“I’m more concerned about hyperspace and quantum field activity.”

“Nothing so far.”

“Very well. Oscar?”

“We’ve come a long way,” Oscar said. “And so far we’ve seen nothing to make us turn back.”

“I agree. Prepare the ship for a hostile encounter scenario. Hyperspace, take us in to one million kilometers above the barrier’s equator.”

“Aye, sir.”

The wormhole projected into real space with a burst of Cherenkov radiation, its toroidal nimbus twinkling with azure scintillations. It dissipated as quickly as it had begun, leaving the Second Chance floating a million kilometers above the blank surface of the barrier. On such a scale there was no visible curvature to the shell around the star. It appeared as a simple flat plane extending to infinity in every direction, as if the starship had reached the bottom of the universe.

“We couldn’t have gone through,” Tu Lee reported as soon as they were established in real space.

“What do you mean?” Wilson asked.

“The barrier is a block to wormholes as well. There was a lot of exotic energy echo as we approached. Whatever the barrier is, it extends through the quantum fields. The wormhole wouldn’t be able to circumvent it.”

“So there really is no way in,” Wilson mused.

“Or out,” Oscar said.

Wilson turned to the astrophysicists. “So how can the star’s gravity field get through?”

“We’ll let you know,” Tunde said. He didn’t sound happy.

“Hysradar sweep gives a sheer surface,” Anne said. “Definitely no neutrino penetration. I’ve never seen the detectors registering this low before.”

“How thick is it?”

“That dimension really only applies to solid matter,” Tunde said. “This is an artificial rift in the quantum fields which manifests itself in spacetime; technically, it has no physical depth. It’s two-dimensional.”

“Fine.” Wilson couldn’t take his attention off the standard radar return. “Any sign of spacecraft activity?”

“Nothing,” Anna said; she sounded slightly peeved at having to churn out constant reassurance. “No rocket exhausts. No wormhole signatures. There’s nobody else here.”

“I’d qualify that,” Tunde said. “This goddamn thing is thirty AUs across. That’s almost impossible for the human mind to grasp. We’re not even seeing a fraction of a percent from here. There could be a battle fleet of ships the size of a moon gathered five AUs away and we’d never know.”

“Let’s not get carried away,” Wilson said. “This is what we’re here for, people, a full survey and analysis. So… Pilot, hold us steady at this stand-off distance. Defense, keep our shields up full until further notice. Hyperdrive, keep us ready for an immediate exit. Astrophysics, you’re on. I want a comprehensive sensor sweep from this distance, probe it with everything we’ve got. We are not getting any closer for now. If you can confirm there are no active components which threaten us, I’ll authorize a remote satellite examination of the barrier’s structure. Until then we play it safe.” He leaned back in the chair, and watched as the data started to build up on his screen and within his virtual vision. The stream of results was unending, and growing by the hour as new instruments were unsheathed and applied. Only a fraction of the information made any sense to him. It was slightly humbling. He’d always thought himself quite up-to-date on physics.

Tunde Sutton and the rest of the science crew tore into the raw data with unnerving enthusiasm. Their attitude was childlike in its wonder. Wilson was very careful not to intrude, or censure Tunde for the way he ran his department. But from what he could see they were acting more like first-life science geeks than the wise, considered professors they’d been when selected. They quarreled and laughed among themselves, completely uncaring for social restraint. Suddenly, after all these months, they were now the elite, aloof from the rest of the crew. It showed.

Wilson overstayed his duty period by two hours, then turned the bridge over to Oscar. An hour later, Anna found him in the forward observation gallery. It was a long dark compartment on the wheel’s middle deck, with subdued blue floor lighting. She paused for a long moment after she came through the door, letting her eyes acclimatize to the darkness. The gallery had three tall windows of optically perfect glass facing forward. The silhouettes of several people were just visible—the barrier was a popular vista. She walked over to Wilson. “Hi,” she whispered.

“Hi.” His hand found hers in the gloom, fingers fumbling. They stood together, content with their closeness. Anna could see the main cylinder above them, a somber gray bulk illuminated by the small nav lights dotting its surface. It was rotating slowly, turning various sensor clumps into view one after the other.

“I’m not sure if I can see it,” Wilson murmured quietly. “My inserts give me a perfect image in infrared. But when I cancel that, I think I can see it. If it’s there, it’s like a flat cloud of the darkest red ever. Maybe I’m just imagining it because I know that’s what it should look like. And it looks as if it’s just in front of my nose.”

“On this scale, it is,” she whispered back. “We’re not even a germ to a basketball.”

“Can you see it?”

“I don’t know.” Stupid though the action was, she leaned forward slightly, squinting. Her inserts were off now, and there might well have been some kind of ultradark vermilion haze out there in front of the nose, the kind of luminosity you got from a single candle lighting a cathedral. “It’s like a ghostlight.”

“Humm. I always thought I had quite good eyes. I’ll have to get them resequenced next time I go into rejuve.” He waved his hand in front of his face to see if that made any difference, if he could see the outline of his fingers against the obscure emission. There was too much secondary lighting in the observation gallery to be certain. “Whether I can see it or not, I can certainly feel it. The damn thing’s spooky, like something lurking just outside your thoughts.”

She curled her arm around his. “Come on, it’s been a long day. Time you got some rest.”

He grinned. His teeth were just visible in the gloaming. “I’m too tired and strung out to argue.” He allowed himself to be led toward the door.

“Strung out? You?”

“Yeah. We spent a year getting this ship built. I spent three hundred years waiting for something this important to happen to me again. I wanted something there when we came out of hyperdrive, something positive that I could see and understand. When we set down on Mars, there was all this alien geology surrounding me. It was strange, and even beautiful after a fashion, and nobody really knew anything about it. But you could break open a rock with a hammer, and see the minerals and strata inside. We had a knowledge base that could take that information and pin down what kind of rock it was, what event produced it. It was all in my head, information I could apply.”

They were alone in the corridor, so she stood on her toes and kissed him. “You poor old thing.”

Wilson smiled, sheepish now. “Yeah well, I guess I’m just intimidated, that’s all. The size of this fucker is mind-warping. I really shouldn’t let it get to me.”

“I know, whacking this with a hammer isn’t going to help.”

“No.” He kissed her back. “I bet it would make me feel a hell of a lot better, though.”

Five days later, Wilson allowed the Second Chance to move up to fifty thousand kilometers above the barrier. They used the plasma rockets, accelerating in at a fiftieth of a gee, then stopped and flipped over to decelerate. The physicists were very keen to see what would happen when the exhaust sprayed against the surface. The simple answer was nothing. Satellites hovering centimeters above the barrier observed the residue of gas and energized particles strike the surface and rebound. There was no heat or momentum transfer. No effect. Gigabytes flowed back up the microwave links between satellites and starship, expanding the already vast database on the barrier. A huge quantity of sensor log files were stored in the RI array, almost all of them containing negative information. Every member of the science crew could tell Wilson what it wasn’t; they could explain its properties at great length. What nobody could tell him was how it was generated, nor from where. And they certainly didn’t know why it existed.