37
The Artifact’s forward sphere was featureless but for its massive docking ring. The collar itself was perfectly smooth, with none of the latches and other machinery they expected for such a device. Centered within the collar was an equally featureless flat disk. They assumed it was a hatchway, though it had no discernable rim. Jack parked the drone a few meters in front of the presumed entrance and began illuminating it with a laser range finder.
Traci watched this with alarm. “What are you doing?”
“Looking for a way in,” he said, entirely too calm. “We use lidar to guide vehicles together, right? The laser pings the target and the mother ship talks the other one in. They’ve got to have something like that.”
She couldn’t argue with his logic. If they did it was likely to be much more advanced, but the basic physics wouldn’t change.
He pivoted the beach ball slowly, methodically guiding its laser across the surface to eventually settle on its center. “Maybe there’s a magic word, like speak ‘friend’ and enter.”
To their mutual surprise a dark spot appeared in the disk, the Artifact’s metallic skin dilating into an opening just barely larger than the drone.
“I think you found the magic word.”
They kept the drone at a distance, waiting to see if the aperture changed. As with the docking collar they saw no machinery at work, just an opening where there had once been a disk of solid nickel-titanium alloy.
“Nitinol can change shape with the application of heat or electrical current,” Bob pointed out, “then return to its original form. That is most likely how this portal functions.”
Directing the drone’s spotlight into the opening had revealed nothing new, other than what appeared to be a cylindrical compartment with no distinguishing features. Its far side appeared to be another flat disk of the same material. “I think you were right about it being an airlock,” Traci said.
“It created an opening sized just right for the drone. That seems like an invitation to me. I think it’s time to go inside.”
After hours of no communication, had the Artifact just opened itself for visitors? She was unconvinced. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I still need the beach ball for exterior maintenance. What happens if you go inside and it closes up behind you? If the outer hull’s opaque to EM scans, we’ll lose control of the drone.”
“Good point. There’s a bigger question we need to consider as well,” Jack said. “If there’s someone aboard, do we want to greet them with a drone?”
“You’re talking about first contact.” Her words carried the weight of all civilization with them; she felt the press of them as if the entire world had just been placed on her shoulders. Of all the people who could have been in her position right now, she would have been the last choice. The mere presence of the Artifact threatened to upset every belief she’d held. Taking that final leap into a face-to-face meeting seemed so far out of reach as to be ludicrous.
Yet here they were. In the amount of time it would take her to don an EVA suit, she could be jetting across space and into the arms of an alien species. Headlong into a new reality. Whatever she did, from this point forward her existence would never be the same. Word of their encounter would eventually reach Earth, and the rest of humanity’s experience might well be defined by her actions in the next few hours.
All of a sudden, being spit out of a tunnel through space-time into a star system twelve light-years from home was no longer the most reality-shattering event of her life.
As she went through the meticulous process of inspecting, donning, and pressure-checking her EVA suit, Traci had been able to push those troubling thoughts from her mind. Long ago she’d learned to compartmentalize, focus, and live to fly another day. Let the outside world inside your head when things got dicey and you’d soon have eternity to ponder your mistake.
Eternity was on her mind as she locked down the last seal and waited for the cool, sanitized air to caress her face as her body purged itself of nitrogen. Two hours of pre-breathing gave her plenty of time to think. She couldn’t escape the thought of Christ praying in the garden of Gethsemane the night before the crucifixion, so fervently that blood was said to have spouted from his forehead, and realized she might be getting a whole new perspective on his predicament. “Take this cup from me,” indeed. As a self-absorbed youngster she’d assumed he had meant, “This is really going to suck. Is there any other way we can do this?” As she’d matured, she’d come to realize it had been a lament against taking the weight of humanity’s failings on his shoulders. But also that it was really going to suck.
Forgive me, she prayed silently, I can’t let go of that one. “I’m guessing you understand,” she said to herself.
“Understand what?” Jack said over the intercom.
“Nothing. Talking to myself.” And being a melodramatic twit.
“Got it. Do what you have to do.” Cybernetic or not, he still knew her too well. And she still didn’t mind. “How’s your suit check?”
“Pressure’s holding at five psi and I have full range of motion. Temp’s a balmy seventy-two. You can start venting the airlock.”
There was a barely audible hiss outside her visor and an amber light beside the outer door began flashing. She watched for any pressure changes in her suit as the compartment’s air was pumped into a storage tank. As the hissing fell away to silence, the light turned a steady green. The airlock was equalized with the vacuum outside. She disconnected herself from the ship’s air supply, now relying on her backpack oxygen. “Suit is go.”
“How about you? Ready to make history?”
“Only the second or third time this week.” She turned a crank to unlock the outer door and watched it fall open silently in the vacuum. As she stared into the depthless black, the weight of the task ahead was swept away by an inescapable truth buried in the rush of events: she hated spacewalks. Just as many pilots had a paradoxical fear of heights, she was more than content to remain within the confines of her spacecraft.
She slipped her boots out of the floor restraints and reached along her sides to unfold the maneuvering pack’s control arms. At the very least she’d be able to direct herself instead of just floating about. As they locked into place, direction cues appeared in her visor. Yes, this was much better than relying on handrails. The suit was now her own personal spacecraft. She pushed herself through the opening with a gentle kick.
She pulsed the backpack thrusters to keep herself pointed at the Artifact, focusing on it and tuning out the void around her. Tau Ceti and its planets could be gawked at another time, while the wormhole was better left ignored. The thought of that thing being so close, and of being so exposed to it, was best kept safely out of her head.
“Thrusters and directional gyros are go. I’m making my way to the forward sphere.” She pivoted toward her target, pushed on the hand controllers, and was rewarded with a gentle press of thrusters at her back. The Artifact loomed ahead, quickly filling her field of view as she closed the distance.
She pulled back on the controllers after a minute, thrusting in the opposite direction to bring herself to a stop a few meters short. Close up, the geodesic sphere’s triangular panels appeared as pristine as they had from a distance. The light from her helmet lamps danced across the surface, the sphere’s strange alloys casting brilliant reflections. “No signs of micrometeor damage or UV decay. Looks like this thing could’ve been put in orbit yesterday,” she said, though she suspected it was unimaginably old. With no way to explain why, she sensed it had been out here for a long time, perhaps centuries.
She realized Jack had been silent for several minutes. “Comm check. Are you seeing all this?”
“I see it. Your video looks great. Just taking it all in. Wish I could be there with you.”
He was, in a sense. “Me too.” She gave the controllers a twist and began moving to the forward collar. “On my way to their front door.”
“Be careful.” His tone was like a parent who’d just removed the training wheels from his child’s bike.
Now he was concerned? “I think ‘careful’ went out the window a long time ago. I’ll try not to do anything stupid.”
Traci pulsed her thrusters to stop in front of the massive docking ring, easily three times her size. “Estimate the collar to be at least ten meters diameter. About one meter deep.” She reached out and grabbed its rim. “Surface is perfectly smooth, no perturbations or obvious machinery. But I do see faint oval outlines spaced evenly around it, one about every half meter. Probably docking clamps, embedded flush along its face.” So no bewildering technology, just extremely tight manufacturing tolerances. It was an odd measure of reassurance to know that they weren’t magicians.
The open portal seated within the collar was no less confounding, however. The beach ball drone had kept its position squarely in front, and the small aperture that had opened for it was still there waiting. There was no discernible change to the portal; it was simply a hole that looked as if it had been forged with the disk.
As she moved behind the drone the portal finally reacted, opening wider until it was large enough to accommodate her. “Holy crap.”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought too. Only with more profanity,” Jack said, just as surprised. “I must have triggered an automated sequence with the beach ball. See what happens if you move away.”
“Gladly.” She gave the controllers a sideways push and the portal closed in on itself. When she made the opposite motion, the aperture opened back up to its former size. “I think you’re right. There must be sensors embedded somewhere we can’t see yet.” She studied the orange drone and considered her next move. “I’m going to push the beach ball through. Let me know what happens on your end.”
She gave the drone a gentle push through the opening, which immediately closed up behind it. “Do you still have a link?”
“Weak, but it’s there. I’m looking around inside now. It’s clean as a whistle, just a big empty cylinder. I’m going to try to come out.”
After a moment, the aperture opened again and the drone drifted outside. “How’d you do that?”
“I just parked it in front of the door and it opened. Presto.” He gave her a minute to collect her thoughts. It was time for her to decide if she was willing to make the jump herself. “Ready to try it?”
“No.” She felt her heart was going to beat itself right out of her chest. “But I’m going anyway.”
“Want me to come along? With the drone, I mean?”
“Best that we stick with the plan, now that we know you can open it. If you don’t hear from me in an hour, park the drone in front of the portal and light it up again.”
“Roger that. Good luck, kiddo.”
She took a deep breath and moved back in front of the portal, once again opened just enough for her. With a gentle pulse of thrusters she sailed into the chamber.
Behind her, the aperture closed silently.
“I am surprised you let her go alone,” Daisy said over their datalink. “Traci is not enthusiastic about extravehicular activities.”
Jack couldn’t believe he was being put on the defensive by a computer. It was one more check in the “female” column, he supposed. “We needed an actual human envoy, and it’s not like I’m in any condition to make the trip.”
“It has been twenty minutes since we have heard from her. Do you believe she could be in danger?”
“I can’t explain it, but no. Gut instinct.” Daisy was showing genuine concern, and so he tried to explain himself. “I got a look inside the antechamber and it was clean, no signs of recent activity. We both think whoever built that ship is long gone.”
“If it was in fact abandoned, that also raises concerns. There could be a latent fault rendering it unsafe for occupation. There is also a nonzero possibility of a critical systems failure occurring while she is inside.”
“The exterior’s held up well,” he argued. “If it’s not brand new, it sure looks like it.”
“I will agree the exotic alloys suggest construction methods and tolerances that are beyond our current abilities. I am also curious as to what type of computing technology it may hold.”
“The Artifact doesn’t behave as if it’s under any kind of intelligent control, if that’s what you mean.”
“The portal you observed may suggest otherwise.”
“It didn’t seem particularly smart,” he argued. “It responded to our presence like an automatic door at the supermarket.”
“An advanced synthetic intelligence could be surprising,” Daisy cautioned. “It may not react until it perceives a need. We do not know enough about the culture it evolved in to understand if we are unwittingly presenting a threat.”
“You’re suggesting it may treat her like a virus if she makes a wrong move?” It was a surprising insight into the AI’s reasoning.
“We shall see,” Daisy said.