A Battle Unseen

[Doc]

IBSI Nevaras Station #4, somewhere on the Nevaran Plateau, Middle of the night

A red light on a console begins to blink. At first nobody notices it-- the alarms were silenced before the war, and nobody here remembered to turn them back on. The light must have been blinking for a while, because the first sound the Desk Sergeant heard over his television program was a phone ring. Also an odd sound as nobody ever called this station, because nothing ever happened. It startled the Sergeant, and at first he froze to make sure that he wasn't hallucinating. He listened. Then the phone rang again. It was in the other room, but before he got up, his mind scrambled to remember the proper protocol in the event that someone calls. Does he pick up the phone and actually talk? Who could possibly have this number? What does he say? Does he just say "Hello, IBSI, who's calling please?" That doesn't sound right. The phone rang again.

From the barracks room adjacent to the listening center, he heard the first lieutenant, a pretty young 20 something recently attached to the station. "Pick up the goddamned phone, Sergeant!" she yelled half asleep. Yes, she had a very disagreeable personality. She was enlisted before joining the Bureau. The Sergeant walked casually into the other room, picked up the phone and said "Hello?"

"Hello?!" responded the voice on the other line. "Who is this?!"

"This is Nevaras, who is this?" the Sergeant said, indignantly. It was 1:45 am and he was already getting yelled at.

"Son, you better get your head out of your ass and report your station properly."

The Sergeant let out a sigh... Some grizzly old guy reading him out over the phone for no reason at all. "Fine. Nevaras Station 4. All clear and board is gre..." at this point he noticed the blinking red light.

"Oh, finally he sees it..." said the exasperated voice on the other end.

"Who is this?" the Sergeant demanded.

"This is Spencer! Its about god damned time you picked up the phone."

"Spencer who?" the Sergeant demanded.

"Spencer G f--king 2 Actual, Mother f--ker," snapped back the voice on the other end of the phone. "Where is your CO?"

Spencer... G... 2... who could that be... Spencer... Holy shit, the Sergeant thought. Spencer, as in Spencer Center. And G2 was the real deal spooks. He was talking to a full bird colonel.

"Sir..."

"Too late Sergeant, put your CO on now."

"Aye Sir," the Sergeant put the phone down and went to wake up the Lieutenant. "Ma'am, Spencer G2 Actual is on the line, and would like to speak with you."

"What the actual hell?" was her response. She rolled out of bed: She was in her PT gear which she slept in... She looked like a mess, half asleep. She grabbed her uniform blouse from off the chair and threw it over her shoulders like a cape, as she made her way to the control room. "Turn that f--king thing off, Sergeant," she said as she went past, referring to the TV. She went in the Control room and closed the door behind her.

It was a tense five minutes that the Sergeant waited. Eventually the door reopened and the Lieutenant came out and said, in a voice that sounded calm but really was a cover for a boiling rage. "Sergeant, did you not see that light blinking?"

"No ma'am," he said.

"When you are on duty overnight, Sergeant, you need to watch that board. And turn the alarms back on please Sergeant."

"Aye Ma'am. I'll do it right now."

"No, Sergeant, now we are going to turn on the data feed and we are going to look at some pictures," She was still speaking very slowly, as if trying to keep a cool head. "Apparently there was a heat signature in Keris and then an explosion. We missed that: That was the blinking light. So now, we need to come up with an analysis, because they think it was an ICBM launch, and we need to confirm it. Ok?"

"Aye Ma'am..." the Sergeant said and immediately turned on the satellite data feed. As soon as the feed updated, both raw video and photos streamed in from geostatic satellites held in synchronous Terran Orbit over the northern hemisphere flooded in. Both the Lieutenant and the Sergeant took the video, fast forwarded it, rewound it, looked at it frame by frame... they then looked at the photos which were taken with a high speed camera that had been repurposed from thermal meteorological imagining to military intel purposes.

"See Sergeant, here is where the heat signature starts, and here is the trajectory, and here is where it explodes in the middle atmosphere. Definitely a test of a rocket of some kind. Egelion didn't inform our government of any rocket launches, so we can only assume it is meant to be clandestine. Do you concur?"

"Aye Ma'am, its obvious."

"Very well. I'm calling Spencer. Meanwhile, I want you to call Kensington. Call your guy there: he'll put us in touch with the right people."

"Aye Ma'am. I will do it now."

"And then turn the alarms back on, please... I don't ever want another phone call like that again, and neither do you."

"Aye Ma'am."