“Where are they now?”
“Contained, what’s left of them. Maybe eight hundred still frozen. Two hundred or so in the breakout party—we don’t have exact numbers. But we ate into them. By my estimate there can’t be more than about sixty still warm, and we’ve got them isolated behind heavy bulkheads and electrostatic shields.”
“How did the ship get so torn up?”
“It was desperate. They were prepared to go down fighting. That’s when most of the damage was done. Normal pacification measures were never going to hold them. We had to break out the heavy excimers, and they’ll put a hole right through the hull, out to space and anything that gets in the way—including drive and navigation systems.”
“We were carrying excimers?”
“Standard procedure, Captain. We’ve just never needed them before.”
“I can’t believe this. A century of peaceful cooperation. Mutual advancement through shared science and technology. Why would they throw it all away now, and on my watch?”
“I’ll show you why,” Struma said.
Supporting my unsteady frame he walked me to an observation port and opened the radiation shutters. Then he turned off the red emergency lighting so that my eyes had a better chance of adjusting to the outside view.
I saw stars. They were moving slowly from left to right, not because the ship was moving as a whole but because we were now on centrifugal gravity and our part of the Equinoctial was rotating. The stars were scattered into loose associations and constellations, some of them changed almost beyond recognition, but others—made up of more distant stars—not too different than those I remembered from my childhood.
“They’re just stars,” I told Struma, unsurprised by the view. “I don’t…”
“Wait.”
A black wall slid into view. Its boundary was a definite edge, beyond which there were no stars at all. The more we rotated, the more blackness came into our line of sight. It wasn’t just an absence of nearby stars. The Milky Way, that hobbled spine of galactic light, made up of tens of millions of stars, many thousand of light years away, came arcing across the normal part of the sky then reached an abrupt termination, just as if I were looking out at the horizon above a sunless black sea.
For a few seconds all I could do was stare, unable to process what I was seeing, or what it meant. My training had prepared me for many operational contingencies—almost everything that could ever go wrong on an interstellar crossing. But not this.
Half the sky was gone.
“What the hell is it?”
Struma looked at me. There was a long silence. “Good question.”
You were not one of the six passenger-delegates. That would be too neat, too unlikely, given the odds. And I would have remembered your face as soon as you came to my door.
I met them in one of the mass revival areas. It was similar to the crew facilities, but much larger and more luxurious in its furnishings. Here, at the end of our voyage, passengers would have been thawed out in groups of a few hundred at a time, expecting to find themselves in a new solar system, at the start of a new phase in their lives.
The six were going through the same process of adjustment I had experienced only a few hours earlier. Discomfort, confusion—and a generous helping of resentment, that the crossing had not gone as smoothly as the brochures had promised.
“Here’s what I know,” I said, addressing the gathering as they sat around a hexagonal table, eating and drinking restoratives. “At some point after we left Fand there was an attempted takeover by the Conjoiners. From what we can gather one or two hundred of them broke out of reefersleep while the rest of us were frozen. They commandeered the drive systems and brought the ship to a standstill. We’re near an object or phenomenon of unknown origin. It’s a black sphere about the same size as a star, and we’re only fifty thousand kilometres from its surface.” I raised a hand before the obvious questions started raining in. “It’s not a black hole. A black hole this large would be of galactic mass, and there’s no way we’d have missed something like that in our immediate neighbourhood. Besides, it’s not pulling at us. It’s just sitting there, with no gravitational attraction that our instruments can register. Right up to its edge we can see that the stars aren’t suffering any aberration or redshift … yes?”
One of the passengers had also raised a hand. The gesture was so polite, so civil, that it stopped me in my tracks.
“This can’t have been an accident, can it?”
“Might I know your name, sir?”
He was a small man, mostly bald, with a high voice and perceptive, piercing eyes.
“Grellet. Doctor Grellet. I’m a physician.”
“That’s lucky,” I said. “We might well end up needing a doctor.”
“Luck’s got nothing to do with it, Captain Bernsdottir. The protocol always ensures that there’s a physician among the emergency revival cohort.”
I had no doubt that he was right, but it was a minor point of procedure and I felt I could be forgiven for forgetting it.
“I’ll still be glad of your expertise, if we have difficulties.”
He looked back at me, something in his mild, undemonstrative manner beginning to grate on me. “Are we expecting difficulties?”
“That’ll depend. But to go back to your question, it doesn’t seem likely that the Conjoiners just stumbled on this object, artefact, whatever we want to call it. They must have known of its location, then put a plan in place to gain control of the ship.”
“To what end?” Doctor Grellet asked.
I decided truthfulness was the best policy. “I don’t know. Some form of intelligence gathering, I suppose. Maybe a unilateral first contact attempt, against the terms of the Europa Accords. Whatever the plan was, it’s been thwarted. But that’s not been without a cost. The ship is damaged. The Equinoctial’s own repair systems will put things right, but they’ll need time for that.”
“Then we sit and wait,” said another passenger, a woman this time. “That’s all we have to do, isn’t it? Then we can be on our way again.”
“There’s a bit more to it than that,” I answered, looking at them all in turn. “We have a residual drift toward the object. Ordinarily it wouldn’t be a problem—we’d just use the main engines or steering thrusters to neutralise the motion. But we have no means of controlling the engines, and we won’t get it until the repair schedule is well advanced.”
“How long?” Doctor Grellet asked.
“To regain the use of the engines? My executive officers say four weeks at the bare minimum. Even if we shaved a week off that, though, it wouldn’t help us. At our present rate of drift we’ll reach the surface of the object in twelve days.”
There was a silence. It echoed my own, when Struma had first informed me of our predicament.
“What will happen?” another passenger asked.
“We don’t know. We don’t even know what that surface is made of, whether it’s a solid wall or some kind of screen or discontinuity. All we do know is that it blocks all radiation at an immeasurably high efficiency, and that its temperature is exactly the same as the cosmic microwave background. If it’s a Dyson sphere … or something similar … we’d expect to see it pumping out in the infrared. But it doesn’t. It just sits there being almost invisible. If you wanted to hide something, to conceal yourself in interstellar space … impossibly hard to detect, until you’re almost on top of it … this would be the thing. It’s like camouflage, a cloak, or…”