The Best We Can by Carrie Vaughn (Tor.com, July 2013) starts with the narrator discussing the discovery of UO1, an unidentified alien craft that is discovered in our solar system, and the bureaucracy that delays the an announcement to the world:
In the end, the discovery of evidence of extraterrestrial life, and not just life, but intelligence, got hopelessly mucked up because no one wanted to take responsibility for confirming the findings, and no one could decide who ultimately had the authority—the obligation—to do so. We submitted the paper, but peer review held it up for a year. News leaked—NASA announced one of their press conferences, but the press conference ended up being an announcement about a future announcement, which never actually happened and the reporters made a joke of it. Another case of Antarctic meteorites or cold fusion. We went around with our mouths shut waiting for an official announcement while ulcers devoured our guts.
Eventually, the narrator releases the news, and the rest of the story is about her further struggles to get a mission to go to the object and drag the (apparently dead) ship into a more manageable orbit so humanity can investigate. She is (spoiler) completely unsuccessful in her various efforts, to the extent she doesn’t even manage to get a JPL probe retasked to take better photographs. By the end of the piece she is reduced to writing a proposal for a Voyager-type probe to be sent to the origin of the object.
This well enough done examination of the inertia and bureaucracy of big organisations, but it is fatally flawed in at least three ways: first, it beggars belief that the militaries of both the USA and China, and perhaps others, wouldn’t be all over the craft; second, it is ultimately a story where nothing happens; third, the back end of the piece seems to be as much about her finding meaning in her life as much as it is about the UO1, and so splits the story’s focus.
** (Average). 4,500 words.