‘Uh huh. Who –?’
‘Perry was the guy who, in 1853, took the US Navy to Japan and demanded they open up to international trade. Appropriate given the nature of my mission, don’t you think?’
‘It’s your ship.’ She glanced about. ‘Anyhow, what are you doing out here?’
He nodded at the Shuttle exhibit. ‘They’ve got my old EMU in there, on display. I’m negotiating to get it back.’
‘EMU?’
‘My EVA Mobility Unit. My old pressure suit.’ He patted his gut, which was trim. ‘I figure I can still get inside it. I can’t live with those modern Jap designs full of pond scum. And I want a manoeuvring unit …’
She was looking at him oddly, as if still unable to believe he was serious.
‘Not ours,’ whispered Xenia. ‘Nothing to do with Bruno.’
Suddenly Maura found it difficult to breathe. This is it, she thought. This unprepossessing blanket: the first indubitably alien artefact, here in our solar system. Who put the blanket there? What was its purpose? Why was it so crudely buried?
A robot arm reached forward from the probe, laden with sensors and a sample-grabbing claw. She wished that was her hand, that she could reach out too, and stroke that shining, unfamiliar material.
But the claw was driven by science, not curiosity; it passed over the blanket itself and dug a shallow groove into the regolith that lay over it, sampling the material.
Within a few minutes the results of the probe’s analysis were coming in, and she could hear the speculation begin in Bootstrap’s back rooms.
‘These are fines, and they are ilmenite-rich. About forty per cent, compared to twenty per cent in the raw regolith.’ ‘And the agglutinate has been crushed.’ ‘It’s as if it has been beneficiated. It’s just what we’d do.’ ‘Not like this. So energy-intensive …’
She understood some of this. Ilmenite was a mineral – a compound of iron, titanium, and oxygen – that was common in long-exposed regolith on airless bodies like the Moon and the asteroids. Its importance was that it was a key source of volatiles: light and exotic compounds implanted there over billions of years by the solar wind, the thin, endless stream of particles that fled from the sun. But ilmenite was difficult to concentrate, extract and process; the best mining techniques the lunar Japanese had thought up were energy-intensive and relied on a lot of heavy-duty, unreliable equipment.
‘I knew it!’ somebody cried. ‘There’s no helium-3 in the processed stuff! None at all!’ ‘None to the limits of the sensors, you mean.’ ‘Sure, but –’ ‘You mean they’re processing the asteroids for helium-3? Is that all?’
Maura felt oddly disappointed. If the Gaijin were after helium-3, did that mean they used fusion processes similar to – perhaps no more advanced than – those already known to humans? And if so, they can’t be so smart – can they?
In her ears, the speculation raged on.
‘… I mean, how dumb can these guys be? Helium-3 is scarce in asteroid regolith because you’re so far from the sun, which implants it. The Moon is a lot richer. If they came in a couple of astronomical units –’ ‘They could just buy all they want from the Japanese.’
Laughter.
‘But maybe they can’t come in any closer. Maybe they need, I don’t know, the cold and the dark.’ ‘Maybe they are scared of us. You thought about that?’
‘They aren’t so dumb. You see any rock-crushers and solar furnaces here? That’s what we’d have to use to get as efficient an extraction process. Think about that blanket, man. It has to be nanotech.’
She understood what that meant too: there was no brute force here, no great ugly machines for grinding and crushing and baking as humans might have deployed, nothing but a simple and subtle reworking of the regolith at a molecular, or even atomic, level.
‘That blanket must be digging its way into the asteroid grain by grain, picking out the ilmenite and bleeding the helium-3. Incredible.’ ‘Hey, you’re right. Maybe it’s extending itself as it goes. The ragged edge –’ ‘It might eat its way right through that damn asteroid.’ ‘Or else wrap the whole thing up like a Thanksgiving turkey …’ ‘We got to get a sample.’ ‘Bruno knows that …’
Nanotechnology: something, at last, beyond the human. Something other. She shivered.
But now there was something new, at the corner of her vision, something that shouldered its way over the horizon. It was glittering, very bright against the dark sky. Huge.
It was as if a second sun had risen above the grimy shoulder of Ellis. But this was no sun.
The prattling, remote voices fell silent.
It was perhaps a kilometre long, and wrought in silver. There was a bulky main section, a smoothly curved cylinder, with a mess of silvery ropes trailing behind. Dodecahedral forms – perhaps two or three metres across, silvered and anonymous – clung to the tentacles. There were hundreds of them, Maura saw. Thousands. Like insects, beetles.
A ship. Suddenly she remembered why they were here: not to inspect samples of regolith, not to pick at cute nanotechnological toys. They were here to make contact.
And this was it. She imagined history’s view swivelling, legions of scholars in the halls of an unknown future inspecting this key moment in human destiny.
She found she had to force herself to take a breath.
The ship was immense, panning out of her view, cutting the sky in half. Its lower rim brushed the asteroid’s surface, and plasma sparkled.
The Bootstrap voices in her ear buzzed. ‘My God, it’s beautiful.’ ‘It looks like a flower.’ ‘It must be a Bussard ramjet. That’s an electromagnetic scoop –’ ‘It’s so beautiful, a flower-ship …’ ‘Yeah. But you couldn’t travel between the stars in a piece of junk like that!’
Now those shining beetles drifted away from the ropes. They skimmed across space towards the Bruno. Were these dodecahedra individual Gaijin? What was their intention?
Silver ropes descended like a net across her point of view now, tangling up the Bruno, until the view was criss-crossed with silver threads. The threads seemed to tauten. To cries of alarm from the insect voices at Bootstrap’s mission control, the probe was hauled backwards, and its gentle grip on the asteroid was loosened, tethers and pitons flying free in a slow flurry of sparkling dust.
The brief glimpse of the Gaijin ship was lost. Stars and diamond-sharp sun wheeled, occluded by dust specks and silver ropes.
Maura felt her heart beat fast, as if she was herself in danger. She longed for the Bruno to burst free of its restraints and flee from these grasping Gaijin, running all the way back to Earth. But that was impossible. In fact, she knew, the Bruno was designed to be captured, even dissected; it contained cultural artefacts, samples of technology, attempts to communicate based on simple diagrams and prime number codes. Hello.
