At least that was the official line, but Duvall and other operators knew that far more went on behind the scenes at Cheyenne Mountain. With the decline of the Cold War and the reduced threat of a concerted nuclear exchange, Cheyenne Mountain’s role had changed gradually to become dominated by both the monitoring of near-earth orbital debris and also of monitoring signals coming from the wider cosmos.
Although Duvall was not prone to conspiracy theories, she did know that from time to time suited men who wore no insignia moved through the base with complete authority. Inevitably nick-named the Men in Black, they showed up at unusual times and seemed to operate mostly from the Watch Station’s Signals Intelligence Office, which had recently developed links to the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. Whatever the hell they were looking at, they kept it well under wraps from junior officers like Duvall.
Despite the perceived glamor of the role and the exotic location, Cheyenne Mountain seemed to Duvall to be a base in decline. Its staff numbers had been slashed over the years to a fraction of their former number, the base seemingly a Cold War relic consigned to mundane debris observation and…
A small, insistent beeping noise broke Duvall from her reverie and she glanced at one of the signals screens before her. Arrayed across the walls of the Command Center, the screens showed a variety of images including maps of the Earth’s surface reminiscent of those seen at Cape Canaveral, that depicted the orbital trajectories of whatever objects Duvall cared to select at her station.
However, she had not selected any objects and in an instant her eyes settled on a single transmission spike. It took her mind only a moment to assimilate three salient points of information from the track.
It did not belong to the United States as it bore no transponder code.
It did not belong to any other nation as it bore no identification code.
It was in space, as its velocity was being recorded as close to seventeen thousand miles per hour, placing it in low Earth orbit.
Duvall lowered her boots from the edge of her desk and leaned forward as she peered at the contact. It was tracking an unusual near-polar orbit, rather than the equatorial orbits favored by most satellites and space vehicles.
The sound of Fuller’s voice broke through her thoughts. ‘The machine’s bust again, decaf’ only and…’
‘We’ve got an infiltration signal.’
Fuller chuckled, more than used to the pranks played by bored operators on their colleagues. ‘Yeah sure, maybe E.T’s got some coffee we can borrow?’
Duvall did not reply to him as she scanned the data stream on her screen.
‘Orbit is seventy nine degrees off the equator, apogee is one thousand seven hundred and twenty eight kilometres, perigee two hundred eighteen kilometres. Orbital period is one hundred and four minutes and thirty seconds.’
Fuller glanced at the main screen, saw the track, and dumped the coffee as he slammed down into his seat and slipped a pair of headphones over his ears.
‘We’ve got a primary return,’ he said as he saw the same track on his own screens. ‘Records confirm it’s not one of ours and it’s not a catalogued piece of debris.’
‘I’ve got data,’ Duvall replied, ‘object is approximately twenty four meters in length, approximately six metres in width. Data calculations estimate a mass of fifteen tons.’
Fuller glanced up at the screen. ‘Damn that’s big, real big.’
Duvall nodded as she held her own earphones to her head, squinting as she sought to determine what she was listening to.
‘I’ve got audio,’ she whispered, almost so quietly that Fuller didn’t hear.
‘You’ve got what?’
Duvall nodded to herself more confidently as she listened.
‘I’ve got audio,’ she repeated. ‘I’ve got a signal. It’s coming from the track.’
Fuller stared at her for a long moment and then looked up at the screens.
‘What the hell is it?’ he uttered.
Duvall reached out for her phone as she set her monitors to record every detail of the track. Without a transponder, identification and with signals being emitted or perhaps even received by the object, she wasn’t about to put her career on the line by taking a chance that it was just an iron-rich meteorite captured by Earth’s gravitational field that just happened to be deflecting satellite signals across the atmosphere.
She picked up the receiver and dialed a single number. The line connected immediately and she spoke clearly, trying to keep the nervous edge out of her voice.
‘Primary Orbital Contact, signals confirmed, initiate Orion Shield. Repeat, initiate Orion Shield.’
Beside her, she heard Fuller curse beneath his breath.
Orion Sheild was the code name for the United States’ missile defense system administered by the Missile Defense Agency. The major component was Ground-Based Midcourse Defense consisting of ground-based interceptor missiles and radar in the United States in Alaska, designed to intercept incoming warheads in space. Duvall knew that some GBI missiles were located at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California and could be supported by mid-course SM-3 interceptors fired from Navy ships, the Missile Defense Agency having some thirty operational GBIs. Those weapons would be augmented by the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense Systems located on US Navy warships and designed to pick out incoming ballistic missiles in flight at high altitude, thus preserving the safety of the continental United States.
‘Roger, Orion Sheild initiated, stand by.’
Duvall set the phone line to stand by as she heard boots running down the corridor leading to the Command Center and a low, mournful wailing siren as the entire base was alerted to the possibility that the United States was about to come under a nuclear attack.
Duvall prepared for the conversations that would follow: the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the line, conference calling as the President was awoken and informed of the crisis. She knew that they would be talking to her long before her boss was on site, and that as a communications specialist she was the most qualified person in the under-staffed base to conduct the assessment of the threat.
Then, just as she felt herself ready to conduct the assessment and as dozens of staff flooded into the Command Center, everything changed.
‘It’s not a missile,’ Fuller said.
‘How do you know?!’ Duvall demanded, tension in her voice.
Fuller looked across at her. ‘Because it just changed direction.’
Duvall looked up in shock at the main screen and saw the object’s orbital track change by a few degrees.
‘What the hell…?’
Fuller picked up his phone. ‘We’re not under attack,’ he said to her, ‘and I don’t know what the hell that thing is.’
Duvall switched her headphones from internal to broadcast and then filtered the feed through to the Command Center’s speakers. Above the rush of conversation a sudden sound of regularly paced beeps and growls echoed across the room and the conversation shuddered to a halt as every person in the building listened intently.
Duvall, along with everybody else in the Command Center, had been trained to recognize the countless signals emitted by both Earth-based installations and those from distant supernovae, neutron stars, black holes and quasars that blazed their high-energy emissions across billions of light years of intergalactic space.
What they were hearing now was none of those things.
The signal echoed around them like the chanting of monks drifting in haunting melody through the halls of some ancient abbey, both tuneful and yet without structure but for the rhythmic beacon accompanying it. Like a song from the depths of prehistory, something about it sounded familiar to Duvall, and she could see from the expressions of those around her that the rest of the team felt the same.