It’s Classified
by Martin L. Shoemaker
I“Moron,” I said to myself under my breath as the latest test run once again glitched.
I don’t know why I said it under my breath. It’s not like there was anyone else around to hear me. The guards were around somewhere, and certainly cameras were recording anything I said. But I doubted the guards cared that I called myself a moron when chasing down a really difficult bug in the code.
What code? Sorry, it’s classified. As a fully cleared contractor to Space Force, I know what I’m not allowed to talk about. The nature of my assignment is not subject to disclosure.
There are things you could pick up from public records. It’s not like our enemies can’t. But still . . . . . . . . . The phrase “I can neither confirm nor deny” is one they trained us to use often.
I’m a software contractor at the Space Force facility in Nebraska, which specializes in orbital object detection, identification, and tracking. It’s public record that my thesis was on the mathematics of multidimensional variances and moments as applied to shape recognition.
So no, if I didn’t just spell it out for you, I can’t spell it out for you. But in general terms, our latest software was crashing. I can tell you that without telling you what it was. There was something that only happened with real data. No matter what test data I used to validate the code, I never saw this crash in test. But after five, ten, or fifteen minutes of a real data stream, the whole system would crash, and take nearly thirty minutes to set up for another run. As you might imagine, the base commander was not happy with that—nor with me, nor my company. So I was working as many extra hours as the military would let me. It was a sign of Colonel Hale’s frustration that he authorized me working so late—under constant guard, of course, but it was still unusual. It wasn’t a threat to national security, but it was making his command look bad, and he wanted that to stop.
I added diagnostics all throughout the code, but to no avail. Wherever the bug hid, it wasn’t someplace I could even imagine to put diagnostic code. Out of frustration, I stopped trying to diagnose the code, and I started trying to diagnose the data. Set by set, entity by entity, I started looking for patterns in the test data that weren’t in the real data—or vice versa.
Something was different between the test entities and the real entities. No, I can’t tell you what an “entity” is in this context, the definition is classified. It’s a thing in a data stream gathered by a classified system using classified instruments pointed at classified targets within a classified field. From the code’s point of view, it’s just a hunk of data in a larger sea of data.
I spent another two hours with two screens up, one with real entities and one with test entities, trying to discern the differences. I’d put significant effort into randomizing the edges of the test entities so they weren’t smooth like an artist’s creation. My girlfriend Kylie might’ve looked at representations of the entities and picked up the differences. She has that artist’s eye that I lack. But as best I could tell, by eye or by data analysis, the character of real data and the character of test data were fundamentally the same. I just couldn’t see what was different, and the math couldn’t either.
Well, except for one object in the real data. That one was . . . . . . . . . different. Size, cohesiveness, albedo . . . . . . . . . No, scratch that, you never heard me mention albedo. But there were a number of factors that made it different from the other entities in the data field. I tried to visualize it from the data, but it didn’t match my experience. Was that anomaly the cause of the crash?
I couldn’t say it wasn’t, not without tracking the exact moment when the anomaly emerged within the data and comparing it to the timing of the crash. I spent another hour playing the data stream back and forth, looking for any correlation.
After an hour, I still had nothing. I was falling into the common debugging trap: assuming that because I saw one anomaly, it had to explain another anomaly. That two different anomalies don’t happen at the same time without reason. Assuming that can bite you in the ass.
But the other thing that can bite you in the ass is ignoring that coincidence might equal cause. And that’s why I love my job. So many easy answers, so many wrong answers. I live to find the right answers.
I was scrolling the video back to view the anomaly’s passage one more time, when I heard the crisp clack of boot heels on tile. I checked my clock just as Lieutenant France’s voice said, “Mr. Simpson, it’s time to pack up.”
“Roger, Lieutenant,” I answered before he could even come around the partition wall and into my work area. “Let me just make some notes here.”
“Now, Mr. Simpson,” he said.
I spread my hands. “Now?”
He gave a small smile and nodded. “One minute, Mr. Simpson. Pack it up.”
France had escorted me from the premises on many long nights in the past month. He was a good officer. He followed orders, but he knew just how much liberty he had to interpret them to fit the situation. The colonel really wouldn’t care about a couple minutes here or there in the schedule, not when I was trying to save his project; but by being firm, France ensured that he was covered in his reports—and then by giving me an extra couple of minutes, he knew he wasn’t interfering with my work, either.
So I made some notes in the metadata for the test set and the real set, and I particularly noted the timestamps where the anomaly came in. I could pick up with those tomorrow, but I didn’t want to forget.
Not that I was likely to. Kylie said I was obsessive about the data, that I had to understand everything. I didn’t want to say she was right, but she was close. I was no good at letting go of a puzzle. I probably wouldn’t sleep well that night.
I was still thinking about the anomaly when I got home. I hated letting that anomaly just sit there, unresolved, even if only for one night.
And it wasn’t just my obsession that was driving me. The glitch in the system had almost eaten through our bonus, and soon we would be into chargebacks. The longer the system was delayed, the lower our profit margins got. In another two weeks, we’d be into the red. My bosses at Warriner would not be happy about that.
So when I walked up the stairs to our apartment, I was still thinking over the problem. Oh, only in my head. I had no data to work with. The Space Force systems were kept in a secure chamber within the base. My work computers were in there; and there they would stay, permanently, paid for property of the U.S. government. Their data never left there through any channel I had access to. And God help me if any of the data ever left with me, on any sort of mechanism! You had to leave phone, Fitbit, Bluetooth headpiece, even USB desk toys all in a secure drawer outside the quarantine zone. Every contractor who went in there received a lecture that if we ever were ever caught taking any data out, even accidentally, we would be subject to a strip search every time we exited or entered for the duration of the contract. And if that didn’t get through to us, they’d move up to cavity searches.
So I didn’t have any data with me; but the one thing they can’t make you leave in quarantine is your brain. Your memories, your experience, your intuition . . . . . . . . . You get to keep those.
“Kylie, I’m home!” I shouted as I closed the apartment door, but I got no answering shout. I went into the kitchen, and I noticed a note stuck to the refrigerator. Peter, Professor K is taking us to an art exhibit. Sorry you couldn’t join us. Next time? But she followed it with a smile. She knew the chances of that were slim. There was one final bit at the end: Roast beef in the fridge is for you. I hope you found your glitch. WE deserve a break. She underlined we. She’d been saying lately that we needed things when she really meant I did. I found it annoying, but also endearing. She meant that I was overworked, and she wasn’t wrong. I just didn’t see an answer for it; and being reminded of something I couldn’t fix only made me more irritated.
I opened the fridge to find a platter of thin-sliced roast beef, just the way I liked it, next to a covered bowl with fresh buns. This after I had stood Kylie up for the seventh time in two weeks. I didn’t deserve her.
***
I like to say I’m not smart, I’m just persistent. I don’t let a go of a problem until I understand all the pieces. In my business, that’s the functional equivalent of smart . . . . . . . . . except when that obsession with knowing things, with being right, makes me do stupid things like decide that maybe I could simulate the anomalous entity, and then learn something from that. I didn’t have any data to describe the anomaly, but I had something almost as good: my expertise. I had pioneered multidimensional variances and moments, and I knew those forms of analysis almost intuitively. I could even look at a data set and predict the moments and their magnitudes. My naked eye was almost as good as the best algorithms I’d ever seen—before mine.
Of course, moments and variances are aggregate data, the sum of thousands of data points. Knowing the answers necessarily loses the inputs. If you have a hundred-pound bag of rocks, that doesn’t tell you anything about the individual rocks within the bag. Without the input data, the moments couldn’t tell me precisely what the original measurements had looked like.
But maybe . . . . . . . . . ? I could examine existing, known data, and see if anything produced similar moments. That was what my method was about, after all, recognizing statistical similarity to—
Sorry, it’s classified. I was getting away with myself there.
But to simplify: I could take a large, public collection of existing entities, analyze them with my thesis algorithms—which are public knowledge—and look for any results that matched. All I really needed was a bunch of test entities to which I could apply the algorithms and filter out anything which didn’t have substantially the same variances and moments. That became an interesting, fun challenge.
I had the analysis filter built in under an hour. I could feed it entities—geometric shape models—and it would spit out any that had characteristics like the anomaly. I just needed a source of entities.
I was still pondering the best web search when Kylie came home from her exhibition. “Hey, Paul,” she said, wrapping her arms around my neck from behind and planting a kiss on my cheek. “Sorry I couldn’t wait, but . . .”
“No,” I said, staring at my latest search results. “I got home two hours after your exhibition started. You did the right thing.”
“Yeah, I suppose . . . . . . . . . But still, you would have enjoyed it.”
“I’m sure I would’ve,” I answered. “But I . . .”
“You can’t explain, I know. Can’t explain, it’s classified, need to know, clearance . . . . . . . . . I am so fucking sick of this,” she said, plopping down behind her desk and powering up her Mac.
“Kylie . . .”
“I know, you don’t have any choice . . . . . . . . . Same old, same old . . .”
“Kylie, do we have to fight about this now?”
“When else are we going to fight about it? You’re here, you’re home, you’re awake. Let’s celebrate with a good fight!”
I sighed. “Look, you’re not wrong, but I don’t have any choice. I have to find this glitch, or we could lose the whole contract that pays my half of the bills around here. Don’t you understand what the penalty phase means? When we start paying them?”
Suddenly she tilted back in her chair, looked up at the ceiling, and screamed for five long, loud seconds. When she was done, she leaned forward and looked at me.
I looked back. “Better?”
She grinned back at me. “No, but venting is good. They say what can’t be changed must be endured, but I think what can’t be changed must be screamed at.”
I understood. Past fights had taught me this: while some people might escalate, Kylie had a good sense for when further argument was futile, when desire was at an impasse with reality. When she saw that point, she gave a good scream. It didn’t change her mind, it just let her release her frustration and move past the fight. She wasn’t over it, but she would let me know when we were good again.
In the meantime, I could turn safely back to my work. I had my obsessions with data, she had her screams of futility. We were each broken in our own unique ways, and we made it work.
I was deep in building entity models when I knew that Kylie was over her anger. She stood behind me, looking at the screen. “What’cha doing?”
I failed to hide my grin. The tone in her question told me she really didn’t care about what I was doing, she cared about what we might be doing. That was another coping mechanism. After we hit a wall that we couldn’t change, some time in bed would remind us that we were worth putting up with each other.
But while she might’ve passed her crisis, I was still stuck with mine. So I answered the question within the bounds of security. “I need to study shapes. Lots of shapes. I’m looking for something—”
“—but you can’t tell me what.”
“But I can’t tell you what,” I said, grinning at her. “And I don’t even really know how to look for it. I just need to feed the computer lots of shapes and let it do its work.”
“Is that all?”
“‘Is that all?’ I need . . . . . . . . . tens of thousands of shapes. Hundreds of thousands, even millions might not be enough.”
“Is that all?” she repeated in the same tone. “Paul, I’m a graphic artist. After all this time, do you have any idea how I work?”
“You . . . . . . . . . um . . . . . . . . . you render images. Lots of rendering, computers always rendering.”
“Paul, you have no idea about anything two inches outside of your data. What do you think I render?”
After a pause, I said, “Models!”
“Models, honey. Digital shapes. And I’ve got a million of them.”
“I knew you had a lot, but—”
“A million,” she said. “I collect them like Imelda Marcos collected shoes. You never know when you’ll need a particular model, and they’re usually cheaper in bulk. I’m always adding new models.”
Finally I saw her point. “Send me a model file.”
“All right, if you say so . . .” Again I heard her suggestive tone, but I couldn’t pay attention. When the file arrived, I started tearing it apart. It was so simple. I could convert the artists’ models into entities with a simple algorithm, hundreds per second, and then feed them to my filter. “Baby, you’ve got the jackpot!”
“Are you sure?” she asked. “Hey, Mr. Obsession, I’m trying to seduce you!”
“After you share your model folder, you can have my full attention. I’ve got nothing but time while the computer works.”
“Good. I want some of that time.”
I was sleeping lazily in a tangle of bedclothes, Kylie’s leg under my head, when suddenly I was instantly awake. My computer had chimed for attention.
I tried not to wake her, but we were too intertwined, and I was too excited. By the time I padded naked out to my desk chair, Kylie was wide awake. She followed me, naked as well, but I barely noticed. “Look!” I said, pointing at my screen. “Zero point nine eight three confidence. This shape has the perfect moments!”
She didn’t ask what a moment was. Early in our relationship, that sort of question had come up often before we realized: She didn’t speak math, and I didn’t speak art. Not even computer art. Instead, she simply asked, “What is it?”
I looked at the filter output, and I read out a file name: “DE_2371_2591_QC_ASTR.SVG.”
“That don’t tell me nothing,” Kylie answered. “Send it to me.” As she sat at her Mac, I sent over the file name. I also brought up a data visualizer to give me an idea of what the entity was. It wasn’t a rendering, more a graph of the shape. I saw signs of a central mass, and lobes branching off from the mass: two long lobes at one extreme, two shorter in the middle, and the smallest at the other extreme. The long lobes reminded me of limbs, except they were too wide, almost stumpy. But then, artists work with imaginary creatures all the time. Was it some sort of fantasy monster? An orc or something?
But Kylie had gone conspicuously silent. She twisted her screen around so I could see it. The model was an astronaut in a puffy spacesuit.
Despite the long, passion-filled night and the exhaustion that followed, I couldn’t go back to sleep. Now that we knew where to look, Kylie sent more models of astronauts and fighter pilots, anyone in a suit with a helmet. The only ones that pinged the bell on the filter were astronauts in their suits.
“What does this mean, Paul?” But before I could answer, Kylie added, “It’s classified. Never mind. But does it mean the contract is saved?”
“Hon, I don’t know what this means. It’s—I don’t know if it’s an artifact of my algorithm, or if it’s just there.”
“If what’s just there?”
I didn’t say, “It’s classified.” I didn’t answer at all. But in the back of my mind, I was coming up with new tests to run on the real data.
Showered and shaved a full three hours ahead of my usual schedule, I sat in my blue Dodge Dart, waiting for my turn at the gatehouse. I’d never had to wait so long before, but I usually came in after the morning commute. I had no idea the gate ever got backed up like that, with seventy-four cars, three trucks, and a white panel van in line ahead of me.
Eventually I pulled up at the gatehouse, rolled down my window, and smiled at Guardian Wayland. “Good morning, Wayland.”
“Good morning, Mr. Simpson,” Wayland answered. After months, I knew the routine. Verify identity—again. Answer questions about my purpose—again. Answer who I was working with that day, and then wait while Wayland called them to confirm. Then one of the guards would leave the gatehouse, get in my passenger seat, and ride with me to the classified building. The guard would then escort me inside and hand me over to another guard, who would escort me to my station.
At least that was the usual routine; but this time . . . . . . . . . After checking his clipboard, Wayland dropped his arm back down to his side. Near his sidearm. “I’m sorry, Mr. Simpson, you have to turn around.”
“What?”
“Your base access has been revoked, sir.” Before I could ask, he continued, “That’s all I know, sir. Instructions are that you can check in at the Administrative Center. Do you need directions?”
“No, I know where it is, but that’s not where I work. I have a computer in there, with all my work. In there.”
Wayland shook his head. “I wouldn’t know about that, sir. And unless there’s need to know, I would prefer you not discuss it further. If you left behind personal property, I’m sure you can make a claim when you go to the Administrative Center.”
“But—”
Wayland stood straighter. I noticed another guard step out of the door behind him, with a rifle unshouldered. “Turn around, please, Mr. Simpson,” Wayland said. “Other people need to get to work.”
As I headed across town to the Administrative Center, I found myself sympathizing with Kylie and her need to scream.
I didn’t know what they did in the Administrative Center—administrate, obviously, but that covers a lot—but the security was tighter. There wasn’t a chance for civilians to enter the fenced area at all. Instead I was instructed to pull off into the Visitor Center parking lot, go in, and wait for someone to come to me.
What else could I do? I was playing Space Force’s game, and on their court. I could play by their rules, or I could go home. I’m sure the bosses would love that. So I entered the Visitors Center, which was at least less boring on the inside than the government-beige-painted bricks on the outside. Everything within was shining metal and glass, with an overriding theme of blue. This was what Space Force was supposed to look like: modern, even hypermodern. A goddamned Starship Enterprise.
But though the style was modern, the procedures were as old as time. Stanchions and ropes guided me to a three-windowed waiting area where receptionists male and female sat behind bulletproof glass. Armed guards at each end of the bank of windows were a clear indication that this was a secure military facility, not a tourist trap. They took security seriously.
A young guardian behind the first window on the left said, “Can I help you, sir?”
I walked up to the glass and spoke into the microphone. “Mr. Paul Simpson, here to see Colonel Hale.”
“Regarding?”
But I was far too experienced to fall for that one. “It’s a classified matter, Guardian. He’s expecting me.” It was a bit of a lie. I had no appointment to see Hale, but he had to expect me to come looking for him. He was Warriner’s contract liaison, and so I was supposed to talk directly to him or to whomever he designated. Not to a random receptionist.
The receptionist didn’t miss a beat. “Very well, Mr. Simpson. Take a seat. When I hear from Colonel Hale, I’ll call you up.”
I turned away with a shrug. There was really nothing else to do. Again a scream moment, when you just have to tolerate the hand you’re dealt. If there were right motions for this situation, I was going through them; and if there weren’t, I would find that out eventually. But only here.
The guardian pointed toward my right, so I shuffled over to a well-apportioned waiting area. I didn’t know what else Space Force spent money on, but they were definitely getting the best when it came to decor.
I might as well have stayed in bed. Getting in early had done nothing for me. Sitting there, stymied, my long night finally started getting to me; and unexpectedly for a government facility, the guest chairs were really comfortable. I found myself fighting to stay awake—and losing.
I must’ve dozed off. I found myself staring down at a pair of shiny black shoes beneath crisp blue pant legs as a hand touched my shoulder. “Mr. Simpson?”
I looked up. A young lieutenant was looking down at me. The rest of her was as crisp as those pants creases. She wasn’t a person, she was Space Force. A part of the machine.
“I’m Paul Simpson,” I answered, rising. “Can I see Colonel Hale now?”
The lieutenant shook her head. “Colonel Hale will not be seeing you, Mr. Simpson. He asked me to give you this.” She held out a thick legal envelope. “And then to thank you for your time, and to let you know that your services will no longer be needed by Space Force.”
“No longer—”
“And one more note: He said to tell you that you did a fine service for your country, and you should be satisfied with that.”
“Satisfied?”
“Yes. Good day.” Before I could say another word, the woman, the machine officer, spun on her heel and strode away.
I waited until I got into the Dart before I opened the envelope and perused the contents. I probably should’ve waited longer, until I was back in the office: a lot of the papers within were stamped CLASSIFIED. I didn’t like examining those out in public.
They were acceptance forms, every single form required by our contract with Space Force; and every one had been stamped COMPLETE and signed by Colonel Hale. I was starting to get nervous. I reached for my phone to call the colonel’s office.
But my phone was ringing even as I pulled it from my pocket. The screen said Richard. My manager at Warriner.
I jabbed the green button. “Paul here.”
“Paul!” Richard said. “Good work at Space Force! You must’ve put the glitch to bed.”
“Richard! Open line!”
“Oh . . . . . . . . . Yeah . . .” I had never understood how Richard could rise to management in a company that dealt with so much classified information and still have so little understanding of what security meant. Yeah, I could slip up once in a while, but Richard was just plain sloppy.
Richard continued, “Great job fixing the thing.”
I stared at the phone, not sure how to respond. But I couldn’t stop myself from saying, “No, I didn’t fix it.”
“Paul, I’ve got the electronic copies right here. It says you fixed it, and all the tests passed after that. Colonel Hale specifically attached a note that said you did good work, and they were letting us keep most of our bonus.”
“That’s—” I almost said crazy, but instead I said, “nice. But there’s more to do.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Richard said. “I can tell you what happened, though the colonel will never admit it. The whole thing was starting to make his command look bad, so he decided to bury it. The scan—”
“Richard!”
“All right, ‘the system’ isn’t that vital for his overall upgrade plan. He’d rather have it officially done and just not use it than have it dragging on and delaying his target date. He just redefined ‘done’ as ‘We can live with it, even if it’s broken.’”
I stared at the beige building for several seconds before answering, “You’re right, Richard. That has to be it.” I hoped I was convincing him, because I wasn’t convincing myself. Not at all.
I told myself to walk away. I didn’t have to prove what I believed. I didn’t have to.
But I had to. I wasn’t going to forget what I knew.
Kylie was thrilled when she came home from her studio and found me waiting, sitting around with nothing to do. She insisted upon going out for dinner, someplace fancy to celebrate the completion of the contract. How could I say no? It was exactly what I had promised her.
But halfway through the meal I could tell she was frustrated because I was distracted. The project had let go of me, but I hadn’t let go of it. “Paul,” she said, “you’re hardly touching your linguine. It’s your favorite dish.”
I picked up a forkful and shoveled it in. “Really,” I said around the mouthful, “it’s delicious. I just—” But I stopped. There were too many levels of classified in this, and I couldn’t explain my frustration.
But apparently I was giving it off in waves, and Kylie was picking up on it. That night she tried to talk me into a repeat performance of the night before; but I couldn’t concentrate, my mind was still elsewhere. As we lay under the covers in bed, she said, “It’s the astronaut, isn’t it?”
“It’s classified. Classified, classified, classified . . .”
She slapped me with a pillow. “Look, Mr. Secrets, it may be classified to you, but I never signed no agreement. I can talk about anything I want to.”
“I wish you wouldn’t.”
“And when you clam up, then I’ll know I’m close to the truth.”
“Then I’ll just have to clam up now.”
“Oh, the silent treatment? We’ll see how silent you are!” Then she ran her fingernails delicately along my short ribs. She didn’t have long nails—she said they interfered with her art—so she didn’t scratch; but she sure tickled, and I flinched reflexively. She dug more, and I found my skin jumping at her touch. Despite myself, I started to giggle.
That only encouraged her. She wouldn’t let up, even when I started to whimper with mirth. “Yeah! Who’s the silent one now? All absorbed with your work, but I got your attention now!” And she did. Suddenly she definitely did.
“Two can play at that.” I started looking for her ticklish spots.
It was a necessary release. I’d had tension building up all day, and I hadn’t even realized it. Now it was released.
But I hadn’t forgotten that the project was suddenly cut short. And I wasn’t going to forget. So I resolved to get answers.
My company did a lot of contracts for Space Force. Project meetings usually happened in a secure facility; but sometimes, when the meetings were strictly financial and administrative, Space Force came to us. So I bided my time, and I kept an eye on the appointment calendar.
Nearly two months later, Colonel Hale and a number of his junior officers came to our site for a budget meeting. I arranged to be nearby. It wasn’t my project, certainly not my meeting; but I was there, waiting for my chance.
In the end, the only time I managed to catch the colonel alone and unawares was when he headed into the men’s room. Social niceties told me that that wasn’t the place for confrontation; but the way the day was going, I wasn’t sure there would be another place. I followed him in.
When he came out of the stall, I was waiting. We were alone, so I said, “Colonel, why is there an abandoned astronaut in orbit?”
He walked past me as if I weren’t there. As he stood at the sink, washing his hands, he stared directly at his own reflection as he said in a low voice, “Mr. Simpson, you shall not ask me that again. If I ever hear you say anything like that again, you will lose more than your security clearance. More than your performance bonuses or your contract. You shall be locked up so deep in a federal prison that you won’t even remember what the light of day looks like.” He stepped away, pulled some towels from the dispenser, and dried his hands as he finally looked at me. “Are we clear?”
I couldn’t find words to speak. He walked past me, dumping the wadded-up paper in the trash by the door. “I thought so,” he said. “I have a meeting to get back to. This encounter never happened.” He pulled open the door and left.
I was shaken. I was infuriated. The colonel thought he could threaten me like that?
But I was also stymied. He could threaten me like that. I understood full well how confidentiality regulations worked. He had me dead to rights. What I knew—knew!—was the result of a classified project. If I were aware of something classified, I had signed paperwork that required me to divulge it only on need to know and only to authorized personnel. I was stuck. Legally, I was obligated to keep my mouth shut, and the colonel had made it abundantly clear that it was in my best interest. So I would have to keep my nose clean and my mouth shut.
Then I came home and found Kylie sitting in an empty living room, staring at the spot where her Mac had been. My computer was gone as well. I didn’t get a word out before she yelled, “Is this your project? And don’t tell me it’s classified!”
“I don’t understand.”
“Guardians showed up with guns. They handed me a subpoena.” She stretched out a piece of paper to me. “A blank subpoena. When I asked what it was for, they said that it was classified. They were very polite as they packed up our computers and then thoroughly searched the apartment for USB drives. They took the fucking DVD library! Who even watches DVDs anymore?”
“Wait . . . . . . . . . They searched the place? Thoroughly?”
“Every inch of every room.”
I stopped talking. Every inch of every room gave them a lot of places to hide listening devices. “I’m sorry, Kylie,” I said.
“Sorry! This is about you and that entity.”
“Shhh! Kylie, shut up, or you’re going to land us both in federal prison.” Her jaw dropped. She started to reply, but I held up a hand. She stopped.
Space Force people are damned smart. There’d been more than enough spoken in that conversation for them to figure out that Kylie knew something too. I wondered if that deep dark hole in the federal prison allowed conjugal visits. At least I got a dark laugh out of that.
Then my phone rang. I looked at it, and it said unknown caller; but with the timing, it wasn’t unknown at all. I pressed the button. “Good evening. I know who this is.”
“You’re learning,” Colonel Hale said. “Make her understand: She has to forget this. Just like you. When our technicians are done, you’ll get your equipment back, and as much data as we choose. Until then, just pretend that everything’s ordinary.”
I almost called him “Colonel,” but that would have been a mistake. I didn’t want Kylie to know anything more than she already did.
After the call, Kylie was furious, as angry as I’d ever seen her. Screaming it out did no good. Oh, she screamed, all right. At me. At Space Force. At astronauts in general. At the dresser drawer as she hauled it out to pack clothes in a bag. At the medicine cabinet as she pulled out her toothbrush and comb and deodorant. At the door as she yanked it open, only to be stopped by the security chain, which I had fastened. As she opened that, I said, “Come on, Kylie, where you going?”
“It’s classified!” She stormed out and slammed the door behind her.
***
I sat in an empty apartment.
Oh, it was still furnished; but for me it was empty. No computer to distract me, no Kylie to care. I was left only with my swirling thoughts, around and around. I had to learn to let go. This obsession wasn’t doing anyone any good. It was only harming me. And Kylie, who had never asked for it. I kind of deserved it, but not her.
But I was lying to myself. I said my obsession did no one any good; but up until the anomalous entity, it had been my bread and butter, my livelihood. Never giving up on a question had given me everything. Way back when, it had even helped me to figure out Kylie and how she saw the world. Her artistic point of view, her mercurial temper, eventually these all made a kind of sense to me. Her way was not my way, but a way.
But never before had my two worlds collided like that. Never before had she been caught up in one of my bugs. And of course, the consequences had never been this severe before.
How could I get her back? Did I want to get her back? I mean, I wanted her back, that was more clear than ever; but did I want to put her through all this? I was looking at some bad times ahead. Maybe she was better off out of them.
So I didn’t chase after her. I didn’t know if that was the right decision or the wrong; but I told myself that in this case, not knowing was okay. Whatever she decided was her right decision.
I was still trying to sell myself that line when I heard a knock at the door. Had she stormed out without her keys?
I rushed to the door, practically tripping over my own feet to unchain the door and open it.
But it wasn’t Kylie standing there in the early Nebraska night. It was Colonel Hale; and from the smell of him, drunk as a skunk. “Colonel, I—”
“Shut up, Simpson. You’re coming with me.”
“I’ll do nothing of the sort. You got no right to—”
“I said shut up. You’ve caused enough trouble as it is. Now are you going to walk, or do I fold you up and carry you out of there?”
I looked at the colonel. Twice my age, shakily drunk . . . . . . . . . I wouldn’t stand a chance. Maybe falling down drunk, but probably not even then. The man was steel.
I walked.
We went down the stairs to the parking lot, and he pointed me to a big white Buick sedan. “Get in,” he said. “You’re driving.”
“Driving where?”
“I’ll let you know.”
We stopped high on a ridge north of the city. I’d never been in the area before. It was dark, very calm. Peaceful. It struck me as a really good place to dispose of a body.
My, I was a cheery sort . . . . . . . . .
“Get out,” the colonel said.
“Look, man, if you’re going to shoot me, you’ll have to do it in here and fuck up your interior.”
“I don’t shoot anyone, I have people for that. Now get out. Go sit on the trunk.”
So I wasn’t going to get shot. That wouldn’t stop him from roughing me up. I got out of the Buick. As I jumped up onto the trunk, the colonel climbed out, opened the back seat, and pulled something out. When he joined me, he had two things in his hands. In his left, he held my laptop. In his right, he had a flask. He held the latter out to me. I took it, and he leaped up, somehow twisting in midair to land seated on the trunk. Yeah, I could forget about taking him in a fight.
He produced another flask, and he took a pull. “You know the drill,” he said. “We were never here.”
“What?”
“It’s classified. Need to know, and there ain’t nobody needs to know this. We were never here, this night never happened. Forget everything.”
“I understand. Compartmentalization.”
“Like fuck you understand. If you understood, you’d have left it alone. Gotten the clue. There are some questions you don’t have to answer.”
“Look, I’ve dropped it already. I get it.”
He shook his head. “You’re in it now. We’re going to finish it up here. And then you and me, we don’t know each other.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. The colonel had his own agenda, and he would reveal what he would reveal when he would reveal it. I was tired of asking for explanations.
He stared up at the sky as it darkened and more stars came out. “They called us Unit 12,” he said as he looked up. “Nothing more specific. You’ll never find the name in any T/O. We were all military, of course, from different branches. That was before the Space Force. I was Air Force, and the brain of the group. My specialty was orbital mechanics, rocket-science stuff. Izzy’s was demolitions. Things that go boom.
“You don’t have to know how we got up there. There are spacecraft no one knows about, missions hidden within missions. Things that look like one kind of payload but are another entirely. It’s one hell of a rough way to get to space, but we were young then. Tough. Not soft like I am now.” If he was soft, I couldn’t imagine him when he was younger.
“So we have assets, classified.” He turned and looked at me. “Classified. You ever mention this, and you’re going to be in a hole deeper than the one I promised you. So deep the only sound you’re going to hear will be me in the cell next to you.
“We rendezvoused with the transport to take us to the enemy station.”
“Enemy station?” I asked before I could remember that I had decided not to know.
“A weapons platform. Hard to see from the ground, the way they’d configured it. I give them credit for ingenuity. The thing had the radar cross section of a communications satellite, even though it was nearly ten times as big. And a million times as deadly.”
“A nuclear platform?” I asked.
He took another swig, and he shook his head. “Rods from God.”
“Huh?”
“What kind of a geek are you that you don’t know Rods from God? Thor? Guided hammers dropping from orbit with as much power as a nuclear blast but without the messy fallout? Jesus, man, have you never read your Pournelle? Heinlein? It’s a kinetic energy weapon. Simple, cheap, and damn effective if you can get it to orbit. And they did.”
“Who are they?”
He just glared at me. “We didn’t need to know that, and neither do you. We just had to stop it, without drawing the sort of fuss an antisat missile would. We wanted to stop them from launching World War III, not launch it ourselves.”
I said nothing. The implications of what he was saying . . . . . . . . . Secret programs, and not just ours, on a battlefield that everyone talked about as if it were hypothetical. Technology the public never knew about, on both sides. It was real, and the fighting was already there.
Hale continued, “We had two objectives: render it inoperative, of course; but first, we wanted their comm protocols and any electronics we could find. The next time they launched, we wanted to be able to disable it from the ground.”
“And can you?”
“It’s classified. But I rest easier at night.” He took a sip. “Most nights.
“So we needed hands and eyes and brains on the scene. And that was us. We rode the sleds in close . . . . . . . . . Oh, wait, forget sleds, they’re—”
“Classified,” I said.
“Yep. Single-operator space transport, with tools and small arms and enough air for maybe half a day in the worst case. And good tracking gear—not that it helped us any. To this day, we still haven’t figured out the enemy’s jamming technology. We had no idea of the precise size of the platform . . . . . . . . . Nor that it was defended. Robots. Not as sophisticated as ours, but killing a man in a suit isn’t that difficult. The bots killed Gaines and Tso before we knew about them.”
Hale handed me the laptop. “Don’t look at me like that. Civilians! You think dying is the worst thing possible. Failing your country is worse! And we weren’t going to do that. Two of us were already lost, but the mission wasn’t. We revised our tactics. Their robots didn’t have lasers like we did. We could sit back and snipe at them. Oh, they were fast. Damn near impossible to hit without a tracking computer; and it took long seconds and a lot of battery power to do real damage to them. They would scramble out of the way and hide in the crannies of the platform before you had a chance to hurt them.
“So that became our tactic. I analyzed the structure and found the control module, and four of us used lasers to herd the robots away from that zone, pin them down, while Izzy made for the control block on his sled.
“I’ll give the enemy programmers credit. The bots kept improvising new tactics, and we had to zip around on our sleds to find new angles to strike from. Then the damn bots actually started tearing off small bits of their own superstructure and throwing them at us. They took out Brown that way before we wised up.
“All the while, Izzy was trying to tear apart the control module. He carried a load of an ingenious new shaped explosive. In a pinch, he could slap it on the module, blow it, and only get tumbled by the shockwave. He would survive, bruised but not broken. So we could stop the station, but we needed the electronics first. That took more time.
“Meanwhile, the bots had yet another new strategy. In the confusion, it was never clear how many there were. It looked like five, but the way they darted about . . . . . . . . . One would strike out from the platform, draw our attention, and then dive for cover. While that one fled, another would come out. They kept us hopping. So we never saw the one crawling through the superstructure.
“Izzy saw it, though, just seconds before it smashed his left arm. I heard him scream, and my eyes flicked toward the control unit just as three bright laser flashes picked out a robot. I shouted to Izzy.
“‘I blinded him,’ Izzy said, with a shrill note in his voice. ‘He’s flailing around, but I’m dodging.’ I turned and concentrated laser fire on the bot near him. Between the two of us, we drove it back to cover.
“But I checked my charge gauge. Don’t believe what you see on TV. Lasers burn power fast. We couldn’t keep that up for long. I asked Izzy how he was doing.
“‘The damn bot’s timing couldn’t be worse. I had the cover loose, and I was cutting the connectors. Now . . . . . . . . . Left arm is broken, numb. I can still work, but I’m slow.’
“‘Should I relieve you?’
“‘Negative. I’m on it.’ There was a pause. ‘Hell, I think I see this platform’s weak spot. I can break it apart if the bots will leave us alone long enough to hit that. As soon as I get these CPUs . . . . . . . . . ’
“‘One job at a time, Iz.’ I saw a bot creeping around the station toward him, and I drove it back with a laser blast—a short one, conserving power.
“Then Iz shouted, ‘I got it!’
“‘Get out of there, Izzy,’ I said. ‘That’s what we need. Get out of there and let the missile boys take out the platform later.’
“‘I don’t think so, Hale,’ he answered. ‘I saw a fail-safe circuit. Their last defense, I guess. If this thing is off-line for too long, it’ll launch the rods. We have to take out the platform now.’
“‘And how do you figure to do that?’
“There was a long pause. ‘I’ve strapped the computer to my sled, and it’s homing in on your signal now. And I’ve spliced my computer into the control circuits. I have to keep fighting the countermeasures. It’s enough to hold off the fail-safe—for now—and to nudge the guidance system.’
“‘Guidance system?’
“‘Come on, Hale, you’re the orbit guy. You know an orbit this low isn’t stable, not without occasional correction. My investigation says this platform has enough fuel to hold orbit for three or four years without servicing.’ He chuckled. ‘That’s enough to boost it to high orbit, but only if I override the controls and steer it.’
“‘Can’t we steer it remotely?
“‘Not enough time, Hale. I’m in the circuit now. I won’t stay in if I wait too long. I salvaged air from Brown and Tso, and I’ve conserved my own. That’ll give me enough air to ride the bird up the hill. Then when I’m high enough . . . . . . . . . Well, I’ve got my charges, and I see the best spot to detonate them. I should have enough explosives on me to break this platform up into a hundred pieces, maybe more, all orbiting so high that any debris will burn up on reentry. It’ll spread the pieces out in a cloud too large to recover, probably too large to track reliably. That is the only way to neutralize this thing. Tell the team to back off, I don’t want them caught in the exhaust.’
“‘Iz . . . . . . . . . ’ I didn’t say more. It was suicide, and it was the only way to complete the mission. I caught his sled, and I flew away.”
Hale looked at me. “That was the last we heard from Izzy. We backed off, and we saluted as the orbital engines ignited. We kept a respectable distance as the flame dwindled, and then we had to get the hell out. You can only pack so much fuel and reaction mass into a small sled, and our mission still wasn’t complete. We had to get the electronics back to the retrieval shuttle. By the time we were back on the shuttle, the weapon platform was invisible to the naked eye.”
“And Izzy . . . . . . . . . ?”
“I saw telescope recordings later. He boosted for nearly a day. He must’ve been pretty hypoxic by then, but he still had enough sense to trigger the explosion. A hundred pieces? Hell, three times that, spread across an upper orbit. Izzy was one of those pieces.”
I swallowed hard. “I’m sorry.”
He shrugged. “It was years ago. And we accomplished the mission. America is safer today because of it.” He stared up at the sky. “Now boot that damn thing up.”
I didn’t ask why, I just booted. He continued, “Damn good security you got there. It took my techs four hours to crack it. I’m impressed.”
“But if you cracked it, why do you need me?”
“Because none of my people can figure out your scanning and pattern-matching code. We can barely get it to run, and we don’t know how to tune it. If you look in the back, you’ll find an SD card with some classified data.” He looked at his watch, then up at the sky. “I want you to run that through your routines and confirm for me what you think you saw up there.”
At last I was seeing the whole picture. I found the data set, and I started the analysis. We sat in silence for several minutes as it ran. I didn’t want to disturb Hale in his thoughts. I didn’t feel any danger anymore, just sympathy.
Then Hale said, “It’s getting to be about time. How’s it going?”
On another night, I might have grumbled about how you can’t hurry the calculations, but I was trying to preserve our new détente. So I just said, “Another couple minutes.”
He looked at his watch again. “Okay, we got a couple.”
The machine continued processing, and then the indicator panel flashed. “All right, we have an analysis.” Hale leaned over and looked at my screen.
The detail was much better with a real data set than with Kylie’s models. I made out a distinct suited figure, floating spreadeagled in space. It tumbled slowly, giving us a good look at arms, legs, and backpack . . . . . . . . . and eventually a helmet pierced by some long, narrow object.
In a very quiet voice, Hale said, “Thank you, Simpson.” Then he laid back against the rear window, eyes turned upward. “Close that damn thing.”
I closed the laptop, grabbed my flask from where I’d set it beside me, and settled back beside him. I didn’t know what we were looking for, but I had no doubt he did.
It was not quite a minute later when Hale’s watch gave a small chime. He unscrewed the lid of his flask, and he held it up to the sky. I held mine up as well, and we clinked them together in memory of the orbiting hero.
Hale drained his flask. “That’s for you, Iz.”
***
Martin L. Shoemaker is a programmer who writes on the side . . . . . . . . . or maybe the other way around. Martin published UML Applied: A .NET Perspective with Apress, but a second-place win in the Jim Baen Memorial Writing Contest earned him lunch with Buzz Aldrin! In addition to Writers of the Future: Volume 31, his work has appeared in Analog, Clarkesworld, Galaxy’s Edge, Digital Science Fiction, and Forever Magazine. His novella Murder on the Aldrin Express was reprinted in Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-First Annual Collection and in Year’s Top Short SF Novels 4. His short story “Today I Am Paul” was nominated for a Nebula and won the Washington Science Fiction Association Small Press Award before appearing in Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-third Annual Collection (edited by Gardner Dozois), The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume One (edited by Neil Clarke), The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy (edited by Rich Horton), Year’s Top Ten Tales of Science Fiction 8 (edited by Allen Kaster), and seven international editions (and counting).
More at shoemaker.space.