Twenty Years Later
May 22, 98 PLD
3075 CE
The day had come. They were going to surface out of SD travel and see LQ Pyx for what it really was. Only a few hours of darkness remained, and then they’d see the stars. The convoy crew held a collective breath. Even I.C.C. seemed distracted. No one knew what they’d find when they arrived—Captain Reginald Straifer IV least of all.
They’d been chosen for one of the Planet United missions based on one possibility: that they might find something improbable. That LQ Pyx might harbor more than natural phenomena.
“What will we find?” Straifer asked for the umpteenth time.
The situation room fell silent. Sniffs and coughs punctuated the pause, but none of the board members threw forth a suggestion. Because the options had all been discussed before. For decades. Every possibility, every supposition, no matter how inane or insane had been vetted. And still, no one felt prepared.
“We’ll know soon enough,” the captain of Aesop said, stately and composed.
That we will, Straifer thought. In the meantime . . .
“Keep spit-shining the observation shuttles and the probes,” he said. He stood at the head of the marble long table, bent over, hands pressed against the smooth stone. “We can’t let the anticipation halt everyday activities. I know sleep patterns and sustenance intake have been off all over the convoy, but I don’t want us to fall to parts right before the big arrival. We have jobs to do, and if they don’t get done, we stop functioning. If we stop functioning we’ll fall behind, and we’ve only got twenty allotted years of study. I don’t want us to lose one second.”
He meant it. They weren’t going to turn into a weeping, pawing, writhing mess. They were on a mission, this was their job. For nearly a century they had adhered to their duty, with only minor deviation. But now, things seemed different. He didn’t like how much their near proximity to the star was affecting the crew. There was too much reverence in the air. Too much. It left the realms of scientific wonder and edged on . . . spiritual awe. What would happen to that feeling when they arrived and found something mundane? Would they ease back into their normal, logical selves? Would the disappointment destroy morale? Or would being this close to a foreign star be enough to sustain their amazement?
Maybe it would. Everyone on board had a natural love for the cosmos. Perhaps he was reading too much into the upset of daily rituals. Or perhaps . . . perhaps he was projecting, if only a little.
Straifer turned to his left. “Lieutenant Pavon, has that arrival message been rewritten to my specifications?”
Margarita stood and held herself at attention. “Yes sir. Subdimensional packets are prepared for pre-emersion, and I have twelve separate messages prepared for photon bursts when we reach full-stop.”
“Have there been any messages received since our last meeting?”
Her shoulders sagged, and he knew her answer before she spoke. “No, sir.”
Almost ten Convoy years without a message from Earth. A century for the home planet. What could have happened? Perhaps the lack of communication had to do with unforeseen ramifications of the SDs. Maybe distance affected the packets—distorted them or redirected them. Or maybe something had happened to the packet receivers on Earth’s end? If the machines had broken down and no one had bothered to repair them—
But why wouldn’t they have repaired them?
Unless, maybe, they were flat-out destroyed. Everything seemed fine in the last messages the convoy had received, but if a war had broken out . . .
“Well,” Straifer said, pushing his troubled thoughts aside. “We’ll hear from them when we stop; we’re shielded from all non-SD-packaged signals now, but once we’re out, we’re bound to intercept something. Even if all we get are twenty-sixth-century reruns. But hey, it’ll all be new to us—am I right?” No one laughed. The situation was too serious, and they’d been groomed for militant behavior for too long. “Guess I’m the only one who’s been dying for something nonarchive.”
“Sir?”
“Never mind. The point is we’ll receive something from home, and they should be able to receive something from us, even if they get it the old-fashioned way. I.C.C.?”
“Yes, Captain?”
“You are still sure all communications are functioning properly?”
“I have ordered the maintenance robots to do a continuous checkup and clean of all systems related to communications, internal and external. They have found no malfunctions, breaches, breaks, clogs, or infestations. All is functioning normally. All is also remarkably clean.”
“Thank you, I.C.C. All right, meeting adjourned. Everyone return to your stations and prepare. I.C.C. will alert you with a convoy-wide announcement when we are ready for full-stop.”
Use this time to prepare. Prepare for arrival, for purpose, for discovery.
Abstractions were nice—very epic and noble sounding—but they were nothing more than placeholders. The crew had no idea what they were preparing for, not really. There was nothing certain except the keenness of arrival.
As the board shuffled out of the room, Straifer was struck by the duality of expressions held on every face. Half somberness, half wonderment. The atmosphere lay thick with tension.
This was the apex on which their mission cruxed. His life’s work, his father’s life’s work, his original’s life’s work: it all hinged on these next few hours to come. What they found when they reached LQ Pyx could be wonderful and exciting, spectacular and unique. Or it could be dull, insignificant. Either way, this was the moment they had sacrificed nearly a millennia of Earth time for.
But, what troubled Straifer the most was not what they might discover, but if they would actually discover anything. The radio silence from Earth was worrisome, to say the least. What if Earth had long ago built a telescope that could bring the variable star into focus? What if they already knew what lay out here in the great beyond, making not only their convoy’s purpose null and void, but all the convoy missions? What if the Planet United endeavors were useless?
Perhaps their ambition had outreached their technology back in 2125. Perhaps the whole effort was a waste.
That would be the most terrifying thing they could discover—the most devastating to morale. Straifer could imagine coming out of SD travel and seeing the star up close for the first time, only to have the elation turn to heartbreak when the speed-of-light transmissions from Earth included pictures and analysis of LQ Pyx from a century before.
Maybe that’s why the SD messages from Earth had stopped. One of their last transmissions might have said, “You can turn back now, we’ve already finished the job.” What if a message like that had come when I.C.C. was down, during the post-revolt years? What if . . .
What if I.C.C. had intercepted and garbled an all-important last message and didn’t even know it?
No, I.C.C. was functioning perfectly. They’d received several transmissions since it had come back on line. A handful, but still . . . Nothing to indicate the convoy had been made useless by planet-side advancement.
But now pure silence for a century of Earth’s time. Something was wrong, that was certain.
Dr. Nakamura was the last person out of the room. Straifer stayed behind. He would take the bridge when they finally arrived, but for now he slid into his captain’s chair at the head of the marble table. “I.C.C., bring up the recording of Dr. Reginald Straifer the First giving his speech at the Planet United proposition conference. Please. And dim lights by sixty-five percent.”
I.C.C. complied immediately—and there he was. Young Reggie Straifer. The scientist, the mastermind, the start of it all. A hitch made Captain Straifer’s lungs stutter, and his stomach roiled. Here was the man responsible for sending their roughly fifty thousand genomes into space. He made their lives possible. He gave them purpose.
And had put the weight of ages on Reginald IV’s shoulders.
Straifer had seen the looks, had felt the stares bore into the back of his head when he walked the halls. His genes had initiated the mission, and thus his crew expected something extra now that said mission had come to its first climax. They expected Straifer to perform a marvel. What kind of marvel he had yet to decipher. And even then, he wasn’t in the habit of preforming miracles.
Would they blame him if the discovery was voided by Earth? If one of the scientists botched an experiment or an away mission?
Those doubts gnawed at him. It was his responsibility to see that everything went right. He owed it to Reggie I, to the generations that had been born in space and died in space without every laying eyes on Earth or the anomaly. He owed it to Captain Mahler . . .
Straifer’s stomach did another flip, but for a different reason. It had been years since the thought of Mahler had given him guilty pangs, but there was no circumnavigating the fact that Mahler was supposed to be captain when they reached the star, not Straifer.
Mahler had gone and eliminated his genetic line, ensuring that no more Mahlers would ever be captain. Six years previous he’d committed suicide, leaving a strange, senseless note behind:
Damn space. Damn utter pointless void of space. There isn’t shit out here, not shit. What’s the point in setting eyes on the variable? Won’t learn crap. It won’t mean anything. The lot of us on board’ll be snuffed out before the convoy gets back to people. Poof, we’re gone. What’s the point of living if it all just ends, like this, in dead space? Where’s the purpose?
Straifer had read the suicide note over and over, trying to decipher it, to find some meaning. Captain Mahler III had never really been a happy man—witnessing the revolt in his youth had made him cynical—but he’d always seen death as weak. Only the weak passed on before they reached retirement. Straifer supposed that was why Mahler had ended it sooner rather than later. He must have realized that his tough-as-nails persona was a steel cage embroiled around a feeble heart. But no one knew for sure what had set him off.
Was it the lack of communications from Earth? Or the decision to discontinue the reproduction of over a thousand crew members?
Mahler II had discontinued the ringleaders of the revolt, but it had been Mahler III who’d suggested they discontinue all “defective” clone lines.
Straifer understood the decision to permanently end the revolutionist’s influence. The way he saw it, those genes had failed. Their sole purpose for inclusion in the convoy was to see to the mission’s success. Since they’d blatantly subverted that purpose, they were no longer needed. If they revolted once they could do it again. Best not to give them the opportunity.
But that one decision opened the flood gates. Revolution wasn’t the only threat crew members could pose.
The board, with Mahler the III at its head, had decided to discontinue anyone whose actions could be deemed harmful to the mission. Anyone with a history of early death due to illness was a possible drain on resources, and thus discontinued. Anyone with a history of work-impacting emotional distress had been deemed inefficient and discontinued. Anyone with a history of suicide was now unconditionally eliminated without the probationary generation which had been customary since year two.
Mahler had known what he was doing. He didn’t want any more of his clones to be grown.
Why?
It couldn’t have had anything to do with me . . . ?
No, surely not. Mahler had no way of knowing how his first officer felt about his wife. None at all. Straifer had never been inappropriate with Sailuk. She didn’t even know how Straifer felt until Mahler was gone. How could Mahler have known?
He didn’t. He couldn’t.
It wasn’t my fault.
It wasn’t.
Straifer refocused on the recording. Reggie was detailing what the mission might find. The possibilities.
Like his original, Captain Straifer favored the more out-of-the-box concepts, like a giant crust of organic material. Something akin to the sugar-clouds the convoy had identified in some systems. Or maybe an asteroid sphere of coal or dirty-salt.
In the early years they’d surfaced out of SD often, in order to give each generation a shot at practical research. But that too had now been declared a waste of convoy time and energy. Luckily, the practice had, at the very least, been enough to help expand their hypotheses about LQ Pyx.
So Straifer expected something complex, but natural.
Reggie had never taken the suggestions of alien contraptions seriously, but he must have known that he owed the acceptance of his proposal to the possibility. None of the other projects had offered what his had: the possibility, however slim, of finding evidence of extraterrestrial intelligent life.
A voice broke in over the comm system. “Sir? Matheson, head of Security.”
“Yes?”
“All areas secure. My staff and I are prepared for any crew member outbursts.”
“Thank you, Matheson. I.C.C., is your consciousness full?”
“My programming gives me free access to open consciousness when convoy activity has a standard deviation of more than 3.000231 from normal. I have been fully conscious for the last three weeks.”
“And I’ll thank you to stay that way,” Straifer said. “All right, Matheson. I’m ready to go to the bridge.”
“Six officers standing by to escort you.” If revolt could happen seemingly out of dead space once, it could certainly happen when the collective emotionality of the crew was at its highest. Every precaution had been put in place.
“Thank you, Matheson. Signing off.”
Time to view Reggie’s magnificent star.
The six officers that made up Straifer’s escort were all Matheson clones.
After the revolt it had become painfully obvious that the security details did not contain enough officers. Two possible solutions presented themselves to the board. Either they should relegate genes that had been brought on board for different purposes to law and order, or they should clone more security specialists. Seven of the top officers had been chosen for hypergrowth, but instead of receiving a numbered nomenclature, they were each named something new. The different names were used to help differentiate those who were serving their original purpose—who would move through the ranks as specified by the mission—and those the convoy had chosen for extra enforcement.
All across the bridge officers hustled left and right, checking stations and preparing for the convoy-wide emergence into normal space. Straifer felt centered. When his nerves lit up he became more focused. His heart rate slowed, his breathing shallowed.
This was it.
“Fleet to all-stop in five, four, three, two . . .”
The main screen danced as they switched phase. Stars swirled where there had once been blackness. Light pierced their bubble. Space as it should be came into focus.
LQ Pyx hung before them, a magnificent burning ball. The glare was extreme.
Straifer barked orders. “Focus and go to infrared and ultraviolet. True picture won’t help us here.” I need to see. I need to see it.
False color imaging strained away the harshness of the star’s rays and left them with a glorious picture sharper than reality. It was so small, still six months out, but they could see what obscured the light.
Not an embryonic dust cloud, not a stellar remnant. Not an asteroid sphere or slabs of dirty ice.
The star’s casing was far too uniform for any of that.
The bridge went silent.
Is that . . . Is it . . . ?
LQ Pyx didn’t look like a star at all. More like a brushed-steel ball dotted with points of intense light. No, that wasn’t right either. It took Straifer’s brain a moment to decipher what he was seeing.
“It’s man-made,” someone blurted. “I mean . . .”
Straifer walked toward the screen, his hand outstretched. “By the ships. It’s artificial.”
The light wasn’t coming from on top of the ball, it was coming through the ball. He’d initially thought the sphere solid, but now he realized it was more like scaffolding—an incomplete structure filled with octagonal gaps that let LQ Pyx’s light shine through. It was as though thick metal netting enveloped the star.
“My god,” someone else whispered. “It’s enormous.”
A stunned pause followed. No one said a word.
The suspended animation of intrigue was fine for other crew members, but Straifer had to take action. He shook himself. “Contact Holwarda and tell them I want an estimation of the structure’s mass ASAP. Alert Nakamura, and instruct her to meet me in the situation room in an hour. Have Lieutenant Pavon join us thirty minutes later. Radio—what’s coming in from Earth?”
Every head on the bridge swiveled in one man’s direction. The communications operator stared back, wide-eyed. “N-n-nothing, sir.”
“It doesn’t matter how trivial, Sawyer. Report.”
Sawyer shrank in his seat. It was clear he wished for fewer eyeballs in the room, and though Straifer pitied him, he was as curious as everyone else. “There’s nothing to report, Captain,” Sawyer said. “I’m not getting anything. No data of any kind on any wavelength. Just dead air.”
With a frustrated sigh, Straifer stomped over to Sawyer’s station. “That’s impossible. Something has to be coming from the planet. Let me have a listen.”
Sawyer rose obligingly and handed over his headphones. Straifer indicated for him to work the buttons and dials.
Silence.
“Who calibrated this thing?” Straifer asked, roughly handing the headphones back to their owner. “I.C.C., has the communications station—?”
The AI answered preemptively. It knew him too well. “All bridge stations are in full working order. Neither Petty Officer Sawyer nor his equipment are faulty.”
“Sir?” asked Sawyer. “What does that mean?”
The captain took in his crew, making eye contact with as many of them as possible. “That we’re alone out here.”
Straifer rescinded his previous orders. He wanted to meet with Nakamura and Pavon at the same time.
No one sat at the long table. Instead they took up comfortable positions around the room, whatever came naturally. Margarita Pavon leaned against a wall, next to the largest monitor, with her arms crossed over her chest. Dr. Nakamura paced near the door, ready to flee the first chance she got. Excitement and nervous energy radiated from her every pore.
Though the engineers saw to ship maintenance and repair, they’d really only been brought along just in case. In case the convoy was met with something more baffling than planetary remnants or galactic amniotic fluid when they reached journey’s end. The engineers were like children appointed to take over the fort only under the unlikely circumstance that flying pigs attacked.
Suddenly, pork was winging left and right.
And the engineers were ready for action.
Straifer sat in his chair, which he’d rolled into the far corner of the room. He crossed his right ankle over his left knee and twitched his foot rhythmically.
The three of them had allowed themselves giddy handshakes and excited exclamations in place of normal stateliness. Neither woman had saluted, and it never crossed Straifer’s mind to make them. They’d each taken turns expressing some variation on, “Can you believe it? Intelligence. They’re out there. They’re out there!”
But when Nakamura had said, “We’re not alone!” the mood shifted. She’d meant it in the Grand Scheme of the Cosmos sense. They now had definitive proof that humanity’s intelligence wasn’t just some isolated accident. But her statement reminded them of Earth’s silence.
The three of them drifted apart, and now occupied their own personal corners of the room, each thrust into introspection.
“Lieutenant, you look displeased,” Straifer said eventually.
Pavon brought herself to attention. “Permission to speak freely?”
“Always.” Why couldn’t the crew see? He wanted to get away from Mahler’s hyperformality and militaristic drilling. They might carry naval titles, but they weren’t military of any kind. Perhaps Mahler’s stringent adherence to order had caused his breakdown—had caused him unnecessary stress. Perhaps it had driven a wedge between him and Sailuk. Perhaps that was why she’d come running to Straifer when—
“I should be at my station right now,” Pavon said. “Maybe Earth’s using bands that were ignored when we launched. I need to go over every possibility. Why couldn’t this wait for the board meeting?”
“I asked for you two because the silence isn’t just worrisome. It’s a clue. Yes, we’re not getting anything from Earth, but we’re not getting anything from anyone else either.”
Nakamura stopped her pacing. “They’re not here, you mean. The aliens,” the word rolled awkwardly off her tongue. “The beings that built that thing out there.”
Straifer nodded. “Either something is preventing signals from reaching us, or we’re totally alone out here.”
Pavon crossed her arms again, her glare passing over the captain first, then the head engineer. “Are you saying . . . You think Earth’s not there? That it hasn’t been there for at least a hundred years?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“But that’s the logical conclusion, isn’t it? No signals because there’s no one around to send them.”
“There could be hundreds of reasons why we’re not getting a signal. Right now, let’s focus on what we can control.” Readjusting his position, Straifer leaned forward. “You were saying something about alternate bands?”
“Our equipment isn’t calibrated for the entire EM spectrum. There are places we’re not looking because they aren’t traditionally used for communication. And maybe our math’s off, maybe we miscalculated the degree of signal degradation—”
“So there’s a chance we’re just overlooking something?”
She sighed. “Yes.”
“Then it could be the same with the builders,” Nakamura said. “They could be close.”
Rocking against the wall, Pavon shrugged. “It’s a possibility. If they’ve got the technology to build something like a—a Dyson Sphere or whatever it is—they probably have communications capabilities we can’t even imagine.”
“So you think it’s a Dyson Sphere?” Straifer asked.
“Why else build a giant net around a star? I mean, look how much of LQ Pyx’s output it’s intercepting. Surely that thing is gathering energy.”
“What do you think, Dr. Nakamura? Was Dyson spot-on?”
She slid into a seat at the long table. “Could be. It’s likely. The three primary possibilities were discussed long ago, and any engineer aboard can recite them by heart. Number one: a Dyson Sphere. Such a structure would be designed to passively gather the majority of a star’s energy output, to effectively make useable what would otherwise be lost to space. A Dyson Sphere could be used as a multipurpose battery, or could be intended to power something specific, like a matrioshka brain—a very advanced AI.
“The second theory,” she continued, “proposes such designs as increased surface area for physical habitation. The lack of signals anywhere in our vicinity would seem to rule this out, as well as the matrioshka brain idea. If there were billions—trillions—of lifeforms crawling around on the inside of that thing, I think we’d have some sort of indication right away.
“The third theory is related to travel. Stellar engines. If a civilization wanted to move a system, they could build a structure around the parent star which would directionalize its radiant energy. For example, a Shkadov thruster relies on the pressure differential created by the ‘capping’ of a star on one end—with something like a giant mirror or solar-sail. The structure is stationary, creating a constant energy differential that generates thrust on one side of the star, effectively pushing it through space. Seeing as how our variable has a wobble, but isn’t exactly streaking across the sky, I don’t think it’s a stellar engine.
“That leaves us once again with Dyson Sphere, but we can’t limit ourselves to one assumption. There are plenty of things it could be, could do. Now that we’ve seen it, can actually quantify its physical aspects and the nuances of its behavior, we need to brainstorm, come up with every possibility.” Smiling an amazed smile, she shook her head. “Who knows—maybe it’s a communications scrambler. Maybe that’s why we’re in a dead-pocket and it looks like Earth has vanished.”
Straifer perked. “What purpose would that serve?”
“Maybe there’s other stuff out here the aliens don’t want us to know about. Chatter they don’t want us to hear.”
“Us?” He raised an eyebrow.
“Anyone,” she clarified. “The point is, we need to know more. We can throw out guesses left and right, but that’s all they are without data.”
Six months later they had officially arrived. Observation shuttles were sent out to visually map the structure, and it had taken them weeks upon weeks. A three dimensional diagram now floated above the long table in the situation room, with the board gathered round. The model slowly turned, orbiting around the illustrated star.
“As you can see,” said Carl Windstorm, head of Observations. “The structure is a lattice work, tied together by sort-of nodes and lathes.”
Straifer raised his palm. “Sort of?”
“That’s the best description I have at the moment,” Carl said, pushing a pair of thick-rimmed glasses higher on his nose. Glasses weren’t a necessity—he could have easily had his sight corrected on Hippocrates. Straifer guessed Carl wore them for the same reason he wore his father’s onyx watch. Nostalgia. “What I’m calling ‘nodes’ appear to be devices of some sort, but we won’t know what they do until we crack one open—presuming we choose to go that route,” he continued, holding up a placating hand, halting the questions that lay ready just behind sealed lips. “Let me finish, please. The nodes come in four sizes—roughly shuttle-size to Mira-size—and are arranged in kind of ripple patterns, with the smallest nodes in the middle.
“And, as you can see, here and here, two sections of this . . . web . . . are anomalous themselves. First we have the gap, which we have no doubt causes the strobing effect that lead to LQ Pyx’s designation as a variable star.”
As if to illustrate the point for Straifer in particular, the large gap in the diagramed construct rotated into view. He’d seen the real gap from the bridge. The web’s orbit had brought the hole into direct opposition with the convoy, spewing the star’s full brilliance at the ships. The dazzling glare had prevented him from making out the gap’s borders, but the illustration defined them clearly. Three AUs tall and half an AU wide, relative to its curvature, it looked so small compared to the rest of the structure—though Straifer knew the distances to be daunting.
Why was it so hard for the human mind to grasp things as large as stars and astronomical units? We were not built for such enormity, he realized. The imagination attempts to make the concepts manageable through the lens of distance. But the truth is we can only understand the vastness intellectually, we cannot comprehend it.
“The gap is interesting,” Carl said. “We can’t tell yet if it is part of the design, or what purpose it might serve. But, of even more interest, is this structure here.”
The 3-D display shifted to show only one device. It dwarfed all the others and broke the pattern. It hung opposite the gap, was approximately the width of Jupiter—one AU long—and stood vertically in the sights of the convoy ships. Its front, angled toward the star, was concave, its back equally convex. Each end tapered into a sharp point. It looked like a fine seed, a thin wheat grain.
A shiver crawled its way up Straifer’s spine. The image hung in the air above the table like a piece of worked stone—heavy, inert, yet somehow organic. It bothered him, sent an uneasiness throughout his limbs, but he couldn’t put his finger on why. The “seed” was clearly the starting point of the structure, but felt separate from the web, like something caught in it.
Or the creature that had spun it.
“Okay,” Nakamura said, taking control of the meeting once Carl finished with his presentation, “what could it be?” She poised a stylus near a wall screen.
Dyson Sphere received the most votes, and many members seemed at a loss for ideas after they’d blurted out the one. Nakamura’s suggestion of a signal-blocker went on the list of possibilities. Someone suggested the web was a dampener, meant to reduce the star’s output in order to protect something from its radiation. Since there was nothing of importance in the vicinity (two planetary bodies had been detected within the web’s grasp, but neither was suspected of being habitable), many found the idea unfounded.
“Plus, Licpix is only G class. If it was something like a neutron star, perhaps that might need encasing. But not Licpix,” Carl dismissed.
Still, Nakamura wrote dampener on the screen.
“A landmark?” suggested the education head. “The strobing is reminiscent of a lighthouse, isn’t it? Maybe it’s used for navigation—maybe even intergalactic navigation.”
“It’s probably just a giant alien sculpture,” said Pavon. “We’re here scratching our heads over what it does when it doesn’t do anything.”
A few members laughed, others rolled their eyes.
“No, no,” Nakamura said. “That’s good. You might have meant it as a joke, but that’s good. Colossal space art.” She added it to the list. “Think big. Think outside the ships—outside what we know or would do.”
“It could have religious significance,” said Carl. “As a sort of temple, or offering. Maybe a symbol.”
“How about a border marker?” suggested Matheson. “Maybe it signals to other civilizations that they’re nearing the Galactic Empire and should keep the hell out.” More chuckles followed, as well as concerned murmurs.
“Maybe it’s a weapon,” Straifer said bluntly. The chatter halted. “Maybe it absorbs energy from the star like a Sphere, then redirects it through that giant seed and blasts things out of space.”
An uncomfortable pause followed as Nakamura wrote weapon of mass destruction on the list.
“If it’s a weapon, wouldn’t someone have used it on the convoy?” asked Carl.
“That’s awfully presumptuous,” said Straifer, leaning forward. “First, you’re assuming we’re significant enough to use massive force against. We’re not. If it’s a weapon, it’s meant for an invading fleet or something, not a small scouting party. Second, you’re assuming someone is still out there to use it. If the structure isn’t blocking signals, then there’s no one in range. It’s dead out there, remember? Lastly, you’re presuming the web is functional. Personally, I think that gap means the structure is incomplete.”
“Why would they go through all the trouble to build a web around a star, then not finish it?” Matheson asked.
“That, sir, might be the most important question in convoy history.”
“How did the meeting go?” Sailuk asked when he entered their quarters, her round cheeks extraplumped by a welcoming smile.
“Fine,” he said with a shrug, then kissed her. “We still have no idea what it is. Any exciting medical emergencies today?”
She was still in her seafoam work jumper, which meant she’d stayed late aboard Hippocrates. “Thankfully, no. We did have a pregnancy scare, though, and had a panicked conference with Morgan and Eden via I.C.C. We were afraid the hormone injections in the food had failed. One pregnancy in the fleet would mean the entire convoy is at risk of naturally procreating. It was a false alarm, though. A small tumor, not a baby. She’ll be fine.”
She winked at him and it triggered a flashback. He remembered the first time he’d seen that wink. It was in a photograph of her and Mahler that the late captain had kept in his ready-room. Straifer had desired her from that first glimpse onward.
After returning her wink he quickly looked away, swallowing a knot of guilt.
Sailuk was older than Straifer, but younger than Mahler. Hers was a sort of in-between generation compared to leadership-slated genes.
Sailuk and Mahler’s children were already grown and in their own quarters. Now that she was remarried, and Straifer had yet to raise any clones, the workers in charge of birthing were debating on whether or not to assign them any children. He hoped they’d assign them at least one.
More faces flashed before his inner eye. The faces of all those he’d helped to discontinue. He thought of all the children who would never be born because of his recommendation.
People who would never know of the convoy’s discovery.
He thought of the seed-like structure, its looming figure above the long table.
In his mind it tilted toward him, aiming its pointed top end accusingly at his heart.
Nauseated, he hurried to the bathroom.
“Are you all right?” Sailuk called after him.
Straifer splashed cool water on his face from the sink and left the faucet running. “Fine, just . . . just stressed.”
“Do you need me to get you anything?”
Confirmation that your husband didn’t know about us—I mean me. That he didn’t know how much I wished to trade places with him. That his suicide was one of the best things to happen in my life.
Another crest of nausea washed over him. No, that’s not right, not what I mean, I didn’t . . . “A few minutes alone,” he said lamely.
I wanted his life, but I never wanted him dead.
Wishing doesn’t make things so. He couldn’t blame himself for Mahler’s suicide, he knew, though that did nothing to alleviate his sudden illness.
He reemerged half an hour later, still unwell but no longer in danger of losing his lunch. “I’m going to spend some time in my ready-room. There’s too much going on in my head, some work’ll straighten me out.”
“Okay.” The laugh lines around her mouth scrunched with concern.
He kissed her forehead, ran his fingers through her short black hair—more salt-and-pepper than black these days, he supposed—then left their quarters.
The room sat right off the bridge, small but comfortable. When he arrived he instructed I.C.C. to dim the lights and play Reggie the First’s proposition speech again. A picture of himself and Sailuk adorned his desk in the exact spot in which the picture of her and Mahler had sat. He swiped up the frame and shoved it in a drawer.
He rewatched the presentation five times before dozing off at his desk.
In his dreams he saw the Seed—skimmed along its surface in an impossible naked space flight. It blotted out the stars and the convoy and everything else. It told him things, things he couldn’t remember when he awoke.
“Captain?”
Straifer shook himself. “What? Yes?” The entire bridge crew was staring at him.
Commander Rodriguez wrinkled his brow. “I asked if you’d like to see the latest probe report. This one shut down before it reached the Seed as well.”
Straifer’d been . . . elsewhere. Thinking about the last dream he’d had. The Seed’s voice had been Mahler’s voice this time. That was new. He’d dreamt of the Seed every night since that first, but never had it used Mahler’s voice to torment him.
“Did it get any new intel? Or was this attempt as useless as the last?”
Several small drones had been sent in succession to investigate the large device, but the missions failed. Each probe self-terminated its information feed before arriving at its destination, but then returned to the research ship, Holwarda, with full functionality.
The only information they could retrieve were whatever pictures they could capture in visible light. Nothing else could penetrate whatever anti-information defenses the Seed possessed.
That seemed to go along with the “dampener” theory . . . but it didn’t explain why they hadn’t received any SD packets. Those were beyond the influence of anything in normal space, and they were sure they would have detected interference—if not the cause or the source there of—if the Seed had generated any subdimensional hindrances.
The rest of the devices had been deemed dormant. They sat still and silent within the thick wires that formed the Web. It was only the Seed that teased them with bits of activity.
“The probe’s approach was from the inside of the Web, rather than outside. The report says there are new photos, but they’re not attached,” said Rodriguez.
“Well, let’s get them. I.C.C?”
“The head of Observations has declined to release them. The pictures were not entered into my system.”
“Why not?” Straifer tapped the arm of his chair impatiently. The air suddenly smelled stale.
“He did not include any notes of explanation.”
Straifer longed for the days of implant communication. The system had been dismantled and all implants surgically removed after the revolt—improved security at the cost of efficient communications. Just one more legacy to haunt me. “Patch me through to Carl—in my ready-room.”
He hurried away. Once inside, he locked the door for privacy.
“Dr. Windstorm speaking.”
“Carl? What’s with the half-assed report?”
“Excuse me? Who is this?”
“Captain Straifer. Why is the latest report from the probe missions incomplete?”
“It hasn’t been fully compiled yet. I assure you, my next presentation—”
“Bull,” Straifer called. “All of the raw data from each mission has always been immediately available via I.C.C., until now.”
A long pause followed. He suspected Carl was choosing his words carefully. “I didn’t want to alarm anyone.”
“What does that mean?”
“The probe found something unexpected.”
“Unexpected . . . ?”
“Meet me in my lab ASAP.”
“This thing is hovering in front of the Seed? Looks like a wire hair ball or a metal nest . . .” Straifer scrunched his nose and glanced away from the projection. Something in Carl’s lab smelled rancid. When was the last time he’d summoned a cleaning bot? “Yes,” he said to himself, turning back to the image and poking at it as though he could feel the strange protrusions. “Have you seen the nests the purple finches make on Eden? With the twigs dangling down and the cup shape in the middle? Even has the same kind of whorl—”
“It’s a ship,” Carl said frankly.
“A ship? You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
“Then you should have alerted the board immediately.”
“As I said, I didn’t want to—”
“Alarm anyone.”
Carl scratched his nose, then crossed his arms tightly over his chest—an ironclad defensive position if Straifer had ever seen one.
“You,” said Straifer, catching on. He put his hands in his pockets. “You didn’t alert the board because you were alarmed.”
“Look.” Carl repositioned his glasses with a shaky hand. “I wanted to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating. We see one alien construct and we start seeing aliens everywhere. I thought maybe—maybe—it was a captured asteroid and I wasn’t seeing what I thought I was seeing.”
At least you aren’t having telepathic conversations with the Seed in your sleep.
Inside, Straifer empathized. On the outside, he did his job. “You don’t think that an alien vessel poses a security threat? Maybe they are blocking our transmissions somehow. Was there any activity?”
“All we have are these pictures, Captain. I don’t have any more information than you do. The only thing I can say for sure is that it is in a steady, matched orbit with the Seed. I cannot identify any active propulsion. But if we could hold off, get more pictures—”
“Which is what we’ll try to do. But our policy is one hundred percent open information. Anything that has to do with the overall mission is supposed to be shared with all personnel. We are not some hush-hush military group that carries a few ‘key’ people. Everyone is key. Everyone needs to be fully informed, whether you think it’s pertinent, practical, real, or not.”
Hypocrite.
“Add these photos to the official report,” he finished. “And be ready to present this and whatever else the probes discovered to the board in three hours.”
“Yes, sir.”
Oh my god, Straifer thought. They’re here.
But their presence wasn’t nearly as baffling as their silence.
“The gap does not appear to be purposeful,” said Carl, gesturing once more at a holographic diagram. “The ends of the tethers are frayed, and several machines appear to have been the victims of collisions, with sections torn away. The destruction is limited to the edges of the gap. The remainder of the Web—as we’re officially calling it—appears unbreached, but there is evidence of midspace impacts on the husk-like outer shells of the devices. None is more pockmarked than the Seed. It seems to have battled many a wandering space rock and emerged undaunted.”
Straifer scratched his Adam’s apple. Apparently Dr. Windstorm was going to give his presentation as previously planned, and wanted to save the best for last. The Captain wished he’d get to the pressing part.
“The Web, as far as we can tell, is not functional. The devices aren’t doing anything, according to the probes. They’re either dormant, never went online—”
“Or were never meant to perform a function at all,” Pavon added helpfully.
Not one to take interruptions lightly, Carl spoke right over the lieutenant. “So, if it is a Dyson Sphere—which I think we can agree is the prevailing theory—we can’t tap into it and hope to get useable energy. I know some of us on Holwarda were hoping the convoy could somehow access its power.”
He paused, shuffling his notes. Straifer’s grip on his armrests turned white-knuckled.
“I have a feeling,” Carl said, “that the other civilizations that traveled here had hoped for the same thing.”
Everyone collectively perked. Captain Straifer leaned forward, expecting an image of the nest-like ship to manifest above the table. Instead, four examples of the “node” devices shimmered into being.
“We’ve identified no less than four distinct styles of construction. We expected to find a subtle change in each meridian slice of the net, as the technology progressed through the builders’ society, however what we actually discovered were major leaps in design, though the technology appears to be no more efficient or evolved than it is around the large parent object we’ve dubbed the Seed. This leads us to believe that four separate civilizations took up the project. Each after the first is assumed to have stumbled upon the star, found it inactive, then located instructions or reverse engineered the devices to continue construction.
“We won’t know if these assumptions are correct until the samples team can tell us if the trace elements in the machines are different in each design, and until the engineers get their hands on the guts of the mechanisms—yes, that is my recommendation, that we proceed by actually infiltrating the devices.”
“I agree,” Nakamura said. “That should be our next course of action.”
“Of course you’d vote for that,” said an elected member of the medical staff. “I want to hear more about these other civilizations. What happened to them? Where are they? If the head of Communications here could figure out why the hell we can’t hear anything out there—”
“Don’t you have someone to go operate on, Kenji?” Lieutenant Pavon spat.
“He’s got a point. If there are others who came here and took up the work, why isn’t the Web complete?” Eden’s captain asked. The nearest people shot her sideways looks, a mixture of patronization and curiosity in each set of eyes.
“Well,” Carl pushed his thick glasses up his nose and cleared his throat, “the seemingly obvious answer is because the builders all died.” He ran his hand through the three-dimensional image and flipped through his slides to find the most impressive representation of the entire Web. “This is a tremendous undertaking.” He waved his arm around the image. “Just to get this far may have taken many trillions of—if you’ll pardon the expression—man-hours. It’s logical to conclude that such a project was never meant to be finished by those who started it, and that those who found it knew that they wouldn’t see its conclusion either. It’s been held as a scientific truth that civilizations have a finite life span. Most likely their societies collapsed before they could finish—it’s even possible their allotment of time and attention to the project led to the collapse—but this is all just speculation. The only real proof we have is the unfinished Sphere we see here.”
“So, why work on it?” Straifer blurted out. “Why all the effort if you’re not going to get anything out of it?”
“The potential. The chance for power, however slim,” Nakamura responded. “If those machines are batteries meant to store up energy from the star, they could power Earth by themselves for centuries, millennia even.” Murmurs sprang up like leaks around the room. “Energy was a problem when we left—hell, it’s a problem for the convoy—it’s probably a dire concern now. It’s worth trying to complete the Web, even if the odds are against you, I think.”
“Knowledge,” Aesop’s captain piped in.
“Pardon?” Nakamura asked.
“If you figure you’ll never finish, wouldn’t you take up the construction project purely for the knowledge of how to do it? More so than on the hope you’ll get something more tangible out of it? Isn’t that why we’re going to do it?”
The mumbling ceased immediately.
“Do what?” Straifer asked.
“Attempt to complete the construction.”
Straifer’s mouth opened limply, and the words trickled out slowly. “Who said we were going to do anything of the sort?”
The other captain chuckled. “Surely no one here thinks we were sent just to look.”
“Would it be possible for us? To close the gap, I mean?” a quiet, recently elected botanist from Morgan put forth. This was her first meeting.
Carl shrugged. “Presuming we can understand the technology used, we could—in theory—continue the work. But I can’t say how much time it would take to close the gap. It’s gigantic. We’re talking three times the distance from the Sun to the Earth just in length. It’s going to be another century for us to get this information back to Earth, and for those back home . . . who knows how much time our society has left before it collapses—provided it’s still there when we get back?”
Straifer put his fingertips to his temples. Like Nakamura had pointed out when they first emerged from SD, why hadn’t they had these in-depth discussions long ago? They’d had so much time before. They knew from a very young age that they were the generation that would finally stop. They would see and do what their ancestors had only dreamed of.
But the only discussions they’d ever had about the future were operational: what steps they would take if they found an asteroid belt; what would happen if this was a new kind of star; when the observations team would send this craft or that craft; if the engineers would be needed; in what order the departments should be sent out; if the biologists would be physically sent in to be sure there was no contamination, or if scans would be sufficient.
The biologists had never found anything before—in the handful of times they’d surfaced from their SD in order to practice on this asteroid or that rocky planet—which made the Web’s discovery even more baffling. They hadn’t come across so much as a microbe in their journey from point A to point B.
These procedures had all been gone over dozens of times, but never had they discussed what they would do with the information gathered, besides deliver it to earthbound ears. No one imagined they would be able to apply any of the new things they learned.
How often did they think of the people who would come after them? This generation was the peak of the journey. Anyone grown on the way back was tasked with analyzing and deciphering the information gathered, and ultimately delivering the findings. But now that their offspring’s offspring would carry the most important message in human history to the leaders of their planet, there would be something to decide when the mission was over: What to do with this information?
Could they build?
Would they?
Straifer shook his head. They were getting ahead of themselves.
Carl waved his glasses like a white flag to get the room to focus again. “We’re getting off track, people. I said the seemingly obvious answer was that the builders had died. But the Web could be incomplete because they simply haven’t finished it yet.”
Yet.
Carl brought up a picture of the Seed. It was animated, revealing the subsonic pulses it emitted—presumably to keep the Web stable and rotating.
Straifer was finally able to put his finger on why the Seed made him grow cold—why it haunted him. It looked more organic than the other devices. They all shared the same musculature and joints and shiny shells, giving each one a look of insectoid-ness, but the Seed looked like a chrysalis. It was a machine, but he had trouble shrugging off the feeling that the device knew something. For real—not just in his dreams. Whenever he looked at it he received a distinct impression of awareness. Yet it did nothing but vibrate mechanically.
And send me dreams . . .
The image spun, revealing the inside curve of the Seed. It swelled from floor to ceiling as the camera zoomed in, coming to focus on a tiny speck a few miles from the Seed’s metallic hide.
The speck resolved into the ship. Barely recognizable as such, but for the shield at what was presumed to be its front, and the open bay doors directed at the side of the Seed.
Straifer breathed a sigh of relief—it was all out in the open now.
Carl cleared his throat, and finally said to the board what had been running nonstop through Straifer’s mind since their meeting, “We aren’t alone.”
Investigating the ship became priority number one. They attempted to contact its operators, hailing on every possible communications frequency and in every possible portion of the spectrum they were capable of using. Silence, just like from Earth.
The Nest, as they called it, never moved and the open bay never closed.
Seed. Web. Nest. All of the names were so simple, so terrestrial, and Straifer was starting to understand why the crew had latched on to them.
They were clear, concise descriptions of the unknown.
The Nest sat too close to the Seed for the probes to retrieve any useful information, as they continued to fail upon entering the dead zone around the giant device.
“Would it be dangerous for us to send a manned mission?” Straifer asked. He had Carl and Nakamura on I.C.C.’s line, each broadcasting from the privacy of their personal offices. “I mean, besides the obvious risks.”
“The probes never lost navigation,” Carl said. “A shuttle should be able to return, if that’s what you mean.”
“Have we gotten anything? Any indication of activity at all—biological or otherwise?” asked Nakamura.
“No,” Carl said. “I’m starting to think . . . no. No assuming.”
“Was that a yay or a nay? Should we put together an away team?” Straifer pulled the picture of himself and his wife out of the drawer. He’d almost forgotten it was there.
“I see no other way to proceed. We have a duty to investigate, no matter the danger. That’s a ‘yay.’”
“I want to be on the team,” Straifer blurted. He thumbed the photograph, stroking Sailuk’s cheek.
“For what purpose?” Carl couldn’t keep the suspicion out of his voice.
“As head of the governing board I think it’s of political and social importance that I be there. If this is first contact, I should witness it firsthand.” Yes, it’s only practical. This would be best for the mission. I’m only thinking of our mission. “Lieutenant Pavon should make it on the list as well.”
Carl cleared his throat. “With all due respect, sir, why? She’s been nothing but combative when it comes to hypotheses about the Web’s functionality. The lack of signals from Earth has put her in an ill mood.”
“But she’s the head of Communications. You don’t think her inclusion pertinent? Should we encounter an alien intelligence—”
“Wouldn’t that be our ambassador’s job? She’s supposed to interface with Earth, so isn’t she the logical choice for interfacing with . . .” He trailed off and flitted his fingers through the air. “Though, realistically, neither the ambassador, nor our Communications head is any better equipped to communicate with it—them, whatever—than the rest of us. And, quite frankly, the lieutenant’s got a bad attitude and I don’t think we want that on an away team.”
“What do you think, Dr. Nakamura?” Straifer asked, steepling his fingers on his desk. “You’ve been awfully quiet.”
“I don’t think my opinion matters much. As long as I’m in charge of picking the engineers for the team, I’ll leave the rest in your capable hands.”
“Heads shouldn’t be part of the team,” Carl interjected. “What if something happens? An accident? Or what if there are life-forms aboard and they’re hostile?”
“That’s what we have backups for. But you make a good point—we should include a PSD. A handful of guards should do the trick.”
“Sir, I still don’t think you should—”
“Unless the board deems me a scientific hindrance, Carl, I’m going. It’s important that I do.”
That evening, Sailuk greeted him with a surprise. “The birthing staff said yes!” With a little jump she threw her arms around his neck and kissed him. “They’ve put us on the list—we’re getting a baby.”
His heart fluttered inside his ribcage even as his guts churned. They were getting a baby—he was going to be a father. He and Sailuk would have a child that was theirs—just theirs. Something Mahler never had a hand in.
Suddenly, getting included in the away team didn’t look like such a good idea.
Carl was right, what if something happened to him? Would they deny Sailuk the child? Or would she be left to raise it alone? She’d retire a few years before the child reached adulthood. How would—?
“Well?” She fluttered her eyelashes at him. Excitement and anxiousness made her body vibrate against his. “Say something.”
Words eluded him. “That’s, that’s . . .” A long kiss was the best expression of how he felt. Enthusiasm, dread, longing, happiness, hopelessness—they all fought for attention in his brain and limbs. Fire raged through his nervous system. The kiss soothed him, reminded him that as long as Sailuk loved him everything would be okay. “That’s wonderful,” he finished.
“It’s been so long since I’ve handled a baby,” she said. “There’ll be diapers and late nights and crying—I hope I can still keep up.”
“Hey, you’ve got me. Together we’ve got it covered.”
The tightness seeped from her face. “You’re so sweet, Rege. John never . . .”
The tension that she’d let go of wormed its way into his body instead. He hated it when she mentioned him. Hated it. He tried to hide the disgust behind a false smile. “You might not have had any help with the boys, but I won’t hang you with all of the responsibility. It’s our child, and we’re partners.” Forget about him, he felt like saying. Don’t ever mention him again.
As he tried to twist his forced smile into a real one, a strange pulse hit him like a sonic blast. Though it raked through his body, he made no outward sign—did not fall forward or crouch or collapse. But he did look frantically for the source. “What was—?”
Sailuk furrowed her brow in concern. “What?”
Hadn’t she felt it? Was it just him? Or maybe he hadn’t felt it either—only sensed it.
Like she could ever forget him.
The words rang out clear in his mind, though he couldn’t tell if they came from inside or outside.
People don’t just forget. Beings don’t forget. Things don’t forget. Every scrap of matter has a memory.
Untangling himself from Sailuk’s arms, Straifer went to the window. Their cabin lay on Mira’s port side, and the angle of the fleet let the edge of the Web skim within view. All he could see now was the Seed.
Memory is tied to desire. If it can remember, it can want.
“And what do you want?” he whispered.
“Rege?”
“Yes?” He shook his head, clearing his thoughts. “Sorry, honey. Nothing. I have some news of my own. The board is putting together a manned mission to that ship outside the Seed. And I’m going.”
I have to.
The away team boarded the shuttle casually, maintaining animated chatter. Chatter in which Straifer did not take part. He’d dreamt of the Seed once more and the afterimages would not leave him.
The group consisted of two biologists, two engineers, two physicists, three security guards, a geologist, himself, and Lieutenant Pavon. Their bodies buzzed with expectation.
Time seemed to pass slowly on the way into the Web. Straifer repeatedly looked to his wrist, where his onyx watch normally sat, and rubbed the arm of his space suit as though the absence of the family trinket physically pained him. Slowly, gradually, the alien ship slipped into view.
A shout came over his suit’s comm channel. “Look, look!” A physicist pressed her masked face up against one of the shuttle’s porthole windows. “There’s a panel bent back on the Seed!”
The entire team pressed up to the side, each vying for a prime position. Straifer nudged his way to the front. A large sheet of metal, the size of a football field, looked as though its fastenings had been partially removed and the panel pried open. It barely blemished the vast face, and may have gone unnoticed for some time if the alien vessel’s bay doors hadn’t sat, splayed wide, in direct opposition.
The newly discovered ship looked even more like its namesake up close. Coppery in color, strange piping dangled from its base and swirled around its sides like woven twigs. What purpose such a tangle served, Straifer couldn’t begin to speculate. A black domed shield covered the top half of what was thought to be the ship’s fore, creating the illusion of a cupped divot, aiding in the nest-like impression.
Leaning forward, he strained his eyes, trying to see the base of the Seed while the others oohed and ahhed at the panel’s damage. The curve of the monolithic structure, subtle at a distance, was dramatic up close. The pockmarked exterior slipped distantly beneath them, like the delicate sway of an outstretched tongue, eager to gather the falling snowflake that was their craft. Likewise, the top bent far over their heads as a giant scorpion’s stinger would, poised to strike them from the void. For a moment he felt trapped between two colossal pincers, and involuntarily shrank back from the porthole in response.
“I’m having trouble . . . with . . . these stupid . . .” The sound of the shuttle driver gnashing his teeth did not help to ease Straifer’s nerves. “Something keeps tripping my controls. Not the steering—it’s the shuttle-to-convoy comms. And the—damn it. The switches keep switching into the off position. Like someone’s in here physically flipping them.”
“Maybe that’s what happened to the probes,” Pavon said. “Maybe they were manually switched off.”
“By what?” asked Straifer.
No one answered.
“Should we abort?” the pilot asked.
Everyone looked to Straifer. “You’re sure you’re having no navigational difficulties?”
“None at this time.”
“Then we continue.”
The operator swung the shuttle around to the rear of the Nest, positioning their doors opposite its bay. The away team lost view of the Seed.
This is it, Straifer thought. If human beings were ever in a prime position to find life, it was now. What would be inside?
And yet . . .
A primal urge—for a means of self-defense—snuck up his spine; what if they did find life and it was hostile? Poisonous, infectious—dangerous in some unforeseeable way?
His breathing stuttered.
I shouldn’t be here/I need to be here.
Their bay doors opened slowly, and two members of the away team unfurled the umbilical used for emergency docking with Hippocrates’ many ports. It twisted open, like the webbed tentacles of a Dumbo Octopus, and the magnetic ring on its neck caught against the alien vessel’s deck and an inner wall. They made sure it was stuck fast, tethering the two crafts together, before drifting out, one by one, into the zero-g of the Nest.
If the outside of the ship resembled a collection of loose twine and haphazardly dangling sticks, then the inside looked like a hollowed-out, metallic tree trunk.
Twelve lights clicked on. Each large, round beam swung this way and that like searchlights scanning for an escaped convict.
Straifer braced himself, ready to jump if his beam illuminated an alien face.
But the bay appeared empty.
“Everything looks . . . fried,” one of the engineers concluded. “It’s burnt out.”
“Maybe an electrical fire,” his counterpart observed, floating over to what appeared to be a workstation in the holding bay. “All of these panels look like they flared.”
“Scanners are working—readings seem on par. We definitely don’t have company,” Sophia, a physicist, stated solemnly.
“That has yet to be seen,” said Tendai, a biologist. In her left hand she carried a sampling kit, and moved to the nearest panel for testing.
“Oh, come on, you’re not even going to find a fungus in here.”
“We’ve got higher chances here than anywhere else,” Straifer mumbled, his eyes following his beam to the ceiling. “You see these dark marks?”
Eleven sets of eyes fluttered like moths to his flame. Eleven beams followed. “Looks like . . . plasma burns?”
“They run along the floor too.” The beams shifted.
“Could the ship have been electrocuted?”
Sophia scoffed. “By what?”
Straifer turned, expecting to see the massive illuminated skin of the Seed, but the white shuttle blocked his view. “I don’t like that thing,” he breathed, barely audible to his own ears.
“Maybe it was the Seed,” the elder engineer, Frank, said casually, coming to the same conclusion. “They tried to crack ’er open to figure out what makes it tick and disrupted something. Zapped ’em when they cut in. We’re going to need to do better than that if we try and reconstruct these babies.” He scratched the bottom of his helmet, as if his chin could feel it. “We should leave the Seed for last—get all the info on the smaller ones first. We should suggest a special team to Nakamura, one purely focused on the Seed. Demands respect, doesn’t it?” His light flicked back to the burnt marks on the ceiling.
“Demands something, that’s for sure,” Straifer said, as though in reverence. His ears perked, waiting. I’m here now. If you have something to say, say it.
“Oh, come on Cap. It’s not asking for your firstborn. Whoever built it was well beyond us—all I mean is that deserves some thought.”
“It already gets my firstborn,” he replied darkly. “And Captain Mahler’s firstborn, and their firstborns.” And Sailuk, and me.
“You sound a bit dire there, Captain. You feeling all right?” Tendai asked.
In truth he wasn’t. He was beginning to sweat and couldn’t wipe his brow or his mouth because of his helmet. There was something wrong with this Web. It was dangerously seductive.
“It was just an accident,” Frank put a hand on his shoulder, jolting him from his thoughts. “These people—aliens, ET, what-have-you—they didn’t think before they messed with things. You saw how they just tore at it. We’re different; we know to be careful.”
“But can’t you feel it?” He turned, searching Frank’s eyes. “There’s more out there than batteries. Why start building this thing around a distant star, why not your own star? Why start something you have to rely on others to finish? Sure, the ones who came after might have undertaken it to learn, but the first ones knew already. This technology was theirs, wasn’t it? The ones who started it knew they couldn’t finish it. And still . . . Still they built. For what?”
The wandering flashlight beams went lax. The team collectively eyed him.
“It looms.” His voice was gravelly, his breath wheezy. “Out there, waiting to be pampered with improvements. It presides. It’s out here for a reason. Its reason.” He floated back and forth, pacing, tracing a jagged, burnt line on the deck. “It’s here to do something. I don’t know, I don’t know . . .” He roughly rubbed the side of his helmet, as if it cleared his mind. “Different pieces, different people . . .” He turned to them. “They knew . . .” He waved his hands, gesticulating chaotically, vocal pitch rising. “They knew, but we don’t. It wants us to work on it. It wants us to prod and pick at it, wants wide-eyed, ignorant passersby to learn its shallow little secrets. It needs Builders. It . . .”
He paused, then blurted, “It’s claimed civilizations, and you think it doesn’t want my child too?” His breaths came swift and shallow, and he knew that in the weak light his drenched, pale face must seem ghostly.
Frank approached him slowly, one arm cautiously outstretched. “You’re working yourself up over nothin’, Captain.”
“Why can’t you see it?” Straifer whimpered. He knew he was alone in his underdeveloped revelation. Something was wrong, but he didn’t know how to communicate it. His bones felt weak, delicate. His whole body slumped.
I’m here, his mind screamed, full of tension though his body was slack. Speak. Tell me what you want! Why aren’t you finished?
What do you want from us?
And suddenly he could feel the pulses emanating from the Seed—just as he had in the cabin. Not quite a thumping and not quite a flowing—each pulse moved through him like a wave.
Like . . . A heartbeat.
He threw his arms up over his head, startled, mortified. “It’s alive! Alive, alive, alive.” He rambled on and on while his body shifted between states of protective curves and wild flailing, twirling and twisting in zero-g. He gasped, again and again. A yellow light flashed within his suit, indicating he’d gone into hyperventilation.
The others backed away, giving the strange display as much space as they could.
“Captain, I want you to go lie down in the shuttle while we continue,” said Frank after moments of stunned silence had passed. “A quick rest and you’ll be good to go again. Go lie down.” Straifer watched Frank approach through a crook in his arm, and he slowly unscrunched himself from the defensive ball he was in, letting his limbs float in a resigned manner.
He was tired. So tired. Terror had overloaded all of his senses, and he saw dark spots before his eyes. In a brief moment of self-control, he held his breath, trying to prevent a blackout.
Frank turned him around and gave Straifer a gentle push in the direction of the shuttle.
“We should get out of here, return to Earth,” Straifer muttered as he allowed his body to be propelled. If anyone heard him, though, no one said anything—for which he was grateful. Once inside he strapped himself down, exhaustion overtook him, and he drifted into an empty, Seedless sleep.
After completing their investigation, the team dropped Straifer off on Hippocrates before redocking with Holwarda. Pavon stayed with him.
“I’m fine,” he insisted. “Just anxious—no big deal.”
“Anxious? You passed out in the shuttle,” Pavon said. “After a pretty major freak-out.”
“Your symptoms do seem to point to an anxiety attack,” said the doctor, giving Pavon a pointed look. Apparently she didn’t appreciate the lieutenant’s phrasing. “Have you experienced such symptoms before?”
Straifer eyed her suspiciously. He knew the path down which such questions could lead. If he had anxiety attacks and they affected his ability to perform . . .
“You won’t discontinue me,” he snapped. “Where’s Sailuk? Where’s my wife?”
“Calm down, Captain.” It was an order from Pavon, not a soothing suggestion. “I’m sure she’s at her post.”
The sterile look and smell of the room was getting to him. It reminded him of the lab in which they built the clone DNA. The lab where he’d announced the changes in crew—where he’d told the technicians they would no longer be building a thousand of their convoy brothers and sisters.
Those lives were lost, unlived. Though, perhaps he’d saved them from the Seed, from whatever secrets it held, from whatever kind of monstrosity it really was.
Perhaps that was why Mahler had killed himself. Perhaps he knew—maybe he felt the pulses as well. He saved himself, but he couldn’t save the rest of us.
Guilt overwhelmed him. “I.C.C., Get me Sailuk.”
The AI obliged, summoning her to the fifth floor of the ship. When she entered, Margarita and the doctor were doing all they could to keep him in the room.
“I’m here, I’m here,” she cooed, and he sat back down on the examination table.
“I’m sorry, Sailuk, I’m so sorry.” He rambled on, spilling his guilt like a bucket of rancid waste.
But, she would not accept his babbling apology. “You did nothing wrong.”
“I’ve always wanted you. And I could only have you if he was dead. Dead.”
Sailuk patted his forehead and asked the administering doctor to give him an injection of sleep-aids. “Rest and I’ll take you home.”
“Now that I have you, I have to protect you. Protect and defend you like I should have defended all those people, all those discontinued people . . .” His mumbling trailed off as drowsiness overtook his senses. Everything went numb, and all he could feel was the pulsing.
The last thing she said to him was “Quiet, love.” before she whirled to confront Pavon.
“What the hell happened out there?”
He’d been ordered by the board to take a week off.
“Don’t do this,” he pleaded with them. “Listen to me. Something’s wrong. We have to scrap the mission—reevaluate our position at least, before moving forward. We can’t cut into those devices. We need to leave them alone.”
“We’ve learned all we can through looking,” said Nakamura. “It’s time for real study—we need samples. We need to open one up and inspect the wiring. And probe for writing. I’m sorry, Captain, but your suggestion isn’t practical. We only have twenty years here before we have to turn around and head back to Earth—that’s a mission fact. We can’t afford to sit back and twiddle our thumbs while the seconds tick away.”
So it had already been decided without him—they were going to the Web to harvest part of a device. They’d shut him out, cut him off. Told him—patronizingly—to take a breather.
A decision made didn’t mean an action taken, though. He couldn’t let it happen. They were tangling with elements they couldn’t comprehend. Whatever the Web was, it was too alien for the likes of humanity.
The manned engineering mission was scheduled for tomorrow, and he knew it was his duty to stop it.
Their shuttle would disembark from Mira, which made his job easier. Stoically, he entered the bay two hours before the mission, and ordered the area cleared.
“But, sir, we have a schedule to maintain,” protested the man in charge of bay operations.
“I understand, but I have a duty to perform which requires you to put that precious schedule on hold. I want no persons or ships to enter this bay until it is time for the away mission. Do I make myself clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
The bay quickly emptied, and he was left alone. Alone, save I.C.C.
“Captain?” asked the AI. “Your agenda for today does not include any work in the shuttle bay.”
He approached the engineering crew’s assigned transport. Without answering I.C.C., he threw back a maintenance hatch and glared at the shuttle’s insides.
“Captain, I must ask what you intend.”
“None of your business, I.C.C.”
“Your behavior has fallen outside the bell curve of typical, with a standard deviation of thirty-eight point seven. So, sir, it is my business.”
Straifer glanced around the room, taking in each camera I.C.C. wielded. “I have to do this. It would make Reggie the First proud. I’m saving his mission, saving his reputation.” He located a basic tool box—all bays had them on hand—and began his work.
He loosened a fastening there. Removed a bolt here. Stripped one wire, then another.
“You appear to be tampering with the functionality of a shuttle. I fail to understand how this behavior is mission appropriate.”
“I love the mission,” Straifer spat, elbow-deep in wires and circuits. “I love it so much I have to stop it. Don’t you see? It’s the only way. If the mission is to succeed we need to survive, and that thing out there will destroy us. It knows, I.C.C.—knows how to use us. I won’t let it. It can’t have the convoy. We must return to Earth.”
The pulsing. The pulsing . . .
“Your tampering may cause a fatal malfunction. My calculations indicate a high probability of crew member death if this shuttle is launched in its present condition.”
“And then they’ll see. Then they’ll listen.”
“Captain Straifer?”
The voice came from directly behind him. He spun on his toes. Nakamura. Behind her, at a distance, stood two security guards. “Get out of here,” he ordered. “I said no one was to enter the bay.”
“I.C.C. insisted,” she explained.
He looked up again and clawed at the air, as though he meant to rip a camera from its nesting. “Traitor. You’re supposed to support the mission, do whatever you can to protect it. But you’re with it, aren’t you? The Seed. Damn electronic puppet! You’re letting it use you.”
“You are not well,” Nakamura said smoothly. “I.C.C., I need emergency personnel to the bay at once. The Captain needs transportation to Hippocrates.”
“Acknowledged, a team is already on its way. I took the liberty of alerting them when I called you.”
“No!” Straifer screamed. “Don’t you see? I’m trying to save you all. You have to listen. We need to go back. Leave!”
“Save us?” Nakamura leaned forward, bringing them nearly nose to nose. “You were going to kill us. I’m going on this mission, Captain. Did you want to kill me?”
“But they can at least grow you again. All the others—all the others are gone.” His legs shook, gave way beneath him. He sank to the floor and fanned out like a pool of honey.
“We’re talking clones, not resurrection. You’re not making any sense.”
The pulsing. Nothing but pulsing. He clutched at his head. “Can’t you hear it? Can’t you feel it?”
She knelt down next to him. “Help is on its way. Everything will be all right.”
He grabbed at the front of her uniform, yanked her close. The officers started forward, but Nakamura waved them back. “No, it won’t,” Straifer said. “If we don’t let go of the Web now, things will never be all right again. We’re caught in the damn thing, like flies!” Even as he shouted, his eyes rolled back and his entire body went limp.
Emergency medical personnel entered moments later and rushed him to the medical ship. Nakamura stayed by his side. She held his hand on the emergency shuttle, and onto Hippocrates. Not until the doctor ordered her to leave the room did she let go.
I.C.C. informed Sailuk of her husband’s condition. She was in the middle of a consultation, and rushed from the room without a word to her patient.
The lifts on the med ship were the most efficient in the fleet. They had to be. But the one she took to the emergency level seemed to lag. It was as though it didn’t want her to get there, as though it knew what she would find.
Nakamura was there when the elevator doors finally opened. “Sailuk, wait.”
She tried to push past her. “Not now, my husband—”
“I know. You can’t go in right now.”
“I have to,” she said smoothly.
“No. I’ve been instructed to keep you here.”
Her face burned with sudden rage. “I am a medical professional, what right do you—”
The door to a nearby room opened, drawing Sailuk’s attention. A doctor stepped out. She’d spoken to him before, but now his name eluded her. “I’m sorry, Sailuk,” he said. “He’s gone. There was nothing . . . I think I know what happened—a ruptured aneurism, perhaps a tumor—but we’ll need to perform an autopsy to verify the cause of death.”
All of the feeling drained out of Sailuk’s body. Her knees gave way, and she crumpled to the floor. Nakamura caught her arms at the last moment, preventing her head from smacking against the tile.
“I don’t believe you,” Sailuk mumbled.
“You may see him, if you’d like,” the doctor said solemnly.
Nakamura helped her up, and together they entered the room, tiptoeing, as though afraid to wake Reginald.
Sailuk stared at him for a long moment, her breaths coming in thin bursts. The rims of her eyes felt hot, and the tears that eventually fell did nothing to cool them.
“We were going to have a baby,” she whispered to Nakamura. She tried to go on, to ask a question, but the words couldn’t find a hold in her throat. Instead she leaned into Nakamura, letting the other woman envelop her in a somber embrace.
Not long after, rumors about Straifer’s death began to circulate. Many thought something sinister had possessed the Captain. Maybe there really were things to be feared in the vast hold of the giant Web.
But none of the board members were convinced.
Straifer had been right in at least one aspect; the task of deciphering the Web claimed the girl that would have been his child; the Seed and its mysteries consumed her life, and the lives of her children, and their children, and would continue to claim the devoted attention of brothers and sisters aboard the convoy for a multitude of generations.