The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle (60 page)

As soon as he was clear of the airlock hatch rim he anchored himself to the fuselage grid. The cilia on his boot soles adhered 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 maneuvering 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 kilometers.

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 get through the physical test routine, burping all the cold gas nozzles, confirming their thrust. Only when his little practice flight around the shuttle was complete did he say, “Ready for crossing.”

“You look good from here,” Oscar said. “Telemetry at one hundred percent. 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 maneuvering 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 centimeters in front of him, or fifty light-years. His radar said ninety-three meters. He bumped the speed up to a couple of meters per second, then told his e-butler to switch on the craft’s spotlights. His space suit 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 meters 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 meter away, and just floated there for a moment. The biomonitor showed him his racing heartbeat, 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 maneuvering pack held him in place.

“Okay, I’m touching it. No apparent reaction. Seems like ordinary solid matter, there’s none of that slight surface instability you get on our force fields.”

“Understood, Mac,” Oscar said. “We were all waiting for some demonic claw to come through and drag you in.”

“Hey, thanks for that.”

“My pleasure. You feel like applying some sensors for us?”

“Will do.” He reached down to the equipment clipped on his belt. One by one, he stuck sensor pads against the barrier, taking measurements. He had to hold each one in place. The high-temperature epoxy was no use at all. When he squeezed it out of the tube, it simply rebounded off the barrier like water splashing off Teflon. “We didn’t think that would work,” Oscar said. “There aren’t any atoms there for it to adhere to. Worth a try, though.”

“Sure, but I’m using up gas at quite a rate keeping these sensors applied.”

“Copy that. Please apply the meson rate detector.”

“Okay.” He settled the fat little cylinder against the surface. Once again that notion of there being something on the other side was strong in his mind. He was scratching away on the barrier like some mouse behind the baseboard, and the house cat was listening intently, unseen, just the thickness of an electron away.
Irrational,
he kept telling himself.
But surely something knows we’re here?
He twisted his head to one side until he could see the starfield. For a moment he was upright, pressed against a wall, with the night sky behind him, the ground lost beneath his feet. The vertical horizon between red and black was perfectly straight and clear. When he looked down, that same horizon was below his boots. A human mind simply couldn’t grasp the
size
of the thing. Whoever established this incredible artifact must have had a phenomenally compelling reason.

Defense? Confinement? The sweepstake on board was running eighty/twenty. Both implied aggression somewhere; again on a scale beyond human comprehension.

“You all right there, Mac?” Oscar asked.

He realized his heart was thudding again, and took a couple of deep breaths. “Sure, no problem. What’s next?”

“Exotic waveform detector. Tunde wants to know exactly where the infrared emission originates. That should help define the barrier interface with spacetime. “

“Sure.”

After forty minutes he placed the last sensor back on his belt, and jetted back to the shuttle. The physicists were pleased with the results; they had moved another step toward understanding the nature of the barrier. But as to how it was generated, and the
why
of it, they hadn’t got a clue.

Two days after Mac’s EVA, the morning departmental heads meeting decided that information gathering had progressed about as far as it could from a static observation point. Wilson was concerned that they weren’t making enough progress in other directions.

“We were sent here to establish the reason why the barrier was erected,” he told them somewhat formally after they’d had the usual roundup of results from the previous day. “Tunde, I know your teams are doing a great job on the characteristics of the barrier, but we need more than that. Now you’re identifying its quantum structure, is there any way we can reformat the hyperdrive to get us past?”

“No,” Tunde said. “In fact, I don’t think there is a way through. We might not be able to generate a barrier like this for ourselves, but we do understand enough about its properties to just about rule out any kind of circumvention through hyperspace. A wormhole simply cannot be opened through it.”

“What about forcing our way in?” Oscar asked. “Can we break through in real space?”

“Again, no. Absolutely not. Even if you could generate collapsed-state energy levels and apply them directly against the barrier, it wouldn’t have any effect. It’s not physical. It can’t be damaged or stressed in the way solid matter can. One day we might be able to manipulate quantum fields in such a way to destabilize a section, but that won’t be for a long time. To use a very bad pun, we haven’t even scratched the surface.”

“Then we must look for clues elsewhere,” Wilson said. “Admittedly, given the size we’re dealing with here, that can only be the most perfunctory search, but it must be done. We’re back to our original two theories: offensive or defensive. If the barrier is defensive, there may be signs of the attacking force left somewhere outside.”

“Signs, or the whole armada?” Oscar asked lightly.

“If they were here, they’d be investigating us by now,” said Antonia Clarke, the engineering chief. “We’ve created enough disturbance since we’ve arrived. Even a few perfunctory warning satellites scattered around the barrier would have found us.”

“Maybe,” Tunde said. “But we certainly haven’t located any active observation equipment. And it is a long time since the barrier went up. The threat might not exist anymore.”

“It’s only long on a human scale,” Oscar said.

“All right.” Wilson held up his hands to prevent any full-scale argument erupting. “If the attacking force or entity is still here, we need to find it—preferably without it seeing us, which I admit is a long shot; however, we have to try. If they’ve gone, then they might have left something behind. And if the barrier was put up for the opposite reason—to confine the star and its inhabitants—then we have an even greater chance of finding the builders. Therefore, I have decided we’ll take the
Second Chance
on a complete circumnavigation of the equator. We’ll stand off an AU and use the hyperdrive at low speed. If we take a week, the hysradar will be able to complete a very accurate scan of the surrounding space. Following that, and taking the worst-case scenario that we find nothing, we’ll fly to both poles and examine them. If after that we still draw a blank we’ll review the situation then.”

“Captain,” Tunde said. “I’d like to raise the issue of communication.”

“With whom?”

“Both our scenarios imply that there is some kind of sentient life to be found inside the barrier. Now that we’re this close it may be possible to attract their attention, possibly even initiate a dialogue.”

“How? I thought you said the barrier was impervious.”

“It is to everything except gravity.” He indicated the chief engineer. “I’ve discussed this with Antonia. It shouldn’t be too difficult to modify the energy configuration of the hyperdrive to create simple gravity waves. If the civilization inside has a working gravity detector, they should be able to pick it up.”

The notion surprised Wilson; given the analysis he’d been getting from the science teams since they’d arrived, he’d dismissed the notion of any attempted contact a long time ago. “How difficult would the adaptations be? I will not authorize taking the hyperdrive off-line at any time.”

“It’s a matter of programming,” Antonia said. “That’s all. Standard gravity wave emission would be a simple modification of the hysradar function. The ship’s RI can give us a reformatted routine within a couple of hours.”

“Okay then, you can go ahead with the program. If the circumnavigation flight doesn’t produce any results, we’ll certainly try it. Good idea, both of you.”

It was the second day of their week-long flight around the equator when the hysradar finally found something of interest. The first scan returns came back just after midnight, ship’s time. Oscar was in command on the bridge; he ordered the
Second Chance
back into normal space, and put a call in to the captain’s cabin.

By the time Wilson arrived, pulling on his jacket and shaking his head to rid himself of sleep, the starship’s main sensors were fully deployed. A picture was building up on the bridge portals. He squinted at it, not quite believing what he was seeing. The radar graphic of neon-green grid lines was the most detailed, showing a perfect hemisphere rising out of the barrier. Its base was twenty-five thousand kilometers in diameter.

Tunde Sutton and Bruno Seymore arrived on the bridge. Both of them stood behind Wilson, staring in perplexity. “Wow,” Bruno muttered. “Talk about a fly in amber.”

“Okay,” Wilson went over and sat behind his console. “What am I looking at? Is that a planet?”

“No, sir,” Russell said, the screens on his console were shimmering with light as he ran the incoming data through analysis routines. “I’d say it’s some kind of extension of the barrier itself. Surface is uniformly smooth, just like the barrier, and it is a perfect hemisphere as well. It has an extremely strong magnetic field, at least an order of magnitude above a standard planetary field; and it’s fluctuating wildly, almost as if it’s spinning. There’s no gravity field, as such … sensors are picking up gravity wave emissions, though. They’re regular, pulses of some kind. Not synchronized with the magnetic shift, though. Very odd.”

At that, Wilson turned to face Tunde who was just sitting down behind his own console. The astrophysicist gave him a confused frown.

“A signal?” Wilson asked.

“I don’t know.”

“The pulse sequence hasn’t varied,” Russell said. “If it’s a signal it’s not saying much.”

“Can you see where they’re coming from?”

“They seem to be from within the hemisphere, although the actual origin point appears to be moving around in there.”

“Okay, anything else?”

“There’s no infrared emission.” He nodded at the large portal. It was showing the barrier’s blank surface in bright carmine. A large circle in the center of the image was black, as if a hole had been cut through. “Wait! There’s something at the top.” Russell’s voice rose in pitch as he interpreted the raw data. “The apex isn’t curved, it’s flat, or … maybe some kind of crater. An opening! There’s an opening there.”

“You’re right,” Bruno called out; there was a wild grin on his face. “Slight photon emission. There’s light shining out, wavelength just outside ultraviolet. It’s not infrared, not like the rest of the barrier. That could be the way in!”

Wilson and Oscar exchanged a shocked glance. “Calm down,” Wilson said. “I want realities not speculation at this point. Get me a decent image from the main telescope. Oscar, what’s our current stand-off distance?”

“A hundred thousand kilometers above the barrier; seventy thousand from the hemisphere.”

“Good enough.”

“Focusing now,” Bruno announced.

The bridge portal showed a fast expanding ring of red flashing outward. Then it was completely black. “Here it comes,” Bruno said triumphantly. A speck of luminescence getting bigger rapidly, jumping up to a crescent of lavender light that shivered in the middle of the portal.

“Size?” Wilson asked.

“The hole is seventeen kilometers across.”

“This wavelength doesn’t match Dyson Alpha’s known spectrum,” Tunde said. “That’s not the star shining out.”