Harry reclined in the privacy of his cabin, letting the day’s tension ebb before he opened his thoughts to the ship. “Beagle, replay my last night with Mary for me. Start from when we left the dining table—from Herbert’s confusion when I started to clear the dishes.”
“As you wish, Harry. Do you wish to have sensory perception this time?”
“Yes, please.”
The hologram formed, transforming half of the cabin into the living room at Scrabo. Herbert, the android butler, fussed his way into the image, scolding as he gathered the dishes from the table just visible on the edge of the hologram.
In the hologram, Harry sat on the sofa in the living room, and Mary smiled invitingly as she leaned down and kissed him, her hair brushing against his cheek. Harry felt her sensuous lips on his, and his heart rate increased.
When he discovered how to get the AI to recreate specific memories as holographic videos, it soon became his favourite late-night indulgence when he was alone. It was not as good as being with Mary, but it was the next best thing. He felt a little guilty about it, as he was pretty sure Mary would not approve if she knew he did this, because if anyone walked in on him, they would be able to see the holographic video too, but he always locked the door—besides, he just couldn’t resist…
With the hologram Mary whispering in his audio nerves, he relaxed, enjoying the sensations of her touch on his arms, and then his chest, and then the delicious pressure as she sat on his lap. He relished the powerful sensations that surged through his body in response to the warmth of hers.
They wrapped their arms around each other and kissed deeply, and Mary repositioned herself on his lap. He drew in his breath as she straddled him, and she had just started to unlace her corset when the image distorted then stopped. The hologram vanished.
Harry sat up, breathing heavily as his heart rate slowed. He suddenly felt self-conscious, and had the distinct impression that he had been watched the entire time.
“Damn it!” he muttered, and glanced around with nervous tension. “Just as it was getting to the good part too. Damn, damn, damn.” When he collected his thoughts, it occurred to him that he might have a bigger problem than not being able to enjoy some virtual lovemaking with Mary.
“What just happened, Beagle?” he asked aloud.
“Someone attempted to access your memories, Harry. I detected interference, but since you have never given me permission to let anyone else access these memories, I shut down the program as a safety precaution.”
“Someone was watching Mary and me?” Harry demanded. “How the hell? Who was it? Bloody bastard! I’ll find him and make him pay for this intrusion!” Harry was fired up now. He had spoken very loudly to the ship, and was self-conscious again. He switched to internal dialogue in his thoughts. “Do you have a trace on who it was?” His mind raced, and he suddenly felt alarmed. “Did they manage to capture any of the video?”
“It is unlikely, though a part of the image might have been caught. It will not, however, be anything beyond the briefest glimpse.” The Beagle paused. “I do not have a complete trace. The source of the attempt is a mobile unit operated by one of the science teams. It does not use a normal direct interface with my system, but operates through another unit to disguise itself.”
“Is this the first time such an attempt has been made?”
“Negative, Harry. I have detected several such intrusions, though this is the first time it has been directed against your personal visual memories.”
Harry let that sink in. He felt almost nauseous as he considered the implications. “Then we have someone attempting to steal information or corrupt it, and I mean a bigger problem than my own personal fantasies, though that is troubling enough. Beagle, I need to know exactly what data has been accessed this way, and most importantly, I need to know who or what is doing it.”
“I will research this and provide the information without delay.”
“Thank you, Beagle.”
His pleasure now spoiled, Harry decided to take a cold shower to calm down. Eventually he turned the water to warm and let it stream down his body. He mentally berated himself for his lack of caution, exposing Mary to this intrusion as well as himself, but then his recrimination turned to anger again. How dare anyone intrude on my private thoughts! What were they really trying to do? Access my mind? Even worse, were they trying to get explicit video to use against me? But Mary is in that video too!
This was not good. He would have to report this to the Commander, a conversation he already dreaded, but first he needed to know what he was dealing with.
He prepared for bed, frustrated and concerned. He hated the thought that some creepy stalker had sullied his memory of his beloved Mary. Now, every time he remembered that sweet night, his thoughts would envisage the rude interruption, and the feeling of being watched, and of someone literally hacking into his thoughts. Damn it all, and it was such a perfect night too. She’d prepared a sumptuous meal for him, and flirted with him throughout dinner; she wore a short skirt, sexy high heels, and a cute little corset top that showed off her perfect body, something she would never wear in public, but this was for Harry’s eyes only. Then she climbed onto his lap and kissed him as he ran his hands through her long beautiful hair and down the curve of her back, and when she straddled him, she murmured how perfect he felt against her…
Damn—it was no use. It was ruined. After tossing in bed and trying to calm his thoughts enough to sleep, he threw the covers aside, got up, dressed, and made his way to one of the observatory domes, hoping to find a distraction.
Harry groaned inwardly when he saw Dr. Palmer waiting for him outside the survey office. He put on his polite face. “Something you need, Doctor?”
“Yes, yes, as a matter of fact there is.” The doctor attempted a friendly smile. It was so patently insincere that it made Harry’s skin crawl. “I was wondering if you had managed to get any clear images of the orphan planets you mentioned observing. My team would like to study them for any signs of habitation. You know the sort of thing—unnatural features, evidence of mining and so on.”
Harry nodded. “Certainly, Doctor. We do have some very clear images of the last two bodies we encountered. Our drones found no atmospheres and were able to get very high-resolution scans. Shall I forward them to your laboratory?” Harry keyed the entry code on the door to the office; it was a restricted compartment because of the sensitivity of the instrumentation and the work carried on inside. He politely blocked the doctor’s attempt to enter. “I shall ask my team to identify any others that may be of interest, and to forward those as well.” He smiled. “Now you must excuse me, sir. The Commander has asked me to fetch our star chart updates for this area, and the Captain is waiting for him.”
Frustrated, the doctor allowed himself a flash of annoyance. He’d fought his way to the top of his specialism, overcoming a number of personal and social hurdles to do so, and he wasn’t used to having his wishes denied. “Oh, very well. Send the material to my team, but I warn you: if there is any contact with any new races, or any suggestion that we might have encountered some new species, I have some very influential contacts and will take steps to prevent anything like what you did on Lycania from ever happening again.” His attempt at a dramatic exit was spoiled when he turned to discover that Regidur was standing directly behind him.
The big Canid stepped aside to allow the flustered doctor to pass. “That one will cause trouble,” Regidur growled to Harry.
Harry grimaced. “You are so right.” He turned to Sci’antha at her workstation. “Send the images we made and the maps of the last two orphan planets we scanned to Doctor Palmer, please. Hopefully that will give him something else to think about for a while.”
Stretched out on his bed, Harry made his usual prayers for his family and friends. As was his way, he’d spent an hour earlier in the evening writing letters to Mary, Ferghal, Danny, and Aunt Niamh. The ship’s AI played its latest selection of his favourite music in
his aural nerves as he pondered the mystery of the elusive entity that had disrupted his virtual lovemaking with Mary.
“I have a trace on the intruder, Harry.” The voice of the Beagle in his ears brought him instantly to full alert.
“Who is it? Where is he located?” Harry swung his feet off the bed and began pulling on his boots.
“I have not identified the person, but the source is a mobile personal unit currently in the laboratory used by the Alien Relations and Communications team.” The Beagle paused. “There are a number of active units there, though only one is currently engaged in attempting to access the data your team have gathered.
Harry pondered the various conversations and discussions he’d had that day. He’d spoken to the members of his team as the Commander had instructed, and received their assurance that they would speak to no one, but one or two had looked uncomfortable.
On impulse, he asked the ship, “Beagle, has Doctor Palmer or his team tried to access anything to do with the scans I made of our unidentified follower?”
“Yes, Harry. He attempted to make a connection to the data record for the optical scanners. I barred the attempt because the request did not comply with the protocols for their laboratory.”
Harry considered this. “Please block all further attempts unless the Captain orders otherwise. Make a record of all such attempts from any location other than that of my team, the Commander, or the Captain. He paused, thinking furiously. “And you had better monitor any attempt to use the hypercoms from that lab as well. Log the signal routing and the destination, please.”
“Should I bar such transmissions?”
The Beagle’s question made Harry grin. “That’s tempting, but I don’t have the authority to do so.”
He lay awake for a while longer, his thoughts drifting back to his home on the shoulder of Scrabo, the great lava up-thrust that marked the head of Strangford Lough in County Down. He’d left it as a twelve-year-old in 1800 and returned to find it much changed but still recognizable in 2204. Slowly, the music of the harp in his ears lulled him to sleep, and the ship, detecting this, faded out the music.
Dr. Greg Palmer slammed into his lab area still seething at the very obvious manner that damned upstart Heron had brushed him off. How dare that youngster treat him with such disdain? It reminded him sharply of how he’d been treated by his peers when he’d taken the first uncertain steps into alien languages and scripts.
He was in the mood to chew somebody out. “Hallam, how far are you with that installation I wanted? Have you managed to get access to the survey records system yet?”
Hallam glanced up then looked round guiltily. He dared not reveal the secret knowledge that he was sure he’d come close to accessing a private memory in Heron’s thoughts. He’d only had a glimpse of a very attractive young woman, but it was enough to make him determined to see more. “Not yet, Doctor,” he hedged. “I need to be careful, though—Lieutenant Heron has a lot of protective barriers installed.” Hallam prided himself on his hacking skills with AIs, but had discovered some real barriers with this one. “If I rush this, he’ll be all over it before I get anything useful.”
“I want access to whatever he’s hiding in there. And I want it now!”
Hallam watched the doctor stalk away then glanced at another member of the team. They shared a knowing look and shrugged their shoulders. Palmer was a difficult man to work for, but he got results, which looked good on a person’s CV. Hallam wondered if Palmer knew that his much-prized algorithm – the key to his success at unravelling alien languages – was someone else’s work. Probably not. The man was far too self-important to even consider anyone might have the same intelligence.
In this, Hallam and several others of the team were wrong. Greg Palmer was very aware of the challenge they posed to his pre-eminence in this field, and some already suspected the algorithm that he claimed credit for might not be his original work at all. It wasn’t, but the true origins of it were now well buried. Part of his resentment was fuelled by the knowledge that many of them were actually better at aspects of deciphering alien languages than their erstwhile leader.
Beckoning to another member of the team, Palmer demanded, “Is that hyperlink set up? I will have a message for transmission later.” To the others, he barked, “Heron will be forwarding some information. As soon as you get it, I want you to go over it in detail. Look for traces of anything redacted or altered. I don’t trust him, and I think he’s hiding information from us.”
Chapter 2
Traces
The planet currently under survey, humorously dubbed Vogon by the geologists, showed that it had suffered a catastrophic event at some point in the past. Dr Klonowski had explained the joke to Harry, telling him it was a reference to a twentieth-century sci-fi story called A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. When he understood the gist of who the Vogons were, he enjoyed the sheer silliness of the joke, especially that the answer to the big question in the story was ‘forty-two’ without any explanation.
On the side of the planet facing the dying star—a malevolent glowing cinder at the centre of the system—the surface appeared partially melted. The face away from the star was distorted and twisted into fantastic fissures, massive plateaus, and tortured surfaces. The planet had even lost its globular shape and now had an irregular appearance. It registered no atmosphere at all.
Dr. Julia Hardacre studied the distorted surface on her screen. “Interesting—the disruption on this hemisphere looks almost as if the planet took a massive impact, yet the other side shows the surface layers stripped away, exposing the solidified inner core. This will mean a revision of a few theories.”
“Hmm.” Her companion stared intently at the screen. “It looks as if it was caught by the full force of a massive solar flare, almost as if the surface was vaporised, but there must have been a complete distortion of the entire planetary form. The other side looks as if it was shattered by the transfer of the impact forces through the core.” He looked up. “Its appearance is more like what I would expect to see on a world that has collided with another large body.”
Julia nodded. “There’s nothing like this on any of the other bodies we’ve studied, and none of the inner planets show the same damage. See if we can make any sense out of the far side.”
At a separate set of screens, Harry watched as his TechRate manoeuvred a scanning drone closer to the surface on the dark side of the planet. Now the disruption was obvious. Great slabs of rocky crust thrust upward and lay in piles at crazy angles to one another. The layers of the rock strata were discernible with the enhanced imaging. The planet’s end must have been swift and violent.
A sharp exclamation on the other side of the compartment drew his attention. “What’s that? That can’t be natural; it’s far too symmetrical.”
“Show me their screen please, Beagle.” Harry studied the image of the surface and could just make out something that appeared to be the entrance to a tunnel. “Enhance the image, please.” The image sharpened, and on his command, it zoomed closer. The science team were clearly excited.
“It has to be artificial. It’s far too regular to be natural,” exclaimed a member of the geological team. “Do you think the Captain will allow a landing?”
Harry smiled. “I’ll put in the request. I must admit that my curiosity is piqued.”
Stepping from the surveyor lander, Harry stood aside as the scientists joined him. The gravity exerted by the planet was less than he’d expected for such a large body. He had not yet set foot on Mars, but he had been on the surface of the Earth’s moon and on the smaller of the moons orbiting Pangaea. This planet seemed to be exerting a stronger pull than Earth’s moon, but not by much.
The tall figure of Dr. Roberta Klonowski joined him. “How far is it to the feature?”
“Not far.” Harry pointed. “If we move to that position, we should be directly in sight of it. If we need to get closer, we will have to use the lift packs.”
; “Then let’s get to it.” She gestured to her team. “Okay, everyone, get samples of everything exposed.”
As he led the way up a short slope, Harry noticed that the surface was covered with a mix of powdery dust and small bits of stone. When he reached the top of the rise, he stopped. Plummeting before them was a deep fissure in the landscape. On the other side, a wall of rock soared high above the barren landscape, its shattered surface exposing stratified rock of different shades and textures. The bottom of the fissure was in total darkness.
“We don’t have a probe to reach the bottom,” Harry remarked to Roberta, his eyes on the circular opening in the rock face opposite them. “We can certainly reach that opening with the lift packs, but we will not be able to go very far into it.”
“I agree, but I think we need to take one of the technicians with us. I want some samples from the inner surface, preferably from about a hundred metres in, and video of what it looks like inside.”
“Why that deep?”
“Hopefully it will have been less affected than anywhere near the separation point.” Roberta paused. “I wonder if we can see the opening on this side from over there?”
Harry visually gauged the depth from the top of the cliff opposite to the opening. “I expect so. The depth appears to be quite large.”
A technician from the science team joined them, and Harry checked the suit packs and controls.
“Right. There’s no atmosphere, and the gravity is low, so we’ll take it slow and gentle.” He laughed at a sudden recollection. “On Lycania I had to tow my friend Rasmus. I hope that’s not necessary this time.”
The transit across the fissure was quick. After landing inside the cavern—Harry refused to think of it as a tunnel until someone proved it—they switched on the lights built into their suits. The cave walls had a smooth polished look, and swept away into the depths in a direct line.
“It can’t be natural,” breathed Dr. Klonowski. “It has to be artificial—but who, or what, made it?”
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