A prologue I wrote for a to-be book a couple years ago. Of course, I never got the plot out right and moved on to other stuff.
A bit long though ^^, but the text paste site doesn't work for me. (Max 34 lines??)
Click to reveal..
Stars burned diamond silver against the velvet background of the night. In front of the myriad glowing scatter of the cosmos lay a shadow, another veil of night, massive, looming, enlarging. A disc-shaped inky blot, now covering half the sky, as black as the pits of sorrow and as huge as a thousand suns. The Sphere.
We were coming closer, shifting from the transfer orbit that had brought us arcing into the system into another that would send us spinning around the great black sphere. It grew in the cockpit windows, steadily eclipsing more and more of the painted starfield behind it, eating up suns; spreading across the face of the galaxy. We sat strapped in, the autopilot guiding our long slow fall down the abyss of its gravity, and watched in silence as we plunged towards its huge dark maw.
The Sphere was one hundred million miles in radius, two hundred million in diameter; from its centre to its wall spanned the distance from a sun to a normal, comfortably inhabited planet. Indeed, it was hollow, this cavern wrought by gods, and at its centre lay a star, lost in the vastness of its interior. We could tell from the radiation emissions flowing piping hot off the Sphere’s exterior that it was a perfectly normal small yellow sun, like any of a hundred million others; and we could tell from gravity readings and analysis of the orbits of the other planets in the system- three gas giants, small and far out- that the walls of the Sphere were seventy miles thick. All this had been known for millennia, since the first tentative expeditions of man swept across these far reaches of the galaxy in times forgotten; all this recorded many times in books of history, forgotten, rediscovered, erased by the tides of war and the fall of dying empires. Nothing more we knew. No one had ever penetrated those mighty walls. No man knew what lay inside that cavern. We were to be the first.
Who could know who built the Sphere? Men, perhaps, under the guidance of a civilisation long fallen, with the aid of technologies and machines whose principles had been lost, whose designs destroyed by time and war. Something else, perhaps, strange creatures toiling in darkness and vacuum for hundreds of thousands of years before vanishing traceless into the depths of space- or perhaps sealing themselves forever inside the impenetrable fastness of the Sphere. There was no telling from its walls; its outer surface was simply a featureless plain of iron and steel and metal mined from asteroids and from the corpses of gutted planets. Whence had the material come, to build such a structure? How many thousands of worlds must have died to complete it? The Sphere glowed darkly red with the transmitted heat of the star inside, and gave up no clues. No one had ever pierced those walls. There had been attempts, expeditions to drill through the mountain walls or to blow holes in them with nuclear fire or antimatter. But none had returned. Their fates were lost in twisted legend, and for centuries this part of the galaxy had been stricken by conflict, riven by total war. It was as if the Sphere was cursed; surely a mere seventy miles of steel could not defeat the creatures who had torn planets from their orbits, killed suns, thrown themselves in an instant across light years in glowing ships of plastic and metal? Yet that barrier, cratered and scarred on the outside with the impacts of millennia of meteorites, had yet to be crossed.
We did not mean to cross by force, but by cunning. We had no drilling equipment or thermal lances the size of cities. We came, the four of us, with nothing but a map.
It was ancient, and confused by many translations, and it had been harder to find than a rook in a flock of a million ravens in the dark, but we had reason to believe that it was genuine. It gave us the key to the Sphere, the way in: a gate, a few hundred metres wide, located in a certain place on the surface, well hidden, leading via a maze of twisted tunnels carved out of the heart of the steel to the inside surface. Anyone could have found it, had they been prepared to look, to fly at close range over the countless quadrillion square miles of the outside surface and go over it with the fine toothed comb of a mass detector. No one had had the time or the inclination. The Universe contained far greater wonders, and far greater rewards.
Our map was a program, written in the obsolete machine code of an ancient computer. We had spent years finding it, following obscure rumours and dead trails to cities long forsaken on worlds devoid of life. We had searched in a hundred museums to find an machine capable of running it. The Sphere was spinning, a slow dance of years and inches per second, and the program knew how, and it could tell us where the Gate was now, in relation to the system’s own North, the perpendicular line to the orbital plane of the gas giants. It remained to be seen if its predictions were correct, and if what it predicted existed in the first place...
We fell into orbit just above the Sphere, flying a few miles above its pockmarked surface, coasting past it at a thousand miles an hour. So huge; at this speed it would take us the better part of a year just to circumnavigate it. Blackness filled half the sky, a great featureless plain scattered with craters and rough impact circles lit by the light of a hundred thousand stars. Our shadow, etched in starshine, flew with us. The Sphere was glowing, radiating the heat of the star inside it in the far infrared, but we could not see it; to our eyes, it was as black as the grave.
It intimidated us, this work of gods. Bigger than anything else in the universe save the massive ruby-glowing red giants, dying stars preparing to blow themselves into oblivion on the winds of infinity. Move it into our home system and it would contain our sun, our homeworld, and the four planets inwards from ours. It dwarfed its contents like a beachball encapsulating a small marble, like a cosmic cathedral made of black aged iron with an apple at its centre. It contained more space than all the structures and all the ships constructed by Man in all the thousands of years since he had built mud huts by the side of some river long dried up on a world long blown to hell. It was unimaginably, inconcievably huge, as difficult to imagine as a whole as it is to picture a billion grains of sand the way you can picture three. From our tiny ship it looked like a plain, the horizon immeasurably far away; a plain exetnding to infinity, with only stars beyond.
We coasted, flying towards the coordinates supplied by the map, and waited, and readied out equipment and tightened our straps and wrote solemn entries in our log, while the excitement and the fear built in our hearts.
Our ship was small, a five-berth light ex-military runabout such as might be found anywhere doing scouting or small cargo runs or paramilitary escort duty. She could make planetfall and loft on her own and was fitted with a slow, cheap and ancient stardrive that groaned when we pushed more than a light year out of it and took hours to recharge afterwards. But she was called Rose, and we were quite attatched to her.
For this trip, the culmination to all the years we had spent roaming around these distant backwaters of the galaxy, spending weeks on messy primitive war-torn planets following up the few leads we had, Rose’s spare berth and her cargo space was filled with equipment we had bought on credit from one of the few ports that would lend us money. We weren’t pirates; we weren’t even wanted by the law. We just had a local reputation for borrowing cash, wasting it on pointless expeditions and taking far too long to pay it back. There was me, the pilot; Ace, the engineer; Jane, our historian turned detective; and Rod, doer of the jobs he couldn’t find an excuse not to undertake, or general systems engineer. Our partnership had begun many years ago, when Jane, fresh out of a research faculty at the richer end of the locality, had approached me with a lead, a dream and a bit of cash. It took her a year and a lot of determination to convince me to pay any attention to her crackpot scheme, until she jumped me with the evidence- and then it took the two of us as long to find anyone gullible enough to tag along with us, in the shape of Ace and Rod. All those who had scorned us, both at the port bars and in the halls of academia, would have to prick up their ears and listen when we returned this time.
Against the night the braking motors fired like unfolding flowers, sending waterfalls of incandescent gas blooming over the steel plain of the Sphere. It would take half an hour to brake our sufficiently to allow us to land on that black cratered plain; we had ample time to wonder what awaited us.
The ship’s forward radars drilled deep into the Sphere’s wall, sweeping over the area below and ahead of us, seeking any variation in the featureless gulf of metal that extended to the starry horizon on every side. They could not penetrate deeper than half a mile, and down to that depth they found nothing whatsoever; not a structural beam, not a hollow, not a single imperfection in the miles-thick armour of the Sphere. We flew over an ocean of steel.
Fifteen minutes into the deceleration burn the nav computer beeped. Ace brought up the radar cross-section. We had it.
A few dozen miles in front of us, the Sphere’s wall suddenly narrowed from heaven knew how thick to a mere two hundred metres from inside to outside. The thin area of the wall was a disc a hundred metres in diameter, and beyond that was emptiness- as if a tunnel wide enough for a battleship had been bored through from the inside of the Sphere and stopped just short of breaching the outer wall. The Gate was here, in the exact position described by the map, give or take a few miles. We screamed with joy, our doubts scoured away, our dreams another step closer to the light of truth.
The circular area where the wall was thinned, inexplicably, was completely free from meteorite impacts. It was just as well, for anything larger than a small hill would have blown right through it and into the tunnel beneath. It was also very strange, since every square metre of the Sphere was pockmarked with at least one inch-wide impact crater- yet there was not one blemish on the flawless disc of the Gate. Yet there were no guns, shields or any sort of hardware capable of warding off such missiles.
Well, whatever. We added it to our long lists of mysteries and decelerated so that we hung in space a mile out from the surface. We dropped five twenty-megaton nuclear warheads with sixty-minute timers and magnetic clamps, retreated to a safe distance, switched off all the non-mil-spec gear and stowed it in the nukeproof lockers, and huddled together in the shielded cockpit. An instantaneous incandescent phoenix flower shone for an instant behind us in perfect silence, faded, and died.
We turned around and thrusted back. A ragged fifty-metre hole had been blown in the centre of the Gate, amply large enough for Rose to fit through. It opened on the gaping abyss of a tunnel that descended into darkness like the opening of some legendary mineshaft. It was cylindrical, and its walls were flat and totally featureless.
We cranked the radar, the seachlights, the laser radar, the forward cameras and the passive EM lenses to full amplification, rotated the ship to nosedive into that midnight canyon, and lit up the main drive.
The tunnel followed a strange path. It dove straight down for a mile or so, then twisted in a complex three-dimensional assembly of S and V shapes, continued sideways along the inside of the Wall for five and a half miles, contorted again like a piece of tangled string, and turned straight “down” again towards the inside of the Sphere. Weightless, for the Wall’s mass was not sufficient to exert anything more than a tiny gravitational pull upon the ship, we navigated that gut of iron. Until, when we were five miles away from the inner surface of the Wall-five miles away from discovering whatever lay on the inside of the Sphere- we had a shock. We had just turned a sharp corner when we began to feel our weight returning.
Ace cut all the thrusters, and the ship began drifting slowly backwards the way she had come. When she had gone ten metres, she stopped- and we were weightless again.
Ace throttled up,we moved forwards, something tried to push us back. She applied more power. We made headway. She looked at her instruments. We had entered a gravitational field of a strength comparable to an average planet’s field, oriented away from the Sphere’s centre- and it was evidently purely artificial. There was no concentration of mass in the area capable of causing it. It was there, we surmised, to hold whatever lay on the inside of the Sphere to the inside surface; to turn the Sphere’s inside into a mock-up of a planetary surface.
One with an area five billion times greater than any habitable planet the Galaxy had ever known.
As to what generated the field, we had no idea. In the region of the Galaxy we called home such technology was a myth, a half-fictional legend that belonged to long-lost high civilisations or other, far-away, more sophisticated parts of the great starry Milky Way. No one could say for certain whether it existed, or had done in the past, or was a mere fairy tale. Certainly no one knew how to construct such a device, any more than they knew how to go about building a Sphere. The extent of local technological knowledge- “local” referring to the region of space one could travel across in a lifetime- went no higher than the simple hyperdrive, and even that was a hit-and-miss art whose technological and theoretical foundations were no better understood than the dreams of a flower or the memories of a ray of sunlight.
We came to the end of the tunnel. There was air here, held somehow in check against the artificial gravity by some mysterious field which we traversed without a whisper. We reached a sheer steel wall fifty metres thick, devoid of a gate or a hatch or a breach of any kind. We clamped the ship to it, feeling as if we were clinging on to the inside of the roof of a massive hollow tower, and got out the drilling equipment.
We never could have known.
EDIT: Bump! Has anyone even read this ?