Excerpt: Childhood's Sentinel

“Contact them again.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Dr. Leah Coffey ran the contact routine once more and received nothing. Some of the perimeter stations on The Shell hadn’t responded to their inquires. This was definitely not the day for comms to go down. The ConFed President and other officials were watching over their private network links. Even worse was a decision by Shell Command to leave one of the massive display walls of Shell Operations to have all the faces of these impatient people watching them.

Shell Ops was fully staffed today. All shifts were fresh and rested from a mandated vacation for most of the personal in preparation for this day. Flicking the on switch of the largest construction project in all of human history wasn’t something you did with overworked and strained people. No, Leah had fought for and requested that her people get a break before the big day. The politicians weren’t thrilled about it, they cried that national security was at stake but after five hundred years of construction what was another two weeks? In the end, she’d won out but if anything did go wrong she’d be stuck in committee meetings for the next five hundred years explaining how she could’ve justified everyone taking a vacation when their were problems to iron out.

Although it was nice to take in Atlantis’s beaches for the time. Sure they weren’t real, just another part of The Shell’s massive construction project but still the contractors did a great job on the beaches.

“Dr. Coffey? Is there some problem?”

The President’s smooth voice brought Leah back from her thoughts. Hopefully he hadn’t noticed her lapse. “No, President Coffey, no problems at all. Just a couple of minor issue on luminal comms, but nothing to worry about. The startup sequence’ll continue as planned.”

“That’s good to hear. I’d hate to disappoint everyone waiting for the big firework show.”

Leah noticed an upward tick in the president’s lips. She hoped he wouldn’t say some awful joke or pun. It looked ridiculous when he did it from behind the Resolute Desk. No matter how many times she’d tell her husband to quit it with the awful jokes, he’d gently remind her it was about as ridiculous as a First Lady who was also one of the best and brightest scientific minds of their age.

She hated it when he got cute with her.

“Dr. Coffey, we’re still not getting any response from Pluto Station and now Ganymede is also experiencing technical difficulties,” said one of the shell ops staff.
Lovely, this was precisely the last thing she needed right now. The pundits’ll have a field day with this. Bad enough the United States became the co-ordinating nation of The Shell project and therefore the lead in the Confederation, but the assignment of the First Lady to work on the project caused a lot of ruffled feathers in many political bodies. If this thing blew up in her face, she’ll never hear the end of it from China, the EU, the South American Hegemony and the Lunar Consortium. Some were even calling it. “Coffey’s Folly” in assigning her for the final construction phases of the solar system-wide defense network.
“Goody, I’m glad this wasn’t gonna be easy,” Leah muttered.
“What was that, ma’am?”
Leah waved off the ensign at the comms monitoring station. “Nothing, Shiels. Keep trying to get a hold of them. Try using the burst transmission array if luminal comm isn’t working.”
“Already tried, ma’am. No response.”
“Fine, then try using good ol’ fashioned radio then,” said Leah.
The young man blinked, his reply slow in coming. “But, that’ll take at least an hour or so to get anything back.”
“Yes, it will. But at least we know it still works and if all of Ganymede’s systems are down at least their emergency radio comms’ll still work.”
“Yes, ma’am. I’ll get right on it.”
Leah wasn’t entirely comfortable ordering around military personnel, but her position as Director of Shell Operations puts her in their direct command chain. She knew Steven got a kick out of it since it made her fear uneasy but it also meant she was responsible for all the lives in Shell Ops and on the entire artificial island chain of Atlantis.
“It could be equipment failure.”
Colonel Rhiannon Waldgrave’s voice came from behind Leah, and she glanced over at the other woman. Her fiery hair and green brilliant green eyes fitted her ancestry’s stereotype almost to a tee, much to Rhiannon’s chagrin. But the ConFed Marine was one of the toughest people Leah had ever met and as the commander of Atlantis’s military contingent she worked with Rhiannon quite a bit.
Sometimes making friends was just a matter of opportunity and proximity.
“Maybe, but across two different stations? Redundancies should have kicked in,” said Leah.
Rhiannon’s voice dropped a couple notches in volume, “Maybe the Striders are back.”
Leah turned in her chair. “That’s not funny.”
“I wasn’t being funny. They could be causing this.”
She stared at her friend for a couple of minutes. Even mentioning The Striders of Eternity in passing was thought to be bad luck. But then, what was to be expected when that race almost wiped Humanity off the face of the universe five hundred years ago. And that was only facing a small battle group that entered Sol. It took a entire fleet of ships, both civilian and warship, to fend them off, and still most of the colonies, orbital habitats and cities on Earth were laid to waste.
No, it couldn’t be the Striders, this wasn’t their style. They came in and started firing regardless of whatever was there, they wouldn’t bother taking out small stations here and there.
“It can’t be them, this isn’t like them,” said Leah.
She watched the massive hologram of the Sol system suspended in the air at the front of the room. The projector pit was ringed with a railing and warnings not to fall in more to keep the image from being disrupted than for anyone hurting themselves. The sun rotated in the middle of the hologram, surrounded by all of its children as they orbited their brilliant father. A constellation of multi-colored dots were splashed all over the hologram like thrown glitter in the air. They moved seemingly of their own mind, each of them representing ships and other man made objects within the Sol system. The only ones which stood out were numerous red dots, arranged like a cloud around the solar system. They represented The Shell and right now it was offline. Humanities most powerful defense system was not yet working, and now the possibility….
Ok, just calm down, Leah. It’s not the Striders. There’s no way it could be them. I mean, what’re the chance of them appearing now? On this day?
“Tactics change, Leah. They could’ve changed their approach after their first defeat.”
“What, it took them five centuries to respond? No, I don’t buy it. It’s too ridiculous to believe!”
Rhiannon rested a hand on Leah’s shoulder. “Leah…”
Before her friend cold say anything, the comms officer interrupted, “Ma’am, still no response from Pluto or Ganymede.”
“Dr. Coffey, what’s happening? Did someone forget to pay the power bill?”
Steven’s little crack got a laugh from the media and officials watching. Leah had to consciously stop herself from making a fist and scowling at her husband. But when she met his eyes, Leah saw the concern in them. He knew she was getting upset and then husband in him wanted to open a private channel and find out what was wrong, but she also know Steven couldn’t break away now. Doing so would raise suspicion and the last thing they all needed was to foster widespread panic across the entire system because of an unverified threat.
“Nothing Mr. President, other than the first day glitches. All multi-trillion credit projects have them.”
She got a rare laugh from the audience. Usually Steven was the center of attention. Leah hated all these eyes on her. It made her feel like they were just waiting for her to mess up and take her to task for it. Well, maybe some of them were, but still she didn’t have to like it.
Pushing her nervousness to the back of her mind, Leah returned her full attention to the hologram. “We need to know for sure.”
Thats it. No more messing around.
Leah walked over to another station and stood behind another young man. Did they all have to be so young?
“Ensign Forner, I want you to bring The Shell’s sensor net up now.”
The man’s back stiffened and he swiveled around to look at Leah. “Ma’am?”
“Turn on the sensor net,” said Leah.
“But, most of the data, power, and defense nodes are still spinning up.”
“It doesn’t matter, just bring it up.”
“We’ll maybe only get about thirty percent of the coverage area…”
“Just bring the damned net up now!”
Leah’s shout stopped most of the conversation in the room. Even the people on the links were now staring at her.
Brilliant. Way to go, Leah.
The Ensign turned back around and tapped a couple of key sequences on the two-dimensional holograms floating around him. In front of him was a simplified diagram of the solar system surrounded by seven layers, each one representing a part of the shell and the sensor net within. The final Shell layer surrounded Earth. Parts of the shell turned from red to green as portions of the sensor network activated.
The main display in the front of the room changed, and more information appeared as the partially active sensor network fed data to it.
“Anything?” Leah asked.
“No, nothing yet, ma’am. What am I looking for?”
Leah straightened. “You’ll know it when you see it.”
Ensign Sheils walked up to her. “Ma’am? I have a private communication request from the President.”
She knew this call was coming.
“Route it to my office, I’ll take it there.”