CHAPTER 13

ARIANA

FINDING CLUES

Ariana Barns liked being a simulation. Without a physical body she wasn’t limited by biological functioning. She didn’t have to eat, she didn’t have to exercise, and she didn’t have to go to the bathroom. She didn’t even have to move if she didn’t want to.

And so, in a way, that’s what she did. For an unusual amount of time, she stayed in one location with her eyes closed, concentrating. Ever since the other team members had departed in their spacecraft, she hadn’t moved from the bridge of the rotating space station in the system. She only recalled opening her eyes twice to see out the window of the deck to glance at the aliens’ vessel.

Had it been weeks or months? she wondered to herself.

With no one around her, she didn’t feel the social pressure to move. She also told herself that, in a way, she was moving because she remotely controlled probes and other devices around the system. So that was her moving about.

She was working on three projects concurrently. She had eleph-ANTs deconstructing the orbiting platform and recycling the material to make a small rocket, which she would use to leave the system when she was done with her research. The second item on her list was properly investigating the alien vessel to better understand it and perhaps the aliens themselves. The final piece, and probably the most important, was she wanted to hack her way into the alien spacecraft. She wanted to get inside of its electronics, to understand how it ticked. And maybe, to identify how it worked. She hoped she might also unlock some alien technology.

Unfortunately for her, she hadn’t found the brains of the ship. It was a mystery. From what she could see, she’d explored every accessible compartment in the spacecraft. And not once did she find a control panel or even some wires that she could plug into. Any human ship would have at least had control panels or something.

She hadn’t yet resorted to cutting her way through the ship. She wanted to do that as a last resort. She still expected to take control of the ship and wanted to fly it all the way back to the others. She couldn’t control the automatic smile on her face as she thought about showing up to Peter in an alien spacecraft.

She had to remind herself that alien meant alien. So it was unlikely they would build in a similar way to humans. She had a few hundred ANTs racing around the alien ship, pulsating different frequencies on the electromagnetic spectrum. Her assumption was that maybe all connection on the ship was done wirelessly. So by racing around the ship with a strong antennae, the ANTs might trigger a panel or whatever to send a pulse back.

And then at least she’d know a location to start investigating. She mentally decided to give it all another month; if she hadn’t found a control panel or something she could start interfacing with by then, she’d start cutting holes in walls and tunneling her way throughout the alien ship until she found something she could hack into.

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She had found one thing though. It was interesting. There were definitely some clear signs about the origin of this starship.

One side of the ship had clearly been subjected to a lot of radiation bombarding it.

When high-energy particles from a star or from cosmic background radiation impact the surface of metals, a change in the metal occurs. The more there is, the more obvious it becomes. In the same way sun damage occurs on the sides of a sofa that are always in direct sunlight, the structure of a metal that is always in sunlight will also change—although much more subtly over time.

She had been researching the changes in metal composition around the ship. There were some clear signs of where the ship came from in the way the metals had changed.

A spacecraft typically always accelerated from one side of the ship, so she assumed this one would too. The engines fired the same way; they needed to in order to pick up speed—assuming the alien didn’t possess some advanced alternative propulsion method.

When leaving a star system, one side of the spacecraft would always face the same direction. There was always a side that was constantly being bombarded with X-rays and ultraviolet light from the star.

Ariana analyzed the changes in metal and confirmed just that. The side of the ship with the engines also showed the most radiation damage.

Ariana smiled at how brilliant the concept was. By having access to this ship, she basically knew what type of star the alien came from.

Red dwarf stars, which were the most common type of star in the galaxy, emitted more longer-frequency light. But bigger stars, on the other hand, emitted more light at higher frequencies. The bigger the star, the more high-energy particles, X-rays, and ultraviolet light that was emitted from the star.

Ariana compared metal from all around the ship. She ran those samples through different simulations. It was clear that the radiation damage experienced by the alien vessel was produced by a G-type star. A good proportion of this spaceship’s life was spent in near proximity to a G-type star, a star of similar size to Earth’s Sun.

Now either that meant this spacecraft had visited Earth recently, or more likely the planet this alien spacecraft originated from was a G-type star. There were fewer than ten of these stars near enough to them that they could have traveled the distance.

Although that was speculation because, if this alien had some sort of warp drive or any other FTL travel method, then the range of potential stars was huge.

Ariana loaded that piece of information and data on everything else she had learned so far onto a tight-beam communication and sent that information to Atlas.

Then quickly she realized she probably needed to explain her findings, as she wasn’t sure Atlas would immediately understand the importance of this finding.

Ariana opened her eyes and instructed an ANT to record her. Before speaking, she faced away from the window and had the ANT move its camera.

Ariana now looked like she was standing on the bridge of the orbiting platform, and out the window the alien spacecraft was visible.

“I’ve made a discovery. The aliens traveled to us from a G-type star. I’ve included that data on how I made that discovery as an appendix to this message. I’m not sure if that’s their home system or not. But this ship definitely came from a system with a yellow dwarf in the center. Atlas, I know there’s a telescope in the system you’re going to. I suggest you point it at the ten closest stars of that size and see if you can spot anything unusual.

“I’ve scanned the databases for information about all the G-type stars near us and couldn’t find anything unusual. But we know the aliens had complete control of our computer systems. It would not have been an issue for them to doctor what we know.

“My suggestion, if you have a look again, is to use the transit method to see if you can identify any biosignatures on any of the planets.

“Let’s see if we can find out where these aliens come from. Let’s find the Atua’s home world.”