A group of four technicians worked around the large crystalline fragment, which took up better than half the large room. Two worked up close with delicate instruments, and another pair on consoles monitoring its signal pulses. Randall Williams walked along its side, one hand trailing over the smooth emerald facets and occasionally lingering on the new fracture growths.
He nodded a greeting to Lieutenant Theresa Dupras, assigned as his direct aide once again and the scientist in charge of this particular experiment. She made room at her console, its screen dedicated to a baseline trace over which the pulse would strobe like some alien heartbeat.
“Okay, everyone.” Williams waved their attention toward the formation. “We’re going to vary the top-end amplitude of a frequency-modulated carrier wave and see what that does to the crystals’ output. Let’s try and find the regenerative signal feedback this time.” He nodded once to Dupras. “Give me a signal.”
And then Major Randall Williams began to wrestle with a new problem, losing himself in the challenge.
* * *
The nanite cores sensed a nearby varying signal. Strong magnitude. The modulation suggested intelligence rather than background noise—an intelligence technologically advanced enough to be manipulating energy for the purpose of communication, power, or weaponry. It was what the probe was designed to recognize, and call attention to.
The incoming energy patterns were re-formed to elevate the power of the signal pulse already in progress. The strengthened signal radiated out from the crystals, to be sampled and recorded by the Union scientists’ equipment. It passed through walls and out over the surface of the moon, above the Tycho Crater Base. Passing up through the thin atmosphere cost it less than three seconds and a small measure of strength as a portion of the signal reflected back off the moon’s thin ionosphere. Then the signal was freed into the Maelstrom.
It reached and passed by the Earth. Stations Independence and Freedom might have detected it except for the repairs still to be made on their electronics capabilities. A Neo-Soviet ground-based installation did detect the ultrahigh-frequency pulses, but as the invariable signals seemed to convey no actual intelligence, the event was labeled one of several thousand anomalies.
Beyond the Earth, the signal found little except vacuum and minor debris for some time. The icy blue nebula eventually fell into its wake, as did a few of the planets that could be seen decorating Earth’s night skies in place of stars. The signal passed through the space recently inhabited by a large portion of a long-dead planetoid, and it would pass by that same island ninety-three million kilometers later where it had temporarily fused into the surface of an airless planet. Asteroid belts. Rogue suns. Derelict spacecraft. World after world.
The beacon swept the alien sky of the Maelstrom, always searching.
About the Author
Loren Coleman
His previous novels were all set in the BattleTech® universe. He has also written game fiction and source material for such companies as FASA, TSR, and Wizards of the Coast.
Loren currently resides in Washington State with his wife, Heather Joy, two sons, Talon LaRon and Connery Rhys Monroe, and a new daughter, Alexia Joy. He works in the company of three Siamese cats.
VOR 01 Into the Maelstrom Page 27