Kate and Jenny decide to remain at the secret base. They get to work decoding the signals from Jupiter and Saturn.
First Contact Facility
October 2022
We’d been at the first contact facility for about a month. The work kept us busy, so we didn’t notice we were living small. There were diversions for sure: an activity center, a gym, and even a movie theater, but we rarely went outside. Nobody seemed to miss it. We were on a mission, and it had become all-consuming.
I was grateful every day Kate had chosen to stay. Colonel Buckley, Mavis, which she finally allowed me to call her, had approved a quick trip for Kate to visit her brother, and Randy had convinced her she couldn’t pass up this opportunity, even without knowing the details of what it was. Maybe Randy just wanted to be on his own with Sharna and their new baby.
And she’d stayed to be with me.
But I would have stayed even if she had left. I’d had the heart-to-heart confession with Kate, but the guilt that I would have chosen the work over her wouldn’t go away. I tried not to think about it, except when it visited a sleepless night on me, like last night. Finally, I had gotten up and headed to my lab without waking Kate, fortunately.
Maybe I’d have some kind of revelation if I spent some quiet time alone in the lab. Kate and I had been trying to decode the anomalous signal pattern from the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction all the astronomers had been delirious over in 2020. The team hadn’t been able to decode the signal in the year and a half that they’d been working on it. So sure, one sleepless night, and I’d have it knocked out. Yet there I was, early morning, and all I’d done was sit and stare at the servers’ flashing lights. I would have been better off if I’d just headed to the commissary and grabbed some break —
“Jenn, Jenn, I’ve got it!” Kate came rushing into the room. She slowed down barely enough to hand me a latte without sloshing it. “I know what we’ve been doing wrong.” She scurried to her workstation and powered it up.
“Slow down, Katy. Doing what wrong?” I took a sip, and oh boy, the coffee was just what I needed.
“About the signals, why we can’t translate them. What if they’re not warning beacons like the ones we found?” Kate worked away at logging on and setting up her laptop.
“If they’re not warnings, what are they?” I wandered over, sipping my latte, and peered over her shoulder. She’d woken up her AI, Jessa, and opened a window to the main file structure of the source code.
“Jenn, we’ve had Jessa use her translation modules to decode each discrete signal. What if we let Jessa decide how to analyze the signals?”
“Okay. But what exactly did you have in mind?”
“Remember, I created her underlying functions to be a signal intercept AI for the military. She’s capable of identifying all sorts of radio traffic.” Kate continued working; I watched as she selected control settings, activated idle modules, and tweaked a bit of code here and there. “What if I just let her do her thing without any restrictions? Let’s see—what—happens.” With a flourish, Kate hit the Enter key. The screen contents swirled away to a dot and a flash, to be replaced with a new spinning 3D “I’m working” graphic. I didn’t know where Kate found the time to create these little doodles, but I loved them.
“Okay. Jessa’s going to need some time to work through the backlog.” Kate took my hand. “Bring your latte. Let’s get breakfast.”
She paused at the door and turned with a severe expression I rarely saw. “And Jennifer, when you’re ready to talk about what’s keeping you up at night, I’m here to listen. Okay?”
She hauled me out of the lab without waiting for a reply.
I wanted breakfast to be a cheery time, but the fuzziness from the sleepless night and a wispy pall of tension between Kate and me conspired to dampen the mood. The constant guilt and the sporadic friction between us wore on me. Maybe I should talk to her.
“Kate, I need to tell you something.”
“It’s about time.” Kate smiled, reached across the table, and took my hands. “Go ahead. I’m listening.”
I couldn’t meet her gaze, so I looked down at our clasped hands and blinked back the tears. “It’s been bothering me since you decided to stay. I know we talked about this, but I still feel guilty and worried you’ll end up hating me.”
“I told you I won’t hate you.” Kate reached up and tucked an errant strand of hair behind my ear. “I could never hate you. I love you.”
I took her hand where it rested on my cheek and lifted my eyes to meet hers. “Oh, Katy. Are you sure? You’re not going to wish someday you’d left?”
“Jenny, no way. I meant it when I said I wanted to stay with you. My only issue was not seeing Randy and Sharna, and Mavis took care of that. I want to be here—with you. I don’t want to be out in the world alone. And I knew how important this was to you. If you’d left because of me, you would have loathed it. I understood the choice.”
Talking to Kate helped—a little. She constantly amazed me. I’d have to trust to time and life with Kate to allay the guilt. But at least she knew how I felt.
Before I could say anything, Kate stood up, stretched, and smiled. “And besides, if I left, who would take care of my girl Jessa?”
I was happy to return to the lab, where we could get some work done. Kate threw me a reassuring smile before she retreated to her workstation and began checking logs from Jessa’s processing. The “I’m working” graphic was still running on her laptop when we came in.
“Jenn, Jessa’s not done, but she’s reported some interesting results. Take a look.”
I went over and placed a conciliatory hand on her shoulder; Kate gave it a gentle pat. “What am I looking at, Katy?”
“We’ve been assuming that these new signals were only present during the conjunction. But Jessa’s reported they’ve been there in all the data, just hidden in the harmonics.”
Once Kate pointed them out, they were plain as day. Back at the university and here for the last month, we’d missed them, filtering them out as noise. Most of the time, the emissions looked like a carrier wave with no message, just radio-band energy. The conjunction highlighted them because data was embedded in the radio waves from both gas giants in the same timeframe, not separated by different observations. “This is very odd. Why would the two planets have such similar harmonics? It doesn’t make any sense.”
Kate exited the data display and returned the laptop to its working mode. “We’ll need to let Jessa finish processing the data and see what she says.”
While we waited for Jessa, we sat at a small worktable to the side of the room and talked of nothing of importance. I opened my mouth to respond to some innocuous comment, and the alarm went off. Kate rushed over to her laptop.
“Oh my god, Jenny. Oh—my—god. Jenny, it’s a conversation. Jessa hasn’t translated it yet, but she says the planets are talking to each other.”
###
Arizona CID Detective Raul Fuentes stormed out of the Criminal Investigations Division colonel’s office, almost slamming the door behind him. He tossed his tablet and notebook on his desk and flopped into his chair across from his partner.
“I swear to god, Jaz, I should just quit.”
“Whoa, Raul, dude, calm down.” Detective Jason Yazzie took his feet from his desk and leaned forward on his elbows. “Keep it cool, or the colonel might take you up on it. You’ve been up in his shit for weeks now.”
“Well, I should be. He’s letting the Feds bury the Raymond case.”
“Let it go, man. It’s their case. That Space Force officer, Buckley, made that pretty clear.”
Fuentes sat up and started tapping a pencil on his tablet’s cover, where it sat on top of the clutter. “Something is going on there. I know it. The higher-ups are just letting this happen. That guy was killed on our watch, in our jurisdiction. A professional hit on a university professor? And what about the two missing students? I’m not buying Buckley’s claim that they’re safe. She’s covering something.”
Detective Yazzie leaned farther forward. “If you keep this up, they’ll bounce your ass.” Punctuating his declaration with a finger pointed at Fuentes.
Fuentes stopped his tapping and clenched a fist around the pencil, driving the tip into a stack of files.
“What do you want me to do? Give up? Let the ‘authorities’ handle it? I tried that once and look where it got me. Nowhere. Ten years and my sister’s still missing.”
“Raul, finding those two girls will not bring Valeria back. And what could you do? You were just a kid?”
“Watch it, Jaz.” Fuentes’ look darkened, brows lowered, eyes narrowed to slits. “I’m not making that mistake again. I’m not dropping this.”
“If that’s the way you feel, call your guy in the Bureau. See if he’ll clue you in.”
Fuentes tossed the pencil on the desk and sat back. “I tried that. He doesn’t know anything or can’t share what he knows. That’s why the colonel had to explain again why I needed to back off. I swear, someday, this will come out and when the shit hits the fan, claiming it’s not our problem will not cut it. It’s a loose end, and I hate loose ends.”
Yazzie opened the case file on his desk and looked up at Fuentes. “But Raul, it’s not our problem, and you’re going to have it explained to you right out the door if you don’t knock it off. Let’s get back to work.”
Fuentes logged in and brought up the crime scene photographs for the case file Yazzie had open. “I just hope I get the green light on my application to the Bureau. Then I can work on Raymond’s case from the inside.”
Yazzie looked up. “You’ve applied to the FBI? Why didn’t you say something?”
“Didn’t want to jinx it, but—yep. Passed all the tests and sat for the interviews. Just waiting to hear if I’m accepted.”
“Raul, that’s great. I hope you get it. I’ll miss you as a partner.” Yazzie put a big smile on his face. “But then I’ll have my guy at the Bureau.”
Fuentes returned the smile and added a thumbs-up.