Arbenz led them along the fabric tunnel towards the borehole. Maybe we’re going fishing, Dakota thought, suppressing a semihysterical grin. As they approached the borehole, the water in its centre began to churn and bubble furiously.
She stared in amazement as a submersible rose out of it, its hull studded with instruments. A metal platform slid out from under the encompassing platform, locking into place on the craft’s hull, while the opposite end of the tunnel they were passing through slid forward on gimbals to connect with a hatch in the submersible’s hull.
A few moments later, the hatch opened and three figures in gel suits disembarked. The Senator took the lead, stepping up on to the encircling platform, and made sure to shake the hands of each of the submersible’s crew in turn. The personnel-two men and a woman-were apparently delighted to find Arbenz waiting for them. A few moments later they walked past Dakota and the rest, heading towards the antechamber.
Dakota peered down into the black, churning waters as she stepped up on to the raised platform. Heating elements were clearly visible for a long way down, ringing the interior of the borehole, and presumably there to keep it from freezing over.
She didn’t want to think just how far down through the solid ice the Freehold had drilled. The ocean under there had been dark for an eternity, and was deep enough to be effectively bottomless. The thought of plunging down into those empty depths, regardless of the circumstances, made her flesh crawl.
She turned again to Corso, who was standing beside her. ‘If you really found a starship,’ she whispered, ‘what the hell is it doing buried down here? And how did you even find it?’
‘Luck,’ Corso replied. ‘The Agartha was the first Freehold ship to arrive at Nova Arctis, but it ran into trouble straight away. It suffered an engine failure during a routine evaluation of the outer system, and somehow the derelict picked up on one of its distress frequencies and responded. The signal was extremely low-power, so they were lucky to pick it up at all. The crew managed to triangulate the source of the signal a couple of weeks later.’
‘Uh.’ A sense of numbness was spreading through Dakota’s body that had nothing to do with the subzero temperatures. A starship? But one, she could only assume, the Shoal knew nothing of.
It was like finding the Holy Grail-no, better. Transluminal technology, at least, was real.
As she followed the rest inside the vacated submersible, it was impossible not to think about the kilometres of lightless ocean below her. She took a seat in a cramped circular chamber. There was a control panel at one end of it, replete with displays showing infrared and sonar maps of the mountainous terrain above and below them, but from the craft’s interior layout Dakota guessed this submersible was automated rather than piloted.
And there it was again: a sense of otherness from somewhere far, far below, in the depths of Theona’s freezing subterranean ocean. It was like finding herself in an empty building, but nonetheless becoming filled with the absolute conviction there was someone or something nearby-but just out of sight. Her Ghost scanned the local comms traffic, but the only detectable signals were the usual low-level automated pings.
It had to be the derelict communicating, in some way she couldn’t understand, with her Ghost. Something was down there, and it was currently trying to say hello.
She looked around at the others, irrationally wondering if any of them could feel the same thing. Her skin prickled unpleasantly.
Corso had again taken a seat next to her. He turned to her and frowned, and she realized she must have looked more worried than she might want to let on.
‘What’s the problem?’ he asked softly.
She almost laughed.
Something alien is signalling to me, from the depths of a bottomless ocean in a dead system, you stupid bastard. What do you think?
Instead she said: ‘If you’ve really found some kind of crashed starship, you lot are going to have a ton of shit coming down on your collective heads once the news gets out. Tell me it’s not a Shoal craft, because if it is, I might as well start writing my will right now.’
‘It’s not Shoal,’ Corso replied, after a moment’s hesitation.
‘You’re serious?’ She looked at him and saw he was. ‘So they really aren’t the only species with faster-than-light travel, after all? It was all a big lie?’
‘The derelict doesn’t look like any Shoal vessel anyone’s ever seen, but it has a drive mechanism that could probably spit it right across the galaxy. It has the external spine structures typical of known Shoal spacecraft, but that’s about as far as the resemblance goes. Plus, it’s old. Really old?
‘How old?’
‘I’d say about a hundred and sixty thousand years.’
‘A hundred and sixty thousand years,’ she repeated. ‘And we know why that’s significant, right?’
‘Why don’t you tell me?’ Corso pressed her in a low whisper, a peculiar look on his face.
It was too much information, too quickly. She needed to curl up in the warm dark of the Piri Reis and think about everything she’d seen and experienced.
‘Forget it,’ she replied with a sigh. ‘I just thought of the Magellanic Novae for some reason.’ That memory of peering through Langley’s telescope, even after so many years and with Bellhaven so far away, was as strong as if it had happened only the day before.
Corso still had that same intense look on his face. It made her uncomfortable.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘the derelict dates from about the same period. But that’s no reason to assume they’re connected with something else that happened in another galaxy.’ She wondered why he was staring at her so hard. ‘Unless you’ve got other ideas?’ he added.
‘You’re looking at me like I just tried to bite your nose off.’
Corso made an exasperated noise and lowered his voice, so he was barely audible over the sound of the submersible’s engines. ‘Mala, I saw you on the bridge of the Hyperion, studying a map of the Magellanic Clouds. You’d drawn lines of trajectory connecting them to this part of the Orion Arm. To as near as damn it to this system, in fact, as makes no difference. Why do that? Do you have some special interest in the novae?’
‘I don’t remember doing anything of the kind. Frankly, I’d say you’ve been working too hard. You’re starting to imagine things.’