Dark as Day Read Online Free

talents, but not long enough to learn all she felt she needed to know about the Argus Project. Now, only six days after arrival, Milly was sitting in her first staff meeting and wondering how long it would take her stomach to adjust to a micro-gravity environment.
    The good news was that she was not expected to do anything. “Just sit in the back and keep quiet,” her supervisor, Hannah Krauss, had said. “Answer a direct question if the Ogre addresses one to you, of course. But I don’t think that’s likely. JB is going to talk more than listen.”
    The Ogre . Hannah was about twenty-four, just a couple of years older than Milly. She was alert and attractive, with a wild mop of dark curly hair, a slim figure, and a mobile face that could take on a huge variety of expressions. When she said, “the Ogre,” her whole countenance somehow adopted a look of menace and malevolence. Milly had heard bad things about Jack Beston, even back on Ganymede. But could he really be as ogre-ish as he was painted?
    Milly looked, and decided that maybe he could. JB, Jack Beston, was standing in front of the group now. He was tall, red-headed, and skinny as a stim-stick. Not bad looking, if you liked skinny guys, as Milly did. But his expression cancelled any possible attraction. He was glowering at everyone and everything before a word was spoken. It made Milly wonder why she had struggled through all the horrendous aptitude tests in cryptanalysis and pattern analysis needed to bring her here. Was she all that keen to be part of the Argus Project?
    She decided that she was. If anyone made contact with aliens, Milly wanted to be in the front row. But for the moment she was quite happy to follow Hannah Krauss’s advice and sit at the back. She scanned the windowless room. Minimal furnishings. Twenty-one people, fourteen women, seven men; three empty seats in her row. Sit tight, keep quiet, and try to be invisible . She placed the rectangle of the scribe plate flat on her knees, where she could make unobtrusive condensed Post-logic notes on whatever she felt needed recording.
    “You’ve heard the crap the media are putting out.” Jack Beston made no introductory remarks. “The Seine is going to link everything to everything and solve every problem in the solar system. I turn that around. When the Seine is up and running—and that’s less than a day from now—nobody will be safe. Nobody will have secrets. People will use the Seine to wander all over the System and stick their nose in where it’s got no right to be. We can’t have that. I want to review where we stand on battening down on Argus information. Druse?”
    A small man with a wizened face and a shaved scalp stood up. “The incoming signals all come in from open space, and we can’t do anything about that. Anyone with the right receiving equipment will get exactly what we get. But so far as we know, no one else in the System has our sensitivity, or our modulated neutrino beam detector. Except—” Druse hesitated.
    “Except the Bastard.” Beston scowled. “He’s got Odin working different targets and a different set of neutrino energies, but his equipment’s as good as ours. No point in worrying about the security of incoming signals. What about the rest of it?”
    “We propose to use the Seine’s computer power only for raw data reduction and for first frequency scan. We don’t give much away there, even if someone taps our whole feed. That’s all that the Seine will do for us. Our private crypto programs and results will be completely caged, so no electromagnetic signals of any kind can get out. If we find a SETI signal—”
    “ When we find the SETI signal.”
    “Right. When we find an unambiguous SETI signal, everything switches from search to analysis. We have to make a choice there. If we use the Seine for decrypt, we lose secrecy. If we don’t use the Seine and stay caged, we limit our computer power.”
    “That’s not your department. I’ll make