In thirteen years, she had lost it badly. Now all she could do was brazen her way through and hope the likes of Pagis wouldn’t spot the mile-wide dropouts in her understanding.
“Radar?” Svetlana asked. “Seeing anything?”
“Not sure,” Pagis said, chewing on the tip of some strands of hair she had tugged into her mouth. “Something’s bouncing back at me, but I’m not sure if I believe what I’m seeing.”
“Could be backscatter off the edge of the hole,” Parry commented. “Used to get a lot of —”
“Ain’t backscatter,” Pagis said. “Too far out for that. Too damn faint, as well. Could be a logic ghost, something bouncing around in the overflow buffer… don’t think so, though.”
“How far out?” Svetlana asked.
“Eighty thousand kilometres — just over a quarter of a light-second.”
Once Svetlana would have laughed at such a small distance. It was nothing compared to the operational sphere of Rockhopper, carved up into entire light-hours. But for thirteen years her world had been two hundred kilometres across, and her mind had become accustomed to handling things on that scale. Now it struggled to make the mental adjustment back to the larger universe beyond the Iron Sky.
“We need to see what it is,” Svetlana said. “Take us through. Maybe we’ll have a better view on the other side.”
Pagis looked over her shoulder. “You sure about this?”
“Take us through.”
Pagis nudged the joystick and powered the free-flier up through the hole. The silver edge reflected back the free-flier’s lights, and then suddenly it was out, rising from the hole.
“Hold at one hundred metres,” Svetlana said.
Pagis nodded and brought the machine to a halt again, suspended on a breath of thrust.
“Pan around. Let’s take a look at the hole from the outside.”
Other than the glimpse they’d obtained from the upper surface of the fallen disc, this was their first view of the other side of the Iron Sky. At first glance, there was nothing very surprising about it. The outer side was as smooth and dark as the inside surface, at least as far out as the free-flier’s floodlights were capable of reaching. It raced away in all directions, black and flat as an oil slick, but with its own dull lustre.
“It’s a tiny bit more reflective than the inner surface,” Pagis announced, “but that’s about the only difference. I think I can already see the curvature in the backscatter. We can map it, if you like: there’s enough fuel in the free-flier for a couple of loops.”
“We’ll lose contact with it once it drops over the horizon, won’t we?” Parry said.
“Most likely, but the autopilot should bring it back, provided the inertial compass keeps working.”
“I want to find out where the hell we are first,” Svetlana said. “Are you still seeing that eighty-thousand-klick echo?”
“Still there,” Pagis confirmed, “although that’s only part of it. Now that we’re clear of the hole I’m seeing a spread of return times. There are reflective surfaces a lot further out than eighty thousand klicks — although the bounces are weaker.”
“How far are we talking?”
“Hundreds of thousands of kilometres. Entire light-seconds.”
“Pan the cam around, see if you can pick up anything else now you have a wider field of view.”
“I’m on it,” Pagis said, with a hint of irritation, as if she didn’t need to be told these things. Svetlana buttoned her lip — she was obviously trying too hard.
“Hey,” Parry said, “that looks like… something.”
“Yup. Looks like,” Pagis agreed.
Something was creeping into view as the free-flier changed its angle of study. The featureless orange background was still there, but now there was a kind of wavy line showing up along one side, like a glowing human hair trapped in the optics.
“Can you zoom in on that?” Svetlana asked.
“Sorry, no — didn’t have time to install a zoom platform.”
Svetlana nodded — she understood the pressure Pagis had been under to put the free-flier together. It was a miracle that they had any pictures at all. “Can you pull back, broaden the field of view?”
“Also a no-no, but we can raster scan the whole area — build up a picture in stripes and then stitch them together in flexy memory. It’ll take a little while, though. And we’ll be burning fuel like a bitch.”
“Do it — even if we don’t have enough left to make an orbit. We can always do that later. Right now I’d really like to know where we are.”
* * *
Lately on Janus, things had a habit of taking longer than anyone expected, even when this trend was taken into account. The simple business of making the raster scan and gluing the elements together to produce a single mosaic ought to have been child’s play. But the remaining flexies did not have enough combined memory to handle the image manipulation without some tricky algorithmic sleight of hand, which taxed Pagis’s ingenuity to its limits.
Svetlana knew better than to pressure her, and to avoid the temptation to breathe down her neck, she took a tractor back to Crabtree on the new road, enjoying the mindless pleasure of just driving, hypnotised by the endless flow of the superconducting line. Emily was just out of school that afternoon, so she took her daughter out to visit Wang Zhanmin, who (Emily remembered from the last visit) had promised her a rocking horse. Svetlana half-expected him to have forgotten, but he had it ready when they arrived, gleaming with vivid scarlet paint. Learning to make wood — or at least a close analogue of it — had been one of Wang’s recent breakthroughs, and he was intensely pleased with himself. In recent months the forge vats had been churning out the parts for wooden furniture, ornaments and toys faster than Crabtree could use them. The lab was bursting with these new creations. “I made you this,” Emily said, offering Wang a cardboard tube.
Wang popped the end on the tube and slid out a roll of paper. Svetlana looked over his shoulder. It was a painting of fish, swimming through rocks and fronds. The picture had been rendered with a childlike delight in the application of bright, clashing colours, but also a certain adult fastidiousness in the way the colours were never allowed to merge or blot. The sea was a joyous, saturated turquoise and the striped and mottled fish seemed to float an inch or two closer to the viewer, as if they had been etched on a sheet of glass resting on the background.
“Thank you,“ Wang said, holding the picture to the light so that the paper shone like stained glass. ”Anything to brighten this place up.” He looked at Svetlana and said, under his breath, ”Thank God for the kids.“
“You hear that a lot these days,” she replied quietly.
“I thought it would make you happy,” Emily said.
“It does.” He looked down at the picture again, stretching it between his hands like a scroll. “It’s lovely. Lovely and a little sad, but in a good way. Do you like your rocking horse?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“I’ll make you another one when you’re bigger, but this fellow should do you for now.”
“It’s very kind of you, Uncle Wang,” Svetlana said.
“I’m glad I can make something,” he said, shrugging.
She smiled quickly and looked away, not wanting to acknowledge the unspoken truth that hung between them. Stools and rocking horses were all very well, but no amount of colourful wangwood knickknacks was ever going to make up for the failing flexies.
Svetlana ate a meal with Emily, and then they spoke to Parry on the link to Underhole. Parry asked Emily what she had been doing in school today, and promised he would see her soon. He put on a brave face, but Svetlana could see something there that he did not want his daughter to pick up on.
When Emily was asleep, Svetlana dosed herself up with black-market coffee, signed out an Orlan and drove back to Underhole, gunning the tractor at fifty kilometres per hour. Everyone was still awake when she cycled through the lock. They had been waiting for her.
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“I think we know where we are,” Parry said, an edge of unease clouding his voice.
Pagis had finished stitching together the raster data. She had also begun to get a handle on the data from the deep-penetration radar.
“So tell me,” Svetlana said, as she struggled out of the bulky suit.
“We’re inside a tube-shaped structure,” Pagis said, directing Svetlana’s attention to the mosaic image spread across the flexy array. “The walls are dark, but there are filaments in them — wavy glowing tracks, a bit like the lava lines. They’re peaking at about five thousand five hundred angstroms, which is why everything looks yellow-orange out there. We haven’t seen any transits moving on them, but it does look like a similar technology.”
“If the Spicans have brought us here, then maybe we shouldn’t be too surprised by that,” Svetlana said.
“That’s what we figured.”
The raster image looked like the view down a drainpipe, with perspective traced by the converging density of the wavy, intertangled lava lines.
“The first echo I got was off the nearside wall,” Pagis said. ‘The tube’s about one hundred and sixty thousand klicks across, so we’re floating pretty near the middle. We’re getting optical data about two hundred thousand klicks down the shaft — we’d see further if we had a better cam.“
“And the radar?”
“The radar bounces are coming back from much further down. We’re reaching two and half light-seconds into the tube before the echo peters out. It isn’t a smooth spectrum of return times — there must be irregularities in the cladding acting as discrete reflecting surfaces.”
“And beyond the last echo?”
“Anyone’s guess. One thing we can be pretty sure of, though: the tube reaches further than we can see.”
“And in the other direction?”
“Our view’s not as good since Janus is in the way, but there’s nothing to suggest we wouldn’t see a similar picture.”
Svetlana looked at Parry. “You said you knew where we are. Are you going to let me in on the secret?”
“It’s not a secret. We’re exactly where we expected to be after two hundred and sixty light-years. We’ve achieved slowdown. We’re at Spica.”
“And the Spican structure?”
He smiled gently. “We’re in it, babe.”
“I don’t —”
“Remember the scale of that thing? We always did have a hard time getting our heads around it. It looked skeletal, but remember what Bella said?”
She bridled at the name. “What?”
“Just one of those longitudinal spars would have the internal surface area of fifty thousand Earths. A million Earths’ worth in the entire structure. Well, I think we’re in one of those spars now. Or maybe one of the cross-connectors. The numbers fit. If it’s a longitudinal spar, the tube could be three light-minutes long. If we’re seeing two and half light-seconds into it, there’s still a hell of a lot more tube down here.”
“We have to know for sure,” she said. “We’ve been inside one cage for four hundred days. I don’t like the idea of punching through and finding another set of walls out there.”
“I agree absolutely,” Parry said vehemently.
“And what kind of fucking welcome committee is this anyway?” Irrational, directionless anger rose in her like bile. “We’ve come all this way — been dragged all this way — and all that happens is they drill a hole in the sky and then fuck off.”
“There’s no sign of alien presence out there,” Pagis said timidly. “We did get a weird transient echo off something for a while, but it didn’t show up again.”
Svetlana rubbed tired eyes. She was close to tears, close to some kind of breaking point she did not want any of them to see. “What kind of echo?”
“Something small, something local.”
“Maybe one of their probes, leaving?” Parry said.
“Don’t think so,” Pagis said. “If the probes showed up on radar, we’d have already seen them. This was a big fat bounce, with a hint of rotation. Then it was gone.”
Parry looked keen. “So maybe there is something out there.”
“Or was,” Svetlana said.
The opening of the sky had offered them hope. That was why they had all been so keen for it to stay open, for that glint of dawn to hold steady and true. But beyond the Iron Sky was just another kind of Iron Sky: more distant, more enormous, more inhuman, more oppressive.
Svetlana felt crushed. She knew that everyone else was feeling it as well but was desperately trying not to show it, as if by an act of collective denial they could pretend that this was somehow good news.
“Wait,” Svetlana said, pressing fingers to her eyelids. “I know what it was you saw. It must have been a piece of our junk: the free-fliers that were still in the slipstream when the sky sealed up. They must have been out there all this time.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Pagis said glumly. “I was hoping it might be something more… exciting.”
“Maybe this is as good as it’s going to get.”
“It’s still early days,” Parry said, forcing strained optimism into his voice. “Someone drilled through the sky, and they must have done it for a reason. Just because we don’t see them immediately, it doesn’t mean they won’t be back.”
“We can go out and look for them,” Pagis said suddenly. “Fuel up Crusader or Avenger, see what’s really out there. At the very least we need to see deeper into the tube.”
“At least that way we’d be doing something,” Parry agreed, “instead of just sitting down here, waiting for them to make the next move.”
“What if there is no next move?” Svetlana asked. “What if they’ve let us out of one cage into another, and that’s it — end of story?”
“I can’t believe that,” Parry said. “We were brought here for a reason, not just to be locked away in a pipe for the rest of eternity.”
She looked at him sullenly. “Maybe that was the reason.”
“Even godlike aliens have to act rationally — don’t they?”
“I wouldn’t know,” she said. “I can’t recall ever meeting any.”
They sat in a brooding silence for half a minute. Svetlana looked at the flexy array again, with its intimations of further mysteries. Parry and Pagis were right, of course: they had waited thirteen years for something to study beyond Janus itself — some key to the deeper purpose behind the deceitful moon. It had brought them here, and it had kept them alive during the flight. Maybe all that had been accidental, and they’d simply hitched a ride in the slipstream of something that neither knew of nor cared about their existence.
But maybe it hadn’t.
“All right,” she said, trying to shrug aside her own sense of fatalistic hopelessness. “We take a look down the tube. We’ll send a free-flier first and see what we turn up.”
* * *
It wasn’t good news.
The probe encountered the end of the tube two light-minutes downstream from Janus. First its radar began to detect bounces from a solid structure blocking the tube; closer, lidar and the optical cam recorded a circular plate one hundred and sixty thousand kilometres across, snugly filling the tube.
By then, the free-flier had consumed most of its fuel and was speeding towards the end wall at its terminal velocity. The final images, transmitted back to Crabtree just before impact, revealed the presence of radial spokes running from the rim to a smaller wheel-shaped structure at the plate’s centre, a mere thousand kilometres across. The grainy pictures suggested that the wheel-shaped structure was etched with inwardly curving lines, like the diaphragm in an old camera.
“It’s a door,” Svetlana said.
No one saw any reason to argue with her.
But the door was closed. It looked immeasurably ancient and heavy, like something that hadn’t moved in a million years. The free-flier dashed itself against the structure like a gnat against a dam. If it left a smear, there was no trac
e of it when a second free-flier sent back another set of images.
A third free-flier had also been dispatched in the opposite direction. One light-minute up the tube, it encountered a blank endcap with no trace of any doorlike mechanisms.
It died as well.
Svetlana had deemed that a trio of free-fliers could be sacrificed in the interests of speedy data acquisition, but that was as many machines as Crabtree could afford to lose. Further investigations would need to be made using recoverable craft, slowly, with the minimal expenditure of fuel and logistics. At least now they knew that the tube was finite, and that there was nothing immediately threatening inside it. That, she supposed, could be construed as a kind of good news. But it was also bad, since there was still no sign of an alien welcoming committee. And the door and endcap both had the brutal look of something impenetrably thick, so thick that even their demolition nukes would be lucky to leave a scratch on them. They had established the parameters of their new prison and the situation was not encouraging.
That left the other piece of news.
They had found something tumbling end-over-end in orbit around Janus. It was the object Pagis had already picked up on the free-flier radar, but Svetlana’s original guess had been wrong. It was not one of the old free-fliers that had been monitoring the slipstream when the Iron Sky had appeared. Of those, there was no longer any trace. This was something else, and it was not remotely what anyone had been expecting.
In a way it was good news, because it was a concrete sign that their arrival had been noticed and — unlike the opening of the sky — it appeared to be a message addressed specifically to them.