Voyager

by Carl Rackman

  The senior cabin manager was a very smiley blonde woman in her forties who introduced herself as Julie. Like many flight attendants of her generation, she was slim and taller than average, with an open, pretty face, understated make-up and fashionable hairstyle. She introduced the assembled crew members. All were impeccably smart and sporting at least a veneer of friendliness.

  After Matt introduced himself and the captain, he gave a quick talk through the flight mentioning areas of forecast turbulence, weather and flight time. The formalities complete, they left together for the security gate.

  Matt hung towards the back of the group and then feigned a last-minute diversion. “Chris, I just need to go to the loo, I’ll catch you up in security.”

  The captain nodded and continued towards the security portal.

  Matt detoured round to the quiet corridor behind the carrels. It held banks of long drawers containing the crew drop folders, organised by role, rank and surname.

  Matt quickly checked both ways and grabbed a charity leaflet from among the dozens on top of the bank of drawers. He took his passport from his inside pocket and wrapped it up in the leaflet. He checked up and down the corridor again before placing it into the drop folder of a colleague whom he knew was not working due to a recent knee operation.

  He breathed in, held it for a few seconds, and breathed slowly out again, allowing the sudden tension to dissipate.

  He walked easily to feign normality. It took immense self-control and no small degree of acting skills knowing the situation was anything but normal. Matt had received some good training. He knew the best way to act naturally was to be quiet. Most criminals and agents blew their cover trying to be too friendly or extrovert – they overcompensated in public, whereas most people kept to themselves.

  Matt gave the merest nod to the security staff as he swiped his ID. He waited for his turn at the baggage scanner. His suitcase had already been spirited away on robotic conveyors to the aircraft. Only his flight bag would be scanned. He was confident the tiny memory card would pass through the scanner unnoticed by the minimum wage private security staff who spent more time flirting and joshing with each other than watching the screens.

  Matt kept his body still while his bag, jacket and hat went through the machine. He consciously avoided the temptation to sneak a peek at the X-ray monitor.

  The other security guard, a short, rotund Asian woman, beckoned him through the detector arch.

  He slightly shuffled his shoes on the floor as he walked through to reduce the chances of them setting off the alarm.

  The alarm shrilled.

  Matt raised his hands involuntarily and shrugged.

  If it wasn’t a genuine alarm, it was one of the built-in random checks that all scanners made.

  He kept his body language fluid and breathed deeply to calm his heartbeat.

  The woman directed him to remove his shoes. He passed them back through to the maw of the scanner. As they passed through the machine, a male guard came over and frisked him.

  He was pronounced clean and proceeded to the end of the conveyor where his belongings were piling up. He caught sight of Captain Beddowes waiting for him by the security door leading directly into the terminal thoroughfare.

  Matt gave an apologetic shrug and raised his eyebrows.

  The captain reciprocated; it was an inconvenience, but they still had an hour to go before departure.

  Matt quickly packed everything into his jacket pockets and bag before replacing his hat. As he passed his arm through the shoulder strap of his bag, he unconsciously felt the seam and the card still tightly wedged inside. He knew he didn’t have to think about it again for the next eight and a half hours.

  “Always when you don’t need it, eh?” Chris sympathised.

  It was uncanny how no one ever seemed to pass through security unimpeded when they were late. One of the truisms of air travel.

  Matt pushed the release button on the wall. The automatic double doors swung open towards them revealing the vista of the terminal interior with all of its busyness.

  The huge windows opened the entire south side of the terminal building to the runway where aircraft queued nose to tail and side by side like metallic birds, their plumage the liveries of airlines from all over the world. Children stood with their hands and noses pressed against the glass drinking in the alien sight with unsuppressed glee.

  Matt and Chris turned from the door and strode off to the lifts that would take them down to the transit system – another robotic train only for passengers and their hand baggage.

  Once again, they attracted attention in their distinctive uniforms and caps. As they pressed deeper into the great halls of the terminal with their irresistible designer shops, they became just one of the countless moving figures coursing through the congested spaces, even as the steel-vaulted ceiling of the building towered high above them.

  Matt relaxed as he sank into the anonymity of the vast, busy airport. Let’s just get to Newark.

  Chapter Four

  Friday, 2nd September 2016

  Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Building 600

  Callie had the entire engineering team in the Mission Control Room. It was 1610, and she had been rushing around for the past five hours trying to marshal enough time on DSN to be able to download Voyager’s tape storage at short notice.

  As usual, the amazing Aussies over in Canberra had squeezed almost sixty hours of time over the weekend, juggled between the five operational dishes, in addition to Voyager’s thirty-two scheduled hours. It would be enough, but Callie had no more favours left for probably the balance of her NASA career.

  It was the good news with which she opened the meeting. The guys were none too pleased about coming in on a Friday afternoon, especially if it meant a full weekend of monitoring the telemetry and data download. But there the good news ended.

  “As yet, we don’t know the content of the tape. If it’s plasma data, we’re not going to look good. If it’s forty-eight images of blank outer space on visual, we’ll look worse. And if we find the camera has short-circuited the platform and drained the juice from the batteries, it’s the end of Voyager One and our program will be down to one wheezy probe – and that’s bad news for all of us.”

  She paused to look at the array of anxious faces hearing this news.

  “Jerry’s going to present the data we were able to obtain from yesterday’s telemetry. Morris has been up at Spaceflight Ops all day troubleshooting the comms. I’m looking for ideas tonight, guys. I’ll be in all weekend to receive the data. The download should be available by three a.m. Monday morning, so I need the visual processing unit back online by then.”

  There was a collective explosion of scepticism from the assembly. All eyes turned to the placid lead engineer on the last visual processing run – the sixty-four-year-old Leon Schlitzky, another old-school spaceflight veteran.

  He spoke directly, in the old school spaceflight engineer style to which Callie was now immune after so many years. “Callie, those machines were decommissioned twenty-five years ago! Nobody knows where they are, or even if they still exist!”

  Callie held up her hands as the mood in the room began to slide alarmingly towards derision. “Guys, I know this is sub-optimal—”

  Leon spoke up again. “It’s a lot worse than sub-optimal, Callie!”

  Callie raised her voice. “Gentlemen! Enough.” The room settled. “I want you to hear from Jerry and Morris first. Save your questions until the end of each presentation. Jerry?”

  She handed over to the tall, grey-haired flight controller. The others peered at the rumpled figure of the engineer. Some checked their watches. The afternoon sunlight angled through the blinds leaving golden stripes on the cheap carpet-tiled floor at Jerry’s feet as if he were mounting sunbeams to reach a celestial stage. It was certainly portentous.

  “Thanks, Callie.” Jerry shifted the clicker to his right hand. “Lights, please.”

  Callie flicked the swit
ches while Ortiz pulled the blinds.

  Jerry brought up slides of the telemetry results and compared them to the latest he had received that morning. He talked them through each parameter and flagged up the changes. It was dry stuff, but the spaceflight engineers lapped it up. Dry stuff was their thing.

  It took about half an hour, but the room was getting the picture by the end.

  “So you can see that at some point during the final moments of the last transmission, something was happening to Voyager One. There was a definite energy spike in the camera circuit. I believe from the data we have – and I stress we are obtaining another run late tonight, so I’ll be able to corroborate this – but the characteristics of the electrical signal to the module would suggest it was intentional,” declared Jerry.

  There was silence in the room. Callie stood up from the desk on which she was perched and brought the lights back up.

  “Any questions for Jerry?”

  Hands shot up. Callie pointed to a mission specialist. “Gordy?”

  “When you said ‘intentional’ did you mean it was commanded, or it originated in the probe itself?”

  Jerry glanced at Callie who nodded for him to answer. “It’s not theoretically possible for the probe to activate a system once we have deactivated it. But we’ve seen anomalous activity in the software before. We uploaded a small upgrade in June after the last data download. It’s possible that a glitch may have re-energised the camera circuit.”

  Another scientist spoke up. “Do we know if the imaging system was active at all?”

  “It may have been active for about five seconds, but we don’t know which module it was. It could have been the gimbals or the camera itself, or the recorder – I can’t say till tonight.”

  Another question, from a serious-looking flight specialist. “What does this mean? What’s really going on up there?”

  Jerry shrugged. “Well, that’s the million-dollar question. Voyager One has put something on tape. We need to find out what it was. If it’s a glitch, the project might have to be terminated if we can’t isolate it. The other possibility is that Voyager One’s camera has been reactivated intentionally. That gives us some other headaches, which I hope Morris will be able to evaluate.”

  Brymon was already on his feet. He switched the data stick in the laptop and took the clicker from Jerry.

  “Thanks, Jerry.” Brymon’s rich voice was not a great choice for late on a Friday. Some of the guys were already zoning out.

  Callie knew what he had to say would wake them up. She hit the lights again as Morris took the room.

  “Okay, ladies and gentlemen. I’ve been able to deeply analyse the signals to and from Voyager since the last downlink in June.”

  He brought up a slide that was even more impenetrable to the layperson than Jerry’s. It was a set of graphs filled with sine waves and other arcs and spikes of data. But the radio specialists saw it immediately; there was a collective intake of breath.

  “You saw it, right? This is the data set from the month of June. Specifically June seventeenth,” Morris added dryly. He used a laser pointer to draw attention to the graphs in question. “You see here? There’s the carrier wave, an X-band transmission, very low energy but discernible. That’s the standard telemetry signal. But you see here—” he switched to the next slide, which enlarged the graph “—there’s a secondary wave. That wave did not originate with us, but it’s piggy-backing our signal.”

  He turned to the rapt audience, a smile pulling the corners of his mouth before adding, “We only have fifteen seconds of that transmission, but it is that signal that makes this bad, ladies and gentlemen. It mimics our own command signal for manoeuvres and component activation, but it’s not our signal. That’s why Jerry couldn’t patch it over with the standard DSN feed.”

  The room was utterly silent. The traffic noise and air conditioning hum were the only sounds. It was one of those very awkward moments. Nobody wanted to ask the question. Eventually one of the younger software engineers tentatively put his hand up.

  “Yes, Andy?”

  “Is this signal definitely coming from Earth?”

  There was the usual chorus of groans and catcalls, but there was also a sense of relief that someone had broached the subject.

  Callie was relieved, too. Voyager’s mission, like the Mars missions, had been plagued with popular speculation around extraterrestrial encounters.

  The Golden Record stuff hadn’t helped. Against the original Program Manager’s advice NASA’s PR, urged on by the doyen of space exploration, Carl Sagan, had included a solid gold record and etched plaque on each Voyager probe. The records contained sounds and recordings of Earth, while the plaques showed human figures along with frequencies and co-ordinates to enable extraterrestrial intelligences to possibly find Earth one day. For most of the Program scientists, it was embarrassing, hokey nonsense. It was good to get this one out of the way.

  “The signal is anomalous, but it’s probable that the secondary signal originated right here on Earth. Not at JPL, but maybe someone is trying to hack or influence the mission in some way.”

  “So is it Russia or China?” asked Andy.

  There were some nervous laughs.

  “It’s way too early to say. First, we need to go through the spaceflight logs and cross-reference the probes with the signal to see what, if anything, changed as a result.”

  “In view of the implications, I am passing the details to JPL security. Do I need to remind you that this must be kept strictly confidential – VIM team only,” interjected Callie. “Something, or perhaps someone, is compromising the VIM. If it’s not external interference, it could point to a bigger internal problem. We have to work this, ladies and gentlemen.” She referred to her own bundle of notes. “Software. Pick the last June update apart and run it through the simulators again, paying attention to the imaging circuit. We need to find out if this is related.”

  The software guys wrote furiously on their pads as Callie continued.

  “Comms. Pick through this signal and see if DSN can isolate it from the feed. Cross-reference it with deep space signals that we know are transmitting from Earth. If we can ID the source of interference, we’re halfway there. Run it through the security office and get the NSA involved.”

  Brymon nodded and checked his watch. He had been in since the morning.

  Callie continued to bark orders. “Imaging. Leon, we need to get hold of those image decoders. By Monday. Find them!”

  Schlitzky’s shoulders sank as he saw his weekend immediately evaporate.

  “IT, we could do with some extra processing power for the comms analysis. Things should be quiet this weekend, so we ought to get some supercomputer time,” she continued further.

  The bookish IT guys, the youngest pair in the room by a few decades, nodded.

  “I suggest we all get some rest till tomorrow night. We’ll come back in tomorrow at twenty-one hundred hours. It’s going to be a busy weekend after that. And…listen up, guys!”

  Some were already packing up to go, like a class at the bell who hadn’t been officially dismissed.

  “Guys, I’m serious about this. Not a word to anyone outside VIM. This is Class A confidential. I don’t want any rumours getting out that could harm the program more than it is already. We’re not a sexy product right now, folks. Senior Review is coming up. We can’t let this jeopardise Voyager’s future,” she concluded.

  Callie watched the group rise wearily to their feet. She heard a few desultory comments about the disrupted weekend and that all her concern would likely be over nothing.

  She wanted to feel the same way, but the nagging sense wouldn’t leave her - this was something important.

  Chapter Five

  Saturday, 3rd September 2016

  Callie pulled up in the Woodbury lot at 7:30 p.m. The street lighting was beginning to overcome the glow of the sun, which had just dipped under the horizon and cast a deepening orange glow over the city.


  She swiped herself in and made her way down the hall, the lights in the corridor coming on automatically as she triggered the motion sensors by her passage.

  She unlocked the door to her office, let the lights flicker on and placed her bag down before placing her suit coat over the back of her chair. She was about to sit down when she saw a plain envelope tucked neatly under one corner of her keyboard. Her name was handwritten in black Sharpie pen on the front.

  Callie took the envelope and quickly turned it in her hands. It seemed perfectly normal. There was no other mark on the envelope. It had a self-sealing flap, neatly closed. She used her letter opener, a plastic-handled novelty from the JPL gift shop. The envelope contained just a single sheet of paper.

  Dr Woolf,

  Please accept my apologies for Voyager 1. Please do not be alarmed, it will be entirely unaffected by our intervention.

  Voyager’s eyes have been opened. But you will need to keep them closed. Much depends on your discretion, Dr Woolf.

  Kind regards,

  Josephson

  Callie rolled her eyes in mock despair. The team were constantly pranking each other with similar stunts. Her warnings from the day before must have come over as too intense, and someone had come up with a suitable, if irritating, riposte.

  Well, the joke was on them – she was effectively locking them in for the night. She screwed up the note and threw it in her wastebasket. The envelope was still useable, so she slid it into her stationery drawer.

  Once she had logged into the secure network, she saw that she already had about fifty new e-mails, even on a Saturday. As usual, most of them were circulars and memos about the JPL site, which were of little worth to Callie.

  Then one caught her eye, sent early that morning – 5:30 to be exact. The subject header was simply ‘Dr Carolyn Woolf’.