“Let’s take a look around,” she said.

The smooth surface of the Builder ship drifted past the drone as if the tiny craft were floating across a still ocean at night. The sun had dipped below the horizon an hour earlier, plunging the vessel into shadow that would persist until morning. Tim suggested moving in closer and using the drone’s searchlight, but that would burn power Tania would rather save, and besides, she still felt uncomfortable with getting too close to the new ship until they knew more about it.

She felt anxious, often pacing the room, her eyes never leaving the screen. She convinced herself that at any moment some calamity would unfold. That those protrusions pointing at Earth were so many gun barrels, and in a sudden bright instant the Builders would pulverize the planet below. Or that they were launch tubes, from which thousands of tiny attack ships would swarm out like wasps and fan across the globe, eradicating the few humans who remained.

When it occurred to her that all the scenarios running through her mind were doomsday ones, she forced herself to stop speculating and focus on the facts in front of her.

“Take a look at this,” Marcus said.

Tania broke her gaze away from the main screen and walked over to the two men. Greg moved aside a bit to make room for her.

A close-up image of the pockmarked end of the ship, the end that pointed away from Earth now, filled the screen. Marcus tapped the screen and the image changed. Another portion of the ship, she guessed, with distinctly fewer craters and gouges.

Marcus flipped back to the first image, then bounced between them in rapid succession. After a dozen cycles, Tania realized they were looking at the same section of the ship’s surface. Some of the craters were in the same position in both images, only smaller in the second picture.

“It’s healing,” she said.

“Yup!”

Greg whistled. “Maybe they can do something for your scalp, Marcus.”

“Maybe they can do something for your mom’s—”

Tania elbowed him. “This is a historic moment, gentlemen. Please, act like it.”

Marcus repeated her words under his breath in an exaggerated, mocking tone. He brought up additional pairs of images and began to cycle them. Each showed the same change. Then he tried a pair of images from the tail end of the craft, the end pointing down at the planet. It looked the same, but then, it didn’t have the scarring in the first place.

“What about the naughty bits,” Greg said. “Er, sorry, Tania. The, um, raised posterior protrusions.”

Tania smirked despite herself. Marcus snorted a juvenile laugh and went back to a library view of all the images taken so far. He selected two. No changes between them, but seeing the extensions close-up, Tania realized they had hints of grooves in their surfaces, like the aura towers.

An hour later dawn broke and warm light bathed the alien ship. The drone made another circuit of the huge mass, shifting its path to look up at it from below.

“Guys,” Tim said, “I found something.” Then, “Wow.”

Tania sat with Greg, while Marcus slept in a curled ball on the floor behind them. She looked up, startled, and crossed back to the center of the room. Greg followed her, and Marcus stirred as if sensing the change in mood within the room.

“What is that?” Greg asked.

On the screen, nestled between four of the huge spikes that jutted from the underside of the main bulb, was a hexagonal mark. A portion of the ship’s surface was darker than the rest, with five perfectly straight edges forming a rough circle. Inset within the hexagon was another, smaller one. Tim enlarged that portion of the image while simultaneously activating instruction of the remote-controlled vehicle to stop above the shape. Still fifty kilometers distant, the small drone’s camera couldn’t discern fine detail. “Push in?” Tim asked.

A laugh caught in Greg’s throat. He withered under Tania’s sidelong glance.

“Yes,” she said. “Get to within a kilometer.”

Tim turned to her. “Really?”

“Do it, and if we have any other bands, IR or UV, see if you can put them on the side monitor.”

“Okay. Right, here goes.”

On the screen Greg and Marcus had been huddled in front of, the camera view vanished and a grid of four new images appeared. Infrared, ultraviolet, and two telemetry views. The repair drone wasn’t built for this kind of work, but it was pretty good at finding microfractures in a station’s hull, or detecting escaping air or water. The tiny craft began a slow approach to the surface of the alien ship. Soon the towers surrounding the hexagonal discoloration filled the edges of the screen, and then even they moved out of view as the little craft drifted closer. Ten kilometers. Five.

When the hexagonal patch on the Builder ship filled the monitor, Tania called a halt.

She stared at it for a long time. One hundred meters across, she guessed. The smaller section within spanned perhaps fifty. Long shadows cast from the surrounding protrusions draped black patches horizontally across the area.

From this distance the drone’s camera could pick up some fine details, chief among which was an obvious groove that ran along the edge of the inner hexagon. The outer portion had no such groove, instead appearing to be painted onto the broader surface of the massive ship. Not painted, exactly, but a cosmetic feature, whereas that small inner area was clearly a separate portion of hull. Like a …

“Door,” she said. “It looks like a door.”

Tim took the statement as permission to zoom in on the inset piece. Soon the widescreen display in front of Tania was filled with a simple image of dark gray, with a lighter gray hexagon in the center. It looked in a metaphorical sense like a flag hanging before her in the room, and she wondered then if that was what she was indeed staring at: a ship identifier, like those painted on military boats on Earth for centuries.

“There’s something near the center,” Marcus said, pointing.

The image only hinted at it, but Marcus had it right. Just below the center of the hexagon Tania could see a bright red dot. She glanced at the smaller monitor off to the side and studied the quadrant devoted to an infrared view. “Look at that,” she said.

Everyone turned. On infrared, five such dots glowed bright in a rough ring around the very center of the door. They brightened in unison, then faded. The cycle repeated at a pace that gave Tania the unsettling impression of a beating heart within.

“Zoom in,” she said.

“That’s max zoom,” Tim replied.

“Then go in farther.” She answered his next question before he could ask it. “Until we can see those lights close-up.”

Tim complied and the remote drone lurched forward in a burst of thrust. Tania’s focus alternated between the IR view, the distance-to-contact readout, and the main screen’s visible-light presentation.

As the craft moved closer—fifty meters, forty—the pinpoints of light became visible on the main screen. Then they became something more than single points of light, but shapes.

“There’s another hexagon in the center of them,” Marcus said.

Tania squinted. She couldn’t see it at first, but then found what he referred to. This five-sided portion was the same color as the surrounding one, and if not for the five lights around it she would have missed it. The only clue was a thin groove that marked its border with the area around it. The groove caught some of the light coming off the five pulsing beacons.

Five sides. Five lights. Five small shell ships crashed to Earth. She shivered at the thought. But the aura towers dispersed in only four groups. That fact troubled her in a way she couldn’t explain.

When the craft loomed just twenty meters from the drone, Tim fired a braking thrust.

Tania stepped forward, studying the screen. The lights were not lights at all, she saw. Not exactly. They were more like portholes. She knew instinctively that the light coming through them was from a single, interior source. She’d had the same impression when she’d seen the pulsing grooves on the aura tower’s surface.

Each light was a shape: a circle, a square, a triangle, each with a minor imperfection. The fourth had an oval shape, with one side undulating in an even waveform. The last resembled an hourglass, albeit with small extensions on the top and bottom that reminded Tania of teeth.

No one spoke for a long time. Then Greg asked, “Is it a code?”

“Maybe that’s their writing,” Tim offered.

Tania nodded. “That’s what I was thinking. Like a ship moniker. An identification system.”

“Right,” Marcus said. “So you don’t confuse it with some other behemoth.”

“Everyone remember where we parked,” Greg said.

The room fell silent again as everyone tried to puzzle out the purpose of the shapes, as if staring at them long enough would somehow unravel the mystery. Tania felt like she’d been given just five characters of Kanji and was expected to learn Japanese from the clues.

“What now?” Tim asked after a minute or two had passed. “We’re at fifty percent fuel on the drone. Cap’s about the same.”

Tania sighed. She wished she was there herself so she could reach out and touch the surface, or peer inside those portholes. Prudence won out. “Bring it back.”

Marcus groaned in disappointment.

Tania ignored him. “Everyone get some rest, or study the recordings if you can’t sleep. We’ll meet in four hours to plan our next move.”

Eventually Greg and Marcus departed the room for their cabins, leaving Tania and Tim alone. She hadn’t moved from her place in front of the screen, which now replayed the drone’s footage in time lapse.

“Tim?”

“Yeah?”

“I want a list of all our vehicles capable of carrying walkers outside.”

“Okay. Does that mean we’re going to go take a look in person?”

“Someone should,” Tania said, knowing she’d go herself.

Chapter 51

Cappagh, Ireland

Date imprecise

VANESSA TOOK A cue from Skyler and left the dome to find a cart, or stretcher, anything that would help on their return walk with the unconscious Ana and the heavy alien object.

Skyler had barely drawn a breath when Vanessa reemerged, wheelbarrow rolling in front of her. She had a heavy coat on, and a dust of snow draped her shoulders.

“Good enough,” Skyler said. Together they lifted Ana in, resting her on a folded blanket Vanessa had tucked into the bottom. Once the girl was settled, they lifted the alien hourglass and placed it between her legs.

Then they each took one of the two handles and pushed together, the loaded wheelbarrow lurching through the churned and muddy ground.

When the front edge of the wheelbarrow hit the edge of the dome it began to bend the surface outward. As soon as the edge of the matte black hourglass object touched the dome, a brilliant purple-white light exploded across Skyler’s field of view. It enveloped him from every direction. He heard a sound like a cannon blast and had a sudden sensation of being underwater, surrounded by buoyant fluid. His vision blurred. He felt like the air was being sucked from his lungs.

Vanessa, next to him, was just a vague form, obscured in a milky purple glow. She screamed.

Then the fluid haze began to shatter and dissolve. Cracks of light appeared everywhere and grew wider. Skyler felt his mind begin to fracture in bizarre combinations of slow and fast, as if his vision had shattered like glass. Some shards presented images of the outside, frozen in time, others the inside of the dome at full speed. The shards jumbled and fractured again. Some combined, snapping together like puzzle pieces. Gradually, over what at once seemed hours and mere fractions of a second, the shards that held the picture of the outside world began to win the titanic struggle, and the images in them began to accelerate in time as the shards themselves grew and fused.

A sound began to build, like an aircraft approaching, the noise amplifying in conjunction with the converging image of the outside world. When the last of the purple vanished from Skyler’s view, the sound peaked and vanished in a thundering boom that shook the ground under his feet.

He stumbled to one knee, Vanessa with him.

The purple dome had vanished. Skyler looked up in time to see a curved wall of white racing down toward him.

“Head down!” he shouted to Vanessa, as he threw himself over the wheelbarrow and Ana.

An avalanche of snow crashed around them, from where the dome’s edge had been toward the pinnacle at the center.

The dome had vanished, Skyler realized, and the snow that accumulated on top of it fell in one instant, dome-shaped sheet.

Bitter cold swallowed him. Vanessa screamed as ice pummeled the ground around them. Then Skyler felt as if someone had jumped on his back. He groaned under the sudden weight, the sensation of frozen slush on his exposed flesh.

The avalanche ended almost immediately. Skyler’s fear of being buried proved exaggerated, as he found himself under just a few centimeters of the white powder. He leapt off the cart and brushed snow from Ana’s face and hair.

“It’s over,” he said to Vanessa, who cowered against the metal side of the wheelbarrow. He staggered to his feet and helped her do the same. “We’re out. It’s over.”

She coughed and looked him over before turning to see the winter world around them. “What happened?”

“When that thing hit the edge, the dome disintegrated.”

“It felt like …” Vanessa stopped, shivered. “God, I don’t know what. A nightmare. A hallucination.”

“Yeah,” he said. “One time frame collapsing and another rushing in.”

“Let’s—oh shit.”

Skyler barely had time to register the urgency in her voice when Vanessa crouched and drew both pistols he’d given her. He brought his gun to the ready without fully understanding why, simply because the woman had done so. Only when Vanessa started shooting did he understand.