Starshine: Aurora Rising Book One (32 page)

“Come on you little star, shine for me….”

Abruptly she spun back around. “Let’s go over there.”

He was leaning on the edge of the data center, ankles and arms crossed loosely as he regarded her with a look of…she couldn’t classify it. But his eyes sparkled and one corner of his mouth was curled up the tiniest bit, causing a flutter in her chest beyond the excitement of the discovery.

One of his eyebrows arched in question. “Over…where, exactly?”

She laughed as she settled into the chair. “Sorry, guess I didn’t actually finish that sentence. Not used to having company.” She gestured about ten degrees starboard. “Over thereish.”

It took them more than an hour to find the companion, despite the fact it was in the end precisely where Alex had thought it would be. It took so long partly because the companion traveled in a bright, dense mass of nebular dust which masked any visual cues, partly because it was smaller than it should have been—roughly the size of Europa—and partly because it was
impossibly
cool.

The
Siyane
hovered 1.5 megameters above the white dwarf. Deep red in color (despite the name), it pulsed at a leisurely period of thirty-six seconds. Seven different ways of measurement told her it radiated a temperature of 910 K.

“That’s not possible.”

“And that’s the fourth time you’ve said so.”

She shot him a glare. “It’s the fourth time it’s been true. The coolest white dwarf ever measured is 2440 K, and it is a helluva lot closer to the center of the damn
universe
than this is. A temperature so low means it’s almost as old as the Big Bang—and
that
is impossible.”

“Excellent.” He shrugged. “So…we go back home and win the Nobel Prize in Astrophysics?”

She burst out laughing, and felt the tension which had been building within her, and thus in the cabin as well, since locating the dwarf melt away. “Maybe, yes.”

She dragged a hand down her face and blew out a long breath. “Okay, fuck it. I’ve measured and recorded everything. Floating here staring at it isn’t going solve any mysteries. On to the next questions: what are they orbiting and why?”

He frowned a little…in concentration, she thought. When he frowned the bridge of his nose drew together until his eyebrows were virtually horizontal. Two fierce streaks of discontentment.

After a second he glanced over and caught her watching him. The frown curled upward into a half-grin. “Yes?”

She looked as innocent as she could manage. “Nothing. You have thoughts?”

“If I remember correctly, nobody ever gets worked up about whatever binary stars are orbiting. It’s usually some arbitrary center of mass they happened to be drawn around.”

“All true. But you forgot one thing—the TLF radiation. There’s nothing arbitrary about
it
.”

“Consider me chastised. So we go check it out?”

“We go check it out.” She swiveled the chair to the viewport and began pulling away from the strange, impossible dwarf star. “We’re likely half an hour out from any visuals.” She gazed at him wearing a hopeful, imploring expression. “Make me a sandwich?”

She had taken a mere two bites of the quite tasty penzine and Swiss cheese sandwich when it dropped forgotten to the plate in her lap. “What the…?”

The nebular clouds had thickened precipitously as they neared the epicenter of the binary orbit, until it was like traveling through fog in a muggy swamp. Flying by instrumentation was a skill of necessity, so it wasn’t a problem as such. It had become disturbingly
eerie
, though.

The cause of her outburst however was not the fog, but rather the spectrum analyzer output. Two minutes into the dense clouds it had begun displaying new frequencies, at first in the background then strengthening until they dominated the noise of the Nebula and even the pulsar.

She sensed him at her shoulder and pointed at the screen.

“What the hell?”

“Indeed.”

She had tuned the analyzer as broad as practicable to capture any unusual readings across the spectrum. Now it was capturing exactly that.

The primary spectrum display updated every two seconds with a measurement of amplitude over frequencies ranging from 0.01 Hz to 10
³⁰
Hz. It showed a deeply concave shape, featuring strong peaks at both extremes and a severe dip along the middle, except for a narrow but massive spike in the upper terahertz range. Every update saw the peaks grow in power.

Below the primary a smaller display mapped the measurements over time. It showed a continual series of deep red, light orange and purple spikes—precise, well-defined and increasing in a perfect linear function as they drew closer.

He dropped his hands to the headrest and leaned into her chair. “Okay. The two extremes are the signals we already knew about, right?”

“The lowest band is in fact our mystery TLF. But I filtered out the gamma flare and synchrotron radiation on account of them being so noisy. I wanted to be able to spot new anomalies. And it seems I have.”

“The gamma wave really isn’t from the pulsar?”

“Nope. And it’s a harmonic partial of the TLF wave.”

“What’s the source of the terahertz?”

“No idea.”

His voice dropped low and acquired a carefully measured tenor. “Alex, slow down.”

“Why, you want to see if the rate of increase slows?”

“No, I’m sure it will. I want you to slow down because I think we should approach more cautiously.”

“Right….” She decelerated to half speed. To neither of their surprise, the sequential graph increases slowed proportionally.

“You think the signals are artificial.”

“I do.”

“You know a number of astronomical phenomena produce very exact, fixed waves, including pulsars.” As she spoke, she sent the terahertz and gamma bands to new screens of their own. At the greater detail the level of fidelity was astonishing.

“Uh-huh. Is the dampener field on?”

“It is. But I can probably kick the power up a bit.”

“Strikes me as a good idea.”

She glanced up at him. He had again moved to lean nonchalantly against the half-wall to the cockpit, one ankle thrown over the other, the picture of casual interest. But the rapid twitching of the muscles in his now rigid jaw and the steady flexing of his left hand told another story.

For the first time in days, he radiated
dangerous
. She didn’t feel threatened, not by him—which was interesting. Yet he clearly felt threatened by whatever lurked in front of them.

She shifted her attention back to the viewport. Her direct line of sight was free of HUD screens so she would have an unobstructed visual of their course. “The clouds look to be thinning out. We may get a glimpse of something interesting soon.”

Three minutes later the nebular clouds didn’t just thin out, they effectively evaporated away—

“Holy mother of god….”

She threw the ship in full reverse to slide backward into some measure of cover while diverting all non-critical power not being used by the radiation shielding to the dampener field. The lights in the cabin dimmed and the temperature control could be heard shutting off.

Then she sank into the chair, instinctively reaching up to grasp Caleb’s hand as it landed on her shoulder. He didn’t let go; neither did she.

A halo of thick clouds—similar in color to the gold and blue of the Nebula but of a distinct form and illuminated from within—roiled like a thunderstorm billowing forth out of…nothing.

The halo framed a ring of seamlessly smooth metal the color of lustrous tungsten-carbide and perhaps a hundred meters in width. The ring itself spanned more than a kilometer in diameter. Its interior was filled by a luminescent, rippling pool of pale gold plasma.

Emerging from the pool was a ship. It was approximately halfway through—which they could tell because it was plainly evident the vessel was identical to the other seventy plus ships filling the space beyond the ring.

Each ship was twice again as large as any human-made dreadnought. Made of an inky black material and laced with bright red fluorescents, they resembled nothing so much as mythological titans of the underworld.

Behind the columns of dreadnoughts were a dozen ships of a different style. Less angular yet still unmistakably synthetic, these ships were long and cylindrical and were woven through with pulsing yellow-to-red filaments. One end expanded to become a claw-like structure, out of which hundreds…no, thousands of small craft streamed.

The small ships were almost insectile in form. Multiple—at least eight or nine—spindly arms appeared to be comprised of a material similar to the dreadnoughts. Yet this material was pliable, for the arms twisted and writhed around a glowing red core. The craft poured out of the birthing ships then flew to the dreadnoughts and docked into their hulls in tight lines.

It was a caricature of the most extreme ‘space monster’ horror films popular in the early days of space exploration. Vids had made millions capitalizing on worries of what fearsome and powerful aliens may be encountered in the void of space. As humanity continued to expand, they never encountered such aliens—or any aliens at all—and in time the fad had passed.

But now they were here.

Her voice trembled at a whisper; she didn’t seem to have enough breath for proper speech. “What
is
this?”

His was lower and darker, though not much stronger. “It’s an invasion.”

The dreadnought finished emerging from the pool of light and began moving toward the end of the flawless columned formation as the nose of yet another ship broke through the plasma.

She swallowed hard to dislodge the lump in her throat. “Where are they coming from? The ring’s obviously artificial, but the interior doesn’t look like a black hole, or a white one. It looks…no, that would be impossible.”

He squeezed her hand; she wasn’t sure he even realized he was doing it. “I think we’ve fairly well redefined ‘impossible’ today already.”

“Ha. Yeah. Okay. It reminds me of conceptual drawings of a brane intersection—a dimensional border.”

“Wow. And I thought I’d learned to expect anything.”

She worried at her lower lip. “Regardless, it’s clearly a portal of some kind. I wonder what’s on the other side.”

“If I had to guess, I’d say
they
are. You’re recording all this, right?”

She spared him a smirk. “Visual and every band since we arrived.”

He spared her a smile. “Of course you are.”

She stared at the mouth of one of the birthing vessels, watching in fascinated horror as the spidery ships spewed forth. Extrapolating from the apparent number docking on each dreadnought, there must be at least half a million of them—and their generation showed no sign of slowing. A quick scale overlay confirmed while they appeared tiny against the dreadnoughts, each one was nearly the size of the
Siyane
.

His grip on her shoulder tightened. “We need to go, before they notice we’re here. We have to warn someone.”

“We have to warn
everyone
.”

PART
III
:

RECURSION

“I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act;

but I do believe in a fate that falls on them
unless
they act.”

— G. K. Chesterton

27

SENECA

C
AVARE,
S
ENECAN
F
EDERATION
H
EADQUARTERS

“
S
O IT’S WAR, THEN.”

Chairman Vranas didn’t scan the room to search for confirmation. Or if he did, it wasn’t with sufficient flair as to be noticeable. From his seat at one end of the long oak table taking up most of the room, he likely could assess the inclinations of the others without so much as a shift of his gaze.