Jotan's Stories: Galactic Penetration

This was a story I originally published under the name Jotan on tumblr back in the '10s.

I remember the alarm sounding -- just a meek little 'beep' to indicate new data was available. A beep like your phone would make when somebody mentioned you on Twitter. It was a tiny, insignificant noise.

Sighing, I looked up to the monitor. It's funny; I remember exactly what page of The Short Victorious War I was on when it happened. I think the universe was trying to be ironic. A few of the Peep ships had just started their invasion.

At first, I simply could not believe what I was seeing. There were six of us trained to sit at this desk and watch the new deep-space sensors. Twenty years ago, some scientists at MIT had figured out how to transmit information faster-than-light. The trick was quantum entanglement, just like all the scifi books had thought. Once the tech was being mass-produced, the Unified Launch Consortium loaded a transmitter onto two dozen probes and shot them as far out into the solar system as they could. Who needs to waste money on observatories when you can drive probes in real-time? It took a good while, but they took up station around each planet and some scattered all about Pluto's orbit to be used for probing the liminality between solar systems.

Universities and independent labs can book time on a probe, but I don't have to wait in line. When I enlisted in the USAF, I expected to get assigned to babysitting satellite orbits and deciding when we needed to blow up some threatening debris. Instead, they took me and my overpriced masters-in-astrophysics and assigned me to keep an eye on any and all data coming out of the deep-space probes. The Air Force gets copied on every single qubit going in or out of the probes.

Not sure how it happened, but some bright general somewhere decided that watching the data for threats was worth our time. So, I sit here for ten hours a day, four days a week, staring at our deep-space threat board. We have software that actually analyses the data, and I just bang out a quick report on anything noteworthy at the end of each watch. It's skull-numbingly boring, but it does leave me with plenty of free time. Except on that one, dark day when the alarm beeped.

This had happened before. Or, it might be more fair to say that the alarm had gone off before. Two years ago, an asteroid had entered the Sol system on a course that would have potentially impact Jupiter. Big deal. We fixed the alert criteria -- which took months of meetings with the software and QA guys -- and shrugged it off.

But that alert was different. Something was moving at about thirty percent the speed of light, and its heading would bring it in-system. Nothing is supposed to move that fast; I assumed it was just a bug, or a broken sensor on one of the probes.

I had been trained for this, so fortunately, I already knew what to do. I put in the override code for civilian traffic to the two probes closest to the one which was reporting the impossible object, booting some folks from MIT and IISc from their regularly-scheduled science time. I commanded the probes to take a gander at the object's current location.

They confirmed something was moving at point-three C, on the exact course the first probe reported, ruling out a hardware fault. I bit my lip, trying to think of anything else I could use to classify this incident as simple computer error. I came up with nothing, then realized I had started thinking of this as an 'incident'.

When threats were confirmed by the operator on watch (me), there was only one thing to do. I flipped up a glass cover on a big red button, balled up my first, and gave it a good solid whack. Klaxons started crying out the "HOLY SHIT ALL HANDS ON DECK" noise across the base. I imagine it gave all the snoozy satellite babysitters a shock; they'd only heard that noise before during scheduled drills.

The phone on my desk rang twenty seconds later. I was already poised to grab the handset; I knew it would be ringing soon, and I knew who it would be.

"Lieutenant. What's going on?" came General Homer's voice. He sounded like he was trying very hard to be concerned.

"Sir, I have detected and confirmed an unidentified object moving at a third the speed of light on a course for the inner solar system. The system is currently alerting our analysis team. The sensor feeds are available for your review now, sir," I responded. These words had been beaten into my head by the bi-monthly drills we were forced to endure.

"Alight then, son. Get on the conference bridge and stand by to bring everybody up to speed. If it's moving that quick, better figure out if it's going to hit anything and an estimated time to impact. We'll want that before anything else. Out," he finished. The phone clicked, and the line went dead.

I pressed a button on the dial pad. The analysts and a couple of Homeland Security folks would be joining up in the next few minutes. It was going to be a long day.

When I finally gave my attention to the tracking data again, I nearly shit my pants. The object, moving towards earth at tremendous speed, had just made a major course change. Maybe a degree or so of change could have been caused by clipping some random asteroid, but it had changes heading by nearly twenty degrees!

It had to be under power. I sat there for a solid ten seconds, with the conference bridge prompts playing and my phone responding with pre-programmed access codes. It connected, and silence fell.

"Lt. Jackson here," I croaked. My mouth suddenly felt dry. "Um, is anybody else watching the feed?"

"Not yet, sir. Logging in now," came back the cheerful voice of a scientist, probably excited to get called in on an unusual celestial event.

"Heading modified -17.818 degrees south forty-six seconds ago. New course will intersect with the Moon in approximately seven hours," I declared. I remember that I managed this without croaking, stuttering, or sounding scared shitless.

After a moment, the General spoke up. "Well, shit."