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?”
