“Wound?” said Skip. “You almost speak of it as if it’s alive.”
“It’s not definable as living or dead. It’s a part biological, part mechanical hybrid, so advanced we can’t say where the biology ends and the machine begins. Anyway, under normal circumstances it would never have crashed—but it had been crippled in an attack. We’ve used a great deal of computing power the last few months, and enough electricity to power Phoenix in the process, to analyze it. We believe Earth was not its final destination. We were merely an accidental obstacle on its mission to carry a vital message across the galaxy—a message to others.”
“‘Vital’？” Tappan asked. “How so?”
“It was one of countless such probes, launched eons ago by a now-extinct civilization on the far side of the galaxy. They all carried the same message, and they wanted to spread it to as many sentient beings as possible.”
“How can you know all of this?” Nora asked.
“From the cube. It’s desperate to communicate with us. It doesn’t know our language, but it can display some pretty nifty holographic, or more accurately volumetric, videos. You don’t have to be a specialist to understand them. We in the intelligence community who’ve seen them are…well, I guess the right word would be ‘alarmed’—if not ‘frightened.’”
They looked at him with varying degrees of incredulity.
“There’s no easy way to put it, I’m afraid. For all their cruelty and zealotry, Atropos was fundamentally right. There is an alien threat of unimaginable evil out there. Only it’s not this probe—or the civilization that created it.”
“Who, then?” Nora asked.
“Let’s look at a video, shall we?”
Greyburn spoke to an aide, who briefly worked a nearby keyboard. A flickering of light shone from a small laser tube directed at the probe. As it did so, one of the lazy, swirling patterns on its hull seemed to come to attention.
“It communicates through the five-hundred-fifty-nanometer wavelength of electromagnetic radiation—in other words, green light.”
Nora watched the peculiar interaction of terrestrial laser and alien technology for a moment. And then, everyone gasped as an exquisite three-dimensional movie materialized in the air in front of them: in vivid color, visible from all angles. It showed first a star map, the POV zeroing in on a green-and-blue planet much like Earth, undoubtedly the probe’s home, orbiting a star. From the planet came a launching of thousands of probes, arcing out in all directions. This was followed by the materialization—or manifestation, it was too unfamiliar for Nora to fully comprehend—of something utterly bizarre. It looked at first like a cloud: a dark mist larger than the planet, a shape that was not a shape but rather the absence of light. But the way it moved gave an indication of sentience that, for no reason she could explain, chilled her to the core. Then it did something—something inexplicable—and the planet burst like a rotten tomato. The video went on to show a subsequent attack on the probe itself by a similar dark, cloudy entity, gigantic and hard to see. There was a cry of pain—was it really pain?—from the probe, but the holograph went on to show them its evasion from the thing, hiding on the dark side of a barren asteroid while it was hunted, and then finally escaping. Next, a pullback to the galaxy as a whole, showing the probe’s long, drifting path over what must have been millions of years. The solar system came into view, Earth appeared, then the crash—and darkness.
Nora was awestruck. An entire history, many millions of years, had been compressed into five minutes and made simple enough for a child to understand.
The general let a shocked silence fall over the group. Then he turned to Tappan. “So tell me. Do you still think keeping this secret is a bad idea? Is the world truly ready to ‘handle’ this information?”
Tappan licked his lips. “No,” he said at last. “No, it’s not. In all honesty, I’m not sure I can handle it.”
“We’re counting on you to do so.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Do you think I brought you all here just to satisfy your curiosity? Mr. Tappan and Dr. Kelly, I need you both—and your resources—to help us with this. In time, we’ll reach out to other important and influential people as well: some who can help…and others who could, if left ignorant, inadvertently endanger our planet. I refer, of course, to SETI and especially the more active attempts at extraterrestrial communication that are now gearing up to follow it. All that effort must be halted. And we must, as a species, find a way to shut down the vast quantity of electromagnetic radiation leaking into space from our activities.”