FIVE

Redwing plucked a banana that grew in a weird toroid, peeled and ate it, its aroma bringing back memories of tropical nights and the lapping of waves. Cap’n’s privilege.

His comm buzzed and Clare Conway said, “We’ll need you on the bridge presently.”

“On the way.”

Yet he hesitated. Something fretted at the back of his mind.

Redwing had read somewhere that one of his favorite writers, Ernest Hemingway, had been asked what was the best training for a novelist. He had said “an unhappy childhood.” Redwing had enjoyed a fine time growing up, but he wondered if this whole expedition was unfolding more like a novel, and would be blamed on one person, one character, the guy in charge: him. Maybe you got a happy childhood and then an unhappy adulthood, and that’s how novels worked.

His mother had made it happy. His father was away at one war or another while he grew up, and when he was home seemed absorbed by sports and alcohol. But that didn’t include playing catch with Redwing or coming to his football games. His mother had given him a birthday gift of a telescope and microscope, and a big chemistry set. He bought chemical supplies by selling gunpowder and other pyrotechnics to the local kids. So science had been in his bones from the time he could read. But there were other currents in the mix. He bought a bicycle and a better telescope with gambling cash. His mother, who was a bridge Grand Master, always played penny-ante poker with Redwing while they waited in the car for his music lessons to start. He then applied what she had taught him to the neighborhood kids. They didn’t know how to count cards or compute probabilities from that. They also paid to see him blow something up or dissect some poor animal as a bio experiment. He was without principle but soon had enough principal to advance. A university career and PhD led to space, where he really wanted to go. But this far?…

Maybe, considering a “fault tree” analysis of his life, having a father who never gave him much time, Redwing figured he was socially unhappy enough to satisfy Hemingway. But finding fault wasn’t like solving a problem, was it?

He had been gaining belly weight in these long months skimming along the Bowl structure. Onboard physio analysis said cortisol was the culprit, a steroid hormone prompted by the body’s “fight or flight” response to stress. It had bloated him, listening to the plight of his teams fleeing aliens, and damn near nothing he could do to help.

He paused outside the bridge, straightened his uniform, and went in with his shoulders straight.

“Cap’n on bridge,” Ayaan Ali said crisply. Unnecessary, but it set the tone. Going into battle, if that’s what this was, had a way of quickening the heart.

“We’re skimming as close as we can to the Bowl rim,” Ayaan Ali said. “Having thruster problems.”

Redwing made a show of staying on his feet, taking in the screens, not pacing. “Seems like cutting it pretty near.”

Karl Lebanon, neatly turned out with his general technology officer uniform cleaned and creases stiff, said, “That magneto grip problem is back, big-time. Sir.”

Redwing gave him a nod. “Hand-manage it. Stay with the scoop Artilect all the time, ride it.”

“Yes, sir. It knows what’s up, is running full complement.”

“Stations,” Redwing said quietly. Old trick: speak softly, make them stay sharp to hear.

He didn’t want to call out of the cold sleep enough people to crew this any better, much less to populate some kind of a big landing expedition. Defrosting and training them would burn time and labor. Even after the reawakened came up to speed, at Glory system in some far future, the whole crew would all have to triple up on a hot hammock schedule, skimpy rations, and shower once a week. Under such stress, how could they perform? He didn’t want to find out. Not yet, anyway.

SunSeeker had five crew defrosted, including Captain Redwing. Beth’s remaining four would make nine. If he had the chance to rescue Cliff’s team, they’d be fourteen aboard. A bit crowded, but they could do it.

“Coming up, sir.” Ayaan Ali stared intently at the screens. “Rim looks the same, but that big cannon thing is swiveling to track us.”

“We’re in that slot?”

“See those walls?” Below he saw where the atmosphere screen was tied down. There was a rim zone with big constructions dotted across it, out in the vacuum. Ayaan had found a slot between two of them that kept below the cannon declination and now they were gliding through it, a few kilometers above the edge zone. Complex webs of buildings and immense, articulating machinery slid by below.

The Bowl’s outer edge loomed before them, bristling with knobs and bumps the size of nations back on Earth. Looking at the rear screens, he saw the thin, smart film that held in the Bowl atmosphere shimmering in slanting sunlight, blue white. This was the closest they had coasted in to that atmosphere blanket. He hoped they wouldn’t take ground fire, though the Bowl’s Great Plain was a thousand kilometers away, and any projectile fire would puncture their filmy cover. But yes, Karl was probably right, just from elementary geometry.

Still … “We’re low enough?”

“Yes, sir. They can’t depress that snout to aim into the Bowl structure.”

“Smart sociology. If there are wars here, at least nobody can blow a hole in their life support.”

We keep below their firing horizon, so we’re safe. Or so went the theory. So many theories had gotten blown away, ever since they sighted this huge, spinning contrivance. But if this one failed, they’d be in easy range of what looked like, Karl said, a gamma ray laser.

“Karl, what’s the emission gain?”

“They’re running something that gives off a lot of microwaves. Chargers, probably. Running up capacitor banks, I’d guess.”

“To discharge against us, through some plasma implosion, giving them the gammas?”

“That’s my estimate, sir.”

“What do you make of our situation?”

“I had the usual basic training in remote warfare. The find-fix-track-target-engage-assess decision tree, with Artilects providing the live data. That’s all I know.”

“No course in alien strategy and tactics?” This got him a round of chuckles around the bridge, as he had planned. Let them get a little steam out.

“Uh—no, sir. Not on the curriculum, couple centuries back.”

A quiet jab, well delivered. Redwing nodded and smiled in tribute. “Then full speed ahead.” In a tribute to ancient naval traditions, he added, “Give us some steam.”

“I don’t like to flex our magnetic scoop system any more, uh, sir,” Karl said.

“Same small-scale problem?”

“Yeah. The system’s pretty compressed. We can’t get into the magneto components to adjust them. It’s a mechanical problem, not just some digital e-management thing.”

“Do your best.” Not the time for more technospeak. Though that was all that kept them alive, of course. “Belay any repairs until we get Beth aboard. How’s the flexi gear straightening?”

“Programmed on the printer,” Jampudvipa said. “Fold points and tension web seem sturdy enough to compile at pickup.”

“Excellent. Clare?”

“Look at the screen. The laser pods are above us now.”

What’s the old saying? “Come in under their radar” means something else. This is running in under the guns of a fortress that cannot fire down into the Bowl lifezone. “Um. Can we skim that close to the atmosphere?”

Karl pointed to the blue sheen cast off by the boundary film of the atmosphere. This close in, it spread like an ocean landscape, yet the eye saw through it to lands and seas below. These stretched away in infinite perspective, intricate layers basking in unending solar radiance, free of night. The eggshell sheen of the boundary tricked the eye into seeing it as an ocean, with lands on the floor below. There were even long rolling waves to the boundary, flexing in slow, marching rows.

Redwing had to admit the design features here were clever beyond easy measure. Rather than fading off in the familiar exponential, like planets, the Bowl’s air ran up and into a hard boundary. The air was thin there, hundreds of kilometers high—but the multilayer smart film kept the errant wind streams and vortices at bay, spreading the energies across vast distances, smoothing them out. No molecules leaked away forever, as they had for poor Mars. The Bowl’s own magnetic field gave a spiderweb defense against cosmic rays and angry storms flailing out from the persecuted star that powered all this. Its fields were like spaghetti strands wrapped around the atmosphere, layers of argument against intruding particles wanting to plow into innocent gases.

Redwing said, “What other weapons does this place have?”

“More than we do,” Clare said mildly.

“Look,” Jampudvipa said with an irked twist to her mouth, “this thing’s unknowably old. Ancient! Beyond ancient. On Earth a century was a huge time for weapons to evolve. I read up on this in preoutbreak history, back when we were on one world. Amazing stuff. In the same century as the first nuke got used, we also killed each other with bayonets and one-shot rifles. So how can we think about—this?”

This outbreak of consternation made them all sit back, think.

Karl said solemnly, “The laws of physics constrain everybody—even the Bowl Folk, whoever they are. Or whatever.”

“Tech has its own evolution,” Clare said. “What’s in those big domes at the Bowl rim?”

“No way to know. Fly low, is all we can do,” Redwing said. Taking my ship into uncharted waters … It was liberating to be simply honest.

They slid on a blithe arc over the quickly spinning lip of the Bowl. Sensors set on the big domes and their enormous snouts registered no change.

Cruising over the Bowl’s lip and down the swiftly rushing hull brought quick instructive views. SunSeeker had come at the Bowl from the side and below, along the axis of revolution and through the Knothole. Now Redwing could see the detailed and intricate lattice that framed the hull’s support structures, threaded by long ribbed structures that looked like enormous subways and elevators, some with spiky turrets protruding at the junctions. But here and there were sections clearly retrofitted, yellow and green splotches of newer joints and fix-up ornamentations of mysterious use.

Additions and afterthoughts, he judged. Some reminded him of accumulated grime, touch-up attempts and insertions. Like the yellowing varnish on a Renaissance masterpiece, he thought. Strip away the accretions, and beneath is the original brilliance. Interstellar archaeology.