As with his view, this vast screen’s perspective could also be rotated to show the various views of the objects’ approaches and orbits, their trajectories and speeds. Tracked simultaneously were at least three or four dozen satellites currently in this section of Earth’s orbital plane, one basically functional space station, various USSR era million-dollar scrap heaps, and one impending meteor shower.

A female officer in her early thirties sat at the command console while her commanding officer, Colonel Barrett Milton, stood behind and to her left. He turned to size Neal up as he was escorted into the room, then the colonel turned back to the main screen as Neal walked up, staying focused on the screen as Neal was announced by the liaison. The colonel dismissed the thankless private without ceremony and waited a moment while Neal took in the information on the big screen.

The room was about the size of a squash court, oriented towards the inextricably cool main screen that no doubt cost more than Neal made in several years. Ten consoles faced the screen about fifteen feet back from it, in a room that clearly followed some military control center design standard: the walls were so as not to detract from the main screen, which in turn was faced by the array of computer stations in two banks.

At these stations sat grim-faced operators, waiting to respond to the commands of the two or three senior officers that could either sit at the central command console that none of them knew how to use, stand behind an unfortunate junior nominated to sit there for them, or bark orders from the balcony that ran across the back of the room about four feet above the main floor. Behind the balcony were two offices; both were glass walled so that the officers that typically sat in them could watch proceedings while pretending to do important things.

Neal neither noticed nor cared about the layout of the room, or the uppity way the colonel had greeted him, or rather, had not greeted him. He did not even see the somewhat elderly woman standing on the raised balcony, quietly watching the proceedings.

Despite his ignominious job and unimpressive resume, Neal was a surprisingly bright man. His downfall had been that he had always had trouble pretending to care what professors often stupider than he, always less intuitive, but nonetheless far more politically and socially aware had been speaking about. The fact that he had made it through his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in astrophysics almost in spite of himself demonstrated just how sharp he was. So when he was presented with a tool as impressive as this huge display and the computers supplying it, with such a plethora of information previously unavailable to him, he was, to say the least, engrossed.