Free [The Fear Saga 01] - Fear the Sky (2014) by Stephen Moss Page A

government. So when the navy had come calling they had put their best people on the project.
    Laurie and Neal stood in overalls staring at the top of the huge tank emerging from the constantly soaking concrete platform surrounding it. Suspended from the steel gantry that ran over the tank, a bulky and irregular probe, covered in plastic and taping, was hanging by a thick cable into the water, pointing down into the dirty depths of the tank, scanning its hidden bottom far below.
    The water had been filled with an unnatural amount of salt, sand, dust, and debris to simulate a greater depth of water than was actually present, for while the tank was one of the largest indoor tanks in the world, it was still a fraction of the depth they would be searching in.
    Laurie looked at the specially field-hardened laptop in Neal’s hands and nodded as he explained what was happening. The initial tests had proven their science sound, but their application amateur. Luckily the practicalities of ocean-bed analysis were the bread and butter of the experts here.
    The Institute was, essentially, the final evolution in the hunt for oil, a hunt that was seeking with reckless resolve to extract every last drop of fossil fuel from the earth, no matter how deep, cold or, as was becoming more and more the case, war-torn its location was. Through long practice they had evolved sonar and seismology to a fine science, and were capable of viewing, analyzing, and categorizing almost any ocean bed on the surface on the planet.
    The very nature of their business, however, meant that the larger the target they were looking for the better. Because of this, high resolution had rarely been a top priority for them as they had scanned the world’s ocean beds for the telltale signs of hidden oil and gas reserves.
    So when they had been presented with the parameters of the problem they were being asked to work on, they had actually been grateful for the introduction of an outside authority to help guide this new avenue of research.
    Laurie had warned Neal, however, that these folks would not listen to him if they knew he held merely a master’s degree, let alone one in an unrelated field. So she had introduced him as an anonymous advisor, his identity necessarily classified, and given him the pseudonym of Mr. Smith.
    More than happy to play to this persona, Neal had joined the team and worked with their superior knowledge of sonar and seismology to seek the results he needed, guiding them like the hands of his mind’s eye, imagining and then executing a barrage of ever larger tests and experimental machinery to aide him in his mission to find a way to locate the meteors.
    Any concern she may have had over his ability to maintain credibility had been assuaged when she had heard him discussing part of the theory they had both developed with his new team.
    “Because of interference, sea state and various other factors, it’s clear that multibeam bathymetry data conceals too many outliers and simply won’t get to the resolution we need. In order to process large amounts of data accurately and effectively, we’re going to need a faster and automatable approach. To this end, Dr. Cavanagh and I may have defined the beginnings of an algorithm for detecting outliers based on density of points.
    “Firstly, each swath of data should be projected along orthogonal and side direction axes. On each plane an initial point would need to be determined according to a corresponding maximum density. Then a whole region could be mapped and searched by the connected neighboring points on each plane. Then we adopt the erosion and dilation algorithms you have already developed to eliminate outliers within the larger region.”
    While Laurie had been somewhat confused by his logic she had seen that the group had been engaged as he spoke. The passionate debate that had been catalyzed by his theory had been one of many crucial steps the team had needed to make in order to realize Neal