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The Eyes of Damocles

By Brian Trent


“Thought you guys only worked in space.”

The old joke floated in the cold night air. Bruce Tennessen, orbital warfare captain with the United States Space Force, didn’t feel the need to acknowledge or correct it. He was still looking at the crash. The vehicle lay a hundred meters below the road, crumpled like a tin can.

At 4:12 a.m. on the outskirts of Colorado Springs, the stars were numerous and bright. Bright enough that they auto-triggered his constellation app. A faint overlay appeared on his optic lenses. It connected the dots of the Little Dipper and Cassiopeia in the sky, bringing them to imaginative life. With a flick of his fingers, he could call up information on any of them—their distance from the Sun, stellar classification, and composition—but Bruce was hardly in the mood. He dismissed the image with a wave of his hand.

“This is a dangerous bend,” the police officer was saying. “If you drive it too fast, it’s easy to lose control.”

Bruce stared down at the car’s wreckage. The occupants—pronounced dead at the scene—had been taken to the morgue. A tow truck idled nearby. Two police cruisers, and Bruce’s own car, were the only vehicles on the road.

It was unusual for anyone from USSF to interface directly with local law enforcement. But the crash had occurred less than ten miles from Peterson Base. Colorado Springs PD had been first on the scene. The base was notified, and so was Bruce.

The cop was watching him. “Do you know what they were doing out so early?”

“I don’t.”

“Did you know them personally?”

“No,” he said, not caring to share the rest: he knew of the deceased. Everyone did. The man in the driver’s seat—whether or not he’d been actually driving the vehicle—had been Gavin Palmer, mission commander for the upcoming asteroid landing. The car’s other occupant was Kia Ortiz, pilot for the same mission. It was a poorly kept secret that the two had been in a relationship. Like the rest of the mission crew, they’d been home for the New Year holiday. As to why they’d been driving around so early, Bruce couldn’t say. The crew was returning to base for training today. Maybe they’d wanted to get an early start. Maybe they’d gone for a romantic drive to watch the starry sky that, in a few short months, would be their workplace.

Bruce’s earpiece chimed with an incoming call. The caller ID displayed in a corner of his vision: Major Markowitz from base.

He touched the icon floating on his visual field. “Yes, sir?”

“You’re at the scene?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What can you tell me?”

He strayed from the police officer, touching his ear in the common etiquette to indicate he’d received a call. “The car went off the road. Palmer and Ortiz were pronounced dead.”

He heard the major let out a deep breath. “Were they driving the car themselves?”

“I don’t know yet. The car’s data recorder was downloaded, but they don’t generally share that . . .”

A pause. More than that—a total silence like cotton stuffed into his ear. Bruce knew that his commanding officer had muted him to relay a command to someone else on staff—almost certainly to clear the way for him to get what he needed from the police. Working with law enforcement could be prickly at times.

On the other hand, the upcoming asteroid mission had become a national obsession. It made Bruce feel good to think of it; too often, USSF missions flew under the radar of public awareness. That went with the job, of course. In its forty years of operation, Space Force guardians had earned their name. The high frontier had always been a dangerous place. The so-called Resource Rush made it worse. A new Cold War, the press called it, but it really wasn’t so cold: there had been hostilities, sabotage, satellite hijacking, peculiar “accidents” in orbit, espionage on the Moon, and cyberwarfare that could strike like a knife in the dark. The asteroid mission had cranked geopolitical tensions to the breaking point.

No, Bruce thought, looking at the ruined car. It isn’t a Cold War. It’s an Invisible War, and it just might have gotten worse.

The major’s voice came back on the line. “We’re talking to the police chief now. Head directly to the station. Ask for the traffic-services unit—they’ll be expecting you by the time you arrive.”

“Sir?”

“We’d prefer this be done in person,” Major Markowitz explained. “You’re not far from the station.”

“Actually, I was wondering why . . . . . . . . . well . . . . . . . . . can you tell me why . . .”

“Page 13 of your report.” He heard the shuffling of papers. “‘In the event of threat profiles triggered, an active response should be immediately engaged, to avoid any delays that could have disastrous ramifications.’”

Bruce remembered writing the words. “The Damocles Report?” he asked, astonished.

“The one and only.”

He felt his breath catch. He’d nearly forgotten about it, and assumed that everyone else had too. Five years ago, the Department of Defense had asked the Space Force to put together what amounted to a kind of readiness-and-vulnerabilities assessment. It was part of a larger initiative touching all JSOC columns. Bruce had been tapped for the work. He’d held meetings over coffee. Virtual conferences. Lots of emails. He worked steadily for a month, typed up his report, and filed it. That was the end of it.

Bruce glanced more to the stars. There was an unfamiliar light up there—the asteroid Ebisu. It was the destination of the upcoming mission. It was where, in a few months, the two deceased astronauts were supposed to be landing.

“The White House chief of staff has called a meeting in five minutes,” the major said. “I need you there to talk about Damocles.”

“I won’t have the data recorder by then.”

“That’s okay. He wants something to bring to the president. Just in case.”

In case the accident was really an assassination, Bruce thought grimly.


In the front seat of his car, he set the vehicle to auto-drive and went into conference mode. The windshield opaqued and displayed the briefing room of Orbital Warfare at Peterson Space Force Base.

There had been lots of jokes from family and friends when Bruce enlisted, about how he’d be working in some futuristic place full of holograms and robots. The truth was more mundane; Orbital Warfare’s operations center wasn’t so different from that of other military branches, with a heavily computerized space filled by individual stations and monitors. Even the large screen hadn’t changed from the kinds of screens used by Navy and Air Force decades ago.

The briefing room was even more mundane than that: a small chamber with a rectangular table, and chairs wired for augmented reality so that personnel from around the world could see each other as if they were in the same room.

The White House chief of staff was apparently a more traditional fellow: his bulldog face loomed from the room’s wall screen in all its 2D glory. He was sitting far too close to his desktop.

Bruce’s image appeared in one of the chairs. Seated across from him, Major Markowitz nodded amicably at him. A handsome, square-jawed man in his fifties, the major was dressed in his USSF blues.

The White House chief of staff leaned even closer to the screen and, without preamble, said, “Talk to me about Damocles.”

Bruce straightened in the backseat. “The Damocles Report examines potential threats posed by asymmetrical warfare in our battlespace,” he began.

The assignment had initially seemed strange. Five years earlier, Bruce had begun his military career with the USSF’s Cyberwarfare division, which had grown out of its earlier incarnation of Cyber Operations. He’d excelled in the post. When the DOD tasked its military branches to write reports on asymmetrical vulnerabilities, Bruce was chosen for Space Force’s contribution. He’d spent the first few days scratching his head.

Gradually, though, he warmed to the concept. And the more specialists he spoke to—his fellow guardians in the fields of intel, cyber, nuclear, technology and innovation, strategy and analysis—the more he appreciated why out-of-box tiger-team thinking was important. There was a danger in insular thinking. It was easy to get complacent. To believe that you knew all the variables. That had always been true in the history of warfare, but it was paramount in an age when an entire conflict could be decided in the first few minutes.

The Damocles Report cast a wide net. By the very nature of the thought experiment, it was sometimes vague, focusing on statistics, hundreds of variables, and data-mining correlations. Nonetheless, it recommended the expansion of existing threat profiles, so that if certain conditions were met . . . . . . . . . 

“Two leaders of a high-value asteroid mission died under mysterious circumstances while driving in the same vehicle,” Bruce said, jostling in his car. “This close to launch, their deaths could cause disruption, even delays.”

“Couldn’t it have been a genuine accident?”

“It’s possible, but not probable. The timing, the variables, the mission’s strategic value to national interests . . . . . . . . . the calculus suggests the involvement of a hidden malefactor.”

“He’s saying,” Major Markowitz added, “that these factors would make for an extremely inviting target of opportunity for a rival nation.”

The Chief of Staff’s frown deepened. “So you’re thinking that . . . . . . . . . what? They were driven off the road?”

“There’s no evidence another vehicle was involved,” Bruce said.

“But you think they were murdered anyway?”

“I do.”

In the past, missions involving asteroids had fallen under the auspices of NASA. That changed quickly during the Resource Rush. It had been known since the 1970s that asteroid mining could supercharge national fortunes. Trillions of dollars in precious metals lay waiting to be extracted. So did water ice—useful for making rocket propellant as well as for human consumption, and which would drastically reduce the need for costly supply launches. All this was enough to make “sky estate” the next major rush. The very concept of asteroid mining was cleared of legal hurdles as far back as 2015; nonetheless, it remained a pipe-dream—a prohibitively expensive one—for a long while.

The asteroid nicknamed Ebisu was a game changer. Catalogued in the 2030s, a subsequent probe landing confirmed it contained—among other materials––vast repositories of lithium and cobalt. Earthside, the demand for both had skyrocketed. The Resource Rush was already pitting the U.S., China, India, and Russia in a mad scramble. Global tensions were high. Proxy wars and industrial sabotage were increasing throughout Africa, Asia, and South America. The newest technologies—and national defense—hung in the balance on a knife’s edge.

Ebisu promised incalculable advantages to whoever could set up mining operations. Of course, by terms of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, no one could claim the entire rock for themselves. Nonetheless, whoever got there first would benefit first . . . . . . . . . and that had enormous ramifications for the global situation. The Race to the Rock was on.

“So you see,” Bruce explained, “there was ample motive and opportunity for a double assassination.”

“What about the means?” the Chief of Staff demanded. “If they weren’t run off the road, and there was no physical sabotage to the vehicle . . .”

“We should consider the possibility that the car was hacked.” Autonomous vehicles relied on GPS satellites, which were fully within USSF jurisdiction.

The man blinked. “You think someone hacked their car and remotely drove them to their deaths?”

“We need to consider the possibility.”

“I’ve been assured that hacking a self-driving car is impossible.”

Bruce considered his next words carefully. In the Damocles Report, the word “impossible” was a recurring antagonist. Assuming something couldn’t be done, that certain ideas were not worth investigating, was itself a problem. It created blind spots. Unsinkable ships sank. Unhackable systems got hacked. Sure, there were things that were probably impossible, like faster-than-light communications and teleportation and other things that certain overly enthusiastic people had suggested to Bruce when he was writing the report. Nonetheless, Damocles didn’t shy from outside-the-box thinking. It discouraged knee-jerk dismissals of what was or wasn’t possible. On page 91, Bruce had summarized this perspective with the Sunbeam Example: Imagine that someone openly wonders what it might be like to ride a sunbeam. A naysayer might callously dismiss the idea, since it was obviously impossible for a person to ride a sunbeam. Yet ruminating on that “impossible” notion had led a patent clerk named Albert Einstein to discovering general relativity, which had a significant impact on the fate of nations.

The Chief of Staff was still waiting impatiently for his response. “Captain? Is it possible to hack a self-driving car, yes or no?”

“I’m hoping the data recorder will shed light on that,” Bruce said evasively.

“I want an update every hour until we know what the hell’s going on.” The man ended the call. The wall screen went black.

Major Markowitz looked at Bruce. “You didn’t answer his question. Can a self-driving car be hacked?”

“It’s probably not impossible.”

“Christ, you’d make a good politician. Are you at the station yet?”

Bruce dispelled the opacity of his window with the touch of a button. “Just arriving now.”

“By any chance, Captain, is your own car in auto-drive?”

“Um. Yes, sir.”

“Well, here’s an idea: maybe drive it yourself for a while, okay? And I’ll advise the rest of the mission crew to drive manually, too—they’re all scheduled to be on base within the hour.”

“Of course, sir.” He ended the call. His car pulled up to the Colorado Springs Police Department. Exiting the vehicle, Bruce hurried inside, glancing back only once to watch it circle around and park itself in a 15 minute parking spot further down the road.

#

The problem, he mused as he entered the police station and was escorted to the traffic-services unit, was that cyberwarfare was an ever-present, ever-advancing threat. In the half century since the USSF’s founding, they’d become the new artillery. State-sponsored hackers in China, Russia, India, North Korea, and Pakistan waged an unrelenting war—an invisible war—against U.S. operations in space. Bruce had devoted an entire section of the Damocles Report to cyberwarfare, going beyond the usual “what if Russia hacks a U.S. satellite” to “what if Russia sends an orbital drone to physically drill into a satellite and hijack it, bypassing the firewall directly.”

So from cars to spaceplanes, hacking was in probability’s ballpark.

“They were driving the car themselves,” the traffic officer said.

Bruce’s jaw hung open. “They were?”

The traffic-services unit was a modest space filled with desks and smartboards. Current traffic-accident investigations were displayed on most, but one board was already devoted to this morning’s accident: the mountain bend, the point where the car had gone off the road, the final resting spot. Data glinted at the margins.

The officer handed him a sheet of paper still warm from the printer. “That’s from the data event recorder. Car departed at 3:45 a.m. It was under human operation the entire time. The driver obeyed the speed limit. At the bend in the road, he jerked the wheel to the right and went off the cliff.”

Bruce scanned the report quickly. “Why would he do that?”

“We’re still investigating. And we don’t have the results of the bloodwork yet.”

“Bloodwork?”

The cop hesitated. “It’s standard procedure.”

“He wasn’t drunk,” Bruce insisted, more aggressively than he’d meant to. All cars had been installed with breathalyzers since the 2030s, so it was inconceivable that Palmer had been intoxicated if he’d been at the wheel.

The officer looked uncomfortable. “A breathalyzer wouldn’t show if the driver was compromised in other ways.”

“Other ways?”

“Mr. Tennessen, if he’d taken pills or other substances, or if there were psychological factors at play—”

“It’s Captain Tennessen,” Bruce snapped, feeling a surge of annoyance. Astronauts were subjected to strict drug tests. Neither Palmer nor Ortiz would have risked consuming so much as a poppyseed bagel this close to launch. And the implication of suicide/homicide really set Bruce’s blood boiling.

He returned to the lobby, signaling his car to pick him up at the curb. Taking the driver’s seat, he switched to manual and made for base. His earpiece chimed; he flicked it to audio.

“Your timing is uncanny, Major.”

“Well, page 53 of your report advises extra levels of security and monitoring for investigations, so I’m monitoring your car’s GPS. Do you have the car’s data?”

“Yes. I’m bringing it back to base now.”

“Good. I want you to talk to my sister.”

“Your sister . . . . . . . . . in space?”

“That’s the only sister I have.”

There was a long tradition of family members following the same career track; the Space Force was no exception. Major Markowitz had three relatives in the service—his mother was a three-star admiral, his cousin was in IT, and his sister was serving as guardian aboard the Argus V station in geosynchronous orbit above the American Midwest.

Orbital stints served a number of purposes. These ranged from repair missions to the more glamorous-sounding (but ultimately fairly mundane) threat response, which almost always included unmanned foreign spacecraft doing things they weren’t supposed to be doing. It had started as early as 2018, when a Chinese device grabbed a defunct satellite. Having USSF personnel in orbit had lessened the frequency of such hostile actions. As a result, guardians on their “high fly” tour were fonts of information. And five years back, Bruce had interviewed the major’s sister as part of his research. She was smart, capable, a real credit to the branch.

She was also a bit . . . . . . . . . well . . . . . . . . . loopy in some of her ideas.

Much of the old mockery against the USSF had dissipated over the years—but not all. It always seemed to be lurking in the margins. Bruce wasn’t the only guardian to be annoyed by this irritating fact. Other military branches didn’t have the same problem; the first suggestions that airplanes might have a place in warfare had been openly mocked at the beginning of the twentieth century, only to have the jokes vanish in the eras of WWI dogfights and WWII bombing runs and air-support and recon that followed. Yet forty years into the USSF, the media still made the occasional joke at their expense—digs about aliens and “space cadets” and the newest live-action version of The Jetsons.

Consequently, Bruce cringed when a fellow guardian became a little too enthusiastic. A few years earlier, a NASA astronaut at the lunar outpost had caused a shitstorm of controversy when he made a slightly intoxicated live-cast, pontificating that if aliens had once visited the solar system, they surely would have left remote-monitoring equipment on the Moon to study the terrestrial surface. Predictably, within minutes of the live-cast, every media headline was some variation of nasa believes aliens are hiding on the moon. And though the controversy hadn’t even involved the Space Force, they were dragged into the mess anyway.

Bruce sighed. “I’d love to talk to her, sir.”

There was a bell-like tone, and a new icon glowed faintly in his vision.

“Captain Tennessen!” The woman’s voice boomed in his ear. “Good morning, sir! How have you been?”

“Good morning, Robin.”

“My brother said you had questions about hacking a self-driving car? Well, sir, I guess it depends on what the goal is. See, in order for a hacker to override a car—say, from a satellite—they’d have to maintain point-to-point connection with a moving target. Any disruption to that connection breaks the two-way handshake. Weather can interfere. And there’s still the problem of cracking through layers of encryption and verification. Can it be done? Sure, but what’s the goal?”

“To kill the driver.”

“Then it’s a lost cause,” she said decisively. “At best, you could only hope to crack the encryption for a few seconds and . . . . . . . . . well . . . . . . . . . I remember you don’t like the word ‘impossible,’ so let’s just say it’s hardly worth a hacker’s trouble. You can’t do much in a few seconds.”

Bruce reflected on the police report. “You could make a car pull a fatal turn in a few seconds.”

“Not necessarily,” she maintained. “Again, what’s the goal? To cause a fender bender? Sure, you could do that. But if you’re trying to kill the occupants, that’s wildly difficult, because you could hardly be certain a few seconds of control would result in a fatal accident. Real-world conditions are constantly changing. If you wanted to slam the car into another car, well, the other car’s self-driver would avoid the move. If you want to slam it into a building, well, even that is no guarantee with airbags and seatbelts and crash foam and crumple zones. And remember that self-driving cars have safety features to prevent sudden, violent turns for no discernible reason—they’d slam on the brakes. Seriously, if you were trying to kill the occupant, there’s far easier ways.”

“Like what?”

“Just hire someone to shoot them.”

“Except that wouldn’t look like an accident.”

“Why would you have to make it look like an accident?”

Because, he thought uneasily, if a foreign power is determined to cripple our asteroid mission, then they’d want to knock off as many astronauts as possible. If your first murders look like an accident, you’ve got time to perpetrate more “accidents” until someone finally gets suspicious. Send a hitman to shoot up famous astronauts, and your opportunity for further malefaction disappears.

The goal was surely to cripple or delay the mission. Could set our program back by months, letting our rivals get there first.

Bruce was reaching the fork in the road that would take him back to Peterson. He was about to turn right when a truck came hurtling at him. Bruce cried out, realizing he was about to be T-boned; in desperation, he veered to the left, gunned the engine, and watched the truck miss him by a foot or less.

“Jesus Christ!” he cursed, heart thudding painfully. Another truck roared by, followed by another. Looking in his rearview mirror, Bruce marveled at the lengthy convoy of trucks racing down the mountain. They looked like National Guard vehicles. What the hell were they doing this close to base? And driving at dangerously high speeds over such a rough and narrow road?

Shaken by the near impact, Bruce continued driving down the wrong road, partly to get his nerves under control, and partly to let the road clear of the trucks. He could still see their headlights winding down the mountain. There must have been twenty of them, maybe more. What the hell?

In his ear, Robin Markowitz cried, “Captain Tennessen? You okay, sir?”

Bruce blotted his sweaty hands on his pants. “Yeah, sorry.” He looked for a place to safely turn around. This side road was poorly maintained, forcing him to steer between potholes and boulders encroaching the shoulder. However, a commuter lot glowed ahead of him, less than a quarter mile ahead. “Robin, what if our hypothetical car was not in self-drive mode? Could a hacker still take control?”

“Ah! That changes things!”

“Why?”

“Because then you wouldn’t need to hack the car. You could just hack the human.”

“What?”

“I’ve thought about this a lot,” she said excitedly. “Pretty much everyone uses augmented reality lenses nowadays.” That was certainly true; AR had become as ubiquitous as smartphones (which themselves had become wrist-phones that transmitted their data to the lenses). Walk past a restaurant, and lunch specials appeared. Approach a department store, and coupons popped up. You had to subscribe to such alerts, and you could tailor them to appear only on your wrist-phone; even so, the majority of people in industrialized countries used AR to see caller IDs, texts, and even to play AR games (which themselves had been around since Pokemon Go all the way back in 2016).

“So,” Robin continued, “imagine a hacker hijacks the optical feed to your eyes. They could overlay whatever they wanted. You’d literally see things that aren’t there. Pretty freaky, huh?”

Bruce struggled with a feeling of peculiar dread. “But doesn’t that have the same problems as trying to hack a self-driving car?”

“Not necessarily, because a car under human control isn’t subject to the same safety redundancies. If a human decides to turn the wheel suddenly, there’s nothing stopping him. That’s the only reason self-driving cars became popular at all: consumers insisted on having the option of control.”

“But AR optics have security features . . .”

“You’d need three things to do it right,” she said. “First, a satcom device that stays near to the target—say, you secretly stick it on their car. That would allow real-time hacking to seek and exploit vulnerabilities in the software. Secondly, you’d want a field team who controls the satcom device and feeds it instructions. And lastly, a spy satellite parked in orbit—my team on the Argus spends most of our time looking for malicious foreign satellites.”

Bruce braked hard. He still had a couple hundred feet to the commuter lot, but he pulled over anyway at far as he could. He parked, opened the door, and stepped out into a chilly predawn.

Then, with one hand, he swiped both contact lenses from his eyes.

It was like flipping a TV channel. The road vanished. The commuter lot glowing in the distance was gone. A few pines and blue spruce surrounded his car. In horror, he saw that he’d parked just meters from the edge of a drop off.

His stomach dropped at the sight. The gorge was dizzyingly far below, and Bruce suddenly recognized it: it was where he liked to go hiking on weekends. He’d glanced up at these precipitous heights, appreciating their beauty from a safe distance. Only a few bulging rocks beneath the ledge interrupted what was otherwise a near-vertical drop.

His line to the Argus V was still open. Mouth dry, he said, “Robin! Someone hacked my optics!”

She laughed. “Like I said, it could be done in theory—”

“Not theory! I almost drove right off a cliff . . .” His blood ran cold and he looked up at the star-bejeweled sky. “My God, they must have been watching me at the scene of the accident! They assassinated two people already. The rest of the crew is returning to base within the hour! Any number of them might be vulnerable to this new kind of hack while en route . . .”

The line went dead.

He checked his wrist-phone. A no signal message locked on the display.

Impossible, he thought. He’d hiked the canyon enough times to know that, despite its pristine wilderness, there was ample cell coverage. There was no goddamn way a signal could drop.

Unless it was being jammed.

Again, he looked into the sky, knowing that someone else was looking back. It was an eerie thing to contemplate. Hostile forces were bending their malice toward him even now, like angry gods glaring down from heaven. Stealth satellites were a major focus of the USSF. Some spoofed telecommunications. Others could jam earthside signals . . . . . . . . . 

Bruce hurried back to his car. The bastards couldn’t hack his vision anymore, now that he’d discarded his AR lenses. But the crew of the asteroid mission were still vulnerable. Enemy intel had surely kept track of exactly where they were. They knew that once they were back on base, the opportunities for attack would disappear. Today presented a dozen targets of opportunity for a dozen deadly illusions.

He was just sliding into the driver’s seat and about to close the door when he thought back to what the lieutenant had told him.

You needed three things to pull off an AR hack. One was a satellite. Another was a satcom device near to the target . . . . . . . . . 

Bruce exited the car once more, and began a slow circle around the vehicle. it. He studied the doors, the tires, and was rounding the rear bumper when he saw the device affixed there.

It was roughly the size of a hummingbird, and some effort had been made to imitate one. There were blue feathers. A small head with black eyes. At some point in the night, the thing must have alighted here—perhaps when he’d gone into the police station. It would have presented the perfect opportunity. Yet in the thin blush of dawn, he could see it for what it was: a mechanical device with magnetic clamps instead of avian talons. The U.S. military had used Nano Air Vehicles like that for decades. Small, lightweight, and nimble enough to fly around an area of operation without drawing casual attention.

As he noticed it, the “hummingbird” took flight. Despite its outward appearance, it didn’t move with either the speed or grace of an actual hummingbird; Bruce easily snatched it out of the air. It buzzed in his hands, servos whining. With no small measure of satisfaction, Bruce broke the wings like snapping a pair of wafers. Then he buried it in his pocket and returned to the car.

On the road above him, a van lurched into view. The tires squealed to a violent stop. The back doors flung open, and three men hopped out with rifles in their hands.

Bruce dove behind his car as they opened fire. Bullets stitched a constellation where he’d been standing moments ago.

Anxiety surging, he glanced back to his wrist-phone.

no signal.

“Fuck,” he muttered. It was a forgone conclusion that foreign agents were operating on American soil. Especially as the Race to the Rock heated up, the USSF had received its share of briefings from the NSA, FBI, and CIA on increased chatter from Beijing and Moscow suggestive of active operations. It had been a dark fact of life in the first Cold War, and there was no reason to think it wouldn’t persist in the second.

Nonetheless, he’d hardly expected to be the target.

Keeping low, Bruce dashed for the cover of a Douglas fir. Bullets whined past him, thumping the ground. A low-lying branch burst like confetti to his left. He flung himself to the ground, rolled twice, and—with his heart in his mouth—willingly went over the cliff.

It was a fatal drop, if not for the bulging rocks he’d noticed a few meters below the ledge. He landed hard on the outcropping.

The Cold War has really turned hot, he thought crazily. These people weren’t trying to capture him, or interrogate him, or negotiate with him. He was the only one who knew what had happened to Palmer and Ortiz of the Ebisu mission.

And I’m the only one who knows that the rest of the crew is in danger.

Footsteps rushed about above him. Twigs snapped. Bruce hugged the rock face, trying to keep out of sight, but there was nowhere to go. In seconds, his assailants would lean over the ledge and see him there.

And then they would kill him.

Something about this realization calmed his horror. Bruce had enlisted to serve his nation. Land, sea, air, and space . . . . . . . . . these were fronts to be defended, risks be damned. But if he was going to die, there was still something he could do, to prevent his knowledge dying with him. A way for the Ebisu crew to be spared from further harm, while also alerting USSF to this dreadful new attack vector.

Fumbling with his wrist-phone, Bruce pressed record.

He spilled it all. In a quick, low voice he explained what he knew. The augmented reality hacks. The device still in his pocket. The presence of enemy hostiles a few miles from base.

Then he set the message for auto-delivery to Major Markowitz in the next five minutes. By then, he’d be dead. The satellite would no longer be jamming him. The message would send.

And hopefully it wouldn’t be too late.

He glanced toward the few stars that remained in the sky. A man in dark clothing leaned over the ledge. Bruce stared helplessly into the rifle’s muzzle as he was lined up in his sights.

Gunshots thundered over the canyon.


In the moments before death, Bruce imagined he was back at his office in Orbital Warfare. He imagined it so vividly that it was as if he’d hacked his own field of vision. There would be hot coffee. Emails to go through. The day’s briefing. The operations center, where USSF personnel—his fellow guardians of the high frontier—were each doing their part to keep Semper Supra.

It took him half a minute to realize he was still alive. The gunshots still echoed in the canyon, but strangely enough, none of them had hit him. The man above him was gone.

What the hell?

Numbly, with extreme wariness, Bruce climbed the short way back to the ledge. Then he saw his attacker, dead on the forested slope. The two other men had likewise been killed. Two armed soldiers in USSF fatigues saw him.

Bruce’s earpiece chimed.

“Captain?” It was Major Markowitz. “Are you all right?”

“S-sir?”

“Page 54 of your report,” the major said. “‘In the event of suspected hostilities, security should be tightened and surveillance on key personnel increased.’ I sent a car to intercept you. Seems they reached you just in time.”

Bruce struggled to get his thoughts in order. “Sir! You need to contact the mission crew! The enemy can—”

“Can hack augmented-reality displays? My sister just called me to tell me about your conversation. Do you need medical attention?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Then get back to base. We have a lot to do, Captain.”

“Yes, sir.”

The guardians formed a protective escort around him as he shuffled back to his vehicle. They were asking him if he was okay. Bruce heard himself answer them. As he reached the car, his eyes flicked skyward.

The brightening sky had banished most of the stars, but he knew they were still up there. An entire frontier of dangers and hopes waited, beyond his sight.

But not beyond our protection, he thought.

When he arrived back at base, a hot coffee was waiting for him.

***

Brian Trent is the award-winning author of the sci-fi thrillers Redspace Rising and Ten Thousand Thunders, and more than a hundred short stories in the world’s top fiction markets, including the New York Times bestselling Black Tide Rising series, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Nature, Daily Science Fiction, Escape Pod, Pseudopod, Galaxy’s Edge, and numerous year’s best anthologies. He lives in Connecticut. His website and blog are at www.briantrent.com.


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