HADRON Axiom

by Stephen Arseneault

  Mace gestured toward the RV. “The reactor in that RV can put out way more than we can use. And we’re rigged up for tapping into it already. I suspect they reserved the general power for in close to the community centers, something extra to draw us in with. When on tour with Bontu, I was told a lot of the rural areas wouldn’t be getting hooked up anytime soon.”

  Johnny nodded. “Gentlemen and Mrs. Tretcher, I think we might be due for a road trip.”

  Mace stroked his beard. “We can’t all go. We need someone to stay here to support Jeff. And, Johnny, so long as you have on that exosuit, we can’t take you anywhere.”

  Johnny replied, “What? This old thing? I have no issue with losing it. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s amazing, but I can do without it if needed, unlike bag-of-bones over here.”

  Jasper chuckled. “Strange, I kind of missed that banter the last few days.”

  Before Johnny could comment, Jane replied, “I didn’t. Believe it or not, you two peacocks strutting around all the time gets tiresome.”

  Mace said, “Here’s what we do. Johnny, you and Jane stay here in support of Jeff. Just make sure you lose the suit before going over to the house where he is. I’ll take Jasper and the RV to investigate the telescope. At sixty miles, we should get there before dark.”

  Jasper said, “You know that’s a radio telescope, right? It don’t need darkness out to work.”

  Mace stood. “You said that. I just don’t want to be driving at night where we have to have our lights on. Kind of makes us stand out more than normal.”

  Supplies were loaded in the RV and they were soon on the road. The ride to Green Bank took them through Caldwell. The barricades that had held the hungry hordes at bay were down, the town largely empty of her citizens.

  Jasper scowled. “Looks like they all left for Ronceverte.”

  Mace turned onto the ramp for a vacant I-64. “They all fought hard to survive, only to be sucked in by those food bars.”

  Jasper slapped Mace on the shoulder. “Yeah, well, we just have to suck them back. The way this exosuit has me feeling, I’d take on all those little gray monsters myself if I had to.”

  Mace laughed as he dodged a handful of abandoned cars. “I bet you would. Nothing like getting that second wind to make you want to get back in the fight. I’ve experienced that high a few too many times. All I can say is don’t let yourself get too cocky. You might be fast and strong in that suit, but you won’t be outrunning any of their weapons.”

  Jasper smiled. “Sage advice, and duly noted.”

  Chapter 18

  *

  They pulled into the parking lot of the giant radio telescope just as the sun was setting.

  Mace said, “Hang back here while I check out the perimeter. If it all looks good, we try to go inside.”

  A walk around the main building yielded no threats. Jasper stood by Mace’s side as the door to the observatory was knocked on. No one answered.

  Mace tried the handle. “It’s locked. You can see the pry marks where someone tried to get in. Doesn’t look like they were successful, though.”

  Jasper sighed. “Well, if you want, I’m pretty sure I can tear that door down with this rig I’m wearing. If I just flip this knuckle shield around, it makes one heckuva battering ram.”

  Mace shook his head. “Before we start destroying things, let’s have a look around. There’s a couple trailers out back. We should check them out.”

  Jasper followed as Mace again walked around the back of the building. A quick check of the trailers found them to be padlocked.

  Mace said, “Go check that back door. See if you can see anything through that window. I’ll check this other building.”

  As Mace made his way across a gravel lot, Jasper yelled, “It’s locked. And I can’t see a thing through the window. Dark tint. You want I should punch a hole in it?”

  Mace laughed. “Just hold on. If this one’s locked as well, you can take your punch.”

  As Mace arrived at the small building and reached for the door, it opened in his face. A thin bearded man stood with a handgun at the ready.

  “This is my property. You need to leave.”

  Mace slowly raised his hands. “Sorry. Wasn’t looking to intrude. If this place is yours, we won’t contest it. We aren’t here to take anything.”

  The man shook the gun toward the roadway. “Good. Then you���d best be going. There’s nothing here for you to take.”

  Mace looked up at the massive dish looming almost over his head. “Was hoping to find someone who could run this thing.”

  The man scowled. “Even if that man existed, the control room doesn’t have power. What could you possibly want to use it for?”

  Mace pointed up. “I’d like to get a look at our friends up there. Might be useful to know how many of them there are. You know how to operate that thing?”

  The man raised his chin. “What if I do?”

  Mace glanced back at the RV. “If you can operate that dish, I have a power system that can run this whole complex.”

  The man returned a suspicious look. “What? On that bus? It’ll take a lot more than the generator on that thing to power this place.”

  Mace smiled. “I don’t think so. We have a small fusion reactor on there. We could power fifty homes with it if needed. And we have external feeds we can hook straight into with only a minor amount of work. Basically, we clip your main power line coming in, attach it to that rig, and you’re in business.”

  The man thought for several seconds before lowering his weapon. “OK, go around front and get started. I’ll open her up.”

  Mace nodded as he turned to walk. “You set OK on food? We can spare a couple days��� rations if you need them. Oh, and my name’s Mace by the way. Mace Hardy. My friend over there is Jasper Collins. You familiar with Organ Cave?”

  The man looked confused. “What does that place have to do with anything?”

  Mace laughed. “The old guy. He owns it.”

  The man squinted his eyes as he looked. “Oh yeah. I recognize him. I think he led the tour I went on a few years ago. You holed up in the cave?”

  “We were, all winter. Tough winter.”

  The man sighed, “Yeah, can’t tell you how many people pounded on the door to my shed back there trying to get in. I was terrified I’d have to shoot someone. I mean, I know they were just looking for food, but I only ever had enough to last me for a week or so. Can’t tell you how many nights I went to sleep hungry.”

  Mace stopped and turned, holding out his hand. “What’s your name?”

  “David. David Yancy.”

  Mace continued to walk. “Jasper, this is David Yancy. He’s letting us in the building and we’re gonna see if we can get this thing fired up.”

  Jasper frowned. “So I don’t get to smash the window?”

  David replied, “Please don’t.”

  Mace asked, “You have a main breaker for the building?”

  David nodded. “There’s one around the side, but it’s locked up. I have a main panel inside we can switch, though.”

  Mace turned the corner to the front. “I have to ask: you think any of your electronics are left working in there? That EMP event knocked out just about everything we had.”

  David again scratched his chin as he walked. “The main gear is in a Faraday cage. This is sensitive radio gear, so we try to block out all the noise we can. Most of the computers will be outside the cage, and this is a metal building, so…”

  Mace shook his head. “Won’t matter. We had stuff twenty feet underground that got zapped. That was far more powerful than any EMP we could produce. Funny, though. The Mawga tried to convince us it was from ionization of the upper atmosphere that all bled off at once.”

  David asked, “The Mawga?”

  Mace stopped by the RV. “Oh ��� I’m guessing you haven’t seen them. I’m sure you’ve seen those ships passing overhead, though?”

  David stroked his scraggly
beard. “So they have some kind of communication device that translates their speech?”

  Mace laughed. “Better. They claim to have been watching us for several years, studying all of us. They taught themselves to speak English and just about every other language during that time. They’re pretty fluent in it. Anyway, I’ve been on one of their ships. Somehow I’ve befriended the guy who’s in charge of an area from Virginia up to Michigan. He’s nice enough, and they’ve pretended to have our best interests at heart, but we’re pretty sure they’re up to no good.”

  David asked, “What do they look like?”

  Jasper replied, “They’re built like us, but only three feet tall, gray in color, with a little rat-face, and big black eyes. Probably weigh all of fifty-five pounds.”

  Mace pulled a pair of heavy duty bolt cutters from a side bay. “You’ll have to give me a few minutes to climb that pole. I’ll need that footage of line to connect in over here.”

  Jasper reached out, snatching the cutters from Mace’s hand. “I’ll do it. This suit will make it a cinch.”

  Jasper walked over to a position just under the power line, near the connecting pole. With a single leap, he reached the wire, catching it in the jaws of the bolt cutter before snapping the handles hard shut. He landed gracefully, but a grimace soon fell over his face.

  “Ugh. I’ve gotta stop doing that. My kidneys are gonna hurt for two days now.”

  David looked on in awe. “He just jumped fifteen feet in the air! How’s that possible?”

  Mace grabbed the downed power line and began dragging the severed end to the RV. “The Mawga gave it to him. Without it he can hardly move around. Arthritis swells up his joints.”

  Jasper came to the RV door, gently climbed the stairs and eased himself into the passenger seat. “I’m gonna have to rest here for a while.”

  Mace pointed at the doorway. “You hungry?”

  David replied, “Always.”

  “Go up, to the left you’ll see the refrigerator. We have some deviled eggs, potato salad, and a roasted chicken. Have whatever you like.”

  David hesitated. “This isn’t some trick to get me on that RV, is it?”

  Mace laughed. “Now how am I supposed to respond to that? Look, I’ve got about five minutes to finish hooking this up. Eat what you can in five. Then we’ll see if your dish still works.”

  David hustled up the steps, jerking open the refrigerator door.

  Jasper spun his chair slowly around. “Hey, careful, you’ll tear that door off its hinges!”

  David apologized as his eyes grew big, pulling a half a chicken from a shelved container. With a ravenous smile, he stripped the chicken of every bit of edible meat.

  Mace laughed as he came up the stairs. “Don’t overdo it. You’ll regret it later.”

  David pulled back from the fridge as he let a deviled egg slide down his throat. Oh, deviled eggs. I haven’t even thought about deviled eggs for so long.”

  Mace gestured toward the door. “Power’s hooked up if you want to give it a try.”

  Jasper asked, “You a drinker, Mr. Yancy?”

  A nod followed. “I was. Ran out the first month after this started. Are you telling me you have booze, too?”

  Jasper smiled. “On the counter to your left. It’s our own special brew. I’d recommend you only put about an inch in the bottom of a glass until you get used to it. Will pickle your gizzard, that stuff.”

  David poured a shot, his hands shaking with anticipation. The glass was tipped back and the smooth but hot liquor consumed. A deep grin spread across his face.

  Mace waved toward the door. “You ready? We get this place running and we can bring in that whole jug.”

  David set the glass down and walked for the door. “Let’s gather some radio waves, gentlemen!”

  The door to the building was unlocked and the three men went inside. A breaker was flipped and the interior lighting brightened the room. David moved around to the tech area attempting to power on equipment. Nothing showed life.

  He turned for the Faraday room. “Now we find out if what’s left still works.”

  Several switches were thrown and buttons pushed. Lights appeared on three key pieces of equipment. When the monitor in front of him came to life, David sat in front of it.

  “Come on, Bessie. You can do it.”

  Thirty seconds later the monitor flashed with a string of boot-up commands. “So far so good.”

  The monitor again flickered as the operating system left David staring at a desktop. “Let me run a few checks and I can tell you if we can at least control her.”

  Mace pulled over another chair and sat. Jasper remained standing, crossing his arms.

  David started a program for monitoring the status of the dish control system. A set of bars on the monitor were all green.

  “And now we see if we can receive and decode a signal.”

  A new window appeared on the monitor, displaying a grid with a wavy line running across it.

  David turned with a smile. “She’s working. Tell me exactly what it is you’re looking for and I’ll see if I can find it.”

  Mace pulled his chair closer. “I’d like to scan the whole sky if possible, to get an idea if the Mawga have a fleet sitting up there.”

  David nodded. “We can do that. Not used to looking for anything that close in, but I can set the dish to do a full sweep and record a broad range of frequencies. The whole sky might take an hour. After five minutes or so, we can open another process to look at the data we’ve gathered. I’m sure you don’t know any specifics of what we’re looking for, am I right?”

  Mace replied, “Don’t have a clue. Just want to know if we can identify that there are ships up there, and if possible, how many and how big.”

  David pushed an on-screen button and leaned back in his chair, clasping his fingers together behind his head. “Today might just be your lucky day, Mr. Hardy. I received my doctorate degree in radio astronomy with an emphasis on signal analysis. If they have ships up there that are emitting RF signals, I should be able to tell you how many, but I won’t be able to tell you size other than the number of signals emanating from any given point.”

  David glanced back at the screen. “Nice! We already have a hit.”

  He typed away, jumping through several windows of data before coming to a stop. “I think we have our first confirmed source. And I’m seeing a half-dozen frequencies in use from two gigahertz up to twelve. Let���s have a look at the low end signal first. Our equipment is better at decoding at the lower frequencies.”

  David continued punching keys and switching application windows. Fifteen minutes later he began to nod. “We have a half dozen hits so far. All within those same ranges.”

  Mace sat back. “If they have most of their ships already in atmosphere, that’s good news. We’re guessing there’s only one or two in our district, and there���s eight districts. That’s maybe less than twenty ships or so covering the states. If we use a guesstimate of fifty times that for the planet, that puts them at a thousand ships. I think they have less.”

  “Where’d you get the number fifty from?”

  Mace half frowned. “From what little intel we have. Could easily be twice that number or half, but I don’t think so. We’ve yet to have a report of any of them grouped together.”

  David leaned forward. “Awesome. We just had our first decode. It’s a strong signal. Very tight bandwidth. And… it’s a carrier signal.”

  Mace asked, “Can we decode what they’re sending on that carrier?”

  David held up a finger. “That’s the million dollar question. We’ve identified the carrier, we can now strip that out. Whether or not what’s left makes any sense or not, who knows.”

  Several minutes passed before David again sat back in his chair. “Huh. It’s analog. And it looks like it might be video. Although at a higher resolution than ours. Let’s try a handful of pattern matches to see if we can break it into frames.”
/>   David turned. “It’s a huge long shot of course. We have no idea of how they would construct a broadcast. Wait… that’s just like one of ours!”

  David again typed away at the keyboard in front of him. Another window opened and a clear video image appeared.

  He sat back. “Whoa. Look at that ship!”

  Mace leaned forward and started to laugh.

  David turned. “What’s so funny?”

  Mace smiled. “I recognize that ship. That video is from a science fiction movie I saw a couple years ago. Looks like the Mawga are not only invaders, they’re video pirates!”

  David looked back at the screen as the scene changed to two Human actors walking down a hallway.

  Jasper asked, “Do we have audio?”

  David pressed a button several times.

  “I’m telling you, Captain, we can’t trust the Derathians. They have half a dozen ships parked around that jump point. If we try to go through���”

  David said, “They’ll rip us to shreds. Yeah, OK, I saw that one, too.”

  After stroking his beard for several seconds, he returned to the keyboard. “Maybe this is a good thing. We now have a basis for their framing that broadcast. Let’s see if that same structure applies to any of these others.”

  Jasper placed his hand on Mace’s shoulder. “You have any idea what he’s talking about?”

  Mace chuckled. “Only the vaguest. But I can tell you with certainty, if we were in here trying to get this running on our own, we wouldn’t know where to begin.”

  When the sky scan had completed, there were fourteen points of signal emission identified. David continued to work over the recorded signals from the first point identified. Two hours into his efforts, he sat back in his chair, rubbing his fingers through the long greasy hair on the sides of his head.

  “Well, gentlemen, we have the carriers stripped of all captured signals. We’re left with seven unique channels identified. Six appear to be digital in nature but heavily encrypted. The seventh I believe is a radar type emission as it pulses at a constant frequency. If I had my normal access to the computers at the university and the ones at the NSF, I might have a shot at cracking that encryption. With this PC, it isn’t happening.”