Bogey

Bill McCulloch's haunted, hollow salute was her first sign of trouble. The Joint Chiefs Chairman possessed the most feared poker face inside the Beltway, as Merry had learned the hard way. He'd not flinched when they finally settled the score in Syria, not blinked at drone strikes inside American territory. Tonight, though, his fingers bobbed just a hair's length from a perfect parallel at her entrance.

Maybe it was because of the company. The worried looking trio looked barely old enough to start basic training, much less attend a private military briefing with the President. One boy fiddled with a tablet while the other two looked like kids about to plunge off the high dive for the first time.

Merry remained standing rather than get swallowed in a chair designed for men much bigger than her small frame. "Alright Bill, what's the big mystery? And who are your new friends?"

"If I might answer your second questions first, President Blake?" he asked, as always the pinnacle of parliamentary procedure. At her nod, he continued. "From NASA we have Doctors Jordan Gutwa and Amber Washington, joined by Dr. Edison Pollard of SETI. They've a report on a troubling new security threat that, upon thorough evaluation, we determined required a presidential briefing."

"SETI?" She trained her eyes on the boy with the tablet. His pupils dilated at her focus, pure whites meeting her's. She smiled invitingly. "Dr. Pollard, did I get that right? Tell me, how goes the alien search?"

Rather than laugh along, the kid coughed asthmatically, gripping his device with a corpse's insistence. The girl (woman, she was a doctor) pushed a tumbler over to him.

"Sorry," he apologized after draining the cup dry. "Er, should I get started then?"

He'd gazed at McCulloch for an answer, but Merry cut him off. "By all means Dr. Pollard," and on cue, she sat in the chair, hands clasped. "Let's hear it."

Dr. Pollard blinked, then fiddled some more with his tablet. At once a projection came into view. Satisfied with the picture quality, the boy stood and gestured. "I, uh, guess everyone here's familiar with our mission, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence?" He waited, glancing around the room. Silence. "Right, of course. So. What I'm about to play comes from our Colossus outpost in Hawaii, first spotted approximately three weeks." He tapped his device, and an infrared display lit up. "Used to we'd only be able to show you the heat pattern," he explained, warming to his speech, "but now, with the latest telescopes, we can actually piece together an image of what's out there."

The heat map sharpened, a distinct shape coming into view. Whatever it was looked big. Anticipating his audience, Dr. Pollard froze the image in place. "I'm about to put up an image of the old ISS for comparison," and with a flick of his fingers the former space station appeared beside the thing, dwarfed by several magnitudes of size.

"What is it?" Merry interrupted, shooting her gaze to McCulloch.

"There's a few theories our NASA joint analysts would like to share," he predicated.

Another bad sign: McCulloch never deferred to civilians, sometimes not even to her. Merry darted her gaze back to the other two strangers in the room, no longer intent on making them feel at ease. "Alright then, Dr. Washington, Dr. Gutwa, I'd like to know what thing is, and what threat it poses."

Dr. Pollard slipped down into his seat with relief as Dr. Gutwa rose, taking charge. "To be clear, we're not sure it is a threat," he began, but she cut him off.

"Look, guys, I get that we have to keep an open mind, but after three years in office I know how things work: don't tell the President until you have to. So, you've already decided there's a threat, probably a big one. I'm just asking how big it is."

Dr. Gutwa nodded. "Of course, Madame President." Merry decided not to let him know how much she hated that phrase, even though several of the military brass around her stiffened in anticipation. For now, facts were more important than her pride. "This object was first observed about two lightyears past our solar system, but we quickly ruled out a natural phenomena like a comet due to its speed. As you can see," Dr. Pollard got the display moving again, "it moved at a very fast forward trajectory, but on a straight line. After a week it was within a half lightyear of our solar system. That's when Dr. Washington had the idea to get V'Ger involved."

Not for the first time Merry blessed her father's science fiction obsession. "If I remember correctly," she broke in, stopping the young Dr. Washington midrise from her chair, "NASA never officially launched a Voyager 6."

Dr. Gutwa actually chuckled. "No, ma'am, I'm afraid that's our little nickname for Voyager 2 since she joined up with Voyager 1 out in the big wide universe. But congrats on recognizing the name: you're welcome to join our Trek trivia team any day."

Merry smiled back, nodding for them to continue. Gutwa had already passed two of her tests: he had a sense of humor, and despite all previous appearances, he didn't throw up under pressure.

Dr. Washington spoke next. "We've been able to get a lot of good data from the Voyager probes in the past. It's been intermittent in the last few years, but between the two of them we finally got a picture of the unidentified object."

The display morphed, and a previous century image came into view. Merry bit back the temptation to perform her best Patrick Stewart imitation, only asking in her normal contralto, "Were you able to make the picture any clearer?"

"Yes, yes." Dr. Washington snapped her fingers, drawing Dr. Pollard's attention to his task again. The visual sharpened, gained size, and got a lot more intimating. "We've got excellent telemetry from the UO, as well, which we immediately supplied to the Pentagon."

Even as she gaped, and realized that Dr. Washington should have added an "F" to her acronym, Merry couldn't resist the impulse to lighten the mood. "I believe what you're trying to say, Dr. Washington, is that it's no moon: it's a space station."

Dr. Gutwa and Dr. Washington froze, expressions locked in a death grip, and for a forlorn moment Merry thought she'd finally stepped a toe too far across some sacred Presidential line. But then poor Dr. Pollard burst out laughing, prompting Dr. Washington to smile, and the rest of the meeting staff to release just a bit of the tension stalking them.

Even McCulloch allowed his shoulders to relax a fraction of an inch, raising an eyebrow for good measure. Fortunately he was blonde; if Merry'd had to fight the ghost of Spock as well as Kenobi she'd have lost it. "That appears to be the case," he corralled the conversation in. "We've taken all the findings from both NASA, SETI, and other sources—" Merry made a note to find out just where on earth such "other" sources came from— "and we believe this object, whether actually manned or not, is capable of military engagement."

Merry listened as he outlined some ideas they'd developed to gather more intel, possibly from the Pentagon's own spy satellites, maybe bribe some of the private space contractors already in orbit. Hubble and its ilk were too public; in the interests of preventing panic, NASA had agreed to turn its sights away for the time being. But the readings they already had were bothering her.

"Dr. Gutwa, I'm afraid my education wasn't as STEAM-heavy as my college application implied," she said, snagging his attention. "Explain to me exactly how fast this thing is moving. In layman's terms."

"Right." His earlier nervousness returned, olive skin paling. "Er, put simply, it's moving just north of the speed of light."

"Meaning it will get here when?"

He looked at her, frown back. "Probably within the year. October, maybe? That is, if we've correctly measured its velocity. "

Her reelection team would be happy. It was an absurdly dumb consolation, followed closely by the realization that this whole meeting could become a textbook example of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

Her stomach roiled, and her reptilian brain prompted her to flee back to the car, to the White House, grab her husband and the kids and hide in whatever secret base McCulloch had to already be prepping for them. But Meredith Blake had not become the first woman President by running away.

She straightened. Time to be the big girl; her meltdown could wait. "I realize we're far short of the time any of us would like to have. But I must thank you for how efficiently you've worked. We're going to need to keep that same caliber of work in order to develop a strong response." She needed to quit pontificating and get on with it. "We've got a problem. Let's solve it. Who's first?"