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Page 36.
Scene 14. Claire Lightfield: Tropic of Capricorn
 Claire Lightfield was not expecting any unusual space activity that morning.
Like most midlevel intelligence officials of the West, she was on a duty roster, rotating with other desk-bound intel officers through several hours a week of what was called General Duty.
This nuisance, known as GD, was shared among midlevel officers of the Security Collective more commonly known as Sigma 2020—which included a network of agencies including the CIA, U.S. and other North American militaries, a Congressional oversight committee, a Cabinet assistant undersecretary, and the Camelback Consortium of major Western corporations.
Claire's doctorate was in Applied Mathematics with specialties in ballistics engineering, orbital mechanics, and astronomy. This coincidentally made her a perfect babysitter for the world's orbital and space industries. For her, GD was like another science lab back at Harvard.
Once a week, Claire drove to Observatory Hill near Massachusetts Avenue. She'd spend four hours, deep in a huge underground technobunker, monitoring launches and landings, as well as telemetry traffic on orbital and space (Lunar, Solar, and soon-to-be Mars) missions, after which she'd be relieved by another intelligence officer of the networked Sigma 2020 agencies.
As a fine autumn morning filled the District of Columbia with sunlight and colorful leaves, Claire sat in the special new underground wing of the United States Naval Observatory (USNO).
Established in 1830 by the Secretary of the Navy, USNO's primary mission had always been the development, maintenance, and calibration of navigational technologies. The Naval Observatory was already old by the time of the U.S. Civil War. It had always possessed a powerful refracting telescope, the most powerful generation of which, a 40" dating to the 1930s, was moved to the Flagstaff, Arizona observatory due to light pollution in the nation's capital. Still continuously in use during its third century, the USNO and its many toys continued to maintain key atomic clocks for calibrating U.S. times and zones, and to monitor certain space activities. The USNO had always been in the forefront of U.S. technological intelligence.
As a sign of the powerful corporate-government linkages in the nation's capital, USNO had become the nation's time keeper from its founding at Foggy Bottom, and as the Transcontinental Railroads spread across the United States during the Gilded Age, captained by the titans of private industry, the USNO had sold time services to the railroads. This had resulted in popular cultural and technological advances like the station keeper's accurate, personal watch—originally, a marvel of its age, the railroad watch—as well as standard time zones. That had replaced than a million local times determined by a railway station chief stepping outside at noon to set his pocket watch by a sundial or stick in the ground. The U.S. Navy's chronological and astronomic services were as much a leading-edge, esoteric network as ever in the 21st Century.
Claire sat in a sterile underground complex, whose ambient light were a mix of soft overhead biolumes, enhanced by the mingled glow of amber, green, and yellows of countless monitors. Technicians from NASA, the military, and intel services (both government and corporate security) sat at their instruments. The atmosphere smelled of coffee, warm rubber, and electronics. Long ago, these rooms had clattered with typewriters and smelled of paper—long gone in this digital age.
This morning, Claire had about thirty events to monitor on at least ten screens. Among the tools available was a digital encyclopedia on which duty officers were encouraged to look up all manner of fascinating launch country information.
Among them was a Russian cargo ship launch from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
The Indians, Japanese, Brazilians, Southern African Union, and Egypt had nothing going up today.
A Chinese bus carrying six replacement taikongren (taikonauts) to the Asian Space Station, and bringing home the current crew, was about to rise from CNSA's Xichuan Satellite Launch Center in southern China.
The Germans this morning were about to launch a sunspot laboratory into solar orbit from JFK Corporate Space Center in Florida, U.S.A.
And in French Guiana—on the steamy jungle shores of the North Atlantic, not far west of the Caribbean Sea—a Spanish-Portuguese-Italian (SPI) communications satellite was about to lift off from Guyane Space Centre. This was an hour's drive along the north Atlantic coast, west of the provincial capital of Cayenne. Kourou, on the coast of French Guiana in South America, was a premier launch center for the European Space Agencies. French Guyana was administratively united with Paris. The fire department at the Kourou launch center, for example, was a precinct of the Paris metropolitan fire department. Now that's centralization, Claire thought. Other equatorial nations were starting to offer competition to the old-timers as well.
As Claire hummed to herself, she skimmed through a digital white paper recently published about the state of the art regarding launch facilities around the world. Her reading would prove to be prescient, because a big fat siren was about to go off on the world’s complacency.
What all these launch centers had in common was that they were each host country's best location close to the Equator. The historic irony or anomaly was that the Baikonur Cosmodrome had once been in the Soviet Union. Now it lay in the sovereign nation of Kazakhstan, Central Asian Emirate, once a Soviet Republic. Kazakhstan had gained independence after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. Kazakhstan itself sprawls across central Asia being, with a population of just seventeen million, the world's ninth largest nation. By another irony, Kazakhstan’s land mass is larger than that of the former Western European Union (WEU) as defined during the Cold War by the Treaties of Brussels (1948 and 1954). The West, a term still vaguely used today, in the age of Jack Gray and Claire Lightfield, had been created during the Cold War in opposition to the Soviet empire of the Warsaw Pact. The Warsaw Pact (1955-1991) had dissolved with the Soviet Union in 1991. The WEU had been officially dissolved in 2009 by the Treaty of Lisbon. The WEU's military alliance stayed in existence for decades more, amid mission creep and definition fog—the new North American Treaty Organization (NATO), a subset of the Pan-European Treaty Organization (PETO). The old North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was long extinct by now.
The Equator is so named because it is the line around the earth's surface that is always closest to the sun. The half of the earth north of the Equator is the northern hemisphere (half-sphere). Below the Equator lies the southern hemisphere.
Because the Equator runs through French Guiana, spacecraft launched from Kourou enjoy a double advantage in lifting power. Nearly all of this comes from the fact that the earth's surface is spinning fastest here, because the surface is farthest removed from the central axis of tilt—same principle as the iron hoop around an old wooden wagon wheel, whose spokes literally move faster (and blurrier) the farther one looks away from the axle hub. A tiny part of the advantage comes from a microscopically enhanced solar gravity, tending to pull the spacecraft closer to the sun.
Claire was most interested in the German circumsolar flight, but something about the Kourou launch got her attention. The spacecraft was named Capricorn. On just one occasion, a garbled exchange—perhaps at a distant tracking facility around the world—referred to Pollux. She did a few quick lookups.
The tropics are those areas of the world within a band no further north or south from the Equator than about 23.4 degrees north or south of the Equator. Since the Equator lies at zero degrees latitude, and the poles are at 90 degrees, the boundaries of the tropics are each 26% of the 90 degrees of longitude north or south of the Equator.
The northern boundary of the tropics is known as the Tropic of Cancer, while the southern boundary is the Tropic of Capricorn.
The most precise, functional definition of the tropics is that they are the region on earth where the sun rises to directly overhead at noon on at least one day of the year.
Less precisely, it is a region of eternal summer—the only other season being rainy—consisting of either baking deserts of sand or stone, steaming jungles. Off the coast of Australia, glittering seas harbor giant salt-water crocodilians and other survivors of the Cretaceous Period.
In the jungles, all manner of things slither or skulk about, from reptiles to the most poisonous vipers and serpents on earth, from colorful toads that sling poison goo to hairy spiders that bite and chew as well as they sting. Even some plants eat meat, while other plants have developed the parasitic ability to wrap themselves like constrictor snakes around trees and gradually kill their hosts. Oh, yes, and of course there are giant snakes like the anaconda, namesake of the world's second most powerful corponation.
Geopolitically, Claire knew that many of the world's Third World nations, and most of the most horrific modern dictatorships, lay within the two Tropical boundaries. Perhaps the poisonous serpents and dictators were related at some subatomic genetic stratum.
Pollux, if she had heard right, was the twin of Castor. They were the divine twins, or Gemini, of the ancient Romans, and the Dioscouri of the ancient Greeks. She must have heard wrong. There seemed to be no thematic connection. Must have been a fluke.
Claire turned her full attention to the Kourou launch of Capricorn SPI-2033F.
The two-ton satellite had obeyed its Global Anaconda and French controllers flawlessly until it reached orbit.
What was Capricorn? What were the SPI launching today? Was it a communications satellite designed to bring backward, subequatorial regions a step closer into the space age? What else could it be?
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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