Five days after its crews violent confrontation on the command deck, the Beauregard finally ramped up for a long jump into the target system, with Megan occupying the chair. Sifras idea of using Meridian hailing codes had failed to provoke any kind of response, which left her wondering what the two men would do, should the alien entity still prove unwilling to communicate at closer range.

Then the stars around the Beauregard changed abruptly, and new data from the external sensors began flooding into her datascape. She pushed most of it to one side, for the moment engaging solely with the incoming visuals.

She floated in space, her virtual body immune to the cold and radiation. Great billowing clouds of gas obscured the star itself, the colour of the clouds ranging from deep red to brown and yellow. Somewhere at the heart of those clouds lay a single massive star comprising more than twenty standard solar masses, its outer layers stripping away as it entered its last few million years of life.

According to the Kelvins initial survey, a few tiny rocky worlds orbited the giant, but this close in, and with so much interference affecting their long-range sensors, it was nearly impossible to acquire accurate readings on anything. The gas and dust clouds were so dense that the Wanderer could be hiding almost anywhere amongst them and indeed, if it werent for the original beacon signal to home in on they might never have been able to figure out where within the system it might be.

As hiding places went, thought Megan, there could be few better.

One of those worlds was a pockmarked and airless wasteland with a largish moon, about a thousand kilometres in diameter, around which the Wanderer currently orbited.

Once shed run a standard all-systems check following the latest jump, Megan returned to the short-range visuals that the Kelvin had recorded during its closest encounter with the Wanderer. Something kept drawing her back to those pictures of twisted, root-like limbs extending from a central mass that measured at least a couple of kilometres across. They never failed to make her skin crawl. The Wanderer looked more like a wind-tossed seed coated in barbs than the product of some ancient civilization.

She zoomed in on the image, noting yet again the peculiarly granular quality of the Wanderers hull. It looked as if it had been smashed into tens of thousands of pieces, then carefully glued back into a misshapen whole.

Something brushed against her thoughts.

Something alien.

She swallowed hard and opened her eyes to the pitch darkness inside the chairs folded-in petals. She felt suddenly claustrophobic, as if something was lurking in the dark unseen.

She sensed Bash coming online. <Hey. Did you feel that just now?> he asked.

<I thought you were asleep.>

<I was, until a couple of seconds ago.>

<You mean that sense of . . . of . . .>