[The Fear Saga 01] - Fear the Sky (2014) Read Free Page A

right of each object in a small semi-transparent table. As the cluster of debris moved across the screen, the table moved with it.
    “Like I said on the phone,” the colonel began, still facing the screen, “we have a briefing at 1300 hours and I wanted you on hand to talk to the details of your report.”
    Neal was still trying to digest just how much he hadn’t been privy to before, and which he had about thirty minutes to come to grips with before the briefing. Staring at the screen and speaking in a distracted tone, Neal said, “Yeah, I just wish you hadn’t called me so early, did I really need to be here this soon?”
    The colonel turned his head, looking at Neal like he was a pestering child, and tried think of a response, but he was neither practiced in, nor did he enjoy, banter.
    At a request from the colonel the view reoriented to show the impending shower’s approach on a cross section of the Earth and started scrolling to show each piece’s trajectory. Of the cluster, about twenty pieces were singled out as large enough to survive entry into the earth’s atmosphere, but very few of the estimated trajectories showed an entry, the rest all showed as bouncing off the atmosphere, due to their oblique angles of approach and limited mass.
    Neal studied the figures and graphics. “Those trajectories are wrong, you haven’t correctly estimated the mass of the objects; they won’t all behave like that.” He turned to the lady at the console, “Didn’t you use the numbers in my report?”
    Before she could speak, the colonel answered for her, “The computer estimated the weights based on data your civilian predecessors have compiled over the years. Were those numbers wrong?”
    “No,” Neal braced himself for a long, laborious explanation, then seemed to change his mind. “Look, there are other factors to consider that appear here but have not been seen previously. Maybe I could just …” Neal started towards the central console, but was intercepted by the colonel.
    “Hold on there, Mr. Danielson. If you could explain these ‘factors’ to me before we go changing our estimates, I would appreciate it,” the colonel prompted, standing in his way and turning, now, to face the scientist.
    Neal sighed a moment, then elaborated, “The objects are behaving slightly anomalously. There is no larger, central mass, so some, if not all of them, must have been joined as a cohesive mass at some point. Some point not too long ago, in fact,” Neal postulated.
    “Why does there have to be a central mass?” the colonel said, shrugging slightly.
    Neal mimicked the shrug and said, “Why would they be so close together if there wasn’t? Listen, Colonel, these objects have come a phenomenally long way from whatever orbital mishap started them on their journey, if they were all separate objects then there would need to be something larger, with enough gravitational pull ,” he emphasized, “to keep them all together as they travelled. Otherwise they would have separated over time. Heck, over the kind of distances we are talking about, they would be light-years apart by now. Unless they had had some proverbial glue binding them.”
    “Well there clearly is no ‘glue’ now, so your theory must be incorrect.”
    Neal shook his head at the remark, but summoning up his patience, he went on, “There is that, but still, despite the apparent lack of a large mass, it is very clear that the objects are, even over the last week, pulling apart from each other. It is slow, but they are more spread out now than they were when we first spotted them. Given time I could probably extrapolate the time they separated.” Neal was aware he was almost pleading, but this was the most interesting thing that had happened to him in a quite a while and he was so very desperate for anything in his life that might be termed interesting.
    The colonel paused a moment, then said, “Mr. Danielson, this is all very well, but I still don’t