The Flight of the Aphrodite by S J Morden

Author:S J Morden [Morden, S J]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473228603
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2022-03-16T16:00:00+00:00

14

They were all there, and Mariucci couldn’t put it off any longer.

‘Firstly,’ he said, ‘I’ve received a message from the Director General of ESA, cancelling this mission, and recalling us to cis-lunar as soon as we can expedite it.’

‘A politically motivated order that takes no account of the scientific work we’re doing,’ said Forsyth into the gap before Mariucci could continue. ‘I will be ignoring it. So will my scientists.’

Mariucci steadied his nerves. ‘I have determined it’s a legally constituted order, which we cannot ignore. However—’

‘Oh, that’s just so much bullshit, Luca. We can be out here until we choose to go back. What are they going to do? Send OSTO agents after us? Your friend Van der Veerden? Vi, for God’s sake, and her ecofascist horde?’

What was he going to say? He’d lost his train of thought. Lost, derailed, it didn’t matter. His mind was blank for a moment, and he was just staring at the faces staring back at him. The signals, that was it. The signals. He regrouped, and hoped they hadn’t noticed.

‘We need to decide what to do about Benjamin and Valeria’s report on the Io ziggurat.’

‘You said you’d send it,’ said Borner.

‘I cannot send what I don’t have. Rory has deleted it, and all the working copies.’

Forsyth became the centre of attention, and he didn’t seem to mind at all. ‘I refuse to tell Earth we think we’re seeing little green men. It will reduce our credibility to zero.’

‘Rory,’ said Benjamin, ‘we’re not saying we’ve seen little green men.’

‘No, and it needs to stay that way.’

‘But the ziggurat—’

‘There is no such thing. Not on Io, not on Europa, not on Ganymede.’

‘But we have images of it.’

‘We have images of Io, yes. But whatever surface features are there are entirely natural—’

Borner interrupted, and Forsyth looked momentarily shocked that someone would do that to him. ‘The signals. The coding. The clock.’

‘Again, whatever you think it is, it isn’t.’

‘Then how—’

‘Whatever it may or may not be, it’s not some alien race from beyond the dawn of history marking time using the moons of a planet as their second hand.’ Forsyth had regained control. ‘Honestly, we’re – at least some of us are – scientists. We deal in certainties. Hard data. Not Fortean ephemera and internet conspiracies. If Earth learns about what you think you might have found, everything else is lost. Everything. All our measurements. All our models. All our images. All our interpretations. All of the science, the papers, the conferences, the positions: none of that will ever happen, because we’ll be the mission that thought it saw aliens.’

‘Rory—’

‘I do not want to spend the rest of my professional life in committees and meetings, for God’s sake! I absolutely will not countenance saying anything, sharing anything, doing anything, that might make that more likely.’

He’d finished, and his words had hit home. Mariucci looked at the faces of the science team, Spinu and Velter especially, but also Tsoltos and Kattenbeck, and they were thinking furiously. No matter how

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.