"I watched it being built," Rick said, a shade defensively. "It was assembled in Building One, you could actually see it from my office window."
"A Jupiter probe?" Julia asked. "Built in full view, and nobody said anything?"
"Best place to hide something," Victor said. "One more space project in an Institute that boots five thousand tonnes of hardware into orbit every week. Who'd notice, who'd even care?"
"Mr. Tyo is quite right," Rick said. "Unmanned planetary exploration isn't of much interest to Institute personnel. Not since the Mars and Mercury landings. There was nothing special about Kiley, the components were all standard apart from the microbe detection sensors and sampling waldos."
"Kiley?" Julia asked.
"Yes. Royan chose the name. It's a kind of boomerang," Rick explained.
"A boomerang? You mean Kiley was a sample-return mission?"
"Yes."
"Has it returned?" she demanded.
"I couldn't tell you. That would depend on how long it stayed in orbit around Jupiter. But I will tell you this, it was built for speed. The probe itself only massed about two tonnes, the propulsion section came in at over forty tonnes. It filled a Clarke-class spaceplane payload bay. There were five stages, throwaway reaction-mass tanks and gigaconductor cells. That raised a few eyebrows at the Institute. Whoever heard of throwing away giga-conductor cells? Royan was certainly in a hurry for it to get on Jupiter."
The corner of Julia's mouth turned down. "Nothing new in that, he was always in a hurry. So how long would it take to get there?"
"Launched at an optimal conjunction, ten weeks," Rick said.
"And presumably the same time to return?"
"Yes, possibly a week or so less. The Sun's gravity field would accelerate it, you see."
"Do you know when it was launched?"
"Not to the day, no. But Kiley was rolled out of Building One eight months ago, last November."
Julia gave him a long hard look, holding her body immobile.
Victor knew her mood well enough, contemplative, but Rick was visibly wilting under such a direct contact.
"Did he ever say why he was so keen to examine these microbes?" Victor asked. "What was so important about them?"
"No," Rick said. "He never confided in me. Sorry."
Victor glanced enquiringly at Julia.
"Fraid not," she shook her head fractionally.
"Care to guess?"
"I don't think I could. I'm beginning to realize how little of him I ever did know."
Rick cleared his throat cautiously. "Er, are we, the Institute, that is, in trouble for assembling the probe? Royan did have all the funding clearance, and we knew he's your husband—" He broke off miserably.
Julia favoured him with a thin grin. "Oh, yes, he's mine all right. And no, I don't hold the Institute to blame. Royan has the authority to use whatever Event Horizon facility he wishes to."
"Even if he can't be bothered to tell us," Victor said. It came out with more feeling than he intended, and Julia registered a flicker of pain. Julia's choice had always baffled him, although he and Royan had always been careful never to show any animosity towards each other. If anything, they'd always been scrupulously polite, to the point of excess, it became a ritual. Perhaps the mistrust he felt was just a security man's instinct. But he always considered Royan a flaw in Julia's otherwise meticulous life; it was always her devotion, her money. All Royan had brought with him were his hotrod programs. Love was never reasonable.
"Something I'd like to ask," Victor said, evading Julia's critical eye. "Seeing as how I don't believe in coincidence: Royan builds a Jupiter probe to investigate alien life, then he turns up warning us about alien life. Would it make sense for our aliens to use Jupiter as a base?"
"You mean, could their ship be in orbit around Jupiter?" Julia asked.
"Just an idea," Victor said. It was one he'd had on the flight back to Wilholm. He had wanted to pursue it with Rick, but then Greg had called and he wound up getting sidetracked with safeguarding Andria Landon.
"A good one," said Rick. "However advanced their technology, a starflight would deplete on-board resources, certainly on a slower-than-light ship. Jupiter would be an excellent resupply point. Minerals and metal in its ring, ice on Europa, He3 in its atmosphere."
"Can you at least run a search of Jupiter for us?" Victor asked.
"I keep telling you," Rick said irritably. "SETI is not a hardware-orientated department. All we have is an office, and access to the Institute's lightware cruncher. That's it, the total, what we are."
"Not any more," Julia said. "As of now, I am placing every deep-space sensor facility Event Horizon owns under the control of the SETI department." Her eyes went distant. "Your role will mainly be co-ordination, but then that's what you're used to. Tell the visible- and radio-astronomy departments what you require, I'll see you have the clearance by the time you get back to the Institute. You can also get the visible-astronomy staff to interpret any recent visual records of Jupiter. There's our own Galileo telescope, as well as the IAP's Aldrin. Victor, you handle any image purchases from the Aldrin. Go through some fronts, I don't want anyone to know Event Horizon is the end user, not at this stage."
"This is all very sudden," Rick said slowly. He kept glancing at Victor for confirmation of what was actually happening. "Funny, nothing like the contact scenarios we were prepared for. We always assumed it would be non-material contact, almost archaeological, digging through the electronic remains of a culture, signals broadcast before the human race had even learnt how to knap flints. Now this, a starship finally arrives, then it hides from us. Crazy."
"I'm sure you can cope," Julia said, there was a line of steel in her voice.
Rick jerked back out of his daydream. "Yes, of course, absolutely no problem."
"Good. You're searching for two things. Firstly, any sign of an alien starship. Secondly, this Kiley probe of Royan's. I want to know if it's still in Jupiter orbit, or if it's en route back to Earth. Got that?"
"Yes." Rick bobbed his head.
"There's a third option on Kiley," Victor reminded her. "The most likely, that it's already returned."
"How would we know?" Julia asked. "Royan's wiped or guarded any reference in the company memory cores. Even I can't find any traces," she added significantly.
"We do it the old-fashioned way. Ask people instead of machines," he said with a slow smile. Investigative techniques, cross-indexing and correlating data, had been a part of his original training. Unused for well over a decade, ever since security simply became a question of correct data retrieval. It would be good to actually use his brain on a problem again, satisfying, that and being out in the field for a change. "We can start with Rick here?"
"Me?" the startled SETI director asked.
"Yes."
"But I've told you everything I know about Kiley, every byte."
"Not quite. For a start, which bay the Kiley was assembled in?"
"F37, I think."
"Right, Julia would you ask your team to access the records for that bay, see if they can work out how Royan glitched the cores to hide what he's been doing?"
"Good idea," she said.
"In the mean time, Rick and I will get back to the Institute, start talking to the team that assembled Kiley, and more important, see if we can locate the spaceplane crew that launched it."
"What for?" Rick asked.
"Because if it has returned, their familiarity with the system would make them the logical choice to perform the recovery flight."
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Julia watched the study door close behind the two men. Rick Parnell had been more or less what she'd expected, except for his physical size; an intellectual, socially out of his depth. Wasn't royalty supposed to be able to put anyone at their ease? That was one trick she had never mastered. It always took three or four meetings with people before they started to relax around her. Apart from Victor, of course, she couldn't think of a time when Victor had been reticent around her. Always honest, that was Victor's big attraction. And loyal, which went far beyond professional integrity. Julia quickly put a brake on that stray thought.