“A what?”
“It has 240 sides.”
“It’s an odd coincidence,” he said.
“What is?”
“We know the clouds rain down fire and brimstone on anything that has right angles.”
“Okay.”
Terry pointed an index finger at the image on the screen. “This thing is loaded with right angles. That’s what it is: An oversize complex of right angles.”
They looked at one another. “Is it designed to be a target?” Jane asked. “Or are the clouds intended specifically to kill these things?”
“IT IS UNDER power, ” said Bill. “There’s only a trace, but we’re getting an electronic signature.” It was rotating. The spines caught and manipulated light from the Bumblebee. “Once every seven minutes and twelve seconds,” Bill continued helpfully.
They had drawn within a hundred meters of the object. The spines turned slowly past them. Bill switched on the navigation lights so they could see better. Terry was reminded of the puzzles he used to do as a boy, enter here, find your way through the labyrinth, come out over there.
There were no sharp points anywhere. The tops of all the spines were flat. Ninety degrees.
Jane submitted a report to Serenity. While she talked, Terry studied the object. It had no thrusters, no visible communication devices, no sign of a hatch. It had enough dents and chips to suggest it was old. A couple of the spines had been broken off. Otherwise, the surface was smooth, as if it had come out of a mold. “Bill,” he said, “train the lights into the notches. Let’s see what it looks like down there.”
It was a long way. No central surface was visible; the spines seemed simply to rise out of each other. Jane took them in almost close enough to touch.
The Quagmor was dwarfed.
“Still no reaction of any kind, Bill?”
“Negative, Terry.”
They approached the top of one of the spines. It was rectangular, about the dimensions of a basketball court, perfectly smooth save for a couple of chunks gouged out by collisions. The Quagmor passed over it, the ship’s navigation lights sliding across the surface, over the edge and into a chasm. Then he was looking down the slanted side until the lights lost themselves in the depths, to reappear moments later coming back up another wall, wider and shorter and angled differently.
“Bill,” he asked, “do you see any more of these things in the neighborhood?”
“Negative. I haven’t been able to do a complete sweep, but I do not see anything else.”
Jane finished recording and sent her message on to Serenity. Then she got up and stood beside him, her hand on his shoulder. “I’ve always assumed the universe made sense, Terry,” she said. “I’m beginning to wonder.”
“I’ve been looking for a hatch.”
“See anything?”
“Nope.”
“Just as well. I don’t think I’d want to go calling. Maybe we should try talking to it.”
“You serious? From the looks of it, there hasn’t been anything alive in there for the last few million years.”
“That’s an interesting estimate. It’s derived from—?”
“It looks old.”
“Good. In the end, I can always count on you to fall back on hardheaded logic.” Her eyes sparkled. “You know, it might be programmed to respond to a signal.”
“It’s a thought.” He swung around in his chair and gazed up at the AI’s image. “Bill, we’ll use the multichannel. Audio only.”
“Ready when you are, Terry. The circuit is open.”
“Okay.” He leaned forward, feeling foolish, and allowed a glib tone to creep into his voice. “Hello out there. Is anybody home?”
Another spine rotated past.
“Hello. This is us out here talking to you over there.” He looked at Jane. “Why are you laughing?”
“I was just thinking how you’d react if somebody answered.”
He hadn’t even considered the possibility. “We getting anything, Bill?”
“There is no response. No reaction of any kind.”
He stayed with it a few minutes before giving up. The hedgehog sparkled and glowed in the lights of the Quagmor. His own interstellar artifact. “Going to have to break in,” he said.
She shook her head. “Not a good idea. Serenity will have the information in a few hours, and they’ll be sending somebody right out. Let’s wait for them.”
There was no way he was going to be sitting on his rear end when they got there, and have to confess he didn’t know any more than he and Jane put in the report. “I want to see what’s inside.”
“We don’t know what it is.”
“That’s why I’d like to see the inside.”
“Let’s let the experts do it.”
“You know any experts on interstellar artifacts? Jane, nobody knows anything about this stuff. Nobody’s better qualified to open it than you and I.”
She made a face. Don’t like the idea. Not a good move. “You know,” she said, transparently trying to change the subject, “it’s one of the loveliest things I’ve ever seen.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No. I mean it.”
“Jane, it has all the lines of a porcupine.”
“No.” She was looking past him, out the viewport at the bizarre landscape passing by. “It’s a rhombi-whatever. It’s magnificent.” She turned a sympathetic smile on him. “You really don’t see it, do you?”
“No.” Terry followed her gaze, watched the shadows from the navigation lights creep up, down, and across the artifact’s planes and angles. “I don’t like the clouds. And I don’t like these things.” He got out of his chair and headed for the storage locker. “You want to come along?”
THEY STRAPPED ON e-suits, which would project a Flickinger field around them, protecting them from the void. The field was flexible, molded to the body except for a hard shell that arced over the face, providing breathing space.
They went down to the launch bay, picked up laser cutters and air tanks, and turned on the suits. While the bay depressurized, they did a radio check and strapped on wristlamps.
There was no launch vehicle in the bay, but it didn’t matter because it wouldn’t have been useful anyhow in the current situation. They pulled go-packs over their shoulders, and Terry hung an imager around his neck. “Bill,” he said, “I’ll record everything. Transmit live to Serenity.”
“Do you really think it’s that dangerous, Terry? Maybe we should reconsider what we’re doing,” said Bill.
“Just a precaution,” he said.
Bill opened the airlock and admonished them to be careful.
They had left Serenity seven months earlier and had spent the entire time studying the omega. It had a numerical designation, as all the clouds did. But they’d gotten into the habit of referring to this one as George. George was apparently a onetime boyfriend of Jane’s, although she refused to provide details. But it amused her to ridicule him. The cloud, she’d said, was inflexible, windy, and took up a lot of space. And it kept coming. No matter what you said or did, it kept coming.
George hung ominously in the background as Terry picked out a spine and directed Bill to match rotation with it, so that it became a stable fixture a few meters from the airlock.
The Quagmor, which was affectionately referred to by almost everyone as the Quagmire, was the first research vessel designed specifically to operate near the clouds without fear of drawing the lightning. Unlike the polygon object it was inspecting, it had no right angles. The ship’s hull, her engine mounts, her antennas, sensing, and navigation equipment, everything, was curved.
They’d even penetrated George’s surface mists, gone a few hundred meters into the cloud, taken samples, and tried to listen for the heart of the beast. That was a joke between them, a reaction to the insistence of one school of thought that the clouds were alive. It was not a view that Terry took seriously. Yet plunging into it had given him the eerie sensation that ther
e might be some truth to the notion. It was a view easily dismissed when they’d emerged. Like laughing at ghosts when the sun was high.
“Ready?” asked Jane.
“All set.” He was standing at the edge of the airlock trying to decide on a trajectory. This was the first time they’d been outside the ship on this run, except for a brief repair job on the forward sensor pods; Terry nevertheless had long experience working in the void. “There,” he said, pointing.
One of the higher spines. Nice broad top for them to land on. Easy spot to start. Jane shook her head, signifying that she’d done dumber things but was having trouble remembering when. They exchanged looks that were supposed to register confidence, and he pushed out of the lock, floated across the few meters of space that separated the ship and the spine, and touched down on his target. But the stone surface was slippery, slippery even for the grip shoes, and momentum carried him forward. He slid off the edge, blipped the go-pack, did a 360, and came down smoothly atop the crest.
“Nice maneuver, Flash,” said Jane.
“Be careful,” he said.
She floated over and drifted gently onto the surface, letting him haul her down. “It’s all technique,” she said.
Terry rapped on the stone with the handle of the cutter. “Feels solid,” he said. “See any way in?”
She shook her head. No.
He looked into the canyon. Smooth rock all the way down, until the beam faded out. The spine widened as it descended. It looked as if they all did.
“Shall we see what’s below?” he asked.
She was wearing a dark green pullover and light gray slacks. A bit dressy for the work. “Sure,” she said. “Lead the way.”
He stepped into the chasm and used the go-pack to start down. Jane followed, and they descended slowly, examining the sheer wall as they went.
Plain rock. Smoother than on the roof, because the lower areas took fewer hits. But there was nothing exceptional, all the way to the bottom.
BILL MANEUVERED THE Quagmire directly overhead, leaving the spotlights off because they would have been a distraction. But the navigation lights were on.
There was nothing in Terry’s experience to which he could compare the place. The spines did indeed grow out of one another. There was no flat or curved surface at the center of the object that could have been described as housing the core. It was dark, surreal, the Quagmire no more than a few lights overhead, and the rest of the world walled out.
Terry felt light-headed. Even in the vacuum, he was accustomed to having a flat space underfoot, a moonscape, a ship’s hull, something. Something to relate to. Here, there was no up or down, and everything was at an angle. “You okay?” she asked.
“I’m fine,” he said.
He took the cutter out of his harness. “There’s a chance,” he said, “that this thing is under pressure. I’m going to cut a narrow hole to find out. But stand clear anyhow. Just to be safe.”
She nodded and backed off a few meters. Told him to be careful. Not to stand in front of it.
Terry grinned. How could he make the cut standing over to one side? He pressed the activator and watched the amber lamp come on, felt the unit vibrate as it powered up. “Big moment,” he said. The lamp turned a bright crimson. He punched the button, and a long red beam of light blinked on. He touched it to the wall.
It cut in. He knew not to lean on it, but simply held it steady while it went deeper.
Jane advanced a few steps. “How’s it going?”
He was about to suggest she try a little patience when it broke through. “Bingo,” he said.
Somewhere deep in the hedgehog, he sensed movement, as if an engine had started. Then the ground murmured. It trembled. Rose. Shook violently. He told Jane to get out, for God’s sake get out, and he stabbed at the go-pack and the thrusters ignited and began to take him up.
And the world went dark.
ARCHIVE
Sky, we lost contact with the Quagmire moments ago. Divert. Find out what happened. Render assistance. Report as soon as you have something.
— Audrey D’Allesandro
Hyperlight transmission to the Patrick Heffernan
chapter 3
Arlington.
Monday, February 24.
THE CHINDI HAD finally begun giving up its secrets. The gigantic alien starship, apparently fully automated, continued its serene slower-than-light voyage toward a class-F star whose catalog number Hutch could never remember. It had taken a major effort, because of its velocity, to get researchers on board. But the Academy had begun to get a good look at its contents, artifacts from hundreds of cultures. And live visual recordings over a span of tens of thousands of years. The ship itself was thought to be more than a quarter million years old.
Its pictures of lost civilizations were opening up whole new areas of knowledge. The vast distances that separated sentient species tended to create the illusion that civilizations were extremely rare. It now appeared they were simply scattered, in time and in space. And, disconcertingly, they did not seem to last long.
They were sometimes suicidal. They were often destroyed by economic, political, or religious fanaticisms; by the selfishness and corruption of leaders; by an inability to stop ever-more-deadly wars. They sometimes simply behaved in stupid ways. Some that had avoided the more obvious pitfalls were swept away by something that should not have been there: the clouds.
Hutch had always felt a special kinship with the Monument-Makers, who’d roamed this section of the galaxy for thousands of years, who’d tried to save others from the omegas. She had been to their home world, and had seen the remnants of a race reduced to savagery, unaware of their proud history. They’d been on her mind recently because the chindi had, a week ago, provided a record of another demolished culture. She’d sat during the course of a bleak wintry day looking at pictures of smashed buildings and ruined cities. And she’d recognized some of the images. It was the home of the Hawks, the race that had come to the rescue centuries ago on Deepsix when the inhabitants of that unlucky world had faced a brutal ice age.
The images haunted her, the broken columns, the brave symbols scrolled across monuments and public buildings, the overgrown roads, the shattered towers, the cities given over to forest. And perhaps most compelling, the starship found adrift in a solar orbit.
The Hawks and the Monument-Makers. And the human race. It was hard not to dwell on what might have been, had they been allowed to sit down together, to pool their knowledge and their speculations. To cooperate for the general good. To become allies in the great adventure.
As has happened with the Monument-Makers, a few individual Hawks had survived. But their civilization was gone. Their racial memory consisted only of a cycle of myths.
Kellie Collier had been there, had been first to board the Hawk starship, and had complained later to Hutch about the cost imposed by the existence of the clouds. There had been tears in her eyes when she described what she’d seen.
KELLIE AND THE broken cities and the clouds were never far from Hutch’s mind. The chilling possibility that they were about to experience another wipeout had kept her awake these last two nights. It would be the most painful of ironies if they had finally found a living civilization, someone other than the Noks, that they could actually talk to, just in time to say good-bye.
The cloud in question was at a substantial distance, more than thirty-one hundred light-years. Nine months away. The Bill Jenkins was enroute, diverted from its survey mission by the station at Broadside. But they’d need a month to get there. Add another week for the report to reach her. It would be April before she knew whether she had a problem.
Prudence, and experience, suggested she expect the worst.
She arrived at the Academy bleary-eyed and in a foul mood. She’d talked it over at home with Tor, but all he could think of was to suggest she ease the pressure on herself by quitting. We can live comfortably on my income, he’d suggested. He was a commercial artist, and t
he money was decent, although they weren’t going to wind up with a chalet in the Rockies and a beach home on Sea Island.
She needed to talk to somebody. The commissioner wasn’t the right person either, so she put in a call to Harold as soon as she arrived at her desk. He wasn’t in yet, his watch officer explained, but they would contact him. Five minutes later he was on the circuit. Just leaving home.
“Harold,” she asked, “have you had breakfast yet?”
“No,” he said. “I usually eat in the Canteen.”
“How about eating with me this morning? My treat.”
“Is there a problem?” he asked cautiously.
“I need your advice.”
“Okay. What did you have in mind?”
“Meet me at Cleary’s,” she said. “Twenty minutes okay?”
CLEARY’S WAS THE small, posh coffee shop overlooking the Refuge, the alien habitat that had been hauled in from the Twins and reconstructed on a platform at the edge of the Potomac in Pentagon Park. The sun was warm and bright, and the sky full of lazy clouds. When Harold walked in, Hutch was sitting in a corner booth, stirring coffee and staring out the window, her mind gone for a gallop. She didn’t see him until he slid in across from her.
“This is a pleasant surprise, Priscilla.” He smiled shyly.
She knew that she intimidated him, but didn’t know why. She’d noticed it years before when she’d provided transportation for him on a couple of occasions. It didn’t seem to be all women, just her. “It’s always good to get away for a bit,” she said. She asked him a few questions about Weatherman, and the tewks, to put him at ease.
Cleary’s used human waiters. A young woman brought more coffee, and some orange juice.
“So what did you actually want to talk to me about?” he asked.
She told him about the report from Broadside that a cloud was changing course. Heading insystem.
His eyes dropped to the table. “That’s unsettling.” He picked up his spoon, fiddled with it, put it back down, gazed out at the Potomac. “Well,” he said finally, “with any kind of luck, it’ll be a false alarm.”
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