[68419] ChaeyoungMu HerculisChaeyoung and Vis were walking along the grow racks on the aft-most spin deck of the Acheron Private Capital Group spacecraft, SSV Jiuhe. These grow racks, algae tanks, and herb gardens were on the topmost deck that was furthest from their sleeping quarters and the conference space, which made it, strangely, further away from “the outside” of space. Instead, they were nestled at the top of the spin deck, closer to the superconducting rings that kept the spin habs rotating, but also closest to the elevators that could take people to the storm cellars that were nestled around the ERR–AL drive, or to the microgravity command decks and cargo bays.Besides the small matter of spatial confusion from living in a spin deck, Chaeyoung had never been happier. They were achieving her dream. They were really in Mu Herculis for scientific study. Better than that, she had cajoled Acheron into hiring Vis, though ultimately Vis’s agronomy certification was more compelling than any argument. It was a good judgement call, and not just for Chaeyoung’s own self-interests. Vis had tended the extensive green spaces of Jiuhe wonderfully, and it had been an enormous morale boost for all the crew over the last one-hundred days in Mu Herculis. Walking the area with Vis always lifted Chaeyoung’s mood, fondly reminding her of the cramped military barracks on Ahtash where she had spent her earliest years as a kid with her friend Sania. More than that, it had become one of the few truly private places on Jiuhe where people could get away from their expedition colleagues to decompress.“If I have to sit through another meaningless status meeting on the laser altimeter and the state of our scan of this orbital area,” Chaeyoung groused at Vis. “I am going to scream.”Vis laughed and put a single finger up to her lips to shush her. “You know your bad vibes are going to make my little friends grow slower,” Vis nodded to the surrounding plants.She stared cut knives at Vis. “Yu gah A il kpafuka!“[34][Di Lingua]: I’ll ruin you! ↑“So dramatic,” Vis laughed again.“I don’t know why Flores wants to keep surveying this gas giant. We should have left Taeyanggu behind weeks ago.”“He probably just wants to make sure everyone understands every part of the survey jobs we’re going to do before we get further into the survey.”“Maybe. I just want to sling-shot toward the main belt and get on with it.”“So impatient. It’s only the third pass on image processing, right?”Chaeyoung smiled at her. “Ah! So, you do listen. Jiuhe’s computers and autos are doing most of the heavy lifting so far. I really don’t think there’s a lot to learn from what we collect here, at least not without a fuller picture of the system.”She looked up and squinted at the simulated sky peaking behind the red glow from the grow lights suspended above the tall stalks of plants on either side of their walking path. “I think we should just flag regions of interest and move on. We can analyze them later. Return if there’s anything truly interesting.” Vis continued to walk through the plants, dabbing each plant as they went. Carefully inspecting any leaves that looked problematic. She bent in close to poke at a particularly chlorotic leaf.“Anything exobiologically interesting so far?”She forced a laugh. “Ha! No.” Vis moved her finger away from the sickly leaf to point at Chaeyoung, looked up at her with EAR mods glowing a brilliant blue.“Admit it! You couldn’t be happier,” Vis said as she pressed her finger into Chaeyoung’s rib playfully.Chaeyoung blushed, grabbed Vis’s hand. “I admit that I feel like I am in my element.” They continued to wander through the thin halls of the green spaces. Racks of plants in metal boxes sat over clear algae tanks. Behind them were pisciculture tanks filled with various small fish. They walked along the entire pseudo-ecological space, going through one full circumference of the spin deck, and did not even see a single hint of another person along the curved horizon ahead of them. “Oke¸ I have to tell you a secret,” Vis said, suddenly seriously.She pulled Chaeyoung to a stop, then looked up at her wanly. “Wettin dey? What is it?” Chaeyoung frowned.Scanning both horizons to her left and right, Vis leaned down to whisper in Chaeyoung’s ear. “I just distilled the first batch of nyams.”Chaeyoung laughed. “What? When did you start?”With a turn, Vis twisted and put her hand over Chaeyoung’s mouth. “Shh! Abeg eheen, be quiet and follow me, otherwise I won’t share.”Vis moved her hand, planted a warm and delicate kiss on her lips.“Oke oke, I’ll be quiet.”Vis pulled her by her hand into an equipment hatch hidden behind the yam grow boxes. There was just enough room for the two of them to fit, even with the large still.“Nawa oh!” Chaeyoung gasped. “You’ve been very productive.” Vis smiled coyly and scooted around to the far side of the still, dipping out of view.“Do you leave it running when you’re not around?”“Ye, but it’s monitored.” Vis’s hand popped above the metal sphere of the still long enough to point at the top of the room where a multi-eyed crab auto was sitting. Red light eyes blinking, claws gently tapping to the rhythm of the drip drip of the still’s distillation process.“Ha!” Chaeyoung chuckled. “How much of your personal payload did this take?” She heard Vis rustling around behind the still, glasses clinking together, and a satisfying pouring sound.“Fabricated it all here. Barely used any of the stocks Acheron brought along,” Vis popped back up and held two beaker glasses filled with green liquid.“Why is it green?”Vis’s face burst into an all-consuming, toothy smile that made Chaeyoung blush. There was a deep blue glow in the silvery body of the still from her EAR mods as she walked over to hand over a glass filled with the distilled soja.“As you said, I have been busy. Gbam!” Chaeyoung took the beaker politely with both hands and tapped the rim of Vis’s beaker. “Gbam!”They each took a sip. It was cool against her tongue, sharp like any soja, with a refreshing herbal flavor. Then the spicy pepper hit her throat. She coughed.“Fen dan! Suya.”[35][Di Lingua]: Bastard! Spicy. ↑Vis laughed. “Careful, eheen.”“Did you infuse this with red peppers?” Vis smiled friskily over the lip of the beaker and took another sip of soja. “Something like that.”“A secret, huh?” she took another sip, this time prepared for the spicy kick, then put an arm around Vis’s waist and pulled their bodies together. “I guess I will have to interrogate you, ye?”***Chaeyoung was hungover at the next morning’s daily status meeting. She leaned her face onto the cool surface of the conference room as Patel was giving an update from the night analysis session to Dr. Flores. Except for Patel’s disheveled appearance in her lab coveralls, it seemed like a normal meeting. Her hair was in a messy bun, and she had darkened rings under her eyes from lack of sleep.Patel was talking over several EAR renderings of slingshot maneuvers that were open to Jiuhe around one moon of the gas giant. The expedition had voted to name the planet Taeyanggu. An animation showed the Acheron supplied spacecraft—a cone with four square radiators—as it swung past the first moon at the edge of the hazardous radiation belts. “We continued the search for the source of the perturbations in Taeyanggu’s rings,” Patel said. “I believe we should follow this new trajectory. That way, we can use the third moon’s gravity and exploit the Oberth effect. Explore the strange patterns in the rings and move deeper into the inner star system.”Chaeyoung stifled a yawn, half-listening. “I’m all for anything that gets us back to the plan. We need to survey the liquid-water zone. We need to get to the astrobiologically interesting regions of this quadruple star system before we have to turn around and go back home.”“Yes, but I am proposing this new maneuver,” Patel pointed to Jiuhe’s orbital map. “We can save considerable delta-vee, receive much better imaging on the ring structure and,” Patel took a deep breath. “And cover the bulk of our scientific objectives in orbital area—”“What is our increased radiation exposure with that maneuver?” Liam asked.Liam Flores was here in place of Sania, which Chaeyoung tried not to resent, given his extremely qualified and interesting background. He was short, an Earther, and had dichromatic skin. His sickly and pallid shoulders and upper arms contrasted with his tanned face and forearms. He always wore a shirt that did not cover his arms, showing off many scars, some of which clearly had stories to tell, and others appeared to be an aesthetic choice of systematic scarification. He had long, entirely greyed dreads that were braided into an asymmetric spiral that wrapped around his head in a shape reminiscent of a bun. At the end of these dreads, there were metal bits attached that gave his hair the appearance of a coiled snake. Completing his unique appearance were the glasses he always wore, which had circular, transparent lenses cut into ovals and wrapped in a wire metal frame bridge across the end of his nose with two little hooks cupping the top of his ears. Whenever he tried to read or look at something far away, he would lean back and peer through the transparent ovals and squint. He was doing this now, arms folded over his worn and banged up biosuit that was pulled down to his waist, his Ahtashian keffiyeh wrapped around one of his shoulders. It would seem intimidating, but his face always had a deeply caring look, a face with an eminently sincere kindness, like a grandparent.“It would eat up a lot of the planned tolerance for the expedition,” Patel said.Chaeyoung stirred, sitting upright in her chair. “We’ve already mapped the outer moons thoroughly, correct? Does anything merit further study? It seems like we can use delta-vee and save on radiation exposure instead—skip the fly-by of the inner moons and the ring entirely.”Patel cleared her throat. “Uh, sorry, but there’s also this,” an additional set of images of the inner orbital structure of Taeyanggu’s moon appeared on EAR. “We found some interesting things in the data at the end of our shift last night.”Chaeyoung’s head throbbed as she focused on the image. There were interesting petal-like structures in the ring system where some errant object was sweeping through and perturbing the debris. “Can you explain these ring perturbations?”“No, doctor, that’s why we’ve been so focused on them,” Patel said nervously. “We…we think it might be a rare asteroid-mass binary object… and the gravitational interplay between the two objects would lead a sort of sloshing motion that alters the gas giant’s rings in this leaf petal pattern.” Chaeyoung skimmed the data, moving between different spectral views on her EAR, and pondered the subtlety of Patel’s description. How had the autonomous systems missed it? There was a quickening to her mind, her thoughts suddenly focused on the strangeness of the astronomical event. It might be an anomaly—just another rare event in the cosmic dance of random collisions in space—yet, she had a hunch, this was something more.“Patel, that is a remarkable find,” Liam said. “But I don’t see a reason to deviate from our slingshot trajectory. We should continue to Mu Herculis’s liquid water zone. Especially since your proposal increases our radiation exposure considerably. We have an expeditionary budget that we need to mind carefully.”“Wait,” Chaeyoung raised a hand to grab everyone’s attention. “How did the autos miss this?”“I don’t know,” Liam admitted, surprised. She was determined now.“Well, I know one edge case the system specifically ignores. Small, oblong objects with significant variation in optical properties across the surface.”Liam raised an eyebrow and looked very suspicious of Chaeyoung. “Yes, but not every anomaly warrants a detour.”“You’re missing the point,” she said as she gesticulated with her hands. “The autos are looking for specific sets of circumstances we expect from studying Europa and Ahtash. That means cryovolcanism, tidal forces, large water budget, some amount of radiation, or anything else familiar from Earth—but a shard from a destroyed moon or planet would have the same properties as this object. Oblong. Reflective on one side, dark coloring on the other. We should take a closer look.”“You’ve been impatient to move on, up until this very nanosecond. But now I agree it is time to move on, and you want to stay?” he rebutted with clear irritation.“I know, but these optical properties are suggestive, and so it is worth investigating.”“Suggestive of what? A destroyed moon?”“Yes, that’s probably why the autos ignored it, but it could also be single-celled growth, like algae. It could indicate panspermia.”“Possibly. Unlikely,” Liam said.She swung around and glared cut knives at Liam. “I think we should use one of our probes.”There was a pause. Two scientific wills clashing in silence. Liam’s eyes searched Chaeyoung’s face as if he was searching for any hint of doubt. She held his gaze, feeling more confident than she ever had.“It may be an extrasolar capture, or from further out in the system,” Chaeyoung said.He folded with a shake of his dreaded hair.“Fine. I agree. We’ll take a closer look,” he turned to Patel. “Thank you for your work, Patel.”“We send a probe as soon as possible—reconvene in five, maybe six, hours?” Chaeyoung suggested.Patel nodded, hesitated at the door, and looked at the two senior scientists.“Acceptable. I will let the captain know we want to launch a probe,” Liam said as he stood up. “Now it’s time for me to get some breakfast.”Patel bowed her head politely, collected herself, and left the conference room alongside Liam.***To Chaeyoung, the science deck, which acted as the core of the scientific project on Jiuhe, seemed like a dreamscape version of an amphitheater-style lecture hall. In the center of the room, there was a depressed area with large ink displays on the ceiling and wall. From this pit, she saw both entrances, elevated and tilted by the spin deck’s curvature, and around her there were large working desks with cushioned acceleration chairs, ink displays, and translucent EAR displays hovering around the chairs. Because of the curvature of the room along the spin deck, the entire room appeared distorted, resembling a heavily curved optical lens with the edges above her bent toward the center.It had a capacity of nearly thirty, but currently only Liam and Chaeyoung were there, sitting in chairs nearest to the center, looking up at large EAR windows and ink displays showing the stream from the Coeus science probe as it headed toward the anomaly in Taeyanggu’s rings.Falling toward the anomaly, the probe was pointed away from Taeyanggu as its fusion drive burned hard to slow it down. There was a red glow and static flicker on the stream, and it was too bright from the fusion plume to see any stars. Chaeyoung glanced to look at the orbital map. Relative to the primary star of Mu Herculis, SSV Jiuhe had a chaotic-looking trajectory marked in a thick white line against the black background. On the map level, Taeyanggu was just a thumb sized orange ball with light white rings reminiscent of Saturn.“Oke, main engine cut-off should start soon,” Chaeyoung said to Liam. “In 5…4…3…2…1!”The probe’s stream made a sickening rotation as it spun around to face the anomaly. Taeyanggu swung into view, filling the screen. Like its namesake, the gas giant almost looked like a treasure flower with its red and orange swirling clouds streaked with light yellows and tans. From this distance, the patterns and clouds were truly stunning, chaotic, and beautiful. More white fog plumes from reaction control, and the probe jittered and tilted again. The ice rings of Taeyanggu swung up like a large flat disk, and there, in the center, was a black, swirling gap from the strange binary anomaly in the ring system.Chaeyoung viewed the stream with rapt attention. She deeply scrutinized the probe’s stream. At its current distance, the binary object was still a blurry, distant shape that was framed by the icy rings. A large, misshapen, stippled white and gray blob next to a much smaller oval shape orbiting it, just barely visible, but getting closer as the probe’s momentum carried it forward. Chaeyoung drew a box around the blob on her EAR, plucked out the strange shape, and flicked it to Liam.“Do you know what the resolution is on this?”The blob—an object of interest—had a shape resembling an arrowhead. The sharp edge and notches near the bottom were a ruddy white common to icy planets that formed at the edges of star systems, like in Sol’s Kuiper belt. There were striations visible from reflected light of Mu Herculis A, the largest of the four stars, but at the current resolution it was like someone had made a painting and mistakenly mixed some of the black of space with the white of the rings.Liam looked over at her. “At this distance, it’s about twenty-four pixels wide.”“Not much better than Jiuhe from here—oke deploy the main telescope.”“Deploying the main telescope now.”Light lag to the probe was only a few moments.“Telescope is deployed…streaming…now,” Liam said.“Oke, looks like we are getting some initial spectral results,” she rubbed the scar on her left lip, and read the results as they streamed in. “Oke, water, ice, tholins—consistent with methangenic biosignatures—more likely abiotic, though.”“Oh, my god! Look at that!”In the center of the visual data streaming in, in glorious high resolution and unmistakable detail, there was a spacecraft, partially melted into ruddy ice. It had a large, flat, oval shape. LiDAR from the probe showed the size of the derelict was several hundred meters long and around one hundred and fifty wide. A split part of the craft revealed twisted and tattered fibers, panels, and struts, as if someone had gashed it open with a dull and jagged and cold knife edge. As the oblong shape rotated, tracked by the science probe, the stream showed four very large rocket nozzles frozen underneath clear ice. Each nozzle was an order of magnitude larger than Jiuhe’s main engines.The stream zoomed in further as the telescope on the probe calibrated, it adjusted and tracked something on the surface. At first, it was not clear to her what it was—it seemed to pop into and out of the camera like glitching pixels. Then, slowly, the image stabilized. Immediately, the visual caused her stomach to knot up. It was an oval shape with spiraling ridges. It looked like a hatchway or domot. And whatever the patterning was over its surface, it caused her significant distress and fear. Disgust was her body’s reaction to the strange black and white patterning, as if she was looking at a diseased and pustule covered patch of skin, filled with unnatural partially filled holes. On LiDAR it was flat, clean, smooth, and perfectly even surface in the false color of raw data. Yet somehow, it induced a kind of visual effect akin to trypophobia. Again, on LiDAR, there was nothing about the hatchway that should have been disturbing.“Oh my god,” Liam gasped with a stomach-churning belch. “What is that thing?”“It’s not human,” she muttered as she held her rumbling stomach.