Calan - The Immortality Paradox

Chapter Three: The Leonian Calanite, Part Three

A few significant undulations on the journey up the mountain meant that the Professor's rear was relatively sore as he parked in the weak shadow of the Astronomy Base. He eased himself carefully from the straddle and walked gingerly to the main entrance. The climate was somewhat more hostile a few hundred metres above the upper city; in periodic intervals, the wind was strong enough to plaster the remainder of his hair cleanly across his scalp. The air was thinner, so Kalet struggled to inhale any oxygen molecules before they were swiped away. He protected his eyes with his forearm and shovelled snow with his feet across the courtyard, reevaluating his decision to brave the weather.

The Astronomy Base was an unmistakable clash of old and modern architecture. Fractured stone and marble foundations supported a glistening and lacquered steel-frame box that cantilevered over the summit's edge. The side overlooking the valley was a half-circle of triple-glazed glass. The entrance to the Base still manifested parts of the old building, with indications of tumbledown stone protruding from the archway. As Kalet entered the ominous hole under the entrance, a headlight stirred into life, giving the snow a yellow veneer. Above the reinforced, grey steel door was a carving of a pickaxe in the stonework. A sentence was carved underneath in embossed letters: Un Cadeau de la Terre. A Gift from the Earth. Some of the last remaining slogans from E'blanche's mining era - or what was satirically known as the Golden Era of the Leonis Chapter. The Base had been renovated from a former mining cache. The Professor had not preserved the letters for pride's sake, more for remembrance of a time best to learn from rather than relive.

Poking out of the steel door was an identification panel. Kalet swiped his finger across the screen, and the internal mechanism groaned like a waking beast. The doors parted, and a scene of chaos unveiled itself like a collision of stars. The central lobby was a cacophony of turmoil and anxiety. Base technicians and workers ran around the place, colliding in a confusing miasma. The room-length screens above them flickered in and out of coherence; the Professor could just about discern the grainy outline of E'blanche's frozen North Pole displayed as an ashen parabola. It took him a few seconds to recognise the feed from U2 Alpha, the contents of his stomach performing an untimely gyration. He reached indiscriminately for the nearest person and found the shoulder of Lisa, his chief engineer. Unsurprisingly, her face betrayed her distress, even more so as she realised her boss was standing in her presence.

'Professor...' She croaked. 'What are you doing here?'

'Harissa contacted me. What's happened?' He gestured to the unintelligible screen above them. 'Why does my satellite feed look like the snowstorm outside?'

'We're not sure. We were working on U2-Fly's memory banks one moment, and the next, we started losing contact with the other satellite.' She held up the portable device in her hand. 'It's the same as last time. We thought the weather was causing the interference, but the satellite's losing altitude rapidly.' Kalet squinted at the small screen, a whole entourage of thoughts racing through his mind. 'Communications tracked down a spike in electromagnetic radiation again - identical to U2-Fly.'

'But how?'

Another engineer appeared - his young, flustered face saturated in sweat. 'The ground telescopes couldn't pick up any signal - we cannot know where the radiation came from.'

Kalet wanted space and time to think, but so much was falling apart. Until recently, he was the sage of E'blanche, the man with all the solutions. People referred to him with high regard, name-dropping in conversations that had the slightest affiliation to science; the Professor who had built the most incomprehensible pieces of machinery for the planet's benefit. Modestly, Kalet had accepted this notability with a shy smile and wave. That reputation was rapidly plummeting, much like U2-Alpha's altitude.