there, the Senate’s going to have a tough time calling you on the carpet to answer for Eta Boötis.”
He grinned at her. “Are you always this sunshine-optimistic, Karyn?”
“I’m a realist, Alex. Sometimes things do break the right way.”
“Not often enough. Excuse me a sec.”
Koenig called up a file in a side window, studying it for a moment. WHISPERS—the unlikely acronym stood for weak heterodyned interstellar signal passband-emission radio search. Ten-kilometer radio telescope antennae orbiting several widely scattered trans-Neptunian dwarf planets far out in Sol’s Kuiper Belt used very wide baseline interferometry to probe target stars at radio wavelengths. It wasn’t as simple as dialing in on alien radio broadcasts; for a century after the advent of radio telescopy, scientists had fretted over the apparent absence of radio signals from other civilizations in space—evidence, it seemed, that Humankind was alone among the stars. By the mid-twenty-first century, it was understood that radio transmissions tended to fade out within a distance of two or three light years, becoming lost in the hash of random interstellar noise and background radiation. There was lots of radio and laser noise out there; it just required very large antenna and extremely fast computer processing to separate it from the background noise.
Large antennae and interferometry baselines of as much as several hundred AUs let sharp-eared AIs sift heterodyned signals out of the static. Alphekka had been a source of weak but numerous signals since the system had first come on-line, back in the mid-twenty-second century.
The fact that Alphekka was in the same general stretch of sky as Arcturus and Eta Boötis, just forty-some light years farther out, strongly suggested that the enemy had a presence there, most likely a military presence.
Disrupting that base with a long-range strike just might stop the enemy’s steady advance into human-colonized space.
“Okay,” he said. “I was checking to see if there was anything new on the Alphekkan transmissions. There isn’t.”
“There wouldn’t be, of course. The signals we’re reading on Pluto are seventy-two years old.”
“I know. But there’s been debate on whether what we’re hearing out there is ship-to-ship stuff, like you might expect from a military force … or background chatter from a civilization. Looks like the jury’s still out.”
On the face of it, Alphekka was an unlikely place to find a civilization. The star consisted of a brilliant type A0 V blue-white star in a close binary embrace with a dimmer, yellow G5 V dwarf just 27 million kilometers away; these circled each other every 17.3 days. Together, the twin stars gave off forty-five times the light of Sol. There was also evidence of an extensive disk of debris and dust about the two stars, a possible solar system in the making … though xenoplanetologists still didn’t understand how such a disk could have survived the gravitational perturbations caused by the binary system at its center.
But something strange was going on out there. The disk suggested that there were no planets in the system yet, or that any planets that had managed to form were still very young … a few hundred million years old at the most.
And that suggested that the radio traffic WHISPERS was eavesdropping on came from ships or star-orbiting bases—and Alphekka’s location suggested that it was likely the Sh’daar or Turusch staging point for their operations at Arcturus and Eta Boötis, at least.
If only the Senate would authorize a mission to find out.
“It’ll come, Alex,” Mendelson told him. “The important thing is you’re off the hook so far as Eta Boötis is concerned, a least for now. You’ll be summoned to another virtual meeting with the Board of Inquiry tomorrow morning at 0900 for the official notification.”
“Thanks, Karyn. I appreciate your telling me.”
“Any time. So … you want to celebrate?”
“Celebrate? How?”
“I was thinking my quarters. Phobia Green-Alpha.”
“It’s pretty late.”
“So? You’ll be here when we have to report to the Directorate chambers in the morning.”
Koenig and Mendelson had been lovers for a couple of years now, at least off and on. Deployments and reassignments tended to keep couples in the military apart—one reason that the military services tended to adopt the free-wheeling polyamory of Earth’s more mobile cultures. Such liaisons weren’t exactly encouraged within the service, especially between people of different ranks, but so long as they didn’t get in the way of routine or spark jealous rivalries, they were tolerated. Sexual relationships were definitely in the old “don’t ask, don’t tell” category that had once defined the homosexual liaisons of earlier centuries. Casual sex with Karyn would have been unthinkable when she’d been his commanding officer on the Lexington.
With them both rear admirals now, and working in different directorates, there was no reason whatsoever not to … “celebrate,” as she’d put it.
“That sounds … very good,” he said.
She smiled. “I’ll expect you, then. You still have my pass code?”
“Yes. I’ll be there in …” He checked his internal time. “Twenty minutes.”
“I’ll be waiting.”
The logistics report, he decided, could wait.
Manhattan Ruins
North American Periphery
1850 hours, local time
Trevor Gray stood atop the ruined skyscraper, staring south into the mist-soaked evening. It was raining, a light sprinkling from a low cloud ceiling, with a chill wind bringing with it the smell of salt out of the south. His uniform kept his body dry and warm, but water dripped from his nose and ran down his cheeks, and he could feel within himself a hint of trembling, despite the smartsuit’s warmth. This was the place from which he’d started in so many in-head replays of the events of five years ago, fifty meters above the hiss of the surf rolling in across East 32nd Street.
South, the gray water was dotted by hundreds of islands, most slumped into mounds, most covered over by vines and low-growing vegetation.
The Manhattan Ruins.
The vegetation-shrouded mounds were all that remained of thousands of buildings, separated from one another by narrow avenues of water, stretching for five and a half kilometers south southwest. A green forest of islands, interspersed with exposed beams and frameworks where concrete and glass had shattered and collapsed. The tallest were marked by flashing automated strobes, warning off low-flying aircraft and personal fliers.
He could just make out the green-shrouded mound of the TriBeCa Arcology, one large island among many, rising less than four kilometers to the south, shadowed and blurred behind the mist and in the fading evening light.
So what was he waiting for? The peaceforcers wouldn’t stop him this time, even if travel to the Ruins was not something the Authority encouraged. So far as they were concerned, the squatties were illegals, squatters on what was still, technically, public property, men and women—social
