“That’s not the only confusing thing,” the ship said. “The only remotely realistic proposals for megastructures like this have been for Dyson swarms – multiple, independently rotating structures, forming a sort of web or net around the star. Making a solid shell that size would be impractical – the tensile strength would need to be far beyond the capabilities of known materials science, and if there were any drift at all it would be difficult to correct, and in the case of such an error, one side of the sphere would crash into the star and the whole thing would be destroyed. But this… it’s like they put an unbroken glass globe around the star.”

“There’s definite radiant output, consistent with a red dwarf,” Drake said. “Which makes me think… maybe it just looks like a red dwarf from the outside. Maybe it’s some other class of star, and only some of its energy is being captured, with the rest allowed to radiate.”

“I don’t know enough about astrophysics to be able to tell if that even made sense,” Janice said. “I’m not sure Drake does either.”

“Very little of this makes any sense at all, but I’m growing accustomed to that sensation,” the ship said.

“Uh. The planet. Look. The day side is… different,” Drake said.

The ship slowly rotated, bringing a portion of the planet’s light side into view. The dark side was rocky, icy, and mountainous: a raw and natural place.

The day side was unnatural. The surface was completely covered in immense shining megastructures. From orbit the structures looked like a maze, or the cross-section of a brain, though there seemed to be multiple levels, towers, branches–

“Can we get a closer look?” Callie said.

The glass in front of them darkened, transforming into a viewscreen, and then replicated the view they’d seen before, at a greater level of magnification. After a moment the screen blipped, and everything was magnified further; then blipped again, and again, and again, each time bringing the view of the surface a little closer.

The structure appeared to be a vast network of branching, interconnecting tunnels, but each tunnel had to be the size of a skyscraper.

“This configuration of matter doesn’t match anything in my local database,” the ship said. “I don’t have access to the Tangle, of course, but even if I did, I doubt I’d find a match. Could they be natural growths of some kind, do you think? Crystal, maybe?”

“No,” Elena said. “This looks like the space station my ship found. Organic shapes, but artificial.”

Callie cocked her head. The structure on the planet did look like what Elena had described, but instead of one immense map of an anthill, it was hundreds of interlocking and overlapping ones.