The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [71]
“The KH-13 is in a standard American spy-sat LEO/POLAR orbit,” Van said. “Apogee 256, perigee 530 . . .”
“Never mind that.”
Van nodded hastily. “So, once I had the orbital periodicity, then I could see these damage episodes are far from random. They only occur when the bird is transiting from the highly charged polar regions into the mid-latitudes.”
This news put General Wessler right off his feed. Wessler started fiddling nervously with the track-wheel in his mouse. “So, what do you mean to say? That it’s surface-charging? That there’s an arc discharge?”
“Well, that’s part of it,” Van said. “I had to look at SD-SURF.”
“Space Debris-Surfaces, yes, we ran that diagnostic almost a year ago.”
“Yeah, you always run that program,” Van told him. “But SD-SURF was written in FORTRAN way back in 1983. So SD-SURF treats the spacecraft’s surface contours as a faceted geometry. That simulation’s not entirely accurate, because you get these peaks and waves of flux and probability surfaces that are artifacts produced by granularity in the model. That’s due to the way the subroutine interrogates the ballistic limit surface . . .” Van’s voice trailed off. Hickok and Wessler were both staring at him blankly. He had completely lost them.
Van cleared his dry throat. “So, anyway, I rewrote SD-SURF and sent it to some friends of mine over at NCAR.”
“Do you mean NCAR up in Boulder? Those Atmospheric Research guys?”
“Yeah. Yes, sir.”
“But NCAR is a civilian agency! They’re not cleared for any of this at all!”
“SD-SURF is not a secret. SD-SURF is public domain. It’s free for download off a NASA Web site.”
Wessler made a quick note on a Post-it. “We’ll have to see about that right away.”
“So, uhm, I had NCAR run my improved version of SD-SURF on their weather-simulation supercomputers. And while I was at it, I also had them search their files for space weather. Solar discharges, photoelectron flux, the works. Everything.”
Wessler narrowed his eyes. “Oh, ho.”
“There was no correlation,” Van said. “Not at first. To maintain my confidentiality, I told my friend at NCAR to search everything. So he also ran through all of NOAA’s conventional weather records. And there, a strong correlation turned up. There is a direct relationship between these, uh, damage episodes and storm fronts moving across the western USA.”
“You mean the weather on the ground.”
Van nodded. He hated talking this much. It was making his head ache.
“Dr. Vandeveer, can I remind you of something? That bird is two hundred fifty miles up!”
“I know that, General. But there’s a lot we don’t know about the upper thermosphere. My friend at NCAR put me in touch with a friend of his at NOAA who’s a world expert on sprites and elves.”
Wessler tugged at his ear. “ ‘Elves’?”
“Sprites and elves. Sprites and elves are huge discharges from the tops of thunderclouds,” Van said. “Nothing like lightning. They go up. They are very big. Colossal. The Shuttle has photographed them from orbit.” Van paused. “Show him those elf and sprite pics, Mike.”
As Hickok busied himself unlatching the case from his wrist, Van forced a swallow of Pepsi. It tasted even worse than he remembered.
Wessler examined the set of glossy NASA printouts. “So, Dr. Vandeveer, you’re telling me my satellite was attacked by elves.”
“That’s just one hypothesis,” Van said. “But I can tell you, as a fact, that there has never been a damage episode that wasn’t correlated with a storm front. When I searched those storm records, that’s when I realized that there haven’t been just four episodes, as your reports say. There were seven episodes, including three weaker storms with three much weaker attacks. The very worst came with the most violent storm last winter. December 17. Those onboard power anomalies.”
“That was really bad,” Wessler said gloomily. “We really thought we’d lost her that time.” The elf pictures had shaken Wessler. Van had felt the very same way when he had seen them. It was truly bizarre to realize that the Earth