Beyond the Pillars of Hercules

Bledar Dervishi had spent the better part of forty-eight hours recalculating the orbital tasking for 2057-017A Thoth, the International Designator (COSPAR ID) assigned to Thoth Network's seventeenth satellite. 

Bledar Dervishi

As Flight Dynamicist for satellites 16 through 20, Dervishi understood the value of every minute in orbit. Every change in attitude, every imaging request, every adjustment in collection priority consumed fuel, power, bandwidth, or all three. Satellites were not toys to be pointed wherever curiosity demanded. Yet curiosity was precisely what had brought Pulsipher Wissenschaft to his office.

The Thoth Board had issued two requests.

David Hassan wanted the satellite tasked to image a region of the Atlantic where he believed evidence of Atlantis might exist. Tariq Mansour wanted several passes over warehouses he owned throughout Asia, the Middle East and North Africa. Neither request had anything to do with the constellation's primary mission.

From Wissenschaft's clipped tone, Dervishi could tell exactly what his supervisor thought of the assignment.

Frivolous. Intrusive. A waste of one of the most sophisticated imaging platforms ever launched.

None of that mattered. His job was not to debate the Board's priorities. His job was to produce an orbital collection plan that satisfied both requests while consuming as little of the satellite's limited operational life as possible.

For Bledar, the newest member of Wissenschaft's orbital operations staff, the assignment carried another weight entirely. Success meant becoming indispensable. Failure meant someone else would eventually occupy his desk.

Working beside him was Liam Müller, a recently hired imagery analyst from Switzerland whose responsibility was reviewing historical imagery from previous collection passes to determine whether either target area warranted additional observation.

It was nearly three-thirty in the morning when Müller appeared in Dervishi's doorway. The color had drained from his face. "I reviewed the previous flyovers," he said quietly.

Liam Müller

Without looking up from his orbital model, Dervishi replied, "And?"

"It's not what I found." That finally drew Dervishi's attention. "It's what isn't there."

Müller laid three satellite prints across the desk.

At first glance they appeared ordinary—deep blue Atlantic stretching west from the Azores.

Then Dervishi saw it. A vast swath of absolute black.

Not cloud cover. Not shadow. Not corrupted telemetry. 

The darkness possessed crisp, unnatural boundaries, as though an enormous section of the Atlantic simply refused to return light.

The anomaly appeared in every pass. Every sensor. Every wavelength. Exactly the same.

Neither man spoke for several long seconds. Finally Dervishi leaned back in his chair.

"Does anyone else know?"

Müller shook his head. "No, sir."

Dervishi studied the images one last time before sliding them into a classified folder. "Good. "He closed the folder. "We finish the assignment."

He looked toward the still-glowing orbital plots on his monitors.

"Then we get some sleep." Another pause. "And after that..."

He rested a hand on the folder. "...we decide who, if anyone, should ever see these."

                                                             Cause Santa Clause Says So!