Engines Of God

"So what happens now? With you and Kosmik?"

"Board of inquiry. They'll find culpability on my part if I let it go that far."

"Can you stop it?"

"I can make a public apology. Take the blame. I don't mind doing that. It happened on my watch, and I can't really evade responsibility. Did I tell you I was directed to see that no one was hurt?"

"No—" Hutch felt a new surge of resentment.

"It's true. I thought I'd arranged things pretty well. But I blundered."

"How?"

"Doesn't matter."

"What will happen to you?"

"They'll get my resignation, I'll drop out of sight for six months, and then I'll start a new career. I'll be fine. I have friends."

Hutch was silent for a long time. Finally she said, "Losing him was such a waste."

"I know. I've been reading his books." She sighed. "Hutch, you have a job with me any time you want it."

They drank to that. They drank to Perth, and to Alpha.

Then, amused, Truscott proposed a toast to Norman Caseway. "God bless him," she said. "We couldn't have got here without him. And you'd still be waiting for the Ashley Tee."

"How do you mean?"

"The Perth brought out the people who are going to implement phase two of Project Hope. It also brought the directive for me to go back and face the music. Caseway did not send my recall on ahead. Instead, he arranged to have it handed to me by the ship's captain. An insult. But, as a result they had to wait around a few days while I finished with loose ends. If that hadn't happened, the Perth would have been on its way home when your SOS came through.

There would have been no ship to send after you."

Hutch drained her glass, refilled it, and refilled Truscott's. "One more," she said. Hutch did not have a lot of tolerance for alcohol. It didn't take much to loosen her inhibitions, and she knew she should not propose this new toast. But she couldn't help herself.

"To whom?" asked Truscott.

"Not a whom, Melanie. You don't object if I call you Melanie? Good. Not a whom, Melanie. A what. I give you, the foamball."

Hutch raised her glass.

Truscott's aristocratic features darkened. She looked hard at Hutch, and the cloud lifted. "What the hell," she said. "Why not?"

It was clearly a bowl. Carson's team gathered in an observation lounge during the approach, where they had access to a wide-screen display and communication with the ship's operations center. Harvey Sill joined them, a

Perth moved in on the open side of the object. It broadened, and mutated into an inverted world, a world whose landscape sank, and whose horizons rose. They glided below the rim, and their perspective shifted again: the surface flattened, became a blue-black plain, stretching to infinity. The horizon rose, and the lower sky went black. They passed beneath an enormous arch, one of a network tied in to strong points across the face of the object. "This is the only one of the telescopes," Sill said, "that's still transmitting."

"Have you tried to translate the signal?" asked Carson.

"We don't really have the means to attempt it. But we can tell you that they were aimed at the Lesser Magellanic."

There was a young male crewman with them, wearing earphones. He reported precise physical specifications as they came in—diameter, angle of curvature, declination. "And thin," he said. "It's very thin."

"How thin?" asked Carson.

"At the rim, they're saying a little under six-tenths of a centimeter."

"That's still thick enough to have ripped us up," said Hutch. "How did we get through?"

"There's an ante

"What holds it together?" asked Maggie. "It seems too fragile."

"It's not metal or plastic. We're getting odd readings: potassium, sodium, calcium. Heavy concentrations of calcium at the center construct."

"Do we have a picture of it yet?" asked Sill. "The center?"

"Coming up now." The crewman glanced at the screens.

The bulkhead opposite the window changed colors, went dark, and revealed a cluster of black globes, a group of small dish ante

Carson glanced at Sill. "We'd like to get a good look at it," he said.

"We'll take you in close."

"Is there a way we can date this thing?" asked Hutch.

"Maybe if we had a sample," said Janet.

"I don't think we want to do that." Carson looked uncertain what he wanted to do. "How about scrapings? Can we do it with scrapings?"

Janet thought about it. "Maybe."

"It's even thi

Nobody noticed Truscott until she spoke. "Now we see why Wink survived," she said.

She was accompanied by a narrow, uniformed man whom she introduced as Captain Morris. His eyes were the color of water, and his hair was black and cut close in a military fashion. He acknowledged their names and shook hands with an irritating air of self-importance.

They were approaching the cluster of ante

"Historic moment," Truscott said. "We are getting a look at the first piece of alien high tech. We'll try to do an analysis, see if we can figure out precisely what we're looking at. How about you, Frank? Do you have an expert along who can give us some answers?"

Carson looked at his colleagues. He received no encouragement. "We're a little short on experts," he said.

Perth glided over the featureless blue-black terrain. Her lights played on the surface, producing muted yellow blurs. The ship might have been moving across a burnished marble floor.

"How does it get power?" asked Janet. "Solar?"

"Probably," said George.

Truscott looked at Carson. "Do you want a sample?"

"Yes," said Maggie.

Carson nodded. "Try not to damage anything."

The captain showed irritation. "We'll take care of it," he said coldly. He spoke into his commlink, listened, and looked puzzled. "Melanie, we can't find the collision site."

"Were we looking for it?" asked Carson.

Morris nodded. "We tracked your course backward, as a navigation exercise for my junior officers. There's no hole anywhere in the impact area large enough to run a starship through. Or anywhere else for that matter."

"Your junior officers flunked," said Carson.

Morris responded with a superior smile. "My junior officers are quite good. And we've checked the numbers. There is no error." He looked at Hutch. "You did not change course, I understand."

"That's correct," she replied. "But we did take some damage. I had to adjust for a tumble, and it's possible that when I terminated the burn the thrusters didn't shut down simultaneously. That could have resulted in a new heading."

Morris shook his head. "There is a hole in the impact area. But it's not big enough to accommodate a shuttle, let alone Wink."

"That's odd," said Truscott.

"That's all there is," said the captain.

"Why don't we take a look?" Hutch suggested. "At the hole we did find."

The site was plowed up, exploded outward. They floated above it, in Flickinger belts, looking down through the open space at stars on the other side.

"It's less than seven meters across at its widest point," said the Ops officer, a young woman named Creighton.

"Well, we certainly didn't come through here," said Hutch. "There must be another one somewhere."