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by Mike A. Lancaster

  “It was strictly a symbolic event, to show that we could do it,” explained Donald Campbell, Cornell University professor of astronomy, who was a research associate at the Arecibo Observatory at the time the message was sent. The signal was nothing more than a demonstration that such messages were possible, and it was aimed at a group of stars named the Great Cluster in Hercules, Messier 13, a destination that it will not reach for 25,000 years.

  The Pabody/Reich radio telescope has been a part of the SETI program since the start of the year, when Dr. Bell—daughter of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Professor Maurice Bell—secured independent funding for a fresh attempt at scouring the heavens for signs of alien life; an ambition that seemed to have been fulfilled last night when Bell, herself, picked up a weak transmission from space that triggered a global attempt to understand the message, and to confirm her findings.

  Within two hours, however, it became quite obvious that this was not a case of ET trying to phone home. Detailed analysis showed that the signal had been a radio telescopic artifact: a kind of digital hallucination caused by the feedback, and misinterpretation, of data.

  By then, Dr. Bell had already contacted observatories across the world, and cabinet sources say that the prime minister was notified, and may even have been preparing a speech to announce the news that we are not alone in the universe. Dr. Bell should be relieved that the embarrassment of such an announcement was avoided.

  Story continues page 4

  Ani looked at Gretchen, who stared back with a baffled expression on her face.

  “Messages from space? I think we can safely say that both our days got just a little bit weirder.”

  Ani couldn’t think of a thing to say in reply and just stared at the screen, feeling like things got a tiny bit clearer, but a whole lot more terrifying.

  CHAPTER TEN: X-CORE

  Joe had thought that when the flyer had said “Brixton Warhouse” that it was a misprint; that someone had simply forgotten an “e” from the word warehouse, but it turned out it was actually the name of the venue.

  He found it easily enough; it was set back from the Brixton Road between a Caribbean grocery store and a dry cleaner’s, but there were still a few hours to go before the show and the place was locked tight and deserted.

  Joe circled the building to make sure, found a homeless guy and his dog but no way in, then walked a couple of hundred yards down Brixton Road and found somewhere to drink coffee and think things through.

  A kid on the other side of the street gave him a weird look, but Joe didn’t rise to the bait and refused to meet his eye.

  The Costa/Starbucks coin flip came up “Costa” and Joe stood in line, paid twice what a coffee should cost, then waited while a barista fussed over his cup.

  Overfussed with it, Joe thought, wondering when it was that coffee turned into such a fetishized ritual. Why did a simple drink require so much gleaming chrome, so many manly handles and valves? When had coffee become machismo in a cup?

  Finally the man brought over his vanilla latte, and Joe took it with a muttered “thanks” and sat down at a table.

  He’d been in a few too many coffee shops recently where the drink had been spelled latté, and it made Joe as mad as he got over those shop signs that put an idiot apostrophe into plurals—carrot’s; DVD’s; biscuit’s. Joe thought that people with a poor grasp of grammar should never be put in charge of writing signs. Ditto people who put pretentious diacritic accents onto words like latte.

  It was at that precise moment, when he found himself railing against coffee and grammatical errors that hadn’t even occurred, that Joe realized he’d been spending far too long on his own.

  It wasn’t healthy.

  If Andy had been around when he’d seen the latté signs, they’d have made a joke about it; they’d have rolled their eyes and felt superior about it for a while, and then it would have been forgotten.

  Joe realized that he had started to dwell on things: tedious, tiny, petty things that he should just be letting go. Without the pressure valve of a friend, Joe could feel his control slipping.

  He couldn’t afford to slip.

  Joe decided that the very next time he saw Abernathy he was going to ask for a new partner. It wouldn’t be an insult to Andy’s memory. It was just something that he needed to do for his own sanity. Being alone didn’t suit him.

  He drank half the latte, then left the coffee shop.

  His step felt light and free as he made his way down the street with purpose and determination.

  Joe sensed trouble two seconds before it arrived: his chip-enhanced senses ringing with an alarm bell that gave him enough warning that he wasn’t caught totally off guard. He turned and ducked, knowing how stupid it would look if it was a false alarm, but prepared to take the chance.

  The baseball bat swished by his head only inches away and Joe spun around and came up under its arc. It had been a poor swing, more Pee Wee league than World Series, but pretty much what you’d expect in a country that didn’t actually play baseball. He slammed his shoulder into his attacker’s midriff and the guy took a couple of steps back. It gave Joe time to clock the face behind the attack: the kid he’d seen over the road just before going into Costa, with a couple of friends in tow.

  As he swept toward the baseball bat kid’s ankles with his right foot, Joe realized that he could easily have prevented this if he’d been less wrapped up in his own thoughts.

  The kid’s name was Lou Brakespeare, and he was a petty criminal that Joe had run up against over a year ago during an operation to infiltrate a gang that had been stealing high-performance cars to order. Lou had been low down on the food chain—just a grease monkey in one of the chop shops the gang used—but Joe and Andy had targeted him and a couple of his mechanic friends, charmed their way into their circle, and had started to work on Lou, whom they’d identified as the weakest link in the operation’s chain.

  Poor, hapless Lou had ended up vouching for Joe and Andy, getting them inside the gang and leading to the downfall of the whole crew.

  Joe hadn’t thought he’d ever see him again.

  That was the thing about going undercover.

  You made friends with people, socialized with them, spent time with them, and then—after the bust, after that peculiar endgame of the investigation, arrest—you dropped them in it and left. You changed your identity and moved on to the next case. Within a week they were forgotten. By the end of a year, you needed a pretty good reason to remember them.

  Like someone suddenly swinging a baseball bat at your head.

  Joe could have switched to his chip to help manage the fight—his eidetic reflexes settings would certainly guarantee a swift resolution to this confrontation—but he felt that he needed a little field exercise, and to let off a little steam, so he went in without augmentation. His foot smashed into both ankles and Lou’s weight shifted very unevenly. Feet together was never a good attack position, and Lou had just found out why. Spread your feet and you’re balanced. Bend your knees and you’ve got yourself a pair of shock absorbers. Stand up straight with your feet together, and you’ve just made yourself a whole lot less stable.

  Ask any lumberjack: hit a tree near its base with an axe and eventually: TIMBER!

  Lou was unstable.

  He wheeled off to the left and Joe followed closely, looking only at Lou’s right hand because it was the hand that was holding the bat. His friends were still a couple of seconds away from reacting in any kind of meaningful way, so Joe quickly grabbed Lou’s right wrist in his left hand—vise-tight—then yanked it forward, abruptly, to unbalance him even more. Joe held onto the wrist, making sure Lou’s arm was straight and under tension, then delivered a single, hard blow with the heel of his right palm into the middle of Lou’s forearm.

  He dropped the bat and made a thin reedy sound so Joe went behind him, still holding the wrist, and brought Lou’s arm up behind his back. Any move that Lou made was liable to break his own arm, so he lapsed
into swearing and cursing, but stopped fighting.

  Joe put his foot on the baseball bat and looked around.

  The other two guys seemed undecided. This wasn’t their fight, but Lou was a friend, so Joe could see the conflict in their faces. What they wanted to do was run away, Joe was pretty sure. They’d gone along with Lou when he had a bat, a plan, some adrenaline, and something that passed as dignity to uphold. But they’d watched as he shed all those things in a little over five seconds and now they needed a reason to retreat without losing face.

  They’d be gone already if there were a way to do it without Lou thinking less of them.

  “Tell them it’s not worth it,” Joe growled low in Lou’s ear. “Tell them to stand down.”

  “No way …” Lou began, but Joe steered him away from any negativity by twisting his wrist and pushing it up toward his shoulder blades.

  Lou’s defiance turned into a sustained uhhhhhhh and Joe maintained the tension on the arm, but pressed it no further.

  “One more chance,” Joe said. “Forget pride. Forget revenge. Tell your friends to walk away or I will break your arm, and I will make sure that it will never work again. Not properly. Not without pain. You’ll curse me every time you try to tie your shoelaces or pick up a PlayStation controller. You’ll remember this moment when you could have ended it before I was forced to use extreme measures, and every time you’ll curse yourself for letting pride overtake reason. Your choice, though.”

  Predictably, Lou Brakespeare chose his arm over his pride.

  “He’s not worth it,” Lou said, his voice bent out of shape by pain and shame. As far as back-downs came, it was hardly original, but it gave his friends an out.

  “Scram,” Joe told them. “When you’re out of sight I’ll let him go.”

  The pair looked at Lou for advice and he nodded.

  They turned and hurried away.

  Joe released Lou’s arm and pointed after them.

  “Don’t look back,” Joe told him.

  Lou scuttled off.

  A few people on the street had stopped to watch the whole encounter and looked like they didn’t know whether to laugh, cheer, or phone the police.

  Joe just shrugged, picked up the bat, and dumped it in the nearest trash can.

  “Sounded interesting,” someone said, and it sounded just like Abernathy.

  Joe spun round expecting to see the man standing behind him, but there was no one there. He looked around. Still no one. He was beginning to think he’d imagined it, but then a thought struck him.

  It hadn’t actually sounded like Abernathy was behind him.

  It had sounded like Abernathy was much, much closer than that.

  “Surprise!” Abernathy said, and this time Joe knew that the man was in his office in Whitehall, probably laughing like a school kid at a teacher saying a bad word.

  “The firewall upgrade,” Joe said wearily. “Couldn’t you have told me that I was now a walking bug?”

  “What? And spoil the fun?” Abernathy chuckled. “How am I coming through?”

  “Loud and bloody clear. You spies and your toys. So, what, I’m wired for sound now?”

  “Indeed. We finally ironed out the wrinkles in the software. Now if you hear it, we hear it. Plus we get to chat like this. Pretty good, no?”

  “Great. Now I have you in my head 24/7? Or are there privacy settings?”

  “It’s only for when you’re out in the field on a specified mission. I wouldn’t dream of listening in on anything else.”

  “Yeah, well, just make sure that it doesn’t mission creep into my personal life.”

  “Believe me, we have no interest in what you get up to in your downtime,” Abernathy said, feigning hurt. “We only activate the audio when you reach the GPS location of somewhere there might be something worth listening to.”

  “Okay. I’m not going to go into how it would have been nice to have been asked, or, I don’t know, warned.”

  “Whose arm were you threatening with eternal pain, anyway?” Abernathy asked.

  Joe was making his way down Brixton Road and was aware that, to an outside observer, it would appear that he was talking to himself. So he took his phone out and held it to his ear, just to make sure he didn’t look like a crazy person.

  “You remember that stolen car ring in Soho?”

  “I remember the expense account claim,” Abernathy said. “I also remember you and Andy enjoying putting a lot of miles on a Ferrari.”

  “You’re not still whining about the Ferrari, are you? You gave a couple of kids a supercar to buy their way into a criminal organization and you’re complaining about the mileage? Anyway, I just ran into one of the mechanics from that job. And he brought a couple of playmates along. Oh, and a baseball bat.”

  “You okay?” Abernathy’s voice softened.

  “What do you think?”

  “I think that even with that chip in your head, you need to keep a tight rein on your anger.”

  “C’mon. I just stopped three thugs with barely any violence and some threatening language,” Joe said.

  “Then forget I said anything.” Abernathy sounded contrite. “So where are we?”

  “Brixton.”

  “I mean, in the investigation.”

  “The place’s deserted. I’m in a holding pattern. That’s why I took a walk and ended up bumping into an old friend.”

  “Unlucky, but not totally unexpected, I suppose. Oh, did I tell you that Victor Palgrave granted us access to his cloud storage? He said it was your idea.”

  “To be honest, I wasn’t holding my breath waiting for it. Mr. Palgrave keeps his cards exceedingly close to his chest.”

  “Practically inside his rib cage. Anyway, there was nothing of any value or importance. If I was a slightly more cynical man, I might suggest that the data he gave us was incomplete.”

  Joe’s mind went back to his meeting with Palgrave and his thought that the man knew more than he was letting on. Now, that suspicion was only deepening.

  “Are you saying he cleaned the data?”

  “You’re saying that. I am simply nodding to a tune in my head. Which you can’t see, obviously. By which I mean the head, not the tune …”

  “Earth to Abernathy. Anything else?”

  “Yes. How would you like to be a blogger for an hour?”

  “Yeah, sharing my meaningless thoughts with the jaded masses sounds just the thing to make my day.”

  “Because if you want to interview some X-Core fans, get yourself down to a place called the Beehive.”

  “Oh, that kind of blogging I can handle. You know, the kind where I don’t actually have to blog. Are you tracking X-Core fans using satellite technology, or by hacking their smartphones?”

  “I’ve been reading Twitter, actually,” Abernathy said, his distaste for the social site obvious in the venom with which he said the word. “When are people going to realize that using social media to tell everyone where you are is never going to be a good idea? ‘Hi, I’m out. Come rob my house!’ Anyway, Puppet609 just tweeted that he was meeting friends before the gig.”

  “Puppet609? Does that mean six hundred and eight other people beat him to the name ‘Puppet’?”

  “Hmmm. According to his online profile: Science Artist, Vegan, X-Core, and Bleach. I suppose he dyes his hair.”

  “Bleach is a Japanese manga and anime—sorry—comic and cartoon series. Very popular.”

  “I’ll take your word for it, my little cultural encyclopedia. Anyway: Beehive, blogger, Puppet609. Skedaddle.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  The guy serving had a goatee that covered up a very weak chin, and he didn’t meet Joe’s eye as he ordered a latte. As weak chin fussed with the drink, Joe looked around and found his targets with ease.

  It wasn’t as if the place was busy.

  He thanked the server, paid, and took his coffee toward the three guys gathered around a table about halfway across the room.

  The
place itself was pretty big—according to the quick search he’d done, it had been a shoe store once upon a time—and its decor had been copied from similar joints up and down the nation. It, too, had embraced the modern habit of having screens up displaying the news, with the volume down and subtitles on.

  Joe made his way to the table with the three guys and offered his most apologetic smile, backed up with chemical reinforcements.

  Contrition, Joe thought, the new fragrance from Calvin Klein.

  “Excuse me …” he said, “are you waiting for the gig later, too?”

  Three pairs of eyes looked at him with a mixture of contempt and hostility. Not the showy, cultivated hostility of close-knit groups that wanted to deter outsiders, but rather almost a reflex of distrust. Their body language was oddly hostile, too, as if they were, by nature, all tensed up and edgy.

  Joe did a quick visual scan.

  There was very little discernible difference among the members of the trio. All males in their late teens/early twenties, and if black was the in color this season, then these three were going for straight As. Black hair, T-shirts, sweaters, and jackets, and black jeans and boots. Joe couldn’t see the socks and boxers but he would have bet on them being black, too.

  “Move along,” one of the three said. “Nothing to see here.”

  The other two laughed—a single, violent bark—as if there was anything remotely humorous in the comment, and that instantly established the group dynamic for Joe.

  Move Along was the leader.

  The alpha.

  The one to work on.

  The other two would pretty much go with the leader’s flow.