“It sounds so creepy, like, surely not everyone is in space for their own profit.”
Kate smiled and leaned back. “No, not everybody I suppose.” She paused. “I’m not.”
“Me neither. My dad wouldn’t be.”
Kate frowned and pulled up a library of survey methods on the other monitor and searched through the titles until she stumbled across one she never dreamt would be any use on the Moon: Methodologies for the Detection of Organic Life in Anaerobic Environments. She downloaded it to Mary’s tablet.
“This is more for microbes, isn’t it?” Mary scanned the abstract.
“Well, we’ll have to adapt it for the ship, but I think it might be useful.”
Kate set the article aside and scanned the titles for other ideas. Establishing the ground penetrating radar parameters for higher resolution mapping was a priority, along with conducting VLF and magnetometer surveys to see if there was anything in the Moon’s crust that could have attracted the ship there. After additional searching, she found an essay on increasing the sensitivity of the Titanius geophones.
“Are you going to use those as hearing aids?” Mary quipped.
“Sure am. We need to gather some fundamental information on this vessel before we tell anyone about it. Make sense?”
“I guess.”
Kate sighed, more a release of her own internal fear and tension than frustration. “What humans should the Rossians contact first? Greedy terran leaders, corporate exploiters, mercenaries . . . or us?”
Mary remained silent, then looked up. “Sounds right when you put it that way. We can trust ourselves.”
Relief spread over Kate’s face. She reached over and squeezed Mary’s shoulder. “Yes, we can. Now come on, let’s grab a bite to eat before we design the next surveys.”
Mary pulled herself up. “Promise me something, Kate?” She looked at her with wide eyes.
“What is it?”
“If we find out they’re hostile and a real danger to Earth, promise me you’ll tell my Dad right away?”
Kate smiled. Mary’s love for her father reminded her of the times she and Jim took long walks together across the City College campus, not talking much, but comfortable in each other’s company, nonetheless. A sudden twinge of deep shame stabbed at her gut.
“I promise. You have my word.”
THREE
Kate
Ten hours later, Kate awoke to the annoying incoming message alarm on the comms system from the Titanius engineering team in New York. She scratched her eyes, crawled out of the bunk, and crept over to the main panel. She pressed the audio only channel and cleared her throat.
“New York, this is the Lunar Geophysical Lab. Good morning.” She paused. In a couple of seconds, the science and engineering bay at Titanius’s headquarters responded. Kate listened as she poured herself a tea from the biofeeder and popped her daily anti-rad pills.
“Ah, hello Kate . . . Stan here . . . I guess it is morning for you. Listen, sorry to rattle your cage like this, but we were expecting the data download from that seismic survey you ran a couple days ago and, well, God’s eyes you know how it is here. Everyone wants everything yesterday.” The satellite’s repeater relay clicked, indicating the terran transmission had stopped. She let the radio carrier drop. Ka-chunk.
Kate sipped her tea. “I do, Stan, but here’s the thing. We had a ton of noise in the array and it corrupted the data. Nothing serious, but extensive. So most of what we got was garbage, despite filtering the crap out of it, and bottom line, we’ll have to run the survey again.”
She held the cup under her nose and closed her eyes. She liked Stan. He was the friendlier of the two techs she spoke with. Talked about his family a lot. Cracked jokes. The other one, Dana, was a hag.
“Sorry to hear that, but I understand. Were you able to track down the problem?”
“Mary and I are heading back out there in a couple hours. I’ll have a better idea for you then, but it must be a glitch in the seismic router, given how extensive the noise is.”
“Okay, sounds good. And we’re here to help you any way we can. I could tie our computers into your system and boost processing power, if you like. Just say the word.”
Kate turned her head and saw Mary sitting on the upper bunk in her underwear and tee-shirt, swinging her legs back and forth. “Thanks Stan, but we got this under control. I’ll check in again once we’ve solved the issue. Lunar Geophysical Lab out.” She ended the transmission.
Mary yawned and hopped down. She stumbled to the biofeeder, grabbed a water gel and snorted. “They’re an anxious lot.”
“They are,” Kate said matter-of-factly, “but their contract requires almost real-time, simultaneous delivery of results to client subscribers. It’s why Clayton Carter and his precious Titanius are as rich as they are and can afford to build a resource company here in space.” She pulled up the lab’s monitoring program and reviewed the habitat’s environmental parameters.
“Everything look okay?”
“Yeah. The engineers built this to last a hundred years. It’s more solid than a nuclear waste site.” Kate had grown accustomed to the lab functioning properly. In her time there, she had had no issues with the operational systems, the integrity of the habitat itself, or any of the computer equipment. Still, she treated Nature here with deep respect. Humans require oxygen, and you can’t just open a window to get it.
“The only problems I’ve ever had involved a couple of geophones affected by dust, and one of the scooter batteries needed replacing.” Kate drew a protein package from the biofeeder and unwrapped it. “Still, we take no chances here. Everything’s backed up. There are redundant life support systems everywhere.”
“Yeah, I remember Esther Tyrone briefing me on all that before I came here.” Mary pulled on her blue form-fitting lab skins. “I had to memorize every safety protocol ever written in the history of the universe. No exaggeration.” She smiled.
“She was after me too about keeping you safe from harm. I think she likes you. In fact, I figured she and your dad would, you know . . .”
Mary smirked and busied herself by pulling out their envirosuits from the rollers in the storage bin. Esther had a thing for Jim and vice versa a few years back, and Kate expected them to get together. But they never did, and the topic wasn’t open for discussion.
“Let’s suit up and hoof it to the site, shall we?”
They loaded up one scooter with various pieces of equipment, including two handheld VLF units, paired magnetometers, and a portable Langdon GPR imaging machine on bubble wheels. They lashed these to the box-like storage compartment behind the pilot’s seat, then packed extra oxygen canisters in case they needed more time at the site.
Kate clamped a secondary tool kit onto Mary’s scooter and told her to lead the way out. She’d follow closely and watch for anything rattling loose and falling off. It was one of those things you did on the Moon because if she lost gear out here, it could disappear forever, despite precautionary radio-tagging everything and following established routes. Taking chances wasn’t in her DNA.
Mary fired up her LunaScoota, buckled the safety harness, and whirred away from the lab’s machine shed. Seconds later Kate joined her, maintaining an easy distance behind. They kept their suit-to-suit radio comms open for the duration of the trip, and she listened to Mary’s soft rhythmic breathing through her helmet speaker.
When they arrived at the alien vessel site, they first undertook a quick visual inspection of the area. Nothing had changed since yesterday. Mary landed her scooter off the edge of the shadowy grey zone—about 20 meters away from the ship’s presumed location. She dismounted and loosened the equipment ties from the storage container.
Kate sensed her growing uneasiness. She had said little during the trip and concern in her voice replaced her normal cheerfulness. Perhaps the Esther thing with Jim was a more sensitive matter than she realized. She pulled up beside her and landed. “Everything okay?”
“I guess so,” Mary’s voice sounded tired and jittery with tension, “but I’ll feel better once we understand what we’re dealing with here.”
“Me too, so let’s get to it.”
They had five hours of oxygen in their tanks, and another six in the spare canisters. More than enough to finish the surveys and return to the lab, even if they needed more time.
She scanned the surrounding area with her on-suit heat signature detector. If the ship was active, or if organic life was aboard, the sniffer would find it. So far, there was no visual evidence of any activity in the craft, and this helped Kate relax. After sampling for several minutes, the sensor showed no abnormal readings. The object appeared dead.
Then, she mapped out her survey lines for the GPR. She’d be taking real-time, continuous readings at one meter row separation. She turned on the GPR, calibrated the sensors, and walked the first line. Mary flew her scooter to the far edge of the seismic array and collected the geophones.
When Kate reached the tenth line, she sensed this was the location where the shadow began, although the exact position was impossible to tell at this proximity. Before she started, she checked that the instrument still functioned well. As she set her pace, pulling the Langdon GPR unit, she peered up at the Earth peaking above the horizon due to a favorable lunar libration.
Beautiful.
She maintained a steady gait across the shadowy area and continued surveying far beyond it. The GPR was a useful tool for near surface anomalies, like graves or archaeological structures, but lost resolution at depth. So, when Mary returned with the geophones, Kate got her to help out with the magnetometer survey, and the VLF. These would reveal more information about the ship’s z-axis and, she hoped, about the crustal material beneath it.
There must be a strategic reason for this ship to land here, she thought, unless it crash-landed. But no evidence of a catastrophic impact was evident. No, this is intentional. They touched down, then buried themselves in the dust.
With her survey work completed, Kate bounded up an incline and sat on a plagioclase outcrop, waiting for Mary to finish up the mag lines. Twenty minutes later, she radioed, and they met at the scooter where she now lashed the coils to the machine’s cargo bin for the trip home.
“See anything weird out there?”
“It’s all neural to me. I have to get the raw data cleaned up before speculating. How about you?”
Kate helped secure the gear. She sensed there was something here, but with no heat signatures and little in the way of obvious physical anomalies, the shadow remained a mystery. “The GPR mapped out the same kind of structure we found in the tomographic image, but even with the higher resolution, it’s unclear.”
“Filtering should help, right?”
“Yes.” Then Kate asked, “How’s your tank? Still good?”
Mary flashed a thumbs up.
“Let’s get back to the habitat. You lead.”
Mary stepped up on her scooter, secured herself on the flight seat, and pushed hard on the power button. She lifted the machine a couple meters off the ground, hovered a moment, engaged the nacelles, and pulled around in a steep turn burning toward the lab.
Kate radioed, “I’ll take one more sweep. Standard comms procedures: channel open.” She maneuvered the scooter across the shadowy area and paused. No life. No heat. No nothing.
Who, or what, are you?
“Do you ever get the feeling we’re being watched?” Mary peered up from her number crunching with an inquisitive look on her young face and a hint of a mischievous smile. They sat beside each other at the main computer console, entering raw data from the surveys and initiating the filtering processes. Kate wondered what precipitated the question. In the short time they’d worked together in the lunar lab, she’d discovered that Mary always thought a few steps ahead, like a chess player. Reminded her of a kid she knew, Martin something, from her early Spacer days at the Training Center.
“Well yes. Part of my paranoia. But seriously, the lab’s monitored for safety reasons by New York. They don’t watch everything we do—we have some personal privacy—but the techs perform random visual inspections whenever they want, and if there’s a glitch in any of the systems.” She cocked her head to one side. “Why do you ask?”
Mary swung her body around. “I wasn’t talking about Titanius.”
“Ah, yes. The mystery ship, then.”
Her face lit up. “Think about it. Maybe there aren’t any life signs or other bio-markers because this isn’t a vessel at all.”
Kate loved the excitement in her voice, the unfettered scientific enquiry at work. The isolation of the lab posting, by her own choice, had dampened her curiosity toward the universe. Mary’s presence contrasted that with a fascinating perspective and intelligent questions that only a passionate, hungry mind could conceive. Was it possible she’d been self-isolated too long? Had she missed a beat? In her quest to be left alone, to disappear, perhaps she’d lost more than just social interaction.
Kate pulled away from her own data cleaning routine and gave Mary her full attention. “Tell me what’s rattling around in that head.”
Mary rose and paced in front of the console, working the problem out as she moved, rubbing her fingers together in her right hand. “I wonder, like, if there’s already bias in the data.”
“What do you mean?”
“Suppose we’re treating this thing not as it is, but what we think it is?”
Kate tightened her mouth.
“Remember your first reaction to it?”
“Yes, I figured it was the Rossian ship Jim and I saw on the computer at the Mount Sutro site. I still do.”
“Okay, but perhaps that’s because you expected to see it someday. You reasoned they were on their way to Earth. You assumed that what you heard with Dad on that tracking computer was real, and then when this shadow appeared, your mind joined the dots.”
Kate’s face flushed and she lowered her gaze. “So, what you’re saying is that because I predicted to find—or at least detect—an alien ship from Ross 128, I automatically concluded this was it when a more rigorous approach could have opened up other possibilities.” She raised her head again and sighed.
Mary sat back down. “Does that make sense? It’s not my intention to question our work, but we don’t want to miss or forget anything either.”
“No . . . no, I suppose we don’t.”
Katie
“Katie, did you remember your ID marker?”
“Yes, Daddy, it’s right . . .” she patted down her pockets. “Where is . . .” Panic set in and she looked at Harve Braddock, overwhelmed with guilt. He sat across from her in the hovercar with a warm smile and pulled the marker from his jacket.
“It was on the kitchen table.”
Katie sighed. “I guess I’m a little nervous about the Aptitudes.” The vehicle slid into the drop-off zone at the Testing Center and came to rest. An odd assortment of other ten-year-olds and their parents milled about the concrete entranceway. She recognized a few from her school.
“You’ll do fine, sweetie. Remember, if you don’t know an answer just move on to the next question. There’s no pass or fail.”
“Yeah.”
His hand brushed over her long, brown hair. Despite what her dad said, Katie understood these initial Aptitude Tests predicted what future school she’d go to, and the career she’d have. Some well-meaning teachers kept telling her class that the results were only indicators, not predictors, but she knew better.
All grown-ups were untrustworthy. Except her mom and dad.
Outside the testing hall, a friendly woman asked for her marker, and Katie handed it over. She scanned it and said without looking up, “Welcome to the Aptitudes, Kate.”
“I prefer Katie.”
She eyed her and looked at her dad. He shrugged.
“Okay, Katie, it says here your father is a nanotronics engineer and your mother is a mathematician.” Her smile widened. “You should
have fun today.”
Katie scrunched up her face. “She’s not a mathematician.”
“Hm?”
“She’s a logician who does math for government. There’s a difference.”
The woman leaned back in her chair. “Well, now . . . my mistake.” She punched some keys on the screen. Katie noted the brand of computer, a Smithworks, visualized its on-screen keyboard, and tried decoding the woman’s writing based on her finger movements. All she read was a Spacer Aptitude but didn’t know what that meant.
Katie relaxed and peeked into the massive hall. Black work stations peppered the white-tiled floor and seemed to go on forever in a checkerboard pattern, but unlike the great room at school, this one had no echoes. Baffles killed every sound in the place. Emily from her class sat in the third row and waved.
“Here’s your tablet, Katie. You can sit anywhere you like. The Aptitudes will begin shortly.”
She grabbed the device and was about to run off and join Emily when her dad stopped her, bent down, and held her shoulders. “I’ll pick you up when you’re finished, okay? Ping me when you’re done.” She pulled away. “Oh, one more thing . . . no, two more things.”
“What, Daddy?”
“Have fun with the tests.”
“And?”
“And your mother and I love you so much. We’ll be thinking of you all day.”
Katie kissed him on the cheek and strangle-hugged him around his neck.
“Bye!”
She never saw her father again.
Kate
“Lunar Gee Whiz Lab calling Kate Braddock . . . come in . . . over.”
“Hm? Oh, sorry. Just thinking about what you said. Perhaps my experience has colored what I’m seeing.”
Echoes In The Grey Page 2
