“Any activity in the surrounding area?”
“Not that I can locate. Do you want an hysradar sweep?”
“Not yet. Expand our baseline for the current sensors. I want a clearer picture of the area. Astrophysics, keep monitoring. Pilot, hold us stable here.”
“Aye, sir.” Anna began to manipulate virtual icons. “Prepping for sensor module launches.”
Wilson let out a quick breath of relief. His virtual finger was tapping icons almost unconsciously. On the console in front of him, one of the small screens flicked between camera images. Each one had a small portion of the starship superstructure: the forward sensor array, a slice of the life-support wheel, the plasma rockets. But no matter which camera he chose, there was never anything other than the ship and the very distant stars. Nothing. The emptiness was awesome. Frightening.
When he was a boy, Wilson had enjoyed swimming. His parents had a small pool in their yard, and he’d used it every day. That didn’t stop him from continually nagging his parents to take him to the larger pool at the county sports center. He’d been nine on the day of that visit, he and a whole group of friends ferried out there by some harassed mother. With his skill and confidence he’d not been intimidated by the size or depth of the big pool, and was soon leading the others through the water. When he was in the deep end he dived to the bottom, sure he could touch the tiles. He made it easily enough, his strong strokes hauling him down away from the surface, popping his ears against the pressure twice on the way down before slapping his fingertips on the smooth blue tiles. Sound from the rest of the pool was curiously muted so far below, the thrashing feet above, dull, like the filtered blue light. Pressure squeezed him gently. So he started to swim up. And only then did he realize his mistake. He’d taken enough breath to get him down, but now his lungs were burning. Muscles twitched as the need to suck down fresh air swelled desperately. He began to claw frantically at the water, which did nothing to increase his terrible slow speed. The need for air became overwhelming. And his chest began to expand, lungs working to pull in that sweet oxygen. Wilson felt the water sliding up his nostrils like some unstoppable burrowing creature. Right that second he knew if it got any farther he would drown. It was enough to send his body into a frenzy, kicking and struggling. At the same time he found the discipline to stop his lungs from trying to inhale. Somehow he managed to break the surface without the water spilling any farther inside him. Only then did he suck down a huge breath of beautiful clean air, almost sobbing as the shock of what’d happened struck him. For a long time he’d clung to the side of the pool as big shivers ran up and down his body. Finally, he regained enough control to swim back out to his friends.
Even during his air force combat flights he’d never felt so scared as that whimpering child striking out for the side of the pool. Nothing had ever come close to re-creating that feeling. Until now. Now that same clammy sickness was gripping him just like it had his nine-year-old self as the reality sank in of how far away from anything they were. He started his ancient deep-breathing exercise routine, trying to calm his body before the shakes started.
“Modules disengaging,” Anna announced.
“Right, thank you,” Wilson replied a little too abruptly. His virtual hand stopped flicking through the camera sequence, and he concentrated hard on the images of the sensor modules. Something to do, something to shift his mind off the nothingness of outside. He felt his heart rate slow as he forced his breathing to a regular rhythm, though there was nothing he could do about the cold perspiration on his forehead. A text-only message popped up into his virtual vision, it was from Anna and read: ARE YOU ALL RIGHT?
FINE, he sent back. He didn’t look in her direction. Everyone else on the bridge seemed to be absorbed by their work, unaffected by what lay outside. He was the only one interstellar space was intimidating. That piqued him somewhat—enough to make him focus properly on his job.
The screen on his console showed him the forward section of the Second Chance. Doors on eight cylindrical bays had opened up, spaced equidistantly just behind the bow’s large sensor cluster. Modules like big metallized insects sprouting golden antennae were drifting out, glittering in the lights around the rim of each bay. Ion thrusters flared blue on the base of each one, pushing them away from the starship.
They traveled in an expanding circle, linked by laser and microwave, taking hours to reach their stand-off station. When they were fifty thousand kilometers out, their ion thrusters burned again, bringing them to a halt. As one, their dark protective segments peeled open, exposing delicate sensor instruments to the interstellar medium. Disks, blocks, booms, and lenses uncoiled on the end of electromuscle tentacles and began scanning space around Dyson Alpha. The big arrays back on the Second Chance correlated the results, combining them into a single image with extraordinarily high resolution in every spectrum.
For everyone waiting eagerly on board, the result was a big disappointment. Virtually no new information about the barrier was revealed. Its diameter was confirmed at twenty-nine point seven AUs. There was a moment of prayerlike silence on the bridge as that fact was absorbed. The surface was emitting in a very low infrared wavelength. Local particle density was slightly lower than average, indicating that solar wind emission from Dyson A and B was blocked. Nothing else could be detected.
After five days of cautious observation for any sign of hostile events, or any other energy emission that might point to artificially generated activity, Wilson had to agree with his science team that there was no obvious danger at this distance. He ordered the sensor expansion modules back to the starship, and they flew fifteen light-years closer.
When they emerged into real space again, they repeated the examination. From five light-years, the images that the expanded baseline modules provided were even more exact. But nothing had changed. The interstellar particle winds blowing off nearby stars were detectable as they gusted around the barrier, creating giant swirls and eddies that sighed in the electromagnetic spectrum like faint whale song.
Wilson moved them forward in one-light-year increments. Each time the eight modules would fly out and peer ahead. Each time they would provide a more detailed survey of the local radiation and particle environment. Of the barrier itself, they revealed nothing.
“Take us to one light-month out,” Wilson told Tu Lee.
“Aye, sir.”
“Tunde, that’ll take us within high-definition range of the hysradar,” Wilson said. “Do we scan it?”
The astrophysicist gave an expansive shrug from behind his bridge console. “It’ll tell us a lot about the nature of the barrier, but then we’ll probably reveal ourselves. If there is an active force controlling it, I can’t imagine they won’t be able to detect it.”
Oscar looked at the forward portals that showed the blue walls of the wormhole closing over real space. “They have to know already. We’d be able to pick up the quantum signature of a wormhole from this distance.”
“The builders must have realized that people would come and investigate at some point,” Anna said. “You can’t do something like this and expect it to go unnoticed.”
“We’ll run passive scans first,” Wilson said. “If there’s no response, we can use the hysradar.”
Just under four hours later, the Second Chance emerged from hyperspace. Wilson didn’t have to order the expanded baseline modules out. The ship’s main telescope revealed the full expanse of the disk. In infrared it was like the baleful eye of some dreaming dragon.
“Very low neutrino density out here, and virtually nothing coming from Dyson Alpha’s direction,” Bruno Seymore said. “I’d say the barrier is impermeable to them. We should be picking up a whole deluge from the star at this distance.”
“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. 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.
Anne 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.”