Darya halted the data readout and looked out of the port. Kallik and Rebka had been crouching down, close to the surface. She had asked them to do additional materials testing outside, hoping to add something to this piece of the planetoid’s description.
“Any results yet, Hans?”
Rebka straightened up. “We didn’t get what you wanted, but we’ve probably got all we’re going to. We couldn’t take samples. The surface is too hard to cut, and it’s impervious to heat. But we’ve been hitting it with precise impulses and monitoring the seismic return wavefronts. The phase delays are very peculiar. We think it’s as you suggested — the whole thing is hollow, maybe with a honeycomb structure.”
Kallik stood up also. “Which makes the high ss-ss-surface gravity even odder, since this is a hollow body.”
“Right. I’ll add that to the physical description. You can give me more detailed data when you get back. No other problems?”
“None so far. In a little while we’re going to head for Nenda’s ship. Keep monitoring.”
“I will.” With considerable satisfaction, Darya added a section to the readout:
GENERAL DESCRIPTION: THE BODY APPEARS TO BE HOLLOW, PROBABLY WITH INTERNAL CHAMBERS. GIVEN ITS ANOMALOUS PHYSICAL PARAMETERS, IT MUST BE OF ARTIFICIAL ORIGIN. THE PLANETOID’S AGE HAS NOT YET BEEN ESTABLISHED. THERE IS A GOOD POSSIBILITY THAT IT IS A BUILDER ARTIFACT. THAT HYPOTHESIS IS GIVEN SUPPORT BY THE FACT THAT PHAGES ARE TO BE FOUND CLOSE BY IN LARGE NUMBERS, LESS THAN A HUNDRED KILOMETERS AWAY FROM THE BODY’S SURFACE.
Darya paused. Better leave it at that, and not stick her neck out too far. But personally she was sure it was an artifact. And if that was the case it should be given its own name and ID number, like every other Builder artifact.
She added a final note to the message. “The artificial planetoid has been assigned the provisional Universal Artifact Catalog number 1237, and the provisional name” — she recalled the bright motes on the sphere’s image, now vanished — “the provisional name of Glister.”
“Darya?” Hans Rebka’s voice came as she was making the final entry. “Darya, we’re over at the Have-It-All now. It seems to be in working order, but you ought to see it for yourself. Can you put your suit on and walk over?”
“I’ll be there in five minutes.” Darya initiated the message transmission, put the Summer Dreamboat into self-protect mode, and moved across to the lock. In less than a minute she was outside.
She looked up. Gargantua loomed in the distance beyond the other ship. High above her head the Phages were invisible, too small to be seen from fifty or a hundred kilometers away, but she had no doubt that they were still there. Phages were always there when they were not wanted.
And what Phages! Phages smart enough to track a falling ship. Phages fast enough to head for that ship. Phages fast enough to come close to catching it.
Darya began to move slowly across the curved and polished surface. The horizon was only a couple of hundred meters away. As Louis Nenda’s ship came more and more into view she could not help glancing up every few seconds, to make sure that some marauding Phage was not diving down on her.
Phages didn’t enter powerful gravity fields; in fact, they shunned them. Sure. That was the conventional wisdom. Until today she had believed it herself. But why assume that conventional wisdom applied to these Phages, and this situation, when everything else about them was so bizarre?
It occurred to Darya that Kallik had taken a bigger risk than they realized when she had brought them down here. The alien surface of Glister might be no safer than Phage-infested space. But Kallik’s own need to know what had happened to Louis Nenda had made her blind to risk.
Darya arrived at the lock of the Have-It-All. One thing was for sure: given the behavior of these new Phages, she would have to do a major rewrite of that section of the Lang Universal Artifact Catalog. Good timing. She was supposed to begin work on the fifth edition when she got back home.
When she got back home…
She stared out across the smooth, glassy surface of Glister before she entered the lock. The little ship they had arrived on was the only familiar object. The Summer Dreamboat had started its life as a teenager’s toy; now it was far from home, looking oddly lonely and defenseless.
Would it ever see its birth world again? And would she see hers?
Darya closed the hatch. When she got home. Better make that if she got home.
ARTIFACT: PHAGE
Exploration History: The first Phages were reported by humans during the exploration of Flambeau, in E 1233. Subsequently, it was learned that Phages had been observed and avoided by Cecropian explorers for at least five thousand years. The first human entry of a Phage maw was made in E 1234 during the Maelstrom conflict (no survivors).
Phage-avoidance systems came into widespread use in E. 2103, and are now standard equipment in Builder exploration.
Physical Description: The Phages are all externally identical, and probably internally similar though functionally variable. No sensor (or explorer) has ever returned from a Phage interior.
Each Phage has the form of a gray, regular dodecahedron, of side forty-eight meters. The surface is roughly textured, with mass sensors at the edge of each face. Maws can be opened at the center of any face and can ingest objects of up to thirty meters’ radius and of apparently indefinite length. (In E 2238, Sawyer and S’kropa fed a solid silicaceous fragment of cylindrical cross-section and twenty-five meters’ radius to a Phage of the Dendrite Artifact. With an ingestion rate of one kilometer per day, 425 kilometers of material, corresponding to the full length of the fragment, were absorbed. No mass change was detected in the Phage, nor a change in any other of its physical parameters.)
Phages are capable of slow independent locomotion, with a mean rate of one or two meters per standard day. No Phage has ever been seen to move at a velocity in excess of one meter per hour with respect to the local frame.
Intended Purpose: Unknown. Were it not for the fact that Phages have been found in association with over 300 of the 1,200 known artifacts, and only in such association, any relationship to the Builders would be questioned. They differ greatly in scale and number from all other Builder constructs.
It has been speculated that the Phages served as general scavengers for the Builders, since they are apparently able to ingest and break down any materials made by the clades and anything made by the Builders with the single exception of the structural hulls and the paraforms (e.g., the external shell of Paradox, the surface of Sentinel, and the concentric hollow tubes of Maelstrom).
CHAPTER 8
Louis Nenda’s ship was undamaged. Inside and out, every piece of equipment was in working order. The main drive showed signs of overload, but it still tested at close to full power.
“I’m sure that overload happened while they were in orbit around Quake,” Darya said. “I told you, I saw them putting in every bit of thrust they had to try and get away from that silver sphere.”
“Yeah. But you also said they were accelerated away by the sphere at hundreds of gees, enough to flatten everything.” Hans Rebka waved an arm at the orderly interior. “Nothing flat here that I can see.”
“Which is not difficult to explain.” Kallik was crouched down on the floor by the Have-It-All’s hatch, sniffing and clicking to herself. “If the ship were to be accelerated by gravity or any other form of body force, neither it nor its occupants would be harmed. They would feel as though they moved in free-fall, no matter how high the acceleration appeared to an outside observer.”