We passed Ben’s Rayleigh limit. Theseus squinted at a meager emission spectrum and saw a rogue halo element from Canis Major—a dismembered remnant of some long-lost galaxy that had drifted into ours and ended up as road kill, uncounted billions of years ago. We were closing on something from outside the Milky Way.
The probe arced down and in, drew close enough for false-color enhance. Ben’s surface brightened to a seething parfait of high-contrast bands against a diamond-hard starscape. Something twinkled there, faint sparkles on endless overcast.
“Lightning?” James wondered.
Szpindel shook his head. “Meteorites. Must be a lot of rock in the neighborhood.”
“Wrong color,” Sarasti said. He was not physically among us—he was back in his tent, hardlined into the Captain—but ConSensus put him anywhere on board he wanted to be.
Morphometrics scrolled across my inlays: mass, diameter, mean density. Ben’s day lasted seven hours twelve minutes. Diffuse but massive accretion belt circling the equator, more torus than ring, extending almost a half-million kilometers from the cloud-tops: the pulverized corpses of moons perhaps, ground down to leftovers.
“Meteorites.” Szpindel grinned. “Told ya.”
He seemed to be right; increasing proximity smeared many of those pinpoint sparkles into bright ephemeral hyphens, scratching the atmosphere. Closer to the poles, cloud bands flickered with dim, intermittent flashes of electricity.
Weak radio emission peaks at 31 and 400m. Outer atmosphere heavy with methane and ammonia; lithium, water, carbon monoxide in abundance. Ammonia hydrogen sulfide, alkali halide mixing locally in those torn swirling clouds. Neutral alkalis in the upper layers. By now even Theseus could pick those things out from a distance, but our scout was close enough to see filigree. It no longer saw a disk. It gazed down at a dark convex wall in seething layers of red and brown, saw faint stains of anthracene and pyrene.
One of a myriad meteorite contrails scorched Ben’s face directly ahead; for a moment I thought I could even see the tiny dark speck at its core, but sudden static scratched the feed. Bates cursed softly. The image blurred, then steadied as the probe pitched its voice higher up the spectrum. Unable to make itself heard above the longwave din, now it spoke down a laser.
And still it stuttered. Keeping it aligned across a million fluctuating kilometers should have posed no problem at all; our respective trajectories were known parabolas, our relative positions infinitely predictable at any time t. But the meteorite’s contrail jumped and skittered on the feed, as if the beam were being repeatedly, infinitesimally knocked out of alignment. Incandescent gas blurred its details; I doubted that even a rock-steady image would have offered any sharp edges for a human eye to hold on to. Still. There was something wrong about it somehow, something about the tiny black dot at the core of that fading brightness. Something that some primitive part of my mind refused to accept as natural—
The image lurched again, and flashed to black, and didn’t return.
“Probe’s fried,” Bates reported. “Spike there at the end. Like it hit a Parker Spiral, but with a really tight wind.”
I didn’t need to call up subtitles. It was obvious in the set of her face, the sudden creases between her eyebrows: she was talking about a magnetic field.
“It’s—” she began, and stopped as a number popped up in ConSensus: 11.2 Tesla.
“Holy shit,” Szpindel whispered. “Is that right?”
Sarasti clicked from the back of his throat and the back of the ship. A moment later he served up an instant replay, those last few seconds of telemetry zoomed and smoothed and contrast-enhanced from visible light down to deep infrared. There was that same dark shard cauled in flame, there was the contrail burning in its wake. Now it dimmed as the object skipped off the denser atmosphere beneath and regained altitude. Within moments the heat trace had faded entirely. The thing that had burned at its center rose back into space, a fading ember. A great conic scoop at its front end gaped like a mouth. Stubby fins disfigured an ovoid abdomen.
Ben lurched and went out all over again.
“Meteorites,” Bates said dryly.
The thing had left me with no sense of scale. It could have been an insect or an asteroid. “How big?” I whispered, a split-second before the answer appeared on my inlays:
Four hundred meters along the major axis.
Ben was safely distant in our sights once more, a dark dim disk centered in Theseus’s forward viewfinder. But I remembered the close-up: a twinkling orb of black-hearted fires; a face gashed and pockmarked, endlessly wounded, endlessly healing.
There’d been thousands of the things.
Theseus shivered along her length. It was just a pulse of decelerating thrust; but for that one moment, I imagined I knew how she felt.
We headed in and hedged our bets.
Theseus weaned herself with a ninety-eight-second burn, edged us into some vast arc that might, with a little effort, turn into an orbit—or into a quick discreet flyby if the neighborhood turned out to be a little too rough. The Icarus stream fell invisibly to port, its unswerving energy lost to space-time. Our city-sized, molecule-thick parasol wound down and packed itself away until the next time the ship got thirsty. Antimatter stockpiles began dropping immediately; this time we were alive to watch it happen. The dip was infinitesimal, but there was something disquieting about the sudden appearance of that minus sign on the display.
We could have retained the apron strings, left a buoy behind in the telematter stream to bounce energy down the well after us. Susan James wondered why we hadn’t.
“Too risky,” Sarasti said, without elaboration.
Szpindel leaned in James’ direction. “Why give ’em something else to shoot at, eh?”
We sent more probes ahead, though, spat them out hard and fast and too fuel-constrained for anything but flyby and self-destruct. They couldn’t take their eyes off the machines swinging around Big Ben. Theseus stared her own unblinking stare, more distant though more acute. But if those high divers even knew we were out there, they ignored us completely. We tracked them across the closing distance, watched them swoop and loop though a million parabolas at a million angles. We never saw them collide—not with each other, not with the cauldron of rock tumbling around Ben’s equator. Every perigee dipped briefly into atmosphere; there they burned, and slowed, and accelerated back into space, their anterior scoops glowing with residual heat.
Bates grabbed a ConSensus image, drew highlights and a conclusion around the front end: “Scramjet.”
We tracked nearly four hundred thousand in less than two days. That appeared to be most of them; new sightings leveled off afterwards, the cumulative curve flattening towards some theoretical asymptote. Most of the orbits were close and fast, but Sarasti projected a frequency distribution extending almost back to Pluto. We might stay out here for years, and still catch the occasional new shovelnose returning from its extended foray into the void.
“The faster ones are pulling over fifty gees on the hairpin turn,” Szpindel pointed out. “Meat couldn’t handle that. I say they’re unmanned.”