Angry Moon

Chapter 3b

     Neil Arndale stared at the computer screen mounted on the wall, where a graphic was showing all the active satellites currently orbiting the earth. “Well, so far as we can tell, they're all still operating normally,” he said into the phone he was holding next to his ear. “They're all in the wrong place and pointing in the wrong directions, but they're all working normally. It's as if something scooped them up and scattered them all across the sky.”

     “What could do that?” asked Samantha from her London apartment. “Could someone have hacked them and told them to fire their thrusters randomly? Could this be a terrorist attack?”

     “Nina Doyle says they're working on it.” She was Assistant Director of Science at the European Space Agency and their go-to person for anything relating to space based astronomy. “She says they're collaborating with the cyber security guys. They took all our Copernicus data...”

     “Yes, John Paul told me. Have you seen the data? Did you see anything?”

     “There was some signal degradation between eight and ten am yesterday, as if something was interfering with the signal.”

     “Water in the atmosphere?”

     “Possibly, but it varied in a strange way, not like a raincloud passing across the satellite dish. Charlie’s looking at it and scratching his head a lot. He says he's never seen anything like it. Look, as soon as we know anything, we’ll let you know. Okay?”

     “Okay. Thanks, Neil. See you Monday.”

     “Monday.”

     Neil cut the connection, then looked back at the computer screen. “What the hell happened?” he said to himself. It was as if space around Earth was a still pool of water in which tiny objects had been left floating in precisely calculated places, and then someone had stirred the water with a stick. What could do that? He went over to the window and stared out across the university grounds. Everything looked normal. Students in their black robes were chatting as they strolled along the pathways to their next lecture and, further away, the city of Bristol was bustling with traffic and pedestrians the way it always did. Nobody out there had any bigger worries than the loss of their satellite television. That would change, though, as the price of food began to go up.

     “I think it was a black hole,” said Josh, one of the interns helping out in the astronomy department as part of his masters degree. “About ten to the sixteenth tons, left behind by the big bang. It passed by the earth, about thirty thousand kilometres out, and its gravity scattered all the satellites.” His eyes were wide with shock as he said it. Small asteroids, between armchair and house sized, passed by the earth now and then, and it was considered a close approach if they passed by closer than the moon. An object as massive as Josh suggested, passing that close, was a one in a billion year event, even if it had been an ordinary asteroid. If it had hit the earth, it was have totally sterilized it. The intern was visibly disturbed by the magnitude of what he was suggesting.

     “It wasn't a black hole,” replied Neil. “It would have raised tides. They've got sensors in all the oceans of the world measuring sea levels, because of global warming, and they’ve said nothing.”

     “Has anyone asked them? They probably store up the data and only look at it once a month or so. Maybe nobody's asked them. Or maybe someone has asked them and they're still looking at the data.”

     “Something that big, passing by that close, you wouldn’t need ocean sensors,” said Sandra Willoughby, looking up from where she was kneeling in front of a computer the size of a chest of drawers. The resident computer expert had taken the front panel off and had her hands deep in the tangle of wires and circuit boards as she struggled to insert a new hundred teraflop processor. “If it came that close, the tides would have been as high as normal lunar tides. Someone would have noticed that the tide was in when it was supposed to be out.”

     “Okay, maybe it didn't come that close. It wouldn’t have had to to affect satellites. And even if it did, it only happened yesterday. Maybe the tides were all over the place and it hasn't made the headlines yet.”

     “The Severn estuary is just four miles away, that way,” said the young redhead, pointing. “Why don't you pop over there and ask people what the tide was doing yesterday?”

     “A black hole doesn't fit,” said Neil. “If it had been a black hole, it would have passed by some of the satellites close enough to throw them clear out of the solar system. Look at the pattern.” He waved a hand at the wall mounted screen. “Every satellite on this side of the planet is out of position, but they're all still orbiting the Earth, and not very far from where they're supposed to be. They all have thrusters, to make course corrections and de-orbit them when they come to the end of their lives. It'll probably be possible to put them all back to where they're supposed to be. If it had been a black hole, some of them would be out past the moon by now.”

     “Something more diffuse, then,” said Josh. “Not one object but a cluster of them.”

     “It would have to have had a huge mass. A million million tons at least. More likely a million times greater still. It would have covered half the sky. Thousands of asteroid size objects passing by the earth, they'd have been seen.”

     “Not if they were very dark. If they were covered with a layer of organic materials. Tres-2B reflects less than one percent of the light that falls on it.”

     “They would still block out the light of objects behind them. Kepler-2 was looking that way. It would have seen dips in starlight. It was designed precisely to look for them.”

     “The signal degradation! The degradation of the Copercicus data! Could that have been caused by... No. The signal would have been blocked intermittently, not just interfered with. You know, the signal degradation might just be a coincidence. A problem with the receiver. A bird sitting on the antenna or something. It might have nothing to do with the stray satellites.”

     “A hell of a coincidence that it happens just at the same time. And if it was a bird it would be happening all the time.”

     “I just used that as an example. Something terrestrial. Some amateur radio hack transmitting in the gigahertz range for some reason, maybe. And coincidences happen. It would be a lot stranger if they never happened. No, I think it was a swarm of dark objects. Their collective gravity threw the satellites around. I think the proof might be in the Kepler data, like you said. Sitting on a hard drive somewhere, waiting for someone to analyse it. It takes months, even years, before it gets analysed. Some of the data from the first Kepler hasn't been looked at yet!”

     Neil nodded. It was possible, he supposed. Recent advances in astronomy had revealed things bizarre beyond imagination. Planets spinning so fast they should have flown apart. Arcs of electricity jumping between a planet and its moons. Even a planet the size of the earth that, if the data was to be believed, seemed to have a hole running all the way through it like a necklace bead. A cluster of dark asteroids was positively mundane in comparison.

     “We have to wait for the data to come in,” he said. “You're right, the answer might be sitting on a hard drive somewhere. A week from now we might know more, or we might not. In the meantime we’ve got work to do. Have you completed the ring analysis yet?”

    Josh shook his head, leaving the room on his way back to his own rooms, and the others returned to their work.