Collective Hindsight (Book 1) - Aaron Rosenberg [7]
“No life signs are evident,” Salek pointed out. “Though with a ship this size we would certainly expect crew. Docking bays and airlocks are visible along the exterior, indicating that it was built for entry, if not for sustained occupancy.”
“The computers—” one of the Bynars began.
“—are active within—” the other added.
“—but are neither broadcasting data nor scanning the area.”
Fabian shook his head. The way the pairing finished each other’s sentences had taken a long time to get used to. It wasn’t like with a long-term human couple, where one might anticipate the other’s thoughts and finish what they’d been about to say. No, this was a case where the two Bynars were so linked that they basically had one mind. Neither possessed the sentence, and neither stole it—they shared it, with no sense of ownership beyond “us.”
“So it’s not looking or talking, but it is doing something?” Pattie asked, and the Bynars nodded.
“Not just—”
“—something. Its signal—”
“—is increasing in strength and frequency.”
“So it’s revving up,” Fabian said, and they both nodded at him this time. “Okay, it’s getting ready to do something. We just don’t know what.”
“Two other elements we must consider,” Salek said. “First, the vessel shows no signs of damage. Its hull is structurally intact, with no more than the minor scrapes one might expect while floating within an asteroid-strewn system such as this one. Second, its energy signature is unique.” A signal appeared beneath the model, with notations alongside indicating various benchmarks along the known spectra.
“That’s not an antimatter signature,” Kieran pointed out. “The pulse is all wrong, and it’s at the wrong wavelengths. If anything, I’d say it was closer to a sun.”
Salek nodded to him. “An excellent deduction. Yes, the closest match to the ship’s energy type is that of a sun. Nuclear forces, caused by the fusion of hydrogen and helium particles.”
“So this thing is harnessing a small sun as its power source?” Carol scratched her chin. “Isn’t that kind of impossible?”
“As far as we know, yes,” Pattie said. “A sun that small would have collapsed long ago, forming a singularity.”
“But it could be solar-powered,” Kieran pointed out. “Just absorbing stellar radiation and using that for power. Free fuel, essentially—and plentiful.”
“That is the most likely possibility,” Salek said. “But we will not know for certain until we have examined the vessel more closely.”
He started to say something else, but Fabian held up a hand. “Hang on a sec. I know we need to find out what’s going on here, and that will probably mean boarding it, but what if it’s a trap? What if it’s a bomb? High energy levels, active computer signals, strong shielding, no sign of a crew, no attempt to send out a distress signal, and it’s sitting in the only free zone within ten systems during an interstellar war. That sounds like a trap to me.”
Again, Salek nodded. “An excellent point. How do you suggest we proceed?”
Fabian sat back and thought about it for a second. “Well, we have to assume that it is a bomb, and prepare ourselves accordingly. The question with any bomb is, what’s the trigger? If this thing is rigged to a timer, we’re screwed—there’s nothing we can do about it, short of getting in there fast and disarming or deactivating it before it counts down to zero. If it’s got a stimulus trigger—it goes off if the air pressure changes, or the temperature, or the noise level, or if something is moved—we’ve got to make sure we don’t affect anything.”
“Easier said than done,” Kieran muttered. “How can we get in there and look around if we can’t touch anything? And if our own body heat could be the thing that sets it off?”
Fabian shrugged. “Nothing’s perfect, but there are a few tricks we can pull. We should beam over in space suits—that’ll help mask our body