Author's Note: This is the final chapter, before the epilogue. Those of you who don't want to know what happens with Kate and Rebecca (and apparently there are some), can read to the end of this, and still get the whole of the central plot.
*****
"What makes you so sure this is where it's headed?" asked Kate as they drove away from the hotel.
They were passing through farmland, green open fields separated from the road by hedgerows. At this time of year, with no leaves on the trees, you could see quite a distance over the flat countryside, brick farm buildings dotted here and there, and houses with large gardens that perhaps formed the outer edge of the local commuter belt. It certainly made a difference from London.
"Remember the text books in Marcus' room at the University?" prompted Rebecca.
"Something to do with signal processing? But we know he was studying astrophysics, so does that tell us much?"
"We never thought to ask exactly what his thesis was on, because the astrophysics connection seemed enough in itself, given that we're looking for something from space. But it may have been more precise than that. Those were books about radio astronomy; that's what he's studying."
"And then he stops off at a travel hotel just a couple of miles from..."
"Jodrell Bank. The largest radio observatory in Britain, and home to one of the largest radio telescopes in the world. Hard to imagine that Marcus Freeman didn't at least have contacts here, and he might well have visited in person. I can't believe I didn't think of it earlier!"
"It does seem a bit of a coincidence otherwise, I agree," replied Kate, "but what it would even want a radio telescope for? Yes, obviously, there's a space connection, but what's it after?"
"I think it wants to send a message. That's the only obvious explanation. It wants to beam something out into space, to specific coordinates, and probably encoded in some way. But definitely a message of some kind. To wherever it came from. There's not really any other easy way it could do that."
"Don't radio telescopies just listen for signals? They can't broadcast, can they?"
"Ah," said Rebecca, getting into her stride, "normally you'd be right. There are only a handful of radio telescopes in the world that are designed to beam radio out into space as well as to receive natural transmissions from nebulae and stars and so on."
"Let me guess, Jodrell Bank is one of them?"
"Bingo. Or, rather it has one of them; the Lovell Telescope. The idea is that it sends radio out into space to bounce off the surface of asteroids, measure their distance, radar-image their shape, that sort of thing. It's not intended for contacting alien civilisations, but the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico was used for exactly that back in the 1970s, so why not? I mean, they didn't get a reply, obviously, but the principle holds."
"And this alien would know exactly where it aim it, and how to get the attention of whatever is listening. I can see how that makes sense. But even if that's right... what sort of message would it want to send? 'Come pick me up'?"
"Possibly, but they'd have to be really close by for that to work on a reasonable time frame. Okay, so let's assume they've got faster-than-light travel, which we don't know, but let's say they do. It still wouldn't help them, because the radio signal isn't faster-than-light. Even if they're parked around Alpha Centauri, they wouldn't pick up the message for over four years, and they're probably further out than that."
"So what, then?"
"I don't know..." she admitted, "but look at the way it has been behaving. It's being entirely secretive, and it has been taking over humans, not exactly asking their permission. And it simply discards them when it's done. It's certainly not being friendly, and that's before we take into account those drones that attacked us. So I don't think it's up to anything good."
"Consider, for instance: perhaps it comes from some civilisation out there that's short on resources. Or that's just hungry for more, which pretty much every living thing we know of is. Why not send out a message saying 'tasty meal here'? Which could mean minerals, or organic matter, or whatever, but no contact with technologically advanced civilisations has ever gone well for those further down the ladder. In this scenario, we are the Native Americans or the Australian aborigines, facing down Cortes and... just general white colonists, I guess.
"In general, maybe I'd say that it could be benevolent. But nothing it's done so far suggests that it has anything but contempt for us. If it's going to send a message, at the very least we want to know what it is before we let that happen."
"I'm all for erring on the side of caution," agreed Kate, "although I still think we need..."
At that point, their phones beeped simultaneously. The call showed as coming from Room 42 in London, and Rebecca asked Kate to take it while she continued driving.
"Hi, it's Brandon," said a familiar voice once Kate had switched the encryption on, "I've got a couple of important pieces of information for you. I've left a message for Helen, too, but she hasn't checked in yet. Anyway, we were digging into the background of this Raina woman."
"The school cleaner? Did you get any hint as to why this thing made her a target?"
"Absolutely! See, turns out she's not just a cleaner for a school. She works for an agency, so she works at a number of different places, and she'd have legitimate access to any of them. And guess what one of those places is?"
"Jodrell Bank," said Kate and Rebecca simultaneously.
"Uh... yes," he sounded disappointed, "how did you know?"
"We're already on our way there."
"Oh, right. Well, it occurs to me that it could use the telescope to send a message into space. Like in the film Species."
"That's why we're going there," Rebecca informed him, "and, seriously, Species? That's your example? It was crap."
"It wasn't that bad."
"You're only saying that because Natasha Henstridge is naked in it."
"Uh... well... I..."
