DENVERS

“That’s all you have so far?” General (2 stars) Blair Marcus (JCS-J6) asked as he accompanied Colonel Wesley Denvers back into the situation room.

“Mostly. It’s been forty minutes since I sounded the alarm, and about an hour since this began. We’re trying to get every asset we can activate to report, but that’s hard.”

“And that supply base?”

“We’d need a better audio analysis, but my team thinks that the guy let drop his satellite phone after he went out to see what was happening. Whatever he saw spooked him and he ran.”

“Well, that’s someone who is going to get a dishonorable discharge soon,” the general commented.

“So, the affected area appears to be expanding steadily. We’re getting reports of knocked-off communications from areas at the previous periphery.”

“It doesn’t look like a cyber-attack at all,” the general pondered.

“That’s the current conclusion as well. We’re getting cascade effects from network and infrastructure nodes outside, but that’s because of the structure of whatever is reporting.”

“High-voltage line absent,” one of the operators reported.

More people were monitoring in the situation room than previously. More and more people were showing up, as alarms called on-duty personnel, more often than not from outside the Pentagon, having departed for the evening.

“Define absent?” Denvers asked.

“PG&E says… well, it got problems in the middle. They’re sending electricity from the east, but their distribution node near Sacramento suddenly got cut off.”

“Line is cut?”

“That’s what is weird. According to their engineers, they’re sending several hundreds of KwH, but they’re not… arriving at the other end. As if someone decided to install a bypass. But who could draw a high-voltage line like that?”

Wesley Denvers shook his head. Nothing on the profile of the… well, the ongoing attack on the US infrastructure made sense.

General Marcus looked at the large-scale map displayed on the situation screens.

“It looks like a circle of sorts, doesn’t it?”

“That’s our best estimate. Based on every data we get.”

“And in the Pacific?”

“No data.”

Denvers was waiting for General Marcus to reach a decision. In his humble opinion, that was a DEFCON-1 situation. Massive attack undergoing, enemy unidentified so far.

The general looked down at a console, and then pulled a card.

“Let me,” he simply said.

Wesley Denvers’ hair rose. You simply did not put an authentication card, one for JSC, into a random computer. Even if the computer was in the depths of the Pentagon, in a mission-critical area.

But of course, you did not say that to a general. Especially one that was in J6, which were the ones in charge of computer security among other things.

The thing the general brought up made him frown.

“That’s Hedgehog. Deep classification, so I’m arbitrarily saying you have need-to-know. There have been discussions of integrating into the situation board for over a year now, but it’s a bit too good.”

“What is it, Sir?”

“Deep Sonic – the Hedgehog, get it? – sensor net. Passive sonar to the tenth power, with all kinds of big words from the contractors who developed the original parts. Its big problem isn’t that it detects all traffic, including subs. It’s that it detects all traffic, including ours. Even those that nobody, not even the Pentagon, is supposed to track.”

“Oh.”

“You should see the discussions about it. Epic ones, every time.”

The general finally pulled a file.

“Can let you only have output, not direct data. This is the status map for right now. The red dots are the offline ones. The online ones aren’t on the map.”

Denvers gestured and an operator took over. A few seconds later, a bunch of new pixels appeared on the map, distorted.

“It looks…” he started.

“Can you change the projection? Make it… centered over Seattle,” he asked.

“That’s where it started?” the general asked.

“Yes.”

The map on the main display of the room redrew itself.

“It does look like a circle, doesn’t it,” General Marcus said.

“It’s close to a thousand miles wide,” Wesley noted.

One of the operators was waving.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

“Yes?”

“NASA. They’re asking for you, colonel.”

“NASA?” the general asked.

“We got in touch just before you arrived. They… ran into the same problems as we did. The ISS.”

“Oh shit,” the general swore.

“It got cut off. I told them that satellites seem to function again once they leave the area, but…”

“It’s a different thing.”

“Want to take the call?”

“No. You’re still in charge of the room. And I do have to make calls myself.”

Wesley acknowledged his superior and picked up.

“Wesley.”

“Houston control, Byrne here. We got contact with the ISS again.”

“Good to know.”

He hesitated.

“Any… damage?” he asked.

“So far nothing. And it looks like the crew might have made it.”

“Might? I thought you had contact again?”

“Look, colonel, it’s already an impossible situation. But either we have aliens invading.”

Wesley laughed.

“Invading the ISS, I mean. Or we have a bigger problem than anyone could imagine.”

“That’s not a joke, right?” General Blair Marcus said, looking at the picture that NASA had sent.

“NASA says the entire crew, all five of them, got changed into, well, what we’re looking at.”

“Are they sure it’s…”

“Them? At least one, a former pilot, gave some anecdote about pub crawling while in London with one of the operators in Houston. So either, they got them feeding intel, they got mind-reading of sorts, or they’re really humans that got Changed by… by the zone.”

“It reaches that high? Ah, GPS.”

“At least 12 thousand miles, yes. And the same astronaut says he could see it growing. At least the upper-atmosphere grid that seems to be it.”

“I need to do more calls, again. The JCS are already en route, but they need to know this ASAP.”

BARANOV

Yaytsev was frustrated. He had multiple degrees, like every member of the ISS, and he was proud to be a nearly-pure engineer. Getting someone like him up was like pulling teeth, since “engineers don’t do research”. He shamelessly had used every friend and friend of the family he could to get actually assigned to a mission rather than just be on the official roster.

And now, the commander was asking him to do “a Scotty”.

‟Am not Scottish, am Russian,” he’d shouted back.

Of course, he knew about Montgomery Scott. The original series might have been bootleg back in the Soviet Union, but any self-respecting spaceman, even Russian, knew about Trekkies.

‟Okay, bad news and not-good news,” he said again across the station.

‟Whatever,” the answer came.

‟Not enough power. There is simply not enough time to recharge the batteries under current load.”

‟We’re heading into the night. Five minutes,” the commander replied.

‟Physics don’t bow for no one. I’m trying to shut as much as I can again, manually this time.”

‟That’s bad news.”

‟No, that’s the not-good one. The bad news is that the systems are fighting me. I get everything from JAXA shit to EU trash saying they need to resume operations, now, and I spend too much time negotiating with stubborn computers.”

‟You want full admin.”

‟That will help, yes.”

And he immediately added, “The longer it goes, the worse it will be by the end of the night cycle.”

‟Let me text Houston,” she replied.

‟Do that, thanks,” he snapped.

Yaytsev pulled again diagnostics and control routines.

I’m sure each control could do it remotely, but that takes so much time and negotiation. Fucking politics.

He drew a quick sheet, doing calculations based on what he hoped to shut down. As he’d said earlier, there was simply not enough available power from the decaying solar panels to fill the batteries in the time between the end of the shutdown and their orbit’s move into eclipse night.

Then he pulled the schematic Houston had uploaded. The extent of the Zone, the area where electricity decided to take a vacation to Siberia or somesuch.

If he had a mouth… and possibly lungs, because he was pretty sure those vestiges of a former existence no longer existed, he’d have sighed.

‟Commander? Got maybe-not-bad news and very-bad ones,” he said.

‟Shoot.”

‟If I can shut down everything I need, and let just Central run on lowlight and we keep the Cupola operating, we’re going to last the night.”

‟I knew you could do it, Scotty.”

‟Let him do it without a scriptwriter,” he snarked back.

‟Okay, the very-bad ones?”

‟We have zero margins for the next orbit.”

Silence answered him across the ISS.

‟The next orbit is in the south portion of the zone, as extrapolated by Houston. But we leave the shutdown zone about ten minutes before the eclipse. Not enough time for any significant time with the batteries.”

Silence stayed. Then he heard Frank Fuller speak.

‟We have to last thirty-five minutes with the entire station powerless?”

‟Just after eleven in shutdown. I can turn the fans to the max to renew the air, but we’ll have to bunker down individually, or we’re going to have too much CO2 accumulating.”

‟Assuming that happens,” another voice said. Shuko Aozora, he guessed.

‟Want to bet, be my guest. Otherwise, we have to spread as much as we can to avoid getting CO2 poisoning, because I have to choose between air or heat. Can’t do both.”

Notifications popped on his display, and if he had a mouth, he would have smiled.

‟Thanks, commander. Shutting down every non-essential… now.”

Lighting flickered, then stopped. He could still see a distant reflection from the central, where minimal lights were still on.

‟We’re getting into the night. Everyone save for Shuko at the Cupola. That includes you, Yaytsev,” the commander ordered.

‟Aye aye. On my way.”

The Cupola area was lighted, as the Earth was in eclipse. Below the ISS, utter darkness scrolled. They were over the Atlantic, heading toward South Africa. Without weather effects, the night under the station was absolute.

That was the first time Yaytsev had seen any of his crewmates since he’d awakened from a dream of blue. He’d thought he was drowning in an ocean of blue, with off-blue lines that crossed in non-Euclidean ways, before trying to gasp awake in complete darkness and silence.

It turned out he had missed said lines of blue, even if his subconscious had somehow filled his dreamscape with them.

They all looked weird. He supposed he looked the same way. Blubbery leather for skin, almost black in the dim light. A misshapen shape of a head, with all of its features missing. The short arms and three-digit hands. The probably non-functional short legs.

‟Well, fuck,” he said.

‟Welcome to the alien club,” one replied. Fuller, he guessed.

It was funny that, even though their voices didn’t seem to use any form of sound, even radio-modulated, he could almost guess who was speaking.

‟Thirty minutes,” the silhouette next to Frank said.

‟And I can turn on everything again, commander,” he replied.

‟No sense keeping spare capacity,” she stated.

‟If the batteries drain entirely, not.”

‟Okay, so we’re deeply in trouble next orbit. What about the one after?”

‟That one depends on how fast that thing grows. If the model Houston got us holds, then we skirt the edge, and we go into the night immediately after.”

‟But with batteries.”

‟Yes. But if the model fails…”

He tried to sigh again, unsuccessfully. Again.

‟Then we might go in shutdown for a minute. And it might get them drained entirely. I am assuming the Zone drains everything almost immediately. The switch from unpowered to normal is… abrupt.”

‟And the next?” she asked.

‟Safe. As much as it can be, with this… thing happening.”

The commander turned toward a tablet, strapped to the Cupola’s edge, as she grabbed another. Yaytsev could see the text dialog that was mostly used for detailed instructions scrolling.

Ops? We need plans for the next two orbits, she wrote.