Decipher, p.21
Decipher, page 21
The guy with the grinning hair and thick bifocals was Nick Austin, senior team leader in charge of ELIGO. “This data means the sun started pulsing out gravity waves nearly twenty years ago. We’d have picked that up, Jon. Have you even checked these figures?”
“I’m aware of the figures,” Hackett confirmed, “but we’re talking about such low-level gravitational shifts you’d need a detector the size of a planet to pick up those kinds of fluctuations. How many of these waves have you registered so far?” he asked Austin.
Austin folded his arms defensively. “Four waves so far. The last three in the past two days.”
“And what was different about the latest wave?”
“It lasted the longest. And we picked up data suggesting there might be internal variations to the wave. Possibly connected to what we can only loosely call its field strength.”
“Is the wave structure like radio waves? Or more like the field strength of magnetism?”
“Maybe a combination. Look, Jon. No one’s ever measured this stuff before. We’re all operating on conjecture. At the vaguest level.”
“Excuse me. Excuse me! But I’ve lost my satellite and my comet! Do any of you people have the faintest idea how badly the gravity wave has warped my section of space?” A blond woman with sharp features was bellowing. She had star charts in her hands and was circling a section of space with a red pen.
“I dunno! We’re still trying to figure out Hackett’s data!”
“Contact with over thirty satellites has been lost, Dr. Weisner,” one of the scientists spat angrily. “Nothing makes yours any more special than the rest.”
Pearce scratched the side of his lip as he lowered his voice. Leaned into Matheson as the two men waited: “Would this many geeks constitute a party?” Matheson didn’t answer as he kicked out his foot disconsolately. “I bet I still end up in the kitchen.”
“Hackett’s an asshole!” the woman was screaming.
“It’s good to see you too, Michela,” Hackett commented loudly. “Ah, this is who I was looking for. Hopefully she’ll get us to that light computer,” he explained quietly. “She’s my ex-girlfriend.”
“Figures,” Matheson concluded meekly. “She obviously hates your guts.”
“Honey?” Hackett accosted her meekly. “I need a favor …”
Hackett noticed Weisner’s finger. It was still very much bare. No ring of any kind. “Funny, isn’t it?” he mused. “So much in life just comes down to a few lumps of rock.”
“What are you talking about?” she snapped irritably.
How could she forget when they broke up? And he stole the ring back just to flush it down the john. They made up a week later. But she expected to see the thing back on her finger at some point. And he had no one to help him sift through the shit in the sewage pipe. He found the ring too, in the end. But the stone was missing. And fifty bucks just wasn’t going to replace an antique emerald.
“Look—I’ve lost Rosetta, my satellite,” she explained, trying to remain calm. “I don’t have time for any shit, Jon. You help me with that, and I’ll think about helping you.”
Rosetta was a European Space Agency probe designed to orbit the comet P/Wirtanen and deploy two 5kg probes, RoLand and Champollion, which would land on the periodic comet and drill into its ice core in search of amino acids, the building blocks of life. Launched in 2003, aboard Ariane 5 from Kourou, French Guyana, it took nine years to get into position. But during its last elliptic orbit, at an altitude of 500,000 km and at a velocity of 100 meters per second, at precisely 9:18 P.M., contact with the probe was lost.
Matheson peered at more data screens, utterly drawing a blank. “And this works … how?” he asked a technician.
“There are six interferometers, or gravity-wave detectors,” the technician explained impatiently, “that run down two, four-kilometer-long, vacuum-sealed channels. What we do is beam laser light down these channels, then split the light through beam splitters. Bounce the light around using mirrors, then re-combine the light and analyze it.”
“And this achieves what, exactly?” Matheson asked, still none the wiser.
“A gravitational wave alters the light’s intensity.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“There’s no way on earth you can measure the velocity, the speed and direction of a wave with that kind of set-up.”
“We know,” the technician conceded darkly. “But tell that to Hackett.”
Hackett was engrossed in a simulated chart of the solar system with Weisner and Austin at a workstation over in one dimly lit corner. Pearce approached them quietly.
“Whether you like it or not,” Hackett was saying, “these waves have to be linked to magnetism. Or at least the magnetic activity on the sun. Nick, this set-up’s been operational how long? Eight years? And until this week you hadn’t even had a sniff of a gravity wave. Not one. And now, this week—four. Is it coincidence that this week is the same week when the sun reaches the high point in its sunspot cycle?”
Weisner raked her fingers roughly through her long dark hair. “Jon, you think the sun’s going to give you the Grand Unified Theory?” she scoffed.
“The what?” Pearce blurted. He hadn’t intended to say anything, and it was obvious Hackett wished he hadn’t.
“The Grand Unified Theory, or the Theory of Everything,” Austin said, happy to explain. “The theory that links gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces into one simple equation. It’s the Holy Grail of physics.”
“And I’m suggesting no such thing,” Hackett said firmly. “I’m only suggesting where you should look for your satellite.”
He turned their attention back to the screen by tapping his pen on the sun. “Sunspots are polarized linked pairs on the surface, like a bar magnet. Y’know, north and south? The lead spot matches the polarization of the area of the sun it appears in. So if that area is positive the spot will be positive. The trailing sunspot in the pair will then automatically be negative. As the sunspot cycle continues, the sunspots start to gather around the equator, which in turn rotates slower than the rest of the sun. With me so far?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Now this is important. The magnetic links between the spots interact with other magnetic phenomena under normal circumstances. And the result is an explosion of ejecta off the surface—”
“A solar flare.”
“Right. The best way to think of sunspot magnetism is like little invisible loops, like snags in a sweater, sewn in and out of the surface of the sun. But the curious thing is, in the last week solar-flare activity has actually fallen, while sunspots have increased tenfold.”
“So … that leads you to what?”
Hackett rubbed his face and sniffed. “I was thinking about the original search parameters for ELIGO. Austin, you theorized that a binary neutron star system would be the best candidate for producing gravity waves. As the two stars collided they would become a massive rotating barbell, flipping end over end, at speeds approaching something like the speed of light. Now keep the idea of that barbell shape in mind. But transfer it to the sun.”
“That’s a big stretch.”
Hackett dismissed him with a shake of the head. “Think about it,” he said. “You get enough sunspots together and they’re gonna wind up linking end to end. Negative to positive. They’re gonna form a chain, like a daisy chain of independent magnetic units, and this chain is gonna stretch all the way around the equator of the sun like a belt. And all it takes is to be a few sunspots short, and this belt is gonna tighten, pulling the equator in. Squeezing the sun’s internal volume out to its northern and southern hemispheres. It would look … like a barbell. Its natural instinct is going to be to return to the center. And that action, at its quickest and most temporary level, would be a good candidate for causing gravity waves.”
Hackett slipped a computer disk into the workstation. Punched up his data. “Okay, now when you figure in the gravitational effects of the planets, their moons, comets and other known stellar bodies like asteroids, you get—well, take a look.”
A simulation of a wave blasting out from the sun played out brightly across the screen. Interaction with planets broke the wave up in places, causing sections of it to collapse in on itself. But eventually a small green cross-hair zeroed in on one section.
Weisner leaned forward. “That’s where you think I’ll find Rosetta?”
“Two hundred and fifty thousand kilometers off course,” Hackett confirmed. “And because it wasn’t programmed to expect the fabric of space to suddenly warp, it’s looking to re-establish contact with the earth in entirely the wrong part of the sky. We shifted along with it. Everything in the solar system shifted. But from Rosetta’s point of view, it’s like its whole universe is suddenly a fraction of an inch out of whack. But it hasn’t been programmed to recognize that.”
He tapped the screen again. “That’s where your satellite is. Right there.”
Austin and Weisner eyed each other silently for a moment. She had her hand over her mouth as she considered the implications. “It’s worth a shot,” Austin conceded. “What would it take? A few minutes of communications time to reposition the dishes and take a look. Doesn’t sound so bad to me.”
“Sounds bad enough to me,” Weisner sighed. Austin didn’t understand. “Because that would make Jon right. And then I’d have to thank him.”
“You don’t have to thank me,” Hackett interjected quickly. “Just do me that favor.”
She leveled her gaze at him in that way that could only say: What is it that you want from me?
“You still dating that guy who’s doing all that top-secret light computer work for the Japanese? Working on those crystals that can store about a terabyte of data on a unit the size of a stock cube?”
“You know I am. You hate him, so why the sudden interest?”
Hackett smiled and pulled out the chunk of C60 like a rabbit out of a hat. Austin looked awestruck while Pearce shifted on his feet, cringing. That wasn’t the best idea, in his opinion. Trouble was, Hackett didn’t want his opinion. “Do you think nature can accidentally encode computer-useful information at a molecular level?”
“You want him to scan that rock and see what he gets out of it?”
“Please. It’s probably just garbage. I mean, statistically it’s gotta be garbage—right?”
“Establish contact with my satellite first.”
It took Hackett ten minutes.
THE WELL SHAFT
Sarah stepped out of the glittering company Land Cruiser to find the blue marquee humming with the buzz of generators and halogen lamps, glowing brightly among the ill-lit monuments. Her ID checked, she made her way through the checkpoints and arrived at the well shaft.
A couple of night-workers were climbing out of the shaft and taking their harnesses off. There was a cool light emanating from the well, flickering as the lights below were obscured by the final Rola Corp. employee making his way to the surface.
Sarah slipped into a coverall two sizes too big, and found she had to roll up the sleeves. She checked the charge on a walkie talkie and hung that on her belt alongside a flashlight, notepad and pencil.
Someone was updating a map on a makeshift table, and Sarah noted the information before taking a final look down the shaft to check that the ladder was clear.
She climbed down.
There was a communications pod at the base of the ladder, with a wire running up to the surface. Thick black cables led out from the device and along the tunnel walls, which was highly useful—they allowed her to use her cell phone deep underground.
She followed the trail of lights and wires until she came to where the plug had been inserted into a narrower section of the tunnel. Chains were still buried into one end. Some high-pressure hammer had been used to knock grips into the rock, and the makeshift pulley system was still piled to one side awaiting a packing trunk for its return to the storehouse. There were hooks in the ceiling as well, which meant the chains had originally been attached to a high-powered winch on the surface. But that was long gone.
Luckily when they removed the plug it had stayed in one piece, and it now lay along the side of the tunnel where it would no doubt remain. A note in red paint had been daubed onto its surface: 7.5 feet long. Approximate weight: 30 metric tons.
The tunnel ahead was a crawlspace into what appeared to be some kind of anteroom.
Sarah peered inside first. Called out: “Hello?” and waited for a response as her voice echoed off the cold sandstone walls. But no reply was forthcoming.
She dropped to her knees and crawled through.
The room itself was circular and very plain. There were two exits up ahead, one on either side. Each exit led to a staircase that spiraled downward. And each exit was also guarded by a statue.
Both statues were in human form. The one on the left was overtly male, while the other was definitely female. But both also had animal heads in the classical Egyptian tradition. The one on the right, the woman, had the head of a lioness and was difficult to identify, while the male had the long curved beak of the ibis bird and was instantly recognizable. It was Thoth, the Egyptian god of wisdom.
As far as the other one went, there were a number of Egyptian gods and goddesses who bore the face of a lion. Sarah would have to seek advice on who this one was supposed to be. She unclipped her radio and flipped the channel open. “Eric?” she said. “Eric, where are you?”
“Sarah!” came the faint excited response. “I’m down in the tunnels! Where are you?”
“I just reached the anteroom,” she explained, looking at the statues. “I’m with Thoth.”
“Oh, you’re back at the beginning,” he chuckled. Clemmens had to be overtired. The man sounded way too happy. “Hey, did you bring waders?”
Sarah didn’t understand. “Are you sure I need them?”
“We’re below the water table down here,” he explained. “Trust me. You’ll need them.”
“Uh, which staircase do I take to get to you?”
“Doesn’t matter,” Clemmens confirmed. “They both end up in the same place.”
When Clemmens signed off, Sarah radioed to the surface for them to send down a pair of waders. A few seconds later she heard them clatter to the ground as they were unceremoniously lobbed down the well shaft unannounced. After pulling on the thigh-high boots she carefully made her way down the stone steps that wound around in a spiral, descending over forty feet. The lights ended at twenty, so for the rest of her journey she had to depend on her flashlight.
It was dizzying. Disorienting. Especially since she still had a significant amount of champagne in her system. And it was due to a combination of those factors that she tripped over her own feet and dropped her flashlight on the final few steps.
She watched it tumble end over end, bouncing off each step in sequence until it disappeared around the bend and she heard it land with a splash.
“Shit!” she spat. Furious with herself. “Stupid! Really stupid!”
She hugged the wall and cursed some more. She daren’t go for the radio in case she dropped that too. Instead she followed the line of the wall and felt her way with her toe, hoping that the flashlight would still be switched on when she got to the bottom. She found that the last two steps were completely submerged in water. She thanked Eric silently. Waders were a good idea.
The steps ended at a doorway that led out to a cavernous room beyond. And under the rippling water ahead Sarah could see her flashlight, its beam cutting into the darkness.
“Thank God,” she muttered, getting deeper into the water and trying not to slip on her ass. “Goddamnit …” The ground beneath her feet was uneven. And though she could sense there was a pattern to it, she couldn’t quite figure out what it was. All she knew was that the ground would alternate between higher and lower sections.
When she got to where her flashlight lay, she rolled up her sleeve to retrieve it.
And that’s when she heard it. A sound that could only be described as a breath being taken, but on a massive scale. It was followed by silence, and then an eerie scratching, scuttling noise, like a mass of whisper-like clicking. A thousand gem picks tapping on rocks. Or fingernails down a chalkboard.
Hand clenched around the flashlight, Sarah stood bolt upright. “What the hell … ?” She whirled around. Sweeping the flashlight over the walls. And couldn’t believe her eyes.
She wasn’t in a room. She was in a tunnel. But a tunnel like none she had ever seen before. Perfectly circular along its length, it seemed to stretch into infinity in one direction, and arc around a bend in the other. The size of a truck in width, and the same again high, the most distinctive feature of the tunnel was the fact that it was made up of two continuous spirals, like the rifling in the barrel of a gun.
“Good God,” she whispered. “I’ve never seen anything like this.” One spiral was sandstone, pure and simple. It constituted the raised portions and was covered in Egyptian hieroglyphics.
The other spiral was indented. And entirely different.
Sarah edged closer to the wall and ran her fingers over the material. It was prickly, like static. And blue. Covered entirely in a language she had never seen before. It was: Carbon 60. Suddenly the scurrying around got louder. Ominous. Then something small and glassy shot across her hand.
Sarah gasped and pulled away quickly. She shuddered. “What was that?” she asked herself. “What the fuck was that?!”
She ran the torch across the C60 and was amazed to see the light pulse through veins within the crystal and spiral away from her, as if the light had been trapped.
And then came the next breath, loud and harsh. Not quite like some ancient mummy waking up, but weird nonetheless. She swept the torch beam across the crystal once more. And that was when she found the nest.
