“Our friend Dr. Gruber has started already, in fact,” Sakalov said. He lifted the notepack he had been holding and gave it to Sianna. She set her cup down on the desk and took the pack. “Images and data pulled down yesterday, last night, and this morning,” Sakalov said. “Gruber wangled time on instruments all over the world, and on the Terra Nova. Have a look for yourself.”
Sometimes Sianna worried that people assumed she was much smarter than she really was. How in the world did Sakalov come to assume she was smart enough to interpret raw images and data without guidance or explanation?
But then she switched on the notepack, and all doubts faded away. It was all so obvious.
“Gruber searched the entire circumference of the Lone World’s orbit—or at least the fraction of it currently visible from Earth,” Sakalov said. “Since we are nearly over the Sphere’s northern pole, and the Lone World orbits along the Sphere’s equator, we can see about nine-tenths of its orbit from here. Those are all visible-light images you have there, but we are hoping for infrared and ultraviolet from the Terra Nova.”
Sianna nodded, not really hearing what he was saying. There they were. Five, six, seven of them, all of them showing the signs of heavy magnification and intense image-enhancement. There were fuzzy, faint, murky images of ring shapes, some seen nearly from the edge, others somewhat foreshortened, and one perfectly face-on. The black holes at their center would be completely invisible, of course, but Sianna found herself straining to see them all the same.
“The only thing I got wrong is the number of them,” Wally said proudly. “We only have images on seven R-H sets so far, but the spacing of those tells us there must be eighteen of them altogether, and including at least one R-H set orbiting the Lone World.”
“A prediction tested and proved correct right there,” Bernhardt said.
Sianna nodded absently and worked the display controls. As Bernhardt himself had pointed out, pretty pictures were all very well, but there was more to analysis than that.
Ursula Gruber had directed whatever detectors she could find, of whatever kind they might be, at the Lone World.
The trouble was that the Lone World was a dim, tiny target at a great distance. It was smaller than the Moon, eight times farther from Earth than Pluto had been from the Sun, and separated by only a few million kilometers from a larger object, an object known to throw off a bit of radiation itself—the Sphere. In fact, to make things even trickier, the Lone World was transiting the Sphere at the moment. “Transiting” was nothing more than a fancy way of saying the Lone World was in front of the Sphere as seen from Earth; the positioning made it that much harder to observe the smaller body.
“Obviously, you’re looking for something that could be a communications signal, a command system, right?” Sianna asked.
“That’s right,” Dr. Bernhardt said. “Gruber’s already pulled in more data than one analysis team could handle in a week. Once we find the correct command channel, there will be less to analyze, but for now we must examine every wavelength we can detect.”
“Why do you assume the Charonians will only use one data channel?” Sianna asked. “We use more than one frequency, and we know they do, too.”
Bernhardt looked confused for a moment. He took his feet down off the desk and turned to face Sianna directly. “I beg your pardon?” he asked.
“The first signal they intercepted back in the Solar System. The Shattered Sphere signal and reply,” Sianna said, paying more attention to the data discrimination reports in the notepack than to her own words. Gruber had picked up a lot of data already, in IR, UV, and lots of radio bands, and rejected them all as “natural” or “static.” How could she be so sure?
“Ah, Miss Colette, you were discussing the first Charonian signal received?” Sakalov said, rather gently.
“Huh? Oh. Right. The first signal was at a frequency of twenty-one centimeters, with the reply at forty-two centimeters. So we know they use more than one bandwidth for signaling. That only makes sense—some frequencies are better for a given purpose than others. One might allow you to transmit more data more quickly, but another might punch through a dust cloud more easily.”
“And, ah, don’t forget the Solar System reported the Charonians were using modulated gravity waves to send signals,” Wally said. “We assume the Multisystem Charonians use MG waves as well, but all our active-process gravity-wave detectors blew up as soon as Earth got here.”
“Yes, I well remember that,” Bernhardt said, with a slight smile. “I was in the next building over from one of the detectors that blew. Every active detector built since then has blown as soon as it was powered up. Too much gravity energy for an active-process detector to handle, and we never had much luck with the alternate-mode detectors based on Charonian technology. But we can still use the old-fashioned passive detectors, and they tell us enough to know Charon Central does not send commands over gravity waves.”
“How so?” Wally asked, in slightly suspicious tones.
“The passive detectors aren’t sensitive to high-frequency gravity modulation,” Bernhardt replied, “but they do detect harmonics, reverberations in the lower frequencies induced by the higher frequencies, and we can usually correlate the harmonics with some sort of activity. If the Lone World were putting out high-end MG waves, we would have spotted that long ago.”
“Right,” Sianna agreed, a bit vague about what, exactly, she was agreeing with. Her mind was working on something else. “Besides, I don’t think MG waves could be all that efficient as a pure signal system. Yes, anything that can be modulated can be used to send a signal—but there are lots of much easier, more efficient things to modulate than gravity waves. Like radio bands.”
“That’s the problem,” Sakalov said. “Gruber’s people did checks all through the EM bands—especially radio. They compared the data we’ve gotten from the Lone World against all the data types we’ve received over the last five years. The Lone World puts out a lot of radio energy, but most of it is natural. Gruber suggests that there’s a lot of interaction between the Lone World’s magnetic fields and the Sphere’s surface. In fact, that sort of interaction accounts for one family of very annoying transient bursts of static we’ve seen for years. Anyway, once Gruber’s team eliminated natural radio sources and the GIGO data, there wasn’t much left.”
Sianna looked up at Sakalov without really seeing him. GIGO. Garbage In, Garbage Out. One of the oldest and most arcane bits of computer slang. It used to mean that if the data that went in was no go, your results wouldn’t be of much use. But meanings change over time. These days, GIGO referred to data that had already been classified as garbage—static, transient spikes or dips caused by power fluctuation, image degradation cause by flaws in the equipment.
Already classified as garbage. Hold it a moment. Who looks for anything in the places they’ve already looked? Sianna worked the notepack controls.
“Miss Colette?” Dr. Sakalov was still waiting for her to say something.
“Ah, um, just a second, sir.” Okay then. They were saying that all of these emissions were GIGO data, pure noise. Someone had decided data like them were noise long before anyone even knew the Lone World existed. Knowing full well they were all waiting for her, Sianna rushed through a series of sorts and checks and groupings on the data, not quite knowing what she was looking for.
She looked up suddenly, staring with unseeing eyes past Bernhardt’s shoulder at the magnificent vista beyond. Wait a minute. That was it. She knew exactly what she was looking for. Vagueness. Yes. Yes.