Phantom Orbit by Ignatius David

Author:Ignatius, David
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2024-05-07T00:00:00+00:00

36

Manhattan Beach, August 2017–­September 2020

Edith Ryan didn’t have to wait long. She soon received a message from Anna Friedman, the space operations chief, suggesting that she apply for a position in the Operations Lab. The lab was in a separate building apart from the main campus, air-gapped from the company’s other computing and communications systems.

Edith still had many of her agency clearances, but joining the lab required her to describe her foreign contacts. She listed several dozen Tsinghua classmates from twenty years before, including the distant but still vivid encounter with a Russian who had studied there. The process took weeks, but Edith was eventually offered a position as senior analyst with the China operations team.

The China team was run by a Vietnamese American named Linh Phan. Her parents had fled Saigon in the late 1970s as boat people. Linh had been born just after the family arrived in America. She hated Communist China the way a Holocaust survivor’s daughter would hate Nazi Germany. She was several years younger than Edith but had worked earlier in her career for both the NRO and the National Security Agency.

Edith’s first day on the new job, she put her hair in a ponytail, something she had rarely done at the agency. She wore black jeans, black sneakers, and a black hoodie to surprise any new colleagues who might think of her as an ex-government goon. Linh took Edith into her office for an initial briefing. Edith signed more forms, and then Linh explained the peculiar analytical work that would now consume Edith’s workdays.

“I want you to think of yourself as a detective,” Linh said. “Our group tails Chinese satellites. Unfortunately, the target is twenty-two thousand miles away. We’d like to cruise in for a close look, but we don’t have that authority yet. So we use other monitors. Telescopes on the ground and in space; signals collection to monitor what they’re uploading and downloading. Radar and lasers to track position and movement. When we see things that don’t make sense, we flag them.”

“China: Menace or threat?”

Linh laughed. “I assume the worst. I think the Chinese are developing advanced anti-satellite capabilities in space. But a lot of people don’t agree, so we need proof.”

“I’m a worst-case person, too,” said Edith. “I smell the flowers and look for the funeral.”

* * *

When Edith joined the lab, the pandemic hadn’t begun, so she could see people’s faces and get to know them a bit before the curtain came down. It wasn’t a chatty office, in any event. Most of her colleagues were engineers. Normal vocabulary range was, “Yup,” “Nope,” and “Awesome.”

A large screen dominated the far wall of the lab, charting orbits of known Chinese satellites around a green-and-blue image of earth. Next to the main screen were separate panels for closer examination of LEO and GEO orbits. A smaller screen conveyed current location data about Chinese satellites, drawn from radio frequency, radar, and optical monitors. Another panel presented real-time information from Chinese launch facilities at Jiuquan, Taiyuan, Wenchang, and Xichang.

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