IV
A silence descended in the briefing room that lasted for several long seconds, as every man and woman present considered just what that meant.
‘Thirteen thousand years,’ Hannah echoed. ‘So it’s not man-made?’
‘Hardly,’ Jarvis pointed out. ‘Thirteen thousand years ago, mankind had just worked out how to throw spears a long way and make knives out of something other than chipped flint. There’s no way Black Knight could have been produced by us.’
Mickey Vaughn, who had been leaning against a wall listening, spoke for the first time.
‘What’s it signalling, and to whom?’
‘A good question,’ Nellis answered as he picked up a remote from the table and pointed it at a television monitor mounted on the wall behind him. ‘This is a recording of the signals detected from the object before it became silent again a half hour ago.’
Nellis touched a button and Ethan heard the strangest sound emerge from speakers mounted discreetly around the walls of the room. What sounded like a rush of distant ocean waves was followed by a harmony of whistling wind, then whoops and what sounded like trickling water. A series of long, low moaning sounds drifted in and out of range over the existing chorus, sombre and deep, followed by what might have been the sound of a crackling fire.
Ethan listened in fascination, actually closing his eyes as he heard the sounds and behind them all a digital warbling, a rippling cacophony that was clearly not natural.
Nellis switched the recording off as he set the remote down on the table. ‘We have our finest cryptographers working on the signals at the moment,’ he revealed to them. ‘As yet we have absolutely no idea what the message means, but then again we always knew that any signal from an alien civilization might take a form that we could not comprehend, let alone translate.’
Hannah leaned back in her chair, one hand absent-mindedly twirling a strand of her long auburn hair.
‘So it’s alien and it’s been up there for thousands of years, and NASA knew about it? How? Did one of the Apollo or Space Shuttle missions stumble across it?’
Nellis picked up the remote again and hit a button. On the screen behind him appeared the image of a young man, dark wavy hair and a thick moustache dominating a stern expression.
‘Nikola Tesla,’ one of the scientists gasped, a man with short white hair and rectangular spectacles that gave him the appearance of a physics professor. ‘Damn me, I might have known!’
Nellis nodded.
‘Indeed, Doctor Chandler. Nikola Tesla was an electrical and mechanical engineer and is widely regarded as one of the greatest geniuses ever to have lived. Born in Serbia, he moved to the United States and became a prolific inventor with some three hundred patents to his name. His research gave us alternating current, the Tesla Coil, induction motors and wireless communication. In short, he gave us much of our modern world.’
‘And what does this guy have to do with Black Knight?’ Vaughn asked.
‘Tesla picked up the first verifiable repeating signal from Black Knight in 1899,’ Nellis explained, ‘while experimenting with electrical discharges into the Earth’s atmosphere as a means of communicating wirelessly over long distances. His data showed that something else was present in the returning signals from Earth’s orbit, and Nikola Tesla at the time made an announcement that he had detected the first signal from another civilization from outer space. It made quite a stir in the media of the time.’
Jarvis picked up the story from one corner of the room.
‘In the 1920s, a small number of amateur HAM radio operators were occasionally able to receive the same signal. In 1928, scientists in Oslo, Norway experimenting with short wave transmissions into space began picking up what they called Long Delay Echoes, in which they received echoes several seconds after transmission. The phenomenon is still not well understood. Everything went silent again until 1954, when several newspapers including the St. Louis Post Dispatch and the San Francisco Examiner reported an announcement from the United States Air Force that two satellites were found to be orbiting the Earth at a time when no nation yet had an ability to launch such objects.’
General Nellis gestured to the image of Nikola Tesla.
‘Tesla died in 1943, penniless. It turns out that after he first detected what we now call Black Knight, the government of the time took to employing him and ensured that none of the recordings he made of the signals reached public hands. Over the next few decades they made every effort to ensure that any tracking of Black Knight’s signals were explained away as atmospheric phenomena.’
‘By 1960 the United States and the Soviet Union both had hardware in orbit,’ Jarvis went on. ‘But in February 1960, newspapers everywhere reported that somebody else also had something in orbit. A radar system that had been designed by the US Navy to detect enemy spy satellites had picked something else up. It was described as a dark, tumbling object in a highly eccentric orbit that wasn’t ours and didn’t belong to the Soviets either.’
Nellis pressed a button on the remote and an image of something in orbit around the Earth appeared on the screen behind him.
‘The Navy explained the detections away as the casing from an old Discoverer satellite launch, a half shell about eight yards long. Trouble was, the casing they used as an explanation was in a slightly different orbit to Black Knight’s. Most people didn’t notice that and the general public bought the story, which disappeared into obscurity once again until 1988.’
Jarvis moved closer to the screen as he spoke.
‘When the Space Shuttle Endeavor made its first flight to the International Space Station during mission STS-88 in 1998, the astronauts aboard took photographs of a strange object which were widely available to the public on the NASA website for a brief time. This is what they saw.’
The image on the screen changed to a bizarrely shaped, black object that looked almost like a giant camera suspended in orbit above the curved surface of the Earth. Ethan leaned closer to the screen as the scientists around him gasped in amazement, peering at the object’s unusual shape, almost like some kind of sculptured undersea creature.
‘That’s Black Knight?’ Hannah asked. ‘It looks a lot like space junk to me.’
‘That’s what NASA said it was later,’ Nellis replied. ‘Unfortunately, NASA took every single one of the images down beforehand. They reappeared later and it didn’t take long for the conspiracy theorists to notice that the images had new URLs and had been digitally altered, along with new descriptions having been added explaining the images as space junk. A few of them asked NASA why astronauts would take some many photographs of a piece of junk that had supposedly already been identified, but NASA remained silent. That, of course, only fuelled the suspicion that the astronauts had photographed something real and mistakenly uploaded their images to the Internet.’
Ethan leaned back in his chair.
‘How come this Black Knight’s causing so much fuss now, if we’ve known about it for so long?’
‘It’s the signals,’ Jarvis explained. ‘All previous signals from Black Knight have been basic beeps and whistles. NASA has been trying to decipher them for decades with no success. But the new signals are completely different and are being emitted four times per orbit in all directions. The only reason they’re not being detected by Russia or other global powers is because a prior space shuttle mission placed a small satellite alongside Black Knight designed to block most of those signals and direct them to only our own listening posts.’