He smiled in return and turned to the colonel, saying, “If they haven’t exuded volatiles it means they don’t, or rather didn’t, have very much of them, which means that unlike typical interstellar masses they may not have the, well, the holes and gaps that escaping gases would leave behind as they either combusted or froze under the alternate exposure to the freezing vacuum and the sun’s unfiltered barrage. Previous estimating tools assume that a significant proportion of an interstellar object’s total volume is, in fact, empty, nothing there: fractures and gaps left by escaping gases.”

He took a breath and continued, walking around the colonel to the console as the junior officer seated at it leant to one side to allow him to reach the keyboard. “Sooo, if these guys don’t seem to have many of those gaps,” he said as he typed into the machine, looking up at the screen as the mass estimates changed under his fingertips, and the computer began to recalculate the way the objects would react to the earth’s atmosphere, “they may have a higher mass to volume ratio, they may be denser, in which case they … might … do … this.” he said as he clicked enter on the last of the reconfigured estimates.

They all looked at the screen as the alternate entry statistics appeared.

The colonel’s obstinacy was not born of ignorance or stupidity, as it turned out, but of long practice of authority, and he was just as quick as his neighbors to see the implications of the new numbers.

“Yes, this would make it more interesting,” he said quietly.

Revised: NOTICE OF ANTICIPATED ATMOSPHERIC PENETRATION

Time logged: 0344 MST

Date logged: September 20

Time Last Modified: 1257 MST

Date Last Modified: September 27

Location: AMFPS85 Radar Array

Noted by: Neal P. Danielson

Note Type: First Contact [never gets old]

Est. Date/Time of Atmospheric Penetration: October 4, ~10am GMT

Est. Volume: ~1.35 km3

Est. Mass: ~116k tons

Impact Probability: Scattered debris

Est. Impact Location(s): Multiple sites: all oceanic,

- North Atlantic, two impacts possible near Outer Hebrides, Scotland, and the Channel Islands

- Northern Pacific, two impacts possible across northern Pacific near Bering Strait

- East China Sea, impact possible northwest of the Okinawa archipelago

- Indian Ocean, two impacts possible: one in the Bay of Bengal near Sri Lanka, one southwest of the Kathiawar peninsula in the Arabian Sea

Incident ID: ColonelMiltonBlows

Chapter 3: Well-Lit Corridors

The colonel walked behind and to the right of the pair of scientists down a long, neon-lit beige corridor, herding them to turn left or right as required. Neal had tried to let the colonel go first as the man knew where they were going better than either Neal or Laurie did, but the military man’s training would not allow him to have civilians walking behind him in the high-security facility, out of sight, as it were.