone had been something of a revelation to Nogrady, discovering how much he preferred the solitude of the mountains. Who knew that I didn’t actually like civilization all that much?

It took long moments to raise the Hawaii location. A junior technician whose name Nogrady couldn’t recall came on the communications screen. The reception wasn’t the greatest. The general feeling was that for all the money that had been poured into the high-tech system that linked them visually with the other Beacon stations, they’d have done just as well with a couple of PCs and Skype. Still, for all the static on the screen, at least Nogrady could make out the technician on the other end and hear what he was saying. “Doctor Zapata’s in the computer room!” the technician told him. “He’s busy trying to recycle some parts from previous models because the money’s not there for upgrading…”

“Yes, yes, I get that, uhm…” He took a stab at the name. “Rice.”

“Royce, sir.”

Dammit. “Yes, I meant to say ‘Royce.’ Royce, are you seeing what we’re seeing…?”

“Yes, sir. There’s massive activity on all the screens. I was just about to get Doctor Zapata.”

“I suggest you do so sooner rather than later, son. Tell him I have a moon trail for him.”

“I’m on it. Don’t go anywhere.”

Nogrady exchanged amused looks with the other technicians at Royce’s parting comment. Where the hell was he going to go?

Minutes later Zapata’s face appeared on the screen. He had a bit less hair up top than the last time Nogrady had seen him, but had apparently decided to compensate for it by growing a rather scraggly beard. He was wearing a gaudy Hawaiian shirt, festooned with a print of yellow and green flowers. He looked like Royce had just dragged him from a luau. But he was holding some microtools that he’d obviously forgotten were in his hands when he’d come from the computer room. He was slightly out of breath, indicating he’d been running. “Cal. You’re looking well,” said Nogrady.

“You look terrible,” Zapata replied. “You’re all grainy and flickering… wait, that’s the reception. Or is that actually you?”

“A little of both.” Nogrady had never really “gotten” Zapata’s sense of humor, but at least he was able to tell when the man was joking and had developed the knack of smiling tolerantly. He did so now, but then got down to business. “Cal, are you seeing what I’m seeing?”

Zapata nodded. “The incoming tracks.”

“I’ve either been at this too long, or our outgoing message path—”

“I have the same thing, Doctor Nogrady. This could be a hoax, a meteor with a jet pack… or…” He paused, licking his lips, which had obviously become quite dry, “… some kind of answer to the beacon.”

The fact that Cal was addressing him as “Doctor Nogrady” was more than sufficient to convey the gravity of the moment, considering that the younger man had typically called him “Abe” or even “Abie,” usually just to annoy him.

The two men shared a moment of pure astonishment. It wasn’t as if they’d ever stopped believing in the possibilities of their endeavor, but somehow neither of them had ever been quite prepared for the actuality of it reaching fruition.

An answer to the beacon. Someone found our bottle, read the message and is responding. Nogrady could scarcely process it. He felt as if his brain was on the verge of being overloaded. We are standing on the cusp of what may be the most important day in the history of mankind since the first of our ancestors hauled himself out of the primordial ooze.

Then Carlson, sitting practically at Nogrady’s elbow, said, “We’ve got something splitting off from the main.”

Nogrady looked down and saw that Carlson was right. A new track had peeled off from the one they were already recording. Best guess was that it was heading toward Asia.

Zapata was tracking the same thing. “Looks like entry problems in the LEO debris belt. It hit something.”

Immediately Nogrady was seized with a sense of helpless frustration. He’d written entire papers on the hazards of just this: the massive amounts of debris that were hanging in low Earth orbit (LEO) that nobody seemed to have the slightest interest in doing a damned thing about. Bad enough that it posed a threat to people residing on the earth below. Now all that space junk might well have crippled someone trying to make contact. What an ignominious, not to mention tragic, beginning to what should have been a new and golden age in Earth’s history.

“It’s splintering,” Carlson confirmed Zapata’s readings.

“At least three pieces of this thing are going to rain down. And at the current velocity, I’d say they’re going to hit in less than ninety seconds.”

Less than ninety seconds…

It was only at that point that Nogrady started considering the possible human element of what he was witnessing. Debris had routinely fallen from the LEO belt, and yet never in the history of the space program had any of it ever struck a human being. There were zero fatalities from man-made space debris.

There were not, however, any statistics related to debris manufactured by something other than man. As