LITMIR.BIZ

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squinted, still unable to make anything out. Eventually the blackness gave way to gray, and the gray to a deep jasper-like green, and then ridges. The side of the crater was terraced—nothing like the smooth sweep of an impact or volcanic caldera, and not nearly as sheer as the walls of a sinkhole.

      But that didn’t mean it was unnatural.

      They were hoping to find something important to the Nataré here (Nataré was what they’d named the Nest’s creators, from the Latin, for how they were believed to be able to “float” or “swim” through the air on their biologically manipulated gravitons). Anything would do really. If all they stumbled upon was a set of tentacle prints and a patch of “we were here” graffiti, she’d take it.

      Because that would silence the doubt.

      When the convoy had successfully developed the technology to access the Nest’s computer, they’d soon come to the conclusion that the ship was more like a shuttle. Which made sense, given its size. Unless, of course, the aliens were considerably smaller than humans; just one of the many things Caznal was hoping to learn. She was still surprised they didn’t even know something that basic about them.

      The ship’s computer contained no visuals of the aliens, nor any general historical data. All they found were three-dimensional representations of hundreds of spheres stuffed full with additional spheres of different sizes.

      At first, the engineers had thought they’d stumbled upon the Nataré writing system, that each parent sphere could denote a page or even an entire document, and the spheres inside were words. But running them through a rudimentary algorithm revealed a lack of repetition, a fundamental requirement for ordering anything—sounds, symbols, movements—into meaningful communication.

      It took them years to mentally convert the Nest’s data into information more suited to a human thinking process. The breakthrough had come when they found spheres with only a couple of—and in some cases, only one—interior spheres. When these were matched to full-to-the-brim spheres, they found an overlap. The mostly empty spheres appeared to highlight points in the full spheres.

       X-marks the spot.

      On human maps, the distance between objects was the focal point; the primary information the map was intended to convey. Objects were usually portrayed as a similar size—a single point at large scales. Not so with the alien maps. The Nataré highlighted gravitational influence over all other possible associations. According to the convoy’s best theories, their evolution had clearly influenced the way they saw and interacted with the world.

      After recognizing the spheres as maps, their research became a quick spiral of realization and discovery. The spheres represented different sizes of gravitational influence created by various cosmological objects, and though they were shown with no distance between them, they were ordered in accordance with their spatial relation.

      All the humans had to do then was take their current gravitational models and overlay them with the Nataré maps.

      When they found one nearly empty sphere that highlighted LQ Pyxidis and a handful of other points, they knew they’d struck gold. It was the smoking gun they’d been looking for, evidence linking the Nest and the Web to new locations: places where more Nataré history, or the Nataré themselves, might be found.

      Places like this planemo.

      Only …

      The ground rushed up at them—though their rate of descent slowed for landing, Caz still felt a jolt in her bones when they touched down.

      “Ready, sir?” Ivan asked, giving her the thumbs-up.

      “Ready,” she breathed, standing. When the pilot gave the green light, she hoisted the duffel bag of tools that lay at her feet onto her shoulder, as did her colleagues.

      “Four hours for setup,” the pilot reminded them. “Half an hour for return. Stay in visual range of your assigned teammates at all times. And Captain Nwosu would like to remind you that if it wiggles, don’t touch it. If everyone’s got that, I’m opening the doors.”

      A series of thumbs-ups and affirmations over comms led to the locks and their airtight seals disengaging, shifting aside to reveal the open plane and perpetual night of the crater floor.

      Since Caznal was the head of the Nataré division, everyone waited for her cue. She would have the honor of stepping on this alien world first.

       Hopefully, though, I won’t be the first sentient to explore this surface.

      The planemo was roughly the size and density of Mars, with a surface of mostly ice, so Caz knew to expect a lower gravitational pull. It was still strange to feel the burden of her bag lighten and the tension of her muscles ease as she disembarked. The artificial gravity on the convoy ships—even the shuttles—was a constant one-g, and though they’d learned from Earth to make gravity cyclers smaller, allowing for more acute graviton manipulation, they had yet to finesse the tech into spacesuits.

      Though she could move easily in the lower gravity, she felt unsteady. Like she was walking on a wobbly gelatin surface instead of solid rock. But the cleats on her soles held true to the frozen landscape, and her confidence increased with each stride.

      The darkness, she found, was both a frustration and a godsend. Though the lights on her suit barely illuminated the craggy surface three feet in front of her, the small sphere of light felt safe.

      She’d heard stories about planet sickness—the agoraphobia-related illness many of the crew members had experienced when the convoy had revisited Earth—and she had absolutely no desire to experience it firsthand.

      “Say something,” Ivan prompted when she’d shambled a few yards away from the shuttle.

      Turning back, she realized no one was following her. But eight helmets—the glare from their mounted headlamps obscuring their faces—peered out from the craft’s opening.

      “Do we have to say something profound every time we step on new rocks?” she asked.

      “Really?” Aziz, whose background was in bioengineering, called. “Really?”

      “Oh, come on,” Caz said. “That’s gonna look way better in the history books than ‘one small step.’ Schoolkids love sarcasm.”

      “We all hate you right now,” Aziz said, pushing past the others to jump through the hatch. The rest of them clambered out in sequence, looking a bit like a set of robots in their uniformity. Very similar, in fact, to the autons stored in the shuttle’s hold, which Caz would call to her aid once the locations for their gear were set.

      They wouldn’t have cared what I said. She smiled as she watched the team quickly fan out in sets of three, carrying their equipment with ease.

      Even though the labor was light, Caz could still hear her breath reverberating through her helmet, which added to the being-in-a-bubble sensation.

      They’d picked Crater Sixty-four as a landing site because it was so unlike most of the planemo’s other craters, which were clearly created by impact. Their radar-mapping flybys hadn’t revealed any overt signs of civilization, past or present. No sprawling cities, no orbiting satellites, no bizarre megastructures. Not even a Cydonian Face to set pareidolia working, or a prominent mimetolith worth speculating about. Just a uniform frozenness, covered over with the dust of impact after impact.

      But here, under the gray-green debris and the superficial indentations left by meteorites, the crater’s rim looked worked, scarred and terraced like in a quarry, disturbed by hand-equivalents with sentient intent.

      But perhaps it was natural. Perhaps they would find no sign the Nataré had ever been here, no discernible Webrelated reason for it to be on their map. No one in their division dared voice such a possibility, though surely everyone was thinking it. If they couldn’t tie this planemo to the Nest, then their detour from the Web would be for naught; a waste of time.

      It

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