No impact or other features at all were apparent. It was smooth as glass.
“Admiral, detach and come forward please,” the colonel instructed, sounding calm and professional. “I believe it is your turn to open our way.”
Krill was fairly unsteady and clearly uncomfortable here, but she was game, Harker gave her that. She took little steps, making her way to the front and then bracing herself against the smooth, streamlined V-shaped end of the valley.
This was where the absorption and analysis of the trans-mission from the surface was so valuable. With her computerlike mind and augmented mental abilities, Krill was able to instantly analyze the system in use here and then interface with the security system on the other side. It could have been done with a robotic system using the same information, but Krill was an acknowledged genius at this sort of thing and much more apt to see any nasty little traps that might have been laid.
She suddenly stopped and took a step back; they could hear the frown in her voice. “That’s odd. It should have cleared.”
She looked around, then up, and added, “Ah. Wait.”
The great disk of Helena was above them, but not for long, as the combination of Hector’s rapid rotation and irregular shape took it in a slow slide out of sight. At almost the instant it faded from view, there was a slight sparkling on the heretofore black obsidianlike rock. Krill turned, nodded to herself, and walked through. “Quickly,” she said. “As soon as any part of Helena is in a direct line, it will instantly power down.”
They all hurried. Once inside, they found themselves in a surprisingly large chamber that had been scooped out of the natural rock by some kind of heat ray. It was like being in an ancient cavern where not even water had touched, but the walls and ceiling were coated with a chemical substance that glowed. It wasn’t as good as full-blown lighting, but it would have allowed anyone there to see around even if they weren’t wearing a special suit, and it gave all of them, appropriately suited up, more than enough light to amplify and use.
“We’re safe in here, even with suit power,” Krill told them. “This is fairly deep and well insulated from outside scans. It’s as close to a perfect natural jammer as I’ve seen. They must have been working here when Helena fell, and possibly after.”
Katarina Socolov looked around nervously at the cold, empty, glowing chamber. “But where did they go?”
“There’s nothing here to sustain a workforce for almost a century,” the colonel pointed out. “I suspect that much of the work was done by machines, probably coupled to a large database, AI unit, and neural net. I’m not getting much in the way of readings on it now, though.”
Krill checked her instrumentation and tried to use her special interfacing abilities. “It’s in complete shutdown,” she told them at last. “I doubt if it has the power to actually operate the device here, or, if it does, just powering up would be enough to bring Titan ships in force to see what was going on.”
Harker looked around. “Okay, so where is this thing? And what the hell is it?”
Krill looked around, then pointed. “Over there. Through that tunnel.”
They walked quickly over and through, Krill leading the way, only to emerge in a much smaller chamber almost too cramped to fit them in their suits.
It was certainly a control room of some sort. A series of screens were mounted in front of a central console, the screens creating a 180-degree forward view and rising up almost to the ceiling. The console itself was not nearly as elaborate. There were no gauges, small screens, dials, switches, or anything of the sort. There was a single command chair, but it was oddly shaped and hardly designed for normal human sitting. It was, in fact, quite large and bulky.
“The command chair is designed to interface with a specially designed suit,” Krill noted, examining it thoroughly. “I’d say the whole thing was designed to connect a human in a suit designed for control purposes with the computer net integrated into the room. The screens appear to be for the observers’ benefit. This is most certainly it, though. The control center for Project Ulysses.”
“All right,” Harker responded. “So what the hell is it?”
“A control center, Mister Harker,” Juanita Krill replied. “A control center and aiming mechanism and a lot more for controlling a force nobody yet understands. Synchronize your suits for an incoming visual and I will transmit to you just what this is all about. I believe it is time that you know what the rest of us know, and perhaps I can also, at this point, fill in a few holes for the others.”
The synchronization took barely a moment, and then they all received an image of a vast starfield. Nothing in it looked familiar, although it appeared to cover a fair segment of space. What was telling was a bright and indistinct area shaped much like a giant eye that had to be an artifact of transmission; it couldn’t possibly be present in real life. It showed some stars and other structures, some clear, some a bit smudged as if obscured by gases, but what was important was that it did not match the surrounding starfield. It was like an eerie, eye-shaped window that looked right through the universe to another, different scene beyond. Even more strange, the eye would occasionally “blink”; it didn’t actually open and close, but the scene it revealed would shift radically, then, a bit later, shift back. It was pretty unnerving.
“That is Priam’s Lens,” Krill told them. “It is only a few parsecs from here, and it is what is known as a micro-lens. We’ve seen these since we could look into space with adequate equipment, but most tend to be of galactic or even supergalactic size. Walls and giant lenses and bubbling voids. This one is quite small. Smaller than an average gas giant, in fact. It is, of course, not real. It’s a distortion caused by something else that is there. Something so powerful and so mysterious that to call it an artifact of a singularity would be like calling an amputation a hangnail. We may never actually know what it is, because it isn’t at the Lens but instead causes it from some other place connected to this sector by this hole in space-time. We have seen many natural wormholes before, although they usually close rather quickly after they open. Judging from its gravitational effects, this one has been around a very long time and shows no signs of shutting down. In fact, controlling or at least capping it was the primary problem to be solved.”
“They capped a natural wormhole?” Harker was astonished.
“Well, yes and no. We could not cap the Lens—it does not help to cap what you cannot even know is there—but the mere existence of the Lens causes other, rather small and limited, wormholes to form all about it. Those were the ones that they sought to cap, and, in one or two cases, they apparently did. Its properties, as I said, are unique in our experience. There were many theories about what was on the other end of the Lens that might be causing the effects, but nothing could survive getting there or being in its presence. For computational purposes, it was termed Olympus, but what it is will remain a mystery until we encounter it or one like it. There are several theories on what it might be, but each is so unique in itself that it stretches credibility.”
“Such as?” van der Voort pressed.
“Whatever it is, it masks itself, and the energy it puts out is enormous. We’ve never found a way to properly measure it. It spawns artifacts and shoots them out and around in all directions, which is also a characteristic of a black hole, only it no longer appears to be swallowing anything. The area of space-time around it is so unstable that these natural wormholes have formed. Somehow they are as stable as the ones we create, but hardly passive.”