2 DAYS LATER. CHRISTIANSTED NAVAL RESEARCH OBSERVATORY, CHRISTIANSTED, ST. CROIX, VIRGIN ISLANDS. 3:04 AM AST. MONDAY, JULY 14, 2025.
Tarantina Highbotham
had a Ph.D. from Cal Tech, an Annapolis ring, and an honorable
retirement from the Navy as a captain—equivalent to a colonel in
the other services. Her whole life’s experience had been in getting
things exactly right.
“That moon is too
bright to have so much of it in your scope,” she told Henry, the
new observer who was just getting his scope positioned. “Just the
northeast corner, less if you can. Make sure you can see
Fecunditatis, but don’t blind yourself with any more light than you
have to.”
“Yes,
ma’am.”
She looked around the
darkened platform; the rest were right on the money. All this can’t be easy. At least my first class in celestial nav involved manual instruments.
What must it be like, trying to learn this and do it right, if you
grew up filling out a screen to tell the telescope where to
point?
No matter. Wherever
they came from, they were doing it.
Henry had been on his
honeymoon on St. Croix; on Daybreak day, his new bride had traded
her jewelry for a ride to the mainland, leaving him a note. He’d
probably never know whether she had gone off with slavers, pirates,
coyotes, or just plain idiots. After that he’d worked odd jobs,
begged in the street, and drunk, until Highbotham hired him to dig
a latrine, and discovered he had been a math major.
Abby, on St. Croix to
work for some alternate-energy foundation, had the best
paper-and-pencil math skills of all Highbotham’s team, and drew
well—better than well—accurately.
Peggy was a retired
high school math teacher who had spent thirty some years with
DoDEA. Her husband, a newly retired Marine general, had dropped
dead when the Pittsburgh EMP apparently reached just far enough to
give him a current surge in the pacemaker. She always showed up in
full makeup.
Richard, a beefy old
sad sack with a heavy drinker’s face, had been an architect;
Gilead, dark-skinned and with a prominent Cuban accent, had been a
technical analyst for a brokerage.
Now they were
Christiansted Naval Observatory, by the authority of Pueblo and the
Second Fleet, and when they weren’t the Observatory, they were the
Caribbean Academy of Mathematics—a brilliant idea Abby had had and
Peggy had pushed, feeding about fifty orphaned children in order to
lure them in for a heavy dose of math and science. Those kids might be our most important work—our
descendants will still know the world is a planet, the sky is a
vacuum, the sun is a star, and the moon’s a big rock that doesn’t
fall down because it falls in a circle. And be able to find their way to the other side of the planet,
and come back.
Not for the first
time, Captain Highbotham realized she loved her team, and her new
work, immoderately. Truth is, retirement was
dull and I hated not mattering. The moon, just past full,
silvered the still figures bent over their telescopes.
Highbotham looked up
at the moon, picking out Fecunditatis—the next dark spot over from
Tranquility. Were you trying to tell us
something, putting your damned moon gun right next to where
the Eagle landed?
They all hit their
clocks.
“Where and what?” she
asked, quietly.
“Still in the
daylight,” Henry said. “But a definite flash. A few of the shadows
blinked.” He was scribbling frantically at his drawing. “I’m
marking which ones.”
That had been one of
his ideas—that as a backup, if the launcher fired while it was
still in daylight, and they had pre-drawn the shadows around the
suspected launcher location, each observer could check off the
briefly vanished shadows. From their checksheets, it might be
possible to calculate the location of the launcher.
“Everyone else?”
Highbotham asked.
“Confirmed, in the
bright area, I’m still marking shadows,” Gilead said.
“Confirmed and
marking,” Abby said.
“Confirmed,” Peggy
said. “Also marking. I think I saw the flash, marking that
too.”
“I was blinking, I
guess,” Richard said, disconsolately.
“You’ve seen a couple
others, and we have multiple observers so someone can blink.” Highbotham noted times from everyone’s
clock. “I have 3:04:16.02, 3:04:15.98, 3:04:15.91, and 3:04:16.17
and that is . . . 3:04:16.02. Good work, everyone, and back to the
scopes. Henry, I’ll want to see how your shadow calculations panned
out tomorrow—so take your time, if you need to, to make them
good.”
Back in the quiet of
her house, she copied
onto the top line of the page, translated all the characters to
ASCII, wrote a line of digits from her one-time pad, added, and
brought the characters back from ASCII. She ran through the usual
annoying precautions to make sure her radio had no nanoswarm, and
finally began to tap the key, sending the coded message.
Hand cryptography. Morse. Wonder how soon I’
ll strap on a cutlass and lead a boarding party.
wtrc attn arnie pkg on way 3:04:16.02 fectas agn