Orbital

Eleven Insiders

Markov’s only comment on Penumbra was that I should hear what they had to say. A man known for his discretion and integrity, I took him on face value and agreed to let them fly me to Virginia business class, put me up in a nice hotel and give me a per diem more than what I made a week protecting underwater robots from catfish.

I tried doing a little research into the Institute and could only find a few mentions of them helping organize some conferences on obscure academic topics relating to cryptography and neuroeconomics, which leads me to the conclusion that it’s a front for some intelligence agency.

There are hundreds of think tanks and organizations that get their funding from the CIA, NSA, NSO, DIA and the Pentagon. They’re intended to work on problems or provide assessments that require considerable civilian involvement or are just so secret they can’t be associated overtly with any government intelligence agency.

I’m picked up at the airport in a private car and driven to an industrial park on the outskirts of Washington D.C. Between the guards at the gate, the ones in the lobby and the man waiting for me by the elevator on the seventh floor, clearly concealing a gun under his blazer, this is definitely a spook operation.

After being buzzed in through the lobby door, I’m escorted down a wood paneled hallway by a friendly receptionist who manages to be cordial without saying a thing that tells me what this is about.

Photos of smiling children from around the world line the walls — the kind you’ll find in any non-governmental organization. I guess it’s more relaxing than pictures of killer drones and tactical aircraft getting ready to bomb a village. Not that it means anything about their real intent.

I’m led into an interior conference room through a double-set of doors — a clear indication this is a bug-proof room. Otherwise, we’d be near a window, or at least in sight of one.

Waiting for me around the conference table are six other people. The woman at the far end stands up and smiles. “Mr. Dixon, thank you so much for joining us. I’m Beth Saul. This is George Ozuki, also from Penumbra. And joining us is Claire Russel and Victor Reyes from a different group.”

I like how she said, “different group,” without specifying anything. I also notice that there are no name tags on anyone. I read somewhere that foreign agents would steal the trash out of garbage cans outside intelligence agencies and embassies to look for the stick-on name tags that have become so popular in government buildings.

“Hello,” I reply, then take an empty seat.

Everyone else has binders and multiple coffee cups and water bottles in front of them. I get the impression this has already been a very long session.

All the way here I’ve been trying to guess what this is about. My best hypothesis is that they got hired to work on some kind of space policy paper and want my input so they can come up with a future strategy that will be ignored by whatever agency requested it.

The door opens behind me and someone else enters the room. I turn around and see Kevin Flavor, my CIA antagonist. Wonderful.

“Hey, David!” he gives me a friendly handshake like we’re old pals then takes the seat opposite me.

I’ve sat in conference rooms like this with him before. When I went through all the various debriefings about the K1 Incident and the Reynolds Report testimony, he was there as a minder to make sure I didn’t stray from the official party line or divulge anything I shouldn’t.

And now he’s here to babysit me. On the plus side, I’m less afraid that I’ll say something to these quasi-spooks I shouldn’t and get hell for it later. I know Flavor will be happy to jump in and tell them I can’t answer that.

“Now that everyone is here, let’s get down to business,” says Saul.

She presses a button on her laptop and an image of a satellite with solar panels on either side fills up the screen. “This is the GRD satellite. It’s used for military communications and can be tasked to rapidly change orbit to assist in data uplinks in conflict areas. We had 23 of them until five days ago. This one, number 17, had been experiencing a series of malfunctions since launch and could never reach a stable orbital position. The satellite was put on a de-orbital trajectory so it could burn up over the atmosphere, which it did. Only there was an anomaly. Victor, would you care to explain?”

Victor Reyes turns towards me because I’m obviously the only one who has no idea what this is about. “I supervise the GRD satellites. Normally we just check a satellite’s trajectory and make sure there’s nobody in the path in case not all of it burns up in the atmosphere as it de-orbits. Standard protocol is to pull in the solar arrays so it enters the atmosphere with a greater velocity and has a higher chance of disintegrating. I wanted to run some tests to see which systems failed first and was monitoring all the data from 17 as it began its de-orbit.

“Two peculiar things happened. The first was that it broke up four hours before our projection. Which isn’t uncommon by itself, but I’d been very closely tracking telemetry and atmospheric conditions. Other than massive sensor error, this seemed unusual.

“After this happened, I went through the sensor information and noticed a peculiarity. Our solar panels have special instruments for reading different wavelengths of light.” A slide appears on the screen showing a light spectrum. “You’ll notice there’s a very sharp cluster of dots in the ultraviolet section to the left. If this had been some kind of cosmic ray discharge or atmospheric effect, we’d see an elevated energy level across the graph. But we don’t.” He stares at me, waiting for me to draw my own conclusion.