Kappa Salvage

"It was a mystery as much discussed by school children as it was among researchers, scientists, and professors, much like the sunken city of Atlantis had been on Earth in centuries past."

For good reason, salvage as an enterprise was never much considered among the space-faring peoples of the early twenty-sixth century. With space so vast and human ships so few and still no signs of other advanced civilizations in that corner of the galaxy, searching for sunken space treasure seemed a fool’s errand. And it would have continued to be if not for a chance encounter on Kappa-363-B, where a party of surveyors happened upon a manufactured structure of complex technological design. It was so advanced as to baffle the engineers and archaeologists sent to examine the enormous object.

At first, the artifact was thought to be a terrestrial structure of some kind, because that’s where they’d found it, and because it was so massive—nearly a kilometer in circumference with solid metal walls a meter thick. After careful study, the scientists dispatched to examine the object determined that it was a segment of a space tower that had once stood on the planet, one of nearly a thousand segments buried in the sands of Kappa-363-B, a startling discovery, not just because it provided the first evidence for other advanced alien civilizations but also because the technology used to construct the segment was beyond the capability of the scientists to explain.

The metal alloy that made up the gigantic artifact’s structure was unknown and theoretically impossible to manufacture.  The only explanation was that these aliens were using some hyper-advanced kind of sub-atomic nanotechnology or printing at the nanoscale, a process that would, in theory, require greater energy input than human engineers could conceive of. The lead engineer’s report became famous for the phrase “star in a suitcase,” which was the analogy he used to describe the type of fuel cell that would be needed to manufacture the metal that made up the artifact’s colossal walls.

Needless to say, scientists and explorers alike were anxious to visit Kappa-363-B, some just to see the immense alien structure, others to study its properties. There was much speculation that other similar structures would certainly be found in the Kappa-363 system. How else could such an impressive space tower have been constructed if not with similar industrial-scale infrastructure? And such a space-faring race of aliens surely would have left similar artifacts in space, where perhaps even some organic trace of their civilization might have survived, absent the corrosive forces of the planet’s biosphere. Yet several decades passed with nothing further being uncovered, and though this was a surprise to many, others pointed to the age of the artifact—nearly three hundred million years—as an explanation for the absence of the aliens or any further physical evidence of them in the system.

It was a mystery as much discussed by school children as it was among researchers, scientists, and professors, much like the sunken city of Atlantis had been on Earth in centuries past. But after the professional-class explorers and astrophysicists scoured the Kappa-363 system without anything to show for their troubles, it was a mystery most thought would go unsolved.

Reid Oster, a twenty-one-year-old salvage pilot and his sixteen-year-old-sister Nia Oster, of course had both studied the Kappa Artifact in school, but it certainly wasn’t of much interest to them as anything more than a curious story. Reid had left school to work for his father as crew on one of the heavy deep-space salvage vehicles the family operated. Nia was far more interested in academics, specifically modeling and mathematics. She constructed virtual environments in her spare time and hoped to be a game designer one day.

By chance, Reid was aboard the Ganzeer when it was dispatched to recover an unmanned freighter that had drifted off course and had been floating in space for nearly thirty years undiscovered. A salvage like this one was a rare occurrence. Most of the family towing business’s calls were from ships with people aboard calling for help after a breakdown. The Osters would then crew the wrecker to pick them up and tow them back to port. In the rare cases large unmanned cargo shipments like this one vanished, it was usually more expensive to search and recover than to just write off the loss. It just so happened that this freighter drifted close to home and the Osters were contracted for the recovery. Reid was part of the team charged with locking the freighter into the Ganzeer’s rear towing platform, and something about this floating freighter struck him as odd. It was covered in a thin coat of dust, but only the metallic parts of the hull. He asked one of the older workers if they’d ever seen it before. The old-timer told Reid that it happens sometimes when there’s enough of a static charge in the hull to attract small particles that build up over the years.

Reid didn’t think about that trip with the Ganzeer until a few months later when the Oster family watched a documentary about the Kappa Artifact, which concluded, as the story usually did, with the fact that nothing else alien had ever been discovered in the Kappa system despite a thorough investigation. It suddenly dawned on Reid, “The asteroids. Those artifacts are hundreds of millions of years old. How long would it take for a deep-space structure to get so covered in dust that it started to look just like the asteroids?”

“You think they haven’t thought of that already?” Nia asked him. “All those scientists spend years exploring the system and you’re going to solve the mystery after watching one documentary, Reid? Really?”

“I bet that’s what it is.”

“There must be millions of asteroids in that system,” Nia said. “So, you’re suggesting somebody go dust them all off to see if there are alien structures underneath one of them?”

“When you put it like that, doesn’t it make more sense that everyone would miss it?”

Nia paused.

“There must be a way to narrow it down without having to actually dig,” Reid said. “Like maybe model how the dust might build up over time or something. And then you could just scan the shape of the asteroids looking for something irregular?”

“You’re crazy,” Nia said. “I think maybe you should go there and find out, Reid.”

“Prove me wrong, little sister,” Reid said. “If you’re so smart.”

Almost as a joke, but also as a way to prove to Reid how stupid he was, Nia used this theoretical problem as a case study in her modeling course over the following months. Her professor helped her to set parameters for accretion of space dust and particles over time. Then they figured out a way to reverse this process to reveal the previous shape of objects by removing acquired material. When Nia entered a time-frame, be it ten thousand or ten million years, the model would display a probable shape for the underlying asteroid at that age. When she dialed it back to the age of the Kappa Artifact—three hundred million years—and ran the model for all the asteroids in the system, to her astonishment, the model discovered five huge objects that were of regular proportions. They were each geometrically structured—clear lines, unmistakably unnatural.

Nia was almost tempted to keep the discovery to herself, rather than to have to tell Reid that he’d actually had a decent idea for once. Instead, she told Reid first. It was his idea after all. She wasn’t anticipating his reaction to the news.

“We have to go!” he said. “We should go check it out. Be the first people to set eyes on an alien ship.”

“Shouldn’t we tell somebody first?”

“And then what? You think they’d ever let us go see what’s under those rocks. No way. I say we go and claim ownership. Salvage laws apply to spacecraft. There’s no clause in the laws that says how old the ships have to be.”

“Is that true?” Nia asked.

When they researched the salvage laws for derelict spacecraft and equipment, the language was clear. If no living owner had placed a legal claim on a space-bound structure, it was free to be claimed. There was no existing alien clause.

“I can’t believe you want to go get an ancient alien spaceship?” Nia said. “This is insane.”

“You thought it was insane that there was something there in the first place. I say we go get one and then see what happens. What are you doing in the next few weeks that’s so important?”

Reid had saved some money working with the family business. He decided it would be a valuable investment to hire a sensor suite that asteroid miners used to survey for valuable minerals, and they attached it to the family’s cruiser. He also hired a small excavator, in case they found something worth investigating beneath the surface of the asteroids. The outfitters thought him a bit crazy to be renting gear to dig on an asteroid’s surface and none of the gear to collect and sort the materials excavated, but his credit was good, crazy or not. With gear in hand, brother and sister set off on an expedition to K-363.

After a long transit spent reading up on the scanning and excavating equipment, they were ready to explore the asteroids of K-363. On arrival to the system, their navigational computer was able to locate the closest of the five asteroids in question, and when they scanned it with the array, it showed a regular solid metal object with no cavities. Reid and Nia decided it was interesting but not worth investigating further until they looked at the others. They set their sights on the biggest object next.

The asteroid had been designated A54-3Z4X in the classification system. The asteroid remained unclaimed. Reid tagged the asteroid and registered the claim in his name as principle and their parents’ names in trust for Nia as second holder. Whatever the scan read, they would officially own whatever lay beneath the millions of years of accreted rock and dust on the surface of that ordinary-looking asteroid. When the scans came back, neither of them could believe what they saw.

Unlike the first object, which wasn’t much more than a regular, nondescript hunk of metal, the shape inside A54 showed a complex network of cavities within. The object was enveloped in an outer layer of rocks and dust, but beneath that layer, the asteroid was completely constituted by this mysterious deep-space artifact, which was a nearly fifteen-kilometer-long mass of intricately woven metal hallways and giant cavities within cavities. Reid and Nia scanned the entire object and decided to call it “Scepter,” because once the 3D imaging program had aggregated the lidar and neutrino particle data, Nia decided that the artifact resembled the scepter of an ancient king. They also identified several cavities at regular intervals along the outer walls that would be large enough to park a ship in—portage bays, presumably. That was where they decided to excavate, at one of the portage bays about halfway down the scepter, where the depth of the space dust wasn’t quite as deep as the other cavities.

Three hundred million years of space debris, in this case, translated to roughly seven meters of dust and small rocks. The cavities they’d scanned appeared to be more like craters than a docking bay. From the outside, it looked like they might even be able to land down inside the crater, but Reid thought it better to set down on the surface outside in case the structure under the rocks and dust was unstable. They did, however, scan the opening more closely to see if they could identify a door to the inside. Then they sent in the excavator to begin clearing a pathway to the corner of the bay where there was an anomaly in the wall that indicated the presence of a circular sliding door.

To their shock, when the excavator began churning up dust and spitting it away from the doorway in the corner, a light appeared above the excavator, illuminating the corner and the metal deck plating the excavator was shoveling clear.

“Power,” Nia said. “Millions of years abandoned and there’s power still?”

“These Scepter people must have had good batteries,” Reid said.

“Or, there’s a power source still running inside. Remember? Sun in a suitcase? One of those might be in here.”

Their scans didn’t show any readings like that, but there was a dark area at the head of the scepter where the only thing the scans returned was an unknown void—a very large area.

“So, what do we do?” Nia said.

“What do you mean, what do we do?” Reid said.

“I mean, we found it. We claimed it. It’s definitely a piece of alien technology. Should we tell someone about it?”

“I want to go inside, are you kidding? We could be the first to step foot on an alien ship.”

“You could be the first. There’s no way I’m going inside that thing. There’s three hundred million years of creepy dead alien possibilities behind that door, Reid,” Nia said. “Nuh-uh. Not me. I have no desire to be in a horror show.”

Reid shrugged. “If that’s how I go out, little sister, I’m good with it.”

“You have no idea what’s in there.”

“If I find the sun in a suitcase, I promise I won’t open it.”

Reid switched on his helmet and charged his oxygen and floated his way to the airlock, where he put on his gloves, shoes, and belt. Then he activated his clothing. His shirt stiffened up, and the nano-sheet expanded from his collar to surround his head in a halo of atmosphere. The rest of his clothes inflated, and his viewscreen displayed a readout of the mapped-out area of the landing bay, as well as a video feed of Nia in the cruiser’s bridge.

“Keep the engine warm, sis,” he said. “If I wake up these Scepter people we may need to get out of here fast.”

“Ha, ha,” Nia said. “Like there’s anywhere we could run from these people.”

Nia pulled up Reid’s feed and displayed it on the ship’s window so she could watch what Reid saw as he explored.

Reid guided himself to the doorway, directing his flight path with the pulses from his gloves and boots. The light they’d seen from the ship appeared to be emanating not from any bulb or node but directly from the metal hull above the doorway.

“That’s some trick,” Reid said.

Nia leaned closer to the screen, puzzled. Reid looked up at it for a moment and then at the door, looking for a way to signal for it to open—a sensor, a touchpad, or even something as basic as a hatch or handle. Then he had what he thought was a crazy idea, he simply visualized the door opening. Suddenly, the dust on the deck plating jumped, puffing up into a cloud beneath his floating body.

“What did you do?” Nia said.

“I thought it open.”

“You thought it open?”

“I don’t know how, little sister, but I did. They must’ve had brains like ours.”

“Or something else, like a heat scanner or a motion detector.”

“I swear, Nia, I thought it open,” he said. “Anyway, here goes.”

He pointed his palms backwards and pulsed himself inside slowly. Once inside, Reid noticed that the corridor was tubular, matching the outer door, which seemed odd to both the siblings, and they discussed what that might have indicated about the aliens who’d built the structure. It was also dimly lit, but lights were going on as Reid directed himself down the tunnel with no sense of a destination. A short way into the passage, behind another thought-activated inner door, Reid came to a narrow space that extended to his left, right, and up along what seemed to Reid like the inner hull of the structure. He instructed his suit to light up the wall, and as he did, he saw that this gap between the outer hull and inner structure went further than his vision could track it in the darkness. He couldn’t find any architectural connection between the outer hull and the curved structure seemingly floating just inside it. Even though he knew that the inner structure was floating in space, he still felt oddly vulnerable about attempting to fly up into that space to explore, almost as though some unknown force could bring the whole wall toward him, squishing him between the two gigantic walls like a bug. He quickly located the closest circular doorway and again very deliberately visualized it sliding open so he could fly in.

Once inside, the door slid shut behind him. Reid was shocked by a sudden rush of air, as the room, which he realized now was an outer airlock, became pressurized.

“Don’t open your helmet, Reid,” Nia said. “You don’t know what type of atmosphere they breathed.”

“What kind of idiot do you think I am?” Reid said, displaying a readout of the air on his nanosheet helmet.

“A Reid-shaped one,” Nia said, “the kind of big dumb idiot who would go wandering off in an alien spaceship all by himself.”

“Funny, funny.”

“Is it breathable?”

“Not even close. Ha! It’s like half carbon monoxide. A surprising amount of helium. What kind of aliens breathed this?”

“Keep going. Maybe you’ll get a chance to ask them.”

“Or find some fossilized skeletons,” Reid said.

He kept his nano-sheet projecting over his head as he progressed, floating down another tubular corridor where he found another doorway that he opened with his mind. On the other side of the doorway, the space opened to a cavernous room, and as the door shut behind him, lights slowly began to come on, illuminating what he now understood to be a gigantic cylinder, which he could see was beginning to rotate underneath him.

“That’s interesting,” he said, and he flew back toward the wall, grabbing hold and catching a ride as the spin gravity slowly began to amp up. “Now that outer shell makes sense. Probably some kind of magnetic drive to the inner drum.”

Nia listened as Reid narrated through the sensations of the gravitational forces picking up. She was thinking about the physics of it, mostly that if he’d simply hovered in place above the wall, Reid would still be floating inside the cylinder and could have simply stayed in place and observed the circumference of the cylinder as it spun past him without moving anywhere. But he was committed now.

“It’s getting heavy,” he said. “I didn’t really think about it, but these aliens could be from a much bigger world.”

“Can you get off the wall?”

“Not at this point,” Reid said. “Ooh. It’s getting rough.”

He adjusted his clothes to flight suit mode, squeezing his extremities to push the blood back into his torso. And he adjusted the rigidity to offer support, but even as his clothing came up to exoskeleton levels, he began to feel lightheaded like he might fall. They’d been at zero Gs for almost two weeks and he was not conditioned for this. He was starting to get woozy.

“Think it down,” Nia said. “Maybe it’s like the doors, Reid. Think it slower.”

It took him a few seconds to realize what Nia was trying to say. It was very hard to focus. All he wanted to do was focus on the feeling in his gut—the blood rushing out of him.

“Don’t go over,” Nia said.

Reid focused on the drum, visualizing both sides of the exterior walls, slowly decelerating. He pushed air steadily into his lungs and closed his eyes. He thought he could feel the weight diminish. Reid continued to focus, and after a few more seconds, he was sure the spin was slowing down.

“Reid?” Nia said. “Reid, are you all right?”

“It’s working,” he said. “I can’t believe it, but it’s working. Psychic computing maybe? That is wild.”

Nia began to wonder how such a thing would even be possible. Ultra-precise electrical sensors picking up on firing neurons, some type of supercomputer interpreting those signals, maybe. But the thought that a system could translate what those firing patterns would mean literally minutes after first contact with a human brain? That was a type of computing firepower she couldn’t quite fathom.

As the gravity slowed down to a comfortable level, Reid began to walk around the interior. He expected there to be a similar accretion of dust or other organic matter in the interior of the drum, but it didn’t seem to be so. The floor was almost entirely metal plating, and as he walked toward the inner structure, it looked like a jagged network of industrial cells all cobbled together by pipes and beams. It took him nearly fifteen minutes to make it from the open drum area to this collection of industrial cells. Without an understanding of who these aliens were, it was impossible for him to get a sense for the purpose all these cells served.

“Could be they lived in there,” Nia said.

“Or maybe they never sleep and they don’t live anywhere but in the open. Could be they grew their food in here.”

“Or maybe they didn’t eat food and got their energy from the sun in the suitcase, wherever that is.”

“My credit,” Reid said, “is on the dark spot on the scanner—the head of the scepter.”

“I’m not sure if my video feed has similar resolution to what you’re seeing, Reid, but have you noticed any markings, any language? On the walls? The Walkways?”

“No, I haven’t. It’s strange. In fact, nothing technological as we’d think of it. Maybe it’s all in the metal, like the light.”

Reid continued to walk in the direction of the scepter’s head, that dark spot on their sensor readings.

“You know, you could probably get there faster if you shut off the gravity and flew down there,” Nia said.

“It actually feels good to walk,” Reid said, “a nice change after two weeks on the cruiser.”

“It’s going to take at least an hour to get down there.”

“Nia, they’ve been dead for three hundred million years now. It’s not like there’s any urgency here.”

“For them. Clock’s ticking on you.”

“I’ve got at least sixteen hours.”

Reid pulled up his ambient air reading on his nanosheet’s display, noting the efficiency of oxygen exchange in his bloodstream. The bots in his blood could keep him perfusing the volume he had for at least another fifteen hours.

“No urgency,” he repeated. “Unless the first ever live stream of an alien space habitat is boring you, little sister.”

She pretended to snore. “Hurry up and get to the good part, will you?”

 It took Reid a little over an hour to make his way to the head of the scepter. He was certain that whatever secrets these scepter people were keeping would be there. Yet, as he approached the area, all he saw was a solid metal wall, seemingly the end of the drum. Nia tried scanning it again from the outside, but all she got back was a collection of garbled feedback the computers couldn’t make any sense of.

“So, dead end?” she said. “Maybe we should call it a win and then call in some experts?”

“What experts? There’s somebody out there who has any idea about alien technology?”

“I meant the archaeologists on the planet. Maybe we could call the team from the documentary?”

“I’m not giving up on this yet,” Reid said, continuing to walk along the circumference of the spinning drum, feeling along the smooth surface of the metal wall, trying to detect any inconsistencies.

“I have the sense there’s more here, something about this wall. I need to get up there.”

Reid stopped and visualized the drum. He focused clearly, directing the structure to stop spinning, and as it slowed, he began to float. Then as he began to fly around the gigantic round wall, he realized that if he spun the drum again, he could float there in front of it and inspect every inch of it in a systematic way by letting it circle around in front of him. He had his suit mark an origin, and as that mark came around each time, he crept closer toward the center of the drum, inching toward the midpoint just below the head of the scepter.

“Nothing?” Nia said.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Reid said. “I know something’s here.”

The last thing Nia saw was a flash of light and then a pall of darkness, as though a hole in the wall simply opened up like a giant maw and swallowed Reid whole.

“Wha—” was the only thing she heard. Then his stream went dark.

Nia knew right away it wasn’t a practical joke. Reid wasn’t playing another one of his stupid pranks on her. He’d vanished into the darkness, gobbled up by the wall of that alien habitat, and no matter how frantically or how many times she shouted onto his channel, there was no reply. Nia had no idea what to do.

She tried to slow herself down and think. There wasn’t exactly a playbook for anything like this. Growing up in the Oster family, she’d had enough experience in space that she had a few moves she could attempt. The first was to send a drone, but the outer door wouldn’t open no matter how much she tried to think it open from the front seat of the cruiser. She kept telling herself to relax, that he’d find a way back any moment.

Almost two hours passed after Reid’s disappearance before Nia suited up and went in after him. There were three remote drones in the cruiser, and she brought them all with her.

She paused at the outer door, shut her eyes, and waited. She still didn’t quite believe that it worked the way Reid had said. She counted to five and then visualized the door sliding open. And the second she thought it, the door slid open.

When it worked as he’d said, she was overcome with a sudden feeling of doubt and confusion. Why would these aliens open the door for Reid and then hurt him? It didn’t make any sense.

When she got to the interior doorway, she opened it only to see the drum containing the interior of the habitat spinning at a frightening speed. She realized that if she floated into that space between the outer and the inner walls she would likely be struck and then battered between the two walls until there was nothing left of her.

Nia tried to think the drum to a stop. It didn’t work. She stared at the spinning surface focusing so hard she thought she might split a blood vessel in her eyes. Yet it seemed to do nothing.

She floated there, holding the outer doorway with one hand and a foot, anchoring herself just in front of the rotating drum. She fired up one of the drones, hoping to see if it could find an open door as the drum flew past. She thought she might be able to sneak a drone inside if she got the timing right, but after about a half hour of trying to locate a door without much luck, she realized that route was hopeless. Nia opted to fly the drones along the length of the drum, hoping she could get a look at what was behind the wall Reid had disappeared into.

It took about an hour of careful negotiation and slow progression, manipulating the controls by eye movements from her nanosheet display. When the drones got to the end of the drum, there was no opening on the top of the drum to fly them down, just a solid metal wall that seemed to be flush with the spinning drum, another seemingly impossible technological miracle—a wall that both was and wasn’t a part of the drum spinning around it.

Nia had no idea what to do, so she returned to the cruiser and called for Reid on comms every five minutes, hoping that somehow, he might come back. And she started a countdown. Fifteen hours. That was all the time Reid had before he would suffocate.

Nia didn’t know what to think with each passing hour. She had a belief, perhaps only from hope, that Reid would pop up again. But as the hours passed, she grew more and more desperate, and by the time the final hour began to count down, she was despondent. She couldn’t imagine her life going on without Reid in it, her big stupid brother she loved so much. All his crazy ideas.

Over the course of that hour, she did get a call, but it wasn’t from Reid as she’d been hoping. The researchers from Kappa-363-B were finally answering the distress call she’d put out to them in hour ten. They established a link with her, and though there was a lag of several minutes on the channel, they managed to have a conversation, a conversation the researchers categorized as “rather unbelievable.” They thought they were being pranked, and Nia’s tears only seemed to make them more suspicious of the situation. Even when they viewed clips of Nia’s footage, the predominant viewpoint was that it was a cleverly crafted fake. Nia suspected it was the prospect of the alien vessel more than the story of her missing brother that prompted them to mobilize a rescue.

By the time they finally arrived, Reid had been dead for approximately fourteen hours by Nia’s calculations. The researchers were astonished, both by the significance of the find and also the unlikely identities of the team of explorers who had uncovered the alien vessel—a teenager and her older brother who worked for the family towing business.

“How did you manage to find this ship?” Exsa, the youngest and most compassionate of the researchers, asked Nia.

“It was his dumb idea,” Nia stated. “He always had so many crazy ideas.”

Exsa sat with Nia in the cruiser while her colleagues tried fruitlessly to get inside somehow. Their wide-eyed focus was so fully drawn to the discovery that they all but ignored Nia’s grief. It was almost as though she wasn’t there.

They spent a long day on the asteroid trying everything they could think of to get past the spinning drum and into the habitat. But reflecting on frustration after frustration, the researchers called an end to their efforts in the early evening.

“We can only hope that eventually it stops spinning and we can get in there.”

But there were complications now, they realized. Nia’s parents were now the holders of the claim to the salvage of this monumentally important discovery, and technically, with Reid dead inside, they couldn’t explore the alien habitat without their permission, and Nia had yet to make the call to her parents, which meant it might take weeks before the researchers could even ask permission to go inside. The circumstances were messy.

The research team decided to sleep on the situation on their cruiser while Exsa stayed with Nia. She promised to help Nia break the news to her parents in the morning. That discussion about the way forward was really the first time the researchers slowed down enough to realize that alongside the most important discovery of their lifetimes, the girl who’d made it was undergoing the greatest tragedy of hers.

The following day, after Exsa helped Nia transmit her message home, the researchers offered to take Nia back to Kappa-363-B where she could await the arrival of her parents. They’d reserved a hotel room for her on the planet. There were several resorts on Kappa that catered to tourists who came to see that first segment of alien space tower still half-buried in the desert sands. Everyone agreed it was a better place for her to wait. Exsa remained aboard Nia’s cruiser so she didn’t have to make the trip alone.

“I almost don’t want to leave him,” Nia said as they finished prep for takeoff. “I still feel like he’s in there.”

“Eventually, it’ll stop spinning and we can go inside,” Exsa said. “We’ll find a way to bring Reid home.”

Still, Nia didn’t want to take off. She sat at the controls soaking in the reality that as soon as she left that asteroid, she was leaving for a life without Reid, her big brother. It was surreal.

“Take as much time as you need,” Exsa said. “I’ll sit here with you all day if you’re not ready.”

Nia took a deep breath and slowly pulled the ship off the asteroid’s surface, kicking up a plume of gray dust. She guided the cruiser around that alien asteroid, following in the wake of the researchers’ vessel, shadowing their course to Kappa-363-B. Once Nia cleared the edge of the asteroid, both ships began to accelerate. Nia had a terrible feeling in her stomach, a sense that she was leaving him there, but she convinced herself that it was normal. That’s just what it feels like when a loved one dies.

“Little sister, you’re not going to believe it,” Reid’s voice came over the comms channel.

The transmission came through patchy, but it was unmistakable. It was him.

“Reid?”

“Who else?” he said. “It’s the craziest thing.”

“You’re alive. How are you alive?”

“What do you mean, how am I alive? I didn’t die, that’s how. What’s going on out there?”

Nia turned the ship around as Exsa looked over at her in disbelief.

“I saw them,” Reid said. “I mean I think I saw them. I was in their star chamber or whatever it was. Like nothing I’ve ever seen. I think I might have seen the inside of a black hole. I’m not sure.”

“How are you still breathing, Reid?” Nia said.

“Deeply and easily? No trouble on my end,” he said, sensing that Nia was in some kind of emotional distress. “What’s going on, Nia?”

“You come back outside immediately,” she said. “I need you.”

Exsa reached over and took Nia’s hand. “Sounds like it’s going to be okay. Do you want me to fly?”

Nia nodded.

Reid returned to the ship, shocked to find another passenger aboard and a second vessel parked beside them. In addition to the stream he’d transmitted on the way in and out, he’d recorded only seventeen additional minutes from the moment he’d entered the head of the scepter, which the researchers all surmised was the power source to the habitat.

“A black hole,” the lead researcher declared. “It has to be. That’s the only thing that could have caused that kind of time dilation. They must have learned how to manipulate black holes.”

“There’s your sun in a suitcase,” Reid said. “But I wouldn’t hold your breath getting your hands on one anytime soon.”

“Young man,” the head professor said, “the claim you two have made—”

“You don’t understand,” Reid said. “You can’t claim what someone already owns, and they’re still in there. I connected with them. They used to be like us a long time ago, biological beings. They used to live inside that drum and on the planet and in the stars. Now, professor, they’re still inside, living off the energy within that scepter, whatever it is—black hole, dark star, antimatter. I could sense them, you know, kinda like how the doors knew when I wanted them to open. For them it must seem like they’ve been in there for trillions of years. I get it now, with the time dilation.”

“They’re still alive in there?” Nia said.

“Galaxies and galaxies, more worlds than you could ever possibly imagine, running forever, little sister. Trillions and trillions of beings are all alive inside that scepter, playing out their entire existences. Probably most of them are blissfully unaware of who and what they are, their whole entire universe slowed down to a fraction of the speed of entropy, a living artifact within the Scepter’s walls.”