Decipher

Stel Pavlou

2001

When an illegal drilling expedition runs into disaster down in the cold wastes of the Antarctic Ocean, the world is precipitated into an ongoing catastrophe.

People had been noticing that the weather was getting worse, but it had been doing that for a while and nobody really cared any more.

There were growing signs of geological instability as ancient fault lines became active and supposedly dead volcanoes began spewing magma once more.

But it was the stellar observatories that caused the biggest surprises, for Sol, long thought to be a normal G type main sequence star was found to be a slow sequencing Cepheid Variable (See here for a definition for Cepheid Variables) and it was about to blow once more!

The researches in Antarctica had located a multi mega tonne source of C60 - Buckminsterfullerene (buckie balls to you and me!). A substance known to Man only in milligram quantities in the lab. A deadly three-way race is fired up when the oil company tries to exploit the buckie reserves and the Americans insist on entering the base the Chinese had established over the top of the Antarctic reserves for somehow a massive power source had activated in these forlorn wastes.

A government research team is also looking into the mysteries created by the changing events and their chosen weapons are linguistics and complexity physics. Professor Scott is the linguist who has the horrible task of trying to decode a language that had passed away long before the recorded languages had come into being. He finds unexpected help from the world's Holy Books - not allegorical description but instruction books in how to survive the forthcoming catastrophe.

Will the team manage to decipher the texts before the Earth is sterilised?

There's only a week to go!

---