‘We are about to have our first look at an artifact of this inner-world’s culture,’ Old Portia continues crisply. ‘Our instruments have detected a fellow-traveller in these reaches, an artificial body moving outwards at a considerable rate.’ Around them, tightly-furled plastic roses open up into screens showing enhanced views of the interplanetary traveller they are closing on. There is notation in the neat letters of Imperial C, which is the written lingua franca amongst the colonists, and in the slipshod and chaotic-looking spider notation, but the floor also buzzes with technical data for those members of the crew with the feet to receive it, and for Helena. Perhaps because they had their Understandings to lean on, Portiid writing systems are considerably less efficient than human. For new information, they prefer directly informative interfaces where possible.
Helena assumes at first she has mistranslated what she is receiving, and double-checks against the screens.
How big? Portia scratches out, soft enough that it is for Helena’s hands only. An error, do you think?
The Voyager has made quite a sharp diversion to get closer to the oncoming object’s trajectory, ever since initial readings showed something other than a mere errant asteroid. Kern has husbanded their energy and fuel all the way through the cold dark between solar systems, but the ship’s scoops have replenished their stores from the rich cloud of ice, gas and dust that formed the edge of their destination system’s orbiting disc, allowing all manner of costly manoeuvres. She constructed remote probes in her internal factories and sent them ahead on one-way journeys, each with a tiny splinter of herself copied into their cores. Now the data comes back, and nobody can quite understand what they are looking at.
The approaching artifact is mostly spherical, with one very obvious exception. The outer surface is studded with a regular net of nodes that might have been sensors or engines or even weapons once, but are now little more than scarred, ice-frosted stumps and pits. One side of it has ruptured, and the innards have come out in a vast, jagged spray that flowers into fantastical spines and curling tentacles as though some unthinkable oceanic horror has been killed halfway through hatching out of an egg twenty-seven kilometres across.
Ice, the probes confirm. Its eruption from the interior of the object might be the result of a fissure in the unknown surface material, or else the freezing of a liquid centre might have burst the membrane open with its expansion. Either way the colossal, frozen eruption threw the entire object’s centre of gravity so that the sphere and its miles-long plume now spin about one another with ponderous grace.
The ice is opaque white over most of its surface, but the keen eyes of the probes find shadows within. Under magnification, some seem to be recognizably fish, others are of a more uncertain shape, although that might also be the work of the expansion.
An artificial moon. A moon of water, Portia suggests. Ornamental perhaps? And is that damage we see from after it was flung into space or the cause of it?
Helena lets her palms touch the deck and subvocalizes, ‘Don’t let speculation run away with you,’ letting the mechanisms in her gloves make their best translation in precisely calibrated touch-speak, while the white dots on her thumbs add palp-emphasis. It is halting at best, and Portia says she sounds as though she is ‘giddy with sweet sap,’ but progress is progress.
The probes get the best look they can at the whirling planetoid, but they lack the ability to reverse their course and follow it, and soon it is on its endless way, heading along the plane of the solar system on a course that will one day see it vanish forever in the great beyond.
Curious, says one of the Alarmed Feet operators.
Uninformative, the other complains, with a twitch of her palps that conveyed the subtext, and I had better things to be doing with my time.
The captain calls up the relevant figures, wavering over whether to pursue the ruined object or let it vanish away: relative momentum, energy consumption . . . probably these quoditian elements don’t sway her as much as the clear radio evidence that there is a great deal more of interest further into the system. Her very silence and stillness is her decision, as physics whisks the object beyond their reach. They are going onwards. And yet . . .
If we push on, we will pluck so many strings we can expect a response by the locals, she addresses them. Analysis of energy signatures leaves open the possibility that they may be more technologically advanced, and also that they may either be fighting a war amongst themselves or be naturally exuberant and wasteful in the way they burn energy. Helena is having difficulty keeping up with the rapid speech of the captain and words from Kern’s version keep creeping in. She fights to concentrate.
Caution dictates we not risk the entire mission by proceeding further as a whole or broadcasting our position. I’m having us move into the shadow of the closest outer planet. The screens begin to display the relevant telemetry. However, we cannot come all this way and not make contact. I’ve ordered a segment of the ship be prepared as an independent scout fitted for a small crew. I’d prefer a crew made up entirely of Portiids. The captain is using the Portiid’s own name for themselves, of course, meaning something like We who know best, and Kern’s translation omits this digression entirely. However, there is a small chance that the civilization is both human and unaugmented by the Unity infection, in which case Human ambassadors will be essential.
Small chance? Helena throws in, through her palms.
One of the sensor operators cocks a cephalothorax to eye her sidelong. There are no human representations within the decoded visual data that forms a large part of the signals we have intercepted, she explains. Mostly it is just rapidly changing colours and irregular 3D shapes. Very fascinating!
The captain continues, The scout will have a facet of the Avrana Kern construct but this will have necessarily fewer resources to draw upon. I am selecting crew and Human companions who have demonstrated their ability to interact with each other independently. This will be high-risk. No guarantee that we will be able to assist if things go wrong. Participation is therefore voluntary. This is said with a brief rearing motion, the captain’s first two pairs of legs held high for just a second. It suggests that anyone backing out will lose status with the captain – hence with the mission as a whole. Portiids place great value on boldness, an archetypal female trait for them with a whole dictionary of social expectations spilling out from it. The captain probably didn’t mean to qualify her words like that, but some mannerisms are too deeply ingrained to shake.