Space. Stephen Baxter

      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. We are your new neighbours. Come over for a drink, let’s get to know each other …

      But this did not feel like a welcoming embrace, a contact of equals. It felt like capture. Maura made a stern effort to sit still, not to struggle against silver ropes that were hundreds of millions of kilometres away.

       Chapter 5

       SADDLE POINT

      The Commodore Perry was assembled in lunar orbit.

      The fuel pellets were constructed at Edo, on the Moon, by Nishizaki Heavy Industries, and hauled up to orbit by a fleet of tugs. Major components like the pusher plate and the fuel magazine frame were manufactured on Earth, by Boeing. The components were lifted off Earth by European and Japanese boosters, Ariane 12s and H-VIIIs.

      After decades in orbit the old International Space Station module had a scuffed, lived-in look. When the salvage crew had moved in the air had been foul and the walls covered with a scummy algae, and it had taken a lot of renovation to render it habitable again.

      The various components of the Perry were plastered with sponsors’ logos. That didn’t matter a damn to Malenfant; he knew most of his paintwork would be scoured off in a few months anyhow. But he made sure that the Stars and Stripes was large, and visible.

      

      Malenfant prepared himself for the trip.

      In her cramped office at JSC, Brind challenged him, one last time. She felt, obscurely, that it was her duty.

      ‘Malenfant, this is ridiculous. We know a lot more about the Gaijin now. We have the results returned by the probe –’

      ‘The Bruno.’

      ‘Yes. The glimpses of the beautiful flower-ship. Fascinating.’

      ‘But that was two years ago,’ Malenfant growled. ‘Two years! The Gaijin still won’t respond to our signals. And we aren’t even going back. The government shut down Frank Paulis’s operation after that one shot. National security, international protocols …’

      She shrugged.

      ‘Exactly,’ he snapped. ‘You shrug. People have lost interest. We’ve got the attention span of mayflies. Just because the Gaijin haven’t come storming into the inner system in flying saucers –’

      ‘Don’t you think that’s a good point? The Gaijin aren’t doing us any harm. We’re over the shock of learning that we aren’t alone. What’s the big deal? We can deal with them in the future, when we’re ready. When they are ready.’

      ‘No. Colonizing the solar system is going to take centuries, minimum. The Gaijin are playing a long game. And we have to get into the game before it’s too late. Before we’re cut out, forever.’

      ‘What do you think their ultimate intentions are?’

      ‘I don’t know. Maybe they want to dismantle the rocky planets. Maybe take apart the sun. What would you do?’

      Oddly, in her mundane, cluttered office, her security badge dangling at her neck, she found herself shivering.

      

      The Perry looped through an elliptical two-hour orbit around the Moon. On the lunar surface, the lights of the spreading Japanese colonies and helium-3 mines glittered.

      The completed ship was a stack of components fifty metres long. At its base was a massive, reinforced pusher plate, mounted on a shock-absorbing mechanism of springs and crushable aluminium posts. The main body of the craft was a cluster of fuel magazines. Big superconducting hoops encircled the whole stack.

      Now pellets of helium-3 and deuterium were fired out of the back of the craft, behind the pusher plate. They formed a target the size of a full stop. A bank of carbon dioxide lasers fired converging beams at the target.

      There was a fusion pulse, lasting two hundred and fifty nanoseconds. And then another, and another.

      Three hundred micro-explosions each second hurled energy against the pusher plate. Slowly, ponderously, the craft was driven forward.

      From Earth, the new Moon was made brilliant by fusion fire.

      

      The acceleration of the craft was low, just a few per cent of G. But it was able to sustain that thrust for a long time – years, in fact – and once the Perry had escaped lunar orbit, its velocity mounted inexorably.

      Within, Reid Malenfant settled down to the routines of long-duration spaceflight.

      His hab module was a shoebox, big enough for him to stand up straight. He drenched it with light from metal halide lamps, hot white light like sunlight, to keep the blues away. The walls were racks which held recovery units, designed for easy replacement. There were wires and cables and ducts, running along the corners of the hab module and across the walls. A robot spider called Charlotte ran along the wires, cleaning and sucking dust out of the air. Despite his best efforts, the whole place was soon messy and cluttered, like an overused utility room. Gear was scattered everywhere, stuck to the floor and walls and ceiling with straps and Velcro. If he brushed