The Cassandra Sanction

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Back in his room, Ben emptied all the stuff out of his bag that he’d taken from Catalina Fuentes’ study. He laid the paper files in a stack on the bed, with the laptop next to them.

‘You know anything about computers?’ Raul asked.

‘I know how to turn them on,’ Ben said. ‘I can do the basics of internet searches and such. Beyond that, not really.’

‘I’ll see what I can do.’ Raul picked up the laptop and carried it over to the little table, pulled up the room’s single chair and flipped open the screen and sat hunched over the keys like a pianist about to launch into a concerto.

Ben let him get on with it, and focused on the files. He found a cheap ballpoint and stuck it in his mouth like a cigarette, ready to make notes. Sitting on the bed, he made himself comfortable and then opened the cover of the first file in the stack, a thick and heavy one labelled SOLAR VARIATIONS TO 2015. It was a random choice, the equivalent of closing his eyes and sticking a pin in a map. When you didn’t know where you were going, one road was as good as another.

The top page was penned in the same neat, feminine handwriting as the label on the cover. Ben spent a moment looking at it, then turned that page and stared at the next one.

He swallowed. This might actually be less easy than he’d imagined.

Because there was an awful lot of science. In fact, there was nothing but science. The pages were black with it, and his brain was instantly swimming.

Ben was modestly aware of the fact that he wasn’t an entirely uneducated or unintelligent person. His academic record was well above average. At age eighteen he’d burned out his brain sitting in Oxford’s Bodleian Library poring over swathes of ancient Greek and Hebrew texts. Years later in the army, he’d laboured over the complexities of battlefield forensics. Struggled with the complicated concepts of classical mechanics involved in understanding the forces governing projectile trajectories. Crammed his head with Stokes’ drag and Newtonian drag and gravity and inertia and momentum and the categories of internal and transitional and external and terminal ballistics that described the flight of a missile from muzzle to target; and all kinds of other initially baffling technical information that had ultimately helped him to become that little bit better at his job of destroying buildings, materiel and human lives, all in the name of Queen and country.

In short, without getting too big-headed about it, and all moral considerations aside, he’d learned that he could grasp pretty much anything he turned his mind to.

But this here was on another level entirely. It would take him fifteen years of study to even begin to get to grips with the brain-numbing forest of numbers and graphs and charts and equations that seemed to cover every page from top to bottom. Even where the damn stuff was presented in actual words, he could seldom go a quarter of a line without ramming headlong into a wall of specialised terminology that might as well have been the native language of alien creatures on some far-distant planet in another galaxy that humans would never know existed.

In other places, meanings suggested themselves to him, but only in the vaguest possible terms:

Which definitely looked like a comparison of data for different years, telling him that something had decreased during that time period. Something, being solar wind velocity and density, but that was as far as he could follow it.

Ben ploughed on, or tried to. He spent a few moments trying to decipher a graph that looked a little less complex than some of the others. It was headed X-RAY FLUX (1 — MINUTE DATA), FEB 2014 150000 UTC. Its left axis was graduated in meaningless power numbers in watts m^-², and down its right side was written GOES 13 0.5–4.0 A / GOES 15 1.0–8.0 A. The graph showed a slightly squiggly red line that was almost flat, and another beneath it in blue that was jagged and wild with peaks and troughs.

Nice colours.

Time to move on.

Here and there, Ben saw disparate words and phrases he was able to latch onto, in the hope they might yield something comprehensible. Comprehensible, being the first step to significant, being the first step to important. On one page of notes he found a line standing proud of the rest, which read:

Which was the only place so far in Catalina Fuentes’ files he’d found as many as four words in consecutive order creating anything like a meaningful phrase. The only question was, what did it mean? 1980 was clearly — or was it? — a date, but apart from the fact that it had been the year in which John Lennon had been shot, and the year of the Iranian Embassy siege in London that had catapulted his future regiment, 22 SAS, to massive (and generally unwelcome) international media stardom, in this context it meant nothing to him.

Raul appeared to be busy on the laptop and Ben didn’t want to disturb him, so he reached for his smartphone and started dialling up an internet search.

‘Hey,’ Raul said, noticing what Ben was doing. ‘I thought we had to be careful about those things.’

‘Relax,’ Ben told him. ‘This phone can’t be traced to me.’

‘I don’t even want to know,’ Raul said.

‘Then don’t bother me with useless questions,’ Ben replied. He keyed in ‘54 Piscium’. A few moments later, he learned that it was the name of a star in the constellation Pisces. More correctly, an orange dwarf.

Orange dwarf. Ben blinked away the surreal image that threw up in his mind, and tried to focus: 54 Piscium was approximately thirty-six light years away, his internet source informed him. Thirty-six years of travel in the fastest spacecraft never invented. Return journey, virtually a whole human lifetime. At that moment, he felt about that far away from understanding. What was ‘mag activity’? To do with magnitude?

Ben put the phone down and returned to Catalina’s papers. A little further down the same page was another name, Tau Ceti. Ben had never heard of Tau Ceti before, but he could hazard a guess that it was the name of another star. Looking that one up as well, he discovered he’d been absolutely right. Constellation of Cetus, twelve light years from Earth. Barely a hop and a skip away. A rather large star, as far as he could gather, comprising something like seventy-eight percent of the mass of the sun. Magnitude again. However million times that made it bigger than the puny little planet he was sitting on at this moment, Ben had no idea. He now felt as insignificantly minute as he did utterly clueless.

Flick, flick. Page after page, graph after graph. Ben chewed his pen. His heart was sinking faster than a burning Zeppelin.

Now he came to a page containing only a vertical list of hastily scribbled figures that looked like someone working out their thought processes on paper. The figures were all four digits long. There was nothing there to explain what they were, but to Ben’s eye they could have been dates. If they were, most were long gone in history, apart from the last.

Okay, he told himself. Here was something he could potentially grasp. If they were dates, they were spaced out — albeit loosely — at rough intervals that averaged just under a couple of centuries. And if they were dates, the last one with its question suggested some kind of relevance to modern times. But the concept of relevance could only be understood if you had at least two variables to play with: such as the relevance of a to b or x to y, whether those were miles to kilometres or apples to oranges. Or clever to stupid. With nothing at all to go on, the whole number sequence fell flat, meaningless and worthless.

The question mark after the last date stood out. Like a reference to the unknown future, a note of uncertainty in the midst of all the inflexible hard data. Or maybe it just stood out because it echoed the giant question mark in his own mind that made him ask himself why he was even bothering with this stuff.

Ben sighed and closed the file. Forget it. There was no point in this. No point at all.

He laid the file to one side and went on sifting through the stack. More random choices, more roads leading nowhere.

Until he came back across the file that said HERSCHEL / SUN.