“Could be something we can use,” Beth mused, ignoring the navigator’s outburst.
Gloria stared at her.
She glanced at each of them. “A probe, maybe. Hitching a ride? This thing is pretty close and the Swarm hadn’t bothered with it. Maybe someone figured out a way to sneak some instruments in.”
“Or a bomb,” Xavi countered. “Which, okay, I grant you that could be useful. But I don’t care what it’s made out of, that surface is absolute zero. Frozen.”
“Still,” Gloria said, resting a hand on Xavi’s arm. “We’re heading for it, anyway, so at a minimum we’ll do a close flyby. See what we can see. Maybe it’s programmed to wake up once closer to the star. Kind of clever if you think about it.”
“What about the bastards crawling up our ass?” Xavi asked.
The captain shrugged. “Focus on the last meal, not the execution.”
—
The size of the object left Gloria speechless. Viewed close-up, the long curved surfaces lost their smooth appearance. Indeed, the surface, or rather the skin of the thing seemed to be composed of thousands of interlocking shapes. Like scales, only writ large, each one a meter wide or more.
Maneuvering the Wildflower in close took precious minutes, so many, in fact, that by the time they were in close enough to study the graphene patch with a spotlight, the Scipio Swarm in pursuit had closed much of the gap. Xavi estimated they would arrive within two hours. The enemy positions were clearly defined now, each a brilliant new star in the sky as they turned about to fire thrusters for braking. Dozens flared against the black of space.
Gloria paid the enemy no attention. She could do nothing about them now, and if these were to be her last moments she didn’t want to spend them fretting over a threat she could do nothing about. Her focus instead lay entirely on the monitor before her. The view of the seed, now just a few hundred meters off. Xavi had matched its vector with flawless precision, the Wildflower moving in toward it at a perfect one meter per second. Gloria flicked on a spotlight. The beam illuminated a circular area of that puzzle-piece skin, and soon the patch of darkness where the surface folded in a peculiar way. The surface below was nearly black and very smooth. Somewhere deep in that cleft was the only bit of artificial material on the entire shape.
“What are we looking at here, Beth?” she asked.
She’d gone back to her instruments below. “It’s definitely graphene, though not pure. I’m picking up several other signatures. Titanium, diamond, and trace elements of a dozen other materials.”
“Something crashed into it,” Xavi said. “Look how tucked in there it is.”
“Doubtful,” Beth replied. “There is no scarring, or debris pattern. My gut tells me some kind of dormant probe landed here. A billion years ago, for all we know, some species tried to explore this thing.”
Finally, the spotlight illuminated the hidden space within the cleft. Gloria did not wait for the engineer’s analysis now. She dialed her view to maximum zoom. “Beth, send a wasp over there, please.”
“My pleasure.” The woman’s whole demeanor had changed since the discovery, as if the possibility of doing some real science had given meaning to what were likely her last hours alive. Her confidence had grown measurably, too, to the point where she was routinely at odds with Xavi. Gloria would need to keep an eye on that. Even here, at the end, crew chemistry meant everything to her.
The image on Gloria’s screen painted a different picture than either of their theories. This was no probe, crashed or otherwise. No, this was something else entirely. A flat, smooth patch below the skin.
“You thinking what I’m thinking?” Xavi asked. “Nah, wait. I’ll just say it. That’s underneath the surface.”
Gloria let that settle, her own mind working. “Beth, run that patch against the database. I wonder if we’ve seen anything like this before.”
Her reply came almost immediately. She’d run the scan before Gloria had even asked. “Oh my God,” she whispered.
“What is it?”
“There is a match, Captain.” She hesitated, as if unable to believe the data. “Just one, and it’s exact.”
“Go on, tell us.”
“That surface matches the material the Builders favor. That remnant they left above Darwin, to anchor the space elevator, is a perfect match.”
Xavi whistled.
“You’re sure?” Gloria asked.
“I can’t believe I didn’t recognize it sooner.”
Gloria recalled the meeting when the OEA had proposed this mission, and the idea of bringing Beth along. The engineer knew the Mark 5 imploder better than anyone, that alone made her a necessary add, but the brass had also spoken of Beth’s “nose for history.” A fascination, some said bordering on obsession, with the Builders, their space elevators, and the fabled group that had left aboard the Key Ship to try to help them free their home world. Carthage, as it had come to be known. Here, in this system. Nothing had been heard of that crew since. No evidence of their fate. No one had spent much time thinking about it in a thousand years or more. Certainly not Gloria, nor anyone she knew.
She stared at Beth. Really studied her. Was this a coincidence? Gloria shuddered, resigning herself to worry about it later. “Xavi?”
“I know what you’re going to say.”
“Prep the sampler.”
“I knew you were going to say that. Holy shit. Builders. Okay.”
“And Xavi?”
A pause. “There’s more?”
“There is,” Gloria said. “Suit up. We’re going over there. We’re going to cut inside. The scan showed empty cavities.”
“That’s crazy.”
“All of this is crazy.”
“I know,” Xavi said. Then he added, “I like it.”
“Beth, you’ll have the ship. Monitor our progress from here, be ready to help.”
Beth’s reply came instantly. “With all due respect, Xavi should stay. He knows how to fly the ship. What I know is the Builders.”
“And the engines.”
“So what? We’re here already.”
Gloria sighed. Not in frustration, but resignation. It was time to make the stakes clear to the outsider. And that meant making them real. A hand against the wall to steady herself, Gloria spoke with as much calm and care as her racing mind would allow. “You’re going to program the engine to overload. To go nuclear, with a remote command from me. Do you understand? Whatever we find here, whatever else happens, we cannot let the Scipios get their tentacles on this ship. Or any of us, for that matter.”
The woman went pale. She must have known, how could she not? But then self-deception was a powerful thing. When she spoke her voice was meek. “We’re already doomed, you mean?”
Gloria could only manage a single nod. “Likely so.”
“What’s the point of going inside, then?”
“I’m making this up as I go along. But if that is indeed a derelict Builder ship, maybe we can find something useful inside. Or maybe our pursuers will treat us differently. I have no idea.”
The engineer made no reply, which Gloria took as tacit agreement. “Right. That’s settled, then. Xavi, get the drill started at your leisure.”
“Going to be a bitch to get through that.”
Gloria nodded. “We don’t have a lot of time, but then we’ll never use that drill again, will we?”
“Good point.”
“Beth, once you finish rigging the fireworks, suit up and be ready to join us. Fair enough?”
“Yes, okay,” Beth replied, a hint of relief there.
Gloria didn’t have the heart to tell her that she’d never let the ship be left alone. Not in these circumstances. She drifted down to the airlock and pulled an EVA suit out. Xavi followed right behind. Despite the dire circumstances, he seemed almost excited. Amazing, the power of having something to do.
He strapped an EVA-capable display to his arm and tapped away at it. “Drill is in position, boss.”
<
br /> “Good. Spin it up,” Gloria said, “and I’ll prep the umbilical. If we can open that thing I want to be ready to enter. Time is not on our side.”
A few minutes later she wheeled the Wildflower’s inner hatch closed, and waited with her companion as the airlock was drained of precious atmosphere. Soon enough the small space turned crimson red. She glanced at Xavi. His eyes lifted from his wrist-screen to meet hers. “Still drilling. Progress is slow,” he said.
“Push it harder?”
“The lance can only get so hot. I’ve got it on max already.”
Under normal circumstances a needle-sized hole would be made in a derelict ship, then quickly capped with a one-way valve to seal in any precious air that might be inside. A drone would be inserted and sent to explore, to take samples of the air, and even to broadcast a greeting on standard emergency channels. This was, of course, anything but normal. And besides, Gloria had no luxury of time in which to do all that. She’d ordered Xavi to go for a full airlock-sized opening right from the get-go. “Let’s get into the umbilical at least, then,” she said.
Xavi floated out first. “Ever done this before?” he asked. “Cracking a derelict, I mean? Boarding one?”
“Nope. You?”
“Negative. Practiced it a hundred times back in the day, but…well, I just never imagined.”
“I know what you mean.”
Xavi stopped himself halfway between the two objects, monitoring the thermal lance. Gloria moved to one side, lowering her mirrored visor to protect from the glare of the drill. She glanced back, making sure nothing was in the way should the object before them explosively vent air once the hole went through. Beyond the Wildflower she counted thirty-two new stars, flaring against the black. Scipio Swarm ships, burning away their velocity. From this vantage point they looked terribly close, though the ships themselves were still lost in the fiery glare of their engines.
“It’s through!” Xavi said.
“Any atmosphere?”
“Can’t tell yet.”
Gloria whipped her gaze back to the target, and watched. No air rushed from the wound, though the lance still had the hole plugged. As it began to move laterally puffs of gas hissed through in a plume of tiny ice crystals.
“What’s that gas?” Gloria asked, worried.
“Beats me,” Xavi said, studying the display on his wrist. “Maybe ice or this organic shit, superheated away by the lance.”
“Actually,” Beth said, no doubt following along with her sensors, “that gas matches Earth’s atmosphere.”
“You’re joking,” Gloria said.
“There’s not much of it, but that’s what it is.”
“Bloody nice of them,” Xavi said.
“The Builders are machines,” Beth replied.
“Your point?”
“They don’t need air. More to the point, the only creatures we know that need air like ours are—”
“Creatures from Earth,” Gloria finished. She frowned, puzzled. Breathable air on a ship intended for machines was strange enough. Human-breathable air, though, was a fact with implications so tantalizing it made her skin tingle. It was as if this hidden place had been prepared for her arrival. And yet the whole thing seemed dead. Utterly frozen, not a shred of radiation coming from within. Perhaps the Swarm ignored it because they’d already been here, years or even centuries ago, and rendered the whole thing a nonthreat, leaving it to drift as a tomb.
Finally the lance turned off. Xavi guided it back and stowed it, while Gloria pulled the umbilical across the gap. Fighting the wind of escaping air, she maneuvered the flexible tube over the hole, then climbed inside at the last possible second before moving it the last meter. She tried to ignore the darkness around her. First things first.
“In position,” she said.
Xavi squeezed through the gap and positioned himself beside her.
“I’ll hold it in place,” Gloria said. “Seal it.”
Xavi searched for, then wrestled with a control on the inside of the umbilical’s end. The white tube, a meter in diameter, ran off into the distance toward the Wildflower’s own airlock at the far end, out of sight.
There was a soundless pulse as a ring-shaped air bag deployed around the umbilical’s circumference, creating a temporary seal. A second later a sand-colored foam was excreted. It hardened almost instantly, turning dark purple as it did so.
“Seal’s good,” Xavi announced. “Crikey. We just docked with a Builder ship.”
Gloria suppressed a grin. “We don’t know that for sure yet. Beth? We’re going to look around. Keep the airlock closed. I’d rather not mingle our air with this just yet.”
“I read you.”
Finally, Gloria turned and studied their immediate surroundings. She found herself in a narrow passage lined with tubes and other apparent infrastructure, all in that dull coloration the Builders favored, yet somehow it looked old and grimy.
Xavi whistled. “Definitely a ship.”
“Right,” Gloria said. “Our goal is to find something—anything—that can help us get home or, barring that, hide. Did you bring roaches?”
Xavi tapped a container at his belt in reply.
“Let them loose,” she said. “Beth, send wasps over the outer hull, maybe we missed something.”
The versatile robots could be activated with any one of a thousand preprogrammed behaviors. When Xavi opened the box, a small family of the little machines floated out and came to life. Sensing atmosphere, they used fans instead of propellant to move. Immediately they began to spread out and split up, in a coordinated pattern based on the shape of the volume they found themselves in.
“Standard search and rescue,” Xavi explained. The simplest of programs: map their surroundings, search for life-forms. Their findings were streamed back to him and relayed to the Wildflower’s datacubes as well.
But robotic eyes were only so useful. Gloria picked a direction and pointed. “Let’s stick together, have a look around. Take point?”
“I’d feel better if we were armed.”
“This place is dead, Xavi.”
“So was this pouch,” he said, pointing at the opening the drones had just spilled out of. “Until I opened it. Builders are machines, right? Dead doesn’t mean anything.”
She couldn’t think of what to say. The mention of the Builders being a machine race sent yet another chill up her spine. She’d had too many chills like that for one day.
“Let me get the service weapons, boss,” Xavi said gently.
She’d forgotten all about them. Even when pondering ways to keep from falling into Scipio hands, she’d not considered the guns. To her they were crude. Barely more than relics from the earliest days of long-term space travel when concerns over crew sanity abounded. Only regulations kept them from being discarded like so much else had been during the Wildflower’s crash diet. “Fine,” Gloria said. “Go back. I’ll wait here.”
He’d already turned and was halfway down the umbilical. Gloria sighed, and waited. Finally, she remembered the roaches, and tuned her wrist-mounted display to cycle through their feeds.
“Any of it look familiar, Beth?”
“The only information about the interior of the Key Ship comes from interviews with Skadz and Ana. They were inside the final Builder ship but decided not to leave with the others. But they described normal hallways, even a conference room.” She hesitated, no doubt studying the same footage Gloria was seeing. “Still, we can make assumptions, can’t we? I see tunnels. Some intersections.”
“Everything’s cold,” Gloria noted.
Xavi’s voice came through the comm. He’d be back aboard by now, fetching the weapons. “What’s this thing doing out here, anyway?”
Gloria pondered that. “Probably part of some failed attack on Carthage a thousand years ago. Maybe the crust on the hull is some kind of Scipio ship-killing virus. Encase the target and prevent it from steering, refueling. Anything.”
“Death by strang
ulation,” Xavi whispered. “That’d be just like those little fuckers.”
“One thing’s for sure,” Beth said through the helmet speaker, “the Swarm was definitely ignoring it before we headed here.”
“Yeah?” Gloria asked.
“I went back and viewed the telemetry during our chase. The long range, I mean. All of their motions were in reaction to us or the Sporting Chance. This thing was well within their range at that point, and as far as I can see they paid it no attention at all.”
“That supports my theory,” Gloria said. “It must be in some highly elliptical orbit around Kep22, and they’ve been tracking it for ages. Flagged it as uninteresting a long time ago.”
“If only we’d found it earlier,” Xavi said, coming back down the tube.
“Why?”
“Could have hitched a ride! Snuck in-system right under their damn noses.” He snorted a laugh. “Imagine if we can get that bit of intel back to the blokes at Anchor. Anyway. Now. Here. Guns.”
He handed a pistol to her. Gloria turned the device in her hand. It had been years since she picked one up. She’d never had to fire one other than at a target while training. Holding it now made the situation feel twice as tense, not less so. She swallowed, her mouth gone dry, and stuffed the item in a utility loop at her waist.
“Oh my God,” Beth said.
Gloria glanced up, surprised, half-expecting to see some monster bearing down on them. “The Swarm?”
“Look at the screen,” Beth replied.
She did. Xavi stood beside her. The image showed an enormous geodesic sphere, like a huge black eye, the pupil glowing faintly orange.
“What the hell is that?” Xavi asked.
“Heat,” Beth replied. “That would be heat.”
The Chameleon
6.AUG.3911 (Earth Actual)
SKYLER HUDDLED NEAR the glowing orb of their only heat source, the others in a rough circle around him, anchored to rungs protruding from the dirt. Sam slept, her head resting in the crook of Vaughn’s neck in a way that would make her gag if she could see how cute it was.
Only Vanessa was not with them. Some time ago she’d begun to pace, unable to sit still. He’d offered her company but she’d refused. Now and then he could just make her out, drifting in the gloom along the edge of the dome, picking her way through the branches.
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