The Star Net

Trent looked up at the sky, It was silvery and clear, as day faded into night. The sky transparent, showing the stars, clean and unobstructed. But in those stars, occasional glints of light belied a great prison constructed by Aliens. For the shards of light were shards of tiny pieces of metal. The byproduct of industrial asteroid mining. Ten years ago, The Categians had come. To mine our asteroid belt. To stop us doing anything about it—they did something so stupidly simple—it clocked the whole planet on the head. They dumped all their garbage in orbit.

The trash would destroy anything that was up there. Mass times acceleration, that old gimmick—anything the size of the coin was spun in orbit so fast it punched a hole in anything:

Satellites, telescopes, the international space station—it all shredded, making the problem worse—because the little shards would blow up the big shards. Then they would hit other shards, making more shards and so on and so. So the Cartegians did not have to actually actively do anything aside from making a small stop on there journey around the sun. No invasion, no blowing up the white house. Just empty their trash weekly, and they had complete run of our solar system.

Trent breathed in and out slowly, keenly modulating his anticipation.

He is the first person to go into space in a better part of the decade. He wasn’t planning on being shot though, he was setting forth into space in a new kind of space ship. Coated with a thin reactive armor that took five years to develop. It was costly, too—utilizing minerals from every continent. The Armour was so unique, it often disrupted radio signals. A drone flight had failed to launch of the pad. So here Trent Wright was. The first Astronaut of the new age. He looked for probably the last time for a while, downwards. The vast launch complex, where jungle met the atlantic ocean was shrouded in night. It was Kourou, French Guiana. The European Union’s principle spaceport.

“This is control, T minus five seconds countdown ignition set” The voice came through faint and crackling,

“Go for control, set final checks.”

“Ignition mark”

Everything roared underneath Trent, as the Energia rocket underneath gave everything it had. A white plume mushrooming in reverse. Russian rocket, Canadian astronaut, German technology, American capsule. The whole planet wanted to make this work. They were all watching the same amount of viewers since the Apollo days, or the ill-fated launch to try to establish contact with the Cartegians. Online or huddled around their televisions. Watching the white rocket, emblazoned with United Nations blue, shoot cleanly into the stars. The rumble was harder than Trent thought it would be. Before he knew it, he was surging up into the clear night sky. The night greens of Kourou spaceport fading to the clouded greys of the stratosphere. Like a javelin, sailing through the sky.

“Gaia I to control, all vectors good, all indicators green, preparing for second stage ignition.”

He was trailing hard, up into that great inky void. He was going to space, he was going to freaking space! Excitement shot down his spine at the speed of his craft.

“This is Kourou Control to Gaia, NORAD and Chinese Space Command report no Cartegian vessels in Earth orbit- go for second stage.”

It was real, it was happening. Like clockwork Trent ran through two sets of switches and pumped a valve. He felt another jolt of gees as the second stage engine kicked into gear and the spent energia boosters fell away to Earth. Higher, Higher. The Cartegians would not know what hit them.

“Kourou to Gaia you are coming up on the mark point for LEO”

Low Earth Orbit, from the small window above him, Trent could see the curve of the Earth, the golden line separating sky from stars. He was here it was time. He switched to second stage mode, through the window, he saw the armor flare with blue electricity. Silicon pads at the top and the bottom of the lander reinforced his armor with strong electric current that would slightly diffuse the energy of anything coming at him. The capsule drew up higher, into the danger zone. He knew debris was already hitting because there was tiny flashes on the armor, the electric armor turning the shards to plasma before impacting soundlessly on his hull. A void opened in his stomach. Before launch academically he knew that he was going to be hit by random bits of metal traveling at several thousand kilometers and hour, but it was one thing else to be in a tin can being hit by said objects. Another cold starburst, then another. The higher he went the more armor flared.

“Approaching Foirere’s point” said his radio crackling.

Foirere was a billionaire who thought he could outrace the space junk by being fired out a hyper-velocity cannon. He was shredded … here.

“You’re now the furthest a human has been in ten years. It’s time to confirm for Phase A” control told him, as one eye was out the window.

Higher, higher. The electric armor was sparking every few seconds now.

“Phase A is good, it’s now or never, I’m already getting hit.”

He opened a plastic cover on his dash. He found a joystick and the fire control. On the top of the capsule a hatch open and a small probe shot poked out of the top of the craft in defiance of the crackling below. Trent punched the deploy button immediately—and from the mouth of the probe a sheet opened up like someone unfolding a napkin. The Kessler net. It was the entire first phase. Another push of the button and the shot away. Firing it’s own thrusters kept it going independent of Gaia. The net was an electromagnet of sorts drawing in the trash, It was a high impact material to sustain the hits. Once the net was full it would shoot itself into a lower orbit, and burn it and all the trash up in the atmosphere. With the nets moving forward and backward in his orbital path, the threat of junk was lowered. So with the first one down, he vectored into a higher orbit.

He prepared to … something struck his window. It bounced harmlessly off the armored glass. But it was close. He went back to the checklist for firing the second Kessler net. The second net was fired, retros on each corner nudging into a higher orbit, it … the capsule started spinning. His retrothrusters corrected the spin, and the capsule righted. The electric armor was angrily crackling. But that was a big hit. Plunk. Another piece hit the armor. He heard it inside the ship. Meaning it pierced the armor. Quickly he ran a pressure check to see if the cabin had been compromised. No, atmosphere was good. He was still in the game. Quickly he fired off the third Kessler net. The net unfolded in his wake. He could see junk hiting the net, making little flares. He fired two more, protecting his vertical axis, and exhausting his supply. The first stage was done. He let out a quiet exhale and then radioed Kourou the good news. They could proceed to the next phase. In Baikonur, Jiquan and Cape Canaveral, three more Gaia craft launched in unison. More Kessler nets, but still he waited for the final phase … he could not see them; of course they were being launched to different orbits. A total of nine were planned to be launched today, from all around the world.

An hour passed, the nets cleaning up his orbital trajectory ahead of him. He deployed the telescope array, scanning visual and radio. Another first in a decade—he was on the first spacebourne telescope since the James Webb had been shattered into a thousand pieces. He turned to the console scanning and praying to find his quarry. Every ping coming back was a piece of trash, the sun reflecting off silvery metals in higher orbit. Everything was still moving. This was the problem searching for them on Earth, and here it was easier but not by much. The Gaia was firing radio signals at objects and counting how fast they came back, then cataloging them by speed. He was looking for something moving artificially, in the telltale retrothruster correction, the perfect vector in. The Cartegians had thought no human would be stupid enough to fight back. He got a fix … no it was the upper stage of a rocket launched seventy years ago. In his fleeting zoom on the object he could make out the letters CCCP before moving the telescope. He scanned again … half of an old internet satellite, again, another broken satellite. Again, another. Sure the Cartegians had put a lot of junk up here, but Humanity had too. Perhaps the same thing would have happened in a hundred years. Again, another, no wait … it was moving on a fine vectored line towards Earth orbit, it would be here in an hour.

A Cartegian mining ship, traveling to the inner system. Predictable to drop it’s trash in Earth orbit, then travel inwards to use the Sun as a gravity assist get up to near lightspeed, traveling to wherever they called home. “Target detected—scanning now for vector and firing solution, ETA one hour.”

“Signal is good, Go for Aurora phase, Repeat we are go for Aurora.”

Trent carefully checked his data, and sent the firing solution down to Earth, twice in case the armor fouled his data slightly.

“Gaia, data is not whole. Repeat” Kourou told him. He repeated the transmission again.

“Data received, put on your sunglasses Gaia”

In Australia, outside the town of Parkes, and all up the eastern coast of Australia sirens were sounding, twenty million people closed their blinds or put on block out glasses handed out by the government. In the red Parkes soil, a giant finger up to the sky was in position. It was a laser. The largest and most powerful laser ever made, called Aurora for the Roman goddess of the dawn. It couldn’t fire until a firing solution could be obtained in orbit. A ship actually needed to stay in orbit long enough to get a fix on one of the Cartegian vessels coming in. Hence this was it’s first time firing.

Even Trent dropped down a helmet visor. He could see nothing but black. He could only in his mind’s eye picture the mighty laser firing, coursing through the sky in a straight line, superheating the clouds around it to make thunderheads. The line extending into space. He didn’t know if had fired at all…

A glow from behind the visor blasted his vision. Trent closed his eyes- but even still some brightness remained.

“Gaia, Aurora has completed firing”

Trent pulled up his visor. His vision was still stained by the after image

He found his telescope controls. On the spectrogram he could see the cartegian ship was wobbling, going to a lower orbit. He zoomed on his scope, what had been the neat lines of an organized space going vessel resembled more the asteroids it mined, a stone with a flaming corona, failing to Earth. He watched it pull towards the karman line, the boundary between Earth and sky, flailing, and trailing frictive fire. The white line fired across the sandy brown of the west coast of Australia to the deep blues of the Indian ocean.

“This is Gaia I, target is down, orbit is terminal.”

The shouts and cheers from the control. It was time to go home. He pitched himself into a declining orbit, following gravity down. There was no concern to what nation he landed in, pretty much anywhere would greet him as a hero. The stars fell away to burning light, the friction of the atmosphere catching him. Through that he could see an amber sky, hued by flaxen clouds. The blues of the Indian ocean meeting the Atlantic greeted him, to the north the heights of the South African cape rose to salute him. Parachutes pulled him back, slowing him as he fell.

The war with the Cartegians was just beginning. He didn’t know how they would react. Nobody did. However, when he hit the warm summer waters of Table Bay and the capsule opened—he looked up at the sky. The world was no longer a prison. The sky was clear.