But Salma had heard mutterings among the others that they had heard, via Conserver Outpost monitors, that Earth might in fact be assembling just such a battleship.

  ‘And besides, we don’t know what we’re dealing with here; how could we know what to send that’s better equipped than us?’ Boyd shrugged. ‘I think we need information above everything else. Caution be damned.’ He added ruefully, ‘If I were a few decades younger I would go down myself.’

  Hild folded her arms, one of her ways of signalling that the discussion was done. She got a moment of silent consent. ‘All right. Boyd – Meriel – do you think conditions down there are stable now, at least?’

  Boyd checked. ‘Stabilising anyhow. A neat one gravity, more or less, a toasty fifteen Celsius. No air. Our first impressions seem to have been correct. It is making us welcome, I think. Based, presumably, on guesses from what it saw of Earth. You’ll need pressure suits, but—’

  ‘I see nothing immediately lethal,’ Meriel said cautiously – perhaps reluctantly, Salma thought.

  ‘Agreed,’ Boyd said.

  Hild called, ‘Zaimu, how soon can the pod be prepped for the journey?’

  ‘Already done, Commander.’ Hild could hear the smile in his voice. ‘Had it ready, just in case we needed to move fast.’

  Salma could see Boyd grinning at that. Hild scowling.

  And Boyd said, ‘I’ve been a little forward too. I’ve continued to scan the surface. Most of it is featureless – save the stretched-out relic of the Hawking signal, but that’s nothing more than a bump in the surface temperature, with no visible component. You won’t even feel it.’

  ‘Damn it,’ Hild said. ‘Doesn’t anybody on this tub wait for my orders before doing what they feel like?’

  ‘You have an efficient crew,’ said Meriel, ‘with enthusiasm and initiative. I want to put on record my objection to this jaunt. But I wish you two luck.’

  Salma stared at Hild.

  Hild crumbled. ‘Oh, hell, go suit up. But I want Doctor Breen to check you over first, and your suits, before you set foot in that pod.’

  When Salma had gone, Hild floated over to Boyd and put a hand on his shoulder. He felt frail, his muscles oddly soft.

  ‘Just so you know. I know you’d have gone if I’d ordered it. Even though you’re out of condition. Meriel tells me you skip your zero-g calisthenics—’

  He shrugged. ‘So what? It’s a young person’s game now, down there. I wish I was down there. But I accept your decision.’

  She didn’t believe a word. But she hoped he felt better at being left behind.

  ‘Oh, this old man has found a landing site for them, by the way.’

  She bent to see his displays. ‘We can patch that into the pod’s navigation systems … What site, though? I thought you said it was featureless, save for the—’

  ‘Hawking relic radiation, yes. Until a few minutes back. Then one of our drones picked up this.’

  He dragged an image across his screen, expanding it with stiff swipes. And he pointed. Hild had to bend down again to see.

  It was a small blemish on an otherwise featureless plain. At first it looked like a rogue pixel, but as he expanded further – she imagined a drone buzzing ever lower towards the site – more pixels coalesced out of the smoothness, gathering into a symmetrical form – a cylinder, lying on the surface.

  ‘Maybe two metres long,’ Boyd said. ‘One wide. Seems to be regular. But it also seems to be the only significant inhomogeneity on the whole damn planet.’

  ‘Which isn’t a planet,’ Meriel called in from her station deep in the bowels of the craft. ‘I’m looking over your shoulder. What do you think that is? Any guesses?’

  Boyd shrugged. ‘Some kind of container. Cargo?’

  ‘And, Meriel? Your guess?’

  ‘That’s a cocoon. Or an egg.’

  10

  It took them a cautious six hours to set up the descent.

  Then they left.

  For Salma, sitting side by side with Zaimu Oshima in the cramped cabin of the pod, both sealed up in heavy-duty environment suits – there could be radiation threats, Meriel had warned them bleakly – the journey to the surface of the new expanded Nine was surreal.

  ‘It’s so smooth it’s like a training sim,’ Zaimu reported at one point during the descent. ‘And a stripped-down sim at that. Flat plain below, nothing but stars outside … We do see your lights, Shadow.’

  Looking back as they sailed away, Salma saw that the mother ship, with its gauzy sail and dim hull lights, was barely visible as a distortion of the stellar background. Its presence was a comfort even so.

  And in fact the ship wouldn’t stray far. Hild had ordered it placed in an orbit about a hundred thousand kilometres out from the planet’s centre, around five radii of the new planet. Here, the ship was in a synchronous orbit above the landing site – where the ‘cocoon’ on the surface was – so as to track the site as the planet turned through its thirty-hour day. There ready in case the explorers needed a fast escape.

  Meanwhile, Zaimu was guiding the little craft through its descent. ‘That smooth, geometric surface down below. Like a sim. You almost expect it to light up with marker lines to tell you your target landing vector …’

  Salma said, ‘A smooth surface, and that.’ Leaning forward so her face visor almost touched the pod’s window, she pointed down to the one blemish on that abstract surface: the pod, the ‘cocoon’ that Boyd had seen from the ship. The smart window, helpfully following her gaze, picked out the blemish, lit it up with guide lines. To rendezvous with the blemish, all Zaimu had to do was hold his course as specified – and Salma knew he could switch over to fully automatic with a word.

  About a hundred metres short of the blemish, Zaimu monitored the pod as the automatics took them down to a smooth landing. The thrusters, spewing out hydrogen propellant heated by the vehicle’s compact fission reactor, kicked up no dust, Salma saw, no debris – this anomaly was surely the smoothest large body in the Solar System, if such a strange object, so far out from the Sun, counted as being in the System at all.

  And as the lander descended further, Nine’s size, or its current size, became evident, with the curved horizon flattening out, featureless, an exercise in perspective, on a sphere far larger than the Earth.

  Salma barely felt the landing itself. Only a smooth, descending tone that told her the propulsion system was closing down.

  They sat still, shared a look, took a few breaths.

  And looked out at a flat, featureless landscape – featureless save for that one low mound-like form, the only bit of geography on this strange world. Beyond that, a sharp horizon. Was it visibly flatter than a similar scene on Earth itself? As if seen over an ocean, perhaps … But Salma, born aboard the Shadow, knew nothing of Earth save through simulations – and even Zaimu, an orphan, had been taken aboard the ship as a five-year-old child.

  Zaimu gently elbow-bumped her. ‘It’s your show, kid.’

  They didn’t debate the order. Salma was first to seal her pressure suit, first to the airlock, first to exit, first to climb down the short ladder.

  It was another experience evocative of endless training exercises, Salma thought, where you suited up, climbed in and out of mock-up airlocks, trying to ignore the pull of gravity. But here the gravity felt Earth-normal, as predicted, expected – even though Salma herself could only compare it to the simulated Earth-normal gravity of the tiny centrifuges aboard the Shadow.

  But this was real. Salma, first ever to set foot on Planet Nine.

  She stepped away from the lander, cautiously. The texture of the flat surface wasn’t quite smooth, it seemed; she felt a grip under her booted feet.

  Zaimu murmured, ‘Focus, Salma. Report.’

  ‘Right. I’m down. The gravity feels normal, Earth-normal. Or as normal as the centrifuges on the Shadow, I’m no expert … The surface feels – gritty. Rough. I can walk easily.’

  ‘And I’m recording this thrilling moment of history,’ Joe Normand, the comms guy, spoke dryly in her ear.

  Zaimu was brisker. ‘Let’s get this done.’

  Once Salma was out of the way, he jumped down the last few steps and onto the ground without ceremony. Then he made for the cargo pallet attached to the lander’s base. He pulled on a tab to release the pallet, which folded itself down to the ground, small wheels touching the flat surface of this odd not-world. The most significant piece of gear aboard the pallet was an airtight shelter, of fabric and cord. The rest was survival gear: emergency oxygen, medical stuff, radio packs, a little food, water.

  Once the pallet was down and assembled and had got its own orientation, it rolled smoothly and silently across the surface of Nine towards the blemish – as Salma kept calling the anomaly on the surface, in her head.

  As Salma and Zaimu followed, another small drone rolled across the surface behind them, capturing every movement – a wheeled, rocket-equipped drone prepared to go into emergency mode at any moment, on the ground or above, laden with cameras and first aid.

  ‘Speak to us,’ whispered Hild, in their ears.

  ‘Huh? Saying what?’ Salma snapped back as she walked.

  ‘It’s what explorers do when they achieve their goals. Be – historic.’

  Salma and Zaimu exchanged a look. Shrugged. Old-folk stuff.

  Salma said, ‘OK. Hello, Shadow. We’re fine, as you can see. The gravity feels Earth-normal – as our suit instruments tell us too. The suits are fine too, flexible, comfortable.’

  ‘We commend the manufacturer,’ Zaimu said.

  ‘Skip the gags,’ Hild murmured. ‘Keep your focus.’

  Salma said, ‘It’s just like a virtual training exercise, though not with this gravity.’

  Meriel said, ‘The suits have exoskeletal support if you need it—’

  ‘We know,’ Zaimu said. ‘The ground – actually, as Salma said, it feels slightly rough, useful for walking over. The temperature—’

  Salma glanced at a display inside her helmet. ‘The ground is a balmy fifteen degrees or so, as predicted. Doesn’t make much difference to us hikers, but I imagine it would if we pitched camp in some way.’

  Meriel said now, ‘It really is like Earth without the atmosphere.’

  ‘So where does the heat come from?’ Zaimu asked.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Boyd put in. ‘Obviously not sunlight. Not from ordinary planetary sources. Earth has left over heat from its formation, and heat from the decay of radioisotopes in its interior – this has a far higher intensity. Here, the ground heat is basically emulating the influx of energy from sunlight on the Earth. As if this is a night hemisphere, giving up the heat of the day.’

  Zaimu laughed, perhaps a little hysterically. ‘So they heated up the whole planet just for us!’

  ‘Whoever they are,’ Hild muttered.

  ‘So it seems,’ Boyd said calmly. ‘As with the gravity. But it’s not magic. With the right technology, it isn’t so much. Just playing with the numbers here. I figure that with matter-antimatter technology, for example, you could heat this whole planet’s surface to the same intensity with a cost of about twenty kilograms a second …’

  ‘We are approaching the surface object,’ said Zaimu.

  So they were. But as they approached they could see it wasn’t a simple cylinder.

  Something else, then.

  Salma and Zaimu stood side by side looking down at what, for all the world, close up, looked like a coffin to Salma, roughly shaped to fit the profile of a human body.

  She felt oddly reluctant to move, to approach closer, let alone touch this thing.

  ‘Like the pharaohs,’ Boyd said in their ears. ‘They had coffins like this, body-shaped, though they had their features painted on … Has to be more than that, though. Who would ship a corpse between universes?’

  Hild murmured, ‘And why a coffin that could fit a human?’

  A brief silence.

  ‘Come on,’ Salma said. ‘Let’s do this thing, before we lose our nerve.’

  ‘Pallet,’ Zaimu said with an air of command. ‘Shelter. Contain us and this – feature.’ He pointed at the coffin.

  Now the pallet rolled a little closer, and broke open, like some tremendous pale beetle opening its carapace, Salma thought.

  Salma and Zaimu stepped back.

  Out billowed a cloth-like material, pure white.

  The cloth, like an unfurling sail, stiffened by internal ribs, swept up and over the two of them, over the coffin, descended to the ground on the far side.

  Once the perimeter was settled, internal lights in the ribbing lit up, and Salma found herself enclosed in abstract whiteness. Just her, Zaimu – and a coffin from another reality. She shivered, and forgave herself for doing so.

  There was a hiss of air.

  ‘OK,’ came Hild’s voice. ‘Can you see in there?’

  ‘Like being in a white-out,’ Zaimu said. ‘But we see fine.’

  ‘And – ah, we see you.’

  There were button cameras everywhere: on their suits, in the shelter’s inner surfaces, on the pallet.

  Zaimu said, ‘We can hear the nitrogen pumping in.’

  ‘Good. Nice inert buffer, and expensive. Don’t waste it. But you need to check your oxygen supplies before opening your suits. In fact, don’t open your suits unless you need to.’

  ‘We know the drill,’ Zaimu said. He raised an eyebrow at Salma. That was Hild all over. ‘Needless to say we are relying on the automatics to do their stuff—’

  A sharp crack.

  Zaimu, startled, shut up.

  ‘Look.’ Salma grabbed his arm, pointed. ‘Look.’

  The featureless coffin was featureless no more. Now a dark seam ran around the edge of the container, separating upper half from lower.

  Nobody spoke, on the ship, on the ground. Salma and Zaimu just stood and stared.

  After maybe a minute, Boyd Hart came on the line. ‘I think the next step is obvious, guys. I think you need to open that damn thing. But try to get a sample of whatever’s inside that box first. I mean the environment, any atmosphere—’

  They exchanged glances.

  Then they went to work, hastily improvising.

  They wrapped the coffin in a lightweight plastic sheet that Salma shook out of one suit pocket, and added a backup air-quality sensor from a pocket of Zaimu’s. Soon they had the coffin entirely sealed by the sheeting, with button-sized sensors carefully placed inside the wrap.

  Another exchange of glances.

  Zaimu said, ‘Opening it is going to be tricky, through the wrap. But we ought to be able to push our gloved fingers into that crack in the coffin, under the lid, without breaking our seal.’

  ‘Right.’ Salma said. ‘We open the coffin, but we don’t break the wrap until the air sensor has given its report. Then when we’re sure it’s safe, we open it all the way.’

  ‘Safe for who?’ Boyd snapped.

  Zaimu grinned. ‘Good point. But I don’t see any completely safe options here. Here goes nothing.’

  ‘Together,’ said Salma.

  ‘Together.’

  They bent easily in their suits. Salma’s hands were clumsy in their gloves, but she managed to get the tips of her fingers under the lid on her side. When she saw that Zaimu too had got that far, she nodded. ‘One, two, three—’

  The lid lifted silently, effortlessly.

  And through the plastic wrap she caught a glimpse of what looked like flesh – a body, curled up like a foetus. Smeared with a transparent, faintly purple, viscous fluid. The skin hairy, perhaps – she couldn’t quite make out the texture.

  ‘I – there’s a body,’ she struggled to say.

  ‘Confirmed,’ Zaimu said in a small voice. ‘As far as I can see.’

  A short silence. Then Meriel snapped, ‘The image capture is poor. What kind of body? Human?’

  Zaimu seemed stunned, and didn’t reply.

  Salma spoke up. ‘Human-like. Humanoid. Not human.’ ‘Zaimu, help me shift this lid.’

  Working together, they managed to get the lid out of the way without breaking their improvised seal.

  Boyd reported quickly, ‘Testing the air that was in there. Nitrogen, oxygen, some trace gases. Water vapour. Carbon dioxide. Nothing that will kill you immediately, or damage your suits. And the buffer supply in the lander is pure nitrogen. That surely won’t kill any occupant immediately. OK. We need to maintain a secure, continuous environment. I’ll have the equipment pump in trace gases into the shelter, to match what was in the coffin. You two keep your suits sealed. The – occupant – may be able to breathe that stuff; you won’t, and there’s a danger of contamination, one way or the other.’

  ‘Noted.’

  ‘Meanwhile I’ll get to synthesising coffin air back here on the ship, in case we need it.’

  ‘Good,’ Salma said. She found she was breathing hard, even though she wasn’t exerting herself particularly.

  But Zaimu said, ‘You’re thinking a few steps ahead. A continuous environment. I take it that means we have to bring the – occupant – back.’

  ‘So long as it’s safe, at every step of the way,’ Hild said sternly.

  They exchanged glances.

  ‘Of course we ought to bring it back,’ Salma said. ‘Whatever it is.’

  ‘Short of a bomb. In that case,’ Zaimu said, ‘before we move it, we ought to take a proper look at our visitor. Come on, Salma …’

  They both braced beside the coffin. A small camera drone hovered over them. At a nod from Zaimu, they ripped aside the thin plastic sheeting.

  To reveal the body.

  ‘Speak to us,’ Hild ordered.

  ‘I … it’s human-ish,’ Salma said. ‘Soaked in some kind of purple gel. I’ll get a sample of that.’

  She reached in to do that. She tried to avoid touching the – occupant.

  She saw arms folded across the chest, legs tucked up against the torso. Limbs very thin, Salma noticed. The ‘arms’ were spindly, leading to odd ‘hands’, three long bony fingers – or perhaps one was opposable, like a thumb. She repeated those observations aloud, for the record.