The Thousand Earths by Stephen Baxter

Author:Stephen Baxter
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473228931
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2022-09-29T00:00:00+00:00

42

In the end it was more like two hundred hours – over a week – before Taiva Lapic showed up again.

And this time her arrival was heralded by a small convoy of ships, converging on the Perseus in its high, looping Earth orbit.

At least, Hackett thought they were ships. They were featureless, silvery spheres, each a little larger than Perseus’s main body itself – though the dark energy scoop, if it had been deployed, would have dwarfed the whole futuristic fleet, he thought with some relish. But that was a childish reaction, for he could see at a glance that this technology was far above his own age’s, and probably beyond Icsoba’s, itself millions of years ahead of his own.

For example there was no evidence of a propulsion system at all: no sails, no rocket nozzles, not even a varying hull temperature (he measured and checked) to hint at the workings of some kind of engineering structure within. And the ships didn’t make any physical contact with the Perseus. They just joined up in close formation and drifted away, taking Perseus with them. No reaction mass expelled, no energy collected, not even from as thin a medium as the dark energy which had propelled the Perseus. No mechanical grappling of the Perseus itself …

Tractor beams?

He hesitantly discussed this with Rava, but she had no better guesses than he had. They speculated that the ships were acquiring their momentum by reaching up into some higher dimension of space, just as through its dark energy scoop the Perseus reached out of this cosmic plane and into what Hackett had learned to call the bulk, to gather its own energy and momentum. If so, the operation was subtle, seamless and invisible.

Icsoba showed no interest in any of this, and wasn’t even motivated to guess. Hackett should have expected that. He had come to realise that she was from a very different age than his own or even Rava’s – an age more like this Andromeda-collision epoch in many ways, where machines had reached such heights of seamless perfection that you simply didn’t need to wonder how they worked any more.

Anyhow, the sphere-ships huddled around the helpless Perseus and wafted it across space, back to Mars, at what seemed an absurd speed to Hackett. He patiently observed what he could, analysed what he could, made notes, because you never knew. And hoped they did no harm to his ship.

Their trajectory brought them to a looping close orbit around the planet, slow enough for the crew of the Perseus to get a better overview of the main features than their flyby had afforded.

Near the equator, Hackett saw now, you still had the great volcanoes, pushing high through now thicker air. Olympus Mons, though its flanks were green-coated, still had a barren caldera at its summit – so high it evidently still poked out of the bulk of the atmosphere, even though the air itself was so much thicker and deeper now. And the caldera itself, a field of overlapping craters, was still a faint pink-red, the colour of old Mars.

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