«Oh, Jesus,» Marcus whispered. Elation mingled with fear, producing a deviant adrenalin high. He smiled thinly. «How about that?»
«This was one option I didn't consider,» Victoria said weakly.
Antonio looked round the bridge, a frown cheapening his handsome face. The crew seemed dazed, while Victoria was grinning with delight. «Is it some kind of radio astronomy station?» he asked.
«Yes,» Marcus said. «But not one of ours. We don't build like that. It's xenoc.»
Lady Mac locked attitude a kilometre above the xenoc structure. It was a position which made the disc appear uncomfortably malevolent. The smallest particle beyond the fuselage must have massed over a million tonnes; and all of them were moving, a slow, random three-dimensional cruise of lethal inertia. Amber sunlight stained those near the disc's surface a baleful ginger, while deeper in there were only phantom silhouettes drifting over total blackness, flowing in and out of visibility. No stars were evident through the dark, tightly packed nebula.
«That's not a station,» Roman declared. «It's a shipwreck.»
Now that Lady Mac 's visual-spectrum sensors were providing them with excellent images of the xenoc structure, Marcus had to agree. The upper and lower surfaces of the wedge were some kind of silver-white material, a fuselage shell which was fraying away at the edges. Both of the side surfaces were dull brown, obviously interior bulkhead walls, with the black geometrical outline of decking printed across them. The whole structure was a cross-section torn out of a much larger craft. Marcus tried to fill in the missing bulk in his mind; it must have been vast, a streamlined delta fuselage like a hypersonic aircraft. Which didn't make a lot of sense for a starship. Rather, he corrected himself, for a starship built with current human technology. He wondered what it would be like to fly through interstellar space the way a plane flew through an atmosphere, swooping round stars at a hundred times the speed of light. Quite something.
«This doesn't make a lot of sense,» Katherine said. «If they were visiting the telescope dish when they had the accident, why did they bother to anchor themselves to the asteroid? Surely they'd just take refuge in the operations centre.»
«Only if there is one,» Schutz said. «Most of our deep space science facilities are automated, and by the look of it their technology is considerably more advanced.»
«If they are so advanced, why would they build a radio telescope on this scale anyway?» Victoria asked. «It's very impractical. Humans have been using linked baseline arrays for centuries. Five small dishes orbiting a million kilometres apart would provide a reception which is orders of magnitude greater than this. And why build it here? Firstly, the particles are hazardous, certainly to something that size. You can see it's been pocked by small impacts, and that horn looks broken to me. Secondly, the disc itself blocks half of the universe from observation. No, if you're going to do major radio astronomy, you don't do it from a star system like this one.»
«Perhaps they were only here to build the dish,» Wai said. «They intended it to be a remote research station in this part of the galaxy. Once they had it up and running, they'd boost it into a high-inclination orbit. They had their accident before the project was finished.»
«That still doesn't explain why they chose this system. Any other star would be better than this one.»
«I think Wai's right about them being long-range visitors,» Marcus said. «If a xenoc race like that existed close to the Confederation we would have found them by now. Or they would have contacted us.»
«The Kiint,» Karl said quickly.
«Possibly,» Marcus conceded. The Kiint were an enigmatic xenoc race, with a technology far in advance of anything the Confederation had mastered. However, they were reclusive, and cryptic to the point of obscurity. They also claimed to have abandoned starflight a long time ago. «If it is one of their ships, then it's very old.»
«And it's still functional,» Roman said eagerly. «Hell, think of the technology inside. We'll wind up a lot richer than the gold could ever make us.» He grinned over at Antonio, whose humour had blackened considerably.
«So what were the Kiint doing building a radio telescope here?» Victoria asked.
«Who the hell cares?» Karl said. «I volunteer to go over, Captain.»
Marcus almost didn't hear him. He'd accessed the Lady Mac 's sensor suite again, sweeping the focus over the tip of the dish's tower, then the sheer cliff which the wreckage was attached to. Intuition was making a lot of junctions in his head. «I don't think it is a radio telescope,» he said. «I think it's a distress beacon.»
«It's four kilometres across!» Katherine said.
«If they came from the other side of the galaxy, it would need to be. We can't even see the galactic core from here there's so much gas and dust in the way. You'd need something this big to punch a message through.»
«That's valid,» Victoria said. «You believe they were signalling their homeworld for help?»
«Yes. Assume their world is a long way off, three or four thousand light-years away if not more. They're flying a research or survey mission in this area and they have an accident. Three-quarters of their ship is lost, including the drive section. Their technology isn't good enough to build the survivors a working stardrive out of what's left, but they can enlarge an existing crater on the disc particle. So they do that; they build the dish and a transmitter powerful enough to give God an alarm call, point it at their homeworld, and scream for help. The ship can sustain them until the rescue team arrives. Even our own zero-tau technology is up to that.»
«Gets my vote,» Wai said, giving Marcus a wink.
«No way,» said Katherine. «If they were in trouble they'd use a supralight communicator to call for help. Look at that ship, we're centuries away from building anything like it.»
«Edenist voidhawks are pretty sophisticated,» Marcus countered. «We just scale things differently. These xenocs might have a more advanced technology, but physics is still the same the universe over. Our understanding of quantum relativity is good enough to build faster than light starships, yet after four hundred and fifty years of theoretical research we still haven't come up with a method of supralight communication. It doesn't exist.»
«If they didn't return on time, then surely their homeworld would send out a search and recovery craft,» Schutz said.
«They'd have to know the original ship's course exactly,» Wai said. «And if a search ship did manage to locate them, why did they build the dish?»
Marcus didn't say anything. He knew he was right. The others would accept his scenario eventually, they always did.
«All right, let's stop arguing about what happened to them, and why they built the dish,» Karl said. «When do we go over there, Captain?»
«Have you forgotten the gold?» Antonio asked. «That is why we came to this disc system. We should resume our search for it. This piece of wreckage can wait.»
«Don't be crazy. This is worth a hundred times as much as any gold.»
«I fail to see how. An ancient, derelict starship with a few heating circuits operational. Come along. I've been reasonable indulging you, but we must return to the original mission.»
Marcus regarded the man cautiously, a real bad feeling starting to develop. Anyone with the slightest knowledge of finance and the markets would know the value of salvaging a xenoc starship. And Antonio had been born rich. «Victoria,» he said, not shifting his gaze, «is the data from the magnetic array satellites still coming through?»
«Yes.» She touched Antonio's arm. «The Captain is right. We can continue to monitor the satellite results from here, and investigate the xenoc ship simultaneously.»
«Double your money time,» Katherine said with apparent innocence.
Antonio's face hardened. «Very well,» he said curtly. «If that's your expert opinion, Victoria, my dear. Carry on by all means, Captain.»
In its inert state the SII spacesuit was a broad sensor collar with a protruding resp
irator tube and a black football-sized globe of programmable silicon hanging from it. Marcus slipped the collar round his neck, bit on the tube nozzle, and datavised an activation code into the suit's control processor. The silicon ball began to change shape, flattening out against his chest, then flowing over his body like a tenacious oil slick. It enveloped his head completely, and the collar sensors replaced his eyes, datavising their vision directly into his neural nanonics. Three others were in the preparation compartment with him: Schutz, who didn't need a spacesuit to EVA, Antonio, and Jorge. Marcus had managed to control his surprise when they'd volunteered. At the same time, with Wai flying the MSV he was glad they weren't going to be left behind in the ship.
Once his body was sealed by the silicon, he climbed into an armoured exoskeleton with an integral cold-gas manoeuvring pack. The SII silicon would never puncture, but if he was struck by a rogue particle the armour would absorb the impact.
When the airlock's outer hatch opened, the MSV was floating fifteen metres away. Marcus datavised an order into his manoeuvring pack processor, and the gas jets behind his shoulder fired, pushing him towards the small egg-shaped vehicle. Wai extended two of the MSV's three waldo arms in greeting. Each of them ended in a simple metal grid, with a pair of boot clamps on both sides.
Once all four of her passengers were locked into place, Wai piloted the MSV in towards the disc. The rock particle had a slow, erratic tumble, taking a hundred and twenty hours to complete its cycle. As she approached, the flattish surface with the dish was just turning into the sunlight. It was a strange kind of dawn, the rock's crumpled grey-brown crust speckled by the sharp black shadows of its own rolling prominences, while the dish was a lake of infinite black, broken only by the jagged spire of the horn rising from its centre. The xenoc ship was already exposed to the amber light, casting its bloated sundial shadow across the featureless glassy cliff. She could see the ripple of different ores and mineral strata frozen below the glazed surface, deluding her for a moment that she was flying towards a mountain of cut and polished onyx.
Then again, if Victoria's theory was right, she could well be.
«Take us in towards the top of the wedge,» Marcus datavised. «There's a series of darker rectangles there.»
«Will do,» she responded. The MSV's chemical thrusters pulsed in compliance.
«Do you see the colour difference near the frayed edges of the shell?» Schutz asked. «The stuff's turning grey. It's as if the decay is creeping inwards.»
«They must be using something like our molecular-binding-force generators to resist vacuum ablation,» Marcus datavised. «That's why the main section is still intact.»
«It could have been here for a long time, then.»
«Yeah. We'll know better once Wai collects some samples from the tower.»
There were five rectangles arranged in parallel, one and a half metres long and one metre wide. The shell material below the shorter edge of each one had a set of ten grooves leading away down the curve.
«They look like ladders to me,» Antonio datavised. «Would that mean these are airlocks?»
«It can't be that easy,» Schutz replied.
«Why not?» Marcus datavised. «A ship this size is bound to have more than one airlock.»
«Yeah, but five together?»
«Multiple redundancy.»
«With technology this good?»
«That's human hubris. The ship still blew up, didn't it?»
Wai locked the MSV's attitude fifty metres above the shell section. «The micro-pulse radar is bouncing right back at me,» she informed them. «I can't tell what's below the shell, it's a perfect electromagnetic reflector. We're going to have communication difficulties once you're inside.»
Marcus disengaged his boots from the grid and fired his pack's gas jets. The shell was as slippery as ice, neither stikpads nor magnetic soles would hold them to it.
«Definitely enhanced valency bonds,» Schutz datavised. He was floating parallel to the surface, holding a sensor block against it. «It's a much stronger field than Lady Mac 's. The shell composition is a real mix; the resonance scan is picking up titanium, silicon, boron, nickel, silver, and a whole load of polymers.»
«Silver's weird,» Marcus commented. «But if there's nickel in it our magnetic soles should work.» He manoeuvred himself over one of the rectangles. It was recessed about five centimetres, though it blended seamlessly into the main shell. His sensor collar couldn't detect any seal lining. Halfway along one side were two circular dimples, ten centimetres across. Logically, if the rectangle was an airlock, then these should be the controls. Human back-ups were kept simple. This shouldn't be any different.
Marcus stuck his fingers in one. It turned bright blue.
«Power surge,» Schutz datavised. «The block's picking up several high-voltage circuits activating under the shell. What did you do, Marcus?»
«Tried to open one.»
The rectangle dilated smoothly, material flowing back to the edges. Brilliant white light flooded out.
«Clever,» Schutz datavised.
«No more than our programmable silicon,» Antonio retorted.
«We don't use programmable silicon for external applications.»
«It settles one thing,» Marcus datavised. «They weren't Kiint, not with an airlock this size.»
«Quite. What now?»
«We try to establish control over the cycling mechanism. I'll go in and see if I can operate the hatch from inside. If it doesn't open after ten minutes, try the dimple again. If that doesn't work, cut through it with the MSV's fission blade.»
The chamber inside was thankfully bigger than the hatch: a pentagonal tube two metres wide and fifteen long. Four of the walls shone brightly, while the fifth was a strip of dark-maroon composite. He drifted in, then flipped himself over so he was facing the hatch, floating in the centre of the chamber. There were four dimples just beside the hatch. «First one,» he datavised. Nothing happened when he put his fingers in. «Second.» It turned blue. The hatch flowed shut.
Marcus crashed down onto the strip of dark composite, landing on his left shoulder. The force of the impact was almost enough to jar the respirator tube out of his mouth. He grunted in shock. Neural nanonics blocked the burst of pain from his bruised shoulder.
Jesus! They've got artificial gravity.
He was flat on his back, the exoskeleton and manoeuvring pack weighing far too much. Whatever planet the xenocs came from, it had a gravity field about one and a half times that of Earth. He released the catches down the side of his exoskeleton, and wriggled his way out. Standing was an effort, but he was used to higher gees on Lady Mac ; admittedly not for prolonged periods, though.
He stuck his fingers in the first dimple. The gravity faded fast, and the hatch flowed apart.
«We just became billionaires,» he datavised.
The third dimple pressurized the airlock chamber; the fourth depressurized it.
The xenoc atmosphere was mostly a nitrogen/oxygen blend, with one per cent argon and six per cent carbon dioxide. The humidity was appalling, pressure was lower than standard, and the temperature was forty-two degrees Celsius.
«We'd have to keep our SII suits on anyway, because of the heat,» Marcus datavised. «But the carbon dioxide would kill us. And we'll have to go through biological decontamination when we go back to Lady Mac .»
The four of them stood together at the far end of the airlock chamber, their exoskeleton armour lying on the floor behind them. Marcus had told Wai and the rest of the crew their first foray would be an hour.
«Are you proposing we go in without a weapon?» Jorge asked.
Marcus focused his collar sensors on the man who alleged he was a hardware technician. «Jesus. That's carrying paranoia too far. No, we do not engage in first contact either deploying or displaying weapons of any kind. That's the law, and the Assembly regulations are very specific about it. In any case, don't you think that if there are any xenocs left after all this time they're
going to be glad to see someone? Especially a spacefaring species.»
«That is, I'm afraid, a rather naive attitude, Captain. You keep saying how advanced this starship is, and yet it suffered catastrophic damage. Frankly, an unbelievable amount of damage for an accident. Isn't it more likely this ship was engaged in some kind of battle?»
Which was a background worry Marcus had suffered right from the start. That this starship could ever fail was unnerving. But like physical constants, Murphy's Law would be the same the universe over. He'd entered the airlock because intuition told him the wreck was safe for him personally. Somehow he doubted a man like Jorge would be convinced by that argument.
«If it's a warship, then it will be rigged to alert any surviving crew or flight computer of our arrival. Had they wanted to annihilate us, they would have done so by now. Lady Mac is a superb ship, but hardly in this class. So if they're waiting for us on the other side of this airlock, I don't think any weapon you or I can carry is going to make the slightest difference.»
«Very well, proceed.»
Marcus postponed the answer which came straight to mind, and put his fingers in one of the two dimples by the inner hatchway. It turned blue.
The xenoc ship wasn't disappointing, exactly, but Marcus couldn't help a growing sense of anticlimax. The artificial gravity was a fabulous piece of equipment, the atmosphere strange, the layout exotic. Yet for all that, it was just a ship; built from the universal rules of logical engineering. Had the xenocs themselves been there, it would have been so different. A whole new species with its history and culture. But they'd gone, so he was an archaeologist rather than an explorer.
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