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39




Now that Traci knew what she was getting into, the second excursion to the Artifact began smoothly. With eight hours of breathing oxygen on her back and a passable familiarity with the alien machine, she sailed through its portal and immediately began exploring the multitude of passages within. She marked her progress on a rudimentary map Bob had created from her video records.

The forward, and thus shortest, passages were punctuated with what appeared to be oval doorways evenly spaced three meters apart. She centered herself in front of the first door she encountered, hoping it would magically open for her as the airlock had.

Of course that would have been too easy. When that approach didn’t work, she began running a gloved hand along its perimeter, searching for an actuator. She eventually gave that up and simply pressed against its face. At this, the door slid silently into a recess within the wall.

“Compartment doors are dead simple. Opens with a little pressure,” she recited into her microphone. “Looks like they saved the exotic stuff for pressure vessels.”

She poked her head inside, keeping her hands braced along the edges. The room was roughly three meters square, matching the intervals between doorways. Its overhead panel was illuminated with the same soft yellow glow she’d encountered throughout the ship the day before.

Its interior arrangement was also equally sterile, if shockingly familiar. Along one wall was a recessed compartment. “Looks like a bunk, about two meters long and another meter deep. So they need sleep like we do. And I see faint outlines of what appear to be storage drawers.” On the opposite side of the room was the flat outcropping of a simple desk with a cylindrical stool tucked underneath. “First level closest to the airlock appears to be crew cabins. Judging by dimensions and placement, the occupants appear to be of the same size as us.”

She moved along the passage, selecting doorways at random. Each compartment she searched had the same arrangement, increasing in size as more area became available beneath the sphere. The largest rooms were partitioned with multiple bunks and work surfaces.

Moving farther down the central corridor, she began exploring the spaces nearest to the atrium—the name she’d given the chamber of Hoover spheres. The doors here were more irregular, some the same size as the berthing spaces, others much larger. “The larger openings must be for moving equipment in and out,” she said, and moved to open the nearest one. It gave way with the same hand pressure.

This was the largest space yet. It was filled with more of the same work surfaces jutting from the walls, each with the same type of cylindrical stools as in the berthing spaces. “Not much variety in the furnishings, just a lot more of it.” She pushed off of the deck and made her way inside. The door slid shut behind her; she tested it with her hand and was relieved to see it opened again just as easily.

About half of the work surfaces were in the middle of the room, all of them empty. Those mounted to the surrounding walls had faint outlines of rectangles and circles of various dimensions embedded in them. She reached out for one of the rectangles and was stunned when a holographic keyboard appeared. She recoiled reflexively and it disappeared, reappearing when she returned her hand.

She assumed it was a keyboard—it featured rows of the same wedge-and-dash characters she’d seen in the atrium. A computer workstation, then? The wall above each station sloped gently inward, and she noticed similar faint outlines etched into their surfaces. Would those be integrated monitors?

She mimed typing on the holopad. She’d toyed with something similar back home while shopping for her gaming setup; they’d been fun to play with but were not tactile enough for her tastes. Her inputs didn’t prompt a response from any of the overhead monitors, so she settled for keeping the keypad centered in her helmet cam for a minute. Hopefully Jack could make some sense of it later.

The rest of the compartment held equipment which she couldn’t begin to identify, tubes and cylinders of various shapes and arrangements made of polished alloys that sparkled under the yellow light. “Daisy, I think you were right,” she said. “This looks like a lab, maybe a processing facility. Doorway’s big enough to move large equipment through.”

She entered the atrium next, this time bypassing its kaleidoscopic wonders and jetting straight across to the portal at the far end of the gangway. This led into a cylindrical antechamber identical to the first sphere’s airlock. “Assuming this is the first connecting node, leading into the central sphere.” As she moved through the portal it opened up to another long gangway. The layout, however, was much different.

Instead of the network of passages branching off like spokes, this was an arrangement of circular decks stacked one atop the other; the gangway now more like the type of connecting tunnel she was used to. And there was much more equipment, some of it mildly recognizable.

The first deck was clearly an equipment room, which made sense being adjacent to the connecting node. Rows of vertical racks lined its walls, with intermittent rectangular outlines which she presumed were doors to storage lockers. She confirmed this with a quick press against one of them, which slid open to reveal an empty closet-sized space.

The second deck looked even more familiar. While its specifics differed greatly, to her eyes there was no mistaking the general layout. “Next level looks like the control deck,” she said confidently. A pair of formfitting couches sat before matched sets of curved panels, with each couch’s armrest—or tentacle rest, for all she knew—ending with a pair of large round knobs. They had to be hand controllers, but it was the couches that caught her eye. Like the bunks, their contours suggested forms similar to humans: seat, torso, shoulders and head. If not for her spacesuit, she could have fit into one herself. “They’re like us,” she said excitedly, “at least in general form.” They might just as easily have been the stereotypical gray bug-eyed creatures so often depicted in the movies. She reached for one of the hand controllers and was startled when a holographic projection of the Artifact’s orientation in space appeared in the curved screen, with icons corresponding to Magellan and Columbus nearby. “3D situational display. Nice,” she said appreciatively. She lingered for several minutes, studying the image and recording its columns of information in their undecipherable script.

A handful of similar control stations were arranged in a semicircle around the deck. She noted that none featured the oversized control knobs of the two forward-facing seats; those had to have been for the pilots. Three in particular appeared to have an unusually diverse arrangement of control devices and faced larger screens. Fiddling with one of these caused a massive hologram of the Artifact to appear, with multiple layers of information hovering over various parts of the ship as she moved a hand across. “You’ll love this. I think I found their flight engineer’s station. Looks like they have one assigned to each module.” She leaned in for a closer look at the sphere she was currently in. “Oh yeah. This is great. I’ve got the whole layout in front of me in 3D. Should save me some time.” She glanced over at the aft module’s schematic, a complex thicket of lines, snaking around a cluster of cylindrical tanks like creeping overgrown vines that led to a smaller sphere. That had to be the powerplant. “And it looks like you were right about those tulip-petal vanes in the stern. It’s a drive system. No idea what kind, but with this kind of technology I’m guessing it’s fusion based. Possibly antimatter.” It felt ridiculous to say, but with everything else she’d seen it couldn’t be ruled out. The technology was far removed from what she knew, but not so far that she couldn’t deduce the intended function.

What she didn’t recognize was that she’d just powered up the ship.


“The Artifact is emanating across the EM spectrum,” Bob announced. Outside, the spheres shone with a new intensity as exterior lighting began to activate.

“I see that,” Jack said abruptly, watching from the inspection drone. What the hell had she monkeyed around with in there? “What about heat?” If that thing’s reactor warmed up, who knew what might come out of its tailpipe . . . 

“New infrared signature in the aft module,” Bob said. “Skin temperature has risen twelve degrees Kelvin in the last minute and waste heat is beginning to emanate from the radiator loops. It appears you were correct about the module’s function.”

It was small comfort. “Traci, comm check. If you can hear me, stop whatever you’re doing and get out of there!”


Traci had moved on to the lower levels, though she could have happily spent the rest of her EVA exploring the control deck. It was near the sphere’s midpoint that she discovered what had to be an enormous logistics level. Reminiscent of an aircraft carrier’s hangar deck, it was filled with machinery and equipment which she didn’t quite recognize but could still grasp their function, much like the flight stations.

Equipment racks and containers were lined up on the deck, stacked neatly in rows extending outward from the central hub. They sure do like their wheels and spokes. In between were what appeared to be low-slung carts and tugs. They had wheels for moving about and seats for the drivers, though the controls were so minimal as to be barely recognizable. She also couldn’t tell what was holding them to the deck in microgravity. It occurred to her that this craft had to have spent most of its time under thrust for this kind of equipment to make sense.

A particular piece of equipment, in fact a whole lot of them, caught her eye. Alongside one of the storage racks was a meter-long truss mounted inside of an open teardrop-shaped shell. Attached to the truss were dozens of the same kind of metallic rings that had held the atrium’s icy spheres. “Wonder about these,” she thought aloud. “I’ll come back to them later.”

She continued her slow flight around the hangar deck. Enormous oval doors encircled its perimeter, or rather the outlines of what were probably doors. It had held true for each one she’d tried so far. Were they airlocks, or was the entire deck kept in vacuum?

One way to find out. She centered herself in front of the nearest door, this one easily ten meters across. As an aperture began to open in its center, her headset squealed to life with an urgent voice. “. . . comm check. Repeat, stop whatever you’re doing!”

Uh oh.


“Didn’t copy your last. Say again.”

Thank God. Her signal was weak but audible, so his must sound the same. He enunciated slowly. “Listen closely. Whatever you did in there caused the ship to turn itself on. Outside it’s lit up like Vegas and the heat signature looks like the main reactor’s warming up. You need to get out of there now. Do you copy?”

There was a long delay, making him wonder what she had to be considering. “Copy. On my way.”

“See you soon.” He then spoke to Bob. “Not sure how that comm made it through, but thank God it did.”

His relief was tempered by Bob’s cold assessment. “I have detected an aperture that has opened along the central module’s equator. It is likely that is how we were able to communicate with Traci. But I do not see that she is coming out.”

What?


Traci had settled on what she wanted to do and raced through her options to get out. There was a fast way to do this, and a safe way. She chose the fast one.

She flew back to the ring truss and its aeroshell, scooping it up and pushing it along ahead of her as she flew back up through the open gangway. If the portals didn’t let her through with it then she’d continue without, but she was determined to try. She jetted along, heading for the atrium as fast as she dared in the confined space.

The shell sailed through the portal and into the atrium. She shot ahead of it toward the opposite side and thrusted to a stop at the far end, turning to catch the shell as it floated up behind her.

She reached for the nearest ice spheres and lifted them one by one from their cradles, carefully placing them into the matching cradles within the shell. She stopped after a half dozen, though there was room for many more. This wasn’t the time to fill up the grocery cart. If the machine wouldn’t let her take them out unprotected, maybe it would if they were in the right container . . . 

She closed up the shell and watched as it sealed itself perfectly with no visible seam. Hopefully it would open just as easily later.

Her hunch paid off. The portal winked open when she parked herself and the aeroshell in front of it. Hallelujah. I get to live another day.


Her radio barked to life as she emerged from the forward collar minutes later. Jack sounded as animated as she’d ever heard him. “Traci, do you copy? Repeat, do you—”

She stepped on his transmission. “I copy. I’m all right, clear of the spacecraft. I’m bringing you a present.”


“It’s quite cold,” Bob said as they examined the brilliant silver teardrop in Columbus’s medical bay. “The protective shell is maintaining an internal temperature of minus two hundred twelve centigrade.”

“Just like inside the atrium,” Traci said, speaking through her headset. She had donned an emergency hazmat suit after shucking off her bulky EVA gear. Though they strongly suspected they knew what was contained within, she wasn’t going to risk contamination.

“You hung your ass in the breeze to bring us this,” Jack said disapprovingly. “What if it hadn’t worked, or that ship had fired up its drive?”

She gave a tired shrug. “Sometimes you have to roll the hard six. I could’ve flown right out that hangar door, or I could’ve done this.” She was determined to not leave without it. “I chose this.”

“The shell is impervious to X-ray and ultrasound,” Bob said, ignoring their simmering argument. “It does not have any active cooling that I can discern. It is almost a perfectly efficient insulator.”

“It can’t be,” she said. “Everything reaches thermal equilibrium eventually.”

“Eventually, yes,” Bob said. “I did say it was ‘almost’ perfect.”

Jack set aside his frustration with her and considered the aeroshell’s purpose. “If it’s meant for depositing organics at other planets, then it only needs to keep them cold long enough to get through an atmosphere. It might be designed to disperse them when it heats up on entry.”

Her eyes widened. “If you’re right, then this is—”

“Panspermia,” Jack said. “Or at least the mechanism for it.”

It was more evidence for the theory that life on Earth had been seeded from elsewhere in deep space, of which Noelle’s original discovery on Pluto had only been the first indicator that it might be correct. The open question then had been were they naturally formed, or deliberately placed across its frozen landscape? This appeared to hold the answer.

“The insulating shell seems to be the same alloy as the Artifact’s hull. In vacuum and absent any solar heating, this could keep its contents stable for a considerably long time,” Bob offered. “Possibly centuries.”

“Now we just have to figure out how to open it.”

Traci shook her head. “Not here. We don’t have the lab equipment to make it worthwhile.”

“Agreed,” Bob said. “I will calculate an intercept back to Magellan.”


“Talk to me, Bob,” Traci said from the control deck. “What’s going on out there?”

“The Artifact is continuing to build up heat. Outside skin temperature of the forward and center modules have maintained an average of minus one hundred fifty-one centigrade. The aft module is considerably warmer, currently positive three hundred and four centigrade at its midpoint. Its aperture is passing five hundred centigrade.”

“Engine’s warming up,” Jack said. “Assuming that’s what it is.”

“Your assumption appears correct,” Bob said. “Electromagnetic field lines are forming around the aperture.”

She began furiously typing commands into the flight computer. “Then let’s get some distance. Bob, load that intercept you calculated. I’m executing a priority-one escape burn back to Magellan.”


“The Artifact is moving.”

“I see it. What a light show. Traci, watch this.” Jack switched the camera feed to a monitor by her flight station. The vessel was receding quickly, its nozzle glowing cherry red around a brilliant blue-and-white exhaust.

“Looks like it’s burning hydrogen,” she said with fascination. “Same as us.”

“Deuterium, more accurately,” Bob said.

The Artifact—which it was beginning to feel increasingly ridiculous to call—had already shrunk to half its apparent size as it powered away. “It’s fast,” Jack said. “Wonder where it’s going?”

“It is too soon to tell,” Bob said, “though it appears angled toward the inner system. I will monitor its progress and develop a trajectory analysis.”

Traci shuddered as she recalled her experience aboard the strange craft. How could she have turned it on so easily, and what if she’d still been aboard when that engine lit off? She rested her hands on the arms of her flight couch and exhaled. “This place has never felt so good, guys.”

Bob’s reaction was also the most unexpected. “I believe I know how you feel.”


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