The Gods We Seek Read online

  “The wind might not be that strong,” Dylan said. “Our predictions might be wrong. After all, we’re the first ever to visit another solar system.”

  “That’s easy to answer. Let’s measure it,” Chad said. He lifted a baseball-sized glassy sphere from a case and pressed it against the transparent wall. The surface softened, absorbing the ball, then pushed it outside the protective hull. “Are you getting a signal from the sensor?” Chad asked.

  “Yes,” Dr. Skye said. “Radiation levels are only slightly higher than in Earth orbit.”

  Chad furrowed his brow and eyed the violent red dwarf at the center of the system. “Maybe.” He nudged the ship toward the co-orbiting sensor ball. When it was close, glassy tendrils formed from the dome that reached out and captured the sphere. The planet vanished under them. The ship pushed the sensor into space again. “Look at that,” Chad said, pointing to the radiation readout. “I moved us a quarter orbit ahead at the same distance. The radiation’s about what theory says it should be. Far too intense for the atmosphere to stay put, two thousand times more than what it is around the planet.”

  “And yet,” Dylan said, “there’s an atmosphere, there’s an ocean, and there’s life.”

  #

  The crew gathered at the bridge’s port side, marveling at the dark-red-and-purple planet below. They orbited low over Proxima Centauri b, or Everdusk as the crew now called it, close enough to make out shadowy islands with the naked eye. The planet was so close to its star that each year lasted a mere eleven days. It turned on its axis once every seven-and-a-half days but was locked in resonance to its orbit, much like Sol’s Mercury, such that twenty-two Earth days passed between sunrises. One day on Everdusk was eleven Earth-days of temperate weather followed by eleven days of bone-chilling darkness. Without the inexplicably thick atmosphere, which carried warmth to the night side, the day/night contrast could have prevented complex life from taking hold. Dr. Skye’s instruments scanned the biomes below proving the impossible. The oceans and land in a broad band around the equator teemed with life.

  “We have to get down there,” Dr. Skye said. “We can’t learn nearly enough from orbit.”

  “That’s not our mission,” Dylan said.

  “There’s life down there. It’s all over the place. We might well find intelligence.”

  Sara looked up from a video feed showing a swarm of round creatures the size of beach umbrellas that drifted along the ocean’s surface, yellow and pink colors flashing in mesmerizing patterns over their bodies. “Intelligence isn’t enough. We need to find someone who understands exactly what invaded Earth and how to stop it.”

  “How do you suggest we figure that out from up in space?” Dr. Skye asked.

  “A reverse SETI,” Sara said.

  Dr. Skye’s gaze sharpened. “We send them a signal. If anyone down there can recognize a pattern and send a reply, we'll know where to go. If we don’t receive an answer…” she stared at the planet. “We know it’s best to move on.”

  “What’s the best way to go about it?” Dylan asked. “This reverse SETI.”

  “Why limit ourselves to one method?” Chad asked, drifting over from a chair he called the conn. “If we grab raw material, I think I can coax the ship into manufacturing a mirror large enough to reflect the sun back down to the surface. It would be brighter than any star.”

  “Like what the Chinese did over DC on the Fourth of July,” Sara said.

  “Exactly. We can modulate the pattern. Do something mathematical, like in the SETI protocols. At the same time, we can broadcast on a number of radio bands.”

  “Grab raw material?” Dylan asked.

  “From an asteroid.”

  “The ship can just… ingest it?”

  “I think so,” Chad said. “That’s what it started doing to those demon probes that smashed into us as we broke away from Earth.”

  Sara watched their exchange from her chair near the center of the bridge. “How long will it take to implement your plan, Chad?”

  “The tricky part is finding an asteroid. We don’t have instruments for that and, if the Quadriga has sensors, we haven’t worked out how to use them.”

  “Can’t you will us to an asteroid like you willed us here?”

  Chad drummed his fingertips, absently tapping a pattern in midair. “Nope. Everything I navigated to so far was a major destination, and I knew how to envision it even if I couldn’t specify its precise location.” His eyes rolled up and to the side, then he nodded to himself. “Come to think of it, it should be easy to find an asteroid.”

  Sara raised an eyebrow. “Easy? NASA’s astro-tracking system cost fifty million dollars and took a year to build.”

  “Sure,” Chad said with a chuckle. “My company subcontracted on that job. That system measures precise orbits, creates a spectral image of each target to estimate prospecting value, and guides mining probes and tugs to any chosen rock. All we gotta do is find any ‘ole asteroid, fly on over, and check whether it has what we need.”

  “That’s easy?” Dr. Skye asked.

  “Yep,” Chad said. “The Quadriga can form an optical telescope from the transparent dome. All we have to do is attach a digital camera-”

  “-and take snaps a few minutes apart,” Dr. Skye said. “Overlay the images on each other and search for specs of light that moved. Let’s do it.”

  They set to work imaging the system’s equatorial plane. Soon, they had two images of a random star field taken a short time apart. Software matched up the stars in each image and flipped quickly between the photos. One of the image’s dots jumped back and forth as the photos alternated. “Eureka,” Chad said. He closed his eyes and envisioned visiting that asteroid. Twelve seconds later, a hundred-meter-long chunk of rock and metal floated next to them. “Look at that,” Chad said. “On the first try. I’ll set to work absorbing what we need.”

  “And I’ll figure out a protocol to signal Everdusk,” Dr. Skye said with an excited grin.

  #

  For the next three days, the Quadriga signaled the planet. Chad’s space mirror pulsed across the surface brighter than everything but the sun. Simple counts. One pulse, two pulses, three. Patterns of long and short pulses. Patterns of mathematical significance. They sent the same signal on a wide range of radio frequencies. He and Dr. Skye stood vigil on the bridge while the others slept, watching carefully for any changes from the planet, anything at all that might represent a response. “Something intelligent should have replied by now if they are able and willing.”

  “Willing may be the key,” Dr. Skye said. “When the Quadriga started signaling us from Jupiter, we didn’t reply. There were many reasons, among them secrecy, but there was also fear… fear of giving something away. We went out to see for ourselves and that took months.”

  “True. But we’re in low orbit. If anything space-faring is down there, how long would it take for them to send a probe?”

  Dr. Skye smiled. “You are a child of the automated manufacturing age, aren’t you?”

  “So are you,” Chad said.

  “Yes, but I listened to my parent’s ‘back in my day’ stories. It used to take months if not years for humanity to launch a rocket. They took forever to make and weren’t lying around in warehouses.”

  A sheepish grin spread across Chad’s face. “Of course. I must seem rather ivory tower right now.”

  Dr. Skye poked him. “Not at all. Everything evolves so damned fast these days, it’s easy to forget how things used to be. Most of us spend all our brain power just keeping up.”

  “So, we wait a few months?”

  “I doubt the rest of the crew would have the patience,” Dr. Skye said. “As much as I want to study what’s down there, I have to admit they’re right.”

  “There aren’t signs of anything advanced on land,” Chad said. “We’d have seen large-scale construction or power systems on the infrared scanners. I don’t see how we can detect anything like that underwater from orbit. We’d ha
ve to go down for a look, and exploring the oceans would take months at least, maybe years.” He turned away from the planet to face her. “I’m sorry, I suppose we’re all in agreement it’s time to leave Everdusk. I hope we find something you can study at the next star we visit.”

  Dr. Skye’s eyes shifted to somewhere over his right shoulder and her expression went blank.

  “Sydney?”

  “What the hell is that?” she asked, pointing to where she was looking.

  A round patch of sky, between the planet and the star, glowed brilliant purple.

  Chad turned. “What is… Holy crap. Whatever it is, it’s the size of a moon. Look, it’s not solid. The star’s shining through, washed out by the violet haze.”

  “That’s not all,” Dr. Skye said. She held out a thumb to cover Proxima Centauri and the purple ring in front of it. “There’s a stellar flare forming, a rather large one.”

  Chad copied her gesture. “How did you see that?”

  “I noticed a sharp uptick in UV on the sensors just now,” she said. “I suspected a flair might be responsible.”

  “So… how is a solar flare causing a moon-sized purple disk in space?”

  “I have no idea.”

  #

  The rest of the crew scrambled onto the bridge, rubbing eyes and grumbling for coffee, urged on by Dr. Skye’s excited calls.

  Dylan, shaking off a yawn, looked where she was pointing. “What in the Sam Hill? What is that?”

  Sara pulsed her get-around to see past him. “Whatever it is, it’s not reflecting light. It’s glowing. Like a cosmic neon sign.”

  “How big is it?” Dylan asked.

  Chad said, “It hasn’t moved much against the stars while Sydney was waking you all. It’s not very close. We’ve been recording it since just after it appeared. Let’s see now…” With hand gestures, he fed the video through a computer algorithm. He tilted his head toward the computer display. “Well, hello there. This is interesting. It’s at the L1 Lagrange point.”

  “The L1 Lagrange…?” Sara said.

  “That’s the spot where an object is balanced between Proxima Centauri and Everdusk. Think of it as where their gravity cancels out,” Chad said.

  Sara nodded. “So… it’s pretty far away?”

  “Yes,” Chad said. “Well, Everdusk is super close to its star compared to Earth, but yeah, still pretty far away.”

  “So that would make it… damn huge?” Sara shook her head, each tiny motion accenting her disbelief.

  “It’s bigger than I thought. About as large as Everdusk,” Chad said.

  “Why the hell didn’t we notice it before?” Dylan asked.

  Musa drifted up from behind and rested a hand on Dylan and Sara’s shoulders. “Maybe it just got here.”

  “Something that large?” Dylan asked. “How could it?”

  “The USS Nimitz would have seemed impossibly large to early Polynesians in their tiny outriggers,” Sara said. “They’d wonder how it could cross the ocean.”

  “But it’s the size of an entire planet,” Dylan said.

  “Perhaps not,” Chad said. “Its circumference seems that large, but look, you can see through the purple light. “It could be a planet-sized ring. That’s still massive by human standards, but not nearly as massive as a planet.”

  “We won’t figure it out from here. Let’s go have a look-see,” Dylan said.

  “We have no idea what it is,” Sara said. “It could be dangerous, like if those Polynesians paddled up to the Nimitz and the Navy crew decided the natives might have a bomb.”

  Chad shook his head. “We came here to find someone, or something, that can help us defeat the Demons.” He flung his arm toward the nebulous purple circle. “Well, there’s something that looks like alien tech. Let’s go investigate.”

  #

  The Quadriga closed the distance to the enormous disk of light in seconds, approaching from the side. Edge on, the light show was a rounded-off cone of haze pointed from the star to the planet.

  “How can this be here?” Dylan asked. “What’s causing it?”

  Chad pulled his legs into a lotus pose. “A stellar storm just started. The first sign was a burst of UV and x-ray light. It’ll be followed by a flood of charged particles in a few hours.” He rested his palms on his knees. “We have a planet down there with a thick atmosphere that should have been stripped away ages ago by these storms. Look at the edge of the light, the ring facing the star. It’s curved like it’s flowing around something.”

  “Flowing around what?” Dr. Skye asked. “What could light flow around?”

  “It’s not light that’s flowing, it’s the stellar wind. It’s being concentrated, creating a dense region of charged particles. The high-energy photons, UV and x-rays, collide with the particles and lose energy.”

  “Wow,” Dylan said. “You’re saying it’s like a Star Trek shield, the size-”

  “-of a freaking planet,” Sara said, completing his thought. “But what’s deflecting the stellar wind?”

  “It’s mega-scale engineering,” Chad said, “but the concept’s been proposed before.”

  “What?” Sara asked, her voice a pitch higher than usual.

  “Some smart scientists considered how much damage a massive solar flare would inflict on our infrastructure back on Earth and came up with the idea. We could probably build it, too, though it would be a planet-wide undertaking and cost perhaps a trillion dollars.”

  Sara sighed. “So, the builders aren’t necessarily any more advanced than us.”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” Chad said. “If they’re not from around here, either they had the technology long ago and sent robot factories here sub-light to build the thing, or they mastered faster-than-light travel.”

  Dr. Skye turned to Everdusk. “The builders could also be local, down there, and we simply haven’t figured out how to communicate with them.”

  “Or,” Sara said, “maybe ancient locals built it in a desperate attempt to survive their sun’s violent eruptions, but it wasn’t enough.”

  “What do we do?” Dylan asked. “Go back to the planet and keep looking for life? Go look elsewhere for the builders?”

  “First things first,” Chad said. “Let’s get a closer peek at the technology.”

  “Do you expect to find ‘Made in Wolf 359’ stamped on it?” Sara asked.

  “No,” Chad said, “but we might find clues.”

  “Is it safe?” Dylan asked. “The radiation’s bound to be intense.”

  “The Quadriga survived at least a year around Jupiter, probably far longer. We couldn’t even measure any radiation once we boarded her, even in low orbit,” Chad said. “This shouldn’t be much worse if we approach from the side. The magnetic field will be strong. You’ll want to take off your jewelry, power down electronic equipment, and store it in shielded boxes until we see how well the Quadriga protects us.”

  Sara pulsed her get-around, bringing her above the rest and drawing the crew’s attention. “Let’s do it,” she said.

  #

  The Quadriga nudged into the torrent of charged particles, an aura dancing over the ship like a plasma globe, flashing blue and green with nebulous touches of yellow. Chad watched the luminous flow and envisioned the magnetic field that must guide it. With uncanny precision, he guided the ship almost directly to a meter-thick tube. It appeared to extend straight up and down, its gradual curvature almost obscured by the structure's massive scale. Careful measurement revealed its minuscule bend. The tube formed a ring precisely the circumference of Everdusk. “Holy cow,” Chad said, shaking his head. “Holy planet-sized cow.” He brought the Quadriga’s transparent dome within centimeters of the mega-structure. “Almost no magnetic flux,” he said, consulting an instrument. “It’s safe to break out the rest of the gear.”

  Dr. Skye set to work unboxing sensors.

  Chad grabbed a powerful flashlight and directed its brilliant beam at the ring. “Oh, my. That looks familiar.”<
br />
  “What?” Dr. Skye asked.

  “The surface looks like gold-gray metal, a liquid metal rippling like a breeze passing over a lake, with tinges of green and pink flashing under its surface,” Chad said.

  “That’s exactly like-” Dylan said.

  “Exactly like I first described the skin of the Quadriga,” Chad said.

  “It’s made of the same stuff?” Sara asked.

  “We’ll do more tests,” Chad said, “but visually, it’s identical.”

  The bridge grew still as the weight of the discovery set in.

  “So, this… megadisk… protects life below,” Dylan said. “It was put here by the same intelligence that left the Quadriga in our own solar system.”

  “Which protects life on Earth,” Sara said. “The timing’s too perfect. It was precisely the tool we needed to give us a chance against the Demons.”

  Dylan nodded. “So, the builders of both machines placed them to help life exist. Humanity has been in two systems so far, and both have advanced technology. Are these two systems special? Will we find this technology spread across the galaxy?”

  “It could be the builders are right here on Everdusk, and they brought their technology to us, their nearest neighbor,” Dr. Skye said.

  “We’re not their nearest neighbor. Alpha Centauri A and B are closer to them,” Jake said.

  “Those stars have no planets in the Goldilocks zone. They’re all balls of lava or frozen solid,” Dylan said.

  “None that we know of. Astrophysics budgets were slashed in the early 2020s for over a decade. The search wasn’t ever completed,” Jake said. “We don’t know for sure.”

  Sara absorbed the crew’s ideas, sorted and processed them. “Volatile red dwarfs like this star are common. That megadisk is enormous and is damn bright when active. Astronomers looking for exoplanets watch Proxima Centauri all the time. Why didn’t we detect it before?”

  Chad considered the question. “We can’t directly spot a planet that small. We infer its presence when it passes in front of its sun. When that happens, the megadisk is behind the planet from our point of view, between the planet and the star.”