The Fallen (3 page)

The hot air dried her contact lenses as she stepped outside.  The sullen guard of the bar looked up at her and then looked down again, squatting and resting on his rifle.  He had given up trying to warn drunken westerners not to walk the streets alone after dark. 

She made it back to her hotel, the one she always stayed at,
The Lion Den
.  She had joked with Tim that someone had obviously left out the ‘
s
’ from
Lion’s
when they painted the sign and he had said that even if they had spelled it correctly, it wasn’t a great choice of name for a cosy B&B.  She laughed to herself as she remembered their conversation and wished he was with her now.  It always felt like home whenever they were together, even when they weren’t speaking. 

She locked the door to her room, took out the key and jammed a chair under the door handle; it was a nice place but she was still a woman travelling alone and who knew what lions might be lurking in the den.  Better to be safe than sorry Tim would say and she had learned the hard way to believe him.  She got under her mosquito net and lay back on the bed, setting her phone to wake her up at ten, a late start but it was going to be a long day.

Chapter 9

“Wake up Timmy”

Tim rubbed his eyes. “Wha…?”

“Wake up.”  Asefa’s voice boomed in his aching head.  For a moment he thought he had woken up in his own bed and that Sarah would be next to him, but Asefa was not in England…?  Waking up in a strange place never sat well with him and never seemed to get any easier.  He looked around to see he was in the sparsely decorated spare bedroom of the Development Institute guesthouse, the residential section of their Dire Dawa office compound.  How many beers had they drunk last night? 

“OK, OK you fucker – I’m awake. What time is it?”

“Five-thirty. You want to go to this copper mine and do some work or stay in bed and have me fan you with palm leaves?  This is not Wolverhampton County Council and we are not on flexi-time woman.  In Africa we start early to beat the Sun; but I know you grey boys back in London don’t have to worry about that.  Ha.  Here drink your coffee man and get dressed.”

Asefa handed him a sweet and strong Ethiopian coffee and some bread, which he took and gnawed on like a sleepy child.  “OK I’ll be ready in ten.  I’ll meet you at the car.”

Asefa was definitely a morning person.  So was he, but a seven A.M. not a five A.M. morning person.  Like most women he’d known, Sarah was not a morning person.  Tim would get up at the weekend and have some alone time before throwing a cup of tea and a bacon roll into the bedroom, like a couple of edible grenades to wake a sleeping dragon.

Tim threw on his clothes and well-worn hiking boots, stuffed his water bottles and the rest of his gear into his pack and brushed his teeth, being careful not to get any tap water in his mouth.  Does fluoride on a toothbrush kill waterborne diseases if you brush long enough?  Today wouldn’t be the day to try it out; a thousand feet down a copper mine and not a bathroom in sight.  He didn’t think the miners would be too pleased if he soiled their tunnels fitted with improvised and barely functioning ventilation. 

He walked out to the cream Landcruiser and got in next to Asefa.  

“Not too much off-roading Asefa.  And I get to pick the music.”

“No, driver decides and driver wants Zangaliwah!” Asefa laughed and put on his Cameroonian tunes.  Well, when in Rome, he thought.   

He had met Asefa in Sudan ten years earlier.  They’d shared a compound working for the International Committee for Migration.  Asefa was the gregarious Cameroonian who kept everyone’s spirits up, often with spirits created in his improvised moonshine kit.  His homebrew wasn’t bad and the Sudanese government’s ban on alcohol made it all the more drinkable.  It was a great time – he’d been young, he loved the work, he was out there meeting people, meeting women, making a difference.  The organization was on a shoestring budget, which meant little oversight and maximum flexibility to do the type of work you wanted; without the endless report writing big money brings.  He’d taken the poorest village in the area and turned it into the most prosperous, just using the things people had around them.  It even started to go a little to his head, and it was Sarah who told him he was in danger of becoming the next Davenport, from Rudyard Kipling’s
The Man Who Would Be King
.  That was how they met.  She was travelling through doing assessments of the refugee camps in the region for the International Rescue Alliance and she had crashed for a week at their guesthouse.  He had fancied her and hated her in equal measure, in part because she immediately called him on a heap of bullshit that he was beginning to form into his own personal throne.  But the next time she’d come through, they’d gotten drunk together on Cameroonian moonshine and danced like drunken monkeys to Zangaliwah in the African moonlight.  You become fast friends in the field.   When he next went to the Capital, Khartoum, he sought her out; partly because he wanted to, and partly because Asefa said he was ‘too much of a lady-boy white-boy to look up that beautiful NGO woman who was totally out of your league’. 

They’d met for a ‘quick catch-up’; tea, baklava and shisha at a little Moroccan place down a side street, but it had turned into an all-afternoon affair and then they had wound up at some Embassy party with unlimited alcohol via a diplomatic bag.  By the end of the night they were together.  They hadn’t been apart, except geographically, since.  He hoped she made it OK to Juba, he always worried about her when she went away on her trips, even though she was at least as worldly as he was. 

The car bumped along the road.   Asefa was singing along to Zangaliwah, rather well; he had a back up career right there if he ever decided to stop helping poor people and start helping himself.  Asefa was a remarkably cheerful and optimistic fellow for someone who had seen so much tragedy in his life.  His first child had died from malaria when she was four and six months later his wife died from complications while pregnant with his second child.  That was before Tim had met him, since then both Asefa’s parents had passed away and his sister – his last remaining relative - had disappeared while working as a nurse with the UN in Congo.  Asefa had gone to the war torn country and spent six months trying to find her, calling in every favour and spending everything he had saved.  Some said they thought the Lord’s Resistance Army took her, but Asefa liked to believe that her car had gone off the road on some remote jungle pass and she died quickly.  The hard part for him was coming to terms with the fact that he’d never know what really happened.  That must have been the case for so many in Africa, never really knowing what happened to family, friends or loved ones that got separated by famine, drought or war.  Little government, few records and poor communications could make tracking down the missing or the dead a life’s work; at some point you have to decide to give up and live.

“How long until we get there Asefa?”

“If you were driving, three hours.  At Asefa speed, make that two – we’ll be down the mine before nine.”  Asefa pushed the peddle to the floor and the dust cloud behind them grew larger.  “Don’t worry, no people on these roads. Just slithering black mambas – and they can eat my black wheels.”

Chapter 10

The coffee at S.E.T.I. was weak but hot.  Hat Creek Radio Observatory, his home away from home.  The array of disks that spanned the horizon turned a thousandth of a degree to scan a hugely different expanse of cosmos for any hint of a radio signal that might indicate intelligence beyond the Earth.  Machines bleeped and packages of data were sent out and retrieved from the myriad of networked home computers, laptops, licit and illicit corporate servers, all sifting through gigabytes of space noise as part of the S.E.T.I@Home project.  Five hundred thousand silicone minds whirring away as one; the processing power of a planet.  

Brian reached for his coffee.  He had joined the programme starry-eyed and straight out of M.I.T. – the geek equivalent of a Hooters waitress landing a supporting role in
Dallas
–
The Movie
.  But eight years and two thousand days and nights later he had experienced nothing but a blip here, a beep there and one unfortunate piece of static that he had got everyone very, very excited about, then very disappointed and slightly angry about.  He hadn’t invented S.E.T.I@Home, Marius had – damn his German techno wizardry.  But to Marius’ credit it was a damn fine idea.  Now the disappointment of not hearing anything from space could be spread across the entire planet and not just the entire office. 

Then the tweets started on the ‘members only’ @SETIInstitute page.  

STARGEEZER42: ‘The silence in grid 164x678y790z – it’s movin.’

Final_Frontier: ‘Moving gap in static 165x677y790z, anyone else see this?’

Life@LibertySHIP: ‘Yep S.E.T.I. HQ are you getting this?’

STARGEEZER42:  ‘S.E.T.I.? Brian u on duty?’

STARGEEZER42: ‘Brian….’

STARGEEZER42: ‘BRIAN OMFG RU F*#%$# AWAKE!?????????????????’

Brian jump-started his brain and switched on everything that had a switch.  

Brian2@SETI: ‘Getting - thanks.’

STARGEEZER42: ‘I’m claimin this 1!’

Brian2@SETI: ‘Don’t get ahead of yourself STARG – remember 2013? Prob nothing, what you got?’

STARGEEZER42: ‘Dnt know – like said - just BIG space in background noise – but movin! – am mapping – CALL UR PEOPLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!’

Brian called Marius; it wasn’t quite time to call the entire cavalry, especially after last time.  “Marius!  Marius?  Are you logged in?  Check this shit out!  What the fuck is it?”

Brian could hear Marius knocking over glasses, drop his phone and apologise to a muffled female voice somewhere in the background as he clambered to his workstation.

“Marius, you there?”

Marius answered in his half-German-half-British accent.  “Yeah Brian, I’m seeing this for sure – but I’m a flying fucking whale if I could tell you what it is.  It is not broadcasting, but it is blocking right?  Which means it is either very big or very close, but hopefully not both, yah?”

“What should I do?” Brian asked, knowing what the answer would be.

“Call everybody.”

Chapter 11

Within an hour Brian was in the S.E.T.I main meeting room, surrounded by people both in person and dialled in on secure videoconference.  Some had made the effort to don dishevelled suits; Marius had turned up in jeans and a slightly German looking leather jacket - he might have come on his motorbike but he was still a geek.

A microphone clicked on over the teleconference.  “So what do we have here?” said one of the non-scientists, with a voice like a senator. 

 “We’re still trying to figure that out sir,” said Brian’s boss weakly; a man who had been wearing the same faded brown suit since Brian joined the office.  Was this who he was aspiring to be?  Time to chip in and redeem some reputation.

Before he could speak Marius interjected.  “We’re calling it the swathe sir.”

The
swathe
? Nobody had mentioned that word until Marius had just said it.  Brian’s father had once told him that everybody blags it, but Marius took this to the extreme and annoyingly always seemed to get away with it.

“The swathe?” said the man who sounded like a senator, “What the hell does that mean and it better mean something - should we be concerned?”

Brian’s boss looked at him and Marius, willing them to speak but also willing them not say anything that would get him into trouble later.

This time Brian made sure he spoke first.  “Sir, this… ‘swathe’… our array picked it up a few hours ago.  People monitoring our signals on the web as part of our cloud observation team spotted it first.  We’ve been tracking it since.  If I show you on here…” He pulled up a 3D matrix of dots on the conference room monitor.  “Sir, this model was sent to us by one of our web observers.  It’s a little crude but I believe accurate.  It represents the sectors we’ve been monitoring for signals over the past week.  Most of what we pick up is static but this is strange.  Normally the spread of static is even but what we’ve picked up is this,” he clicked his mouse and a gap in the 3D dot matrix was visible moving across the screen.  “This silence, or swathe, is cutting through the static.  If it hadn’t been moving, we wouldn’t have noticed it.  But it is moving and it is moving this way.”

“So at gone midnight on a Friday we should be concerned by a moving patch of silence?” said the man on the teleconference, sounding tired and slightly irritated.

“The problem is,” Marius pulled the table microphone towards him, “...is that we don’t know what this silence is.  All we know is that it’s big and moving this way.”

The man on the teleconference looked confused.  “But we were told that the chance of a sizeable celestial object impacting on earth was millions to one?  How likely is it to make contact?”

“That is correct sir,” said Brian’s boss, “The chances of an asteroid of any consequence hitting the earth are infinitely small.  And this may well not be an object at all sir.”

Brian did his best to lean towards the now inconveniently placed microphone.  “That’s the problem sir – it
is
highly likely.  I should have explained the scale of the model.  The silence is one light-year wide, two high and of unknown depth.  The chances of it hitting the earth would be as likely as a marble balanced on a pier being hit by an approaching tidal wave.  But we don’t know what the tidal wave is made of or what it will do when it reaches us.  It might be nothing more than a moving gap in the static, or…”

“Or what?”

Brian’s boss took over again. “A worst case scenario would be a cloud of radioactive particles powerful enough to wipe out life on earth.  Or as Brian said it could be nothing.  We have always known about the potential for an event like this, we just never thought we would see it before it hit us.”