They were right. Nothing did go wrong. The ship took some minor hits from some minor bits of ice in the gaps. Nothing the structured foam hulls and carbon composite skeletons couldn’t handle, and nothing that service egg jockeys couldn’t repair once they were settled in.
Each pass through the potentially hazardous ring gaps came more quickly on the heels of the last. The first ring crossings were separated by a day and a half. Just before the Nixon finally settled into the inclined circular orbit that threaded the Maxwell Gap, the crossings were three and a half hours apart.
Then they were close.
“What do we know?” Fang-Castro asked.
They were gathered in the Commons, which had been declared temporarily off-limits to anyone not invited—not because there were any secrets, but because there wasn’t enough room for everybody who wanted to attend. The chairs were mostly occupied by the science crew, along with representatives from Navigation and Engineering. Sandy was recording the meeting, which was being transmitted directly back to Earth on an encrypted link.
“We’re poking at it with everything we’ve got,” said Barney Kapule, a ranging and surveillance expert, one of two on board. The two had been chosen for their expertise in operating the onboard telescopes and the associated cameras. Everything they saw in their scopes was on its way back to Earth within milliseconds.
What had appeared two years earlier to be idle speculation by Richard Emery, the vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was close to spot-on.
“This is no moonlet,” Kapule said. “Our primary object is the size of a minor moon, an oblate spheroid a good five kilometers in diameter.” He tapped his slate and a vid of the object popped up on the oversized Commons vid screen. “It has minimal perturbing effect on the rings, so it has to be very low in density. In other words, we think it’s hollow, so it’s not a natural object. Whether it ever was a natural object, we don’t know yet. The surface is irregular. At this distance, we can’t tell if it’s natural weathered material, you know, roughened up by occasional small impacts over the years, or an artificial shell with a lot of hardware stuck on the outside.”
“Why can’t we see it better?” John Clover asked.
“Because it’s dark—not exactly stealth-black, but the surface is very, very dark, shading to a lighter gray at both of the poles,” said Candace Frank, Kapule’s associate. She touched her slate and brought up a different view of the object. “Whether or not this was intentional camouflage, it made the primary difficult to pick out in the Maxwell Gap as anything more than a minor moonlet. But it is more, a lot more. Not only do we have the primary, but it has a substantial retinue of dozens of additional moonlets, considerably less than a hundred meters in size. They appear to orbit in a fixed formation with the primary, and statistically there’s no possibility that the formation is natural. They were placed where they’re at. Whether they’re physically connected or just station-keeping, we can’t tell at this distance, but they’re all associated with each other.”
“In other words, we don’t have one alien object, we got a whole bunch of them,” Fang-Castro said.
“Even more than we’ve been talking about,” Kapule said. A new view came up, one that seemed sprinkled with salt. A group of thin red rings popped up, surrounding each white grain. “We’re seeing hundreds, and maybe thousands, of pixel-sized glitters of light that move between the primary and its moonlets and out into the rings and back again. Whatever they are, they’re always moving, like a swarm of bees around a hive… not to suggest anything invidious here.”
“What are the patterns?” Fang-Castro asked. “Is that a defense system?”
“Yes, we have an analysis,” said Don Larson, the mathematician and former founder of the orgy club. “To go back to the bee metaphor, it’s more like they’re gathering honey and bringing it back to the nest, rather than performing any kind of defensive maneuvers. They’re not particularly fast… fast enough, but not way fast… and their actions are deliberate, rather than random. Even if not designed for defense, they could certainly be used that way. To see them at this distance must mean that they are some meters in diameter. If they are metallic, and if enough of them hit the Nixon as quickly as they are moving now, they could tear us apart. It’d be like being hit by cars driving at highway speeds. In other words, they seem to be gathering honey, whatever that is, but like honeybees, they could bring out the stingers.”
Fang-Castro shook her head. She wanted none of that. The Nixon was not an armored warship.
Over the next several days, the steady minuscule thrust of the Nixon’s engines gradually warped its orbit, changing its inclination until the Nixon was orbiting within the Maxwell Gap in the plane of the rings. Simultaneously, they crept up on the alien constellation. Navigation and the surveillance people fed a steady stream of vid to the computers, where image analysis software tracked the motion of each of the bees. Sophisticated statistical modeling looked for any changes in the pattern of their collective motions, any indication that they were responding in any fashion to the approaching spaceship.
From Earth, they got a steady stream of essentially useless speculation about the nature of the constellation: the scientists on the Nixon saw everything hours before the earthbound analysts, and by the time their speculations got back to the ship, it had all been thought of.
Fang-Castro said to Crow, quietly, “David, the politicians and the military seem strangely quiet.”
“By design, I think,” Crow said. “Almost anything they say, the Chinese would pick up, one way or another. Not the encrypted stuff, but just chatter in the hallways. Which tends to be fairly accurate, if you’re in the right hallway.”
None of the analysis picked up changes in the behavior of the alien artifacts. The bees appeared to be as oblivious to the presence of humanity in the solar system as the starship had been two years earlier. Still, the Nixon held back, stabilizing its position at three hundred kilometers from the constellation. This was plenty close for the Nixon’s best telescopes—they could see ten-centimeter details on the alien facilities and the bees.
And they launched two recon shells, basically small, slow rockets equipped with cameras and designed to be extremely visible to radar and even visual detection, the better to signal peaceful intentions. The recon shells did a complete loop around the station, broadcasting a three-hundred-sixty-degree view of it.
They watched for a day. The nature of most of the bees became apparent, although the ultimate purpose of their activities was still mysterious. Most were ice-catchers. They hunted for ring debris. Some of them looked for chunks of ice comparable to their own size, latched onto them with grapples, and hauled them back to one of several moonlets. Others had large scoops and swept up ice gravel and sand, the way a whale scooped up plankton. This was also ferried to the moonlets. Another much smaller group of bees shuttled containers of some kind between the moonlets.
None of the bees seemed to be equipped with armaments, not even so much as a cutting laser. The same seemed to be true of the moonlets and the five-kilometer primary. The surfaces were mostly natural rock, porous regolith dotted with various alien assemblages that were mostly unrecognizable. A few were clearly antennae of some kind or another; none looked anything like a beamed energy or projectile weapon. The constellation seemed to be entirely unarmed.