Peter Hamilton - The Mandel Files

“I was just trying to establish if there’s a third method of aliens arriving in the solar system.”

“If there is, we can’t conceive it. Which would make them roughly the equivalent of angels.”

“Fair enough. So just go back to my original question, we don’t know the method they used to get here, and we didn’t see them arrive. How do we locate them now?”

“These hypothetical aliens, are they on Earth?”

“No. We don’t believe they could get past the strategic defence sensors.”

“Good point. But you’re giving me a tall order here, you know? The solar system is a big place, and that’s just staying in the plane of the ecliptic. They could easily be in a high inclination orbit. If you take Pluto’s orbital radius as the boundary, and extend your search to cover a spherical volume, that’s a quarter of a million cubic AUs to sift through. An electromagnetic sweep is the only practical method, assuming they’re emitting in that spectrum. There’s a good chance of picking up random noise leakage from their on-board systems, certainly with the power levels a starship will need to employ.”

“Do you have that sort of equipment?”

Rick Parnell gave a low laugh. “We’ve got six ten-million-channel receivers operating at the moment, although we only own them in partnership with various national science councils and space agencies. But they’re all assigned to specific sections of the sky. It’s the old nightmare, you listen to your section for eighteen months of deathly silence, then the day you move on to the next, there’s a genesis pulse.”

“What’s a genesis pulse?”

“Special message, a shout that says “Here we are!” to the universe at large. You use a dish like the Arecibo to beam a strong signal at a star cluster with a high quota of Sol-like stars. Put in plenty of data about local life and culture, star co-ordinates-you do that by triangulating with known quasars. We send out a couple every year. Give it a millennium, we might even get an answer.”

“So there’s no way you can run a search for me, then?”

Rick Panel swivelled his chair, and tapped the hologram of the giant dish. “This is Steropes, we’ve spent twenty per cent of our budget and three years refining the design. You persuade our lovely lady boss to part with two billion pounds New Sterling and in five years I’ll have it up and running for you. If you’ve lost a hydrogen atom inside the solar system, this beauty will be able to find it for you.”

Victor held back on the urge to shout. “I meant, starting today.”

“God, no. No way, sorry.”

“Shit.”

Rick Parnell clenched his hands tight, as if he was praying. “OK, I’ve been straight with you. Now, what have you got? What made you come in here and ask me this?”

“We are in possession of certain evidence which suggests that first contact has already been initiated.”

Rick Parnell’s lips moved around the words, repeating them silently. “Oh, God. What evidence?” he croaked.

“An artefact.”

“What fucking artefact?”

“A biological one.”

Rick Parnell lent right over the desk, fired by excitement and trepidation. “High order?”

“Pardon me?”

“I mean, more advanced than the microbes?” His hands spun for emphasis, urging Victor on like a football coach.

Victor felt a real tingle of alarm. Greg had once explained to him how his intuition manifested itself, a cold that wasn’t physical. This was something similar. “Slow down. Which microbes are we talking about?”

Rick Parnell let out a groan and flopped back into his chair. “After the turn of the century the Japanese NASDA agency sent an unmanned probe called Matoyaii out to Jupiter. It was designed to measure the near-Jupiter environment, from the ionosphere out to it’s plasma torus. That’s a pretty active area, saturated with radiation, the planetary radio emissions; and then there’s the magnetosphere, the flux-tube, small moons, the ring bands. Fascinating to see how they all interact. Thing was, when mission control manoeuvred the Matoyaii in close to a ring particle the on-board spectroscope started to register some pretty odd hydrocarbon patterns. Nothing conclusive, nothing final, you understand. Intensive analysis wasn’t possible, the sensors weren’t designed for microscopic examination. And the hydrocarbon deposits were minute. Specks really, like dust motes. If they were microbes, they could’ve been captured by the gravity field, and settled on the ring particles.”

“They were alive?” Victor asked.

“More than likely. The theory’s been around since the middle of the twentieth century. High-order organic forms couldn’t survive interstellar transit, they couldn’t contain enough energy, not for the time-scales and distances involved. But something like a microbe or a germ, they might just make it. Go into a kind of suspended animation between stars, they’re small enough to withstand freezing. The microbes were even put forward as an hypothesis for flu epidemics, literally a plague from space.”

“So there is life on other planets,” Victor said, half to himself.

“Now you question it!” Rick Parnell exclaimed in exasperation.

“What we found might have been a joke, an elaborate bioware construct. But not any more, not with you telling me this.”

Rick Parnell smiled affably. “Well, we’ll know about the microbes for certain when Royan gets back, of course.”

Victor looked up sharply, meeting a sincere expectant gaze.

The bishop was from the trendier wing of the Church of England, a Campaign for Orbital Disarmament badge prominent on his lapel. His wiry grey hair blew about in the light breeze as he stood at the microphone at the front of the stage. He kept slipping youth-culture sound bites into his speech in an effort to hold the younger members of the audience.

It sounded bizarre to Julia, like a Victorian toff getting enthusiastic about the lifestyle of New Age communes. Her early years had been spent with the First Salvation Church in Arizona; it was more cult than religion, but she had picked up a basic belief in Christian teachings and ethics which had never been discarded. She found the bishop squirm-inducing, almost making her feel ashamed about her faith.

She’d chosen to sit with the rest of the parents, in a plastic chair set out on the browning grass of Oakham School’s playing fields. The governors had wanted her up on the makeshift wooden platform with the bishop and other dignitaries, or at least in the front row of the seats. She turned that down with a flatness which left them thinking they’d mortally offended her. Worried glances had flown like startled sparrows.

People were so stupidly sensitive. Did they think she was some sort of mafia princess who kept a black book?

There were about five hundred parents listening to the speeches and waiting for the prize giving. The men in grey tropical-weave suits, putting a brave face on the bishop’s verbal meandering; wives in light colourful dresses and elaborate hats, smiling brittlely.

She had deliberately fled into the middle of them, seeking anonymity; sitting with Eleanor in the hope she would blend in. Some chance. Between the two of them, she and Eleanor had six children to manage, then there were her seven hard-liner bodyguards. Her party had taken over an entire row of the hard chairs.

Eleanor fanned herself with the programme, glancing at her slim Rolex. “He can’t go on for much longer,” she muttered out of the corner of her mouth.

“No, they’ll lynch him soon,” Julia agreed.

“Will the hardliners do it?” Matthew, her eight-year-old son, asked eagerly.

“Don’t be silly,” Anita Mandel told him imperiously. “Aunty Julia was being sarcastic. Don’t you know what sarcastic is?”