Space. Stephen Baxter

remained quiet: they seemed to be producing no electromagnetic output but the infrared of their waste heat.

      It was as if a wave of colonization had abruptly reached this part of the Galaxy, this remote corner of a ragged spiral arm, and diverse creatures – or machines – were busily digging in, building, perhaps breeding, perhaps dying. Nobody knew how the colonists had gotten here. Nobody could even guess why they had come now.

      But it seemed to Maura that already one fact was clear about the presumed Galactic community: it was messy and diverse, just as much as the human communities of Earth, if not more. In a way, she supposed, that was even healthy. If communities separated by light years had turned out to be identical, it would be an oppressive sky indeed. But it was sure going to make figuring out the meaning of it all a lot more difficult.

      And, for Maura, that was a matter to regret.

      She was never short of work, of invitations like this. She knew that as part of the amorphous community of pols and workers who never really got the stink of the Beltway out of their nostrils, she was prized by corporations like Bootstrap as an opinion-former, perhaps a conduit to power. But she was, officially, retired. Perhaps she should sit back and stop thinking so hard, and just let the pretty light shows from the sky wash over her.

      But that wasn’t in her nature. And, after all, Reid Malenfant was older than she was, and she knew he continued to agitate for a deeper engagement with the mystery of these Gaijin, for more probes, other missions. If he was still active, then perhaps she should be.

      But, in this complicated universe, she was too damn old. The more complicated it was, the more likely it was that she would never live to see this puzzle – perhaps the greatest mystery ever to confront humanity – unravelled.

      Now a technical feed faded up in Maura’s other ear. ‘Closing with the target at two metres per second, range just under a klick, one metre per second cross-range. Hydrazine thruster tests in progress: +X, -X, +Y, -Y, +Z, -Z, all check out. Counting down to the thruster burn to null our approach and cross-range velocities a klick above the ground. Then we’re on gyro-lock to touchdown …’

      With an effort of will, Maura tuned out the irrelevant voices.

      The asteroid became a wall that approached her in slow, dusty silence; the tether lines twisted before her, retaining their coils in the absence of gravity. She made out surface features, limned by sunlight: craters, scarps, ridges, valleys, striations where it looked as if the asteroid’s surface had been crumpled or stretched. Some of the craters were evidently new, relatively anyhow, with neat bowl shapes and sharp rims. Others were much older, little more than circular scars overlaid by younger basins and worn down, presumably by a billion years of micrometeorite rain.

      And there were colours on Ellis’s folded-over landscape, spectral shades that emerged from the dominant grey-blackness. The sharper-edged craters and ridges seemed to be slightly bluish, while the older, low-lying areas were more subtly red. Perhaps this was some deep space weathering effect, she thought; perhaps aeons of sunlight had wrought these gentle hues.

      She sighed. It really was lovely, in a quite unexpected way – like so much of the universe she found herself in. By God, I love it all, she thought. How can I retire? If I did, I would miss this.

      And now, with a kiss of dust, the Bruno reached its destination.

      The techs began cheering tinnily.

      

      A year before the Bruno’s arrival – after the AAAS meeting – Malenfant had returned to the Johnson Space Center, for the first time in two decades.

      The campus looked pretty much unchanged: the same blocky black and white buildings, with those big nursery-style numbers on their sides, scattered over square kilometres of grassy plain here at the south-east suburban edge of Houston, all contained by a mesh fence from NASA Road One. (But it wasn’t called the NASA Road any more.) In the surrounding streets there were still run-down strip malls and fast food places and Seven-Elevens.

      But inside the campus itself, there was no sign of the tourists who used to ride between the buildings in their long tram trains. And though there were plenty of historic-marker plaques, nobody was making history here any more.

      The cherry trees were still here, though, and the green grass still seemed to glow.

      He wasn’t here to sight-see. He had come to meet Sally Brind, who ran a NASA department called the Solar System Exploration Division. He made his way to Building 31.

      Inside, the air conditioning was ferocious, a hell of a contrast to the flat moist Houston heat outside. Malenfant welcomed the plummeting temperature; it was like old times.

      

      Reid Malenfant had loomed over Sally Brind. He was leaning on her desk, resting his weight on big, bony knuckles. He was around twice Brind’s age and he was a legend out of the past. And, to her, he was as intimidating as hell.

      ‘We got to get out to the solar focus,’ he began.

      ‘Hello, good morning, nice to meet you, thanks for giving up your time,’ she said dryly.

      He backed off a little, and stood up straight. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

      ‘Don’t tell me. At your time of life, you don’t have time to waste.’

      ‘No, I’m just a rude asshole. Always was. Mind if I sit down?’

      She said, ‘Tell me about the solar focus.’

      He moved a pile of glossies from a chair; they were digitized artist’s impressions of a proposed, never-to-be-funded, unmanned mission to Io, Jupiter’s moon. ‘What I’m talking about, specifically, is a mission to the solar focus of Alpha Centauri – the nearest star system.’

      ‘I know about Alpha Centauri.’

      ‘Yes … The sun’s gravitational field acts as a spherical lens, which magnifies the intensity of the light of a distant star. At the point of focus, out on the rim of the system, the gain can be hundreds of millions; at the right point, it would be possible to communicate across stellar distances with equipment no more powerful than you’d need to talk between planets. The Gaijin may be using the Centauri solar focus as a communication node. The theorists are calling it a Saddle Point. Actually there is a separate Saddle Point for each star. All roughly at the same radius, because of –’

      ‘All right. And why do we need to go to Alpha Centauri’s focus?’

      ‘Because Alpha was the first source of extrasolar signals. And because the Gaijin are there. We have evidence that the Gaijin entered the system at the Alpha solar focus. From there, they sent a fleet of some kind of construction or mining craft into the asteroid belt. Sally, we now have infrared signatures, showing the activity in the asteroid belt, going back ten years.’

      ‘There is an unmanned probe en route to the asteroid belt. Maybe we should wait for its results.’

      Malenfant flared. ‘A private initiative. Not relevant, anyhow. The solar focus – that is where the action is.’

      ‘You don’t actually have any direct evidence of anything out at the solar focus, do you?’

      ‘No. Only what we’ve inferred from the asteroid belt data.’

      ‘But there’s no signature of any huge interstellar mother ship out there, at the rim. As there would have to be, if you’re right.’

      ‘I don’t have all the answers. That’s why we have to get out there and see. And to tell the damn Gaijin we’re here.’

      ‘I don’t see how I can help you.’

      ‘This is NASA’s Solar System Exploration Division. Right? So, now we need to go do some exploring.’

      ‘NASA doesn’t exist any more,’ she said. ‘Not as you knew it, when you were flying Shuttle. The JSC is run by the Department of Agriculture –’

      ‘Don’t