Aliens - The Truth is Coming (Book of Aliens 1)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Professor Frost was waiting for them, sheltering from the sharp breeze in the lee of the sculpture, shoulders hunched inside the fur-lined jacket he wore. A younger man than his title suggested, he nonetheless conformed to several of the stereotypes associated with academia, pale-faced, balding and a little unkempt. Large sunglasses balanced halfway down his long, thin nose, gave him a half-alien appearance to match his surroundings. Fahim pulled his own coat tight as he climbed from the car, relieved to feel his feet on solid ground once more. Ortega glanced up once at the sculpture and shivered, muttering a Spanish expletive that was stolen away by the wind.

  “Doctor Barad,” Frost called, walking forward with his hand outstretched. “It's good to meet you in person.”

  Fahim shook his hand. “Likewise, Professor. To tell you the truth, I'm embarrassed that I've not been up here since your equipment went online – after all, I've been assigned here for over six months now.”

  Ortega grunted. “Looking at too many of those statues, if you ask me. Maria Ortega, Professor.”

  “Just Brian, please. Or Frosty. We don't stand too much on ceremony up here. And – for the record – Doctor Sharpe wasn't one for coming up here either. We didn't hold it against him though,” Frost added with a smile.

  Fahim nodded. “Brian it is, then.” The wind turned suddenly and blew dust into his face. “Perhaps we should go inside?”

  Frost hesitated. “Oh, yes. Of course – a good idea. Please, follow me. I've got Scipius set up for you over in the main dome, but we can pass by the commissary first if you want.”

  “Coffee would be good,” Ortega agreed.

  ***

  The coffee was, predictably, awful. Standard Corporation brand, poorly roasted and served at a temperature guaranteed to scald. Fahim sipped politely at his but made certain to leave it in the commissary when they moved on. The housekeeping mechs approached the table in slowly-decreasing circles, like predators stalking unwary prey.

  “Exactly how long has Scipius been operational now?” Fahim asked as they took the facility's spinal corridor towards the observation dome.

  “Five months and three days,” Frost replied. He waved with the foil-wrapped fruit bar he now carried in the general direction of Myers City and the spaceport. “The Corporation kept losing our crates, so we ended up about six months behind schedule. But the wait has been more than worth it. The reception here is almost crystal clear. When we finally pick up the old transmissions from Earth, the sound quality will be absolutely incredible. The data we've sent back so far has more than paid for the investment that the Partnership made.”

  Long-term planning, Fahim thought. Everything the Corporation did was long-term, and now other companies followed suit. Planetary engineering was a science where processes were measured in centuries: atmospheric terraforming, followed by ecopoiesis, and then by the more visible – and viral – process of colonisation. Humanity was learning to change its terms of reference, to think in the future.

  “You've had more success than we have then,” Ortega observed, and Frost glanced over his shoulder at her in surprise.

  “How so?”

  Fahim cut in before Ortega could answer. “The Contact and Archaeological Society has been on Myers Station since the Corporation first signed contracts on the planet. We've been trying to understand the significance of those alien sculptures ever since. Like yours, it seems to be a very long-term project, Professor.” Ortega nodded in long-suffering agreement, and Fahim allowed himself a wry smile. “We haven't made much headway, I'm afraid. Doctor Sharpe told me that his experiences here were very dispiriting.”

  Despite the arguments there was one important issue, Fahim knew, that was never mentioned at all. It hung like an albatross over everything that the CAS did, over every project and investigation, but to speak of it – to even allude to it – was to invite ostracism and an immediate re-posting elsewhere in the sector.

  The very presence of the sculptures themselves was reminder enough of the controversy. The fact that this had not always been an empty world; it had once been home to another intelligent species. Now mankind had come, as a jackdaw, to claim that home for itself. Some parts of the CAS, Fahim knew too well, were not entirely comfortable with that.

  Frost shrugged expressively. “Well, they fox the hell out of me,” he said. “You ever tried walking past one of them at night? When the wind is up? Enough to give anybody the jitters. What do you think they're all about then?”

  “My own opinion?”

  Frost nodded, and Fahim paused to order his thoughts. It struck him that the professor and his colleagues had probably not involved themselves very much in the developing world outside the observatory – in fact he would be surprised if they had been down to Myers City more than once or twice in the last year. Certainly, up here in the hills, they had risen above the debates he still had to negotiate every day. Funny how quickly communities cluster together and then fracture, even on new worlds such as this.

  “I think,” he said slowly, “that they show how absolutely different and inimical this alien civilisation must have been to our own. If they have any purpose at all, it must be far beyond our reckoning – we can't even see that they had any kind of written language.”

  Ortega shook her head. “They are like graffiti, Brian. I believe that they say nothing more than 'We were here'. They are fossils.”

  “Like me,” Fahim commented, smiling his self-deprecation. “It has only been six months, but I feel I have been here so long that I could root myself to the ground as they have and spend my days whistling in the wind.”

  Frost blinked uncertainly and his gaze flicked between the two archaeologists. “Yeah, this place... it does something to you, doesn't it?” He shook himself visibly. “And, well – if they give you the shivers, then you should hear what we've had to listen to for the last few days.”

  ***

  The control room in the dome was lined with displays and tracking instruments, all monitored remotely from one station at a central desk by a pair of technicians. Fahim waited patiently while enough chairs were brought up to seat them all, content to look around at the pristine, slumbering equipment. The telescope was in the downtime segment of its cycle, marking time until nightfall. A few tiny maintenance mechs moved overhead, cleaning the component parts of the Scipius telescope with barely audible hisses of compressed air.

  “Impressive,” he said. “You look on the universe at the exact opposite end of the scale to the CAS. Your telescopes to our microscopes.”

  Frost seemed pleased. “Thank you,” he said.

  Ortega gestured to the readouts before them. “So what are we looking at here? Some kind of radio wave?”

  The Professor nodded firmly. “Amongst other things, yes. It appears to be emitting from the surface of the moon, broadcasting across a wide range of frequencies with differing modulations and tones. Some even seem to be pure data streams. This is the clearest signal. We spotted this the other night during a routine equipment work-up, but when we lost the signal we thought it might have been random scatter from something in orbit. Until the moon came up again the following night. That was one of those smack-your-head moments,” he smiled.

  Fahim peered down at the screen, which was replaying a recording of the signal. It was made up of several discrete frequencies, all oscillating around a base tone. “It repeats every ... thirty seconds or so?”

  “Thirty-one point two four,” Frost confirmed, a note of surprise in his voice. “You spotted that remarkably quickly.”

  Fahim shrugged. “An interesting pattern. Quite strange, but I'm certain I've seen something like it before. Maria?”

  She leaned between the technicians and Fahim suppressed a smile as he watched the men shift in their seats. No need to lean forward in quite such a way... A quick glance confirmed that Ortega's movements appeared to have the same effect on the professor as well. It was deliberate, Fahim knew: another by-product o
f Maria's impatience and frustration with the glacial progress of the CAS investigations. Something she had quickly found had no effect on Fahim at all.

  “It looks like static to me,” she said after a few moments of furrowed thought. “Is there a visual element to the signal?”

  Frost smiled. “This is the visual element. Here – this is the rest of it.” He reached down to flick a switch.

  Speakers on the side of the panel came to life, and Fahim winced. The sound was raw, like an undulating scream of metal sheets. Elemental voices caught and distorted through vast distances. It was a sound akin to a tornado, he decided, but only in the same way that the sun itself was akin to a flashlight.

  Frost let the sound play for a few moments more and then cut the circuit with a visible shiver, his smile now wan and apologetic. “Not the most calming thing I ever heard,” he said. “We've found we can't actually listen to it any more – makes every single one of us so uncomfortable that we can't focus on what we're supposed to be doing.”

  “I'm not surprised,” Fahim said.

  “It's not static though,” Frost said. “Nor is it naturally occurring – it's not stellar radiation, in other words. The repetition is too precise and regular for it to be anything other than a transmission directed toward the planet.”

  Fahim stared at him sharply. “Directed?”

  “Yep,” the professor said. “Definitely. We verified that with the help of the Corbulo, up in orbit. And there's a fair degree of power behind it too, as far as we can tell.”

  Fahim stared down at the screen once more. An alien transmission... communication from another species... all he had ever wished for.

  “So you wanted our opinion on it before you sent it upwards to CAS on Earth?” Ortega asked.

  Frost nodded. “That and – well, it seemed the courteous thing to do, rather than go straight over your heads.”

  Not so isolated after all, Fahim thought. “Thank you for your generosity,” he murmured, still somewhat distracted by the signal that flowed across the screen. “There are other mysteries, you say?”

  “Not least of which is what the hell it actually says,” Ortega observed. “If you're going to say something on a continuous thirty-second loop, it must be something damned important.”

  “Well, besides that,” Frost agreed. “The other thing is, as I said, that we found this signal two days ago, searching through a quadrant of the sky we had already catalogued immediately after Scipius came online. It wasn't there then, we're absolutely certain of that.”

  There was something about the shape and the flow of the signal, Fahim thought. The way it veered sharply up and down, frequency tones merging and looping outwards... like an optical illusion, there was meaning hidden inside it. “Is it intended for us then?”

  Frost shrugged. “Who knows? We thought you might be able to do something with it.”

  “In time, perhaps,” Fahim said. “But with no terms of reference, and no hope of conversation to set in place a vocabulary? It’s like piecing together a jigsaw in the dark, I'm afraid.”

  “Can you give us a recording of this?” Ortega asked.

  “By all means. I can run one up for you right now.”

  Fahim stood back from the table. “Good. At least we can make a start on it. One more impossible task to add to everything else, perhaps, but this should keep you busy, Maria. You'll have to organise a trip up to that moon: see what's making this noise.”

  She made a sour face. “Well, it'll make a change from endless monolithic sculptures.”

  ***

  To Ortega's surprise – and clear delight – Fahim left her to supervise the new investigation into the transmissions from the lunar surface. She was less happy to find that the signal emanated from yet another monolith. This one looked very different to the planet-bound versions, the lines harder and more clearly delineated, all flat planes and sharp edges. Ortega's survey team left it in place rather than run the risk of interrupting the transmissions by moving it, but they brought back enough raw data and flaked samples to establish that the thing was not made of any known element.

  After that, Fahim faded quietly into the background. Organising resources and liaising with CAS Head Office would keep Ortega busy enough that Fahim could continue his own research more or less uninterrupted: the Scipius transmissions had reinvigorated him and awakened him from what he thought had been a five-year-long sleep.

  His career had been in a gentle freefall ever since the sudden end of his tenure as project leader on Halfmoon. Not that any of that was my fault. Just because I refused to give up my headcount – that was still an important dig, regardless of what the CAS thought. On reflection, he could have approached the situation somewhat less aggressively, but it was all water under the bridge now. His anger had diminished – eroded with time and distance, until only a directionless frustration remained. He had come to Myers with no real enthusiasm, only to have his curiosity aroused by the planet's collection of near-identical sculptures. And now these transmissions too...

  He felt a small pang of guilt at abandoning such a major project to his junior staff, but that soon passed when he reminded himself that this was, as it always had been, a long game. There was no such thing as a quick gain. The monuments left on Myers were still just as important as the transmissions from the planet's moon.

  He returned to the records that the CAS had compiled over the intervening years. He re-examined pictures of the sculptures in minute detail, comparing angles and sets of measurements, searching for links between them. After that he spent eight painstaking days constructing perfect computer models of them, and then another ten days subjecting them to every statistical analysis he could think of.

  There had to be something – he refused to believe otherwise.

  On the positive side, his seclusion meant that he missed the sudden flurry of activity as news of the transmissions rippled outwards across space and all eyes turned toward Myers. Journalists arrived by the shuttle-load, and the Corporation even sent two board members to visit the observatory. The arrival of the Corporation's flagship Belisarius was a newsworthy event in itself – although it was a sight Fahim himself had seen too often for his own liking. He saw Professor Frost's perpetually alarmed face on news shows almost every time he turned around. But, barring a few intrusions at the height of the frenzy, Fahim was left well alone, as suited him best.

  There was something just beyond his reach. He felt several times that understanding was only a step away, only to wake the following day dogged by frustration, unable to find the way forward. He was drawn again and again to a hole in the middle of the sculptures, undulating through from one side to the other, exactly the same in every example: that was the key, he decided. If he could decode the meaning of that, at least, the rest would surely follow.

  Satisfied that he now had a direction at last, Fahim allowed himself to return to the world.

  A fine lunch at the Minerva with two directors of the newly-founded city college was interrupted by Ortega's rushed arrival. Fahim Barad set his plate aside with a resigned sigh and excused himself from the table.

  “You've got a good reason for this?”

  Ortega looked impatient as usual, but this time Fahim could sense the excitement radiating from her. “Frosty called a few minutes ago – there's a change in the signal.”

  “Frosty?” He raised an eyebrow.

  “Professor Frost,” Ortega corrected herself. “Anyway – he's got new data for us.”

  “Is it urgent? Can it wait until the end of the meal?” The question was pointless; Maria was quite incapable of waiting. Besides, he was interested – new data could change everything they knew.

  Ortega shrugged. “I've got nothing else to do.”

  Fahim smiled at her. “In that case I'm sure you won't mind if I drive this time.”

  ***

  With the observatory's raised profile had come more traffic, Fahim noted, taking care
not to scrape the bodywork of the sleek, upgraded models that now filled the lot. Brian Frost waited for them, as he had before, in the lee of the sculpture in the parking lot, shuffling from foot to foot while they found a slot and plugged the car into a charger.

  Once again there was a lively breeze, whipping dust across the lot and whistling through the alien artefact. Fahim drew his coat closed and wished he had thought to bring his hat.

  “Professor,” he called in greeting. “Interesting times, eh?”

  Frost grinned widely. He seemed to have gained confidence in the intervening months, Fahim decided. Intense scrutiny from the media of all the settled worlds could have that effect. “Not half. I can't say I'm looking forward to having to do it all again, mind.”

  “Perhaps that all depends on what this new data suggests,” Fahim said.

  “Let's go find out then – this wind's not helping my mood,” Ortega muttered darkly.

  ***

  There were new control panels and repeaters inside the main dome now, and the Scipius equipment was undergoing an extensive upgrade from what Fahim could make out. He saw that the technicians had prepared a separate control unit for them, with refreshments – coffee and biscuits – on a small table to one side. Clearly Ortega's working relationship with the observatory had borne fruit since Fahim had last been up here.

  Frost played with the controls and set up a loop of the previous signal; mercifully he left the audio channels muted. “Okay, so this is what we had last time. Signal One. Whatever it says.”

  “Still nothing on that front, by the way,” Ortega commented.

  Fahim nodded slowly. Despite the distance he had maintained, he had still monitored her team's progress reports. Looking at the recording as it looped through on the screen before him, however, he thought he could see something...

  “And late yesterday evening, it stopped broadcasting,” Frost said. “Scipius has been trained exclusively on this signal since we first contacted you. When we lost the signal we ran our usual diagnostic scans and started up the reserve 'scope, but we couldn't spot a thing. Then, just over an hour later, Scipius found the signal again. Or, at least, we thought it had.”