took a deep breath and let it out slowly. ‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because of James Webb.’
‘Anyone mind telling me who the hell James Webb is and what he’s got to do with any of this?’ Franklin said, directing the question to the room.
Merriweather took off his glasses and rubbed at the indentations they’d left on the bridge of his nose. ‘James Webb was the architect of the Apollo programme, the one who put a man on the moon. But in this case it’s not a who it’s a what.’ He sank down at the laptop he’d been working on and typed something. The screen filled with an image of what looked like a wide flat coffin with a golden satellite array on top like a sail. ‘Say hello to Hubble’s successor, the James Webb telescope. It’s bigger, will have a much higher orbit and will see much, much further. They’re building it right now. My guess is if we can’t fix Hubble from down here then they won’t bother fixing it at all. They’ll just shut us down and wait for James Webb to come online.’
‘And you’ll most likely be out of a job?’ Shepherd said, knowing exactly how painful that felt.
Merriweather nodded.
‘Is that why you think Dr Kinderman couldn’t be involved,’ Franklin said, picking up the line of questioning, ‘because he wouldn’t sabotage his own project and betray his colleagues?’
Merriweather shrugged. ‘Why would he do it? Why turn his back on his life’s work, all of our work? It doesn’t make any sense.’
Franklin pulled out a chair and sat next to Merriweather, bringing his eye level down to his. ‘People do all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons, son.’ His tone had softened considerably. ‘But if Dr Kinderman was coerced in some way, if someone put him in a situation that forced his hand in this then we can help him. If he’s in danger we can bring him to safety. So anything you can give us, anything at all that might help us understand what has happened here will be a great benefit. And you won’t be being disloyal, you’ll be doing him a favour.’
Shepherd had to hand it to the old bastard. He might have pitched it wrong at the start of the interview but he was playing it pitch-perfect now.
Merriweather balanced his glasses back on his nose and ran his thumb along the line of his lower lip. ‘OK,’ he said, punching a new command into the laptop. The image of the James Webb telescope was replaced with streams of code. ‘I’ve been trying to pin down the virus ever since it was uploaded but whoever designed it knew what they were doing and covered their tracks unbelievably well. The only way I can see anyone getting a program big enough to do what it did past the network security would be by junk streaming it.’
Franklin glanced at Shepherd, one eyebrow raised in a question mark. ‘Junk streaming is when you attach tiny bits of code to genuine traffic. They’re too small to be picked up by the firewalls so they pass through it and then activate and clump together when they’re on the other side. It’s a bit like sending component parts of a bomb onto a plane one piece at a time then building it on board. But in the same way, if one piece doesn’t get through or gets corrupted in transit then the whole thing won’t work.’
Merriweather continued to tap commands into the keyboard. ‘But uploading the virus is only part of the story,’ he said. ‘What it then managed to do was very sophisticated and precise. It didn’t just knock out the comms and send Hubble spinning off into space. It actually reprogrammed the guidance systems causing the onboard rockets to fire and carefully move Hubble out of position.’
‘Dangerously so?’
Merriweather glanced up at him. ‘Sir?’
‘I mean has it been effectively weaponized? Is it currently hurtling towards Manhattan or Washington?’
‘No, no – nothing like that.’ He turned back to the laptop, finished his sequence of commands and hit Return.
High on the wall next to the main screen four rows of red LED numbers flickered into life.
‘See that top figure – 569, that shows the telescope’s current altitude in kilometres. As long as the number doesn’t start getting smaller there’s no danger of Hubble crashing back to Earth. So far it hasn’t changed. The next two readings are the relative long and latitudinal positions and the fact that they are changing shows that Hubble is drifting, but in a very controlled way. But it’s the last reading that’s the most interesting and seems most relevant to the message. That shows us where Hubble is pointing. Before the attack it was in the 270-degree range, locked onto a piece of thin space in the constellation of Taurus. But now it’s shifted round to dead zero where it’s remained ever since. Zero degrees is the home position. It means Hubble is now pointing directly at Earth.’
Shepherd glanced at the message shining out from every screen – MANKIND MUST LOOK NO FURTHER – its meaning more resonant and emphatic now the instrument of man’s furthest gaze had been turned inward.
‘You think this could be some kind of cover up?’ Franklin asked. ‘Maybe Hubble saw something out there and Kinderman didn’t want anyone else to know about it, so he put up this warning and turned the telescope around so no one else could see it?’
‘Maybe. Hubble’s not like a conventional telescope where you look through an eye-piece and see stars, it builds up images from the data it collects. People like me work on specific batches of gathered information and just see a tiny part of the puzzle. Dr Kinderman’s the only one who gets to see the whole picture.’
Franklin turned to Pierce. ‘Any chance we can take a look at the archives?’
‘No,’ Merriweather replied, hunching over the laptop and rattling in new commands. ‘After the crash I initialized a system check to isolate any infected files. That’s when I discovered this.’
A new directory opened listing dates running back for weeks. Merriweather clicked today’s date and a new window opened.
It was empty.
He clicked another, then another, working his way back through the week, each file as empty as the one before. ‘All the recent data has been wiped. I checked the backups too. There’s no trace of anything Hubble has been looking at for the last eight months. It’s all gone.’
Franklin nodded. ‘So maybe Kinderman did see something – the only question is what?’
Shepherd’s eyes flicked between the telemetry and the biblical message shining out of the screens. ‘You said Hubble was investigating a piece of thin space before the attack.’
‘In Taurus, yes.’
‘Were you looking for something specific?’
‘Not that I was aware of, I was just looking at edge radiation – Heaven data.’
Franklin turned to Shepherd. ‘Could you kindly translate?’
‘Sorry. The known Universe was created by a single event, the so-called Big Bang, which happened around fourteen billion years ago. Since then everything has been constantly expanding outwards. Thin space is where the edge of the Universe is closest to Earth. Beyond it lies whatever was there before everything else came into being. Some think this is where God resides.’ He frowned as a new thought struck him.
‘When the Hubble project was launched wasn’t there a lot of noise and protests from various religious groups?’
‘Yes,’ Pierce answered. He stepped forward out of the shadows and into the light. ‘I’d just started working here, had to run through protest lines to get to work sometimes: people waving doom and judgement placards in your face, calling it all a heresy, daring to gaze so far into heaven.’ He stared hard at the message on the screen, his mind ticking behind his eyes. ‘I didn’t really connect all that with this until just now, but –’
He snapped to attention. ‘Come with me, gentlemen, there’s something I need to show you.’