said the Colonel. “But that’s the least strange of the possibilities, Tanner. Show a little more imagination.” He leaned forward again. “Contact me immediately once you’ve got some footage to show me,” he said, and reached out to cut the link.
23
The power of the signal, Altman realized, had increased sometime during the night. The indicator he’d installed was reading higher than he’d ever seen it. The pulse ended and it fell back, still higher than it had been in its previous resting state.
He glanced over at Field, who seemed immersed in his own calculations. Just to be safe, he angled his holoscreen so that there’d be no chance of Field seeing what was on it. He scrolled back through the data log until he found the shift. There, sometime around six or seven in the morning, though he’d have to do a full correlation to make sure. The signal’s increase wasn’t gradual but immediate, as if something had suddenly and deliberately amplified it.
He hadn’t heard from Hammond since the night in the bar, which concerned him a little but not too much. The security technician was probably lying low, being careful. When he wanted to get in touch, he would. In the meantime, it was up to Altman to find out what was going on.
He logged his results into the encrypted database and then looked to see if they correlated with work done by the others—the others in this case being the three other scientists who had, like Altman, been intrigued by the gravity anomaly and the pulse and wanted to pursue it: Showalter, Ramirez, and Skud.
Showalter, who had more powerful equipment than Altman’s simple sensor, had gotten the same readings. At 6:38 a.m., there had been an extraordinarily strong pulse, followed by a shift in the signal patterning. The signal was now perpetually amplified. There were still high and low points, but the basic profile of the signal was stronger, and had remained so ever since.
Ramirez had noted something else, something that he had picked up off the satellite images while trying to get a sense of whether there had been a change in the condition of the crater itself. A freighter, anchored about fifteen miles southeast of the crater’s center.
“At first I didn’t pay much attention to it,” said Ramirez in the vidfile he’d attached. “But then, I go back a day and it’s still there. I go forward a day and it’s there, too. If it’s really a freighter, what would it be doing sitting in the same place?
“So, yesterday morning, I hired a local man who called himself Captain Jesús to use his old motorboat to run me out for a closer look. I took a fishing pole with me. Once we were about two hundred meters from the freighter, I had Captain Jesús stop and cast my line into the water.
“The captain told me I wasn’t going to catch anything. When I asked why not, he gave me a long hard look and pointed out to me that I hadn’t bothered to put any bait on the end of my line.
“I didn’t know what to say to that, so I didn’t say anything. Captain Jesús made a point of looking at the freighter and then looking back at me, then told me that it didn’t seem like it was fish I wanted to catch and that the kind of fishing I wanted would cost me extra.
“In the end, I had to promise to pay the good captain double his normal rate to stay there so that we could get a good look at the freighter. It didn’t have any markings. Other than that, itseemed an ordinary enough freighter, except for the fact that it had a brand-new heavy-duty submarine lift attached to its deck.
“That was all I had time to ascertain,” Ramirez said. “We’d been there all of five minutes, two of which I spent bartering with Captain Jesús, when a launch appeared from the other side of the ship and pulled up alongside us, manned by four muscle-bound boys with military haircuts, but without the requisite military garb.
“ ‘Move along,’ one of them said.
“ ‘I’m fishing,’ I claimed.
“
23
The power of the signal, Altman realized, had increased sometime during the night. The indicator he’d installed was reading higher than he’d ever seen it. The pulse ended and it fell back, still higher than it had been in its previous resting state.
He glanced over at Field, who seemed immersed in his own calculations. Just to be safe, he angled his holoscreen so that there’d be no chance of Field seeing what was on it. He scrolled back through the data log until he found the shift. There, sometime around six or seven in the morning, though he’d have to do a full correlation to make sure. The signal’s increase wasn’t gradual but immediate, as if something had suddenly and deliberately amplified it.
He hadn’t heard from Hammond since the night in the bar, which concerned him a little but not too much. The security technician was probably lying low, being careful. When he wanted to get in touch, he would. In the meantime, it was up to Altman to find out what was going on.
He logged his results into the encrypted database and then looked to see if they correlated with work done by the others—the others in this case being the three other scientists who had, like Altman, been intrigued by the gravity anomaly and the pulse and wanted to pursue it: Showalter, Ramirez, and Skud.
Showalter, who had more powerful equipment than Altman’s simple sensor, had gotten the same readings. At 6:38 a.m., there had been an extraordinarily strong pulse, followed by a shift in the signal patterning. The signal was now perpetually amplified. There were still high and low points, but the basic profile of the signal was stronger, and had remained so ever since.
Ramirez had noted something else, something that he had picked up off the satellite images while trying to get a sense of whether there had been a change in the condition of the crater itself. A freighter, anchored about fifteen miles southeast of the crater’s center.
“At first I didn’t pay much attention to it,” said Ramirez in the vidfile he’d attached. “But then, I go back a day and it’s still there. I go forward a day and it’s there, too. If it’s really a freighter, what would it be doing sitting in the same place?
“So, yesterday morning, I hired a local man who called himself Captain Jesús to use his old motorboat to run me out for a closer look. I took a fishing pole with me. Once we were about two hundred meters from the freighter, I had Captain Jesús stop and cast my line into the water.
“The captain told me I wasn’t going to catch anything. When I asked why not, he gave me a long hard look and pointed out to me that I hadn’t bothered to put any bait on the end of my line.
“I didn’t know what to say to that, so I didn’t say anything. Captain Jesús made a point of looking at the freighter and then looking back at me, then told me that it didn’t seem like it was fish I wanted to catch and that the kind of fishing I wanted would cost me extra.
“In the end, I had to promise to pay the good captain double his normal rate to stay there so that we could get a good look at the freighter. It didn’t have any markings. Other than that, itseemed an ordinary enough freighter, except for the fact that it had a brand-new heavy-duty submarine lift attached to its deck.
“That was all I had time to ascertain,” Ramirez said. “We’d been there all of five minutes, two of which I spent bartering with Captain Jesús, when a launch appeared from the other side of the ship and pulled up alongside us, manned by four muscle-bound boys with military haircuts, but without the requisite military garb.
“ ‘Move along,’ one of them said.
“ ‘I’m fishing,’ I claimed.
“
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