by P. K. Lentz
I understand this decision disregards the safety of our passengers, but I can’t justify passing up an opportunity of this magnitude. If the odds of our encounter with Beshaan were astronomical, then I don’t think there’s a word to describe the unlikelihood of what’s happened now. --MK
***
“That’ll do it,” Ren said dispiritedly, withdrawing her hands from the console. “We sacrifice sixty percent of our speed for two hundred hours within flyer range of the object. It’s the best trade we’ll get.” She unbuckled her seat restraints and left her station. “I’m not feeling well. I’ll be in my berth if you need me.”
Kearn gave a bare nod as she exited. He had yet to follow Lisset’s advice and make amends with Ren, and so their relationship remained cold and awkward. Now it seemed too late, and at any rate the artifact provided yet another convenient distraction.
‘Artifact’ was how he thought of the object, even though no one was ready to say it aloud. But if that’s what this really was--some alien construct, proof of intelligent non-human life--then Halo’s voyage, and even his own name, would become the stuff of legend. Who cares that the discovery had occurred only by strange accident?
The course Ren had plotted took Halo through more than one full orbit of L155 before their scheduled rendezvous with the object in eight ship-months. There wasn’t much to do then but return to hibe.
***
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
LOG: LUCIFER’S HALO
Beshaan interception +598,154h
We’ve begun our initial approach. While we were in hibe Halo was busy launching probes. The analyses remain inconclusive, but the visuals have stunned us all. The object is clearly artificial. Constructed, yet not by human hands. By what, then? That question is almost secondary to the mere fact of its existence.
Optimal time for a manned excursion will occur in twenty-eight hours. It’s probably reckless and unnecessary to send down human explorers at all, but nothing in this universe could keep me away. --MK
***
Kearn spent the last two pre-launch hours checking and rechecking equipment and supplies aboard the shuttle. With tolerances already so low after Halo’s first brush with disaster, there was scant room for human error on this expedition. Loaded with recording and analysis instrumentation, the small cargo hauler they would take could accommodate a crew of four. Kearn himself would be the first, of course. Second and third would be the chief engineer Castro and his apprentice Isaak, the two most capable of grasping unknown technology and reverse-engineering it if need be to determine the most promising samples for collection.
The fourth would be Serenity. Maybe the decision to take her along was more personal than professional, given that she’d already cracked once under pressure during the Beshaan boarding. But even if leaving her behind was the right decision, he couldn’t do that now without it looking and feeling personal. She was Halo’s most capable pilot, Kearn told himself, and let that be the end of it.
The one assumption inherent to their preparations was that the Artifact was abandoned. That hypothesis seemed a safe enough one. Any advanced intelligent presence would have had ample warning of their presence in-system, yet no attempt to communicate with or intercept them had yet been detected. Halo had even broadcast, to no reply, some simple greetings in many languages over the past several months. And according to sensor logs, the artifact’s behavior hadn’t changed in years, a fact which further lent itself to the conclusion that no one was home.
Of course, if they really were dealing with alien beings, no assumptions were safe. One could not apply human logic and thought patterns to whatever might have created this thing. Maybe its owners just didn’t find Halo worthy of interest.
Or maybe they weren’t very friendly. On that possibility, the expedition would carry no weapons of any sort. Arming the party could only increase the risk of giving offense. And if the hypothetical alien presence did turn out to be hostile, resistance was not likely to prove a realistic option, even with the best weaponry humanity had to offer--a description which decidedly failed to apply to Halo’s available arsenal.
But all this was wild speculation, the stuff of groundsider fantasies. It had no place here.
After Kearn, Ren was the first of the expedition crew to arrive in the shuttle hangar. She was already dressed for void, minus her suit’s helmet.
“I’m glad you’re here,” Kearn said when she drew near.
She eyed him skeptically. He’d given some thought to what he might say, but the preparation failed to make the words come any easier.
“I’m not sure what we’re heading into,” he started. “Maybe it’s dangerous. So just in case anything happens...” He trailed off. “I don’t want us to be like this. Not that I have any easy solutions. Lisset told me how you felt, and--”
“She came to you?” Ren cut in. “That’s news to me.”
Kearn dismissed her surprise. “It’s okay. She’s right, I was too harsh, and I’m sorry. I don’t really know how to solve this, but I hope that when we come back we can talk. Like adults.”
Serenity looked dubious, almost defensive, as she considered his offer. Finally she nodded dignified approval. “I appreciate it,” she said coolly, and breezed past him into the shuttle.
Kearn watched her go, pleasantly surprised at how easily the encounter had gone. Lisset’s talk and his own experience of Ren’s character had led him to expect a less subtle reaction. Perhaps, for better or worse, Ren had changed. Probably for the better. In any case, what counted now was that they be able to look one another in the eye while spending the next two hundred hours in close quarters.
Castro and Isaak arrived shortly thereafter and ran some final pre-launch checks on the boxy cargo hauler. Then the crew of four boarded, and the mission was prepped for launch.
“All systems optimal, engines primed, course set,” Kearn confirmed from his station. “We’re go.”
“You’re all clear,” came the reply from Lady’s bridge crew. “Good luck, and keep in touch.”
The hangar door slid back on a tranquil starscape. Looking out into the unknown on the shuttle’s viewscreens, Kearn felt his first glimmer of real worry. If the worst happened and this flyer failed to return, Halo would continue on its programmed course back into human space. In that event, if they weren’t killed outright on the Artifact, the four in this cockpit would live out the remainder of their extremely brief lives here in the cold light of an alien star.
An ugly fate, but hardly enough to scare him off. What fear Kearn could not dismiss, he swallowed as the tiny cargo hauler cast out from Halo’s black belly.
***
It was a long, silent ride before the hauler began its descent toward the artifact, a dull grey planetoid some thousand kilometers in diameter. Its surface had proven completely opaque to Halo’s probes, which meant nothing could be learned of its interior, assuming it had one.
Ren decelerated and took them on their first close pass. The view of the satellite’s surface thus achieved would not have been terribly inspiring but for the simple fact of its construction by alien hands. If hands they had. What little visible light reflected off the sphere’s dull surface revealed an array of geometric structures, mostly squat cylinders and shapes like decapitated pyramids. Around and between those structures flowed a network of green lines, reminding more of veins or rivers than artificial seams. The overall effect, in Kearn’s mind, was rather haphazard and ugly.
“The Pit should be on our horizon in ninety seconds,” Kearn advised, consulting a map compiled from Halo’s probe data.
The Pit, as they called it, was a gaping circular hole, or rather more of an effect, at one fixed location on the planetoid’s surface. The feature baffled scans by trapping or absorbing any and all electromagnetic signals directed at it. Probes that were sent into it registered no physical impact, but rather just ceased transmission on crossing the threshold. This was the planetoid’s only truly distinctive feature, so natura
lly they were drawn to it. It remained only to hope that the thing was more front door than hungry maw.
“One minute,” Kearn counted down. “Ren, you ready to take us in?”
“Ready as I will be. Hold on.”
The Pit came into view as a dark ellipse on the curved horizon. It grew steadily wider as the flyer maintained a tangential course, gaining altitude over the sphere’s surface. Inertial forces tugged the on crew in their seat restraints as Ren altered course by eighty-five degrees over twenty seconds.
Completion of the maneuver left the hauler aligned directly on the black, featureless Pit.
“Heading in,” Kearn transmitted back to Halo. “We may be out of touch for a while.”
What he meant, of course, was that they had no idea what might happen next.
The Pit drew nearer, filling the hauler’s forward view with a widening ring of impenetrable black void at the floor of a shallow crater. With sheer grey walls rising to greet and engulf them, Kearn’s survival instinct begged him to call off the dive.
“If this ends abruptly,” he said with eyes riveted on the Pit, “it’s been great knowing you all.”
Passing the crater’s lip, the craft was swallowed by darkness. After a few anxious heartbeats in which he failed to meet a catastrophic end, Kearn recovered his wits enough to study his instrument displays.
“I’m receiving signals from the lost probes,” he reported. That confirmed the assessment, or rather the guess, that the Pit served as something of a one-way door. “We’re inside. I just hope it lets us out when--”
Suddenly a pale greenish light flooded the cabin, leaving the thought unfinished. Ahead lay a succession of glowing rings roughly equal in circumference to the Pit entrance behind them. A tunnel. The darkness through which they’d passed was merely a veil, pierced without noticeable effect.
Ren adjusted course to avoid skimming the tunnel wall and set the hauler on the long, straight course described by the glowing green rings. Kearn launched a beacon back up the shaft to let Halo know they’d survived, on the chance it might be allowed to exit. That done, he turned to the incoming data from the lost probes.
“This shaft ends thirty kilometers ahead in an open chamber,” he said.
The hauler progressed through ring after ring. None of the four souls in its cabin spoke words of wonder or awe. Words seemed unnecessary, even futile.
They passed through the final ring to emerge into a cavernous chamber filled with the same greenish light as the shaft. Walls arced away in all directions. The shape of the chamber suggested that the planetoid was not completely hollow, but rather at least one sphere nested within another. Their flyer currently occupied a space between two layers. Spindly bridges or struts connected the outer ‘crust’ to a smaller, spherical ‘core’ at regular intervals like useless, threadlike spokes on a monolithic wheel.
As Serenity decelerated, Kearn scanned the immense chamber for any sort of activity. He found none. What did manage to draw his attention, though, was an assortment of irregular shapes that dotted the face of the outer shell for as far as was visible in every direction.
Hesitant to speak any more than needed in this place where human voices did not belong, he motioned to Ren to steer closer to one wall. The hauler veered toward the concave outer shell. With that closer view, it became clearer that the irregular shapes were not part of the artifact but rather something attached to it. Strange oblong objects tethered to slender towers.
“Ships...” Kearn concluded breathlessly.
His mind hovered somewhere between excitement and fright--excitement at the enormity of this discovery and fright at the prospect of meeting its owners.
Well, the aliens would be spacers, right? They already had something in common.
But as the flyer continued along its course Kearn sensed more and more that the Artifact was deserted, and had been for quite some time. It came as a relief. However great the honor of being among the first humans to encounter an alien life form--assuming said life form had no desire to kill, imprison, experiment upon or otherwise torment its hapless visitors--it seemed quite a bit safer and more profitable to explore an empty relic. Someone else could have the honor and the risk of first contact, if ever that came.
For now Kearn was satisfied to study the wide curving field of what he assumed to be alien starships. Admittedly, that assumption owed more to instinct and context than to any similarity the craft bore to human equivalents. Though they varied greatly in size, all the alien vessels followed the same essential blueprint of a tapering cone with a hemispherical base. The design conveyed a certain organic quality, an impression that each had been molded as a single whole rather than assembled from parts. A sleek, metallic root vegetable was the unlikely comparison they conjured in Kearn’s mind.
Or perhaps the comparison was not unlikely. He reminded himself again of the dangers of assumption. Maybe humans actually did share the universe with starfaring root vegetables.
Serenity noted in apparent confusion, “I don’t have to correct course to hug the wall. The central sphere exerts gravitational force. Far too much for its apparent mass. We’re orbiting it.”
Her voice snapped Kearn out of a mesmerized stare. “We’ll fly a few full circuits of the place,” he announced. “If no one stops us to say hello, then we’ll...dock.”
Two full orbits of the Artifact’s core passed quickly, with no apparent sign of life. The initial sense of awe began to wear off, replaced by intense curiosity.
“As bad as it sounds, this is now a scavenger mission,” Kearn instructed his crew. “Castro, Isaak, get inside one of those ships and get me an engine. If it’s feasible I’d even like to bring one of the smaller vessels back to Halo intact. Ren and I will try to access the interior of this station.”
With the plan thus set, they approached a relatively dense cluster of alien craft and secured the cargo hauler with grapples to an empty docking spire. All four boarders checked equipment, suit seals and maneuvering harnesses before passing through the hauler’s airlock into the vast unknown beyond.
First priority was to gain the engineers access to an alien craft, a seemingly simple task that proved nothing of the sort. All of them together spent their first twenty minutes in the alien environment scouring the hull of one vessel from bow to stern without finding a single hatch. Isaak located some all-but-invisible seams, but even these failed to yield to any pressure they could exert. There were no obvious locks or keypads, nor sensors for scanning of thumb or retina or whatever analogous parts its alien crew might possess.
“My guess is an EM key,” Castro lamented. “But who knows.”
“Can we cut the hull?” Kearn asked.
“We may have no alternative, but somehow I think no means no on these carrots.” The engineer cast a glance down the sheer, curved surface of the Artifact’s shell, dotted at more or less regular intervals with docked vessels. “Should be no more than a few minutes of EVA between each berth. We might find one unlocked.”
“Try it,” Kearn agreed. “If you have no luck by number ten, just start cutting. Record your every move and check in by comm at five minute intervals.”
The two engineers set off along the circumference while Kearn and Ren began an easy ascent to the base of the docking spire. Half-expecting more locked doors, Kearn was pleasantly surprised--after an initial fright--when a circular marking on the surface ahead of them emitted a green glow as they approached. A solid two-meter wide chunk of wall described by the circle first grew translucent, then faded altogether from view.
Beyond them lay a green-lit chamber. Ren wordlessly overtook Kearn with a burst of forward momentum and sailed feet first through the hatch.
“After you,” Kearn said belatedly, following her in.
Past the portal was the intersection of two wide tubular hallways that ran perpendicular to one another. Assuming each docking spire on the shell’s inner circumference marked a similar crossroads, the entire outer sphere was a latt
ice of tunnels. Like everything else in this place, the corridors were lit by a faint green glow.
“Pretty adamant about their color scheme,” Kearn joked.
Ren replied humorlessly, “I’m sure they knew what they were doing.”
Letting that matter drop, Kearn consulted his suit display. “There’s atmosphere in here,” he reported. “But none we can use. It would leave a bad taste in your mouth for all of the ten seconds you lived.”
“I’ll keep that in mind. Where do we go from here?”
If such a gesture weren’t meaningless in a v-suit, Kearn might have shrugged. “Forward,” he said.
Planting a locator beacon at the now-vanished hatchway, he selected one of the two passages arbitrarily and started down it. The tunnel’s walls were inscribed with more circles like the one through which they’d entered. If these were in fact more doors, they failed to open obligingly upon approach. Private, perhaps?
Ten minutes later, satisfied that nothing lay ahead but more of the same, Kearn called a halt to take a closer look at one of the circular markings.
“Any ideas?” he asked Ren as she drew even with him.
No sooner did he speak the words than the area of wall within the circle began to glow, then, like the first, vanish.
Suppressing his natural reaction, which if not fear was its close cousin, Kearn peered into the newly revealed chamber.
The room was less featureless than what they’d seen so far. Its walls were irregularly shaped and lined with bright lights and symbols in various shades of green. No movement was visible inside, at least not from their vantage point in the corridor.
“You don’t think that was an invitation, do you?” Kearn remarked.
Ren studied the room cautiously. “I think it opened when it realized we weren’t just passing by.”
With a deep breath Kearn crept forward through the portal. Ren followed. They were relieved to find that the room was indeed vacant, at least according to their human senses. The rows of lights arrayed on the curved walls in clearly meaningful designs gave the unmistakable impression of technology. Arrangements of metal bars set into depressions on the floor might have been some alien equivalent of chairs.
