convoy to move.
“Doctor Kapoor!” Stone shouted.
Her head snapped up. She followed his outstretched hand, pointed like an arrow through the casement.
Thoomp, dooooozsh. Thoomp, dooooozsh.
There was no noise, but the sudden slow-motion leapfrogging of the pod created dramatic sound effects in her mind.
For a moment the pod looked like it was imploding, the pinkish-orangish field shrinking, turning in on itself, until there was nothing, it was gone.
That was the thoomp.
Half a second later, the field and probe appeared again, kilometers closer than before.
The violent, static-encrusted expansion—sparking, widening—engulfed her mind like a deluge of water. Dooooozsh.
The lights in the observation lounge turned purple. Captain Tan’s voice echoed over the comms system. “In order to avoid collision, we are engaging the SD drive—”
Thoomp.
Dooooozsh.
Closer. It kept coming, kept coming.
“Please, everyone, remain calm and secure yourself and any loose belongings that may pose a danger to—”
Thoomp.
Dooooozsh.
Vanhi could see the antennae groups on the pod clearly. It was so close, so—
“Dive!” Tan ordered.
Thoomp.
This time there was sound. Eardrum-bursting, earth-shattering, bone-vibrating ssssshhhhhhcrrrrash.
The pod collided with Breath, below the window deck. A white spark-lined leading edge of sunset orange passed unperturbed through the observation window, through the hull.
Vanhi’s feet left the floor as the gravity was disrupted, or damaged, or whatever was happening. She tried holding on to the desk, to keep herself grounded as chairs and mugs and monitors sailed up and away, with no clear direction, but soon she, too, was floating, aimless.
Until the strange field slammed into her, throwing her sideways, blotting out the purple light and turning it chartreuse. Her eyes snapped closed, and her breath punched its way out of her body.
Her head went light, fuzzy, nothing but …
… nothing …
… but …
… a …
… haze …
CAZNAL: IN SEARCH OF THE LESSER REDOUBT
ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTEEN YEARS SINCE THE INCEPTION OF NOUMENON INFINITUM SEPTEMBER 5, 117 RELAUNCH 5274 CE
… Convoy Seven has been assigned a new mission, designated Noumenon Infinitum. Its express purpose is to travel to the variable star LQ Pyxidis and complete construction of the alien megastructure, thought to be a Dyson Sphere and known as “the Web.” Once complete, Convoy Seven is to charge the batteries on the ship designated Zetta, then return to Earth …
Confidential addendum to official statement, Convoy Seven crew only:
In addition to the official mission parameters appointed by Earth, Noumenon Infinitum is to investigate the craft known as “the Nest.” Any information garnered from the investigation pertaining to alien involvement with the Web is to be applied …
… The final clause of the official mission statement can be struck. Convoy Seven need not return to Earth …
It started with a map, like all good treasure hunts do. One alien in origin, and not immediately recognizable for what it was. But it had led them here.
Caznal the Fourth gazed out of the shuttle porthole and into the inky night beyond. It wasn’t the total lightlessness of an SD bubble; it was a dark monolith of matter. A planemo—a systemless planetoid—wandering and alone. Starless, moonless. Naught but a black disk against the stars, and it blotted them out one by one as the shuttle shifted.
But Caz didn’t see a flat emptiness. She saw a blank slate. The planemo held nothing but potential.
Light lensed around the edges in a visible halo as they descended, creating a bowed outline of the galaxies and such beyond.
Out the opposite side of the craft, over her apprentice’s shoulder, she could barely make out the twelve ships of the convoy, their illuminated windows only distinguishable from far-off stars because of their orientation and regularity.
No one could have anticipated, all those years ago on Launch Day, that the convoy would have found itself here.
When Noumenon, the original mission, had arrived at LQ Pyx, they’d discovered an alien craft floating near the Web’s most massive component. The craft was damaged, and empty, but clearly belonged to an alien species who had taken up the construction project. The convoy had taken the ship—dubbed the Nest because of the many pipes that circled around it and dangled from its bottom in an arrangement that resembled woven twigs—believing it held answers to the Web.
Now that ship hovered in the belly of Slicer, where the engineers poked and prodded it like a sick patient with a rare disease.
And it had led them here.
As the shuttle fell into a degrading orbit, Caznal’s apprentice, Ivan Baraka the Fifteenth, grinned at her and bounced in his seat, practically vibrating inside his spacesuit. There were old Earth vids of teenagers his age bearing that same expression as they waited for a rollercoaster to spill over its first hump.
She shared his excitement, as did the other seven scholars aboard. But still, a small discrepancy in their studies nagged at her. After all, when a treasure map’s instructions read “Twenty paces past Skull Rock, one hundred and twenty around Crocodile Cove, and there be the Cave of Wonders,” one expects the cave to be there, not a divot in the ground.
That they’d arrived at a divot—a planemo—and not a cave was troubling.
The Nest had not given up any of its secrets easily. At first, it appeared to have no electrical connections. “It’s like finding a sailboat in orbit,” someone had once said. How could a spaceship function without wires and transistors?
But they’d been looking at it all wrong—all human.
Not only did the Nest have vast reserves of hydrogen that it could compress into a metallic superconducting superfluid to form electrical connections a single atom thick, but the way the Nest relied so heavily on gravitons suggested the aliens that had created it had been able to biologically manipulate gravitons.
If they’d never come to such a realization, not only would the Nest still lie dormant, they never would have recognized the alien maps for what they were.
“Approaching Crater Sixty-four,” the pilot said over the intercom, her voice