Free Interrupt by Jeff Carlson

hurt from sleep deprivation and coffee. He needed food, but he didn’t know when he would ever sleep.
    He returned to the office where Roell had bunked. No one else should get stuck with cleaning, although he realized tidying up was also a way to say goodbye.
    Behind him, Agent Drayer knocked on the open door.
    “Mr. Wolsinger,” she said. “We have a call from back East.”
    Why had she come instead of one of his assistants? Was she was trying to be courteous? They would be working alongside each other for the foreseeable future, so Marcus supposed he should accept her olive branch. “Let’s go,” he said, brushing past.
    They walked down the hall together, uncomfortable and silent.
    Marcus had spent years feeling bitter after his divorce, but, for once, there was no solace in delving into his work. When he reached thecontrol room, he found Steve, Kym, and one of Drayer’s men. Her other agents were in the adjacent room with the servers. They’d started to install network monitoring software that Kym muttered was a jack, as in
hijack
. Soon the NSA would be a permanent presence, limiting their outside contacts and recording every move.
    Nevertheless, Steve was bursting at the seams. “Marcus!” he said. “You need to see this.”
    Across the room, Marcus caught a glance from Kym. Drayer went straight to Steve, making certain she didn’t miss anything, while Marcus pretended to yawn and let Drayer pass.
    Kym took him aside with a whisper. “Why are you reading about ice caps and lava beds?” she asked.
    Marcus’s heart leapt. “I’m not,” he said.
    “Uh.” Kym’s dark gaze didn’t move to Drayer, and Marcus liked her for being so perceptive. She said, “We just got twenty-six file attachments from NOAA.”
    “Delete them for me.”
    “Even if I did, everything stays on the servers, where these guys’ll find ’em as soon as they check your traffic. Sorry. But I saved the files to a thumb drive.”
    “Good enough. I’ll tell you about it later,” Marcus said, offering Kym his full confidence.
    She smiled before he hurried across the room. Maybe she’d bought him some time. Possibly he could bargain with it. He needed to regain control.
    Joining Steve and Drayer, Marcus said, “What’ve we got?”
    Steve didn’t let their tension affect his enthusiasm. “Goddard’s reporting similar microflares from half a dozen F-and G-stars, and they’re barely a quarter of the way through their logs,” Steve said. “We’re sure to see more.”
    “What does that mean?” Drayer asked as Marcus said, “What’s the longest span?”
    “Eight years,” Steve said.
    “One of you needs to explain what that means,” Drayer said.
    “I’d like to make several calls,” Marcus told her.
    “First you talk to me.” Drayer answered too quickly—she didn’t mean it—but he would try to hold her to their bargain when he wanted to contact Australia and Japan.
    “Show her,” he said urgently.
    Steve tapped at his keyboard. The smattering of instant messaging windows on his screen were blotted out by eleven hi-res images, each of which began to jerk through its own slide show. Most of the images looked like speckled blobs of white Jell-O set against backgrounds as black as obsidian, although a few were distorted like jellyfish or windswept ghosts. No matter their shape, every image expanded or fell inward during the short, repeating video loops.
    The sight caused an unpleasant, forlorn emotion in Marcus. He felt as appalled as when the doctors explained his mother was sick.
    He found his voice. “We have a friend at Goddard, the Goddard Space Flight Center near Baltimore,” he said. “That’s one of the places where they perform ground control for the Hubble Telescope.”
    Drayer pointed at the screen. “Those are stars,” she said.
    “Correct. Goddard’s been crunching data on thousands of main sequence G-class stars like our own.”
    “Why do they look like bubbles?”
    “Those are