Peter laced his hands behind his back, standing with his legs spaced slightly apart. “Now let’s talk hard numbers. How far have they reached? What have they actually found out there?”
Auger sat forward, sensing that some kind of climax was imminent.
“We still don’t know exactly when they found the Sedna portal,” Peter said. “Our best guess is that it was somewhere around fifty years ago, between twenty-two ten and twenty-two fifteen. Since then they’ve surveyed—or at least visited—somewhere in the region of fifty to sixty thousand solar systems. Pretty impressive, by anyone’s measure. There’s just one nagging little problem: they haven’t actually found anything to justify all this effort.”
Auger nodded to herself. She paid scant attention to rumours about the hyperweb, but even so, one thing kept shining through: the whole affair was a bitter disappointment.
“Or at least,” Peter continued, “nothing they want us to know about. It’s tricky for them, really. They want access to Earth, and the only thing they can really offer us—apart from a drip-feed of UR and other dangerous little toys—is permission to use the hyperweb as paying passengers. So they try to dress up the brutal truth of what they have found out there, which is an endless catalogue of dead, uninhabitable rocks and crushing cold giants.” Peter unlaced his hands from behind his back and leaned conspiratorially toward the camera. “The funny thing is, though, that even if they had found something out there, they probably wouldn’t tell us that either.”
“Please get on with it,” Auger said, as if it would make any difference.
“The illusion,” Peter said, “that the hyperweb has turned up nothing of value is maintained even in Slasher circles, at surprisingly high levels of security. That’s why it’s been such a tough old nut to crack.”
Now the picture behind him changed again. It zoomed in on one specific arm of the galaxy, the scene behind him punctuated by stars. Something loomed out of the darkness between them: a blue-grey world of unnatural smoothness, one crescent picked out in orange-red by an off-stage sun or cluster of suns. The other limb was a frigid blue, like the colour of moonlight on snow. The view zoomed towards the sphere, until it was much larger than Peter. At this extreme magnification, it was possible to make out some detail on the surface of the sphere. It was nothing at all like the texturing and weathering of a planetary surface.
The sphere was made up of countless neatly interlocked platelets, arranged in a pattern of mind-numbing regularity. It looked less like a planet than some crystalline molecule or virus.
“Let’s bring in some scale here,” Peter said.
A box surrounded the sphere. Numbers popped up on the axes, indicating that the diameter of the sphere was around nine or ten of whatever units of measurement were in force.
“What…” Auger began.
“These numbers are units of one light-second,” Peter said. “The sphere is nearly ten light-seconds in diameter. To put that into context, you could fit the sun into that structure and still have plenty of elbow room. You couldn’t fit in the Earth as well, since the Earth’s orbit around the sun is eight light-minutes wide, or about fifty times too big to fit into the sphere. But if you put the Earth in the middle, you’d have more than enough room to include Earth’s moon.”
“Excuse me,” Auger interrupted, “but was it me, or did he just call that thing a structure?” The agents ignored her, and she grudgingly returned her attention to the recording.
“I suppose we shouldn’t be too surprised that we’ve actually found something unambiguously alien,” Peter said. “After all, we always knew they were out there somewhere. The hyperweb is all the evidence we need of that. But to find something this huge… well, I don’t think anyone was expecting that. The first big question, of course, is what the hell is it? And the second big question, what can it do for us?”
The sphere shrank, receding to a dot and finally to nothing. Now the view of the galaxy returned, with the intricate ratlines of the hyperweb superimposed as glowing vectors. “Now for surprise number two: the Slashers have found more than one of these things. In fact, they’ve found around twenty of them, spread throughout the galaxy.” Peter clicked his fingers and blue-grey spheres the size of golf balls dropped into place on the map. “You can’t see it on this scale, so you’ll have to take my word for it that none of these objects show up in any significant location, other than always being within easy reach of a portal. The Slashers call them ‘ALS objects,’ ALS standing for ‘anomalous large structure.’ Just rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it? And if they’ve found twenty in such a short period of time—and since we know that the hyperweb is much more extensive than the mapped connections would imply—we can be sure that there must be thousands, maybe tens of thousands of these things out there. Sitting between stars, brooding like eggs.” Peter waited a beat. “Or time bombs.”
The image changed again, focusing once more on a single blue-grey ALS sphere. The view had a pared-down, schematic quality to it. The spherical shading faded, leaving only a ring of very thin material.
“This is the cross section,” Peter said. “The Slashers mapped the interior using neutrino tomography. They put a fifty kilowatt neutrino laser on one ship and flew it to one side of the ALS. Another ship carried a corresponding neutrino detector—an array of ultra-stiff sapphire crystals primed to undergo lattice vibration on the arrival of a single neutrino. The transmitting ship varied the path of its beam through the ALS, while the receiver ship kept track along the predicted beam, measuring the rise and fall in neutrino flux as the beam passed through the ALS at different angles. What they found indicated a hard, thin shell of unknown composition about one kilometre thick. They also detected a significant concentration of mass at the core, forming an inner sphere a few thousand kilometres in radius. In other words planet-sized, and with exactly the density profile you’d expect for a typical large terrestrial like Venus or Earth. The rest of the sphere seems to be hard vacuum, to the limit of the neutrino sweeps.”
Auger turned to Ringsted and Molinella. “This is amazing, no question. It scares me that you’re even telling me this stuff. But I still don’t understand what any of it has to do with me or my tribunal.”
“You’ll see,” the woman said.
Peter was still speaking, oblivious of her interruption. “Based on these clues, the Slashers concluded that the ALS objects were physical shells wrapped around planets. Sometimes the planets even seem to be enclosed complete with moons. It is evidence of a very advanced technology—comparable even with the hyperweb itself. But why do this? Why imprison an entire world inside a dark sphere, isolating it from the rest of the universe? Well, maybe they aren’t dark inside. No one knows that for sure. And maybe they only look like prisons from the outside. The state of matter inside that shell could be something very odd indeed. Are these planets that have been quarantined because of some awful crime or biological cataclysm? Are they antimatter worlds that have somehow drifted into our galaxy, and must be shielded from outside contact on their way through? Are they something worse? According to our intelligence, the Slashers have no idea in spite of all their research. Just a lot of guesswork.”