THE ARGUS PROJECT
Night fell on Olympus Mons, Mars' highest mountain peak, and the stars came out. The planets shone brightly against the glowing backdrop of the Milky Way. Brightest of all was the blue dot called Earth...
"This could be bad news," Venix said to Arjja and Juan. "The propaganda-show from Earth - look."
She switched display to a larger wall-screen, to let them watch the current edition of Hard Booby, hosted by the ever-pneumatic Olga Oh.
Most Martians hated the show for its lies and sugarcoated threats against the Outer Planets - but some watched it anyway, after they had edited away everything but Olga Oh's genetically enhanced body. Grown men whimpered when they saw her move.
Young Juan stared too, even as he sneered at the newscaster's words:
"... and I know I speak for every true daughter of Mother Earth, when I wish Argus-A good luck on his next dangerous mission over enemy territory! Mmm, when I think of him I get warm all over. And speaking of big guys, they don't come any bigger than the Kansler. Right, boys and girls and she-boys? I saw his speech just an hour ago and I cried, really, I cried. He makes us all so proud. Mother Earth bless him.
"Oh yes, I really shouldn't tell you this now, but a little bot whispered in my ear... a hot new award ceremony is coming up in just twenty-four hours! The word on the beams is that Argus-A and our great man, the Kansler himself, will make a rare live appearance when the Kansler awards Argus this year's Nobel Peace Prize! Now isn't that great?"
"Same old roska they give the Kansler each year," Juan complained to the screen. "As if we care who gets it."
"Amazing," Arjja added, "that he gives up the award to Argus after hogging it for five years in a row. He must really want the whole Solar System to watch. Kyllä." She patted Venix' shoulder - gently - and gave her a smile that was meant to cheer her up. "Let's see how our geniuses are doing."
***
Neutrino communication had never really caught on, due to the vast excess of neutrino "static" coming in from all corners of the universe - and the over-sensitive, expensive technology needed to transmit and intercept neutrinos. Only certain parts of the Fleet used it.
Arjja, Juan and Venix left the smaller anteroom and entered the main hall of the Olympus Mons Observatory, situated on the top of the 27-kilometer-high, dead volcano.
The main hall housed a planetarium, where live telescope images could be projected on the inside walls. The images were fed from a field of 2,000 computer-controlled small telescopes on the crater floor. The vacuum at this altitude provided excellent images of space.
A small but devout team of independent researchers had an entire section of the hall to themselves, for various experiments.
As the three visitors ran down the stairs to check on the research-team, they saw the device that took up most of the team's consigned space.
It resembled a laser transmitter but had a torus-shaped section at its base, to which four thick power cables ran across the floor.
The visitors approached the scientists, some of which they recognized from the council meeting. The researchers' senses were all hooked up to each other by way of a closed neural laser-grid, so they could act like a single mind.
One of the "gridders" waved at the guests while he was busy working, and another gridder spoke in his place.
"You're just in time for good news," said one gridder with an unkempt beard and the build of a skysurfer, speaking very rapidly - though not too rapidly for Venix. "This is so cool, we'll skip sleep for the next two days!"
"Fine, fine," Arjja said, "but we're running short on time. What've you got?"
"Arjja, remember two years ago, when we told the world about the cheap, improved neutrino detector we'd built, using the underground water reservoirs as detectors? And almost before we went public, the MSF sent their goons to intimidate us, virtually threatened to shut our lab down... but! Just as quickly as they came, they got nervous and left.
"They must have figured out that if they told us where we weren't allowed to search for neutrinos, we'd know exactly where to look for their classified stuff. In other words: We suspected back then, that the Fleet was doing secret neutrino-com tests. Venix has helped us confirm this. So we -"
"Wait," Venix broke in. "Did you detect secret transmissions targeted at the following coordinates?"
She told them from memory, the exact time and place that Argus-A was struck down by a paralyzing command in Old Copenhagen, on Earth, several weeks earlier.
The gridders fed the data into the computer grid they were all jacked into... and simultaneously, the men turned to smile at Venix.
"That's..."
"Right!"
"At exactly that time..."
"...we detected a massive, fifty-second burst..."
"...of neutrino signals. Neutrinos can't be deflected or bounced - they just take a straight path, right through planets and asteroids, until they're stopped by water."
"And?"
"The burst came from a moving source, in an eccentric orbit intersecting the Asteroid Belt. First we mistook the source for a comet, and the spectrometry indicated it as one. But then it started to change course, using a powerful ion-based propulsion device. So we took a closer look, and found out the "comet" had to be an artificial body camouflaged as an asteroid. Since then we've detected similar neutrino bursts from the source, beamed at Jupiter. We think the Fleet got nervous that astronomers like us were listening in on them. They started to send irregular bursts at various occasions, to throw us off track."
"Deciphering?" she asked briskly.
"No luck. The modulations of the bursts are way off the scale, I'm talking gamma-ray intensity. But the particles are still so light, they can't cause any harm."
"Can I see these transmissions, translated into light signals, at the exact original speed?"
"We'll play them on the planetarium. Look up."
The gridders, working as one man in several bodies, switched off the ceiling lights and the enormous dome went black.
Out of habit, Venix switched to infrared vision - but switched back when she noticed everybody else were looking up at the projections on the dome's inside. She gaped.
"I can read it! It's an intricate pattern..."
"I just see a pulsating light," Juan told her. "What's it saying?"
Venix couldn't reply. Her memory-metal-and-plastic muscles coiled up in cramp; she struggled to keep her balance, shut her eyes for a moment, and opened them again.
Arjja shouted at the team to switch off the transmission, but Venix threw out a hand to counter the order. With a shudder, Venix' muscles uncoiled. Her injured leg was shaking a little, but it worked well enough to stand on.
"That signal is what happened to Gus," she told Arjja. "That is why he cannot disobey his orders. Thought I was immune to it - but when I looked at this translation into light-pulses..."
"They entered your nervous system through your eyes instead of through neutrino receptors, because you are not built to convert neutrinos into electric pulses!" one scientist filled in quickly.
"But light-signals don't work as efficiently - I can avert my eyes. Neutrino signals would pass right through Argus's skin and into his hidden receiver. He will have to remove it or smash it."
"Kyllä. I wish a girl with your smarts could hook up with our grid," the scientist said in awe.
The gridders looked at each other and had an internal discussion, which only they could follow over their neural network. After a few seconds they nodded in simultaneous agreement, and urged their visitors with them into a small office.
"Listen," they explained, "the MSF left bugs in the building. Lots of micro-bots, cam-sects and walking ears, but we're feeding them fake surveillance with counter-bots that the militia are producing. So hopefully, the MSF don't know this yet: We've built an experimental neutrino transmitter, right here, based on specs we calculated from the Fleet's early transmissions. We still can't use it, though."
"Why?"
"Yksi: Our machines can't speak the language. It's extremely complex, like human thought processes but many, many times faster.
"Kaksi: Once we aim the transmitter at the Fleet and send a test signal to Argus-A, we have about one hour before they can detect us and send a strike order across to Zodong-Petain. We saw what the proton cannon on the Phobos Station did to your escape truck. It can pop this dome like a balloon."
"Here is the signal-converter you need." Venix put a fingertip against her forehead. "I've done it before."
"Moy!" The gridders could not keep still in their excitement, and shouted Finnish-Martian slang to each other. "Juttu!" In the low gravity they pogo-danced out to their prototype transmitter, bouncing up and down. "Uuno Turhapuro!"
***
A few minutes later, Venix sat on a chair and let the gridders connect the cortex port in her hand to their transmitter.
She strained her eyes to the utmost, scanning the premises for surveillance devices. She couldn't see any, so she had to trust the gridders they were under control.
"How much longer?" she asked. "I've been here -"
"Two minutes," Arjja interrupted. "Just relax."
"If this doesn't work, what do we do? I must get in touch with him again."
"One of us wants to send stealth drones, straight to Jupiter," a researcher said, while he quickly attached a series of cables to the transmitter's base. "The drones could spray-paint a message directly on the frozen surface of the moon Europa. The letters would be visible from orbit and Argus-A can see them while he is in flight."
"Brilliant," Arjja said, sneering. "Let's try this first, shall we?"
"We're ready," Venix was told. "Just concentrate on what you want to say, and the machine will convert it to neutrino signals at the exact frequency of the signals we detected before."
"Good luck," Juan said with a slight nod, and he seemed older than he had acted the first time he met Venix.
"This is insane."
With her free hand, she fixed the hand with the connected cortex port, to keep it from shaking. She shut her eyes, blocked out her surroundings, and thought of the one person in the world she wanted to speak to.
The converter sent its sequence commands to the transmitter's mini-cyclotron. The cyclotron started to spit out neutrinos in the given sequence.
The others stood in silence around Venix and watched her beautifully curved, smooth-skinned face. Before their eyes, she grew ever more still until she resembled a painted sculpture...
38: A Night At the Observatory
(NEXT CHAPTER)
THE ARGUS PROJECT INTERNET EDITION (c)A.R.Yngve 1999, 2000, 2004. All rights reserved. May not be copied without permission.
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