We must be more responsible.

Now, slowing towards orbit, we see everything they saw and more. We see the scabs, and the impossible iron core. We hear the singing. And there, just beneath the comet's frozen surface, we see structure: an infiltration of architecture into geology. We are not yet close enough to squint, and radar is too long in the tooth for fine detail. But we are smart, and there are three of us, widely separated in space. The wavelengths of three radar sources can be calibrated to interfere at some predetermined point of convergence—and those tripartite echoes, hologramatically remixed, will increase resolution by a factor of twenty-seven.

Burns-Caulfield stops singing the moment we put our plan into action. In the next instant I go blind.

It's a temporary aberration, a reflexive amping of filters to compensate for the overload. My arrays are back online in seconds, diagnostics green within and without. I reach out to the others, confirm identical experiences, identical recoveries. We are all still fully functional, unless the sudden increase in ambient ion density is some kind of sensory artefact. We are ready to continue our investigation of Burns-Caulfield.

The only real problem is that Burns-Caulfield seems to have disappeared…

Theseus carried no regular crew—no navigators or engineers, no one to swab the decks, no meat wasted on tasks that machinery orders of mag smaller could perform orders of mag better. Let superfluous deckhands weigh down other ships, if the nonAscendent hordes needed to attach some pretense of usefulness to their lives. Let them infest vessels driven only by commercial priorities. The only reason we were here was because nobody had yet optimized software for First Contact. Bound past the edge of the solar system, already freighted with the fate of the world, Theseus wasted no mass on self-esteem.

So here we were, rehydrated and squeaky-clean: Isaac Szpindel, to study the aliens. The Gang of Four—Susan James and her secondary personae— to talk to them. Major Amanda Bates was here to fight, if necessary. And Jukka Sarasti to command us all, to move us like chess pieces on some multidimensional game board that only vampires could see.

He'd arrayed us around a conference table that warped gently through the Commons, keeping a discreet and constant distance from the curved deck beneath. The whole drum was furnished in Early Concave, tricked unwary and hung-over brains into thinking they were looking at the world through fisheye lenses. In deference to the creakiness of thenouveaux undead it spun at a mere fifth of a gee, but it was just warming up. We'd be at half-grav in six hours, stuck there for eighteen out of every twenty-four until the ship decided we were fully recovered. For the next few days, free-fall would be a rare and blesséd thing.

Light sculptures appeared on the tabletop. Sarasti could have fed the information directly to our inlays— the whole briefing could have gone through ConSensus, without the need to assemble physically in the same place— but if you want to be sure everyone's paying attention, you bring them together.

Szpindel leaned in conspiratorially at my side. "Or maybe the bloodsucker just gets off seeing all this meat in close quarters, eh?"

If Sarasti heard he didn't show it, not even to me. He pointed to a dark heart at the center of the display, his eyes lost behind black glass. "Oasa object. Infrared emitter, methane class."

On the display it was—nothing. Our apparent destination was a black disk, a round absence of stars. In real life it weighed in at over ten Jupiters and measured twenty percent wider at the belly. It was directly in our path: too small to burn, too remote for the reflection of distant sunlight, too heavy for a gas giant, too light for a brown dwarf.

"When did that show up?" Bates squeezed her rubber ball in one hand, the knuckles whitening.

"X-ray spike appears during the 76 microwave survey." Six years before Firefall. "Never confirmed, never reacquired. Like a torsion flare from an L-class dwarf, but we should see anything big enough to generate that kind of effect and the sky's dark on that bearing. IAU calls it a statistical artefact."

Szpindel's eyebrows drew together like courting caterpillers. "What changed?"

Sarasti smiled faintly, keeping his mouth closed. "The metabase gets—crowded, after Firefall. Everyone skittish, looking for clues. After Burns-Caulfield explodes—" He clicked at the back of his throat. "Turns out the spike might arise from a subdwarf object after all, if the magnetosphere's torqued enough."

Bates: "Torqued by what?"

"Don't know."

Layers of statistical inference piled up on the table while Sarasti sketched background: even with a solid bearing and half the world's attention, the object had hidden from all but the most intensive search. A thousand telescopic snapshots had been stacked one on another and squeezed through a dozen filters before something emerged from the static, just below the three-meter band and the threshold of certainty. For the longest time it hadn't even been real: just a probabilistic ghost until Theseus got close enough to collapse the waveform. A quantum particle, heavy as ten Jupiters.

Earthbound cartographers were calling it Big Ben. Theseus had barely passed Saturn's orbit when it showed up in the residuals. That discovery would have been moot for anyone else; no other ship caught en route could have packed enough fuel for anything but the long dejected loop back home. But Theseus thin, infinitely attenuate fuel line reached all the way back to the sun; she could turn on the proverbial dime. We'd changed course in our sleep and the Icarus stream tracked our moves like a cat after prey, feeding us at lightspeed.

And here we were.

"Talk about long shots," Szpindel grumbled.

Across the table, Bates flicked her wrist. Her ball sailed over my head; I heard it bounce off the deck (not the deck, something in me amended: handrail). "We're assuming the comet was a deliberate decoy, then."

Sarasti nodded. The ball riccocheted back into my line of sight high overhead and disappeared briefly behind the spinal bundle, looping through some eccentric, counterintuitive parabola in the drum's feeble grav.

"So they want to be left alone."

Sarasti steepled his fingers and turned his face in her direction. "That your recommendation?"

She wished it was. "No, sir. I'm just saying that Burns-Caulfield took a lot of resources and effort to set up. Whoever built it obviously values their anonymity and has the technology to protect it."

The ball bounced one last time and wobbled back towards the Commons. Bates half-hopped from her seat (she floated briefly), barely catching it on its way past. There remained a new-born-animal awkwardness to her movements, half Coriolis, half residual rigor. Still: a big improvement in four hours. The rest of the Humans were barely past the walking stage.

"Maybe it wasn't much trouble for them at all, eh?" Szpindel was musing. "Maybe it was dead easy."

"In which case they might or might not be as xenophobic, but they're even more advanced. We don't want to rush into this."

Sarasti turned back to the simmering graphics. "So?"

Bates kneaded the recovered ball with her fingertips. "The second mouse gets the cheese. We may have blown our top-of-the-line recon in the Kuiper, but we don't have to go in blind. Send in our own drones along separate vectors. Hold off on a close approach until we at least know whether we're dealing with friendlies or hostiles."

James shook her head. "If they were hostile, they could have packed the Fireflies with antimatter. Or sent one big object instead of sixty thousand little ones, let the impact take us out."