NINE
“This was definitely not built by human hands,” said Iarrey six hours later, looking at a holographic model of the artifact. “The technology used to create that … that …”
“Let’s called it a station,” Bourne suggested.
“I don’t think it’s a station, Mr. Bourne,” the first officer argued. “More likely a classic FTL spaceship.”
“Where does your certainty come from?” Morrisey asked.
“It’s not certainty, but a conclusion based on the comparative analysis. I think what we’re looking at is an element of a larger vessel. It was the only survivor of a crash which must have taken place here around fifty thousand years ago.”
The captain whistled and leaned back in his chair.
“Fifty thousand years ago? Are you sure, First Officer?”
“Annataly and I checked it three times on each of the samples we’d taken. The results were similar each time, ranging from forty thousand nine hundred to fifty thousand fifty years. That’s standard error of measurement.”
“If I’ve understood correctly, you’re talking about that junk …” The captain waved an arm, putting his hand through the holographic image of the disc surrounding the artifact.
“According to our findings, a significant part of those remains belonged to the vessel we’re interested in. We spotted pieces whose appearance suggests they come from identical sheathing to this.” He pointed at the central element. “It was most probably an external propulsion module. In the lower part of the object, if we consider the surface around which the fragments are moving as a level plane, we’ve only found cavities and a whole lot of protruding and apparently melted elements. Similar technology was used in pioneer times of space conquest, before the discovery of FTL drive.”
Iarrey changed the holo. This time, the pear-shaped artifact was displayed horizontally, and a long grille extended from its narrower end, on which there was the dome of a huge engine.
“Of course it didn’t necessarily look like that, I used models similar to the ones known from our history; however, I think that it might have looked something like that. The main engines, reactors, and fuel tanks were separated from the main hull, that’s for sure. The radiation is too high for it to be an accident.”
“And what’s that cavity?” Morrisey asked, pointing at the place where the projected girders emerged from the hull.
“No idea.”
A silence fell. They all looked at the slowly revolving hologram.
“So … do we go in by ourselves, or report it first?” Bourne asked timidly.
“Go in?” repeated Iarrey, clearly astonished by the very idea. “What do you mean, go in?”
“Just like we do with every wreck,” the captain responded.
“It’s the first trace of an alien civilization we’ve ever come across, and you want to go right ahead and loot it?” the first officer dug his heels in.
“Who said anything about looting?” Morrisey bridled. “We just want to examine it thoroughly.”
“Yeah, right!”
“You know very well, Iarrey,” the captain continued, “that if we hand it over we’ll never find out what was inside. For the next hundred and fifty years information about the discovery will be more secret than the identities of the joint chiefs of staff. Our artifact will simply disappear, vanish into space. And you’ll be given the order to keep your mouth shut till you die, or else …”
His meaningful gesture left no doubt that High Command knew how to keep its secrets secret. “If I am to be muzzled for the rest of my life I want to know why, at least. I’d also like to have some sort of souvenir, evidence that we were the first people to discover a trace of an alien civilization.”
“Shall we vote?” Annataly decided to put an end to the debate.
“I’m in favor,” Bourne volunteered.
“Of going onboard, reporting the discovery, or voting?” Morrisey asked. “Could you express yourself clearly just this once?”
“I’m for going onboard,” the lieutenant stated.
“Me, too,” the navigator supported him without hesitation.
“Mr. Iarrey?” Morrisey looked at the first officer expectantly.
“I don’t think it’s a good idea—” Heraclesteban began.
“I’m not asking about the quality of the idea,” the captain interrupted him, “just if you’re buying in.”
“I’m against going onboard. God knows what—”
Morrisey interrupted him again.
“Nike?”
“I …” the cadet stammered, recalling the scene from the battleship. “I’m with the First Officer. It’s not our business … We’d better stick to the rules.”
“So it’s a draw.” Morrisey stood up. “As the commanding officer I have the right to the deciding vote. And I am telling you: whatever might happen, we’re going onto that … that … whatever it is.”
“I wonder how.” The first officer pointed at the holographic image of the alien ship. “Can you see any hatches? And what do we do about the force field?”
“We?” Nike smiled to himself. Iarrey who had been outvoted immediately became a servile cog in Morrisey’s machine.
“The force field’s a piece of cake,” Annataly said. “Whatever was powering it must be almost dead by now. We’ll just smash into that cob a couple of times with a broadband laser and it ought to dissipate it for good.”
“And what if it’s an absorptive field?” Nike asked.
“Absorptive, you say …” The navigator stopped to think. “Who the hell knows? For all I know, it may be an absorptive field, considering that after thousands of years their ship still has an active force field. Of course, if it is an absorptive field, there’s no point shooting, we’d only be strengthening it. It’s a huge vessel, several times bigger than our most powerful battleships. Even if we were to use all the firepower we possess, we wouldn’t trouble her potential defense systems.”
Annataly was silent for a moment.
“All I’ve just said is strictly hypothetical, because I don’t have a clue how powerful that force field is and how it works,” she added quickly, seeing the look on their faces.
“The safest thing to do would be to use the trash orbiting it,” Iarrey butted in when she had finished. “Constant bombardment ought to exhaust the energy of the deflectors pretty quickly, whatever their type. According to my calculations, right now there are ten collisions with the force field every standard hour. If we go into the very center of the belt at full power, we could make that figure increase even a hundredfold—”
“But that would mean unleashing a shitstorm again,” Morrisey cut in just to keep his first officer from ever fully expressing an opinion. “The belt would become unstable …”
“… which won’t be a problem if we set up the smallest collapsar at the edge of the zone. I can steer it manually, decreasing and increasing the power of the gravitron depending on what we need and how the situation develops,” Iarrey gave as good as he got. “I can also program the objects leaving the zone to be intercepted. In less than six hours we’ll be rid of most of the trash surrounding the artifact. Our lasers will easily deal with the rest.”
“But what about getting inside?” Nike asked.
“We’ll have a good look,” Bourne calmed him, “and if we don’t find anything, you ought to know that a C4 robot only needs thirty minutes to get through the reactive sheathing of a modern battleship.”
Morrisey lounged in his chair, folded his hands behind his head, and closed his eyes.
“I doubt whether that something is more resistant. And even if it is, we aren’t short of time.”
“Except we’ll leave tracks behind us,” Heraclesteban observed.
“I have faith in you, First Officer. I’m certain you’ll think of something.”
“But it might not go down too well with the High Command experts, particularly considering that it’s our first contact with Aliens.”
“Right, it could be a serious problem,” the captain said glumly. “We haven’t thought about what top brass might say.”
“If they find out we inspected the artifact we’ll end up in quarantine,” Bourne murmured. “Eternal quarantine … We have to proceed with extreme caution.”
The captain was visibly dejected.
“If we don’t find a way to make a noninvasive entry, we’ll have to forget it.”
“There only remains the question of those in sleep.” Bourne interjected. “What do we do with them?”
“Are you talking about the numbers?” Morrisey snorted contemptuously. “Let’s leave them in their little coffins. We don’t need witnesses. The holy man can also keep on snoring for a while. Unless you want to administer a ceremonial baptism to our Aliens.”
Up close, the alien ship was oppressively large: pear-shaped, covered in growths, and with a perimeter of more than three thousand five hundred yards at its widest point. The Nomad—hanging at a distance, which allowed its connecting corridor to be spread out—seemed like a fly about to alight on a cow’s backside, as Morrisey had colorfully described it a moment earlier.
Iarrey’s plan turned out to be perfect. It took less than six hours to neutralize the force field, and another six to clear the surroundings of flotsam. At sixteen hundred according to ship’s time, they went eyeball to eyeball with the greatest mystery and the most momentous discovery of their lives.
Bearing in mind Iarrey’s words of warning, the captain did not immediately order the penetration of the hull, but first sent all the available robots to search the wreck’s surface thoroughly for a hidden hatch or any other point of entry. The operation was not yielding any results; the ship’s hull seemed a genuine monolith.
Hour after hour the entire crew pored over their screens, analyzing the data being sent by the robots. Finally, when they had lost hope, and Morrisey had begun to prepare a report for High Command, something bizarre happened. One of the symmetrically aligned domes on the upper part of the hull became transparent. The rough surface first went cloudy, and then literally in a few seconds grew as transparent as the purest crystallite. They could see it thanks to the probes’ cameras.
For fifteen minutes they were inspecting the rest of the ship, but nothing out of the ordinary occurred. The robots painstakingly continued to search other parts of the alien craft’s rough sheathing, but the crew gathered on the Nomad’s bridge lost interest in their work.
The transparent dome didn’t reveal anything specific; the only thing that could be seen beneath it was a lustrous surface as flat as a tabletop, which might have been a wall or the floor, depending on one’s point of view. There were no marks on it whatsoever; nothing apart from uniform wearisome greyness.
“Hm …” Iarrey murmured, tapping more commands into the computer. “I think our little ship is up to something … If you ask me, that glowing surface is a sort of a solar collector. We’ve exhausted the ship’s energy reserves and someone, or something, wants to replenish them.”
“Don’t be ridiculous!” Bourne waved his hand disdainfully. “A spaceship using solar collectors? Not quite the required output.”
“Really?” Heraclesteban became indignant. “Mr. Bourne, the well-known expert in alien technology, knows best as usual. Their output may be hundreds of times greater than ours.”
“Sure …”
“Have you read the instructions for those collectors? Is that why you’re so certain?” Iarrey snapped back. “They were traveling in space when Humankind was still using flints to start a fire. It just so happens that the ship’s dome is aimed at the brightest point in the system. Straight at the central star.”
Bourne shrugged and went back to his duties.
“That would explain how the force field endured so long,” Annataly said.
“I don’t agree,” Heraclesteban retorted at once. “We’re too far from the central star for this method to work, even if the efficiency of those cells is a thousand times greater than ours. I’d say we seriously depleted the reserves of energy, which that something—for reasons unknown to us—needs very much. That explains the dramatic and ineffective attempt—”
“That’s all well and good, First Officer,” Morrisey said, turning around in his chair. “But what the hell does it mean?”
“In my opinion the core of the ship’s central section, or whatever they used there to generate power, is still active. At least partially. Apparently, no living creature is in control, for a sentient being would know that such attempts are useless. A machine doesn’t think; it just implements the most effective procedure needed to carry out its task. One by one, according to priorities and instructions …”
“Meaning?” the captain asked again.
“What do you think I am, an Alien?” Iarrey laughed. “I don’t have a clue, but let’s wait, something’s sure to happen.”