Von Neumann’s War

Caller: I’m not certain, Ret. I just don’t know But I suspect… to communicate with their alien masters. The Roswell landing was not a crash, Ret. It was a controller, sent to make contact with our government and begin the conquest…

* * *

“Holy crap,” Roger said, quietly, as the image from the Hubble filled the oversized monitor.

The Hubble Space Telescope had been for all intents and purposes commandeered by Neighborhood Watch. Multiple observation cycles were implemented on the outer planets and the data gathered there was not very promising. Albedo shifts had already been measured on Callisto, while the returns from Rhea and Hyperion at Saturn were less conclusive. Titan looked iffy, but the standing hypothesis was that it was a function of that planet-sized moon’s dense atmosphere.

The returns from Io and Europa couldn’t have been more conclusive. Among other things, Europa and Io both now had noticeable atmospheres; the halos were distinct in the image.

“You’re going to owe me a year’s salary,” Traci said, chortling quietly at the scientist’s disbelief. The current Io image was sharp enough that major features of the distant moon could be distinguished and it was apparent that the entire face had been radically altered. In fact, it looked as if one section had been deep strip-mined. For the change to be visible at this distance, even with the resolution of the Hubble, the structure had to be at a minimum four hundred kilometers across. The way things were going, the probes might just eat the moon.

“I think we should run a sharpening filter on the—” Roger said, reaching for the mouse on the image analysis computer.

“My job,” Traci said, slapping his hand aside. “You rocket scientists and telescope builders can’t do planetary measurements worth a flip. I’m not so sure the image can be any sharper. The aliasing seems to me to be due to being at the limit of the sensor’s resolution.”

“Traci dear, I’ve been analyzing IMINT imagery for more years than you’ve been in school,” he said.

“You’re not that old. And what’s mint imagery?”

“IMINT — it stands for ‘image intelligence.’ Astrophysicists.” Roger shook his head.

“Well, all I know is that the astronomical imagery data from the Hubble looked better before you ran that filter again.” She pointed at the now blotchy image on the monitor. Traci hit the undo button in the software menu to restore the image.

Traci had proven to be well worth her weight in gold. She had gotten in touch with the right people at the Space Telescope Science Institute and was trained on the Hubble-cycling protocols in just a few short days. She had gotten a lot of help from a fellow named Hamilton there. Jack Hamilton had been the first person to really detect the change in the Martian albedo and had been aware of the problem from the beginning. The STScI had been gagged by the President to keep the space telescope data quiet, so Jack and his professors had been briefed into the Neighborhood Watch from early on.

Traci had a command station set up in the HOSC at Huntsville and had it connected and encrypted through the program’s protocols. So between the folks at the STScI and the command station in Huntsville, the Hubble Space Telescope was being tasked one hundred percent by the Neighborhood Watch and Traci was doing the driving — with a little input from Jack and, of course, Roger.

She knew, more or less, what was going on at Saturn and its moons. Traci wasn’t quite sure what to make of the Titan data.

The moons of Uranus had similar changes. Ariel in particular had a surface albedo much greater than ever before measured. Likewise were the moons of Neptune. Triton specifically had obvious changes.

The albedos of the Kuiper Belt Objects including the Pluto-Charon system were harder to determine changes since there was less highly accurate albedo data available. However, some preliminary investigation suggested that Pluto was slightly brighter.

These experiments took the better part of the month following the Neighborhood Watch final report briefing to the White House. At the same time they’d gotten to work on Asymmetric Soldier.