After noticing several satellites he had notably not seen on his own views, he focused in on the object of his previous week’s hard work. It had now resolved into a hazy cloud of what was, according to the system, 156 chunks of varying size, but few larger than a Volkswagen. Basic information was presented in a list to the right of each object in a small semi-transparent table. As the cluster of debris moved across the screen, the table moved with it.

“Like I said on the phone,” the colonel began, still facing the screen, “we have a briefing at 1300 hours and I wanted you on hand to talk to the details of your report.”

Neal was still trying to digest just how much he hadn’t been privy to before, and which he had about thirty minutes to come to grips with before the briefing. Staring at the screen and speaking in a distracted tone, Neal said, “Yeah, I just wish you hadn’t called me so early, did I really need to be here this soon?”

The colonel turned his head, looking at Neal like he was a pestering child, and tried think of a response, but he was neither practiced in, nor did he enjoy, banter.

At a request from the colonel the view reoriented to show the impending shower’s approach on a cross section of the Earth and started scrolling to show each piece’s trajectory. Of the cluster, about twenty pieces were singled out as large enough to survive entry into the earth’s atmosphere, but very few of the estimated trajectories showed an entry, the rest all showed as bouncing off the atmosphere, due to their oblique angles of approach and limited mass.

Neal studied the figures and graphics. “Those trajectories are wrong, you haven’t correctly estimated the mass of the objects; they won’t all behave like that.” He turned to the lady at the console, “Didn’t you use the numbers in my report?”

Before she could speak, the colonel answered for her, “The computer estimated the weights based on data your civilian predecessors have compiled over the years. Were those numbers wrong?”

“No,” Neal braced himself for a long, laborious explanation, then seemed to change his mind. “Look, there are other factors to consider that appear here but have not been seen previously. Maybe I could just …” Neal started towards the central console, but was intercepted by the colonel.

“Hold on there, Mr. Danielson. If you could explain these ‘factors’ to me before we go changing our estimates, I would appreciate it,” the colonel prompted, standing in his way and turning, now, to face the scientist.

Neal sighed a moment, then elaborated, “The objects are behaving slightly anomalously. There is no larger, central mass, so some, if not all of them, must have been joined as a cohesive mass at some point. Some point not too long ago, in fact,” Neal postulated.