The World Keys (The Syker Key Book 2) Read Online Free Page B

wouldn’t destroy the planet; that wouldn’t serve their purposes. But it would be enough to cause fear, panic, chaos, collapse an economy or two, a government or three, and the populace would cede everything to the powers that be to protect them.
    Recent cuts to NASA’s budget ensured that they would not be found, but they still had lots of computing power available to other astronomers, and there was always the chance that one of those infernal amateur types would see the rocks and spoil the surprise.
    Rob had ways of dealing with them, if he caught them quickly enough.
    “Fine, I’ll make it happen,” the Vice President sighed. Of course he would. He didn’t have a choice if he didn’t want to be disgraced in some public way. Buying politicians was easy; buying witnesses was easier.
    ***
    Jack Weston had the misfortune of being a somewhat strident amateur astronomer. His custom built twenty five inch telescope sat nestled in his home-made observatory, situated a good two hundred feet away from his house to avoid light bleed. Not that it was too much of an issue; he lived thirty five miles from the nearest human, and was always sure to turn the lights off on the house when he was photographing the sky.
    He had finished building this particular telescope only a couple months before, replacing the ten inch unit he had used for eight years, and was ecstatic at the images it was producing. More than four times the clarity he was used to. He’d had to upgrade his Nikon for the increased resolution.
    Northern Arizona was ideal country for a telescope too, dry, high altitude. And skies dark enough that he could use the timed motor mount to track the motion of the sky and still get stunningly sharp images.
    As any astronomer knew, only half the job was actually done with the telescope these days. The other half was done on the computer, and Jack’s day job was as a computer programmer. He’d written his own photographic analysis tool in the Python programming language, and was starting to rely on it heavily, becoming more confident in it’s accuracy every day, with every tweak of the code.
    But he still loved the night viewing.
    There was something transcendent about looking into a telescope and seeing the rings of Saturn with your own eyes, or the slowly fading Red Spot on Jupiter.
    Seeing the images in the computer after the fact was still thrilling, knowing they came from your own telescope, but it wasn’t quite the same.
    As luck, this particular night the clouds had settled in, and he was reduced to reviewing pictures taken the night before while his program ran.
    Suddenly his iPhone beeped. A text message. His program had found something.
    Jack looked at the identifiers of the two images showing the discrepancy, then quickly pulled them up on his screen, focusing on the coordinates the page had shown him.
    With a key press he was able to swap between the two images, back and forth until he could see what his program saw. It was barely anything. In fact, it was the absence of something that the computer had found. Interesting because he hadn’t programmed it for that.
    In one frame, an object identified as USNOA2 1050-01219719 was there, and the next it wasn’t. It wasn’t a nova, it just wasn’t there. He advanced to a third frame. It returned again, but slightly dimmer. He checked the fourth frame. It was there, and back to its original brightness.
    Something had passed in front of 9719.
    He quickly calculated the direction, then slid over to his computer running the scanning program and changed the parameters to scan for the path of this hidden object. Within seconds the program found it.
    Another object in USNOA2, this one was 0555 though. The same thing, object disappears, then returns. This time it was longer though, as though it was growing in size.
    Or coming closer.
    Jack went back to his main computer and ran the expensive orbital calculator he’d purchased. It wasn’t much data, but the program was