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  The operational regulations for pilot environments, Freeman explained, had been tightened in 2010. The air pressure and temperature in the cockpit now had to be slightly more comfortable than before. New aircraft like the F-22 met the new requirements, but the F-15 was a product of the seventies. Going high enough to launch the ASM-140 would cause conditions in the cockpit to fall below the new acceptable minimum level.

  Sylvester threw up his arms: What are you going to do? “I argued against it. The pilot will barely be able to move bundled up in that space suit, and they can’t wear a regulation helmet. We even have to modify the ejection seat. Oh, that reminds me—we removed the standard-issue AC.”

  “Fine, fine,” Lintz said, waving a hand dismissively. How had a project designed to reuse existing technology gotten so bloated? “Did you read Freeman’s report about SAFIR 3’s second stage yet, Major?” he asked, changing the subject.

  “I believe so,” Sylvester replied. “Request for permission to observe a rocket shell gaining altitude or something? No argument from me as long as his regular duties aren’t affected.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Freeman.

  “But first get to Hangar 5,” Sylvester continued. “Make sure those pressure suits come in okay.”

  “Yes, sir. I’m on my way.”

  Sylvester sat down in a chair and watched Freeman leave. “Unusual orbit, I think he said? Amazing that he noticed. I’ve never been able to get my head around all that business myself.”

  “There are amateurs out there these days who make a hobby of tracking objects in low orbit,” said Lintz. “Someone would have noticed sooner or later.” More importantly, he explained further, if NORAD could find out what was causing the irregularity, STRATCOM would owe them a favor.

  At this, Sylvester nodded, apparently in agreement.

  “Enough about that, though,” Lintz said. “This hat. Can’t we send it somewhere else?”

  “Anywhere else it would just get in the way,” grinned Sylvester. “It’s just two weeks, Colonel. I’m sure you can manage.”

  Fri, 11 Dec 2020, 05:55 +0400 (2020-12-11T01:55 GMT)

  Desnoeufs Island

  In a room lit only by the stars and a monitor on its dimmest setting, a tuneless voice broke into song, “Ozzy in Seychelles, telescope to the sky …”

  The room was so large that the starlight couldn’t dispel the gloom of its farthest corners. In its center stood a gigantic desk, and sitting at this desk in a tank top and shorts was Ozzy Cunningham, owner of the tuneless voice. Every time Ozzy moved, his Aeron chair groaned in protest; he was at least 25 percent over the three hundred–pound weight limit of the famous chair, used in offices worldwide, and the sides of his thighs were well beyond the edges of the seat.

  Ozzy’s desk faced a curved window twenty meters wide and four meters high that took up one entire side of the room, offering him an uninterrupted 180-degree ocean view.

  Through the window, he could see the Milky Way sprayed across the eastern sky like vapor from a whale’s blowhole that had frozen in midair. The sea was still; no fishermen were out chasing sardines tonight. Desnoeufs—thirty miles southwest of Mahe Island, home of Victoria, the capital of Seychelles, and not far from Madagascar—was owned outright by Ozzy. Living with his “man Friday” in a UFO-shaped building jutting out from a cliff overlooking the Indian Ocean to the east, he devoted himself to his hobby: observing the skies through the three-meter reflective telescope and low-orbit radar of his private observatory, the Seychelles Eye.

  The ocean view was astonishing, without a single artificial light in view, but right now Ozzy was ignoring it. Instead, he was squinting at a two-by-two bank of monitors, like something you might see on a trader’s desk, while his fingers worked a trackball. He didn’t like to use a mouse; moving his arm was a chore.

  Ozzy checked the radar in the upper-right quadrant of his setup. No rain clouds to the east. The weather forecast for remote islands like his was useless; you needed high-quality radar if you wanted to observe the skies. All the more so when your target was Mercury, whose visibility was notoriously susceptible to atmospheric effects.

  Photographing Mercury was no easy task to begin with. Much closer to the sun than Venus, this tiny planet was completely blotted out by the blue-tinged atmosphere of Earth when the sun was shining. You had to catch it just before sunrise or just after sunset.

  Ozzy spun the trackball, selecting “Mercury” from a list of celestial bodies on the screen. He had spent a lot of money streamlining his setup so that no finicky adjustments were required. His lower-right monitor sprang to life, displaying a close-up of the planet lit by the sun directly below it.

  Nodding with satisfaction, Ozzy set the lower-left monitor to display the feed from the support camera. It was pointed in the same direction as the telescope but took in a much wider area. The part of the screen that would be photographed by the telescope was indicated by a small white frame at the center of the monitor. Overlaid on the image was information about the celestial bodies currently visible. Right now it was showing the predicted orbit of Tiangong-2, which was currently just above Mercury. Ozzy put one finger to the monitor and confirmed that the line gently curving away from Tiangong-2 would pass through the shooting area, before zooming the camera in. In ten seconds or so, space station and planet would be in alignment.

  “Counting down! Eight, seven, six …” Ozzy raised his right arm from the desk and aimed at the trackball button with his right index finger. “Four, three, two … Ah, crap, not quite.”

  Peering at the live view, Ozzy waited for the right moment to shoot. He was recording the video feed in full HD, but a still from an HD video wasn’t worth much these days, when even television was broadcast in 4K or 8K. A photograph had to get above the gigapixel level to be worth anything at all. And the raw data of an image stitched together from twelve high-sensitivity CCDs could easily pass the gigabyte mark. Burst shooting was impossible. You had to take one shot at just the right time.

  The dot for Tiangong-2 entered the white frame in the live view as a shining point appeared in the view through the telescope.

  “Zero!” Ozzy cried, letting his fat finger fall onto the button.

  The trackball made an ominous sound. Ozzy’s chair began to spin clockwise from the force of Ozzy’s button press, but it groaned to a halt only a quarter of the way around. Cursing, Ozzy grabbed the desk and pulled himself back around to face front again. The trackball button had gotten stuck pressed down.

  “This chair cost a thousand bucks, and it already needs replacing,” he complained, prying the trackball button free with one fingernail. “They don’t make anything like they used to.”

  When he looked up and checked the photograph he had taken, Ozzy stroked his chin in satisfaction. “Not bad. Not bad at all! Never seen this combination in a resolution this high before.”

  The Tiangong-2 was visible in silhouette, its two pairs of solar panels extended. Below it hung Mercury, visibly spherical rather than the indistinct disc it appeared as in most photographs. The contrast was too high to see any craters, but the heat haze rising from the Indian Ocean had been neatly removed by the image-processing engine. A superb result, all in all.

  Ozzy tagged the image Tiangong-2 and Mercury, then uploaded it to Wikimedia under his pseudonym, “X-Man.” Wikimedia’s voluminous archives already included thousands of high-res photographs from X-Man, consistently an order of magnitude better than what others had to offer, and this mysterious user from Seychelles was starting to attract attention among the amateur-astronomer community—even if part of his reputation was as an unreliable purveyor of disinformation and half-truths.

  “Nothing beats being here all by myself,” Ozzy said to no one in particular. The Seychelles Eye’s location suited him just fine. Being alone on an island in the middle of the Indian Ocean had plenty of advantages. No light pollution, for one,
but best of all, no competition. North and South America were full of hobbyists and professionals alike turning their telescopes to the night sky. The South Pacific was too close to Australia and New Zealand and their nature-loving populations. Ozzy’s formal knowledge of astronomy was limited, so it was important not to have to compete with people who specialized in it. All he wanted was to fire up an interest in space, even if only a spark, among people who never usually looked at the stars. That was what he sought with his beautiful photography and startling writing. He didn’t want people getting in his face and telling him to stop writing nonsense.

  Ozzy’s young friends had often extolled the virtues of getting out on your own. “You don’t find opportunities staying with the herd,” was how Ronnie Smark had put it—and he was a billionaire now.

  Ozzy would never forget that night in the summer of 1998, when Ronnie came to visit him at his penthouse apartment carrying nothing but a single scrap of paper.

  “We’re going to open a bank on the Internet,” he had said.

  This was back when Ozzy himself had barely even started doing his taxes on a computer. The Windows operating system was spreading in the consumer market, but communicating with others using computers was still just a hobby for geeks. Ronnie had still been a tenant of Ozzy’s then, a young man in an ill-fitting suit and dirty Converse sneakers speaking passionately about his plans for the future.

  “It won’t be long before the whole world’s connected to the Internet,” he said. “I’m going to create a way for anyone to open up shop there. We’re already in negotiations with our first bank. One success, and the rest is repetition and refinement.”

  Ozzy looked down at Ronnie’s dirty shoes. The poky offices he rented on the second floor for $400 a month weren’t even air-conditioned. Security deposit was $1,000, if he recalled correctly.

  “I’m not sure I understand that part,” said Ozzy, “but what you’re saying is, you want me to let you have the office rent-free until you get into the black?”

  “That’s not it at all, Mr. Cunningham,” Ronnie said, brows knit in a wounded expression. He held the scrap of paper up to Ozzy’s face. “We want you to invest in us. We’ll give you ten thousand dollars’ worth of nonvoting shares. That’s 20 percent of our total capital. In return, all we want is use of the office for three years.”

  “Right. You want me to let you stay there without paying rent.”

  “No, no. It’s an investment.”

  “Don’t give an inch, do you? You can’t even get a ten-grand loan?”

  But even as he complained, Ozzy was mulling the proposal over. It wasn’t as if people were clamoring for an office in his partially converted warehouse outside San Francisco. Better to have young people coming and going than to let it stand empty. If there were enough of them to entice a coffee cart to set up shop out front, it would be easier to fill the rest of the space too.

  “All right,” he said. “Give me that note. You’re going to expand, right? Go ahead and use the warehouse space on the first floor too. The office there has AC.”

  “Thank you kindly, Mr. Cunningham. Welcome to our stakeholder roster. I assume I can leave the power bill to you as well.”

  Ozzy couldn’t remember the expression on Ronnie’s face at that moment. But that had been the beginning. Ronnie and his friends had gotten to work, briskly encircling the torpid credit card companies and building out a settlement network that soon became an indispensable piece of online infrastructure. They were out of the warehouse within three years, and when their Internet bank was bought out by an online auction company, the scrap of paper in Ozzy’s desk was worth well over a billion dollars.

  But Ronnie’s success did more for Ozzy than just make him a billionaire. As young entrepreneurs began flocking to Ozzy’s building in their own suits and scuffed Converse shoes, Ozzy offered access to what they needed: lawyers, accountants, free high-speed Internet connections. Then he bought another building. The entrepreneurs were a superstitious group, so Ozzy bought them what they wanted—another converted warehouse. Rent was payable in nonvoting stock. Ozzy’s hands-off approach was a success, ensuring that every time a tenant moved out they left behind a substantial chunk of capital. But none had ever made as much for Ozzy as Ronnie had, and none were ever as successful as Ronnie himself.

  After ten feverish years, a new age dawned, this one dominated by the megaplatforms: Google, Amazon, Facebook.

  Many successful entrepreneurs from the early days of the boom pivoted from IT to so-called commodity industries like automobiles and infrastructure. No small number of them became photographers as well. Ozzy was fascinated by the photos they took now that their success had freed them from financial concerns and made it possible for them to travel the world focusing on their art. So fascinated, in fact, that he decided to reinvent himself in Seychelles too. Since he couldn’t walk a mile without getting out of breath, he decided to take up astrophotography. As long as you had the facilities, you could do that right from your chair.

  The most successful entrepreneur of all, though, had taken a different route entirely. Ronnie had invented the industry of commercial space development, and now he was two days away from leaving Earth with his daughter, on a rocket he had built himself, and checking in to accommodations to be injected into orbit by his tested and true Wyvern spacecraft.

  “Talk about friends in high places,” Ozzy muttered. He briefly toyed with the idea of applying to go on one of Ronnie’s space tours himself, but a creak from his chair brought him back to earth. The additional fees required to carry his massive 190-kilogram frame into orbit would be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. And there was still plenty for him to do here, away from the herd.

  Today he had to run checks on more than a dozen satellites. Busy didn’t begin to cover it. The second stage of SAFIR 3 was particularly intriguing. Ozzy scanned the latest newsletter from Meteor News in Japan again. Could SAFIR 3 R/B really be gaining altitude?

  If you had a story no one else did, that was valuable. Pair it with a shiny image, and Internet tabloids like Geeple would be sure to pick it up. As the source of the story, Ozzy’s blog would see pageviews well into five-figure territory, and that in turn meant more incoming payments for advertising via good old Ronnie’s Internet bank.

  In fact, Ozzy could make money without putting much thought or effort into it at all. Some of the stock he’d accepted in lieu of rent back in his landlord days was starting to pay serious dividends as the issuing companies moved into their growth phases. But the money he made from his photographs and writing—and of course advertising payments—that was different. That was money he’d earned with his own hard work.

  Ozzy highlighted the TLE for SAFIR 3 R/B in the Meteor News newsletter and selected Copy.

  “Into the moon with me … My heart’s in its orbit …”

  Singing a half-remembered song, Ozzy pasted the TLE into his orbital-forecast software. “SAFIR 3 R/B” appeared in his telescope’s list of tracking targets. A quick spin of the protesting trackball and a line appeared across the wide-view monitor. Perfect—the object’s orbit would take it directly over Ozzy’s island.

  Satellite rise was in ten minutes. Better prep the radar. SAFIR 3 would be lit up by the sun about two minutes after it rose above the horizon and reached thirty degrees or so of elevation. It would then pass directly overhead before sinking again in the east. This was the perfect path, allowing him to see it lit from both front and back.

  Ozzy watched the dot on his monitor representing SAFIR 3. Its orbit was so low that its motion would be visible to the naked eye while it was overhead, but while it was over the horizon the dot moved slowly enough that he couldn’t tell whether it was moving or not. The dot approached the horizon, touched it, rose above it …

  “Strange. Should be out by now.”

  The predicted location for SAFIR 3 superimposed over the low-zoom
field view to the west was well clear of the horizon, but Ozzy couldn’t see anything through the telescope except stars streaming slowly through the frame with the rotation of the Earth. He watched SAFIR 3’s expected location rise until it was high enough that the sun’s rays should have been reaching it. But not a hint of sparkle appeared.

  Just as Ozzy was wondering if he’d missed it altogether, a point of red light appeared in the field view—an object in orbit lit up by the morning sun. The redness was due to the light’s long passage through the atmosphere, the same effect that gave you red sunlight at dawn and sunset. The red dot was moving roughly parallel to the predicted path of SAFIR 3, just below the area framed by the telescope.

  “Off the rails a bit there,” muttered Ozzy. The TLE in Meteor News must have been inaccurate. He’d almost missed the object entirely.

  Ozzy switched off automatic tracking based on the bad TLE data and activated visual tracking instead. One click on the red dot in the wide view and the telescope was on its way. The telescope image panned swiftly across the sky until a cylindrical object appeared clearly on the screen, slowly stabilizing at the center. It certainly looked like a rocket body.

  As he watched, there was a flash of light from the cylinder. The image blurred for a moment.

  “What was that?” Ozzy leaned close to the monitor. The cross in the center of the image was still directly over the rocket, the tracking operating as expected. “Shit! Should have been watching more closely.”

  He could look back over the video and the logs to see what the telescope had captured and how the object had moved. But if the same thing happened again in the meantime, he’d miss it.

  “Come on, once more … Aha!” There was another flash, and the telescope’s angle began to move, slowly but surely. “A flash from behind, then it moves forward … That settles it—those lights are thrusters. That piece of space junk is accelerating!”