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Closer. It kept coming, kept coming.
“Please, everyone, remain calm and secure yourself and any loose belongings that may pose a danger to—”
Thoomp.
Dooooozsh.
Vanhi could see the antennae groups on the pod clearly. It was so close, so—
“Dive!” Tan ordered.
Thoomp.
This time there was sound. Eardrum-bursting, earth-shattering, bone-vibrating ssssshhhhhhcrrrrash.
The pod collided with Breath, below the window deck. A white spark-lined leading edge of sunset orange passed unperturbed through the observation window, through the hull.
Vanhi’s feet left the floor as the gravity was disrupted, or damaged, or whatever was happening. She tried holding on to the desk, to keep herself grounded as chairs and mugs and monitors sailed up and away, with no clear direction, but soon she, too, was floating, aimless.
Until the strange field slammed into her, throwing her sideways, blotting out the purple light and turning it chartreuse. Her eyes snapped closed, and her breath punched its way out of her body.
Her head went light, fuzzy, nothing but …
… nothing …
… but …
… a …
… haze …
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_1561ebc4-b6b9-5ded-973d-5bb72e815b82)
CONVOY SEVEN (#ulink_1561ebc4-b6b9-5ded-973d-5bb72e815b82)
CAZNAL: IN SEARCH OF THE LESSER REDOUBT (#ulink_1561ebc4-b6b9-5ded-973d-5bb72e815b82)
ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTEEN YEARS SINCE THE INCEPTION OF NOUMENON INFINITUM SEPTEMBER 5, 117 RELAUNCH5274 CE
… Convoy Seven has been assigned a new mission, designated Noumenon Infinitum. Its express purpose is to travel to the variable star LQ Pyxidis and complete construction of the alien megastructure, thought to be a Dyson Sphere and known as “the Web.” Once complete, Convoy Seven is to charge the batteries on the ship designated Zetta, then return to Earth …
Confidential addendum to official statement, Convoy Seven crew only:
In addition to the official mission parameters appointed by Earth, Noumenon Infinitum is to investigate the craft known as “the Nest.” Any information garnered from the investigation pertaining to alien involvement with the Web is to be applied …
… The final clause of the official mission statement can be struck. Convoy Seven need not return to Earth …
It started with a map, like all good treasure hunts do. One alien in origin, and not immediately recognizable for what it was. But it had led them here.
Caznal the Fourth gazed out of the shuttle porthole and into the inky night beyond. It wasn’t the total lightlessness of an SD bubble; it was a dark monolith of matter. A planemo—a systemless planetoid—wandering and alone. Starless, moonless. Naught but a black disk against the stars, and it blotted them out one by one as the shuttle shifted.
But Caz didn’t see a flat emptiness. She saw a blank slate. The planemo held nothing but potential.
Light lensed around the edges in a visible halo as they descended, creating a bowed outline of the galaxies and such beyond.
Out the opposite side of the craft, over her apprentice’s shoulder, she could barely make out the twelve ships of the convoy, their illuminated windows only distinguishable from far-off stars because of their orientation and regularity.
No one could have anticipated, all those years ago on Launch Day, that the convoy would have found itself here.
When Noumenon, the original mission, had arrived at LQ Pyx, they’d discovered an alien craft floating near the Web’s most massive component. The craft was damaged, and empty, but clearly belonged to an alien species who had taken up the construction project. The convoy had taken the ship—dubbed the Nest because of the many pipes that circled around it and dangled from its bottom in an arrangement that resembled woven twigs—believing it held answers to the Web.
Now that ship hovered in the belly of Slicer, where the engineers poked and prodded it like a sick patient with a rare disease.
And it had led them here.
As the shuttle fell into a degrading orbit, Caznal’s apprentice, Ivan Baraka the Fifteenth, grinned at her and bounced in his seat, practically vibrating inside his spacesuit. There were old Earth vids of teenagers his age bearing that same expression as they waited for a rollercoaster to spill over its first hump.
She shared his excitement, as did the other seven scholars aboard. But still, a small discrepancy in their studies nagged at her. After all, when a treasure map’s instructions read “Twenty paces past Skull Rock, one hundred and twenty around Crocodile Cove, and there be the Cave of Wonders,” one expects the cave to be there, not a divot in the ground.
That they’d arrived at a divot—a planemo—and not a cave was troubling.
The Nest had not given up any of its secrets easily. At first, it appeared to have no electrical connections. “It’s like finding a sailboat in orbit,” someone had once said. How could a spaceship function without wires and transistors?
But they’d been looking at it all wrong—all human.
Not only did the Nest have vast reserves of hydrogen that it could compress into a metallic superconducting superfluid to form electrical connections a single atom thick, but the way the Nest relied so heavily on gravitons suggested the aliens that had created it had been able to biologically manipulate gravitons.
If they’d never come to such a realization, not only would the Nest still lie dormant, they never would have recognized the alien maps for what they were.
“Approaching Crater Sixty-four,” the pilot said over the intercom, her voice echoing slightly inside Caz’s helmet. “Spotlights should be illuminating the eastern edge soon. Take note.”
Caz squinted, still unable to make anything out. Eventually the blackness gave way to gray, and the gray to a deep jasper-like green, and then ridges. The side of the crater was terraced—nothing like the smooth sweep of an impact or volcanic caldera, and not nearly as sheer as the walls of a sinkhole.
But that didn’t mean it was unnatural.
They were hoping to find something important to the Nataré here (Nataré was what they’d named the Nest’s creators, from the Latin, for how they were believed to be able to “float” or “swim” through the air on their biologically manipulated gravitons). Anything would do really. If all they stumbled upon was a set of tentacle prints and a patch of “we were here” graffiti, she’d take it.
Because that would silence the doubt.
When the convoy had successfully developed the technology to access the Nest’s computer, they’d soon come to the conclusion that the ship was more like a shuttle. Which made sense, given its size. Unless, of course, the aliens were considerably smaller than humans; just one of the many things Caznal was hoping to learn. She was still surprised they didn’t even know something that basic about them.
The ship’s computer contained no visuals of the aliens, nor any general historical data. All they found were three-dimensional representations of hundreds of spheres stuffed full with additional spheres of different sizes.
At first, the engineers had thought they’d stumbled upon the Nataré writing system, that each parent sphere could denote a page or even an entire document, and the spheres inside were words. But running them through a rudimentary algorithm revealed a lack of repetition, a fundamental requirement for ordering anything—sounds, symbols, movements—into meaningful communication.
It took them years to mentally convert the Nest’s data into information more suited to a human thinking process. The breakthrough had come when they found spheres with only a couple of—and in some cases, only one—interior spheres. When these were matched to full-to-the-brim spheres, they found an overlap. The mostly empty spheres appeared to highlight points in the full spheres.
X-marks the spot.
On human maps, the distance between objects was the focal point; the primary information the map was intended to convey. Objects were usually portrayed as a similar size—a single point at large scales. Not so with the alien maps. The Nataré highlighted gravitational influence over all other possible associations. According to the convoy’s best theories, their evolution had clearly influenced the way they saw and interacted with the world.
After recognizing the spheres as maps, their research became a quick spiral of realization and discovery. The spheres represented different sizes of gravitational influence created by various cosmological objects, and though they were shown with no distance between them, they were ordered in accordance with their spatial relation.
All the humans had to do then was take their current gravitational models and overlay them with the Nataré maps.
When they found one nearly empty sphere that highlighted LQ Pyxidis and a handful of other points, they knew they’d struck gold. It was the smoking gun they’d been looking for, evidence linking the Nest and the Web to new locations: places where more Nataré history, or the Nataré themselves, might be found.
Places like this planemo.
Only …
The ground rushed up at them—though their rate of descent slowed for landing, Caz still felt a jolt in her bones when they touched down.
“Ready, sir?” Ivan asked, giving her the thumbs-up.
“Ready,” she breathed, standing. When the pilot gave the green light, she hoisted the duffel bag of tools that lay at her feet onto her shoulder, as did her colleagues.
“Four hours for setup,” the pilot reminded them. “Half an hour for return. Stay in visual range of your assigned teammates at all times. And Captain Nwosu would like to remind you that if it wiggles, don’t touch it. If everyone’s got that, I’m opening the doors.”
A series of thumbs-ups and affirmations over comms led to the locks and their airtight seals disengaging, shifting aside to reveal the open plane and perpetual night of the crater floor.
Since Caznal was the head of the Nataré division, everyone waited for her cue. She would have the honor of stepping on this alien world first.
Hopefully, though, I won’t be the first sentient to explore this surface.
The planemo was roughly the size and density of Mars, with a surface of mostly ice, so Caz knew to expect a lower gravitational pull. It was still strange to feel the burden of her bag lighten and the tension of her muscles ease as she disembarked. The artificial gravity on the convoy ships—even the shuttles—was a constant one-g, and though they’d learned from Earth to make gravity cyclers smaller, allowing for more acute graviton manipulation, they had yet to finesse the tech into spacesuits.
Though she could move easily in the lower gravity, she felt unsteady. Like she was walking on a wobbly gelatin surface instead of solid rock. But the cleats on her soles held true to the frozen landscape, and her confidence increased with each stride.
The darkness, she found, was both a frustration and a godsend. Though the lights on her suit barely illuminated the craggy surface three feet in front of her, the small sphere of light felt safe.
She’d heard stories about planet sickness—the agoraphobia-related illness many of the crew members had experienced when the convoy had revisited Earth—and she had absolutely no desire to experience it firsthand.
“Say something,” Ivan prompted when she’d shambled a few yards away from the shuttle.
Turning back, she realized no one was following her. But eight helmets—the glare from their mounted headlamps obscuring their faces—peered out from the craft’s opening.
“Do we have to say something profound every time we step on new rocks?” she asked.
“Really?” Aziz, whose background was in bioengineering, called. “Really?”
“Oh, come on,” Caz said. “That’s gonna look way better in the history books than ‘one small step.’ Schoolkids love sarcasm.”
“We all hate you right now,” Aziz said, pushing past the others to jump through the hatch. The rest of them clambered out in sequence, looking a bit like a set of robots in their uniformity. Very similar, in fact, to the autons stored in the shuttle’s hold, which Caz would call to her aid once the locations for their gear were set.
They wouldn’t have cared what I said. She smiled as she watched the team quickly fan out in sets of three, carrying their equipment with ease.
Even though the labor was light, Caz could still hear her breath reverberating through her helmet, which added to the being-in-a-bubble sensation.
They’d picked Crater Sixty-four as a landing site because it was so unlike most of the planemo’s other craters, which were clearly created by impact. Their radar-mapping flybys hadn’t revealed any overt signs of civilization, past or present. No sprawling cities, no orbiting satellites, no bizarre megastructures. Not even a Cydonian Face to set pareidolia working, or a prominent mimetolith worth speculating about. Just a uniform frozenness, covered over with the dust of impact after impact.
But here, under the gray-green debris and the superficial indentations left by meteorites, the crater’s rim looked worked, scarred and terraced like in a quarry, disturbed by hand-equivalents with sentient intent.
But perhaps it was natural. Perhaps they would find no sign the Nataré had ever been here, no discernible Webrelated reason for it to be on their map. No one in their division dared voice such a possibility, though surely everyone was thinking it. If they couldn’t tie this planemo to the Nest, then their detour from the Web would be for naught; a waste of time.
It was an outcome Caznal had feared ever since they’d emerged from SD travel, still light-years away, to do a gravitational survey in order to make sure they were on the right track. Everything had lined up relatively well—putting all the gravitational influences almost exactly where the Nataré data put them, accounting for the millennia that had passed since the Nest had been abandoned inside the Web—everything except their destination. Their treasure map’s X, the Cave of Wonders, did not have the gravitational influence the map insisted it should.
There should have been, at a minimum, a star system. But all they’d found was this small wandering rock.
How could that be? Had a collision or some other calamity displaced the mass the Nataré had noted? Did it mark something unnatural? A fleet of alien ships? The fleet the Nest had once belonged to, that had long ago vacated the parsec?
And if the map had meant to point to something other than the planemo, then that meant their time here would amount to little more than a geological side-trek, and the surface beneath her feet was of no more importance than any other. Nothing but a cold rock. Inconsequential. A cosmic red herring, steering them away from their true purpose.
What did that make her career, her department? Misguided? Overblown?
She remembered stories about Earth scientists losing all their funding and credibility in the search for Atlantis. There were even crackpots who’d said the Atlanteans were still alive, just hiding.
That wasn’t what she’d been doing all these years, was it? Searching for Atlanteans?
“Here looks like a good spot for the first post,” Aziz said, waving Ivan over.
They were triangulating spotlights this go-around, and setting up the perimeters of their dig site. They’d become exoarchaeologists soon—using ground-penetrating radar to check for buried evidence, shoveling aside layers of dirt and stone and ice not touched by so much as a breeze in this perpetually frozen nightland.
It wasn’t a job they were meant for, not in the same way other clones were destined for their positions after the DNA reevaluations on Earth, before Infinitum’s inception. Theirs was a small, hodgepodge group. Originally, study of the Nest and its contents had fallen solely to the engineers, but, in time, it became clear the convoy required a new department, one focused on the creatures, full of people who could decode the fundamentals of Nataré culture, biology, and data.
Clones had been siphoned from bioengineering positions, which included medical staff and food processing staff. Communications had given up a line or three, as had computing, education, and SD drive maintenance. And, of course, Caznal’s line had been taken from engineering.
Now, the copper-colored jumpsuits of the Nataré scholars were one of the rarest uniforms among the crew, second only to the server caretakers’ sand color on Hvmnd. They wore it as a point of pride. Caznal saw it as a symbol of evolution: the evolution of purpose, of understanding, of their focus and dedication.
When each of the three teams was set, Caz activated her puppeteer implants, calling to the autons.
Three of the robots emerged from the shuttle’s storage hatch, unfolding from their compact travel positions, with legs slung over their own dislocated shoulders. The autons were an Earth invention, humanoid in form, dexterous in movement, with tensile strength and lifting power far beyond any machine in existence when the convoy was first launched.
Caz couldn’t see them at this range, but she could see through their “eyes,” and they could sense the weak infrared signatures emanating from the humans. She directed one to aid each set of three.
They relied entirely on her instruction, with no will or executable programs of their own. Each auton’s sleek black helmet of a head contained an active neural network, which her implants communicated with. Theirs was a hybrid of human and elephant brain tissue, without its own sentience, but with the speed and nuance only biological computing was capable of.
Scratch that. I.C.C. could match brain banks for reasoning, intelligence, and empathy any day of the week. It was the only truly artificial intelligence currently known to humanity.
But I.C.C. was confined to its body—the convoy. It was of no help down here. Especially with no hands of its own.
She used the autons to work in mirrored tandem, each coring a hole for, and setting up, the spotlight poles. While she directed their labor, others packed up the core samples for testing on Holwarda, and drew a detailed guide-grid for the area.
Few people in the convoy currently knew how to manipulate the autons—especially with her level of skill. The robots weren’t needed on a daily basis, so most of the artificial forms were held in reserve on Bottomless II, with appropriate neural networks being cloned only a handful at a time. Eventually the time of the autons would come, when the convoy was ready to set to work on their Dyson Sphere, but for now, most remained on lockdown.
“Ready to start mapping the grid area,” Ivan announced when Caz was nearly done with the hard labor.
“Everything calibrated?” she asked.
