A year and a half ago, Dr. Shaw had tapped into the digital feed of the new Dark Energy Camera, a 570-megapixel array engineered by the Fermilab here in the States and installed at a mountaintop observatory in Chile. Using that camera, Dr. Shaw had tracked the comet’s passage. It was there that she had discovered anomalies that she believed might be proof that the comet was shedding or disturbing dark energy in its wake.
Her work quickly became cloaked under the guise of national security. A new energy source such as this had vast and untapped potential—both economically and militarily.
From that moment forward, the ultrasecret IoG project was repurposed for one goal only: to study the potential dark energy of the comet. The plan was to fly IoG-2 across the comet’s blazing tail, where it would attempt to absorb that anomalous energy detected by Dr. Shaw and transmit it back to its sister craft orbiting the earth.
Luckily, to accomplish this task, engineers had to only slightly modify the earlier mission satellite. A part of its original design included a perfect sphere of quartz buried in its heart. The plan had been to set that sphere to spinning once the satellite was in orbit, creating a gyroscopic effect that could be used to map the curve of space-time around the mass of Earth. If the experiment was successful, the beam of dark energy from one spacecraft to the other should cause a minute disturbance in that curve of space-time.
It was a bold experiment. Even the acronym IoG was now jokingly referred to as the Eye of God. Painter appreciated the new nickname, picturing that whirling perfect sphere as it waited to peer into the mysteries of the universe.
The lead specialist called out. “Spacecraft will be entering the tail in ten!”
As the final countdown began, Dr. Shaw’s eyes remained fixed to the flow of data on the giant screen.
“I hope you were mistaken earlier, Director Crowe,” she said. “About something going wrong here. Now is not the time for mistakes, not when we’re tapping into energy connected to the birth of our universe.”
Either way, Painter thought, there was no turning back now.
7:55 A.M.
Over the course of six painstaking minutes, the flight path of IoG-2 slowly vanished deeper into the ionizing stream of gas and dust. The screen to the right—running live feed from the satellite’s camera—was a complete whiteout. They were now flying blind, entirely reliant on telemetry data.
Painter tried taking in everything at once, catching the room’s excitement, sensing the historical significance of this moment.
“I’m registering an energy spike in IoG-2!” the EECOM tech called from his station.
A smatter of small cheers broke out, but the pressure of the moment quickly quashed them. The reading could be an error.
All eyes swung to another console, to the aerospace engineer monitoring IoG-1. He shook his head. There seemed to be no evidence that the energy picked up by the first satellite had been transmitted to its Earth-orbiting twin—then suddenly the engineer jerked to his feet.
“Got something!” he yelled.
The SMC control officer hurried over to his side.
As everyone waited for confirmation, Dr. Shaw pointed to the world map, to the scroll of telemetry data. “So far it looks promising.”
If you say so . . .
The crawl of incoming data was incomprehensible to him. And it only continued to flow faster. After another tense minute, the flood of data grew to a blur.
The EECOM tech popped to his feet. Warnings and error messages flashed on his screens as he continued to monitor IoG-2’s passage through the comet’s tail. “Sir, energy levels here are off the map now, redlining across the board! What do you want me to do?”
“Shut it down!” the control officer commanded.
Still standing, the EECOM tech typed rapidly. “No can do, sir! Satellite navigation and control are not responding.”
To the right, the giant screen suddenly went black.
“Lost camera feed now, too,” the tech added.
Painter pictured IoG-2 sailing from here out into space, a cold and dark chunk of space debris.
“Sir!” The engineer assigned to IoG-1 waved the control officer to his side. “I’ve got new readings here. You’d better see this.”
Dr. Shaw shifted to the rail of the observation deck, plainly wanting to catch a glimpse. Painter joined her, along with most of the brass gathered on the deck.
“The geodetic effect is altering,” the engineer explained, pointing to a monitor. “A point two percent deviation.”
“That shouldn’t be possible,” Dr. Shaw mumbled at Painter’s side. “Not unless space-time around the earth is starting to ripple.”
“And look!” the engineer continued. “The Eye’s gyroscopic momentum is growing stronger, far stronger than prelaunch estimates. I’m even getting a propulsive signature!”
Dr. Shaw gripped the rail harder, looking ready to leap below. “That can’t happen without an external source powering the Eye.”
Painter could tell she wanted to declare it dark energy, but she restrained herself from jumping to premature conclusions.
Another voice called out—this time from a station marked CONTROL. “We’re losing orbital stability of IoG-1!”
Painter turned to the big board in the center, the one showing the world map and the flight paths of the satellites. The sine wave of IoG-1’s trajectory was visibly flattening.
“The gyroscopic forces inside the satellite must be pushing it out of orbit,” Dr. Shaw explained, sounding both panicked and thrilled.
The screen to the left showed the profile of the earth growing larger, filling up the monitor, eclipsing the dark void of space. The satellite was falling out of orbit, starting its slow crash back into the gravity well from which it came.
The transmitted image quickly lost clarity as the satellite entered the upper atmosphere, showing streaks of data artifacts and ghost shadows, drunkenly doubling and tripling the picture.
Continents flashed by, swirls of clouds, bright blue expanses of ocean.
A moment later, the screen went dark like the other.
Silence settled heavily over the room.
On the world map, the satellite’s path split into a frayed end as the mission computer attempted to extrapolate various crash trajectories, taking into account a slew of variables: the roil of Earth’s upper atmosphere, the angle of entry, the rate at which the craft broke apart.
“Looks like debris will strike along the eastern border of Mongolia!” the telemetry specialist said. “Maybe even spilling into China.”