The Eye of God Read Free Page B

mean?” His boss stood beside him atop the observation deck.
    General Gregory Metcalf was the head of DARPA, the Defense Department’s research-and-development agency. Dressed in full uniform, Metcalf was in his fifties, African-American, and a West Point grad.
    In contrast, Painter simply sported a black suit, made more casual with a pair of cowboy boots. They were a gift from Lisa, who was on a research trip in New Mexico. Half Native American, he probably should have balked at wearing the boots, but he liked them, especially as they reminded him of his fiancée, gone now a full month.
    “Something’s got the OSO spooked,” Painter explained, pointing to the operations support officer in the second row of consoles down below.
    The lead mission specialist moved over to join his colleague at that station.
    Metcalf waved dismissively. “They’ll handle it. It’s their job. They know what they’re doing.”
    The general promptly returned to his conversation with the commander of the 50th Space Wing out of Colorado Springs.
    Still concerned, Painter kept a keen eye on the growing anxiety below. He had been invited here to observe this code-black military mission not only because he was the director of Sigma, which operated under the aegis of DARPA, but also because he had personally engineered a piece of hardware aboard one of the two military satellites.
    The pair of satellites— IoG-1 and IoG-2 —had been sent into space four months ago. The acronym for the satellites— IoG —stood for Interpolation of the Geodetic Effect, a name originally coined by the military physicist who had engineered this project for a gravitational study. He had intended to do a complete analysis of the space-time curvature around the earth to aid in satellite and missile trajectory.
    While already an ambitious undertaking, the discovery of the comet by a pair of amateur astronomers two years ago quickly shifted the project’s focus—especially after an anomalous energy signature had been detected out there.
    Painter glanced sidelong to his neighbor on his left, noting the lithe form of the researcher from the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.
    Only twenty-three, Dr. Jada Shaw was tall, with a runner’s lean physique. Her skin was a flawless dark mocha, her black hair trimmed short, highlighting the long curve of her neck. She stood in a white lab coat and jeans, with her arms crossed, nervously chewing the edge of her thumbnail.
    The young astrophysicist had been whisked from Harvard seventeen months ago and ensconced in this code-black military venture. Clearly she still felt out of her league, though she was doing her best to hide it.
    It was unfortunate. She had no reason to be so nervous. She had already won international recognition for her work. Using quantum equations—calculations well above Painter’s intellectual pay grade—she had crafted an unusual theory concerning dark energy, the mysterious force that made up three-quarters of the universe and was responsible for its accelerating cosmic expansion.
    Further proving her prowess, she had been the only physicist to note the small anomalies in the approach of this celestial visitor blazing in the night sky—a comet designated as IKON.
    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