Dash had found a multitude of Old Earth documents in the Unseen archives. Apparently, the enigmatic aliens had, over the course of centuries, surreptitiously gathered samples of their culture into an enormous, curated collection, against the possibility of humanity wiping itself out. Dash never realized Old Earth had been so bent on destroying itself, but it did explain a lot about how humanity worked—or didn’t work—in the present day.
In crafting these sixteen super-Earth planets that they had gifted to Dash and the Cygnus Realm, the Unseen had gone to great lengths to replicate humanity’s ancient home. This one, the first they’d explored and settled, had come with what amounted to an owner’s manual—an extensive documentation of the entire planet they had come to call Pristine. Because that’s exactly what it had been, a lush, hospitable, and entirely unspoiled world.
The documentation included a comprehensive list of every species that the Unseen had introduced to the place, such as varieties of terrestrial fish called trout, salmon, and catfish that were good to eat. This particular lake was supposedly home to the type called trout, so Dash, intrigued, decided to try his hand at catching some. He’d studied images of the varieties—Brown, Rainbow, and the ominously named Cutthroat—and concluded that trout were, all in all, beautiful creatures he very much wanted to catch.
And eat.
Which brought him back to what he’d told Leira—the point isn’t to catch fish. According to the Old Earth books, the act of fishing was, in itself, the objective.
But, having seen nothing to indicate that the damned trout even existed, Dash was beginning to think that either the Unseen had played an obscure and specific prank, or the Old Earth books were just full of crap.
Dash started to slowly wind the reel, tugging the bait through the water in a warbling dance. The small wake from his bobber was the only disturbance he could see. The lake was a glassine expanse, perfect and—
—fishless. Or, free of fish who were willing to indulge his trip into humanity’s pastimes.
Leira was rubbing first aid gel on her bug bites. “What were these damned things called?”
“Mosquitoes,” Dash said. “They’re—”
“Pardon me, Messenger.” A smooth, baritone voice cut in from the comm clipped to Dash’s belt. “There is an urgent message from Harolyn DeBruce. You had indicated that you preferred to not be disturbed, but—”
“That’s okay, Custodian,” Dash said, lifting his hook out of the water and glaring at it. The bait was gone, but he hadn’t felt even a hint of a tug on the line. “I think I’m just about done relaxing down here, anyway. Go ahead and put her through.”
“Dash?”
“Harolyn, are you back at your Anchor yet, or are you still coming up with excuses to get out and get your hands dirty?”
“Dirty hands every time. I spend enough of my life these days reading reports, and writing reports, and reading what’s been written about my reports. But this isn’t just a courtesy, saying hello kind of call, I’m afraid.”
Dash exchanged a glance with Leira, who capped the container of first aid gel and put it away. “Okay, you’ve piqued my curiosity. What’s up?”
“Let’s say my curiosity is piqued about our newly minted planet. I tend toward suspicion, anyway—you know that, but this is something so minor, it’s begging me to investigate. Call it . . . strange behavior,” Harolyn said.
Dash wound up the rest of the line and put the rod aside. “Strange how?”
“It’s wobbling in its orbit. And it’s doing it with a regular interval of a little less than six hours between variations.”
Dash sat up. “How much is it wobbling? Is the planet in danger?” He looked at Leira while speaking, and she raised her eyebrows in answer. He knew exactly what she was thinking. They’d all taken the Unseen’s work to be, by default, pretty much flawless. But if the aliens had screwed up and left one of their sixteen planets in an unstable state, then what other problems might be lurking among them?
“The wobble is very slight—a perturbation of a tiny fraction of a percent. I asked myself the same question you just did and ran a simulation. And the answer is no, the planet’s not in immediate danger. If this wobble persists exactly this way, then in a little over a hundred years it will edge inward from the system’s habitable zone and start getting too close to its star to properly support life.”
“A hundred years?” Leira said. “That doesn’t seem like very much, in cosmic terms.”
“Oh, it’s not. That’s why I said immediate danger. I’d say it’s something we want to investigate, though,” Harolyn replied. “Think of it as our natural need to know.”
“Agreed,” Dash said. “Custodian, Sentinel, any ideas?”
“We only have Harolyn’s data to work from,” Sentinel said. “They do indeed show that the planet in question is being perturbed in its orbit every five point eight five hours.”
“The implication,” Custodian said, “is that an intermittent gravitational phenomenon is affecting the planet in question.”
Dash had to smile. He hadn’t had to talk to Custodian, the Forge AI, about anything unusual in some time. Life after victory was a different thing. There were no longer battles. Disasters. Quick decisions where thousands—or millions—of lives hung in the balance.
In short, life had gone to a simpler state, leading Dash to stand on a shoreline being roundly ignored by alleged trout, which may have only been a cruel rumor. When The Life War ended, Dash went from Messenger to man.
In the interim, he’d forgotten how mechanically officious and precise Custodian could be. In fact, the AI had lately begun to loosen up, Dash thought, but in a flash, the rigid, omniscient AI had returned in a single sentence.
It was jarring.
And exciting, if Dash was being honest.
“So, Custodian,” Dash said, waving away a persistent mosquito. “What could cause such a gravitational phenomenon?”
“A mass of sufficient size in orbit near the primary star or Planet Fifteen. That’s one possible cause,” Custodian said.
“You mean like a planet? How big would it have to be?” Dash asked.
“Based on Harolyn’s data, the mass would have to be immense, dense, and at a great enough distance to avoid easy detection. So, to put it in your terms, big and far away. Stealthy, too, with an appropriate magnitude,” Custodian said.
“Hard to believe that the Unseen would just miss something like that,” Leira said, but Dash raised a hand.
“Hang on, Custodian. You said this perturbation happens about every six hours. How fast would this thing have to be traveling to have that kind of orbital period?”
“A high trans-luminal velocity.”
“So faster than light. A lot faster than light.”
“Correct,” Custodian replied, economical to a fault.
Dash closed his eyes, working angles. “Strange. Scratch that. Odd.”
“Is odd more weird than strange?” Leira asked.
“It is now,” Dash replied with some dignity, then grinned.
“Could it be something orbiting the planet itself?” Leira asked, waving a hand vaguely at the heavens. “A moon or something we just haven’t detected?”