The Black Knight Read Free Page A

looked up at the screens.
    ‘What the hell is it?’ he uttered.
    Duvall reached out for her phone as she set her monitors to record every detail of the track. Without a transponder, identification and with signals being emitted or perhaps even received by the object, she wasn’t about to put her career on the line by taking a chance that it was just an iron-rich meteorite captured by Earth’s gravitational field that just happened to be deflecting satellite signals across the atmosphere.
    She picked up the receiver and dialed a single number. The line connected immediately and she spoke clearly, trying to keep the nervous edge out of her voice.
    ‘Primary Orbital Contact, signals confirmed, initiate Orion Shield. Repeat, initiate Orion Shield.’
    Beside her, she heard Fuller curse beneath his breath.
    Orion Sheild was the code name for the United States’ missile defense system administered by the Missile Defense Agency. The major component was Ground-Based Midcourse Defense consisting of ground-based interceptor missiles and radar in the United States in Alaska, designed to intercept incoming warheads in space. Duvall knew that some GBI missiles were located at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California and could be supported by mid-course SM-3 interceptors fired from Navy ships, the Missile Defense Agency having some thirty operational GBIs. Those weapons would be augmented by the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense Systems located on US Navy warships and designed to pick out incoming ballistic missiles in flight at high altitude, thus preserving the safety of the continental United States.
    ‘Roger, Orion Sheild initiated, stand by.’

    Duvall set the phone line to stand by as she heard boots running down the corridor leading to the Command Center and a low, mournful wailing siren as the entire base was alerted to the possibility that the United States was about to come under a nuclear attack.
    Duvall prepared for the conversations that would follow: the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the line, conference calling as the President was awoken and informed of the crisis. She knew that they would be talking to her long before her boss was on site, and that as a communications specialist she was the most qualified person in the under-staffed base to conduct the assessment of the threat.
    Then, just as she felt herself ready to conduct the assessment and as dozens of staff flooded into the Command Center, everything changed.
    ‘It’s not a missile,’ Fuller said.
    ‘How do you know?!’ Duvall demanded, tension in her voice.
    Fuller looked across at her. ‘Because it just changed direction.’
    Duvall looked up in shock at the main screen and saw the object’s orbital track change by a few degrees.
    ‘What the hell…?’
    Fuller picked up his phone. ‘We’re not under attack,’ he said to her, ‘and I don’t know what the hell that thing is.’
    Duvall switched her headphones from internal to broadcast and then filtered the feed through to the Command Center’s speakers. Above the rush of conversation a sudden sound of regularly paced beeps and growls echoed across the room and the conversation shuddered to a halt as every person in the building listened intently.
    Duvall, along with everybody else in the Command Center, had been trained to recognize the countless signals emitted by both Earth-based installations and those from distant supernovae, neutron stars, black holes and quasars that blazed their high-energy emissions across billions of light years of intergalactic space.
    What they were hearing now was none of those things.
    The signal echoed around them like the chanting of monks drifting in haunting melody through the halls of some ancient abbey, both tuneful and yet without structure but for the rhythmic beacon accompanying it. Like a song from the depths of prehistory, something about it sounded familiar to Duvall, and she could see from the expressions of those around her that the rest of the team felt the