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CHAPTER 54

March 5, 2100 (Earth/Proxima timeline)

Proxima b, aka Fintidier

It wasn’t the Lunar Farside Radio Observatory, but Rain thought it was beautiful, nonetheless. She and Roy had taken the crude radio receiver that they had cobbled together to reestablish communications with home, added some additional spare electronics, printed equipment, and then some repurposed radio antennas made by the Fintidierians and made a pretty decent radio telescope. The first radio telescope facility on Fintidier. She immediately dismissed the internal comparison to Karl Jansky, the man who discovered that you could use radio as an astronomical tool, and smiled at the thought of comparing herself to Jocelyn Bell Burnell, the woman who discovered radio pulsars, which later led to the navigation system they were supposed to use on their journey here.

The system had been online for roughly three days and most of that time was spent calibrating the results with observations taken from Earth of known deep-space radio sources. Being closer to Proxima Centauri than Earth was to Sol had to be considered—there was much more noise coming from Fintidier’s ionosphere than her Earth-based counterparts had to deal with and orders of magnitude more than she had to contend with on the radio-quiet lunar farside. Pointing was also a bit of an issue given the quite different day/night cycles and orbital period of her new home planet. The software would take care of most of that, but someone, thankfully not her, had to do all the programming. The good news was that it worked and the calibration cycles were now complete.

“How does it look?” asked Mak, momentarily pausing the neck-and-shoulder rub he was giving Rain as she looked over the data. Rain had requested the rub. She had been sitting in the chair, poring over the data for hours, and could feel the tension in her neck and upper back. Besides, over the last few weeks she had learned that Kopylova gave fantastic back rubs and seemed to enjoy providing them.

“The system is working and the calibration runs are complete. When the constellation gets about twenty-two degrees above the horizon, we’ll see if there is anything there,” she said, easing her body back into Mak’s firm hands. “That’s the spot, right there, hmmm.” If she weren’t careful, he would put her to sleep.

“And it is on automatic? You don’t have to be here to start the scan?”

“That’s right. I’ve got it set to alert me if anything unexpected comes in. The odds are extremely low that we will detect anything on the first pass, even if something is there. SETI researchers had scanned hundreds of thousands of possible targets and heard mostly nothing until we accidentally picked up the signals from here—and we had to be on the lunar farside to that, with much more sensitive equipment, I might point out,” Rain said.

“Did the SETI searchers look at the constellation you found in the Atlantean temple?” Kopylova was referring to the lone odd piece of astronomical data the team had photographed during their incursion into the burial mounds on the southern continent. Other than the image of the flaring Proxima b, the constellation was the only visible reference to anything astronomical found in their excavations there, so, of course, it piqued Rain’s interest.

“I don’t know and we won’t have any information about that for several years. I made the request by radio in the last batch of updates sent home and you know how long it will take for the signal to get from here to there and then for the data to be sent back. Who knows? I suspect not, or there would have been some sort of news about it a long time before now.”

“How much time do we have?” Mak asked, pausing the back rub to scratch his chin, which did not look all that easy to do through his beard.

“Two hours, give or take,” she said.

“Then we have time for lunch,” Mak said. “I will prepare my famous soup, some pasta, and allow you to try my latest attempt at making kompot. I promise it will be better than the last, and not so bitter. I’m finally getting used to what fruits to use.”

Rain smiled. She had been spending a great deal of time with Mak these last few weeks and enjoying each time more than the last. As she rose to leave, their eyes locked and she knew he felt the same way. She so much wanted to lean in and kiss him through his scratchy beard, but she restrained herself. Rain was all too aware of Mak’s deep love for his long-dead wife and she did not want to rush him. The moments stretched to a few awkward seconds.

“Ah, yes. Lunch,” Mak said, adding a smile to his face. “Perhaps when we return and you examine the data, we will have reason to celebrate with dinner tonight as well.”

“That would be wonderful,” she said as they walked out the door.

* * *

They had just finished the kompot, which was, to Rain’s delight, much better than the last attempt, when the automated alert from the radio telescope came to her ear patch and sounded. They quickly exited Mak’s spartan apartment and hurried across the compound to the observatory.

Rain sat at the console and then looked straight ahead, poring over the processed data being sent to her contacts. Mak quietly stood behind her.

“Oh my God,” said Rain after a few minutes.

“What?” asked Mak.

“There is something there, near the twenty-one-centimeter band, just like the early SETI researchers claimed there might be. Clear as day,” Rain said.

“Is it like what you detected on the Moon? Some sort of radio leakage?”

“No. This is definitely not an analog transmission. The computer ran it through all the algorithms and says it is digital, and highly sophisticated. In fact, so sophisticated that it was almost classified as noise, but not quite.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The more sophisticated, in other words, the more information that is packed into a packet of data, the more random it seems. The encryption algorithms generated by our quantum computers make the signals we send appear to be nearly random. That is why they are not so easily decoded unless you have the key and is the reason we couldn’t figure out how to read the signals coming from Earth in the last half of our trip thanks to whatever Gaines did to the Samaritan’s communications system. This signal is clearly artificial—the computer pegs it with a ninety-seven percent probability.”

“But we can’t read it,” Mak said.

“That’s correct. But, by God, there’s someone else out there and they’re signaling us.”

“Signaling us?”

“Well, maybe not us, but someone here, on Fintidier or nearby. The message has to be directional. It’s too strong to be otherwise—strong enough that if it were omnidirectional, then it would have been seen at Earth a long time ago. The constellation of stars we are looking at is visible from Earth and the signal strength is high enough that the lunar radio telescope would have heard it like someone yelling in a quiet room if it were directed toward Earth or emitted at this strength in all directions. No, whoever this is wants their signal to be heard by the Fintidierians or someone else in this general direction.”

“Do you know from which star the signal comes?”

“Not yet, this hardware isn’t directional enough to pinpoint a specific star, just a general group of them. If there were another telescope on the other side of the planet, then I might be able to triangulate and narrow it down. Of course, the best way will be to send one of the ships to the outer solar system and let them listen from there. That would give enough of a baseline to narrow it down considerably.”

“We need to notify everyone,” said Mak.

Rain rose from her chair and right into Mak’s embrace, which was quickly followed by a very scratchy kiss.

“We must celebrate,” Mak added as he caught his breath.

“I am looking forward to it, but after we tell everyone. Tonight, we will celebrate!” she said, leaning forward to initiate her own kiss.

And celebrate they did, for more reasons than one.



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