[The Fear Saga 01] - Fear the Sky (2014) (8 page)

“I hope you have also gathered some measure of respect for me too, over the years,” she continued, “and now I hope I can cash in some small part of that mutual respect for your trust when I say that we have something here. Something unusual, something potentially unique, and though I don’t know what it is yet, when something like this lands just out of reach, I think it is our job, our duty, to reach farther. To keep reaching until we have it in our grasp.”

She held his gaze, and he felt the full weight she was putting behind her words. Her powerful sincerity met him head on, and he realized that he did indeed have a great deal of respect for this woman. As his usual pragmatism struggled to reassert control over him, he was overcome with the knowledge that she had proven to him again and again that she had a formidable mind, and he had never seen her be unreasonable or behave like the stereotypical blinkered pursuer of truth at-all-costs. He had also never seen her lose her cool. This formidable woman was asking for his trust, and more than that she was asking for his help.

The moment was broken by the smiling invite from Margaret to go in, and the two of them stood, the general indicating for Laurie to go first. Jim Hacker was ready with handshakes and platitudes as they came in, prepared to talk the doctor down from what sounded like a potentially costly project.

He was not ready, however, for the usually pragmatic General Pickler to be on her side.

Neal had never enjoyed living in Arizona, so the change of venue would have been welcome anyway. The fact that he was also working on something that was so cutting edge also helped make up for the fact that he was also, frankly, well outside his area of expertise.

Luckily the same skills that had gotten him through seven years of university with a pretty much constant hangover had served him well when he was invited to join Dr. West at the Marine Research Institute in Florida. Though this was officially a navy project, the Institute was actually a private facility. It owed a lot of its funding, however, to the US government. So when the navy had come calling they had put their best people on the project.

Laurie and Neal stood in overalls staring at the top of the huge tank emerging from the constantly soaking concrete platform surrounding it. Suspended from the steel gantry that ran over the tank, a bulky and irregular probe, covered in plastic and taping, was hanging by a thick cable into the water, pointing down into the dirty depths of the tank, scanning its hidden bottom far below.

The water had been filled with an unnatural amount of salt, sand, dust, and debris to simulate a greater depth of water than was actually present, for while the tank was one of the largest indoor tanks in the world, it was still a fraction of the depth they would be searching in.

Laurie looked at the specially field-hardened laptop in Neal’s hands and nodded as he explained what was happening. The initial tests had proven their science sound, but their application amateur. Luckily the practicalities of ocean-bed analysis were the bread and butter of the experts here.

The Institute was, essentially, the final evolution in the hunt for oil, a hunt that was seeking with reckless resolve to extract every last drop of fossil fuel from the earth, no matter how deep, cold or, as was becoming more and more the case, war-torn its location was. Through long practice they had evolved sonar and seismology to a fine science, and were capable of viewing, analyzing, and categorizing almost any ocean bed on the surface on the planet.

The very nature of their business, however, meant that the larger the target they were looking for the better. Because of this, high resolution had rarely been a top priority for them as they had scanned the world’s ocean beds for the telltale signs of hidden oil and gas reserves.

So when they had been presented with the parameters of the problem they were being asked to work on, they had actually been grateful for the introduction of an outside authority to help guide this new avenue of research.

Laurie had warned Neal, however, that these folks would not listen to him if they knew he held merely a master’s degree, let alone one in an unrelated field. So she had introduced him as an anonymous advisor, his identity necessarily classified, and given him the pseudonym of Mr. Smith.

More than happy to play to this persona, Neal had joined the team and worked with their superior knowledge of sonar and seismology to seek the results he needed, guiding them like the hands of his mind’s eye, imagining and then executing a barrage of ever larger tests and experimental machinery to aide him in his mission to find a way to locate the meteors.

Any concern she may have had over his ability to maintain credibility had been assuaged when she had heard him discussing part of the theory they had both developed with his new team.

“Because of interference, sea state and various other factors, it’s clear that multibeam bathymetry data conceals too many outliers and simply won’t get to the resolution we need. In order to process large amounts of data accurately and effectively, we’re going to need a faster and automatable approach. To this end, Dr. Cavanagh and I may have defined the beginnings of an algorithm for detecting outliers based on density of points.

“Firstly, each swath of data should be projected along orthogonal and side direction axes. On each plane an initial point would need to be determined according to a corresponding maximum density. Then a whole region could be mapped and searched by the connected neighboring points on each plane. Then we adopt the erosion and dilation algorithms you have already developed to eliminate outliers within the larger region.”

While Laurie had been somewhat confused by his logic she had seen that the group had been engaged as he spoke. The passionate debate that had been catalyzed by his theory had been one of many crucial steps the team had needed to make in order to realize Neal and Laurie’s somewhat naïve plans. Once again she had found herself reflecting that Neal was smarter than even he gave himself credit for, though she had no intention of fueling his self-confidence and resulting dubious sense of diplomacy further by telling him so.

Two months later they had a prototype for the tool they would need to find the meteors, and she had come down to Florida a couple of days ahead of the generals, admirals, and other White House advisors who would be arriving tomorrow to view the demonstration.

They had spent the first day going over the theory and design of the scanner, or Gamma-supplemented Radar Sonar Seismographic and Planar Array. They had been incredibly creative in their thinking, and had come up with some fundamentally new ways to approach the problem, but essentially the system worked by combining multiple existing scanning techniques, and using them in unison. The readings of all of these were then cross-referenced using a series of complex algorithms developed by the team to single out features of the scanned area that met a series of criteria, each identified by a different part of the scanner.

That had been yesterday, but despite her interest in the scientific rigor, she was keen to see the machine in action. It had been necessary to bring her up to speed, however, as the team arriving would be looking to her for reassurance that there was meat behind what the civilian team was saying.

Though today they would see it in person, Neal had taken some pleasure in teasing her further by spending two hours explaining the tests they had developed for it. After all, before the navy would agree to dispatch the tool and the team to one of its vessels to go hunting, they would have to prove to the arriving dignitaries that it would work in waters that were really two miles deep.

With Laurie’s patience running dangerously thin, Neal had eventually brought her from the meeting room where they had reviewed the countless equations, and out into the ‘lab.’

As they stood there amongst the tanks and cranes, they were both starting to feel like they had chosen the wrong specialization, for no astrophysics experiment had used labs like this since the moon landing tests. Sure, they had their Hubble telescope, but you didn’t wear overalls and a tool belt to work on things like that, you wore a full-body encounter suit and re-breather, and most astrophysicists were unlikely to be doing that anytime soon.

The probe dangling in the huge tank, which they stood watching, was scanning through the water. It sought a variety of identically shaped objects which had been strewn on the bottom of the tank, each of a different material and correspondingly different density. The test for the probe was to see if it could detect the position and density of each object in a series of controlled tests, with remote-controlled underwater cranes moving them between each running of the test.

The cranes would also rearrange a set of even smaller iron blocks into different patterns, testing the ability of the probe to achieve the necessary resolution for the greater vertical distances that would eventually be required.

All of this was done amidst a bed of sand and small rocks designed to mimic a natural ocean bed. This, and the debris in the water, should prove enough to demonstrate the machine’s ability to see through everything, up to, and including, mud.

There was one other test that they would keep in reserve in case their audience was not convinced by this massive and impressive show. The second test was fairly expensive, a little strange, and very messy, so they would only show it if someone in the review board asked the same question that Laurie had asked immediately after Neal had finished explaining the first test.

While considerations of cost and clean-up affected the test’s appeal for the Institute’s administrators and financiers, Neal and most of his colleagues were hoping more than a little that they would have to go to plan B.

* * *

The next day, seated in three rows on white plastic fold-out chairs, the review board was arranged like a wedding, with the naval officers on one side, the air force’s on the other, and the various civilian assistants and advisors to each dotted amongst them like their proverbial dates. The chairs had been arranged in the same spot Neal and Laurie had stood in only a day beforehand viewing the massive tank that housed their main experiment.

In the back row Laurie sat between General Pickler and an ex-naval captain who had joined the Institute full-time four years ago after being assigned there for two years as a navy liaison. The appropriateness of Captain Hawkson’s assignment had been a little too good, it turned out, and his passion for the specific brand of naval ingenuity the Institute required had drawn him away from his career in the navy proper. Well, passion and a private sector paycheck. Laurie had met him when the project had been initiated eight weeks beforehand, and since then, he and Neal had clearly become friends. The night before the team had gone out for a drink after the dress rehearsal was complete and they had ended up polishing off beers into the wee hours. No doubt if they were successful today, they would repeat that this evening, but first they had seventeen pragmatic and dispassionate senior military men to show the light to. Considering the audience, they had felt it best not to set Neal loose on them, so they had picked one of the Institute’s own to lead the demo.

And so, after introducing the project and the team, Laurie had handed over to the team’s designated driver and taken her seat, winking at Neal on his spot on the other side of the tank from them. He was standing at the control panel that linked him with the remote cranes at the bottom of the deep well of murky water.

* * *

An hour or so later, the demo was going well, and they were approaching the end of the third and final repositioning. Dr. Madeline Cavanagh, the designated speaker and another member of the previous evening’s celebration, continued her description of the way the tools worked, and how they had solved the multitude of problems they had been presented with.

Dr. Cavanagh was in her mid-thirties. She had started out as a marine biologist but her sharp intellect had driven her to branch out into different fields since then, and for the last three years she had been earning the respect of her peers at the Marine Institute. She had an excellent speaking voice and a clear, concise way of explaining even the most complex ideas. She also had striking blue eyes that contrasted her red hair, and which she was using to full effect to engage her audience as she talked. She had that rare kind of attractiveness that did not diminish her intellect, but instead served to heighten her outward credibility. She had been a force on the team over the past two months, second only to Captain Hawkson, who, unbeknownst to the rest of the team, she had been seeing for quite some time.

At Neal’s confirmation in her ear, she wrapped up her explanation and guided the audience’s eyes once more to the large screen where they were projecting the compound image from the probe. The image started out blank, then slowly but surely each element of the probe started to return data, the computer running simultaneous algorithms to sort the images into an ever more detailed picture of the tank’s dark bottom.

Meanwhile, Neal was looking at the raw data behind the image as the computer zeroed in on the anomalous shapes it was seeing, determining their exact shape and density with ever-greater certainty. Even given infinite time the machine would never reach 100% certainty, but the margin would gradually decrease by ever-smaller amounts. For their purposes 85% or above had proven more than reasonable and soon the computer made its ‘guesses.’

Neal relayed them to the main screen, and Madeline read them off to the waiting guests, who had each previously been handed the tests’ layouts to compare against. As with the first two tests they were appropriately accurate. Neal and Madeline smiled. Laurie turned to James to shake his hand. As the group started to ask its final questions, they were clearly just going through the motions. The tests had been both impressive, and as close to conclusive as a system’s test could reasonably come. While Neal did not want to invite undue criticism of his team or their work, a part of him still waited hopefully for that elusive question that would force them to go to Plan B. As the group’s questioning continued along ever more banal avenues, it seemed less and less likely, and he was surprised when it eventually came up, not least of which because of who ended up asking it.