He loosened his tether and tried to get closer to her.
“There was a war here,” Emma said.
“Or an execution. Or—”
“Or suicide.” He felt Emma’s hand creep into his. “It’s just like home.”
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe these are the ones who explored the artifact. The Sheenas. Or maybe some of them were touched by the downstream signal.”
“Like Michael, and the other children.”
“Yes. And the others feared them, feared what they had become, and killed them.”
Or maybe, Malenfant thought, the smart ones won. He wasn’t sure which was the scarier prospect.
“What have we got here, Cornelius?”
“Ask the boy,” Cornelius snapped. “He’s the intuitive genius. I’m just a mathematician. Right now I’m trying to gather data.”
Malenfant said patiently, “Tell me about your data, then.”
“I didn’t know what to measure here. So I brought everything I can think of. I have photodetectors so I can measure the light that’s reflecting off that thing, and the light it emits, at a variety of energies. I have a gravity gradiometer, six rotating pairs of accelerometers, that they use in nuclear submarines to detect underwater ridges and mountains from variations in the gravity pull — nice plowshare stuff.
“There’s a powerful magnetic field threading the artifact. Did I tell you that?
“Oh, and I have particle detectors. Solid state, slabs of silicon that record electrical impulses set off by particles as they pass through. Nothing very elaborate. I even have a lashed-up neutrino detector that is showing some results; Malenfant, that thing seems to be a powerful neutrino source.”
Cornelius was talking too much. Spooked, Malenfant thought. Handling this less well than the kid, in fact. “What is an artifact of spacetime?”
Cornelius hesitated. “I shouldn’t have said that. I’m speculating.”
Malenfant waited.
Cornelius straightened up stiffly. “Malenfant, I feel like an ancient Greek philosopher, Pythagoras maybe, confronted by an electronic calculator. If we experiment we can make some guess about its function, but—”
And Emma was yelling. “Michael!”
Michael had taken off all his tethers. He looked back at Emma, waved, and then made a standing jump. In the low gravity he just sailed forward, tumbling slightly.
Emma grabbed for him, but he had gone much too far to reach.
He hit the black surface, square at the center, just as he’d clearly intended. He seemed to Malenfant to flatten — his image became tinged with red — and then he shot away, as if being dragged into some immense tunnel.
There was a screech in Malenfant’s headset, a howl of white noise loud enough to hurt his ears. He saw Emma and Cornelius clap their hands to their helmets in a vain attempt to block out the noise.
After a couple of seconds, mercifully, it ceased.
But Michael was gone.
Emma was standing before the artifact. “Michael!” The burnished hoop was gleaming in her gold faceplate. Malenfant couldn’t see her face. But he knew that tightness in her voice.
He looked for something practical to do. Emma was unteth-ered, he saw. He bent and picked up loose tethers and clipped them to her belt.
She turned to him. “So,” she said. “What do we do now?”
“Malenfant.” It was Cornelius. “Listen to this.” He tapped at his softscreen, and a recording played in Malenfant’s headset. Words, too soft to make out.
“It’s the screech,” Cornelius said. “It came from the artifact, a broad-spectrum radio pulse that—”
“Turn up the volume, damn it.”
Cornelius complied.
It was, of course, Michael — or rather, his translated voice.
I found my stone.
Emma Stoney:
The three of them beat a hasty retreat back to the dome.
Cornelius dragged off his suit, went straight to his softscreens, and started working through the data.
Malenfant patiently gathered up the discarded equipment. He hooked up their backpacks to recharge units. And then he got a small vacuum cleaner to suck up the loose dust.
Emma grabbed his arm. “I can’t believe you’re doing this.”
“We’ll all be finished if we forget the routines, the drills, our procedures.”
“We lost Michael. We all but kidnapped him, brought him all the way to this damn asteroid, and now we lost him. His oxygen will expire in—” She checked.” — ten more hours.”
“I know that.”
“So what are you going to do? “
He looked exhausted. He let go of the cleaner; it drifted to the floor. “I told Cornelius he has one hour, one of those ten, to figure out what we’re dealing with here.”
“And then what?”
He shrugged. “Then I suit up and go in after the boy.”
Emma shook her head. “I never imagined it would come to this.”
“Then,” Cornelius said coldly, “you didn’t think very far ahead.”
“Your language is inhuman,” Emma said.
Cornelius looked startled. “Perhaps it is. But to tell you the truth, I’m not sure Michael is fully human. He’s been one step ahead of us since we arrived here. It may be he knew exactly what he was doing when he walked through that portal, where he was going. It was his choice. Have you thought of that?”
An air-circulation pump clattered to a stop.
Malenfant and Emma stared at each other. After so many weeks in the O’Neill and the hab bubble, she’d gotten to know every mechanical bang and whir and clunk of the systems that kept her alive. And she knew immediately that something was wrong.
She followed Malenfant to Cornelius, who was sitting on a T-chair by the hab’s mocked-up control board. The softscreen display panels were a mess of red indicators; some of them were showing nothing but a mush of static.
“What’s happened?”
Cornelius turned to Malenfant, the muscles around his eyes tight with strain. “It looks like something fried our electronics.”
“Like what? A solar flare?”
“I doubt it.”
Malenfant tapped at a softscreen. “We’re not in any immediate danger. The surface systems seem to have gone down uniformly, but a lot of the hab systems are too stupid to fail.”
Emma said, “Have we taken a radiation dose?”
“Maybe. Depending what the cause of this is.”
“My God.”
Cornelius had produced an image on the softscreen.
It was a star field. But something, an immense shape, was occluding the stars, one by one. In the middle of the black cutout form, a light winked.
“That’s a ship,” Malenfant said. “But who—”
With a mechanical rattle, all the hab’s systems stopped working, and silence fell.
Cornelius turned to Malenfant. “Too stupid to fail?”
Emma felt hot, stuffy, and her chest ached. Without the air circulation and revitalization provided by the loop systems, the carbon dioxide produced by her own lungs would cluster around her face, gradually choking her.
She waved at the air before her mouth, making a breeze, fighting off panic.
The softscreen image, relayed by some surface camera, fritzed out.
“I think we’d better suit up again,” said Malenfant.
June Tybee
June lay loosely strapped into her couch. She was one of ten troopers in this big circular cabin, which was one of five stacked up at the heart of Bucephalus. The troopers in their armor looked like a row of giant beetles.
Her suit, after weeks of practice, felt like part of her body, even the bulky helmet with its thick connectors. The suit was colored charcoal gray, nearly black. Asteroid camouflage. It had been a relief for June when the order had come, just before the brilliant flash of the EMP bomb, to close up her visor. The troopers ought to be rad-shielded, here at the heart of the ship. But it didn’t do any harm to be wrapped in the suit’s extra shielding.