The Stars At Night (Clap Clap Clap Clap)

It was 10:31 PM on a Saturday night, the 30th of June, 2076, and Armando was on the night desk at TSG Station Four, in the Davis Mountains outside Fort Davis, Texas. A drone had been drifting into his zone for forty-three minutes when Hutchins called back.

"Third one this month, huh," Hutchins said.

"Yeah."

"Saltillo's saying it's a nav fault. They want to send a recovery team."

"From Saltillo?"

"From Saltillo."

Armando spun a slow half-turn in his chair. The console wrapped around him in a soft U — six panels, a dozen feeds, the Davis Mountains laid out in green lidar across the middle. The drone was a fat little smudge at 31,000 feet, moving north-northwest. An unmanned Auto Cemex SkyHaul, cargo class, registered out of Saltillo and bound, per its flight plan, for a distribution hub outside Albuquerque. Its transponder was working fine, which was kind of the funniest part. It was announcing itself crossing into this restricted zone the whole time.

Most of what Armando shot down wasn’t even trying to be sneaky. The sneaky stuff was rare and got handled by people higher up the chain than a sergeant on the night desk. What Armando handled was the everyday traffic — drifting cargo haulers, decommissioned ad-sats that had slipped their orbits, the occasional Chinese weather balloon that had wandered too far south, once a wedding company’s drone swarm that was supposed to spell out MARRY ME LINDSEY over Big Bend and had instead spelled most of it over the protected cone. The cone was the thing. A wedge of sky above McDonald Observatory, pinched at the bottom and flaring out toward the stars, which the Texas Star Guard had been federally authorized since 2061 to keep clear of any object Armando, or someone like Armando, decided didn’t belong there.

The vast majority of the country lived under the climate blankets now — the high-altitude reflective haze that kept the worst of the heat off and turned the sky a permanent milky white from horizon to horizon. The rest lived under the ad-sats: Coca-Cola’s constellation, the Amazon grid, the smaller national flags some countries had paid to project on national holidays. There were other dark-sky reserves left, technically. Texas was the only one allowed to shoot.

"How long's their recovery team gonna take?"

"Hour, easy."

"Mm."

"Yeah."

It was a Saturday, and the parking lot at McDonald Observatory was probably packed. Saturdays in late June you got the Austin people, the Houston people, somebody's in-laws from Ohio. The visitor center sold a lot of t-shirts on a Saturday. Armando had one of the t-shirts. His mom had bought it for him the first year he'd been stationed out here, before she really understood what he did, when she still thought it was something like park ranger.

Hutchins was breathing on the line in that way he had, which wasn't impatient, just present.

"I'll wait for the seven-minute mark," Armando said.

"Yep. You're clear when it gets there."

"Cool. Thanks, Hutchins."

"Big and bright."

The line clicked off and the hold music didn't even come back on, which Armando appreciated. His phone buzzed against his thigh. It was his cousin, Omner.

Omner: bro

Omner: BRO

Omner: is it happening

Armando: standby

Omner: dude the market closes in like 90 min

Omner: I'm in for 4200

Armando lifted his eyebrows at the screen and didn't reply for a second. The Polymarket Party, which had merged with what was left of the Democratic Party fifteen years ago, had been around for what felt like forever — Armando's dad said the app had started as a way to bet on sports back when he was a kid — and even though you could do everything on it now, from booking a flight to updating your driver's license, the market predictions were still the heart of it. There had always been niche markets, but somewhere in the last five or six years they'd gotten weirder and more granular, and one of the ones that refreshed monthly was will the Texas Star Guard engage three or more targets this calendar month. It wasn't a huge market. A few thousand traders, mostly Texans, a handful of guys in Singapore who treated it like a sports book. It was, technically, public information. Under a 2071 disclosure agreement, TSG pushed a same-day engagement tally to Polymarket at midnight Eastern — just the number, no details — with the full incident reports following a week later on the transparency page. The agreement had been controversial when it was signed and was now mostly forgotten, the way most things were. The market mostly tried to guess from weather patterns, satellite traffic, the plane-spotter forums where retirees in Marfa cross-referenced ADS-B feeds against TSG patrol schedules and posted them on Reddit, and some people just played on vibes. Whichever way they played, Polymarket took its cut. The market mostly got it wrong. Polymarket mostly got paid.

Four thousand two hundred dollars was more money than Omner had ever had at one time in his life, including the brief and luminous period in 2071 when their abuela had co-signed a food truck called Omner's Omelets. The truck had lasted six weeks. The branding had been, in retrospect, the strongest part. Armando had tried to tell him that people only wanted omelets in the morning, but Omner had been convinced he could change that.

Armando: you good for that?

Omner: no lol

Omner: thats why i need to know if i flip before it resolves

Omner: lines at 96 NO right now

Omner: everyones already called it a slow month armando

Armando looked at the clock. Thirty minutes until the market resolved at midnight Eastern. Five minutes until he had clearance to engage.

Armando: its about to not be a slow month

Omner: OH MY GOD

Omner: OH MY GOD I LOVE YOU

Armando: flip it. and you didnt hear it from me, id like to keep doing this.

Omner: never. swear. abuela on it.

Armando: dont put abuela on it. also dinner is on you, no omelets.

Omner: youre right sorry

He set the phone face-down on the desk. The SkyHaul nudged its heading two degrees, autonomous correction, still drifting toward the cone. Eight minutes out. He pulled up the engage suite, ran the check, watched the green lights come up one after another like a coffee pot warming. Battery Three out near Mount Locke registered ready — a kinetic interceptor, basically a smart slug, twenty-two miles southwest and pointed at the sky. He took a sip of his coffee, which was not good, and waited.

At seven minutes he keyed the sequence.

"Battery Three, Reyes. Engaging."

"Copy, Reyes."

He pressed the thing. Battery Three answered about a second and a half later, which was the part of the job that still, after five years, felt slightly like cheating — that you pressed something and twenty-two miles away a thing you couldn't see did exactly what you'd told it to. A new dot on the screen, a brief overlap, and then one dot instead of two. The whole event took less time than tying a shoe.

"Splash, Reyes."

"Splash, copy."

He logged it. Time, target, classification, authorization chain, the little dropdown for cause of incursion where he selected navigation fault (foreign commercial) because that was almost certainly what it was. Somebody in Albuquerque was going to be short a pallet of HVAC compressors come Monday. The form took longer than the engagement. It always did.

His phone buzzed.

Omner: flipped. cleared like 1900

Omner: te amo primo

He smiled at that and didn't write back. He stood up, stretched, felt his back pop in two places, and went to refill his coffee from the pot in the break room, which somebody — probably Delgado — had made too strong again. On the way back he stopped at the door of the bunker and pushed it open with his shoulder and stepped outside for a second, just a second, because the rules about not looking up while on shift were really more of a guideline and he was technically between incidents.

The Texas night sky was doing what it did. What it had done for millions of years.

It was easy to forget, that was the thing. You worked under it for five years and you forgot, and then you stepped outside on a Saturday in late June with a bad cup of coffee and there it was, the whole spilled bowl of it, more stars than a person could really hold in their head at once. Somewhere out past Mount Locke a tour group was probably having the same moment, except louder, and with somebody's mother-in-law from Ohio going oh.

"The stars at night," he sang, quiet, mostly to the coffee, "are big and bright."

He clapped four times against the side of the cup.

"Deep in the heart of Texas."

Then he went back inside, because the night was young and Saturdays got busy, and he sat down at the console and pulled up the next sweep.