‘What about particle density?’ Wilson asked.
‘Interstellar wash, that’s all. No particle wind from the star itself. The barrier must be converting all the energy hitting its internal surface to infrared. Output corresponds to that, assuming the star remains the same inside.’
‘Thank you,’ Wilson said. He was staring at the red circle, all sense of isolation long gone. ‘Is it solid?’
‘No, sir,’ Tunde Sutton said. ‘We’re picking up the star’s gravity field. It’s weak but detectable. If that thing was solid, it would mass at least the same as an average star. Probably a lot more.’
‘So it blocks neutrinos, elementary particles, and most of the electromagnetic spectrum, but not gravity. Are any of our force fields like that?’
‘Similar,’ Tunde said. ‘I’m sure we can build a generator that duplicates those properties. It wouldn’t be easy.’
‘And what would it take to power one this size?’
Tunde almost flinched. Bruno and Russell grinned at his discomfort.
‘A good percentage of the star’s fusion energy.’
‘Can you tell if that’s missing?’
‘Not really. We’d need a much better measurement of the naked star to compare with. We’ve never had that.’
‘Okay. If you can pick up the star’s gravity field, can you tell if there are any planets orbiting inside?’
‘Not from out here, we need to get closer for that.’
‘Anna, is there any sign of activity outside the barrier, anything at all?’
‘No, sir, nothing. No microwave communications, no laser, no radar emission. No plasma trails, not even a chemical rocket plume as far as we can see, though we’re stretching resolution on that one. There’re no wormhole signatures either. As far as our sensors are concerned, we’re alone out here.’
Wilson gave Oscar a glance.
‘It’s beginning to look like a relic,’ the exec said. He sounded disappointed.
‘All right. Give it a hysradar sweep. And I want a very careful watch for any response. Hyperdrive, be ready to take us straight out of here.’
‘Yes, sir.’
The bridge was silent for a couple of minutes as Anna and Tu Lee worked in tandem, sending out hyperaccelerated gravity waves from the wormhole generator.
‘Unusual,’ Tunde Sutton said eventually. ‘It simply reflected the pulses back at us, like a mirror. That indicates a very complex quantum structure. But then we knew it was never going to be anything simple.’
‘Did we ring any bells?’ Wilson asked.
Anna and the astrophysics team shook their heads. ‘Still no sign of activity. But we are limited with sensors from this range. Anything in the electromagnetic spectrum is going to take a month to show up.’
‘I’m more concerned about hyperspace and quantum field activity.’
‘Nothing so far.’
‘Very well. Oscar?’
‘We’ve come a long way,’ Oscar said. ‘And so far we’ve seen nothing to make us turn back.’
‘I agree. Prepare the ship for a hostile encounter scenario. Hyperspace, take us in to one million kilometres above the barrier’s equator.’
‘Aye, sir.’
The wormhole projected into real space with a burst of Cherenkov radiation, its toroidal nimbus twinkling with azure scintillations. It dissipated as quickly as it had begun, leaving the Second Chance floating a million kilometres above the blank surface of the barrier. On such a scale there was no visible curvature to the shell around the star. It appeared as a simple flat plane extending to infinity in every direction, as if the starship had reached the bottom of the universe.
‘We couldn’t have gone through,’ Tu Lee reported as soon as they were established in real space.
‘What do you mean?’ Wilson asked.
‘The barrier is a block to wormholes as well. There was a lot of exotic energy echo as we approached. Whatever the barrier is, it extends through the quantum fields. The worm-hole wouldn’t be able to circumvent it.’
‘So there really is no way in,’ Wilson mused.
‘Or out,’ Oscar said.
Wilson turned to the astrophysicists. ‘So how can the star’s gravity field get through?’
‘We’ll let you know,’ Tunde said. He didn’t sound happy.
‘Hysradar sweep gives a sheer surface,’ Anna said. ‘Defin-itely no neutrino penetration. I’ve never seen the detectors registering this low before.’
‘How thick is it?’
‘That dimension really only applies to solid matter,’ Tunde said. ‘This is an artificial rift in the quantum fields which manifests itself in spacetime; technically, it has no physical depth. It’s two-dimensional.’
‘Fine.’ Wilson couldn’t take his attention off the standard radar return. ‘Any sign of spacecraft activity?’
‘Nothing,’ Anna said. She sounded slightly peeved at having to churn out constant reassurance. ‘No rocket exhausts. No wormhole signatures. There’s nobody else here.’
‘I’d qualify that,’ Tunde said. ‘This goddamn thing is thirty AUs across. That’s almost impossible for the human mind to grasp. We’re not even seeing a fraction of a per cent from here. There could be a battle fleet of ships the size of a moon gathered five AUs away and we’d never know.’
‘Let’s not get carried away,’ Wilson said. ‘This is what we’re here for people, a full survey and analysis. So . . . Pilot, hold us steady at this standoff distance. Defence, keep our shields up full until further notice. Hyperdrive, keep us ready for an immediate exit. Astrophysics, you’re on. I want a comprehensive sensor sweep from this distance, probe it with everything we’ve got. We are not getting any closer for now. If you can confirm there are no active components which threaten us, I’ll authorize a remote satellite examination of the barrier’s structure. Until then we play it safe.’ He leaned back in the chair, and watched as the data started to build up on his screen and within his virtual vision. The stream of results was unending, and growing by the hour as new instruments were unsheathed and applied. Only a fraction of the information made any sense to him. It was slightly humbling. He’d always thought himself quite up-to-date on physics.
Tunde Sutton and the rest of the science crew tore into the raw data with unnerving enthusiasm. Their attitude was child-like in its wonder. Wilson was very careful not to intrude, or censure Tunde for the way he ran his department. But from what he could see they were acting more like first-life science geeks than wise, considered professors – the reason they’d been selected. They quarrelled and laughed among themselves, completely uncaring for social restraint. Suddenly, after all these months, they were now the elite, aloof from the rest of the crew. It showed.
Wilson overstayed his duty period by two hours, then turned the bridge over to Oscar. An hour later, Anna found him in the forward observation gallery. It was a long dark compartment on the wheel’s middle deck, with subdued blue floor lighting. She paused for a long moment after she came through the door, letting her eyes acclimatize to the darkness. The gallery had three tall windows of optically perfect glass facing forward. The silhouettes of several people were just visible – the barrier was a popular vista. She walked over to Wilson. ‘Hi,’ she whispered.
‘Hi.’ His hand found hers in the gloom, fingers fumbling. They stood together, content with their closeness. Anna could see the main cylinder above them, a sombre grey bulk illuminated by the small nav lights dotting its surface. It was rotating slowly, turning various sensor clumps into view one after the other.
‘I’m not sure if I can see it,’ Wilson murmured quietly. ‘My inserts give me a perfect image in infrared. But when I cancel that, I think I can see it. If it’s there, it’s like a flat cloud of the darkest red ever. Maybe I’m just imagining it because I know that’s what it is and should look like. And it looks as if it’s just in front of the nose.’
‘On this scale, it is,’ she whispered back. ‘We’re not even a germ to a baske
tball.’
‘Can you see it?’
‘I don’t know.’ Stupid though the action was, she leaned forward slightly, squinting. Her inserts were off now, and there might well have been some kind of ultradark vermilion haze out there in front of the nose, the kind of luminosity you got from a single candle lighting a cathedral. ‘It’s like a ghostlight.’
‘Humm. I always thought I had quite good eyes. I’ll have to get them resequenced next time I go into rejuve.’ He waved his hand in front of his face to see if that made any difference, if he could see the outline of his fingers against the obscure emission. There was too much secondary lighting in the observation gallery to be certain. ‘Whether I can see it or not, I can certainly feel it. The damn thing’s spooky, like something lurking just outside your thoughts.’
She curled her arm round his. ‘Come on, it’s been a long day. Time you got some rest.’
He grinned. And his teeth were just visible in the gloaming. ‘I’m too tired and strung out to argue.’ He allowed himself to be led towards the door.
‘Strung out? You?’
‘Yeah. We spent a year getting this ship built. I spent three hundred years waiting for something this important to happen to me again. I wanted something there when we came out of hyperdrive, something positive that I could see and understand. When we set down on Mars, there was all this alien geology surrounding me. It was strange, and even beautiful after a fashion, and nobody really knew anything about it. But you could break open a rock with a hammer, and see the minerals and strata inside. We had a knowledge base that could take that information and pin down what kind of rock it was, what event produced it. It was all in my head, information I could apply.’
They were alone in the corridor, so she stood on her toes and kissed him. ‘You poor old thing.’
Wilson smiled, sheepish now. ‘Yeah, well, I guess I was just intimidated, that’s all. The size of this fucker is mind-warping. I really shouldn’t let it get to me.’
‘I know, whacking this with a hammer isn’t going to help.’
‘No.’ He kissed her back. ‘I bet it would make me feel a hell of a lot better, though.’
Five days later, Wilson allowed the Second Chance to move up to fifty thousand kilometres above the barrier. They used the plasma rockets, accelerating in at a fiftieth of a gee, then stopped and flipped over to decelerate. The physicists were very keen to see what would happen when the exhaust sprayed against the surface. The simple answer was nothing. Satellites hovering centimetres above the barrier observed the residue of gas and energized particles strike the surface and rebound. There was no heat or momentum transfer. No effect. Gigabytes flowed back up the microwave links between satellites and starship, expanding the already vast database on the barrier. A huge quantity of sensor log files were stored in the RI array, almost all of them containing negative information. Every member of the science crew could tell Wilson what it wasn’t, and they could explain its properties at great length. What nobody could tell him was how it was generated, nor from where. And they certainly didn’t know why it existed.
But then, he told Anna charitably one night, they had only been there for five days. He shouldn’t expect miracles.
The starship hung above the stubborn barrier for another eight days, picking at it with various beams of radiation, like a small child with an intriguing scab, eager to see what lay beneath. Their wormhole generator distorted spacetime in many convoluted perturbations; the wave function of each one bouncing off the near-invisible surface without any significant resonance pattern. During that time, their only major discovery was the planets inside the barrier. Tunde confirmed that gravitational readings showed two gas-giants and three small solid planets were orbiting the star, with indications of several large asteroids. It livened up the daily department heads’ meeting when he told them that one of the solid worlds was within the life band, the distance from the star which would allow carbon-based life to evolve should the planetary conditions be favourable, such as the availability of water, a decent atmospheric pressure . . .
Finally, for morale’s sake rather than practical science, Wilson allowed McClain Gilbert to fly out to the surface. After the long, boring flight, the crew was becoming restless. Like Wilson, they’d all expected something a little more substantial, some hint as to the origin of the barrier, the reason behind it. One of their own actually going out there and examining it in person should help alleviate some of the tension which was building up in the life-support wheel.
So the whole starship was watching as the small shuttle flew out of its hangar in the cylindrical superstructure. It was a simple spherical life-support capsule capable of transporting up to fifteen passengers, sitting on the top of a drum-shaped propulsion section containing the environmental equipment and two small plasma rockets. A short-range vehicle, with a ten-day flight margin, it was intended to ferry science officers between any ‘items of interest’ to be found at the Dyson Pair. Although it didn’t have an atmospheric entry ability, it could set down on small airless moons, or more hopefully rendezvous with alien starships, alien space stations, or if they were really lucky, even a barrier generator. Nearly everybody on board had volunteered to accompany Mac, including a very vocal Dudley Bose, but Wilson had vetoed any passengers on this trip. Mac had a back-up exploration team member, a pilot, and an engineer riding with him, but that was all.
The shuttle used its tiny chemical reaction control engines to hold station a hundred metres away from the barrier, and Mac wriggled his way carefully out of the craft’s cylindrical airlock. His spacesuit’s inner plyplastic layer gripped his skin, constantly adjusting to accommodate his every movement yet always fitting snugly. On top of that he wore a thermal regulator garment, woven out of heat duct fibres, which would carry away any excess body heat. Above that was a thicker suit, a pale grey in colour, combining a radiation baffle cloth and an external impact armour layer, resistant to most micro-meteor strikes. It had a built-in force field generator web, which was his real protection in space. If that failed, then procedure was to abandon the EVA and head for the nearest airlock. His helmet was a reinforced transparent bubble, also radiation-proof and temperature-resistant, which he could opaque depending on the light level, giving him all-round visibility, which was boosted by various collar sensors he could access through his virtual vision. Batteries, the heat regulator, and the air regenerator system were all contained in a neat little pack built into the front of the outer suit, with a couple of circular radiator fins to discard surplus body heat. The whole thing was interfaced and controlled via his e-butler, with its system schematic icons sprinkled around his virtual vision.
As soon as he was clear of the airlock hatch rim he anchored himself to the fuselage grid. The cilia on his boot soles adhering to the lattice with a grip strong enough to hold him in place against the kind of torque his body might apply by mistake in the confusion of freefall. He bent over, his stomach muscles pulling hard in the absence of gravity, and unfastened the manoeuvring pack from its storage rack. It was a simple unit, a slim backpack with fat plastic mushrooms on each corner sprouting cold gas nozzles that could jet him about freely over a range of several kilometres.
As he was strapping it on, a new set of icons appeared in his virtual vision. He made sure the diagnostic software ran a full check before his virtual hand began to manipulate the joystick. Now he was actually out here, with so many of his crewmates watching over his shoulder, it was tempting to twist the throttle and scoot over to the barrier right away. But he forced himself to go through the physical test routine, burping all the cold gas nozzles, confirming their thrust. Only when his little practice flight round the shuttle was complete did he say: ‘Ready for crossing.’
‘You look good from here,’ Oscar said. ‘Telemetry at one hundred per cent. Clear to proceed.’
That familiar voice, with its perpetual tone of dry amusement, was one Mac found absurdly reassuring. In this awesomely bizarre situation it was a
welcome touch of normality, the same voice that had led him out onto a dozen new worlds. Virtual fingers tilted the joystick forward, and the manoeuvring pack nozzles snorted nitrogen, moving him out away from the shuttle. As far as he could see in the standard visual spectrum he was heading into total darkness; the barrier could be a couple of centimetres in front of him, or fifty light-years. His radar said ninety-three metres. He bumped the speed up to a couple of metres per second, then told his e-butler to switch on the craft’s spotlights. His spacesuit glowed a dusky pewter as the beams followed him. Up ahead he was sure he could see the triple circles where they were striking the barrier; they formed a royal blue patch; the effect was almost as if someone was rendering a cartoon shimmer on the surface.
Mac activated the infrared function in his retinal inserts. Half of the universe turned a lambent carmine. Even though he could see the barrier, there was still no way to judge physical distance. The radar put him forty metres out. He began to reduce his closing speed, and the spotlights were showing up as circles with a slightly greenish tint. But he could finally see his own shadow projected onto the flat wall ahead.
He came to a halt a metre away, and just floated there for a moment. The biomonitor showed him his racing heart-beat, and he could hear the adrenaline buzz in his ears. He started to raise his arm, fingers extending to touch the enigmatic surface, then paused. He hadn’t received permission, but if he checked before doing anything the EVA would take all day. The reason he’d been chosen was because of his contact experience. Not in this situation, he told himself evilly, and managed a small grin. His heart rate had slowed a little now, so he completed the motion. His fingers touched the surface.
For one twisted-up moment he imagined the barrier vanishing like a soap bubble, punctured by his ignorant touch. But it didn’t, and he chuckled slightly at the notion. By now he was drifting away, propelled by the slight contact; so he moved the joystick forward, and put his hand out again. This time the manoeuvring pack held him in place.