The Artificial was turning into as much of a smartass as Alex. This really should not surprise him.
UNCHARTED SYSTEM
GEMINA PORTAL SPACE
It also should not have surprised him when Valkyrie had a potential target within two hours. A cold red giant with two distant planets, neither of which showed any signs of harboring life. There was nothing unique or particularly interesting about the star, except according to Alex it exhibited low luminosity for its spectral class, yet its mass placed it on the cusp of earning the supergiant label.
Also relevant was the reason Valkyrie had picked it out: an oxygen-neon-magnesium core that was degenerating faster than natural stellar evolution could explain.
Alex was scowling darkly at the massive vermilion star out the viewport. Her brow had drawn into a series of creases, her mouth into a thin line.
He buried a chuckle; she was deep enough into the work of unraveling the mystery she wouldn’t appreciate him making fun of her…much. “You expected a Dyson swarm, or at a minimum a constructed halo ring or two.”
“Maybe a little.” Abruptly she exploded in movement. “So how are they doing it? What’s feeding the changes in the star’s composition?”
‘They could be using a machine which is relatively modest in size. Without an idea of precisely where to look, it will be difficult for us to detect a small, low-power structure.’
“Hunt for power signatures similar to those generated by their ships or the cloaking—ugh, if the apparatus is cloaked we’ll never find it.”
He shook his head. “There’s no reason for them to cloak it. There’s no one here to hide it from.”
“Right. We have no choice but to act under that assumption, anyway.” She blew out a breath through once again pursed lips. “Let’s be methodical about it. Valkyrie, adopt an orbital course 0.5 AU out from the star and open the scanners wide. We can detect as low as a hundred twenty terajoule energy emission for 0.1 AU in every direction. We’ll do a full stellar orbit then shift to the next sector and repeat until we find something.”
He didn’t suggest the possibility there would be nothing to find. Like her, he believed there would be, for it was clear the Metigens were up to mischief on an astronomical scale. Whether they’d be able to uncover the source was another matter, but they wouldn’t know until they made the attempt.
‘I think I have something.’ A pause. ‘Yes. I’m detecting a steady 1.2 petajoule energy source 1,235 megameters away.’
They’d been relaxing on the couch, talking about nothing in particular and relishing simply being close, but now Alex vaulted out of his arms for the cockpit. This was their seventh pass; they’d moved to 0.3 AU out from the star, as close as they dared spend any time.
He stood and followed her at a more reasonable pace. “We’re fully cloaked, right?”
“Almost always.”
He waited, and the next second Valkyrie helpfully provided a more comforting answer. ‘We’ve been at one hundred percent cloaking strength since we reached this system.’
“Thanks, Valkyrie.”
Alex settled into her seat and strapped in. “Approach at forty percent max impulse speed until we’re twenty megameters away, then slow to ten percent max. Oh, and shift our heading until the object is between us and the star. I want to be able to see this bastard.”
A low-level buzz began to thrum beneath Caleb’s skin the closer they got to the mysterious object. The familiar, comforting perception of an approaching threat. Of danger.
He worked to keep his expression serious but neutral, not intending to give away the fact some part of him hoped for a confrontation, even if a confrontation with Metigens was unlikely to provide him anything satisfying to combat.
They were less than a megameter away when the object finally crystallized against the filtered light of the star. Similar to many structures the Metigens built, it displayed an orb-like shape and lacked obvious external ornamentation. Something powered it, however, and to a substantial level. It was not in orbit around the sun, but rather stationary, and the area of the sun directly in front of it constantly shifted.
“It looks big, but I recognize that doesn’t mean much.”
Alex shook her head. “No, it is big, at least compared to us.” She opened a new screen on the HUD. “Six hundred eighty meters in diameter. Bigger than a cruiser, smaller than a dreadnought, though not necessarily smaller in volume. Valkyrie, are we able to pick up anything beyond the power signature? Any indication of what’s happening inside?”
‘Nothing except…may I move the Siyane S 72° -44°z?’
“All right.”
The profile of the orb shifted until only a sliver of an arc remained backlit by the star. He could sense Alex getting agitated.
‘There is an opening approximately sixteen meters in diameter 31° below horizontal on the sun-facing side.’
She made a face. “Well that’s…something.”
‘Indeed. What—?’
“What?”
‘I detected a dimensional disturbance outside the opening. It lasted a brief five hundred sixty-eight milliseconds. I was not able to identify visible matter, but material of some form was ejected from the opening.’
“Now that is something.”
They had closed to ninety-five kilometers from the object, but other than the small opening they remained unable to detect anything regarding its interior or purpose.
Caleb evaluated the situation. The Metigens as individuals had never caused them harm, though their ships had inflicted a great deal of it on humans. There was also the minuscule but non-zero chance whoever operated this structure was not a Metigen but instead a native inhabitant, in which case every risk was on the table. Their instruments were not sophisticated enough to detect, much less measure, whatever was occurring inside the object.
Yet here they were.
He caught Alex’s gaze. “We should go check it out.”
Her eyes instantly lit up. “You mean a spacewalk?”
13
UNCHARTED SYSTEM
GEMINA PORTAL SPACE
* * *
SOME PART OF HER HAD EXPECTED floating in space to feel like it did when she experienced it via the senses of the Siyane, for joining with the ship had fundamentally altered her perception of the physicality of space.
It didn’t feel any different from previous spacewalks, though, not even through Valkyrie’s eyes…
…that was the difference, self-evident now. Valkyrie was in her head, but it was still her head. And Valkyrie wasn’t in her skin.
I perceive it as if I am, but objectively I recognize your point. Besides, your skin is not the Siyane’s skin. For you, it does not and cannot work both ways.
No, I suppose it can’t.
Caleb gave her a firm nod, and they fired their suit thrusters and headed toward the structure. It loomed menacingly against the sun, growing larger every second. A speck of dust on the scale of the stellar system, their figures measured hardly more substantial against the structure.
No alarms sounded or weapons fired as they neared. Metigen hubris on display yet again—what need had they for a security system?
Another eighty meters then they cut the thrusters and drifted into the outer hull of the object with two hollow thuds.
“Well, here we are. Now to try to uncover more about this thing than we could from a distance.” She peered at Caleb through their faceplates. “You suggested the spacewalk. How are we going to do this?”
His smirk was easily discernible in the light from the star as it cast beams across his helmet. “Hell if I know. I just wanted to go for a spacewalk, and something told me you would, too.”
Her skin tingled without the need for any connection to the Siyane; if they were on the ship she would’ve tackled him and ripped his clothes from his body right then and there. “Have I told you how glad I am you’re here with me?”
The smirk only widened. “You can tell me again later.”
>
“Deal.” She forced her attention back to the massive hull they weren’t so much clinging to as repetitively bumping into. “Let’s move toward the opening. Hopefully we can get a better idea of what it’s being used for.”
The outer material of their gloves had enough stickiness to the texture that as long as they didn’t generate any momentum away from the hull, they could move along it manually and didn’t need to use the thrusters. It was slow progress due to the size of the structure, but more efficient in the end.
‘I am detecting an acceleration in the increasing mass of the star’s core.’
She paused. “How much of an acceleration?”
‘Linear growth thus far.’
Caleb continued moving ahead. “Keep us updated. If the transformation becomes too worrisome we’ll return to the ship.”
When they were fifteen meters from the rim of the open area, Valkyrie warned them to halt. ‘The dimensional instabilities surrounding the opening are likely dangerous. I don’t recommend exposing yourselves to the space affected by the disturbances.’
She bumped into Caleb as they both halted. “Understood. Can you detect anything else about the phenomenon?”
‘Not as of…wait. Yes. Something is being ejected at regular intervals in the direction of the sun. It is not visible, however. I can speculate as to why, but it would be no more than that.’
Valkyrie’s speculation was more reliable than decades worth of any think-tank’s research, but without hard data to analyze it was only speculation. Alex studied the structure beneath them. The surface curved into the sun’s profile to the left and the blackness of space to the right. Their traversal had revealed no other entrances or anomalies.
But for this one circular opening—the one too hazardous to approach—the object was impenetrable.
She sighed. “Okay. I think I’m going to have to use the quantum space to see what’s happening inside. It’s not ideal—I won’t be able to interact with anything or take any measurements or samples, only report what I see.”
“It’s better than nothing. Are you sure you’ll be safe?”
“As safe as floating out here. I think. So…hold onto me so I don’t drift away.”
“That I can do.” He maneuvered closer, wrapped one arm around her waist and hooked his fingers into her belt. “Tell me what you see.”
She took a deep breath, closed her eyes and tried to remember exactly how this worked. She’d dallied in exploring the strange quantum dimension with Devon and Morgan months ago, but she hadn’t visited it since journeying to the portal network.
It was easy to determine where to direct her consciousness: straight ahead. She didn’t know how thick the exterior was, but given the diameter, it couldn’t be more than four or so meters.
Let’s do this, Valkyrie.
There was no sensation of moving through solid metal. She was simply inside.
The interior was lit in the same white light used to illuminate the Metigen superdreadnoughts. Multiple streams fed into a central lattice that…she tilted her head—her perception—and the edges of the lattice fell in on themselves.
It’s extradimensional.
Six? Seven? Then something I can’t quite perceive.
It’s almost—
A Metigen moved beneath the lattice. Or rather, a concentration of points of light which were ice blue instead of true white and thus were probably a Metigen moved beneath the lattice.
She retreated toward the interior wall. “A Metigen is here. It’s operating, or supervising, some sort of extradimensional machinery.”
Caleb’s voice sounded hushed, distant, though he was centimeters from her physical body. “It can’t see you, right?”
“Right.” The appearance of the Metigen had startled her, but now she moved lower. Closer.
At the deepest, most complex in-folding created by the construct, a liquid, pearlescent metal floated up into the center like a slippery oil, until the metal coalesced into a small orb. Underneath the lattice and attached to it was a slightly more conventional machine.
The Metigen watched the process, then as the orb solidified, extended a part of itself and reached inside the lattice. The Metigen’s limb—points of light, not corporeal in any definable way—enveloped the new orb, twisting it around as an additional layer of particles built outside it.
The orb vanished.
No. Not vanished. See the absence? It marks the orb’s location.
The ‘absence’ plummeted into the machinery below—real machinery—then shot out the circular opening in the structure into space.
Track it!
I cannot. With hyper-specialized instruments I may be able to detect the movement by the perturbations it creates in the surrounding space-time manifold. But even the Siyane does not possess those instruments. However, as with the measurements taken earlier, its trajectory suggests its destination is the system’s star.
Not surprising in the slightest. The process had already begun anew, and soon another orb was on its way. They’re tiny, only eleven meters in diameter. How can they possibly affect an object the size of a star?
Who knows how many have been injected into the star. Also, this may not be the only such facility, merely the only one we detected thus far.
True. The orbs must be some form of—
The Metigen vanished from the chamber in a whirl of light. As it did, she had the brief but palpable sense of the alien traveling past her in this quantum space. The alien gave no indication of detecting her presence, but she still instinctively shrunk away from the Metigen as it passed.
Then it moved beyond the walls and was gone.
“Why did it leave?”
“What happened?” Caleb. She’d hadn’t updated him in…several seconds at a minimum.
“The Metigen left.”
“I wonder if it—”
A vicious whoosh blasted past her, and her consciousness resided in emptiness. The entire structure was now gone as well.
“Alex, get back here.”
She blinked, disoriented, managed to mumble something resembling ‘return’ in her mind, and discovered she and Caleb were tumbling head over feet through space. Caleb’s gloved hands held her waist tightly.
She twisted around to face him. “What happened?”
“The structure catapulted away without warning. We got knocked off a little roughly.”
“Where did it go?”
“The opposite direction from the star—which means we need to get back to the ship.”
‘I am now detecting exponential growth in the mass of the star’s core, as well as a marked increase in neutrino production.’
“Ship. Now.” Caleb fired his thrusters, dragging her along with him until she was able to get her head straight and fire her own as well.
No longer needing to remain hidden from the structure or its former inhabitant, Valkyrie met them halfway with the Siyane, and they were inside the airlock in less than a minute.
Alex quickly ditched her helmet and began unfastening the environment suit while moving to the cockpit. “What’s the star doing?”
‘It is undergoing an electron capture gravitational collapse.’
“Oh, fun. The star is going supernova. Those orbs…they could have been a type of graviton bomb, increasing the density in the core until it overwhelmed the degeneracy pressure and triggered a core collapse.”
Caleb shot her a bemused look in response as he tossed his suit to the floor in the main cabin and joined her. “I’m not sure I have the slightest idea what you just said, but I assume this means you now know how they’re doing it.”
‘Alex, at this proximity to the star, our radiation shielding will not sufficiently protect the two of you from the neutrino burst preceding the shock wave.’
She stared in fascinated horror at the star, anticipation growing for what was now certain to follow. But Valkyrie had a point. “Let’s withdraw a bit, ten or so—”
The star’s pho
tosphere convulsed and plunged inward.
“Go! Ten parsecs, now.”
Valkyrie engaged the sLume drive…and for a frozen second of time, the bubble wavered and oscillated as it struggled to form amid the increasingly unstable forces.
Then space blurred away. She sank against Caleb in relief, mentally and existentially exhausted.
He gathered her into his arms. “That was close.”
She nodded into his neck and prayed he didn’t ask how close. “It was.”
A few minutes later they exited superluminal. She arced the Siyane until she could see the radiant energy shimmering in the distance, propelled outward by the supernova shockwave. The light dominated the viewport, many orders of magnitude brighter than the star it had been moments before.
So dazzling, so commanding in its potency. The forces required to engineer such an event….
Caleb urged her chin up until she met his gaze. “Keep going.”
“Hmm?”
“This entire pocket universe is dangerous, and in ways we can’t predict or control. The Metigens are working in technology far beyond our understanding. They’re shaping the very space around us, and they’re shaping it into a deadly minefield. Keep going to the portal, then go through it.”
…were in fact so very lethal.
The secrets this place held enthralled her. The wonders they had seen were astonishing beyond measure. Space had never felt dangerous to her, though she respected its power. And now, for maybe the first time, she began to respect the Metigens’ power. They manipulated dimensions like they were paper maché, including time.
She did not want to be in awe of them, because they used their power for evil. Yet she found it difficult not to be in the face of what she’d seen here.
There were answers needing to be found about what the Metigens’ goal was here—and why—but she conceded those answers wouldn’t be found here. “Valkyrie, adopt a superluminal course for the portal. Caleb’s right.”
She’d expected some murmur of thanks or relief from him, but his attention remained focused on the space outside long after they left the supernova behind—long enough she became curious. “What’s on your mind?”
Dissonance: Aurora Renegades Book Two (Aurora Rhapsody 5) Page 7
