Hex (10 page)

“No planets?” Andromeda was confused. “Are you using the optical imaging system or the infrared rangefinder?”

“Both, but...” Melpomene pointed helplessly at her station's largest screen. “Well, see for yourself. No planets, only the starbridge in sight... but there's something else out there.”

Andromeda didn't rise from her seat but instead tapped commands in her lapboard that linked the wallscreen to Melpomene's console. The forward bulkhead disappeared, replaced by a floorto-ceiling starfield so realistic that it seemed as if a section of
Montero
's outer hull had simply vanished. Distant stars against black space, all marked by translucent red numerals identifying them by their catalog numbers. None were unfamiliar, yet as Melpomene pointed out, neither were any of them planets.

Then the starfield slowly began to turn as the forward telescope twisted about, and something appeared that she'd seen before, but only as the grainy telescope photo that Ted Harker had shown her.

Directly in front of the ship, one and a half astronomical units away, lay HD 76700, a star just a little larger than 47 Uma. It wasn't clearly visible, though, for surrounding it was a translucent haze the color of old rust tinted with silver. It might have been a planetary nebula were it not for the fact that it was perfectly spherical. Indeed, the sphere was so immense that it almost completely filled the wallscreen.

Jason gasped in astonishment, and Zeus murmured something under his breath. “What the hell?” Andromeda stared at the object. “Mel, what's the scope's magnification?”

“Zero.” Her voice was strangely hollow. “That's what we're seeing from our current position.”

Andromeda wasn't in the habit of distrusting her crew. When Melpomene said this, though, she had to see for herself whether or not the pilot was mistaken. Unfastening her seat belt, she pushed herself out of her chair. The nearest porthole was directly above her; the ship's windows had automatically shuttered just before the
Montero
went through hyperspace, but she found the button that opened this one.

The shutter slid open and Andromeda peered outside. Her view was obscured slightly by the deflector array; nonetheless, it was the same she'd seen on the wallscreen. Whatever the object was, it was vast enough to completely surround the star at its center.

“Hell's bells,” she whispered, “what
is
that thing?” Tearing her gaze away from the porthole, she looked down at D'Anguilo. “Are you getting any readings?”

The scientist was already bent over his console. “Whatever it is, I can tell you for sure that it's not a dust cloud. Mass spectrometer shows hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, iron, silicon... They're all there, along with carbon dioxide, argon, methane...” He looked up at her. “Everything you'd expect to find in the absorption lines of a planetary system, but the estimated mass is off the scale. That should be a planet, maybe even a superjovian, but...”

He suddenly stopped, his mouth falling open. “No,” he murmured. “It can't be.” Then he turned to Melpomene. “Give me a close-up!” he snapped, pointing toward the wallscreen. “Highest magnification you can!”

The helmsman gave Andromeda an uncertain glance. The captain nodded, and Melpomene turned to her console again. Still hovering near the ceiling, Andromeda twisted herself around until she was upside down; the wallscreen looked odd from that angle, but the display remained unchanged. For only another moment, though; then the optical system cast a new image upon the forward bulkhead, and she felt her heart skip a beat.

In the new image, HD 76700 had grown large enough that the polarizing filters automatically activated to prevent the bridge crew from being blinded. Even so, the alien sun was still obscured by whatever lay between it and the
Montero
. Yet the object no longer had a spherical shape. In close-up, what they saw was...

“That can't be right.” Jason shook his head in disbelief. “That just can't... There must be something wrong with the scope.”

A vast and seemingly endless network of hexagons, each having the same six-sided form, each identical to its six adjacent neighbors. The hexes weren't solid, though; they were open at their centers, with sunlight shining through. Linked together in perfect geometric pattern, at first glance they resembled a chicken-wire fence, much like that a farmer might put up around a roost to keep the hens from wandering away. But there were no chickens inside this immense pen, but a star instead.

“Apparent magnification is .01 AU from the outer perimeter.” Melpomene's voice was hushed. “We're seeing it from approximately 930,000 miles.”

The goddamn thing is made up entirely of hexagons,
Andromeda thought.
There must be thousands, maybe millions of them. Hell, more than that...
billions
, even.
A cold chill went down her spine.
Whatever it is, it's not of natural origin. Someone actually
built
this...

“I knew it!” D'Anguilo was no longer at his station; he had risen to his feet, his shoes barely anchored to the floor. “I
knew
it!” he yelled, laughing with almost adolescent delight. “Those crazy bastards, they actually did it!”

The flight crew stared at him. Until then, Tom D'Anguilo had been quiet and reserved, the very picture of a former university professor. Suddenly, it was as if an overexcited student had taken his place. Apparently forgetting where he was, he let the soles of his stickshoes leave the carpet; he began to float upward, not noticing or even caring.

Swearing under her breath, Andromeda pushed herself away from the ceiling. “Cut it out,” she said, grabbing D'Anguilo by the shoulders. “You're on the bridge. You can't monkey around like that in...”

“Sorry. Didn't mean to get carried away.” He shook his head as he calmed down a little. “It's just that... I mean, I suspected that the
danui
might have done something like this, but until now I couldn't believe that they...”

“Pardon me, Dr. D'Anguilo...” Jason pointedly cleared his throat. “If you already know that the
danui
are responsible for”—he motioned to the screen—“well,
that
, then why didn't you tell us?”

“I didn't really believe it was possible until...”

“Never mind that.” Still holding on to D'Anguilo, Andromeda looked him straight in the eye. “What I want to know is...”

“A Dyson sphere.”

“What?”

“It's a Dyson sphere. An artificial habitat, only with more room than hundreds, even thousands of planets.” The astroethnicist glanced at Jason. “And, no, I didn't know for sure that the
danui
had built one. I suspected that they were engaged in some massive engineering project, but I couldn't be sure until we actually got here.” His gaze traveled to the screen again. “I thought it might be a network of space colonies, like
Talus qua'spah
. Maybe even some sort of terraforming operation. But this...”

“Tell me later.” Andromeda cut him off with a wave of her hand. “The
danui
invited us, so they're probably waiting for a message. I'm sure they must know we're here.”

Letting go of D'Anguilo, she pushed herself toward the com station. “Anne, would you please transmit a text message? Standard Ku band. Umm... ‘Coyote Federation starship
Carlos Montero
to
danui
homeworld. We have arrived in your system, request permission to land...' No, scratch that.” She reconsidered her words, tried again. “ ‘Request permission to rendezvous at whatever coordinates you wish to give us. Captain Andromeda Carson, commanding officer.'” She looked at D'Anguilo. “Think that'll work?”

“It's as good as any, I suppose.” Still hovering in midair, D'Anguilo continued to stare at the wallscreen. “They'll be able to translate it, of course. Whether they respond is another matter entirely.”

“What do you mean?” The comps of starships of races belonging to the Talus were loaded with translation programs capable of deciphering the written languages of other member races. “If they receive a message in Anglo, they should...”

“They should, yes. The question is whether they
will
.” D'Anguilo shrugged. “The
danui
have their own way of doing things... and it's often not what anyone else expects or even understands.” He nodded toward the screen. “I think that should be obvious, don't you?”

Andromeda didn't reply. Anne's hands were resting on her keyboard, waiting for her captain to give her the final go-ahead. Andromeda gave her a silent nod, and the communications officer began to type the message. Planting her stickshoes on the deck, the captain carefully walked back to her seat. “Mel, set a course for... whatever that thing is. Set thrust at .05 g. That should give them enough time to respond while we figure out exactly where we're going.”

“Yes, ma'am.” Melpomene started to turn to her controls again, then she paused and looked over her shoulder at the captain. “Skipper? That's a rather large target. I know we haven't yet heard from the
danui
, but could you be a little more specific, please?”

“I'd say the equator,” Jason said, before Andromeda could reply. “That way, we won't be very far off the mark, no matter where our hosts tell us to go... assuming, of course, they mean for us to somehow dock with the thing.”

The first officer was making a guess, of course, but it was the best they had for the time being. “The equator sounds about right,” Andromeda said. “Go ahead, Mel.”

The helmsman nodded as she began entering coordinates into the nav system. Andromeda was about to take her seat again when she noticed that D'Anguilo was still floating above the holo table. Unable to reach either the ceiling or the floor, he flailed helplessly in midair. He might have been an experienced spacer, but this time his enthusiasm had gotten the better of him. Andromeda glanced over at Zeus and silently gestured in D'Anguilo's direction:
get him down from there
. The chief petty officer smirked as he unfastened his seat belt and pushed himself toward the hapless scientist.

Zeus had just hauled D'Anguilo back down to the deck when Andromeda heard someone coming through the hatch behind her. Looking around, she saw Lieutenant Cayce glide up the manhole from the access shaft. The team leader's eyes were wide, plainly astonished.

“Captain, where are we?” His gaze never left the wallscreen. Melpomene had returned the image to its previous magnification, so he was seeing the same thing he'd seen on his cabin comp screen or through a porthole, only much larger. “Are we in the right system? And what's that...?”

“Lieutenant,” she said, “in the future, if you want to visit the bridge, I'd appreciate it if you'd call ahead and request permission.” He started to stammer an apology, but she went on. “To answer your questions... Yes, we are in the
danui
system, with the star positively identified as HD 76700. And no, we're not absolutely certain what that is, but Dr. D'Anguilo has tentatively identified it as something called a Dyson sphere.”

“A what?” Cayce's expression was bewildered. Grabbing hold of a bulkhead rung, he turned toward the Janus exec, who'd just then resumed his seat at the remote survey station. “You mean you know what this is?

“Sort of.” D'Anguilo grinned; he seemed to be happiest when he was explaining things to other people. “It's an old idea, really... and not really what a lot of people were expecting. Dyson spheres were thought to be solid structures, or at least by those who wrote about them.”

Andromeda turned to look at him again. “And who would that be?”

“Science fiction writers, who else?” D'Anguilo chuckled at his own joke. “My late father was a literature professor who specialized in twentieth-century science fiction. I read a lot of the books in his collection.” He pointed to the wallscreen. “But almost all those stories got the idea wrong. The physicist who came up with it in the first place—Freeman Dyson, one of the foremost visionaries of his time—never intended for such an object to be a solid sphere, but rather a series of individual habitats in orbit around a star.”

He paused to study the screen. “But that doesn't quite appear to be what's happening here,” he added, a little less confidently. “From the looks of things, this appears to be a linked network of hexes.”

“Hexes?” Cayce shook his head, not quite understanding what he meant.

“Plural for hex.” D'Anguilo reflected upon this for a moment, then looked at Andromeda again. “Come to think of it, that's not such a bad name... Hex.”

“Whatever.” At that particular moment, she was less interested in what they called the place than in what she and her people would do once they got there. “Mel, how long will it take for us to get there?”

“At our projected velocity”—the helmsman paused to enter numbers into her console and study the readout on one of her screens—“about seven days.”

“Good. That gives us plenty of time to study . . . um, Hex . . . before we arrive. Maybe we can make sense out of the thing by then.” She turned to Cayce. “In the meantime, I want your team to prepare for a reconnaissance mission. Before I commit my ship to anything, I'd like to make a flyby, to see what we're getting into, and maybe send down a survey team.”

“Not a problem, Captain,” Cayce said. “That's what we're here for.”

D'Anguilo coughed into his fist. “Captain, with all due respect . . . I don't think the
danui
would've deliberately given us permission to visit their system if they thought the environment was hostile for us.”