“Oh, my God,” he said, catching his breath. “We’ll have company—and real soon.”

More gamma ray tracks were lancing through the tanks—more and more of them, all at 0.5 million electron volts. The computer assembled the information, red-dotted the sources, and threw them up on Peterson’s star field display.

Without warning, two new points of red appeared beneath Vega.

Another winked on in the shoulder of Orion.

Then another.

And another.

“You’re kidding me,” Peterson said. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding!”

“Multiple deceleration sources,” the computer replied. “Distance five light-months. Velocity ninety-two percent light speed. Your opinion?”

“They must have been cruising at that speed for decades!” he shouted. “And now they’re turning on their engines all at once—correction, they turned them on all at once.” He stared at the display. “They’re scattered across light-months. They can’t be communicating with each other, so they must have synchronized years in advance to light up their engines now! But why? And why so many of them?” His throat constricted as he said, “Call Earth.”

“Maximum power?” the computer asked.

“Do it. Downlink all data immediately.”

“Ready, Dr. Peterson.”

He fumbled in his mind for the right words, but there was no precedent. No one had ever announced the arrival of alien starships before. His hesitation insured that the data would arrive ahead of his words, and he decided that this was as it should be: let the facts speak for themselves. Otherwise, someone might think he’d gone nuts out here.

“This is Dr. Donald Peterson at Miranda Station. Here is what has happened—”

His pad flashed, revealing a point of gamma shine only light-hours away. The display indicated that it was decelerating, but not enough to reduce its velocity by any significant fraction. Ahead of it, only light-minutes away, still another point came alive, then burst into ten thousand pieces.

“Oh, God, no!” Peterson shouted.

3

Inner Spaces

As Peterson found the right words, Hollis was just over four kilometers down on the bed of the Atlantic. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute’s inner space craft Alvin was now in its one hundred and twelfth year of service, although the decades of constant overhaul and refinement had erased every trace of the ship that was originally christened in 1964. The earliest relic of the old Alvin was a titanium sphere 2.13 meters in diameter, dating back to the 1970s. It had once been the entire crew compartment, but was later rebuilt as an escape pod mounted on the aft of the newer, larger cabin. The ship could now support a crew of seven for missions lasting up to several weeks. Today Alvin carried only two people, but Hollis would have had the sub all to herself if that Wayville fellow hadn’t decided on a whim to come along for the ride.

It was nearing that point in the expedition when everyone topside had just about seen enough of the black wilderness on the bottom, and Hollis preferred it that way. She always looked forward to an expedition’s end days, to the rare opportunities for total solitude—just her and the crushing pressures and communion with the Earth. By training she was a Jesuit priest of the agnostic order. She was also a fully qualified Alvin pilot, and as a pilot-priest she sought the deserts of the deep in the same way the founding prophets had sought the land deserts as catalysts for meditation and revelation.