Being a passenger-carrying vessel, supposed to fly between two settled, civilised solar systems, the Equinoctial carried no shuttles or large extravehicular craft. There were no lifeboats or tugs, nothing that could nudge us onto a different course or reverse our drift. Even our freight inventory was low for this crossing. I know, because I studied the cargo manifest, looking for some magic solution to our problem: a crate full of rocket motors, or something similar.
But the momentum of a million-tonne starship, even drifting at a mere fifty meters a second, is still immense. It would take more than a spare limpet motor or steering jet to make a difference to our fate.
Exactly what our fate was, of course, remained something of an open question.
Soon we would know.
An hour before the suit’s arrival at the surface I gathered Struma, Doctor Grellet, the other officers and passenger delegates in the bridge. Our improvised probe had continued transmitting information back to us for the entire duration of its day-long crossing. Throughout that time there had been little significant variation in the parameters, and no hint of a response from the object.
It remained black, cold and resolutely starless. Even as it fell within the last ten thousand kilometres, the suit was detecting no trace radiation beyond that faint microwave sizzle. It was pinging sensor pulses into the surface and picking up no hint of echo or backscatter. The gravitational field remained as flat as any other part of interstellar space, with no suggestion that the black sphere exerted any pull on its surroundings. It had to be made of something, but even if there had been only a moon’s mass distributed throughout that volume, let alone a planet or a star, the suit would have picked up the gradient.
So it was a non-physical surface—an energy barrier or discontinuity. But even an energy field ought to have produced a measurable curvature, a measurable alteration in the suit’s motion.
Something else, then. Something—as Magadis had implied—that lay entirely outside the framework of our physics. A kink or fracture in spacetime, artfully engineered. There might be little point in attempting to build a conceptual bridge between what we knew and what the object represented. Little point for baseline humans, at least. But I thought of what a loom of cross-linked, genius-level intelligences might make of it. The Conjoiners had already developed weapons and drive systems that were beyond our narrow models, even as they occasionally drip-fed us hints and glimpses of their “adjunct physics”, as if to reassure their allies that they were only a step or two behind.
The suit was within eight thousand kilometres of the surface when its readings began to turn odd. It was small things to start with, almost possible to put down to individual sensor malfunctions. But as the readings turned stranger, and more numerous, the unlikelihood of these breakdowns happening all at once became too great to dismiss.
Dry-mouthed, I stared at the numbers and graphs.
“What?” asked Chajari, one of the female passengers.
“We’ll need to look at these readings in more detail…” Struma began.
“No,” I said, cutting him off. “What they’re telling us is clear enough as it is. The suit’s accelerometers are going haywire. It feels as if it’s being pulled in a hundred directions at once. Pulled and pushed, like a piece of putty being squashed and stretched in someone’s hand. And it’s getting worse…”
I had been blunt, but there was no sense in sugaring things for the sake of the passengers. They had been woken to share in our decision-making processes, and for that reason alone they needed to know exactly how bad our predicament was.
The suit was still transmitting information when it hit the seven thousand kilometre mark, as near as we could judge. It only lasted a few minutes after that, though. The accelerational stresses built and built, until whole blocks of sensors began to black out. Soon after that the suit reported a major loss of its own integrity, as if its extremities had been ripped or crushed by the rising forces. By then it was tumbling, sending back only intermittent chirps of scrambled data.
Then it was gone.
I allowed myself a moment of calm before proceeding.
“Even when the suit was still sending to us,” I said, “it was being buffeted by forces far beyond the structural limits of the ship. We’d have broken up not long after the eight thousand mark—and it would have been unpleasant quite a bit sooner than that.” I paused and swallowed. “It’s not a black hole. We know that. But there’s something very odd about the spacetime near the surface. And if we drift too close we’ll be shredded, just as the suit was.”
It reached us then. The ship groaned, and we all felt a stomach-heaving twist pass through our bodies. The emergency tone sounded, and the red warning lights began to flash.
Had we been a ship at sea, it was as if we had been afloat on calm waters, until a single great wave rolled under us, followed by a series of diminishing after-ripples.
The disturbance, whatever it had been, gradually abated.
Doctor Grellet was the first to speak. “We still don’t know if the thing has a mind or not,” he said, in the high, piping voice that I was starting to hate. “But I think we can be reasonably sure of one thing, Captain Bernsdottir.”
“Which would be?” I asked.
“You’ve discovered how to provoke it.”
Just when I needed some good news, Struma brought it to me.
“It’s marginal,” he said, apologising before he had even started. “But given our present circumstances…”
“Go on.”
He showed me a flowchart of various repair schedules, a complex knotted thing like a many-armed octopus, and next to it a graph of our location, compared to the sphere.
“Here’s our present position, thirty-five thousand kilometres from the surface.”
“The surface may not even be our worst problem now,” I pointed out.
“Then we’ll assume we only have twenty-five thousand kilometres before things get difficult—a bit less than six days. But it may be enough. I’ve been running through the priority assignments in the repair schedule, and I think we can squeeze a solution out of this.”
I tried not to cling to false hope. “You can?”
“As I said, it’s marginal, but…”
“Spare me the qualifications, Struma. Just tell me what we have or haven’t got.”
“Normally the ship prioritises primary drive repairs over anything else. It makes sense. If you’re trying to slow down from light speed, and something goes wrong with the main engines at a high level of time-compression … well, you want that fixed above all else, unless you plan on over-shooting your target system by several light years, or worse.” He drew a significant pause. “But we’re not in that situation. We need auxiliary control now, enough to correct the drift. If it takes a year or ten to regain relativistic capability, we’ll still be alive. We can wait it out in reefersleep.”
“Good…” I allowed.
“If we override all default schedules, and force the repair processes to ignore the main engines—and anything we don’t need to stay alive for the next six days—then the simulations say we may have a chance of recovering auxiliary steering and attitude control before we hit the ten thousand kilometre mark. Neutralise the drift, and reverse it enough to get away from this monster. Then worry about getting back home. And even if we can’t get the main engines running again, we can eventually transmit a request for assistance, then just sit here.”
“They’d have to answer us,” I said.
“Of course.”
“Have you … initiated this change in the schedule?”