“Well?” Hans Rebka was staring at her impatiently. Darya came back to the present with a jerk and realized that her thoughts had strayed off in a quite unexpected and inappropriate direction.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Point one: Nenda and Atvar H’sial were alive when the ship got here. Kallik is sure of that. Point two: There are no suits missing. Point Three: The air on the surface of this planetoid is breathable. Point four — not proved, but a good working assumption: This planetoid is hollow. Point five — another working hypothesis: The inside of Glister contains the same sort of air as there is on the surface. Put them together: if Louis Nenda and Atvar H’sial are still alive — or even if they’re dead — we know where they can be found.” She pointed at the floor.
“Inside Glister.” Rebka was frowning. “That’s what I decided, too, while you were sitting there daydreaming. I don’t much like that idea.”
“I never said you would.”
“It gives us another problem.”
“I know. To see if we’re right, we have to get inside. And we haven’t seen any sign of an opening or a hatch.”
“On the descent, we certainly didn’t.” Rebka sat down in the control chair. “But that’s not surprising — we had other things on our minds. There could be ways in just a hundred meters away, or there could be openings around the other side that we’ve never seen.”
“And we won’t find them sitting here.” Darya stood up. She was full of an irrational energy. “You know what? I want to find Nenda and Atvar H’sial, and spit in their eye for trying to kill us on Quake. But even if they didn’t exist, I’d want to find a way to the interior. And so would you. You pretend you’re not interested in Builder artifacts, but you’re the man who was all ready to risk a descent into Paradox, before you were sent to Dobelle. And this is an artifact. I’ve studied all twelve hundred and thirty-six of them, and I’m sure of it. Come on, let’s take a look outside.” Darya placed her hand on the control that would move her suit from full open to closed mode, then paused. “The air out there is supposed to be breathable. I might as well test it a little. Keep your eye on me.”
She headed for the lock, expecting to hear Rebka’s voice ordering her to stop. Instead he said in an amused tone, “I swear, if it isn’t one of you wanting to run off and do something crazy, it’s the other. Wait for me.”
“And me,” Kallik said.
“And don’t worry about the air,” Rebka added. “After the analysis was finished and came out positive I put my suit on partial transparency. Glister’s atmosphere is fine.”
“And you call me crazy.” Darya stepped through into the lock.
In the time they had been inside Nenda’s ship, Glister had made a quarter-turn on its axis. Gargantua was visible as a half-disk, while Mandel and Amaranth were hidden behind the planetoid. Darya emerged to an overhead dazzle of orbiting fragments and a cold, orange twilight. The air was odorless, tasteless, and chilly in her nose and lungs. Her breath showed as a puff of white fog when she exhaled.
What now?
Darya stared around at the featureless horizon. She began to walk forward, moving across Glister in the direction away from the Dreamboat. As she went she scanned the surface ahead. It had not occurred to her before, but without light from Mandel, visibility was going to be much reduced. Even using the image intensifiers in her suit she could not see details more than fifty meters away.
Darya slowed her pace. Kallik was a lightning calculator, but the Hymenopt was fifty meters behind and Darya would have to work it out for herself. A little more than a kilometer in radius. So the surface area of Glister was a bit less than seventeen square kilometers. And she could see things clearly for at most fifty meters in each direction. Assume that they split up and found an efficient way of covering the whole area. Then each of them would have to walk over fifty kilometers to be sure of finding whatever might be there.
Not good enough. And she should have thought it through before she left the ship. Darya waited for Rebka and Kallik to catch up with her.
“I’ve changed my mind.” She outlined the problem. “It will take us too long. I think we ought to go back inside and use Nenda’s ship; he doesn’t need it at the moment. And we should do a low-orbit traverse of Glister, a few hundred meters up, and use every sensor on board to explore the surface. Anything odd that we find — cracks, openings, hatches, markings, whatever — we’ll have the ship’s computer make a note of it, and then later we take a closer look ourselves. On foot. Can you fly the Have-It-All, Hans? If not, we can go back and use the Dreamboat. Though I’m sure the equipment there isn’t as good.”
“It isn’t. As you saw, Nenda travels first-class. I can fly his ship. And I bet that Kallik can fly it at least as well as me.”
“I have flown it often, on both planetary and stellar missions,” the Hymenopt concurred.
“So let’s go back inside.” Darya was turning toward the ship when she noticed an odd effect on the horizon behind Hans Rebka. It was as though she were suffering slight vertical double vision, with a thin brighter layer added above the sphere’s original curved boundary. As she watched, the region thickened and solidified; faint sparkles appeared within it as random points of light. Part of Glister looked the way it had when she first saw it, from far out in space. Darya halted for a closer inspection.
Increased intensity added color. The cloud became a gauzy orange patch, lying close to Glister’s uniform horizon, and extended over more than a quarter of the circle. As Darya watched the nimbus grew in size. The twinkle of interior lights became brighter.
“Hans!” She pointed. “Look there. Did you see anything like that before, when you were out on the surface?”
He stared, and at once took her arm to begin pulling her toward the Have-It-All.
“We sure didn’t. Come on. And hurry.”
“What is it?”
“Damned if I know. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. I think maybe me and Kallik weren’t too smart when we banged on the surface to learn more about the interior structure. Bit like knocking on the door to say, hey, we’ve arrived.” He was still holding her arm. “Come on, both of you, get moving. I prefer to watch that thing, whatever it is, from inside the ship — with the shields up. Close your suit completely, just in case. And don’t look back.”
Darya at once felt an irresistible urge to look behind her. The orange shimmer was bigger, spreading more than a third of the way across the horizon and perceptibly closer. Kallik had not moved, but that did not mean she would be left behind. When she decided to travel, the Hymenopt’s eight wiry legs could carry her a hundred meters in a couple of seconds.
“It has a discrete structure.” Kallik’s calm voice came through Darya’s suit phone. “The points of light are reflections of incident radiation from Gargantua on individual small components, each no more than a few centimeters across. Their angles change constantly, which is why they sparkle like that. To appear as bright as they are, those components must be almost perfect reflectors. I can see no sort of connection between the parts.”
The leading edge of the cloud was within twenty meters of the Hymenopt when Kallik finally turned. The thin black legs became a blur, and a second later she was by Darya’s side. “I concur with Captain Rebka. This is a phenomenon outside my experience.”
“Outside anyone’s.” The Have-It-All was only forty meters away. Darya could not resist looking back again. The cloud was not gaining. They could crowd inside the airlock and have it closed before the twinkling fog arrived. With the ship on standby, there was a good chance they could even take off from Glister before the leading edge touched the hull.
“Ahead!” Kallik spoke at the same moment as Hans Rebka began to swear.