“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.”
Wilson looked at Tunde and raised an eyebrow in query.
“Gets my vote,” Tunde said. “Until something else comes along to disprove it.” He gave Bruno a thumbs-up. “Smart.”
Oscar launched the Moore-class satellite twenty minutes later. Its ion drive accelerated it away from the big starship, sending it curving over the apex of the dark hemisphere. Nearly every screen on board relayed the image from its visual spectrum cameras. The violet glow didn’t reveal much; certainly there was nothing lurking just inside. A very detailed analysis program picked up a slight but regular fluctuation to the output intensity. It didn’t match the oscillations of either the gravity waves or magnetic field.
Four hours after leaving Second Chance, the satellite was directly above the opening. Even on the highest magnification it could see nothing but the homogeneous dark blue glow, as if the hemisphere contained nothing but a fluorescent fog. Twenty minutes later, when half of the crew had lost interest, the light vanished, leaving the opening completely dark. Eighteen minutes later it reappeared.
Intensive slow-motion replays coupled with image enhancing programs showed that something had moved across the opening, cutting off the light.
“Your evil lord just blinked,” Oscar told Jean.
After three days of observation they knew the light was blocked on average every seven and a quarter hours, though this could vary by up to eight minutes. The eclipse duration was more constant, lasting a fraction over eighteen minutes, except once when it had gone on for nearly thirty-five.
As nothing had come out of the hole in all that time, Wilson finally authorized a close observation. A larger Galileo-class satellite left its launch bay on the Second Chance, equipped with a more expansive sensor suite than the Moore. Anna slowed its approach as it closed in on the hole, keeping it twenty kilometers above the hemisphere’s perfectly black surface. Telemetry showed her the little craft was taking a beating on the magnetic and electromagnetic wave fronts; even with circuitry hardened to withstand the kind of treacherous energy environment found around the most active gas giants she had to watch out for overloads and temporary glitches. Interference caused a lot of static within the datastream link back to the starship, resulting in poor imagery and broken instrument readings.
Everyone on board the starship watched as the hole slowly slipped into view, its gentle lavender radiance appearing like the dawn of a weak sun. It was an illusion that was broken soon enough as the satellite crept closer; the illuminated hole was small by any standards. Then the satellite passed over the rim, slowing to a relative halt. The magnetic flux in tandem with the gravity waves were strong enough to induce a detectable wobble, as if the satellite was floating on a sea. Anna did her best to counter the tiny vibrations, allowing the sensors to peer down carefully.
Four hundred kilometers below the hole, a curved lattice of immense dark strands were gliding slowly across the blue glow that came from deeper inside. As the satellite focused on the strands it became clear that the lattice was anything but a uniform hexagonal honeycomb. The interstices ranged from simple triangles up to twelve-sided grids with some of the strands curving them into near-ellipsoid geometries. The holes were the size of small countries, with strands up to a couple of hundred kilometers wide. One thing was obvious from the curvature and ponderous motion: the lattice was a sphere.
A thousand kilometers beneath it, a second lattice sphere was visible, also composed of dark strands, though this one had a more regular geography, mostly comprised of triangles and pentagons. It, too, was rotating, but in a completely different direction to the outer layer. And below that was a third lattice grid, with wider spacings. Its continent-long strands glowed a strong indigo, helping to create the pervasive glow. Its radiance was complemented to a large degree by streaks of amethyst light that came from underneath it, the indicators of a fourth lattice sphere spinning somewhere in the deeps. Exactly where was unclear; the third lattice appeared to be surrounded by some kind of lambent vapor.
“Son of a bitch,” Wilson whispered. Out of all the things he’d expected to see within the Dark Fortress, a kinetic sculpture bigger than planets was not high on the list. The scale of the barrier was already hammering at his beleaguered human senses. But that at least had been a projection, energy manipulated and folded on a stellar scale, while these lattice spheres looked resolutely solid. This was matter manipulated in quantities incomprehensible to Commonwealth technology. Yet the barrier creators had produced something that from a simple visual viewpoint was almost laughably mechanical, in the truest sense of the word. He wouldn’t be at all surprised now if they were to find gearboxes with cogwheels the size of moons driving the entire edifice. “Are those strands really solid?” he asked.
“I can’t tell,” Anna said. “The electromagnetic environment in there is playing hell with the satellite’s radar.”
“That much matter would coalesce under its own gravity,” Bruno said. “They have to be energy forms.”
“Not so,” Russell immediately claimed. “There’s nothing like a terrestrial planet mass in there. And their spin rates will keep them inflated.”
