John Sandford - Saturn Run

“In other words, we don’t have one alien object, we got a whole bunch of them,” Fang-Castro said.

“Even more than we’ve been talking about,” Kapule said. A new view came up, one that seemed sprinkled with salt. A group of thin red rings popped up, surrounding each white grain. “We’re seeing hundreds, and maybe thousands, of pixel-sized glitters of light that move between the primary and its moonlets and out into the rings and back again. Whatever they are, they’re always moving, like a swarm of bees around a hive… not to suggest anything invidious here.”

“What are the patterns?” Fang-Castro asked. “Is that a defense system?”

“Yes, we have an analysis,” said Don Larson, the mathematician and former founder of the orgy club. “To go back to the bee metaphor, it’s more like they’re gathering honey and bringing it back to the nest, rather than performing any kind of defensive maneuvers. They’re not particularly fast… fast enough, but not way fast… and their actions are deliberate, rather than random. Even if not designed for defense, they could certainly be used that way. To see them at this distance must mean that they are some meters in diameter. If they are metallic, and if enough of them hit the Nixon as quickly as they are moving now, they could tear us apart. It’d be like being hit by cars driving at highway speeds. In other words, they seem to be gathering honey, whatever that is, but like honeybees, they could bring out the stingers.”

Fang-Castro shook her head. She wanted none of that. The Nixon was not an armored warship.

Over the next several days, the steady minuscule thrust of the Nixon ’s engines gradually warped its orbit, changing its inclination until the Nixon was orbiting within the Maxwell Gap in the plane of the rings. Simultaneously, they crept up on the alien constellation. Navigation and the surveillance people fed a steady stream of vid to the computers, where image analysis software tracked the motion of each of the bees. Sophisticated statistical modeling looked for any changes in the pattern of their collective motions, any indication that they were responding in any fashion to the approaching spaceship.

From Earth, they got a steady stream of essentially useless speculation about the nature of the constellation: the scientists on the Nixon saw everything hours before the earthbound analysts, and by the time their speculations got back to the ship, it had all been thought of.

Fang-Castro said to Crow, quietly, “David, the politicians and the military seem strangely quiet.”

“By design, I think,” Crow said. “Almost anything they say, the Chinese would pick up, one way or another. Not the encrypted stuff, but just chatter in the hallways. Which tends to be fairly accurate, if you’re in the right hallway.”

None of the analysis picked up changes in the behavior of the alien artifacts. The bees appeared to be as oblivious to the presence of humanity in the solar system as the starship had been two years earlier. Still, the Nixon held back, stabilizing its position at three hundred kilometers from the constellation. This was plenty close for the Nixon ’s best telescopes—they could see ten-centimeter details on the alien facilities and the bees.

And they launched two recon shells, basically small, slow rockets equipped with cameras and designed to be extremely visible to radar and even visual detection, the better to signal peaceful intentions. The recon shells did a complete loop around the station, broadcasting a three-hundred-sixty-degree view of it.

They watched for a day. The nature of most of the bees became apparent, although the ultimate purpose of their activities was still mysterious. Most were ice-catchers. They hunted for ring debris. Some of them looked for chunks of ice comparable to their own size, latched onto them with grapples, and hauled them back to one of several moonlets. Others had large scoops and swept up ice gravel and sand, the way a whale scooped up plankton. This was also ferried to the moonlets. Another much smaller group of bees shuttled containers of some kind between the moonlets.

None of the bees seemed to be equipped with armaments, not even so much as a cutting laser. The same seemed to be true of the moonlets and the five-kilometer primary. The surfaces were mostly natural rock, porous regolith dotted with various alien assemblages that were mostly unrecognizable. A few were clearly antennae of some kind or another; none looked anything like a beamed energy or projectile weapon. The constellation seemed to be entirely unarmed.

The primary rotated slowly with a period of four hours, further evidence of its artificial nature. A natural moon this close to Saturn would’ve been tidally locked, just as Earth’s moon was to its parent planet.

At Fang-Castro’s command, the Nixon moved closer, then paused again. During the primary’s second rotation, after the move, the Nixon ’s computers spat out an anomalous delta.

A previously jet-black spot on the surface of the primary had turned light gray. During the third rotation things began to get genuinely weird. The black spot was now bright white and surrounded by concentric rings in rainbow colors. When the polychrome target came over the horizon on the fourth cycle, it was glowing dimly.

As the primary’s rotation brought it around toward the Nixon , the glow brightened and coruscated until it could be seen with the naked eye through the windows of the Nixon , sparkling in the distance like a glass crystal spinning on a string and catching the sun.

The glow began to fade again after the target passed the median line until it was almost extinguished by the time the target had rotated past the horizon.

The fifth rotation repeated the light show of the fourth. The message was clear: “We know you’re here.”

Who or whatever “we” meant.

Naomi Fang-Castro took slow, shallow breaths and sipped her tea as her most senior crew members took their seats for the morning briefing, chatting with each other, making last-minute slate checks. Her face was calm, peaceful in its thoughtfulness.

That was entirely for show.

Aliens were no longer a distant, hypothetical consideration, not with Nixon parked next door to the primary. When everybody was settled, she put down her cup, and the chatter ended; the crew had learned early on that this was the signal that the meeting was about to begin.

“We’re skipping the usual status reports,” Fang-Castro said. “Have them recorded before dinnertime. I assume everything is nominal. Our sole business this morning is to decide on our next move. John, what’s your take on what we know?”

Clover put down his triple-strength espresso, put his fingertips together, and said, “They’re inviting us over for coffee and Danish.”

“This is being recorded, John, so…”

“I’m somewhat serious. Look at their behavior… and lack of it. They take no apparent notice of us until we settle into our position. They keep doing business as usual. There’s no evidence of weaponry or hostility. The colored lights are not in any apparent way a warning. We don’t know what those colors mean in their culture, obviously—white is for mourning in Korea, black is for mourning in the West—but it seems likely that given the colors they’ve chosen, which they probably know are attractive to us, they’re inviting us in, rather than warning us away.”

“Where does that conclusion come from?” asked Martinez. “That those colors are attractive?”

“Our astronomers have done an analysis of the colors, and they are quite pure, they are very specific wavelengths—there’s nothing in the UV or IR ranges, as though they were spattering us with everything. That suggests that they know what wavelengths we see, and that… give me a little rope here… suggests that they may very well know which ones we like,” Clover said. “So we show up, but we do nothing. Eventually, they take the initiative. They set up a pretty little light show, designed to catch our eye, and just in case we’re really thick, it shines brightest when it’s pointed directly at us. Then they sit back and wait. How could that not be taken as an invitation?”