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.’
12
Cold neon tubes tinked into life in the visitors’ centre as Pierce held the door and Franklin and Shepherd hustled in out of the weather. It was a big, rectangular space large enough to accommodate the busloads of school kids who came here every day to look at the old rockets and dream of riding them to the moon. Shepherd had been one of them once.
‘In here, gentlemen,’ Pierce said, shrugging out of his rain slicker and punching a code into a door next to the ticket desk.
His office had none of the romance of the public areas. There were no pictures on the walls of man’s extraordinary exploration in here, no forming galaxies or wonders of creation, just a framed photograph of Pierce in his State Trooper days wearing a dress uniform and looking a little more lean and a lot more mean than he did now. A coffee pot sat in the corner. The heating plate was turned off but the smell of burnt coffee still filled the room with a smoky aroma that twisted Shepherd’s gut. He hadn’t had time to eat before leaving Quantico and they hadn’t stopped anywhere on the way. Franklin didn’t seem to need food.
Pierce fitted a small key into a large filing cabinet and heaved open the bottom drawer. ‘We get crank mail here all the time, mostly reports of UFO sightings and/or conspiracy theorists and moon-landing deniers who think Hubble is NASA’s latest hoax and all the images are done in Photoshop. Most of it comes in as email but we still get some the old-fashioned way.’ He lifted a well-stuffed hanging divider out of the drawer and started sorting through it. ‘This past year it’s gone nuts. I don’t know if it’s all this weird weather we’re having, or the business in Rome that knocked the Church on its ass or what it is but something sure got the doom and damnation crowd all worked up. ’Bout eight months ago we