Relativity
Relativity
A claw. Hard edges, nails extending past soft flesh. A natural adaptation, one would think, to zero gravity. Grasping fingers proved too soft to keep in good condition over years of use. To propel oneself by the sheer power of one finger required more than the simple pad of a thumb, or the whorl of a man's fingerprint.
Likewise, a tail. Soft, supple, prehensile length fused to the lower spine. Early experiments showed that prolonged exposure to zero gravity weakened the bones dangerously. The early astronauts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries came back to the harsh chains of gravity in wheelchairs; wan and weak, but still smiling. Weaker bones meant that even the simplest tasks became more difficult under the pressures of the occasional acceleration. A third limb, sliding out from behind the back, proved more useful than any mechanical augmentation could provide.
His voice was gravelly, coming from deep within his throat. It was almost a growl, though from the sound of it there was no menace intended. His words came rhythmically, a loud grunt after each word. The person speaking, though not a human, had the same bipedal characteristics; an erect spine, long arms ending in a facsimile of a hand, long legs bulging with muscled calves.
Bulged out from the front of his head was a short muzzle, tapering to flattened snout. The few whiskers that rose from the flesh were stubby, as though cut short. The muzzle hung open, deep panting breathes coming quickly. It had been decided that the species should take advantage of its innate lack of sweat glands, rather than add them to the final product. Though not readily apparent, sweat in zero gravity had a tendency to collect into small clumps and float through the air until sucked up by the ever-present ventilation system.
As a whole, the species was a success. Mankind's first leaps into space had foundered beyond the simple boundaries of the solar system. Those that had ventured Beyond had spent years in zero gravity, and had returned with a complete inability to set foot on their native planets. Instead, it was, ironically enough, their test subjects which ultimately provided the answer to extra-solar exploration...
***
Rajit panted heavily in the thick air of the cabin. His wrists were locked into thick metal collars attached to the wall in the room where he spent the most of his time. At the direct opposite side of the room, 180° from where the clamps around his wrists were, two similar clamps were attached to his ankles, stretching his spine straight. After a moment, he grunted loudly and strained on his biceps, pulling downwards. His legs, locked in place, gave him enough leverage to tug the rings around his wrists downwards, straining his biceps and forcing a grunt out of his chest.
He held the position for a moment, then released, letting his wrists move back to the starting position. "Thirty-five," he remarked to the air around him, taking a moment to catch his breath. His tail, hanging behind him, lifted upwards. The end of it was wrapped around a small plastic water bulb, almost half-empty. Acting entirely without thought, he brought the container to his lips by tilting his head to the side and bringing the tip of his tail up over his shoulder. He placed his lips around the seal and bit down lightly on the nozzle, opening it. He took several sips, savoring the cold fluid as it washed across his rough tongue. Releasing the pressure on his teeth, thus closing the seal, he pulled his tail back from over his shoulder and simply let it drift behind him, keeping the water in his grasp for now.
He grunted again, using his biceps to pull the rings along their elastic bands, paused momentarily, then said "Thirty-six." He panted for a moment, then tugged and released the elastic rings four more times in rapid succession, pushing himself to the end of the exercise routine. "Thirty-seven. Thirty-eight. Thirty-nine. Forty." He stopped speaking, panting quietly to himself. As absentmindedly as before, his tail came up and around his shoulder again, and he found himself draining the remaining water in several sips.
"Computer, release exercise equipment." He spoke to the empty air in a crisp, commanding voice, as deep as the sounds he made when he grunted. At the last word, there was a snapping sound and the rings around his wrist unclamped, as did the ones around his ankles. With a whirring noise, both identical pairs of rings withdrew into the walls of the room. Small metal covers rolled into place over the spot where they had emerged from, leaving only a small sign to indicate where they lay when dormant.
Rajit floated in the center of his cabin, his muscles adjusting to the feeling of being used for strenuous exercise for the first time in almost two weeks. The computer had reminded him each day for the previous week that he was past due for such a session. Although his species lost muscle mass at a far slower rate than that of the humans that had bred his ancestors, he still needed to exercise weekly to maintain his edge.
His exercise done, he reached for a rung set in the wall perpendicular to his body. Zero gravity living allowed for no real concept of 'up' or 'down', leaving spatial relations to be determined solely by the position of a person in respect to where he was intending to go. He tugged on the ring lightly, swinging his body over to the screen embedded in the wall near his hand.
"Temperature optimal, all sensors check normal," he muttered to himself, reading from the screen. It helped him to at least keep his mouth in use, so as not to feel completely isolated. "Cryo-pods read all systems normal. Fuel levels at optimum level for this stage of acceleration. All ship-board systems are in the green." He ran through the checklist slowly, double-checking each indicator.
"Accelerating in five, four, three, two, one, mark."
His finger stabbed at a certain spot on the panel, pushing at it as if it were a button. There was a loud clanging noise, and the entire room shuddered momentarily. This was always his least favorite part. A deep thrumming noise began to emerge from the wall in front of him, a bass rumble that sounded throughout the entire ship.
Slowly, over the course of the next minute or so, he began to feel the effects of the acceleration. He reached above his head and grabbed a rung, holding tightly onto it. The pads of his feet began to move towards the wall from which the rumbling emerged. After another minute, he could feel the effects of the acceleration even stronger.
He sighed to himself, and let go of the rung. Acceleration provided by the engines created enough gravitational force that he drifted slowly down towards what had now become the floor, in what had previously been a room with no floor or ceiling. The rumbling picked up in volume almost as soon as his feet hit the floor. He could now feel the force of gravity tugging him downwards.
"Computer, steady acceleration at point four gravities." He spoke into the air again, the microphones buried in the walls picking up his voice and running it through a vocal recognition circuit. The rumbling beneath his feet leveled out, and the increasing pressure on his body slackened and did not increase again. He turned to his left and took a step under the force of gravity for the first time since the last period of acceleration almost one Earth month ago.
He resented the periods of acceleration with a fervor tending towards hate. His ancestors had found themselves brought into space for experimentation by the early explorers. While so many others of their mammalian counterparts had panicked at the first experience of weightlessness, something unique to the common housecat had been apparent almost immediately. Felines had suffered none of the ill effects of weightlessness; the innate spatial awareness that had proved so useful in falls on Earth seemed to give them an almost instinctual ability to work in space.
After centuries of futile attempts at exploration, a coalition of scientists had created the Pilot species, for that was what they were. While the humans lay motionless and mindless in their cryo-pods, Pilots like Rajit kept the great colony ships on track. Periodic acceleration allowed them to make minor course adjustments if necessary. As it was, each great ship reached a final velocity of almost three-quarters the speed of light before beginning the inexorable periods of slow deceleration.
The scientists who created the Pilots had further capitalized on the very feline ability of spending long periods of time doing very little. Rajit was one of the Pilots who had inherited this aspect in spades, spending the majority of his time resting in one of the specially designed sleeping hammocks, his eyes focused on the screen placed almost a foot from his sleeping quarters. Buried deep within the computer's massive data storage banks was almost every book that had been scanned into the world's largest databases. He had an effectively endless supply of reading material, something that he had spent large amounts of time using during the first three years of the voyage. Besides the reading material, he spent a lot of time simply sitting and thinking, trying to stave off the isolation. The life of a Pilot was a lonely one, but it was an isolation coded too deeply to remove.
Rajit walked slowly, though not painfully, towards his sleeping hammock on the other side of the room. The ship had been designed so that the hammock was still useful, even when under acceleration. He settled down in the hammock, grunting with the effort of fighting the minor gravity after weeks in zero gravity. His tail lifted from behind him, still clutching the empty water bulb. He reached out his left hand and took it between two fingers. The blackness of his fur refracted through the canister, turning the few drops left a murky color, until he lifted it and placed it in a specially designed slot in the wall, where it promptly refilled itself and sat there, waiting for another use.
He turned his head to the side and stared at the panel in the wall. Checking that the acceleration had not changed the status of any of his readouts, he yawned softly, tilted his head straight again, and closed his eyes.
***
Two days later, Rajit was jolted from a short nap by the loud wail of an alarm klaxon. The sound triggered an instinct deep inside of him, and he rose from supine to erect in the hammock almost instantaneously. The klaxon continued to sound, coming from the wall across from the hammock. He tensed the muscles of his back and legs and sprang out of his resting place in one bound, landing on all fours in front of the panel that was flashing bright red.
"Computer, terminate alarm and bring up cause on panel four." He barked the command quickly, his eyes focused on the screen in front of him. The piercing noise finally came to a halt, and lines of data began to appear in the display. His eyes scanned from line to line as it appeared. "Proximity alarm? What the hell? There are no planetary bodies or charted comets anywhere within a hundred billion miles of here." His tail twitched furiously behind him in agitation. "Computer, give me details on the object that triggered the proximity alarm."
The data scrolled across the screen, listing relative velocity, approximate size, and various other statistics. The computer's long-range sensors had picked up the object roughly fifteen million miles ahead of his ship. Initial bounce-back information from the sensors recorded the object's size as roughly three hundred times the size of his own ship. That alone had triggered the alarm klaxon, being massive enough to have enough gravitational pull to alter, even slightly, the ship's flight path. Such a minor deviation would become magnified by the sheer length of the voyage, causing the ship to end up in some uncharted region of the galaxy.
The more Rajit studied the data, the more confused he became. His was not the first ship to use this route to reach his destination, and none had reported such a gargantuan object. Whatever the object was, it wasn't a planet. There was no solar system within several light years of his position. His first thought had been that it was an asteroid or comet, but as he studied the computer's readouts, even this much more sensible idea began to waver in his head.
The largest comet ever discovered had been roughly two-thirds this object's size. The astronomers who discovered it were convinced that it was not a traditional comet, but the remains of some planet's moon, smashed out of orbit by a collision dating back to the universe's creation. This object, however, displayed none of the characteristics of a comet.
Perhaps the strangest thing Rajit found, as he dug through the data, was the fact that the object appeared to be accelerating. This far from any charted stellar bodies, there should not have been enough of a gravitational pull to account for even a fraction of the acceleration the object appeared to be experiencing. The occasional small asteroids or comets that occurred almost always moved at a constant velocity. The object that the computer's sensors had picked up seemed to be accelerating on a vector perpendicular to his current path. A few quick calculations showed that at his current acceleration, he would pass within several million miles of the object, enough to alter his course by approximately one degree.
Rajit stood back from the display screen, his tail twitching agitatedly behind him. The standard procedure for proximity alerts called for the ship to maneuver to avoid the object. The problem with the simple procedures was that they had never been designed to be used during interstellar travel; the chance that a Pilot would encounter anything between the solar systems was considered so minute that no real thought had been given as what to do. Thus Rajit was stuck with extremely vague instructions, and almost no specific orders telling him what to do.
He sighed heavily, lifting a paw to his muzzle and brushing at his chin in a gesture acquired unconsciously from the few humans he could call his friends. He thought for a moment, trying to work out a plan of action, aware that everything he did now would be reviewed by the Board of Pilot Affairs upon his arrival three years hence. Facing the wall, he spoke tentatively. "Computer, how long until the ship's telescopes can pick up a clear picture of the object?"
A number popped up on his screen. "Right... two hours. Guess I'll have to wait until then," he muttered to himself. He took several steps to the left, walking along the wall of the room until he came to another panel set in the wall. This panel was higher than the previous one, placed several inches above his head. He reached up and pressed a button on the side of it, turning it on. "Computer, on my mark begin the standard engine deactivation sequence."
After a second, a small warning message popped onto the screen, reminding him that this phase of the voyage wasn't due for another three days. He pressed another button by the panel, erasing the message. "Computer, begin sequence." His words were crisp and clear, brooking no argument from the primitive artificial intelligence that governed his ship's computers.
By degrees, the rumblings from beneath his feet began to slacken. He took a quick step over to his personal area, quickly gathering up the few objects he had left out during the two days with the small amount of gravity. He stowed each object in a specially designed compartment as rapidly as he could. Already he could feel himself lightening, each step taking him farther. Five minutes after his command, the rumbling finally ceased, leaving him floating in zero gravity.
He let out a very loud, very satisfied sigh, then winced lightly as he felt his spine begin to uncompress, now freed from the weight of his body on it. Although he had been born in gravity, like every other Pilot he was much more at home floating in the center of his room, weightless.
Freed from the bonds of gravity, his tail rose to latch around a rung behind him, and he flexed the muscles in it, pulling himself backwards. Having already made his decision, he reached for his hammock and tugged himself into its webbing, now floating without pressure. He reached for the safety straps on the side of the hammock, slipped them around his waist, and paused. "Computer, set alarm for one hour and fifty-five minutes from now." Having said that, he closed his eyes and settled back, returning to the nap from which he had been so rudely awoken.
***
Visual confirmation of the object's strangeness came roughly two hours later, along with a muffled curse as the computer's alarm forced Rajit from his sleep for the second time that day. The bleating of the alarm drew him from his hammock and across the room to the panel on the wall. "Computer, bring up visuals," he commanded, stifling a yawn. He held onto a rung on the wall with one claw, stabilizing himself so he could keep an eye on the panel.
A picture materialized on the screen in front of him. Seen from a much closer view, the object seemed oddly shaped. "Not a comet at all," he muttered to himself, eyes picking out minute details in the image. The object was a rough ovoid, tapered at one end but slightly more bulged at the other. Like some sort of egg, the visuals showed the object spinning on its axis almost uniformly.
He stared at the strange ovoid for another moment, then narrowed his eyes and leaned forward to get a better look at a spot on one of the ends. "Computer, enhance and zoom image at my mark." He lifted his hand towards the screen and placed a finger lightly on the screen, drawing out the area he wanted enlarged. His eyes narrowed as the image grew on the screen.
"What the hell is this thing," he muttered to himself, twitching a finger along the screen to slide the view from one side of the object to the other. Closer analysis seemed to show a number of protrusions coming out of the sides, like the arms of a giant creature but frozen like crystals. It was like nothing he had ever seen before, out of the thousands of meteors and comets he had examined under the duress of extreme boredom.
As his eyes roamed over every inch of the screen, he could feel a growing sense of excitement rising in his chest. The fur on the back of his neck was sticking straight up from his body, standing on end. With each passing moment, he became more convinced that he'd made the discovery of a lifetime. It couldn't be, it had never been proven, but here was evidence that it just might be true.
Aliens! After centuries of space travel, and not a single shred of evidence showing the existence of extraterrestrials, they had almost faded into the world of myth, as far from possibility as finding a dragon dining with a unicorn while sitting on top of a pot of gold at the bottom of a rainbow. Rajit, having been trained for years in the strictest mental rituals, had lost all of the belief in aliens before he had even crossed into his sixth year as a cub. Likewise, to make serious comments in the academic community as to the existence of intelligent alien life was to be laughed out of academia.
To Rajit, standing in front of the monitor with the mysterious object large on the screen, such arguments were rapidly being thrown out. Surely nothing natural could have caused those huge protrusions, jutting at ninety-degree angles from the surface of the ovoid and extending half a kilometer in each direction. Sensors showed that each of the protrusion eventually tapered to a point, like a massive spire towering over the surface of the planetoid.
Rajit's hands began to shake slightly, and his tail clenched tightly around the rung in the wall. Even if this thing was just some sort of freak asteroid, he needed to get a closer look at it. If it turned out to be the first sign of alien intelligence ever detected he'd not only be rich beyond his wildest dreams, but all these long years of isolation between the stars would finally have paid off.
He continued to scan the panel, then paused for a moment to think. Uncurling his tail from the rung, he pushed off the wall lightly, gliding towards a small panel set in the wall beneath him. He reached out with one hand and caught the rung next to the panel with one finger, tugging himself the rest of the way there, footpaws wrapping dexterously around the rung placed at an equal distance away from the panel on the other side.
"Computer, bring up trajectory of the ship and match it with that of the object. I want to see where we're going to intersect." Right now, his problem lay with the fact that he didn't have full control of his ship. The job of a Pilot was to keep the ship on course, to keep it facing the right direction, and to make sure that nothing came in contact with it over the course of the voyage. Cryogenic stasis was a delicate procedure, and as of now there was no way of automatic awakening, without a medical support staff on hand. Thus, a Pilot had very little to do in-between solar systems, where the auto-pilot took over except for small issues of acceleration and minor course correction. Even if Rajit wanted to slow down the ship for an appreciable length of time, he could do no more than cancel the acceleration or alter the course a fraction of a degree. Safety procedures built into the ship had shown that this was far more than necessary to prevent any sort of collision in deep space.
All of this flashed through Rajit's mind as he watched the trajectory of his ship be traced out onto the panel, a line heading through a three-dimensional field as projected on the screen by the computer. The computer quickly filled in the expected trajectory of the strange object. On his current course, he would pass within three hundred thousand miles of the object. At the speeds he was going, there was simply no way to bring the ship close enough to investigate the object for as much time as he wanted.
He paused for a moment, then his tail contracted reflexively as a solution presented itself. Hidden in the depths of the ship was a smaller vessel, designed for the Pilot as an escape vehicle if ever necessary. Most of the time, the shuttle sat unused, hidden away behind several bulkheads. But the important thing was that it contained a powerful engine and enough power to get him near enough to the object to collect measurements and accurate data.
He turned back towards the panel, reaching up towards the two lines at their intersection point. Almost absentmindedly, he traced out a path that would take him from the ship, to the object, and back. It was going to be tough to do in the allotted time. With his ship unable to do more than simply continue at its current velocity, he would have to accelerate towards his destination, do whatever he was planning to do, and then catch his own ship as it coasted by. The shuttle could only carry relatively small amounts of fuel, so he had to be mindful of the fact that he would be limited by a strict schedule, or else be stranded on his return voyage.
The next words out of his mouth were brisk commands to the ship's Computer to calculate exactly how much time he would be able to spend in examination. The answer, when it came, was not as bad as he had expected; if he left in approximately two hours, he would have just under fifteen hours to make all the observations he wanted. Leaving his tail wrapped around a support rung, he stiffened the prehensile appendage and used it to swing himself across the room in one smooth motion, a practiced maneuver that was the most efficient way to make it from one side to the other. "Time to start packing," he muttered to himself, opening a locker and getting to work.
***
The following two hours passed rapidly as he gathered cameras, microphones, telescopes, data recorders, audio recorders, and anything that would be available to document the, well, the whatever it was. As he worked, he managed to hold his excitement in check, but one topic kept rising to the front of his thoughts. Rajit was a Pilot, and as a Pilot had a number of expectations. Humanity had raised the Pilots not as a species of sniveling underlings, forced to do the biddings of the Men on high, but as an equal match to his own highs and lows. Nothing, however, was that simple. The life of a Pilot was a life of solitude. At the relativistic speeds that each ship traveled, a Pilot could not afford to become known as anything more than a drone that emerged from deep space as his own entry in the history books. Mankind viewed the Pilots as a worthy species, but a species with neither a past, nor a future.
A Pilot existed solely to be a Pilot. Though some showed the aptitude, the peculiar configuration of a Pilot's digits presented any from becoming doctors, or any other such precise profession. The bones that kept a Pilot strong and free from osteoporosis after years in space were the very same bones that prevented them from standing upright under Earth's harsh gravity. Pilots were thus relegated solely to the space stations, or the moon colonies, placed where they could be kept out of sight from the vast majority of the human race.
Pilots began their training at a very young age, and were kept in the training until past adolescence, when some went on to more specialized zero-gravity work and the rest continued to train as Pilots. This intense life meant that in the centuries since the first Pilots took mankind across the great void, there was still not a single Pilot who had gained any measure of celebrity. There were no heroes among the Pilots, no great leaders, no villains either. Thus, while they held every legal right that humans had held, they were relegated to the dustbin of history.
As Rajit prepared for his trip to the object he couldn't help but reflect on his species, as well as the vain hope that this, this would be the chance for his species to pull itself up. It wasn't just the fact that, were it really an alien artifact, Rajit would be rich beyond his wildest dreams. It was the fact that for the first time, a Pilot would go down as being a pioneer, an explorer. A Pilot, feline in human form, bred for one purpose, would be known for more than what he had done in servitude to mankind.
"Pilots tango with Solitude out there in the deeps." The words, spoken by an unknown writer in the early years of the Pilots, rang in Rajit's ears. Every Pilot, from the smallest cub to the oldest spacecat lounging around a space station's bars late at night, knew what it was like to be alone. Even in a lover's embrace, or at a family gathering before a Pilot ventured out, solitude was a constant companion. To be the first to discover alien life, to be a Pilot and to know that the rest of Humanity would know who you were, would be to scream in the face of Solitude, to stop the tango, to go whirling off into the circle of watchers and start a new dance.
Rajit opened the hatch of his shuttle and stepped in, the rift inside of him growing smaller by the moment.
***
Six hours later, the shuttle had shifted into an orbit six thousand miles around the artifact. And artifact it was, as had become clear almost an hour before. Rajit had stayed with his paws clutching tightly to the controls of the shuttle as the spacecraft grew in the viewscreen, rising towards him like a behemoth. Each of the spires that jutted from the surface contained thousands upon thousands of smaller spires, each jutting at a different angle. The impression he was left with was that of a giant porcupine, quills erect and ready.
Rajit's stomach, on the other hand, was about as far from steady as possible. For the first time in his life, he was feeling spacesick. The magnitude of the find was so vast that he was having a hard time dealing with it. It had been fine when it was still just a theory, but to have the proof of alien life shoved down his throat like this was almost too much for him. If he had been more feline, he would have been hacking up a fur ball about right now.
The cameras were rolling as he continued to orbit the object. He has half-way around the object, circling along the thick part of the ovoid, roughly at its equator. Unfortunately for him, the past hour of flight had provided nothing different than the first few minutes. The spire-studded surface rolled past beneath the shuttle, without any change. Close magnification of one of the images he had taken had shown that even the smaller spires were studded with their own protrusions. They glinted oddly in the small amount of light his engines gave off. Each little trough and valley in the spires seemed to devour the brightness. The only places that allowed any light to reflect were the places where meteorites had knocked some of the spires off, exposing a dull metallic surface beneath.
Rajit had his proof, but the puzzle of this giant object was still hanging before him. What was it for? Why was it here? He sighed to himself, tail twitching moodily from side to side. The euphoria of his discovery hadn't faded entirely, but the sheer monotony of these spires was starting to get to him. He flipped a switch on the control panel, and the shuttle twitched around him, acceleration pushing him back into his seat. He fired several retro-rockets, and the shuttle began to turn perpendicular to its original path, heading towards one of thinner ends of the ovoid. Everything shook around him as the main engines on the shuttle fired, and he settled in for another hour of watching the spires go by.
***
A loud beeping noise roused him from the fitful nap he had accidentally lapsed into. The spires had proved almost hypnotic, and he had set the computer to wake him up when he neared ten thousand miles of the artifact's pole. He sat up a little straighter in his chair and turned to the monitoring equipment, looking down at the surface of the object as it flashed beneath him. Almost instantly, he noticed that the number of spires had lessened considerably, from a gargantuan forest to what seemed like plain of smaller spires.
His eyes scanned the surface, looking for some sort of pattern, something to distinguish this area from the others in any way but the density of the spires. He was so intent on looking for something blindingly obvious that it took him almost ten minutes to realize that the spires had begun to be laid out in vast rows, stretching in front of him and behind him. The change had come so gradually as to be almost unnoticeable, but there was a definite pattern, a definite sense that all the spires were leading somewhere. He pulled back the magnification, and the effect was startling. Thousands of rows of spires were visible, heading towards the object's pole. Doing a quick mental calculation, Rajit figured that at their current rate, the spires would converge at a point roughly fifty miles from the absolute pole.
He finally had a point to go to, and his tail lifted from behind him towards the control panel above his head, stiffening so that he could push a series of buttons. His fingers danced over the control panel in front of him. Outside the ship, a row of retro-rockets fired, tilting the ship towards the convergence point of the spires. His tail lowered behind him again, resting in the air for now. He would be at the pole in minutes, so he kept his senses sharp, watching every screen, double checking that this was in fact being recorded.
The rows of spires stretched out beneath him, the distances between them narrowing as they raced towards their destination. The closer he got to the pole, the more difficult it became to distinguish individual rows from their neighbors. He spent a few minutes idly coming up with reasons for the odd configurations of spires, but he could think of nothing.
Something flickered on the horizon in the direction he was heading, and his eyes glued themselves to the viewscreen. His tail twitched around the throttle lever, and he gave it a tug, turning the engines off and letting the ship coast at constant speed. He glided towards the converging rows, and activated the telescope attached to the shuttle's outside camera. His eyes locked on the spires, and he drew in a deep breath in one gulp, stifling a gasp at what he saw.
The shuttle was coming up on a massive hole in the artifact. Every marching column of spires was headed towards the rim of the hole, which the computer noted as being located exactly on the artifact's pole. Rajit's heart hammered in his chest as he took a few quick measurements. The hole in the surface was massive; a few bits of information flashed on the screen, indicating that the diameter of the hole was exactly one hundred miles across. The rim was bent into a perfect circle, and as the shuttle moved closer, it became apparent that the spires didn't just stop at the edge, but instead continued over the side and down into the middle.
Rajit sat back in his chair and reached for a control, cutting the throttle and firing the nose-rockets to slow down his shuttle. He wanted a close look at the shaft, not a quick flyby. This was what he had come for. His fingers close around the various buttons and levers of the control board, tail coming from behind him to grab onto the upper panel. He stabbed at a button and the ship's nose tilted towards the artifact, heading for the rim.
As he got closer, he noticed that the spires nearest to him were more rounded than the ones on the artifact's equator. They looked more used, almost smoothed down by the passage of time. His entire body was shivering as he got closer and closer to the point where he'd be able to see over the rim and down into the deep hole. The fur was standing up on the back of his neck, and if Pilots had been able to, he would have been sweating.
Less than one thousand miles away, and at a pace of twenty miles per second, he'd be there in fifty seconds. His entire attention was focused on the viewscreen as he got closer and closer. Off on the side of the control panel, a small warning light suddenly flared red, but he was too caught up in the moment to notice. Twenty seconds left, and a second warning light, close to the first, suddenly popped on, flashing steadily. He ignored this one too, counting down under his breath as he got closer. With fifteen seconds left to go, an alarm klaxon sounded about one foot away from his head, knocking him from his semi-trance.
The two flashing lights now drew his attention as his piloting reflexes kicked in. He noticed which two lights were active, and shouted to the empty cabin. "What do you mean, gravitational anomaly?" Six seconds until the shuttle arced over the walls of the shaft and into space above it, and Rajit's eyes widened in shock as a small panel above his head lit up like a Christmas tree. Three seconds left, and his tail shot from behind his head towards the throttle lever, moving almost unconsciously, but it was too late.
The shuttle shot past the rim like a cliff-diver throwing himself out above the waters, seemingly hovering in the air at the apex before tilting towards the embrace of the sea and plummeting downwards. Likewise, for a brief moment the shuttle sailed peacefully into the open space above the hole, until a giant hand reached out and grabbed it, pulling it towards the middle of the shaft. Rajit was thrown back against his seat and his view tilted down towards the bottom of the hole.
There was no control of the shuttle now, plummeting as it was towards the center of the artifact. Outside the shuttle, he could see the inside walls of the hole flash past, rows of spires twisting away from orderliness and mutating into varying patterns that emerged and subsided with a mathematically perfect chaos. The pressure on Rajit eased slightly, enough for one hand to snake out and activate the retro-rockets on the base of the shuttle in an attempt to slow his descent. There was a loud whine, and the switch he had pulled shorted out, sparks flying from the panel and onto his fur. He yelped loudly and yanked his hand back, the motion knocking his head up.
He gasped loudly and let out an almost guttural moan of fear as his eyes locked on the viewscreen showing the cameras from the bottom of the shuttle. He wasn't in a simple hole; he was in a tunnel so large that it stretched out of sight beneath him. At the far end of the tunnel, there was a glint, and he realized that he was looking all the way through the artifact and out the other side. He was nothing, a dwarf, a speck of dust in comparison to this tunnel, boring through from one pole to the other.
Like it or not, he was hurtling towards the other side, and if his instruments were to be believed, he was doing it at a far faster pace than his shuttle was even capable of. Warning lights were flashing on every single panel, but were concentrated the most in the panel that had first lit up, indicating that he was stuck in some sort of massive gravitational field. The field had been unable to be detected from anything further than three or four hundred miles or he would never have gotten close enough to it. Various ideas sleeted through his head as he struggled to find some way to explain what was happening.
Propulsion! The Computer back on his ship had indicated the artifact was actually accelerating, which implied that it was under some sort of force. Rajit's heart sank deep within his chest as he realized that he must have been caught in some sort of giant engine, hurling this ship through space by channeling gravitational forces. He shuddered as he realized that if he was right, and if he had somehow approached the artifact from the other pole, he might have been torn apart by the backwash of the interstellar engine. Instead, it was only luck, if you could call it such, which had brought him to the intake, sucking him down into the depths of the artifact.
He checked his instruments again, and noticed that at the speeds he was traveling, after a mere five minutes hurtling down the tunnel, he was already half-way through. His shuttle had accelerated from what was almost rest to a phenomenally fast speed, with enough acceleration that he was still pinned in his chair. At this rate, he calculated, he'd be thrown out the other side of the artifact in just a few minutes. The walls of the tunnel were a featureless blur now, reflecting back some of the light produced by his shuttle.
The other end of the tunnel was fast approaching, and his shuttle showed no signs of deceleration. His fur stood on end, and he reached out both of his hands to grasp the sides of his seat, holding himself tight. If he was right, he'd be thrown out of the leviathan engine's exhaust like a piece of paper thrown from an airplane, battered by conflicting forces.
He could see the exit of the tunnel clearly now, the marching rows of spires visibly lining the rim. He made sure his cameras were still active, and that he was still receiving footage, and he leaned back in his chair, holding as tightly as he can. This was going to get rough. Eight thousand miles away, then fifteen seconds later only eight hundred miles from the exhaust. The ship jolted as it cleared the rim of the tunnel, and for a moment he thought everything was fine. Then there was a loud screeching noise and every panel in his vehicle exploded in sparks. This time, much harder than before, a giant hand grabbed the shuttle and shook it, and Rajit's head whipped forward, the restraints holding it in place snapping taut just a second too late. His forehead hit the front console panel, and everything went black.
***
Eight hours later, the main engine coughed, sputtered, and burst into life. Rajit's head throbbed from where he had hit the control panel, but he had spent every hour since regaining consciousness working on restoring the main systems. The artifact was already receding into the distance behind him, but he had all of his tapes, all of his proof. He activated the steering thrusters and turned back towards the main ship, still sailing through the void on the same path he had left it on. As he limped back towards his only home, battered and bruised, a smile crossed his muzzle. Only one year to go, then he'd be at his destination. And it would be his final destination. Inside his heart, Solitude lifted its hand for one last dance before the Pilot whirled off into the crowd of dancers around him.