Tunde grimaced, reluctant to give an opinion. “I’d say not. Judging from what we’ve seen, I’d put them on a par with us, except that they don’t have wormholes. The Dark Fortress is orders of magnitude above anything we’re capable of.”
“That implies the barrier was put up by an outside agency.”
“It’s looking that way, yes.”
“They were confined inside, then. Someone thought they were a threat.” Wilson turned his attention back to the magnificent astroengineering accomplishments which the sensors were revealing. Given his background, it was hard not to be envious of Dyson Alpha’s civilization. “Why?”
“I’m more concerned about why it was switched off,” Oscar said. “Somebodyobserved us here.”
“That doesn’t make a lot of sense,” Wilson said. “If you were attempting to close off this civilization, why remove the barrier the first time a ship investigates it?”
“They didn’t ‘attempt’ to cut them off,” Tu Lee said. “They succeeded.”
“Which makes switching the barrier off all the more nonsensical.”
“I don’t know what you’re worrying about it for,” Anna said. “There’s a simple way of finding out now.”
The bridge crew all looked at her. She grinned back, small spiral OCtattoos on her cheeks shimmering a soft silver.
“Ask them,” she said, and pointed at the portal.
On the third day after the barrier fell, they used the hysradar to scan the system. Wilson had heard every argument for and against making contact. Most people, himself included, were being cautious, despite what they’d seen of the Dyson aliens. Dudley Bose was eager to start hailing them, while Oscar wanted to turn the Second Chance around and head straight back to the Commonwealth; he was still badly worried by the timing of the barrier coming down.
It was the first time Wilson really wished they had instantaneous communications back to the Commonwealth. He would have been relieved to pass the buck on this question. Anna was right, they could learn a lot from initiating contact. But now that it looked certain the Dyson aliens had been confined, shipboard speculation was heavily focused on the reason. Their civilization was impressive, but not that threatening.
There were now eighty-three ships heading out from the star system. After three days of continual flight at five gees acceleration the first wave had now traveled over ten AUs, and still more were being launched. The first ships from the outermost gas giant had almost reached the boundary where the barrier had been.
Nobody on board the Second Chance could work out what they intended to do once they were outside the thirty-AU limit, as the ships weren’t designed for interstellar travel. But the crew had spent their time gathering more data on the Dyson Alpha system. It wasn’t just the planets that had been colonized. There were two asteroid belts, one on either side of Alpha Major’s orbit, which were extensively settled. And each of the gas giant Trojan points, with their broad cluster of medium-sized planetoids, accommodated thriving spaceborne societies. More intriguing—certainly to the physicists—was the swarm of rings, five hundred kilometers in diameter and protected by force fields, which were orbiting three million kilometers above the star’s corona. They seemed to be absorbing the solar wind, siphoning in massive currents of elementary particles that jetted out of the flares and sunspots below them.
Wilson finally authorized the use of the hysradar to obtain a more detailed chart of the star system and its inhabitants. Nobody was really surprised when it showed tens of thousands of the big ships coasting between planets, moons, asteroid habitats, and the industrial stations. The total was slightly unnerving given how alone the Second Chance was. Also unforeseen were the number of stray asteroids they detected out beyond the second gas giant that showed signs of colonization and industrial activity. Three of them were only a couple of AUs away. Wilson gave Sandy Lanier, the duty sensor officer, a very hard time for not picking up their neutrino emissions earlier. He paid for it that night, when Anna gave him a lecture on how small the fusion generators were, and how big space in general was. “They must be just starting to build on those asteroids,” she claimed heatedly. “If there’s anything big and dangerous close to this ship, our department will spot it for you.”
He managed to grumble a mild apology, and said they should take a really good look at the nearby asteroids. Having examples of the Dyson civilization so close was an excellent chance to learn what they could without being observed themselves.
She accepted the apology, and let him kiss and make up. They were getting good at finding innovative ways to use the low gee of the crew ring.
With a more complete picture of Dyson Alpha’s system established, the starship’s hysradar was focused on Dyson Beta. The range was extreme, but even so the return showed that the barrier around the second star remained intact. It strengthened Oscar’s argument that the removal of Dyson Alpha’s barrier had been triggered by their arrival. Not that anyone could come up with a convincing reason why, and the scenario certainly wasn’t one of the contingency plans so carefully prepared before they left Anshun. All of which left Wilson even more aware of how critical his decisions were now. He ordered the sensor department to resume collecting information on the Dyson Alpha system.
It was while they were scanning the nearby asteroids for high-resolution images that the first firefight broke out a third of the way around the star system. The electromagnetic sensors spotted it first, several large em pulses erupting halfway between the orbits of the two gas giants. They were quickly confirmed as nuclear explosions. The second barrage broke out as exhaust plumes suddenly streaked out all around the trio of explosions, exposing two squadrons of over thirty ships converging on each other. The fighting had started when they were a million kilometers apart. Now they were all accelerating toward each other at over seven gees. Missiles and gamma lasers turned the shrinking gap into a lethal hurricane of energy. Exploding ships added their fury to the radiation deluge.
Hysradar swiftly scanned the area in real-time, finding a large, expanding cloud of debris and vapor with several ruined ships tumbling through it. Thirty-two million kilometers away, five colonized asteroids were surrounded by a shoal of ships whose active sensors were probing the battle zone.
“Glad we weren’t there,” Oscar exclaimed.
Wilson stared at the display with its crumbling flecks of irradiated matter hurtling apart. It reminded him of the ridiculous slow-motion explosions in the blockbuster films of his youth, where steroidal Hollywood action stars outran the blast wave. “Defense,” he asked slowly. “Could our force fields have stood up to that kind of assault?”
“The initial blasts, sir, possibly. But it got pretty hellish in there toward the end.”
“Thank you.”
He glanced at Oscar, and inclined his head. The two of them went into the senior officer’s briefing room, and opaqued the glass wall. Screens around the long central table glowed blue and crimson from the sensor graphics they were showing.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Wilson said as he sat on a corner of the table.
“It’s not difficult. I’ve been saying it ever since the barrier came down. We should leave. These developments have pushed us way outside our original mission scenario. We were supposed to be a scouting flight. This is something else entirely.”
“I know, I know.” Wilson ran his hand back through his hair; it was getting longer than he liked. “But we still don’t know why they were confined, and we certainly don’t know who or what put the barrier up. We were sent here to find out. That means we haven’t completed our mission, not to my satisfaction.”
“That fight was a damn good indicator why they were penned up in here. It doesn’t come any clearer than that to me.”
“Maybe, but we can’t go home with just an assumption. I need to be certain.”
“It’s not just the Dyson civilization you have to consider, Wilson. Why was that barrier taken down for us? Doesn’t that bother you?”
“Of course it does. But the people who can tell us about the barrier are right here.”
“We can’t ask them, it’s too risky. In our whole history, the human race has only ever let off five nuclear warheads in anger. And they were under the most extraordinary, exceptional circumstances. That fight of theirs just saw eight hundred and seventy-two fusion bombs detonating inside of thirty minutes, and half of them had diverted energy output functions. They are dangerous, Wilson. Very, very dangerous.”
“The kind of weapons involved in any conflict are determined by the nature of the battleground and the technology available. If we are attacked out here, I’m quite prepared to use our nukes. It would be an appropriate response. Does my willingness to do my duty make the human race a bunch of dangerous killers?”
“You’re twisting this. I’m on record here: I don’t like this situation. It is my opinion we should leave.”
“We can’t. For all it’s an unexpected outcome, this is why we’re here. Discovery and opportunity, Oscar. We can’t turn our back on it. That would be less than human. I’m going to authorize a remote investigatory contact.”
Oscar closed his eyes and let out a long dispirited breath. “Okay. It is your choice, and I will support it. But can we at least be cautious about it?”
Wilson smiled at him. “Believe me, we are going to be so cautious you’ll think I’ve turned dangerously paranoid.”
They set out the rules of contact at the next daily departmental heads meeting, drawing on the Commonwealth protocols for alien contact, and adapting them to their own unique situation.
“It is my intention to discover what we can about the Dyson aliens without ourselves being observed,” Wilson said. “Now we’ve seen how volatile they are, I am not prepared to take the Second Chance into orbit around any planet or moon. God alone knows what weapons systems they have in orbit around their large population centers.”
“The initial investigation will be a contact team deployment to a deserted artifact, something big, an abandoned habitat or wrecked spaceship,” Oscar said. “Anything that will show us how they live, give us an indication of their physical shape, their culture. If we get lucky there might be some electronic memory units we can access. Whatever we choose, it will be a minimum of five million kilometers from any settlement or ship. We can manage a five-gee acceleration in an emergency combat situation, which is significantly lower than most of the ships we’ve seen flying around out there; so our primary tactical advantage is our FTL drive. I’d like to avoid any sort of chase altogether, therefore the whole procedure will be conducted on a minimum emission basis.”
“Before we begin this investigation, I’d like some idea of their response if we’re exposed to them,” Wilson said. He glanced around the table until he found Emmanuelle Verbeke, their alien culture officer. “Can you give us any insight on their society, yet?”
“Very little other than the obvious,” she said. “What we’ve seen matches our standard simulations for a non-FTL technological species. They’ve followed a logical progressive route of development across their star system. Given the extent and obvious success of their colonization I am slightly puzzled by the fight we saw. I would have expected more social stability. But as we really know nothing about their culture it would be inappropriate to speculate too much on the conflict at this point.”
“We’ve made no progress on decrypting any of their signals,” Anna said. “That’s worrying. I don’t expect the RI algorithms to begin immediate translations, but there were some areas I expected progress with.”
“Such as?” Oscar asked.
“Video or holographic signals for a start. There are basic formatting rules which data of that nature has to follow. Even if they see in ultraviolet or air-sonar, there will be display template patterns that can be determined. So far we haven’t found any. Their transmissions seem to be almost completely random, and they’re all analogue signals, which is even stranger. Of course it doesn’t help that we’re receiving so many of them. Overlap and interference is considerable. I would at least have hoped to play you an example of their language by now, but I can’t even do that.”
“It is unusual that we don’t even know what they look like,” Emmanuelle said. “If the situation were reversed, and the Dyson aliens were lurking close to a Commonwealth world, they would soon be able to gain an understanding of us from what we broadcast.
“We are recording it all,” Anna said. “If we eventually make contact, and the Dyson aliens want to talk to us, then we’ll have a full understanding of whatever communicative pathways they employ. After that we can start translating the signals we’re recording now. It’ll be helpful in case they start restricting their output when they find out we’re here; what we’re receiving at the moment could be quite valuable later on.”