“Signs, or the whole armada?” Oscar asked lightly.
“If they were here, they’d be investigating us by now,” said Antonia Clarke, the engineering chief. “We’ve created enough disturbance since we’ve arrived. Even a few perfunctory warning satellites scattered around the barrier would have found us.”
“Maybe,” Tunde said. “But we certainly haven’t located any active observation equipment. And it is a long time since the barrier went up. The threat might not exist anymore.”
“It’s only long on a human scale,” Oscar said.
“All right.” Wilson held up his hands to prevent any full-scale argument erupting. “If the attacking force or entity is still here, we need to find it—preferably without it seeing us, which I admit is a long shot; however, we have to try. If they’ve gone, then they might have left something behind. And if the barrier was put up for the opposite reason—to confine the star and its inhabitants—then we have an even greater chance of finding the builders. Therefore, I have decided we’ll take the Second Chance on a complete circumnavigation of the equator. We’ll stand off an AU and use the hyperdrive at low speed. If we take a week, the hysradar will be able to complete a very accurate scan of the surrounding space. Following that, and taking the worst-case scenario that we find nothing, we’ll fly to both poles and examine them. If after that we still draw a blank we’ll review the situation then.”
“Captain,” Tunde said. “I’d like to raise the issue of communication.”
“With whom?”
“Both our scenarios imply that there is some kind of sentient life to be found inside the barrier. Now that we’re this close it may be possible to attract their attention, possibly even initiate a dialogue.”
“How? I thought you said the barrier was impervious.”
“It is to everything except gravity.” He indicated the chief engineer. “I’ve discussed this with Antonia. It shouldn’t be too difficult to modify the energy configuration of the hyperdrive to create simple gravity waves. If the civilization inside has a working gravity detector, they should be able to pick it up.”
The notion surprised Wilson; given the analysis he’d been getting from the science teams since they’d arrived, he’d dismissed the notion of any attempted contact a long time ago. “How difficult would the adaptations be? I will not authorize taking the hyperdrive off-line at any time.”
“It’s a matter of programming,” Antonia said. “That’s all. Standard gravity wave emission would be a simple modification of the hysradar function. The ship’s RI can give us a reformatted routine within a couple of hours.”
“Okay then, you can go ahead with the program. If the circumnavigation flight doesn’t produce any results, we’ll certainly try it. Good idea, both of you.”
It was the second day of their week-long flight around the equator when the hysradar finally found something of interest. The first scan returns came back just after midnight, ship’s time. Oscar was in command on the bridge; he ordered the Second Chance back into normal space, and put a call in to the captain’s cabin.
By the time Wilson arrived, pulling on his jacket and shaking his head to rid himself of sleep, the starship’s main sensors were fully deployed. A picture was building up on the bridge portals. He squinted at it, not quite believing what he was seeing. The radar graphic of neon-green grid lines was the most detailed, showing a perfect hemisphere rising out of the barrier. Its base was twenty-five thousand kilometers in diameter.
Tunde Sutton and Bruno Seymore arrived on the bridge. Both of them stood behind Wilson, staring in perplexity. “Wow,” Bruno muttered. “Talk about a fly in amber.”
“Okay,” Wilson went over and sat behind his console. “What am I looking at? Is that a planet?”
“No, sir,” Russell said, the screens on his console were shimmering with light as he ran the incoming data through analysis routines. “I’d say it’s some kind of extension of the barrier itself. Surface is uniformly smooth, just like the barrier, and it is a perfect hemisphere as well. It has an extremely strong magnetic field, at least an order of magnitude above a standard planetary field; and it’s fluctuating wildly, almost as if it’s spinning. There’s no gravity field, as such… sensors are picking up gravity wave emissions, though. They’re regular, pulses of some kind. Not synchronized with the magnetic shift, though. Very odd.”
At that, Wilson turned to face Tunde who was just sitting down behind his own console. The astrophysicist gave him a confused frown.
“A signal?” Wilson asked.
“I don’t know.”
“The pulse sequence hasn’t varied,” Russell said. “If it’s a signal it’s not saying much.”
“Can you see where they’re coming from?”
“They seem to be from within the hemisphere, although the actual origin point appears to be moving around in there.”
“Okay, anything else?”
“There’s no infrared emission.” He nodded at the large portal. It was showing the barrier’s blank surface in bright carmine. A large circle in the center of the image was black, as if a hole had been cut through. “Wait! There’s something at the top.” Russell’s voice rose in pitch as he interpreted the raw data. “The apex isn’t curved, it’s flat, or… maybe some kind of crater. An opening! There’s an opening there.”
“You’re right,” Bruno called out; there was a wild grin on his face. “Slight photon emission. There’s light shining out, wavelength just outside ultraviolet. It’s not infrared, not like the rest of the barrier. That could be the way in!”
Wilson and Oscar exchanged a shocked glance. “Calm down,” Wilson said. “I want realities not speculation at this point. Get me a decent image from the main telescope. Oscar, what’s our current stand-off distance?”
“A hundred thousand kilometers above the barrier; seventy thousand from the hemisphere.”
“Good enough.”
“Focusing now,” Bruno announced.
The bridge portal showed a fast expanding ring of red flashing outward. Then it was completely black. “Here it comes,” Bruno said triumphantly. A speck of luminescence getting bigger rapidly, jumping up to a crescent of lavender light that shivered in the middle of the portal.
“Size?” Wilson asked.
“The hole is seventeen kilometers across.”
“This wavelength doesn’t match Dyson Alpha’s known spectrum,” Tunde said. “That’s not the star shining out.”
Wilson couldn’t take his gaze off the sliver of light. “Any local activity that would indicate spacecraft or sensors?”
“No, sir.”
“I don’t suppose you know if that hole was open when we emerged from the wormhole?”
“We know the apex was flat, but the hysradar return doesn’t tell us if it was open.”
“Very well, recommendations?”
“Send a probe in,” Russell said immediately.
“Eventually, yes,” Tunde said. “But we’ll need to observe it for a while first.”
“While we’re doing that we could send a satellite on a flyby above the opening,” Oscar said. “Keep it at our current standoff distance, and take a look directly down inside. Our position gives us a lousy angle of view.”
Wilson was mildly surprised at the suggestion. He’d expected Oscar to be more cautious, although a satellite flyby was reasonable enough. If anything was in there, they must surely be aware of the Second Chance. “Go ahead.”
“I’ll start the prep sequence.” Oscar went over to the console Anna normally used, and called up the launch sequence.
“In the meantime,” Wilson said dryly, “does anyone have any ideas about what this thing is?”
Jean Douvoir chuckled softly. “Fortress of Darkness, where the evil lord hangs out.”
“Thanks. Anyone else?”
“I have a possibility,” Bruno said. He was close to blushing as the bridge crew all looked at him. “Well, it’s active, right? Something inside is generating gravity waves, and magnetic fields; and that’s just what we can detect. It’s also absolutely right on the equator; and as near as our sensors can tell, it’s perfectly aligned with the plane of the ecliptic. Though I’m not sure how relevant that is…” He glanced around, unnerved by the attention. “I just thought it might be a generator, that’s all, where the whole barrier is being produced from, or at least this area of it.”