“Now those are odds we have all faced many time in Vegas, sadly, but multiply that likelihood that one of them would impact to cover all eight making it and you have the same increase in probability that you will win eight times in a row at a roulette wheel.

“Specifically, the chance that all eight would impact is closer to 1 to twenty trillion, roughly.” Or 1:20,047,612,231,936, as he had written on the whiteboard for effect.

Once again, Neal was not one for flights of fancy, but above one in a million, he started to get curious. At the very least this probability had to warrant some exploration. This had been the crux of his argument to Washington. General Pickler’s counter, for he was not a complete fool, it turned out, or, at least, one of his advisors wasn’t, had been that these estimates of likelihood were based on the relatively limited experience we had with interstellar masses, and maybe these were just of a type that we had not previously theorized.

While the general had agreed that this unusualness alone did make the asteroids of interest, he had then pointed out that the shallowest of the waters they had landed in was nearly two miles deep, roughly the depth the Titanic had sunk in. Given that it would cost a massive amount to raise any of them, but more than the difficulties of getting one of these rocks up, there was a much bigger problem. It was one thing to find one of the largest ships in history sitting on a rocky ocean bed, but the very thing that made these rocks of interest was their relatively small size. Finding them amongst their annoyingly also very rock-shaped surroundings presented a potentially insurmountable problem.

It was to these challenges that Neal had set his mind, and as he had discussed his ideas with Laurie, it had become enticingly clear to her that the problem had been a proverbial Pearl Harbor to his sleeping intellect, and had awakened a giant.

* * *

At 4am Laurie lay in her hotel bed, too mentally exhausted to relax. A late dinner of pizza had been eaten on a tablecloth of papers as they had gone through the final throws of their efforts to codify their conclusions. Eventually she had returned to the faceless Marriott Courtyard and collapsed.

She could remember the moment she realized his ideas were taking shape in her own mind. As she had started to defend them in ways he had not yet seen she had realized that she had joined him, and was now one of two people that believed that these objects could and should be found. It was an opinion that had lost him his short-lived respect at the Pentagon, but she had friends he did not. That and the fact that the two of them now had a plausible theory on how to find their quarry should make some measurable difference.