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36




“It’s better if we explain this on the rec deck,” Jack said. “We can use the big screen.”

Bewildered, Traci pushed off for the central corridor and up into the recreation level. The area was divided into a galley, workout area, and lounge, each mostly untouched since she’d last been here years before. She moved past an exercise bike and microgravity treadmill to settle in front of a small divan. Embedded in the opposite wall was a widescreen video monitor which she suspected hadn’t been needed in some time.

His voice came over the cabin speakers as the screen flicked to life. “You might as well get comfortable.”

What followed was a survey of the Tau Ceti system, the yellow star taking center screen within concentric rings and ellipses that depicted its planets. “Once we had a good fix on where we were, Daisy accessed the IAU’s exoplanet database to see what was known about the system. It has eight identified planets, each of which we’ve been able to confirm and measure their orbits. Four inner, four outer, and at least one of those outer planets is a monster. Bigger than Jupiter, with a dozen moons we’ve been able to identify.”

“Have you taken imagery?”

A small blue-green crescent appeared, with the suggestion of white cloud bands circling its equator. Its most visible moons were a sextet of pinpoint lights. “We’re calling it Colossus, until someone comes up with something better.”

She drew herself closer to the screen, eager to tease out more detail. “That’s amazing. What’s it composed of?”

“The usual outer-planet mixture. Hydrogen, helium, methane. And it has a nasty magnetic sheath, like Jupiter.”

“Molten core, then,” she said. “What about the inner planets?”

“Rocks, just like ours. Two are in the Goldilocks zone, spectral analysis of both show water, oxygen and nitrogen.”

Similar to Earth. “Life, then?”

“Doubtful,” Daisy interjected. “There are prohibitively high levels of carbon dioxide and monoxide, and methane. We suspect there was once life, perhaps on both worlds.”

“What makes you think so?”

Daisy didn’t answer, deferring to Jack. “Inference. Process of elimination.”

“Inferred from what?” she asked warily.

“The outer system has some weird characteristics, kind of like ours,” he said. “We’ve found similar signatures of water ice and organics.”

“You think the inner planets were once seeded the same way Noelle thinks Earth was?”

“The thought had occurred to me. Is that her official theory now?”

“She was getting ready to publish,” Traci said, then remembered the time-dilation effect. “Probably has by now, but word was starting to get around. Her hypothesis is that those ice balls we found may have triggered the Cambrian explosion. They’re being called ‘Hoover spheres’ among the astrobiology community.”

“No kidding? Way to go, Dr. No. Anyhow, we identified a handful of minor planets in the outer belt and were in the process of searching for more when we found something else much closer.”

The image on screen changed. What she saw wasn’t a planetoid or jagged cometary fragment, nor some oddly shaped asteroid. It had a clearly defined structure: three glistening metallic spheres, strung end-to-end like beads on a necklace. The chances of three perfectly spherical bodies colliding to join in such a way were so remote as to be unthinkable.

Traci’s eyes grew wide, her mouth hung open in disbelief. She told herself this had to be an optical illusion, some strange effect of the extreme gravity gradients. “What is it?”

Daisy explained. “Visible construction appears to be of three spherical forms, each one hundred meters’ diameter and connected in a linear arrangement. Spectral analysis indicates a nickel-titanium alloy skin with external structural elements of reinforced carbon, possibly graphene. It is in a circular orbit around the wormhole’s barycenter, radius 354,759 kilometers with a period of 5.87 Earth days and an average velocity of 4.39 kilometers per second.”

“Circular orbit,” she said. That generally didn’t happen by accident. “What’s the eccentricity?”

“0.00001,” Daisy said. “Quite rare for a naturally occurring object.”

Rare indeed, not without an external force influencing it. It had to have been placed there. “There’s nothing else nearby to act on it?”

“Just us,” Jack said, “and we’ve been keeping our distance.”

“What did you say it’s made of?”

Daisy was customarily precise. “A nickel-titanium alloy similar to nitinol, with traces of exotic elements I have not been able to identify on the periodic table. Nitinol’s shape retention and self-healing properties make it extremely difficult to forge in significant quantities or fabricate into large structures.”

“Yet we’re looking at a—whatever this is—nearly thousand-foot structure made of the stuff.” It was no optical illusion.

“The outer hull, at least,” he said. “A self-healing alloy is a nifty way to skin a spacecraft, if you can manage it at that scale.” On Earth, it was most frequently used in eyeglass frames and orthodontics.

When she considered the ungainly micrometeor umbrellas mounted to their ships, she had to agree. “Is there any possibility this came from Earth? The Planet Nine theory has been postulated for a long time. Maybe the Russians beat us again and kept it to themselves?”

“That is so unlikely as to be impossible,” Daisy said. “The economics of producing such a vehicle are beyond their abilities, either present or past.”

These days it’d be beyond anyone’s abilities, economic or otherwise, she thought. Traci stared in silence at the image, stunned by its implications. Here was proof right before her eyes of a technology that could not have originated on Earth.

Technology of an unknown origin.

Foreign.

Alien.

“I know this must be difficult for you to process,” Jack said gently. “It was for me, too. Still is.”

She spoke in a whisper, hands covering her mouth, her knees shaking. “I don’t know what to think. This is . . . remarkable.” Devastating, she kept to herself. She couldn’t stop staring, marveling at the mystery it presented while hoping to tease out some detail that would reveal it couldn’t possibly be what it obviously was. The sight of some national flag or corporate logo on its hull would be an immense relief, yet there it remained, mute refutation of so much she had come to believe. “Have you tried communicating with it?” She felt crazy just asking the question.

“We have tried both laser and radio communications across our entire frequency range,” Daisy said. “The Artifact is not actively emitting any EM radiation and has not reacted to our presence.”

“How did you find it?” It was big for a spacecraft, but not so big that it would have been easily detected.

“Search radar,” he said. “First thing we did coming out of the Hole was to sweep the area for any collision threats. We first pinged it as a metallic asteroid and marked its orbit. We didn’t do a spectral analysis until later, when Daisy noticed it was radiating too much heat to be just another rock.”

That meant it still had a working power source. “What do you think it is?”

He let out another shrill electronic laugh. “Alien battleship. A barn for all the cattle the UFOs took from Earth. Your guess is as good as mine.”

Daisy’s take was more practical. “A sphere is the ideal pressure vessel. Given its construction, it is almost certainly meant to contain a pressurized volume. Of what, we cannot know.”

“I do have a couple of guesses,” Jack said, turning serious. “It might be a propellant farm. If you were going to use the Hole as a galactic highway, putting a gas station by its off-ramp would make sense. Or it is—was—a crewed ship, modular construction like we use. Just different.”

“Can you tell what it uses for propulsion?”

“We haven’t gotten close enough to see. Could be as simple as one sphere is for crew, one for consumables, and one for propellant.”

Traci returned to the enigmatic image on screen. “Then I guess we’ll have to get closer, won’t we?”


She had looked forward to a joyful return with Jack in tow, him recovering safely aboard Columbus while she piloted them homeward through what he’d taken to calling “The Hole.” Though she’d no idea what home might be like now. Given how things had been when she left Earth, being able to skip ahead a few years didn’t sound like such a bad thing.

All of that had changed in more ways than she could’ve imagined. She was twelve light-years away, his brain had been hotwired into Daisy’s network, and oh, by the way, there was an alien spacecraft orbiting nearby.

She owed Cayman a report; by her reckoning a few years would have passed while “proper time” for her had been a few days. The time dilation from Magellan’s transit had been almost five years; she could only assume hers had been equivalent. Would anyone still be waiting for her to check in, assuming Hammond had somehow kept the wolves at bay? Could she even get a transmission through without a relay on the other side?

Bob’s cheerful voice greeted her as she flew through the docking tunnel into Columbus, headed for the control deck. “It is good to see you again. How was your visit?”

She ignored him, lost in her thoughts. She punched up the search radar and directed its antenna at the patch of space where that alien tank farm should have been.

He tried again. “You seem distraught.”

“I do? Whatever for?” she said tersely, then caught herself. Bob didn’t deserve sarcasm. “Let’s just say it didn’t go as I expected.” She explained Jack’s condition and the “artifact” they’d found.

“That is most unexpected. Perhaps you need time for rest and contemplation.”

That irritated her more than it should have. “Now you sound like one of those behavior-modification bots I left behind on Earth. Start acting like that and I’ll unplug you myself.”

“Understood. But I would rather you didn’t work yourself into exhaustion.”

She bit down on her lip. “I’m sorry, Bob. You’re right, I need to decompress. But we have a lot to do first.” She opened some notes she’d taken from Daisy and began plugging them into the flight management computer. “These are orbital parameters for the whatever-it-is they found,” she said, still unable to say alien spacecraft. “Plot us a Hohmann transfer for the first available intercept. Use the OMS—I want us to come up nice and slow. If we light up the fusion drive in some mad dash it might think we’re hostile.”

“It will no doubt detect our approach regardless. Its construction suggests advanced technology. It is certainly aware of our presence.”

“Yes, but if we show that we’re not in a hurry it may not get spooked. For all we know it could be a proximity mine guarding the wormhole.”

“That would be most unfortunate if true.”

“Quite,” she said politely, matching his tone. “Finally, I’ll need you to open a direct datalink with Daisy and download everything they’ve observed so far. They don’t have the fuel to come along, so if you can spare the network space I’d like to see if there’s a way for Jack to come along for the ride.”


Bob had conveniently—or considerately, she couldn’t be sure—timed their burn after Traci had first been able to enjoy a full twelve-hour rest cycle. Sleep had come slowly, but she had also forced herself to not look at any of the ship’s data files or the information Daisy had pushed to her tablet. She finally drifted off with a worn copy of one of the cheeseball prairie romance novels she’d retrieved from her old quarters on Magellan, mentally as far away from space travel as she could manage. When she’d awakened, a half hour on the treadmill followed by a breakfast of orange juice and reconstituted eggs left her feeling mostly normal.

She also woke to a new companion. “Nice ship,” Jack said over the galley speaker. “I forgot how clean they could be before we humans come along and mess things up.”

“It’s easier when I don’t have to clean up after you,” she teased. “How are you finding things?”

“Right where I expect them to be. Same layout, just newer. I see the medical pods are a lot nicer. I never asked how hibernation went for you.”

“It wasn’t bad,” she admitted, “though waking up’s always a bitch.”

“I’ll have to take your word for it.”

“Sorry. Forgot.” She absentmindedly tapped her fingers together, considering what to say. “It’s surprisingly easy to talk to you like this. Probably because I’ve only had Bob for so long.”

“He seems to be coming along, by the way. Not quite at Daisy’s level, but he’ll get there with enough interaction. My being plugged into his network might speed things up.”

“I look forward to that opportunity,” Bob said. “We are coming up on our injection burn. OMS thrusters have warmed to operating temperature.”

“Got it.” She stuffed her spent bulb of coffee into the water reclaimer and pushed off for the control deck. “Jack, meet me up forward.”

“I’m already there.”


Their transfer orbit to intercept the Artifact took most of the day, their time spent poring over updated imagery and spectral scans as they drew closer. Bob had composed a simple greeting of prime numbers between 1 and 101, which he broadcast continuously throughout their approach.

Traci, for her part, had become transfixed by the feed from the observation dome’s telescope. The lack of surface detail as they drew closer was confounding; she’d expected to see more features but so far there were only ragged shadows, suggesting its spherical hulls had been pockmarked by untold years—perhaps centuries—of micrometeor impacts. It looked strange for a skin that was supposed to be self-healing.

“Still nothing?” she asked as the time came to decelerate to their rendezvous.

“No response to our broadcasts,” Bob said.

“Radar returns are better defined at this range, but that’s it,” Jack added. “Still no EM radiation, just residual heat. It’s generating power but that’s all.”

“Unmanned?” she wondered, “or un-something, whatever they are?”

“Might be a completely different biology. For all we know they’re cold-blooded lizard people.”

“Great. Thanks.” She tried not to think about a ship populated with intelligent dinosaurs as the nose thrusters fired a long burn, bringing them into a common orbit. “That’s it. Stable, trailing at five hundred meters.” She unbuckled from the pilot’s station and pushed off for the observation dome. Bob had trained their rendezvous lights on the Artifact, its metallic spheres glimmering as she settled into the dome.

They weren’t perfectly smooth, but it wasn’t pockmarked like they’d thought. From here, she could see its uneven reflection was actually a feature of the Artifact’s construction. The spheres were massive geodesic shapes formed from tens of thousands of small triangular panels, mated to each other within a trio of smooth, jet-black trusses along their length. That was no doubt the reinforced carbon Daisy had identified spectrally.

“No position lights, no windows either,” she said, reciting her observations for the cabin voice recorder. The Artifact remained motionless relative to them, not slowly tumbling like they might expect if it were derelict. “It’s under control, looks passive. Internal gyros keeping it stable,” she guessed.

Jack was conducting a closer inspection, using the feed from the external cameras. “The nearest sphere has a large ring centered forward, maybe ten meters diameter. Each of the trusses has something like mating collars on their ends. That must be how they stack.”

“Modular, like you thought,” Traci said. She picked up a pair of binoculars from a compartment beneath the dome. “That ring must be a docking port, maybe an internal airlock.”

“That’s where I’d put one. Can we maneuver around it, get a look at the other end? I want to see if there’s some kind of propulsion.”

She considered the risks of possibly staring down its tailpipe. It hadn’t shown any signs of activity so far, but that could change in a fiery instant. “I’d prefer we keep our distance for now. Let’s send a drone.”

“Good point. Sometimes I get a little too detached from human caution for my own good.”

Sometimes? she wondered. “We can send the beach ball. I’ll even let you drive.”


The “beach ball” was a self-propelled maintenance drone fitted with visual and infrared cameras, used for exterior inspections of Columbus. A small port opened on the ship’s service module and the half-meter ball drifted free. With a quick burst of reaction jets, it began to sail across the gulf toward the Artifact.

“Closing at one meter per second,” Jack said. “Be there in eight minutes.”

Traci watched the bright orange drone silently move away from them. “That’s fast enough. We don’t want to give them any ideas. Bob, are you still transmitting?”

“Yes, but there has been no reaction as yet.”

She was beginning to prefer it stay that way. It was easier to think of this enigmatic machine as a derelict. “Let me know right away if there’s a spike along any spectrum.”

“I’m at two hundred meters. Starting to pick up more surface detail. Are you seeing this?”

She bent down to a monitor carrying the beach ball’s video feed. The Artifact’s central sphere was dotted with small domes made of something less reflective than its nitinol plating. “Antenna fairings?” she wondered, hoping they weren’t also emitters for some type of exotic weapon.

“Could be,” Jack said. “They look to be nonconductive. Maybe protective covers for observation domes, like ours.”

As he steered the drone closer, toward the opposite end of the Artifact, more details emerged. The spheres were in fact joined by mating collars identical to the one they’d observed. Moving farther along, tubing of a bright metallic material similar to the sphere’s geodesic plates snaked around its circumference. “I’m guessing that’s plumbing for coolant.” He followed them around the sphere until they converged into loops of concentric circles around its far side. Nested within its center was a layered arrangement of dull metallic petals that resembled a massive, mechanized tulip bulb. “I think we’ve found their exhaust nozzle.”

“So it’s not a tank farm,” she said. “It’s a ship. Be careful.”

“Infrared signature’s the same as from the rest of the ship. No neutron or gamma traces either. I think it’s been quiet for a long time.”

Let’s hope it stays that way. At least they knew which end was which now. “Get some more video, then head back to the bow. Let’s have a look at that collar.”


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