I’m in the cargo hold checking out the rover one more time. Above me the stars are shining steadily, below me the engine thrums. But soon it will stop, and I’ll be just kilometers from something bigger than I thought I would ever see in my lifetime.
Once I made the decision to search this baby out, finding it was close to inevitable: It’s huge, it’s almost one hundredth of the moon’s volume. The advance probe spotted it only two months after launch, I couldn’t believe it at the time. I thought we had stumbled upon another proto-Pluto object. But as the probe got closer, it became clear this was it! The Honeycomb Comet, and no other!
The engines stop, “All set,” Announces Honey. I bring the rover out of the cargo bay and launch for the Honeycomb.
As I round my ship, there it is: Shining pure white in the sun’s faint light--at this distance the sun looks like just another star, it’s bright, but no longer a disk, just another point of light in a dark space filled with points of light.
This huge rock is lens shaped with one rounded face and one fragmented face--clearly this used to be bigger, and it got clobbered. The fragmented face is pocked, but the pocks are not deeply shadowed as they would be if this was the inner solar system. The shadows from the sun are faint because the light from the billions of other stars in all directions is nearly as strong.
The probes have been analyzing the Honeycomb for months while I closed with it. It’s very roughly a hundredth of the moon in volume, and scarcely a hundredth of its density. It’s about the density of Styrofoam--which is why it’s nothing close to round in spite of its massive size. Most of the rounded side is dark gray speckled with whiter spots--rather ordinary planetary looking--this is a “space weathered” face. The fragmented side is pure white, white with small colored splotches in it. After I look at a while, I laugh! With a mottled gray round side and a white flat side with small colored splotches, it resembles ... a cupcake with sprinkles on top! It’s rotating about once every 30 days. There’s a slight magnetic field, and the density seems quite uniform.
The probes have been trying to orbit the thing, but it’s so diffuse that it’s been really tough. It’s like trying to orbit a gas cloud.
I don’t call it a comet anymore, but I’m not sure what to call it. It’s not a moon, not an asteroid, not a comet ... for now it’s just Honeycomb. I’m coming in near the center of rotation on the fragmented side.
This time I’m armed for bear: I’ve got a couple day’s supply of food, water, and air, lots of cargo containers that can launch back to the ship on their own, and a full battery of recording instruments. Call me silly, call me irresponsible, but I’m sure I’m not going to find this expedition dull!
The face looms in front of me. It’s rugged and pocked and huge! I’m a spacer and I’ve approached more than my share of smaller-than-planetary bodies. None have looked as imposing. Asteroids seem to shrink as you approach them because they’re rounded. Approaching comets is like a scene out of a mystery movie because you’re always approaching through the mists surrounding them. Nothing has spread across my view screen like this.
I land, and grip the surface. It’s the same as the fragment I found earlier: A porous, boney-like substance. I’ve landed just “down gravity” of a massive pock. I climb up and walk in.
The pock is a huge tunnel roughly a kilometer across. The entrance is bare, but as I go deeper detritus collects. By a half kilometer in, the “man-madeness”, or “alien-madeness”, is decisive. I’m looking at a massive highway of some nature. The walls are lined with entrances and “porches” of some nature.
“Down” does not seem well defined in this structure. As I walk the corridor I can’t determine which way was “down” when this was inhabited. It’s disconcerting. Every man-made spaceship has at least one definable down, it may have more than one, but it has at least one--this doesn’t seem to.
As I go deeper into the Honeycomb the signs of ruin become more obvious. This thing is old, and whatever broke it in pieces broke up a lot of the internals as well. The “floor” I’m walking on is a thick layer of trash--whatever was delicate on this ship is now the trashy floor, and only the robust structures are still attached to the walls. I would like to find out if there’s some layering to this trash--some difference in the composition as you go down--but I’ll hold off on digging until I’ve pretty much walked through this corridor to two kilometers deep. There’s so much to see. ...
It’s about 500 meters in that I find my first body.
It’s a suit actually, mostly buried, with a body still inside. The suit looks like a dead dog when I first see it, dead with its feet up in the air. When I close I find it’s more insectoid with six legs, two are still buried. It’s about dog-size, though, and there’s a big hole in it. Inside is a desiccated cat-size corpse that looks nothing like the suit, or a cat. In fact, as I look closely, I find there are two bodies inside, both different from each other.
I shudder, there’s an incredible thrill running through my body, “Jesus, I’ve done it. I’m the first person to discover an alien.” And this is no simple single cell alien living under a rock, this is a full fledged technological alien with a huge space ship!
This is really more than I can take. The implications ... The implications ... I’m in a daze as I carefully record the surroundings and dig the suit out of the trash. I pack it in the first auto return container and send it back to the ship.
I break for lunch. It gives me time to think. I decide to root around here a little longer. Who knows what brought this little fella here, or what ended his life here. One thing I’m sure of: If something living killed it, it’s dead now. This place has been in hard vacuum and space cold for eons.
I walk around a little and look the area over carefully. I set up the neutron analyzer for directional analysis. Up until now it’s been on omni-directional and recording the macro characteristics of the terrain I’ve been walking over. The results have been mostly silicates of magnesium and calcium, in other words, rather pure space rock. There have been traces of heavy metals, but nothing big enough for a hoary old prospector like myself to get excited about.
But wait! I’m not looking for a minable vein, now. This is a ship. I’m looking for artifacts. Small is OK.
I scan around, then walk a bit and scan again. I triangulate in on an interesting mix of carbon, iron, and copper that’s close to the surface, and head over to it. Normally I use the walker driller for sampling, but this time I get out of the walker and attack the likely spot with a shovel.
As I hoped, it’s another suited body, but clearly not the same design, or the same species inside! What am I looking at here? Was there some kind of space convention going on when this space ship blew up? I fish around further, but nothing else of interest shows up. It’s all just rubbley space rock. I send the second body back to the ship.
I continue my walk down the main corridor. There are small corridors springing off, not quite at random, but not in a strictly ordered way, either. At about the two kilometer mark, I come to a giant intersection--my corridor and two others of equal size come together in a huge dome. It could be a dome, or it could be a sphere that’s half filled with garbage that was the sphere’s contents. There are huge scars in the dome walls, and the scars seem to be where the wall had a color. I investigate the nearest one. There are scrape marks, it looks as if someone went after the wall with a backhoe. Mining something? Why would you mine something out of a spaceship? I take samples of the colored rock.
I don’t follow my corridor much further--I’m at my two kilometer limit. I turn back and take a cat nap in the intersection.
After I wake up I decide that now that I've seen the big, it’s time to see the small. I head back down “my” corridor and take the first major corridor to the left. I’m going to follow the “left hand rule” here. Traditionally I’ve found going left finds me things faster than going right, I get ahead of all those people who don’t think about it and turn right.
I pick the next sub-corridor off this one on the left. As the corridors get smaller, the trash thickness declines dramatically. I can start to see the floor in places. When I get to a corridor that’s three meters high, I see a door at the far end. It’s broken, but it was clearly a cover, the first I’ve seen. Inside is a room and in the room are containers--all broken and scattered. I touch one and it turns to dust. I photo the area and collect a sample in a baggie. I head on.
I pass more rooms filled with broken containers. I’m getting the impression this place was looted, and looted thoroughly. On a two meter corridor I come across a door still pretty much in tact. It’s partially open. I peer in with an optical fiber. This is a find! Scattered on the ground are more suits, and the “boxes” haven’t been fully ransacked.
I take my time. I check around the area as best I can. The corridor and rooms on either side are the usual “looted empty” of this corridor section. I look in and scan the room thoroughly from my position outside. The suits are not a pretty sight. This may have been a “last stand” that wasn’t successful, and the attacker used something highly corrosive to finish them off. The room is covered in white dust, and the suits are disintegrated so badly that they are mere outlines of their former selves. They turn to dust on touch.
The near boxes are in similar condition. But the far boxes look to be in better shape.
It’s been a million years, maybe, and corrosive, toxic chemicals don’t stay corrosive and toxic for a million years, even in hard vacuum--they corrode or toxify something, and turn harmlessly inert. Still ...
I scan the white powder, and wait for results. The white powder is about 80% phosphorous oxide--the attackers apparently were no-nonsense physical types. The bad news is that phosphorous oxide is highly corrosive, even after a million years. The good news is it’s not too hard to neutralize. The better news is that anything subtler, such as nasty germs or organic poisons, will not have survived millions of years of contact with the phosphorous oxide. This room is as sterile as the outside of the ship.
I need to get the door open. I push it experimentally, it wobbles a bit. It’s not going to be hard, but to be on the safe side, I pull it open with a long stretch of cable and the winch. It creaks open, and sheds a lot of white powder in the process. I’ve saved myself a fair amount of clean-up by being far away when that shedding happened.
I put disposable Baggies on the walker’s feet--a pain in the ass job, it takes for ever--and head in slowly.
Sigh, It’s gonna be dusty, I’ll have to head back after this and clean up the walker. I use a rake tool to scrape at the remains of powdered boxes and suits. I don’t bother to try and collect these suits, they’re just too damaged. At the back of the room I hit paydirt: there are five “boxes” that don’t fall apart under the rake’s touch.
I pull them out with the big grabber, brush as much dust off as I can, and put them, one each, into “sample homers” and send them back.
“Weeha! It’s time for this doggie to head home!” I shout, and I “gallop” the walker back to the ship.