Gordon leaned in and she tapped the suite again. The picture became artificially sharp, a false color image designed to bring out the details in the captured blobs of light. At the center was a sharp circle of bluish white, the scintillating edge of the alien photon drive. Around it, an equal distance from the center and arranged in a somehow familiar fashion, there were four reverse shadows, the edges of four immense objects surrounding the drive flare, illuminated with a red brilliance and spots of blue bright enough to obscure anything else from view. Gordon’s heart hammered excitedly within his chest. He looked back up to Lydia. “What the hell is it?”
She shook her head. “We don’t know, but it is structure, and it’s definitely not a rogue fragment ejected from a star.”
Gordon grinned. “I’ll tell you what it is. It’s my damned aliens! This is it! Proof, incontrovertible proof that they’re coming here, just like I always said.”
Sykes shook his head. “Hold on, Lee. It’s ‘something’. Whether or not it’s proof of your pet aliens is another matter entirely.”
Gordon shooed his hands at Sykes, dismissing him and focusing on Lydia. “How did you get these shots? What are they from?”
“Optical interferometry. They’re from the Solar System Baseline Array.”
“I tried to get my astronomers tasking on the SSBA since it became operational, but we always got the brush off. They told me it was because the ‘fragment’ was a low order priority, but I always figured it was just another sign of the box I’d been put in.”
Lydia frowned. “You’re closer to right than wrong, but not everyone who believed was isolated like you were. You had more than a few supporters within the community. Eventually it became more suspicious to reject their requests than it was to let them get their pictures. No one in the administration ever imagined it would reveal something like this, though.”
Gordon’s eyes narrowed slightly. “And which side were you on, Lydia? Were you one of the believers or one of the ones blocking them?”
She returned his glare steadily. “The administration is my administration, Gordon, for better or worse, but I also have faith in my friends. I’m the one that authorized the re-tasking of the SSBA. Is that good enough for you?”
He nodded, his expression softening. “I’m sorry. It’s just been a long time out in the cold is all. I’d become of the opinion that I didn’t have any friends left out there anymore.” Gordon shook his head and smiled again. “But what are we doing here? We should be planning our press conference! We have to get the word out as soon and as wide as possible.”
Neither of the others said anything. A hint of a smile touched the corner of Sykes’ mouth. Gordon looked from one to the other and then sat back, dismayed. “You’re still not going public, are you? You have pictures of the damn thing and you’re going to sit on it?”
Lydia’s voice pleaded for his understanding. “We have pictures of something, something that backs up your original assertion, but it’s still not proof. The images we have come from a new satellite constellation that most people don’t understand, and that brings with it some doubt. We only arrive at a final image by mathematically combining the images from space based telescopes positioned in different orbits all around the solar system. For most people, that brings in even more doubt, some degree of un-believability. And to get the final image of the … object, we had to process it even further.”
Sykes cleared his throat, inserting himself in the conversation. “That picture doesn’t really exist, and it won’t exist. It’s a computer-manipulated image from an unproven system that backs up the claim of an industrialist most people regard as nuttier than Howard Hughes in a straightjacket. No one is going to publicly stick their necks out to support you, and they’re certainly not going to give you a budget to assist with your little science fiction crusade.”
“So we work harder to convince them!” Gordon downed a slug of scotch. His expectations had grown so high in moments, and now they had been sent crashing. His nerves were a mess. “We support some pretty screwy shit in this country with no justification whatsoever, and now that we have something real and verifiable to show people, we’re just going to say that it’s too risky? That there’s not enough there to back it up?
“This could be either the best thing to happen to the human race in its whole history, past or future, or it could be the end of our history, the end of everyone, timid politicians and innocent soccer moms alike. Either way, people have to be prepared. By the time we have the type of evidence that will convince the administration to go public, we won’t need it, because everyone will be able to just look up and see the aliens in orbit!”
“Oh, get off your soapbox, Lee. You had the chance to go public years ago as well, right after you got the brush-off from the government, but you didn’t do it. Where were your press conferences then?” Gordon said nothing, so Sykes continued. “No, you didn’t go forward with telling everyone because you knew that the standard for convincing people about aliens is higher than it is for other things. It’s higher than some weird kinematics off a bunch of telescope sightings, and you know that it’s higher than some doctored photo of a bunch of red and blue blobs that look nothing like our concept of a spaceship. You stayed underground and let the evidence exist as some internet rumor because that’s as far as you could go until you had more to show. We’re the same way. We can’t go forward on the basis of this photo.”
Then Lydia smiled. “But maybe we can stop holding you back.”
Gordon looked at them both sharply, but they said nothing. The servers returned with food and fresh drinks, whisking away their half-eaten cups of gumbo and replacing them with steaming, sizzling dinner plates. Sykes was served some sort of squash risotto alongside an immense blackened porterhouse, a dollop of butter melting on top. Both Lydia and Gordon were each served shrimp.
In this case, shrimp was an oxymoron. These were prawns, three grilled, butterflied tails apiece, each one four inches long, spiced with flakes of red pepper and herbs, lying atop a bed of sticky white rice, drizzled and surrounded by a rich crawfish étouffée, and topped off with a sprinkling of lump crab meat. Gordon looked down at it and smiled. He glanced back up at Lydia. “For this, I forgive you of nearly half of the crap you’ve pulled.”
“My, my. That much? And we haven’t even gotten to coffee or the desserts yet. I just might be back in your good graces by the end of the night.”
“Don’t push your luck.” Gordon sliced off a forkful, making sure he got a piece of everything. He tasted it cautiously, but as the myriad spices, sauces, and meats inundated his senses, he began to chew with gusto. No one flavor or spice stood out. It was an exercise in exquisite balance, with the resulting mélange of flavors nothing less than arthropodic bliss.
In so far as it is possible to define a person in simple terms, Gordon Lee was a man of great drive but little philosophy. One of the few beliefs he held, aside from an almost religious devotion to preparing for the Deltans, was that there was a definite moral equivalency to being part carnivore. If an animal had to die for his dinner plate, he felt that it should have an honorable death, and that its passing should result in something greater than just the filling of his belly.