with a rare disease.
And it had led them here.
As the shuttle fell into a degrading orbit, Caznal’s apprentice, Ivan Baraka the Fifteenth, grinned at her and bounced in his seat, practically vibrating inside his spacesuit. There were old Earth vids of teenagers his age bearing that same expression as they waited for a rollercoaster to spill over its first hump.
She shared his excitement, as did the other seven scholars aboard. But still, a small discrepancy in their studies nagged at her. After all, when a treasure map’s instructions read “Twenty paces past Skull Rock, one hundred and twenty around Crocodile Cove, and there be the Cave of Wonders,” one expects the cave to be there, not a divot in the ground.
That they’d arrived at a divot—a planemo—and not a cave was troubling.
The Nest had not given up any of its secrets easily. At first, it appeared to have no electrical connections. “It’s like finding a sailboat in orbit,” someone had once said. How could a spaceship function without wires and transistors?
But they’d been looking at it all wrong—all human.
Not only did the Nest have vast reserves of hydrogen that it could compress into a metallic superconducting superfluid to form electrical connections a single atom thick, but the way the Nest relied so heavily on gravitons suggested the aliens that had created it had been able to biologically manipulate gravitons.
If they’d never come to such a realization, not only would the Nest still lie dormant, they never would have recognized the alien maps for what they were.
“Approaching Crater Sixty-four,” the pilot said over the intercom, her voice echoing slightly inside Caz’s helmet. “Spotlights should be illuminating the eastern edge soon. Take note.”
Caz squinted, still unable to make anything out. Eventually the blackness gave way to gray, and the gray to a deep jasper-like green, and then ridges. The side of the crater was terraced—nothing like the smooth sweep of an impact or volcanic caldera, and not nearly as sheer as the walls of a sinkhole.
But that didn’t mean it was unnatural.
They were hoping to find something important to the Nataré here (Nataré was what they’d named the Nest’s creators, from the Latin, for how they were believed to be able to “float” or “swim” through the air on their biologically manipulated gravitons). Anything would do really. If all they stumbled upon was a set of tentacle prints and a patch of “we were here” graffiti, she’d take it.
Because that would silence the doubt.
When the convoy had successfully developed the technology to access the Nest’s computer, they’d soon come to the conclusion that the ship was more like a shuttle. Which made sense, given its size. Unless, of course, the aliens were considerably smaller than humans; just one of the many things Caznal was hoping to learn. She was still surprised they didn’t even know something that basic about them.
The ship’s computer contained no visuals of the aliens, nor any general historical data. All they found were three-dimensional representations of hundreds of spheres stuffed full with additional spheres of different sizes.
At first, the engineers had thought they’d stumbled upon the Nataré writing system, that each parent sphere could denote a page or even an entire document, and the spheres inside were words. But running them through a rudimentary algorithm revealed a lack of repetition, a fundamental requirement for ordering anything—sounds, symbols, movements—into meaningful communication.
It took them years to mentally convert the Nest’s data into information more suited to a human thinking process. The breakthrough had come when they found spheres with only a couple of—and in some cases, only one—interior spheres. When these were matched to full-to-the-brim spheres, they found an overlap. The mostly empty spheres appeared to highlight points in the full spheres.
X-marks the spot.
On human maps, the distance between objects was the focal point; the primary information the map was intended to convey. Objects were usually portrayed as a similar size—a single point at large scales. Not so with the alien maps. The Nataré highlighted gravitational influence over all other possible associations. According to the convoy’s best theories, their evolution had clearly influenced the way they saw and interacted with the world.
After recognizing the spheres as maps, their research became a quick spiral of realization and discovery. The spheres represented different sizes of gravitational influence created by various cosmological objects, and though they were shown with no distance between them, they were ordered in accordance with their spatial relation.
All the humans had to do then was take their current gravitational models and overlay them with the Nataré maps.
When they found one nearly empty sphere that highlighted LQ Pyxidis and a handful of other points, they knew they’d struck gold. It was the smoking gun they’d been looking for, evidence linking the Nest and the Web to new locations: places where more Nataré history, or the Nataré themselves, might be found.
Places like this planemo.
Only …
The ground rushed up at them—though their rate of descent slowed for landing, Caz still felt a jolt in her bones when they touched down.
“Ready, sir?” Ivan asked, giving her the thumbs-up.
“Ready,” she breathed, standing. When the pilot gave the green light, she hoisted the duffel bag of tools that lay at her feet onto her shoulder, as did her colleagues.
“Four hours for setup,” the pilot reminded them. “Half an hour for return. Stay in visual range of your assigned teammates at all times. And Captain Nwosu would like to remind you that if it wiggles, don’t touch it. If everyone’s got that, I’m opening the doors.”
A series of thumbs-ups and affirmations over comms led to the locks and their airtight seals disengaging, shifting aside to reveal the open plane and perpetual night of the crater floor.
Since Caznal was the head of the Nataré division, everyone waited for her cue. She would have the honor of stepping on this alien world first.
Hopefully, though, I won’t be the first sentient to explore this surface.
The planemo was roughly the size and density of Mars, with a surface of mostly ice, so Caz knew to expect a lower gravitational pull. It was still strange to feel the burden of her bag lighten and the tension of her muscles ease as she disembarked. The artificial gravity on the convoy ships—even the shuttles—was a constant one-g, and though they’d learned from Earth to make gravity cyclers smaller, allowing for more acute graviton manipulation, they had yet to finesse the tech into spacesuits.
Though she could move easily in the lower gravity, she felt unsteady. Like she was walking on a wobbly gelatin surface instead of solid rock. But the cleats on her soles held true to the frozen landscape, and her confidence increased with each stride.
The darkness, she found, was both a frustration and a godsend. Though the lights on her suit barely illuminated the craggy surface three feet in front of her, the small sphere of light felt safe.
She’d
