We trooped down the ramp into a bright glare thrown by lights studding the hangar fabric. The ship they illuminated was a dark botanical red, like a once-vibrant flower losing its bloom. It measured about sixty meters long and thirty wide. At its highest it rose maybe twenty-five meters above the ground. But those were only the overall dimensions. The fuselage itself was probably fifteen percent smaller, a basic truncated cone shape with a flattened belly. The extra dimensions were made up from protrusions—call them small wings or fins—nearly three hundred of them sticking out from every part of the ship. Quite a few were bent or broken off, showing the kind of damage it’d suffered from its hard landing. From what I could see, it had struck the ground along its port side before coming to rest more or less flat on its belly.

A hatch was open near the front, where three of the stumpy fins had twisted out of alignment to clear a route to it. The hatch itself used electromechanical actuators, nothing too different from human technology.

“The ship’s atmosphere had bled out,” Lankin said, “so the techs just allowed it to fill with nitrogen; it’s a good neutral, nonreactive gas. So far we haven’t monitored any adverse reaction in the structure.”

“Do you know what the original atmosphere was?” Loi asked.

“Preliminary examination of the life support indicates an oxygen nitrogen mix. The percentages seem to be different from Earth, but not much; slightly heavier on the oxygen percentage.”

“What are all the wing-things?” Callum asked. “Are they functional?”

“They have a core of material similar to our active-molecular technology. As near as the physics team can figure it, they’re negative energy conductors.”

“Negative energy? You mean exotic matter? Wormholes?”

“Yes.”

“So it is an FTL drive?” Eldlund said excitedly.

“Possibly.”

“Possibly?”

“The fins are only conductors,” Lankin said. “We think they were used to channel a flow of negative energy. So far we haven’t found anything on board that can create negative energy.”

“So how did it fly?”

“Best guess, it rode along a wormhole the way trains used to ride along railway tracks.”

“But something went wrong,” Yuri said suddenly. “It jumped the rails.”

“Most likely. If it fell out of the wormhole somehow, and emerged back into space-time, it might not have been able to get back in. There are fusion chambers in the aft section, which would serve as rockets as well as generators.”

“So…it dropped out of a wormhole tunnel into interstellar space, then flew here on a fusion drive?”

“That’s pretty much the consensus here, yes.”

“Holy shit!”

“And you said there are humans on board,” Loi said. “Which means there’s an alien wormhole terminus open in a human star system?”

“Yes,” Lankin said. “That’s about the size of it.”