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  Just before dawn, the transmission stopped. It was over.

  By then all sorts of people had begun showing up. His own staff of off-duty watchstanders. The people who had for years not noticed that the Drake Center even existed: Barkley and Lansing from Yale, Evans from Holloway, Peterson and Chokai from Lowell, DiPietro from LaSalle. By midmorning the press had arrived, followed by a gaggle of politicians. Everybody became part of the celebration.

  Jason broke out the champagne that had, metaphorically, been on ice for two and a half centuries and ordered more sent over from the Quality Liquor Store in the Plaza Mall. He held an impromptu press conference. One of the media types pinned the name Sigmas on the creatures, and that became their official designation.

  After she’d gotten Prissy off to school, Teresa showed up, too, along with her cousin Alice. She was clearly delighted by the attention her husband was getting, and she sat for hours enjoying the warm glow of reflected celebrity. It was, in many ways, the happiest moment of his life.

  YEARS LATER, WHEN he looked back on that day, after the Sigmas had faded into history, it wasn’t the call in the night that stood out in his memory, nor Tommy’s comment, “This one might be a genuine hit,” nor even the message itself: “Greetings to our (unknown) across the (unknown).” It wasn’t even Ginny’s confirmation. “We can’t find a bounce.” It was Prissy, when she got home from school, where she’d already heard the news. It was odd: Nine years old, and she understood what her mother had missed.

  “Daddy, are you going to send a message back?” she’d asked. He was home by then, exhausted, but planning to change clothes and return to the Center.

  “No,” he said. “They’re too far away, love.”

  “Even to just talk to them? They sent us a message. Why can’t we send one back?”

  “Do you know about the pharaohs?” he asked.

  “In Egypt?” Her dark eyes clouded with puzzlement. What did pharaohs have to do with anything? She was a beautiful child. Armed with her mother’s looks. But she had his brain. She’d be a heartbreaker one day.

  “Yes. Do you know how long ago that was? King Tut and all that?”

  She thought about it. “A long time,” she said.

  “Thousands of years.”

  “Yes. Why can’t we talk to the Sigmas?”

  “Because they’re not there anymore,” he said. “They’re dead a long time ago. They were dead long before there were pharaohs.”

  She looked baffled. “The people who sent the message died before there were pharaohs?”

  “Yes. I don’t think there’s much question about that. But they weren’t really people.”

  “I don’t understand. If they died that long ago, how could they send us a message?”

  “It took a long time for the message to get here.”

  Her dark eyes got very round. “I think it’s sad that we can’t say hello back to them.”

  “I do, too, sweetheart,” he said. He looked at her and thought how she had touched ultimate truth. “They’re starting to build very fast ships. Maybe one day you’ll be able to go look.”

  PART ONE

  prometheus

  chapter 1

  Thursday, January 11, 2255.

  FRANÇOIS ST. JOHN did not like the omega. It lay beneath him, dark and misty and gray. And ominous, like an approaching thunderstorm in summer. It was a vast cloudscape, illuminated by internal lightning. It seemed to go on forever.

  They’d measured it, estimated its mass, taken its temperature, gleaned samples from deeper inside than anyone had been able to penetrate before, and they were ready to start for home.

  The omega, despite appearances, was by no means adrift. It was racing through the night at a velocity far exceeding anything possible for an ordinary dust cloud, running behind the hedgehog, its trigger, closing on it at a rate of about thirteen kilometers per day. In approximately three thousand years it would overtake the object and hit it with a lightning strike. When it did, the trigger would explode, igniting the cloud, and the cloud would erupt in an enormous fireball.

  The omegas were the great enigma of the age. Purpose unknown. Once thought to be natural objects, but no more. Not since the discovery of the hedgehogs twenty years earlier. Nobody knew what they were or why they existed. There wasn’t even a decent theory, so far as François was aware. The lightning was drawn by the right angles incorporated into the design of the hedgehogs. The problem was that anything with a right angle, if it got in the path of the cloud, had better look out.

  He was surprised by the voice behind him. “Almost done, François. Another hour or so, and we can be on our way.”

  It was Benjamin Langston. The team leader. He was more than a hundred years old, but he still played tennis on weekends. There had been a time when people at that age routinely contemplated retirement. “You got anything new, Ben?”

  Ben ducked his head to get through the hatch onto the bridge. It was an exaggerated gesture, designed to show off. He enjoyed being the tallest guy on the ship. Or the most put-upon. Or the guy whose equipment was least reliable. Whenever anyone had a story about women, or alcohol, or close calls, Ben always went one better. But he knew how to speak plain English, which set him apart from most of the physicists François had been hauling around these last few years.

  “Not really,” he said. “We’ll know more when we get home. When we can do some analysis.” He had red hair and a crooked smile. He’d probably injured his jaw at some point.

  “I have to admit, Ben,” François said, “that I’ll be happy to be away from the thing. I don’t like going anywhere near it.” The Jenkins was supposed to be safe for working around an omega. The Prometheus Foundation, its owner, had rebuilt her several years ago, taking away the outer shell and replacing it with a rounded hull. No right angles anywhere. Nothing to stir the monster. But he’d seen the holos, had watched the massive lightning bolts reach out and strike target objects left in its path. The thing was scary.

  He looked down at the cloudscape. It felt as if there were something solid immediately beneath the gray mist, as if they were gliding over a planetary surface. But people who’d done work around omegas said that was always the impression. One of the uncanny features of the omega was its ability to hang together. You would have expected it to dissipate, to blur at the edges. But the clouds weren’t like that. Ben had commented that they had nearly the cohesion of a solid object.

  In fact, Ben admired the damned things. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” he said. He sounded awed.

  That wasn’t the way François would have described it. But he pretended to agree. “Yes,” he said. “Beautiful.” Dead ahead, and deep within the cloud, a red glow appeared, expanded, brightened, and finally faded. It lasted only a few moments, then it was gone, and they saw nothing except their own navigation lights, captured and blurred in the mist.

  It happened all the time, silent flowerings of ruby light.

  They talked about incidentals, about the long ride home, which would take approximately three weeks, and how good it would be to get out of their cramped quarters. Ben admitted that he missed his classes. He was one of those very occasional academic types who seemed to enjoy the give-and-take of a seminar. His colleagues usually talked about it as if it were a menial task imposed by an unthinking university interested only in making money.

  “François.” The AI’s voice.

  “Yes, Bill, what have you got?”

  “Cloud’s changing course.”

  “What?” That wasn’t possible.

  “I’ve been watching it for several minutes. There’s no question. It’s moving to port, and below the plane.”

  It couldn’t happen. The clouds stayed relentlessly in pursuit of their triggers unless they were distracted by something else. The lines of a city, perhaps. But there were certainly no cities anywhere nearby. And no gravity fields to distract it.

  “It’s picked up a geometric pattern here somewhere,” said Ben. He pe
ered at the images on the monitors. “Has to be.” But there was nothing in any direction save empty space. For light-years. “François, ask Bill to do a sweep of the area.”

  François nodded. “Bill?”

  “We need to get out in front of it.”

  Ben made a face. “We’ll lose contact with the probe if we do that.”

  François wasn’t sure what kind of data the probe was collecting. The only thing that had mattered to him was that it was the last one. He looked at Ben. “What do you want to do?”

  “Are we sure the cloud’s really changing course?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then let’s find out why.”

  “Okay,” François said. He gave instructions to the AI, and the sound of the engines began to intensify. He switched on the allcom. “Leah, Eagle, Tolya, strap down. We’re going to be executing a maneuver in a minute.”

  Leah was Mrs. Langston. Like Ben, she was a specialist in various aspects of the clouds, physical structure, nanotech systems, propulsion. The objective of the mission was to learn something about their makers, who they were, what their capabilities were, why they sent the damned things out into the Orion Arm. Into the entire galaxy for all anyone knew.

  Eagle’s real name was Jack Hopewell. He was a Native American, the mission’s astrophysicist, the department chairman at the World Sciences Institute. He claimed to be a full-blooded Cherokee, but he always smiled when he said it, as if he didn’t really mean it. François thought there might be a German back there somewhere, and maybe an Irishman.

  Tolya was Anatoly Vasiliev, a nanotech specialist from the University of Moscow. She was on the verge of retirement, had never seen an omega, and had pulled every string she could find to get assigned to this mission.

  Leah responded with that very precise Oxford voice: “François, what’s going on?”

  He explained, while—one by one—the three indicator lamps brightened. Everybody was belted down. Ben slipped into his seat, and the harness closed around him. “All right, guys,” François said, “I’ll let you know when we’re done. This is going to take a few minutes.” He switched back to the AI. “When you’re ready, Bill.”

  The Jenkins was, of course, moving in the same direction as the cloud, pacing it. François extracted the yoke from the control panel and pushed it gently forward. The engines grew louder, and the cloudscape began to move aft. Swirls of mist accelerated, swept beneath the glow of the ship’s lights, and blurred. Bill announced he’d lost contact with the probe.

  It took a while, but eventually the horizon approached.

  “The omega is still turning,” said Bill.

  More electricity flashed through the depths. To François, the cloud seemed alive. It was a notion that had respectability in some quarters. No one had really been able to demonstrate the validity of the proposition one way or the other. And François would readily have admitted he had no evidence to support his impression. But the thing felt alive. That was why he didn’t entirely trust the assurances of the engineers who told him the Jenkins, because of its rounded edges, was safe. Who could really predict what one of these monsters might do?

  They soared out past the rim, the leading edge of the cloud. “See anything yet, Bill?” he asked.

  “Negative. But the turn is slowing. It’s settling in on a vector.” Bill adjusted course and continued to accelerate.

  François looked out at the stars. There was no nearby sun. No nearby planet. Nowhere it could be going. “You figure that thing can see farther than we can, Ben?”

  Ben sighed. “Don’t know. We still don’t know much. But it has potentially a much larger reception area than we do. So yes, it probably can see farther. Maybe not optically, but in some sense.”

  The cloud was dwindling behind them, becoming part of the night, a dark presence blocking off the stars, illuminated only by periodic lightning. It could have been a distant storm.

  “Still nothing?” asked François.

  “Not yet,” said Bill. “Whatever it is, it’s dead ahead. The omega has begun to decelerate.”

  He eased back on the yoke and opened the allcom: “Going to cruise, folks. If you need to get anything done, this would be a good time, but don’t go too far from your couch.”

  Minutes later Leah’s head pushed through the hatch. “Nothing yet?”

  “Not a thing,” said Ben.

  Leah was in her nineties. She was tall and graceful, with dark brown hair and matching eyes. A good partner for Ben, given to trading quips with him, and easily, as far as François could see, his intellectual equal. “Okay,” she said, starting back. “Let us know if you see something.”

  François had known Leah for thirty years, had hauled her to various destinations during his Academy days, before she’d married Ben. Before she’d known him, as a matter of fact. He’d made a play for her once, in those halcyon times, shortly after his first marriage had gone south. But she hadn’t been interested. He suspected she’d thought she wouldn’t be able to hold on to him.

  A half hour slipped past while Bill sought the reason for the omega’s course change. François began to wonder if the AI had misread the omega. Ben had fallen silent, was going over some notes, and François was sitting with his head thrown back, half-asleep, when Bill stirred. You could tell Bill was about to deliver an announcement of some significance, because it was inevitably preceded by an electronic warble, the AI’s equivalent of clearing his throat. “François, object ahead. Range 3.4 million kilometers.”

  Ben immediately looked up. Studied the display. “What is it?” he asked.

  “It appears to be a ship.”

  “A ship?”

  “Yes. An artificial construct of some kind. It is not under power.”

  Ben turned to look out the viewport. “François, who else is out here?”

  “Nobody. Not supposed to be anybody.”

  What the hell? “Bill, what kind of ship?”

  “I don’t know. We’re too far away.”

  IT LOOKED LIKE a collection of cubes, or boxes, of varying sizes connected by tubes. Some of the tubes ran straight from one box to another, others angled off in various directions. None curved. It was all right angles, a target made for an omega.

  The thing resembled a child’s toy, a puzzle to be manipulated until all the cubes lined up one way or another. Despite Bill’s assessment, it was most definitely not a ship. “I was in error,” said Bill. “I see no visible means of propulsion. Furthermore, if there were a method not apparent to us, I doubt the thing would hold together under acceleration.”

  “A space station of some kind?” asked Ben.

  “Possibly a habitat,” said François. “I really don’t know what to make of it.”

  “What’s it doing out here?”

  François gave them a ride. With the cloud coming up in the rear, he wanted to get to the object as quickly as he could. So he accelerated, then threw on the brakes. He burned fuel heedlessly. Ben grinned down at him. “That’s good, François. You’re learning.”

  “Bill,” he said, “how much time do we have?”

  “The omega is still decelerating. If it continues to slow at its present rate, after we arrive, we will have approximately twenty-three minutes before the cloud comes within strike distance.”

  Ben stared at the object and looked pained. “François, it’s alien.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s priceless.”

  “I know that, too, Ben.”

  “Can we save it? Push it aside?”

  “How big is it, Bill?”

  “I am not able to estimate its mass. But the largest of the segments is eleven times the diameter of the ship. It dwarfs us.”

  “Couldn’t we accelerate it?” said Ben. “It’s big, I know, but it’s adrift.”

  François counted nine boxes. “It wouldn’t matter. We have no way to control its flight. The thing would just roll off to the side when we started pushing. All that would happen is that the g
oddam omega would adjust course.”

  Eagle and Tolya had crowded into the hatchway. Leah was behind them. “We have to do something,” Tolya said. “We can’t just let this happen.”

  “Damn right,” said Eagle.

  François raised his hands. “We don’t have much choice. For what it’s worth, we’re recording everything.”

  “That’s not worth much,” Leah said.

  “There’s nothing else we can do.” He pulled at one ear. “Bill.”

  “Yes, François.”

  “Is the thing hollow?”

  “It appears to be.”

  Leah broke in. “When we get there, we’ll have a few minutes. We need to find a way in.”

  François squeezed his eyes shut. “No,” he said. “Absolutely not. That’s the last thing we want to do.”

  “Look, François.” She was trying to sound reasonable. “We can probably find a hatch or port or something. We can get in, take a quick look around, and clear out.” She was already opening the storage locker and grabbing for air tanks and an e-suit.

  “No,” said Ben. “Absolutely not.”

  Tolya looked frantic. “I’ll go, too.” All the women on the flight were deranged. “What do you want to do,” she demanded, “just give up?”

  François wanted to remind her she was only a student. Not here to give directions to anybody. But Ben took care of it with an icy look. “Forget it,” he said. “Nobody’s going anywhere. Twenty minutes won’t be enough time.”

  “He’s right,” said François.

  Ben was a bit too daunting for her, so Tolya turned on François. “What the hell do you know about it? What are we going to do? Just stand by and watch the idiot cloud blow that thing up? Spend the rest of our lives wondering what it might have been?”

  IT WAS TUMBLING. Slowly.

  “I wonder how old it is?” Leah checked Ben’s air tanks. “You’re all set.”

  They were in the airlock, carrying lasers and tool belts, ready to go. Eagle and Tolya had wanted to go along, too, but fortunately there were only three e-suits on board, and nobody got to use the captain’s. It was a violation of regulations.