“I… do not know. We stopped, and abruptly, but without damage to the Anjou. I can only theorize that some technological force capable of manipulating inertia was involved.”

Elena took that in, then put it aside for the moment, because there were more pressing concerns. “Where are the others?”

“Gathered in the cargo hold. The alarms woke Robin, who tasked me to wake the rest of you. You were the last.”

Elena undid the straps in the pod and gave herself a little push, floating up out of the chamber, then shoved off toward the door leading to the corridor.

The Anjou wasn’t exactly roomy – it was mostly engines and cargo and cold storage – but the rest of the crew were squeezed in near the biological samples, all floating in a cluster around something unseen.

“It’s fucking aliens.” Bristles of wild blond hair stuck up all over Hans’s head. “You think people made that thing?”

“May I see?” Elena said.

Sebastien (oh, Sebastien) looked up and raised one wry eyebrow, but it was Ibn who moved aside, letting her take his place so she could see the oversized tablet in Robin’s hands. Robin was the oldest of them, her hair unapologetically gray and short, on her third career (finance, environmental law, ecological engineering). She was officially their captain, though there wasn’t much captaining to do. Usually. “What do you think, Elena?” she said.

The screen displayed a high-res image of an organic-looking structure made of crisscrossing branches and tubes and tunnels and arches, floating silvery-gray against the blackness of space. “It looks like a cast of the interior structure of a rat’s lung,” she said.

“Ever see one of those sculptures people make by filling an anthill with molten lead and then digging it up after the metal solidifies, so it’s a three-dimensional map of tunnels laid out by bug-logic?” Hans gestured at the screen. “Those sculptures look just like that. Except that thing is as big as a city.”

Think how big the bugs must be, Elena thought. (It was a thought that made her shudder later, when she remembered it to Callie.)

There was nothing in the image to provide a sense of scale, so Elena said, “A city? Are we talking Milwaukee or are we talking London?”

Robin zoomed in on one of the tubular branches. “That bit there? Is the size of a skyscraper, maybe eighty stories high. This thing is an astonishing feat of engineering. It must be hundreds of miles of tunnels – assuming those things are tunnels.” She glared at Hans. “But we don’t know that it’s alien. We knew there was a chance, on a five-century voyage, that technology on Earth would outpace us and make us obsolete.”

“Earth is long gone,” Hans said. “Before we left, we’d gone so far past the tipping point nothing could save us but an act of God, and I’m an atheist – sorry, Ibn.”