Sebastien stepped closer to Elena. She was profoundly aware of his presence, which was ridiculous in their current circumstances, but bodies and brains reacted strangely to stress sometimes, and hers was clearly urging her to try and reproduce before she died. Stupid bodies. “I guess our faction wins,” he said. “Exploration it is. I never expected to meet aliens. I wonder what they’re like?”

“An aperture is opening in the structure.” Uzoma’s tone was as matter-of-fact as always. Just reporting data.

They all looked at the screen. An irregular, roughly oval hole was opening up in the side of one of the skyscraper-sized portions of the structure, right down at the end of a branch, on the edge of the vastness. “It looks like the metal is flowing away, not like a door opening,” Elena said.

Hans scowled. “No reason to believe it’s metal at all. Our sensors can’t tell us a damn thing about it. We’ve got a nose full of surveying equipment, and as far as it’s concerned, that thing out there is basically invisible. It absorbs everything we throw at it.”

There was no perceptible sense of movement, but the aperture got bigger and bigger on the screen, until the edges vanished entirely and the screen went black. Robin flicked through various external camera views, but they all showed darkness.

Hans consulted his handheld tablet, presumably full of useless sensor data. He was the ship’s chief engineer and fixer-of-broken-things. “We’re inside the structure, whatever it is. The sensors think there’s a lot of empty space and a few solid objects in here with us. Let there be light.” He swiped at the screen and the ship’s external lights came on, shining into the darkness.

They all looked at the view on Robin’s screen, but even the lights revealed little beyond some lattice-like structures that could have been metal struts or girders. Hans hmmed. “Are those cranes and gantries, maybe? Could this be some kind of ship-building facility?”

There was a thump as the ship settled down on some kind of surface – and then another thump as they all dropped the short distance to the floor. Uzoma made a noise that was almost a whimper. “There is gravity. I… cannot explain why there is gravity.”

Sebastien bounced up and down on his heels. “A little less than one G, I think. This big anthill isn’t spinning, and it’s hard to imagine something this size could accelerate fast enough for this to be thrust gravity already, though if they can control inertia, who knows? Artificial gravity. That’s interesting.”

“We should look around,” Elena said.

Robin gave a definitive nod. “All right. Let’s assess the situation. Ibn, you and Hans are with me.”

“I will comply,” Ibn said, “but why have I been selected?”

“You’re a surveyor,” Robin said. “We’re surveying.”

“I am primarily a geologist.”