“Perhaps it is enough to say that this has to be my last voyage as a Starflight commander, and I want this year in full.”

O’Hagan looked pained, but he held his ground doggedly. “I’m sure I’m speaking for all the other section heads when I say that we feel the utmost personal loyalty to Captain Garamond, and that our feelings aren’t affected by the circumstances surrounding the start of this voyage. Had it turned out to be a normal, uneventful mission I, for one, wouldn’t have considered questioning its legality — but the fact remains that we have made the most important discovery since Terranova and Sagania, and I feel it should be reported to Earth without delay.”

“I disagree,” Napier said coldly. “Starflight House didn’t direct the Bissendorf to this point in space. The sphere was discovered because Captain Garamond acted independently to check out a personally-held theory. We’ll hand it over to Starflight, as a bonus they didn’t earn, at the end of the mission’s scheduled span of one year.”

O’Hagan gave a humourless smile. “I still feel…”

Napier jumped to his feet. “What do you mean when you say you feel, Mister O’Hagan? Don’t you think with your brain like the rest of us? Does the fact that you feel these things turn them into something for which you have no personal responsibility?”

“That’s enough,” Garamond said.

“I just want O’Hagan to stand over his words.”

“I said…”

“Gentlemen, I withdraw my remarks,” O’Hagan interrupted, staring fixedly at his notepad. “It wasn’t my intention to divert the discussion away from the main topic. Now, we seem agreed that the sphere is of artificial origin — so what is its purpose?” He raised his eyes and scanned the assembled officers.

There was a lengthy silence.

“Defence?” Denise Serra’s round face mirrored her doubts. “Is there a planet inside?”

“There might be a planet on the far side of the sun which hasn’t shown up much on our gravitic readings.” Yamoto said. “But if we had the technology to produce that sphere, could there be an enemy so powerful that we would have to cower behind a shield?”

“Supposing it was a case of ‘Stop the galaxy, I want to get off’? Maybe the builders were pacifists and felt the need to hide. They made a pretty good job of concealing a star.”

“I hope that isn’t the answer,” Yamoto said gloomily. “If they needed to hide…”

“This is getting too speculative,” Garamond put in. “The immediate practical question is, does it have an entrance? Can we get inside? Let’s have your thoughts on that.”

Yamoto stroked his wispy beard. “If there is an entrance, it ought to be on the equator so that ships could hold their positions over it just by going into a parking orbit the way we did.”

“So you suggest doing a circuit of the sphere in the equatorial plane?”

“Yes — in the opposite direction to its rotation. That way we would get the advantage of its seventy thousand kilometres an hour equatorial rotation and cut down on our own G-forces.”

“That’s decided then,” Garamond said. “We’ll turn around as soon as Kraemer and his team are on board. I hope we’ll recognize an entrance if we find one.”

Three duty periods later he was asleep beside Aileen when his personal communicator buzzed him into wakefulness.

“Garamond here,” he said quietly, trying not to disturb his wife.

“Sorry to disturb you, Vance,” Napier said, “but I think we’re going to reach an entrance to the sphere in a couple of hours from now.”

“What?” Garamond sat upright, aware of deceleration forces. ”How could you tell?“

“Well, we can’t be certain, but it’s the most likely explanation for the echoes we’re picking up on the long-range radar.”

“What sort of echoes?”

“A lot of them, Vance. There’s a fleet of about three thousand ships in parking orbit, dead ahead of us.”

six

The ships were invisible to the naked eye, yet on the detector screens on board the Bissendorf they appeared as a glowing swarm, numerous as stars in a dense cluster. High-resolution radar, aided by other forms of sensory apparatus, revealed them to be of many different sizes and shapes, a vast and variegated armada poised above one point on the enigmatic sphere.

“You could have told me they weren’t Starflight ships,” Garamond said, easing himself into his seat in central control, his eyes fixed on the forward screens.

“Sorry, Vance — it didn’t occur to me.” Napier handed Garamond a bulb of hot coffee. “As soon as I saw the lack of standard formations I knew they couldn’t be Starflight vessels. The silhouettes and estimated masses produced by the computers confirmed it — none of the ships in that bunch can be identified by type.”

Second Officer Gunther gave a quiet laugh. “That was a pretty nervy moment up here.”

Garamond smiled in sympathy. “I guess it was.”

“Then we realized we were looking at a collection of hulks.”

“You’re positive?”

“There’s no radiation of any kind. Those are dead ships, and they’ve been that way for a long time.” Napier shook his head. “This is turning out to be one hell of a trip, Vance. First there was the sphere itself, and now… We always wondered why no Saganian starships had ever been found.”

One hell of a trip, Garamond repeated to himself, his mind trying to deal with the magnitude of the new discovery and at the same time cope with the shocking and unexpected presence of something akin to hope. He had fled from the Earth as an obscure flickerwing commander, but now had the prospect of returning as the most celebrated explorer since Laker had founded Terranova and Molyneaux had found Sagania. It was bound to make things more difficult for Elizabeth. In practice she was outside the law, but even for the President of Starflight Incorporated there were limits to how far she could go in full view of the mass television audience — and Garamond was going to be a public figure. A rigged trial, with witnesses primed to swear Harald’s death had been the result of wilful action, would destroy Garamond. It would, however, focus the world’s attention on him even more firmly and help deny Elizabeth the personal revenge she had never been known to forgo. If he and his family were to die it would probably have to appear accidental. And even the most carefully planned accidents could be prevented, if not indefinitely, at least for a reasonable length of time. The future still looked dangerous, but its uncompromising blackness had been alleviated to some extent.

Maintaining its height above the surface of the sphere, the Bissendorf — which had been closing with the immense fleet at a combined speed of almost two hundred thousand kilometres an hour — swung out of the equatorial plane. It described a wide semicircle around the ships and approached them from the opposite direction, carefully matching velocities until it shared approximately the same parking orbit. In the latter stages of the manoeuvre, telescopic observations by Chief Astronomer Yamoto revealed that several of the vessels at the centre of the swarm were shining by reflected light. He deduced that there was a beam of sunlight being emitted from an aperture in the surface of the sphere, and reported to Garamond accordingly. Shortly afterwards the aperture revealed itself in the telescopes as a thin line of faint light which gradually opened to a narrow ellipse as the Bissendorf crept closer.

The big ship’s central command gallery took on a crowded appearance as officers who were not on duty found reasons to stay near the curving array of consoles. They were waiting for the first transmissions from the surveillance torpedo which had been dispatched towards the spaceships illuminated by the column of light escaping from Pengelly’s Star. There was an atmosphere of tension which made everyone on board the Bissendorf aware of how uneventful all their previous wanderings in the galaxy had been.