“You forgot your phone, sir.”
“Oh, thank you, Jeffery. I’m obviously running on empty.”
“Yes, sir, just go home and have a nightcap. Try not to think about the alien artifact.” Jeffery heard someone behind him clear their throat. He turned around to realize in a moment of mortal terror that one of the androids was actually an enormous marine.
“I suppose you didn’t see me here,” Harris said with a tool-hardened edge to his voice.
“No, I thought you were a … oh no…” Jeffery looked at the man in much the same way a cornstalk views an approaching combine.
“It’s all right, Jeffery. It’s too late to change now,” Eugene said gently. “It wouldn’t have happened had I remembered my phone.”
Corporal Harris let out a resigned sigh and looked the smaller man in the eye. “It’s all right. It could have happened to anyone this late.” He turned to address the professor. “I don’t suppose artifact means broken pottery or flint arrowheads?”
“Not unless they were deer hunting in the vacuum of space,” confirmed Eugene. “I’m sorry, Corporal Harris, but it looks like you’re going to need to do that rapid packing we spoke about.”
CHAPTER 3
Two hundred and eighty-five trillion kilometers away, someone else’s night had stretched to infinity. Three days had passed since Allison ordered Magellan to a standstill. The entire crew was assembled in Shuttle Bay Two to hear their captain say something inspiring and historic. She was having enough trouble focusing on the next few minutes, much less coming generations. Her crew divided themselves into the usual peer groups of officers, academics, and technical specialists. It wasn’t that different from your average junior prom, only their names had letters before or after them, usually ending in D.
The bay was optimized to launch and recover Magellan’s atmospheric shuttles. It was not optimized for sweeping oratories. As a result, the echoes of 157 people packed into a room already full of shuttles and mysterious artifacts had reached concert levels.
“Everyone, if I could please have your attention. Quiet down, please.” Allison’s voice didn’t pass the first row, beaten back by waves of noise. “Excuse me. I’d like to get started…”
A whistle pierced the air like an arrow. “Stow it!” shouted Commander Marcel Gruber, Allison’s executive officer. The order was obeyed involuntarily as every set of teeth in the room had gritted against the whistle. “Better!” He motioned to Allison. “Your floor, ma’am.”
Allison nodded thanks. Ignoring the tiny tuning fork lodged in her right ear, she stepped up to the podium—well, a tool locker the size and shape of a podium. “As you’re all aware, we haven’t arrived at Solonis B. It’s been only three and a half weeks since the beginning of our last sleep cycle. Magellan woke me three days ago when she spotted something … out of place.”
Every eye in the bay glanced toward the artifact. About the length of an airbus, it was a seamless, polished silver, speckled with tiny micro-meteor craters. It looked like an hourglass stretched in a taffy puller. A block of unintelligible characters scribed into one of the metal lobes taunted them.
“At this point, we know nothing more about it than what can be seen with naked eyes. But that is going to change, people. Through luck or providence, we’ve been entrusted with this discovery. Ours are the only hands and tools that will handle it for decades. We all signed up to explore and push back the horizon. Well, the horizon of human knowledge sits right over there”—she threw a finger at the artifact without breaking eye contact with her crew—“and we’re going to push until we find the edge.”
Allison really put some Tabasco sauce on the last word, but she was rewarded by only a handful of harrumphs and a smattering of claps. Most of the crew continued looking anxiously over their shoulders. The murmur started again.
A voice managed to struggle to the surface. “We don’t even know what it is. What if it’s a mine or something?” The speaker was too short to see above the crowd.
“Well, one telltale sign of mines is the way they explode when they get near a ship. Seeing how it’s already inside…” This outburst of common sense came from Ensign Wheeler, Allison’s helmsman.
“What about the runes?” It was one of the engineers.
“Maybe they’re warning labels!” shouted one of the environmental techs. “Like, ‘Danger. Radioactive. Keep your balls at least one kilometer away!’”
The deep Southern drawl of Chief Engineer Billings came to life. “If y’all think I brung that thing on board without passin’ it by a Geiger counter first, y’all’re duller than a field of sun-dried cow chips.”
Some of the wind spilled from the sails of discontent, if only to permit the crew to ponder the nature of cow chips, which were not, as some of them assumed, thin slices of dried beef.
Content, the engineer looked back to his captain. “Ma’am, you wus sayin’?”
“Thank you, Chief.” Allison raised her hands, palms out. “I expect once Earth has time to form a plan, we’ll be ordered to come about and bring the artifact home.” She let that settle in for a moment.
“I know we all have questions, serious questions. So we’re going to work around the clock to find the answers.” She held her breath for a moment and then took the plunge. “I intend to set up research teams to work rotating shifts while the rest of the crew sleeps.”
Shouting exploded through the bay. Then Gruber’s dreaded whistle hit them like an artillery volley. “This expedition may not be military, but this isn’t a town council meeting either! The lady is in charge. Don’t like it, you all know where the exit is.” The XO pointed toward the clamshell doors that led outside. There was a small welcome mat on the floor, right next to the dachshund shoe brush.
The captain’s gentle voice nudged aside the heavy curtain of embarrassed silence to resume her speech. “I don’t think the choices need to be quite that extreme. We will start the rotations on a volunteer basis. If that proves insufficient, we will draw lots. No one will be excluded, not even command staff.” She paused. “However, since we all volunteered to be here in the first place, I don’t expect that will be necessary.” Allison looked around the room, lingering on the eyes of a select, vocal few, until she was confident that she wouldn’t need to go looking for straws to draw.
“We have a unique opportunity, people. Right there sits the proof of intelligent life beyond Earth that we’ve searched out for ten thousand generations. It simply doesn’t get bigger than this. The chance to find that proof is the reason most of us gave up more than a century to be here.
“When I first realized what we had found, I was reminded of an ancient Chinese curse: ‘May you live in interesting times.’ I’m here to tell you, our times are going to be very interesting. AESA is assembling a crack team on Earth to handle the data and convert what we’ve discovered into usable science for our industries back home. We’re going to be their eyes and ears. Literally everyone back home will be waiting with bated breath for every terabyte of data we can give them. So let’s all do our part to ensure the ship runs smoothly and that we get good, accurate analysis of the artifact back to Earth as fast as the QER can relay it.” She stepped back from the podium and crossed her hands behind her back. “Dismissed!”
A surge of cheers went around the bay. Even the few hecklers seemed to join in the exuberance.
Allison and Gruber walked away from the podium when Dorsett, the flight ops officer, approached them. Flight ops was a natural fit for Jacqueline. She appeared perpetually ready to take flight herself.
“Yes, Jackie, what is it?” Allison asked.
“Um, hello, Captain. I really liked your speech. I, ah, I have something I’d like you to see … I mean, have.”
“Oh, wonderful, may I see it?”
“Um, yes, it’s, ah…” Jacqueline reached into her cavernous backpack until it looked like she might fall in. Her arm returned with a yellow-and-black book. Not a page-reader screen, an actual paper-an
d-ink book.
Allison took the offered gift and read the title aloud: “First Contact for Dummies: The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Most Important Moment in History.” Allison choked on a giggle and let out a little cough instead. She looked at Marcel. “It’s nice to know the crew has so much confidence in their captain.”
“Oh, no, ma’am, I didn’t mean—that is, I don’t think…” Jacqueline’s eyes went wide.
“Jackie, it’s all right.” She put her hand on the younger woman’s shoulder. “I was only kidding. It’s a lovely gift. Where did you find it?”
“It was my mum’s, ma’am. She was with SETI. She bought it as an antique and always kept it near her desk, just in case. When I was accepted for Magellan’s crew, she gave it to me. She said, ‘You’ll be closer to the action than I’ll ever get.’ But if anyone here is going to be the first, it’s going to be you, Captain. So I thought you could use it more than I could.”
“I love it, Jackie. Tell your mother that I will read it, cover to cover.”
“I wish I could, ma’am. She died eight years ago. Real years, that is.” The young woman’s eyes began to mist over.
Einstein said time was relative, but he never went through cryogenic sleep, skipping through the years one week at a time. For the universe at large, her mother had departed nearly a decade ago. For Jacqueline, it had been two months.
Allison realized she didn’t hold a book but a Dorsett family heirloom. She held it to her chest and squeezed.
“Thank you, Jackie. I mean it. We’re going to do your mom proud. Okay?”
“Okay.” Her voice cracked, just a little, before she clamped down on it.
Allison switched to her captain setting. “You’ve got to get my shuttle refueled and repacked, yes?”
Dorsett nodded.
“Well, then, round up your people and get to it. You never know what we’ll need it for next, right?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Jacqueline disappeared behind the shuttle.
Allison gave herself a little shake. “Sometimes I forget what everyone gave up to be here,” she said to her XO.
“It’s the life, ma’am; we all know what’s coming when we get in the cryopod.”
Allison shook her head. “I thought I knew what was coming before my preflight physical. I was wrong then, too.”
CHAPTER 4
Felix Fletcher was on edge. This was not unusual, but his current anxiety was several standard deviations above the norm. Several factors were responsible.
First, he was on a collision course with the largest man-made object ever built. Second was the situation that had hurtled Felix away from Earth in the middle of dinner. A yank inbound from a two-decade-long resupply trip to Proxima Centauri had blown two of its gravity projectors spooling up to decelerate. Slowing it down was going to be, well … an optimist would say interesting, challenging, exciting, even. But since Felix’s nerves resembled a loose bundle of stripped, live wires, he had a different set of adjectives.
Born in New Detroit, Luna, Felix spent his childhood in the moon’s half-hearted gravity. Among Lunies, he was average height and solidly built, which meant among children of Earth, he was tall, gangly, and an unhealthy pallid color. Nature had boosted his mental-lifting capacity attempting to compensate. However, as any owner of a high-performance noggin could tell you, it just added another layer of social awkwardness.
Despite these setbacks, Felix had not turned into a basement-dwelling recluse. His talents for mathematics and constant tinkering had landed him in an exceptional graduate engineering program, and he was considered something of a prodigy inside the gravity propulsion community. Today, his abilities would be put to the test, as he’d been asked to troubleshoot the stricken yank while it hurtled through the Sol system at 40 percent light speed.
Directly ahead, and growing ominously in his field of vision, was the Unicycle, a circular particle accelerator five thousand kilometers in circumference. It was built in orbit at the L1 Lagrange point, one of the points in space where the game of tug-of-war between sun and Earth played to a draw. The sunward side was a ring of solar panels five kilometers across, powering the station and providing shade to keep the superconducting electromagnetic coils at a crisp and efficient three degrees above zero. Not the balmy zero on Earth, where thermometers are given a minus range so Northerners can puff out their chests about how tough the winters are. The real, absolute zero, which doesn’t have negatives because there’s nowhere else to go.
The array had a surface area of 24,920 square kilometers. With solar energy density at L1 of two kilowatts per square meter and 65 percent panel conversion efficiency, the Unicycle had 32.4 terawatts of electricity on tap. Or, if you like, the combined power output of forty-five billion horses, without the grain requirements or stables to muck.
It was a successor to the Really Large Hadron Collider in response to the failure of the Second (We Think That’s Got it) Theory of Everything. The few physicists brave and/or delusional enough to tackle the Third (Fine, You Do it, Then) Theory of Everything ran their experiments inside. The array could also beam power to yanks on their way out of the system, and again on the way back in, greatly reducing the reactor mass they needed to carry.
It was built by a French consortium whose institutional experience spanned centuries, all the way back to the original LHC. The drawbacks to the French team were that the Unicycle only worked thirty hours per week and frequently started smoking.
“Excuse me, but are we going to start decelerating soon?” Felix squeaked to the pilot.
“We don’t start our reverse for another fifteen minutes, Mr. Fletcher,” the pilot responded curtly.
“Oh, okay. It’s just that it looks awfully big. You have a lovely shuttle here. Very posh. I’d hate to see anything happen to it, or any of the passengers. Or crew, mind you.”
“Yes, sir, but it looks big because, frankly, it is big.”
“Right, then. I’ll just, um, leave you to avoiding collisions, and other important piloting duties.” He returned to his seat and his fidgeting. It wasn’t that he disliked space travel. The empty space wasn’t the part of the trip that worried him.
Felix glanced up from his duty-free catalog and saw the “Fasten Harness” light flick on overhead, accompanied by a three-minute countdown. This wasn’t the gentle suggestion it would be on a terrestrial airline flight, mainly because the crew didn’t want to clean up the mess if one of their passengers hit a bulkhead at five g’s of deceleration. Nor was the harness a simple lap belt, but a web of thick straps and industrial-strength buckles strong enough to tie down a shipping container. At least they didn’t waste time dithering about with safety lectures. Few people held illusions about the survival prospects of a space accident.
He got himself situated with thirty seconds to spare; just enough time to finish his drink before the shuttle flipped like a coin and the pilot pushed the throttle through the windshield. He let out a chirp as the harness did its best to squeeze his internal organs out through his nose. While the other passengers suffered under five times Earth gravity, he was subjected to thirty times moon gravity.
The beating continued for almost ten minutes before the pilot returned the throttles to neutral and Felix returned to weightlessness. By that time, the portals were totally filled by the Unicycle.
They drifted close enough to make out a few of the thin spokes that gave the facility its informal name. These spokes contained transfer tubes and power relays and connected to the docking hub and control center located in the center of the ring. Retro rockets fired. Once the shuttle had a solid lock with the Unicycle, Felix poured himself into the aisle and sloshed his way to the exit door, pretty sure he’d broken a rib or six.
After many flights into space, he’d learned not to check a bag. Anything security didn’t confiscate became subject to a sorting system seemingly governed by a roulette wheel. Some statisticians claimed just randomly grabbing a bag from a different flight i
ncreased your odds of getting the right set of luggage.
Felix made his way to the check-in desk. Within an hour, he sat with over a dozen scientists and engineers doing their level best to make the crowded conference room look like an unsupervised day care. Data pads and holos displaying diagnostic results and course projections lay strewn about like discarded toys. Shouts and hand gestures from several continents permeated the air while the countdown clock wound its way toward zero.
Felix pecked away on a tablet and sat quietly in a forgotten corner, cross-checking his own projections against the simulations being run by the facility’s Space Traffic Control computer. Math was his marble; tangents, cosigns, and vectors were his chisels and hammers. While the rest of the room argued over why their plans wouldn’t work, he tried to find one that would.
Eventually, there was a lull in the battle while the parties regrouped and retrenched. Felix used the pause to spring his surprise attack.
“I think I have a solution,” he proclaimed, rather meekly.
The announcement struck the collected scientists like a falling leaf. One of the older men broke away from the maelstrom and gave Felix a sideways glance.
“Did you say something, my boy?” Felix recognized him as Dr. Shuler of Cambridge.
“I said, I think I’ve hit on a solution.”
Shuler chuckled. “Well, son, it’s one thing to hit on a solution, but quite another to take it home.”
Felix’s eyes narrowed, and he tried to stare daggers at the man. He managed butter knives. “I’m cooking it breakfast.”
The rest of the heads in the room turned to evaluate the new challenger. Several of them licked their lips.
“All right, then. Step right up, my boy, and let’s hear all about this well-fed solution.” Dr. Shuler swept his hand wide in a mocking invitation to the table.
Felix stepped up and linked his tablet to the holo-projector at the center of the table. Numbers and schematics danced in the air before him.
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