Even during his air force combat flights he’d never felt so scared as that whimpering child striking out for the side of the pool. Nothing had ever come close to re-creating that feeling. Until now. Now that same clammy sickness was gripping him just like it had his nine-year-old self as the reality sank in of how far away from anything they were. He started his ancient deep-breathing exercise routine, trying to calm his body before the shakes started.
“Modules disengaging,” Anna announced.
“Right, thank you,” Wilson replied a little too abruptly. His virtual hand stopped flicking through the camera sequence, and he concentrated hard on the images of the sensor modules. Something to do, something to shift his mind off the nothingness of outside. He felt his heart rate slow as he forced his breathing to a regular rhythm, though there was nothing he could do about the cold perspiration on his forehead. A text-only message popped up into his virtual vision, it was from Anna and read: ARE YOU ALL RIGHT?
FINE, he sent back. He didn’t look in her direction. Everyone else on the bridge seemed to be absorbed by their work, unaffected by what lay outside. He was the only one interstellar space was intimidating. That piqued him somewhat—enough to make him focus properly on his job.
The screen on his console showed him the forward section of the Second Chance. Doors on eight cylindrical bays had opened up, spaced equidistantly just behind the bow’s large sensor cluster. Modules like big metallized insects sprouting golden antennae were drifting out, glittering in the lights around the rim of each bay. Ion thrusters flared blue on the base of each one, pushing them away from the starship.
They traveled in an expanding circle, linked by laser and microwave, taking hours to reach their stand-off station. When they were fifty thousand kilometers out, their ion thrusters burned again, bringing them to a halt. As one, their dark protective segments peeled open, exposing delicate sensor instruments to the interstellar medium. Disks, blocks, booms, and lenses uncoiled on the end of electromuscle tentacles and began scanning space around Dyson Alpha. The big arrays back on the Second Chance correlated the results, combining them into a single image with extraordinarily high resolution in every spectrum.
For everyone waiting eagerly on board, the result was a big disappointment. Virtually no new information about the barrier was revealed. Its diameter was confirmed at twenty-nine point seven AUs. There was a moment of prayerlike silence on the bridge as that fact was absorbed. The surface was emitting in a very low infrared wavelength. Local particle density was slightly lower than average, indicating that solar wind emission from Dyson A and B was blocked. Nothing else could be detected.
After five days of cautious observation for any sign of hostile events, or any other energy emission that might point to artificially generated activity, Wilson had to agree with his science team that there was no obvious danger at this distance. He ordered the sensor expansion modules back to the starship, and they flew fifteen light-years closer.
When they emerged into real space again, they repeated the examination. From five light-years, the images that the expanded baseline modules provided were even more exact. But nothing had changed. The interstellar particle winds blowing off nearby stars were detectable as they gusted around the barrier, creating giant swirls and eddies that sighed in the electromagnetic spectrum like faint whale song.
Wilson moved them forward in one-light-year increments. Each time the eight modules would fly out and peer ahead. Each time they would provide a more detailed survey of the local radiation and particle environment. Of the barrier itself, they revealed nothing.
“Take us to one light-month out,” Wilson told Tu Lee.
“Aye, sir.”
“Tunde, that’ll take us within high-definition range of the hysradar,” Wilson said. “Do we scan it?”
The astrophysicist gave an expansive shrug from behind his bridge console. “It’ll tell us a lot about the nature of the barrier, but then we’ll probably reveal ourselves. If there is an active force controlling it, I can’t imagine they won’t be able to detect it.”
Oscar looked at the forward portals that showed the blue walls of the wormhole closing over real space. “They have to know already. We’d be able to pick up the quantum signature of a wormhole from this distance.”
“The builders must have realized that people would come and investigate at some point,” Anna said. “You can’t do something like this and expect it to go unnoticed.”
“We’ll run passive scans first,” Wilson said. “If there’s no response, we can use the hysradar.”
Just under four hours later, the Second Chance emerged from hyperspace. Wilson didn’t have to order the expanded baseline modules out. The ship’s main telescope revealed the full expanse of the disk. In infrared it was like the baleful eye of some dreaming dragon.
“Very low neutrino density out here, and virtually nothing coming from Dyson Alpha’s direction,” Bruno Seymore said. “I’d say the barrier is impermeable to them. We should be picking up a whole deluge from the star at this distance.”
“What about particle density?” Wilson asked.
“Interstellar wash, that’s all. No particle wind from the star itself. The barrier must be converting all the energy hitting its internal surface to infrared. Output corresponds to that, assuming the star remains the same inside.”
“Thank you,” Wilson said. He was staring at the red circle, all sense of isolation long gone. “Is it solid?”
“No, sir,” Tunde Sutton said. “We’re picking up the star’s gravity field. It’s weak but detectable. If that thing was solid, it would mass at least the same as an average star. Probably a lot more.”
“So it blocks neutrinos, elementary particles, and most of the electromagnetic spectrum, but not gravity. Are any of our force fields like that?”
“Similar,” Tunde said. “I’m sure we can build a generator that duplicates those properties. It wouldn’t be easy.”
“And what would it take to power one this size?”
Tunde almost flinched. Bruno and Russell grinned at his discomfort.
“A good percentage of the star’s fusion energy.”
“Can you tell if that’s missing?”
“Not really. We’d need a much better measurement of the naked star to compare with. We’ve never had that.”
“Okay. If you can pick up the star’s gravity field, can you tell if there are any planets orbiting inside?”
“Not from out here, we need to get closer for that.”
“Anna, is there any sign of activity outside the barrier, anything at all?”
“No, sir, nothing. No microwave communications, no laser, no radar emission. No plasma trails, not even a chemical rocket plume as far as we can see, though we’re stretching resolution on that one. No wormhole signatures either. As far as our sensors are concerned, we’re alone out here.”
Wilson gave Oscar a glance.
“It’s beginning to look like a relic,” the exec said. He sounded disappointed.
“All right. Give it a hysradar sweep. And I want a very careful watch for any response. Hyperdrive, be ready to take us straight out of here.”
“Yes, sir.”
The bridge was silent for a couple of minutes as Anna and Tu Lee worked in tandem, sending out hyperaccelerated gravity waves from the wormhole generator.
“Unusual,” Tunde Sutton said eventually. “It simply reflected the pulses back at us, like a mirror. That indicates a very complex quantum structure. But then we knew it was never going to be anything simple.”
“Did we ring any bells?” Wilson asked.
Anne and the astrophysics team shook their heads. “Still no sign of activity. But we are limited with sensors from this range. Anything in the electromagnetic spectrum is going to take a month to show up.”
“I’m more concerned about hyperspace and quantum field activity.”
“Nothing so far.”
“Very well. Oscar?”
“
We’ve come a long way,” Oscar said. “And so far we’ve seen nothing to make us turn back.”
“I agree. Prepare the ship for a hostile encounter scenario. Hyperspace, take us in to one million kilometers above the barrier’s equator.”
“Aye, sir.”
The wormhole projected into real space with a burst of Cherenkov radiation, its toroidal nimbus twinkling with azure scintillations. It dissipated as quickly as it had begun, leaving the Second Chance floating a million kilometers above the blank surface of the barrier. On such a scale there was no visible curvature to the shell around the star. It appeared as a simple flat plane extending to infinity in every direction, as if the starship had reached the bottom of the universe.
“We couldn’t have gone through,” Tu Lee reported as soon as they were established in real space.
“What do you mean?” Wilson asked.
“The barrier is a block to wormholes as well. There was a lot of exotic energy echo as we approached. Whatever the barrier is, it extends through the quantum fields. The wormhole wouldn’t be able to circumvent it.”
“So there really is no way in,” Wilson mused.
“Or out,” Oscar said.
Wilson turned to the astrophysicists. “So how can the star’s gravity field get through?”
“We’ll let you know,” Tunde said. He didn’t sound happy.
“Hysradar sweep gives a sheer surface,” Anne said. “Definitely no neutrino penetration. I’ve never seen the detectors registering this low before.”
“How thick is it?”
“That dimension really only applies to solid matter,” Tunde said. “This is an artificial rift in the quantum fields which manifests itself in spacetime; technically, it has no physical depth. It’s two-dimensional.”
“Fine.” Wilson couldn’t take his attention off the standard radar return. “Any sign of spacecraft activity?”
“Nothing,” Anna said; she sounded slightly peeved at having to churn out constant reassurance. “No rocket exhausts. No wormhole signatures. There’s nobody else here.”
“I’d qualify that,” Tunde said. “This goddamn thing is thirty AUs across. That’s almost impossible for the human mind to grasp. We’re not even seeing a fraction of a percent from here. There could be a battle fleet of ships the size of a moon gathered five AUs away and we’d never know.”
“Let’s not get carried away,” Wilson said. “This is what we’re here for, people, a full survey and analysis. So … Pilot, hold us steady at this stand-off distance. Defense, keep our shields up full until further notice. Hyperdrive, keep us ready for an immediate exit. Astrophysics, you’re on. I want a comprehensive sensor sweep from this distance, probe it with everything we’ve got. We are not getting any closer for now. If you can confirm there are no active components which threaten us, I’ll authorize a remote satellite examination of the barrier’s structure. Until then we play it safe.” He leaned back in the chair, and watched as the data started to build up on his screen and within his virtual vision. The stream of results was unending, and growing by the hour as new instruments were unsheathed and applied. Only a fraction of the information made any sense to him. It was slightly humbling. He’d always thought himself quite up-to-date on physics.
Tunde Sutton and the rest of the science crew tore into the raw data with unnerving enthusiasm. Their attitude was childlike in its wonder. Wilson was very careful not to intrude, or censure Tunde for the way he ran his department. But from what he could see they were acting more like first-life science geeks than the wise, considered professors they’d been when selected. They quarreled and laughed among themselves, completely uncaring for social restraint. Suddenly, after all these months, they were now the elite, aloof from the rest of the crew. It showed.
Wilson overstayed his duty period by two hours, then turned the bridge over to Oscar. An hour later, Anna found him in the forward observation gallery. It was a long dark compartment on the wheel’s middle deck, with subdued blue floor lighting. She paused for a long moment after she came through the door, letting her eyes acclimatize to the darkness. The gallery had three tall windows of optically perfect glass facing forward. The silhouettes of several people were just visible—the barrier was a popular vista. She walked over to Wilson. “Hi,” she whispered.
“Hi.” His hand found hers in the gloom, fingers fumbling. They stood together, content with their closeness. Anna could see the main cylinder above them, a somber gray bulk illuminated by the small nav lights dotting its surface. It was rotating slowly, turning various sensor clumps into view one after the other.
“I’m not sure if I can see it,” Wilson murmured quietly. “My inserts give me a perfect image in infrared. But when I cancel that, I think I can see it. If it’s there, it’s like a flat cloud of the darkest red ever. Maybe I’m just imagining it because I know that’s what it should look like. And it looks as if it’s just in front of my nose.”
“On this scale, it is,” she whispered back. “We’re not even a germ to a basketball.”
“Can you see it?”
“I don’t know.” Stupid though the action was, she leaned forward slightly, squinting. Her inserts were off now, and there might well have been some kind of ultradark vermilion haze out there in front of the nose, the kind of luminosity you got from a single candle lighting a cathedral. “It’s like a ghostlight.”
“Humm. I always thought I had quite good eyes. I’ll have to get them resequenced next time I go into rejuve.” He waved his hand in front of his face to see if that made any difference, if he could see the outline of his fingers against the obscure emission. There was too much secondary lighting in the observation gallery to be certain. “Whether I can see it or not, I can certainly feel it. The damn thing’s spooky, like something lurking just outside your thoughts.”
She curled her arm around his. “Come on, it’s been a long day. Time you got some rest.”
He grinned. His teeth were just visible in the gloaming. “I’m too tired and strung out to argue.” He allowed himself to be led toward the door.
“Strung out? You?”
“Yeah. We spent a year getting this ship built. I spent three hundred years waiting for something this important to happen to me again. I wanted something there when we came out of hyperdrive, something positive that I could see and understand. When we set down on Mars, there was all this alien geology surrounding me. It was strange, and even beautiful after a fashion, and nobody really knew anything about it. But you could break open a rock with a hammer, and see the minerals and strata inside. We had a knowledge base that could take that information and pin down what kind of rock it was, what event produced it. It was all in my head, information I could apply.”
They were alone in the corridor, so she stood on her toes and kissed him. “You poor old thing.”
Wilson smiled, sheepish now. “Yeah well, I guess I’m just intimidated, that’s all. The size of this fucker is mind-warping. I really shouldn’t let it get to me.”
“I know, whacking this with a hammer isn’t going to help.”
“No.” He kissed her back. “I bet it would make me feel a hell of a lot better, though.”
Five days later, Wilson allowed the Second Chance to move up to fifty thousand kilometers above the barrier. They used the plasma rockets, accelerating in at a fiftieth of a gee, then stopped and flipped over to decelerate. The physicists were very keen to see what would happen when the exhaust sprayed against the surface. The simple answer was nothing. Satellites hovering centimeters above the barrier observed the residue of gas and energized particles strike the surface and rebound. There was no heat or momentum transfer. No effect. Gigabytes flowed back up the microwave links between satellites and starship, expanding the already vast database on the barrier. A huge quantity of sensor log files were stored in the RI array, almost all of them containing negative information. Every member of the science crew could tell Wilson what it wasn’t; they could explain its properties at gr
eat length. What nobody could tell him was how it was generated, nor from where. And they certainly didn’t know why it existed.
But then, he told Anna charitably one night, they had only been there for five days. He shouldn’t expect miracles.
The starship hung above the stubborn barrier for another eight days, picking at it with various beams of radiation, like a small child with an intriguing scab, eager to see what lay beneath. Their wormhole generator distorted spacetime in many convoluted perturbations, the wave function of each one bouncing off the near-invisible surface without any significant resonance pattern. During that time, their only major discovery was the planets inside the barrier. Tunde confirmed that gravitational readings showed two gas giants and three small solid planets were orbiting the star, with indications of several large asteroids. It livened up the daily department heads meeting when he told them that one of the solid worlds was within the life band, the distance from the star that would allow carbon-based life to evolve should the planetary conditions be favorable, such as the availability of water and a decent atmospheric pressure.
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