Letters from the Spiral Arms

The Needle

First year of the interstellar age.

Rani was surrounded by stars.

They were like little pieces of sunlight scattered across the sky, snowflakes carried by an invisible wind. Way down there was the Earth, so far away, in fact, that one could question whether or not the planet was below anything. It gleamed in blue and white against the background of space. The old, battered home of humanity, bathed in distant sunlight.

Rani had never liked the way light behaved in space, the way it engulfed everything in stark brilliance instead of being filtered and scattered by the atmosphere. She had spent most of her childhood near the equator and in her eyes, the sun had always been a warm companion perched on her shoulder; but so far up in the skies, the distant star was sharp and cold like a blade. Rani blinked. Sunlight surrounded her from behind, a corona of white colors curving around the moon. She could feel a particularly unpleasant warmth pour through the fabric of her spacesuit and all around her back, while her face and chest felt so cold she feared there was a hole in her self-contained, human-shaped spaceship. Rani blinked again as her radio came to life.

"Hey, Rani, are you still with us?"

She forced her mind to leave the heights of her thoughts, come back to the world of the living and to the lifeline that linked her to the nearby spacecoach. The small icy craft glittered under the sunlight as if it had been made of diamond dust. It bore the emblems of the Moon Communes, the six-tipped star under the white crescent.

"Yes, Jan, yes...I am with you."

Small drones undulated around the craft, their maneuvering thrusters piercing space with little plumes of pearlescent gas. There was something in the void, a few hundred meters away from the spacecoach. It looked like some kind of flat needle, pitch-black and cratered by billions of micrometeorite impacts. Two automated tugs were attached to the artifact via loose cables that birthed images of lazy jellyfish in Rani's mind.

In a strange manner, the sight of this object did not evoke anything other than familiarity for the scientist. She had been tracking the anomaly for two years now, ever since it had mysteriously appeared beyond Jupiter's orbit. She knew its characteristics by heart. It was two hundred meters long and ten meters wide, with a central bulge that was about fifteen meters thick. It was made of an artificial, steel-like compound and had no obvious means of propulsion. The object's age was hard to establish, in no small part because the strength of its outer shell was still unknown. According to the initial trajectory of the object within the solar system, it came from Alpha Centauri, though there was no way to determine if it had been sent by anyone there or if it had just passed through the system. As soon as the non-human and artificial nature of the artifact had been established, the Moon Communes had sent a fusion picket to intercept and retrieve the object, which Rani herself had dubbed "the needle". The USRE had protested, to no avail. The Moon Communes ruled post-lunar space and were only accountable to their citizens. And now, here they were. Rani noticed the white-grey shape of her colleague zoom past her, carried by the small thrusters on his spacesuit. He stopped a few meters away from the needle and attached his lifeline to one of the orbital tugs. The artifact was rather smooth and the outer shell had proven hard to bore through; the tugs themselves were a better anchor point than the anomaly.

"Jan to Spacecoach, I'm anchored to the object. Your turn, Rani."

The scientist reached for the commands on her chest and started bridging the gap between the ship and the needle. She always felt clumsy in space, despite having now spent more time on the Moon and in Lagrange stations than on Earth. The thing that really terrified her, on a fundamental level, was the lack of friction and the idea that if her maneuvering thrusters were to fail she would just end up drifting for an eternity, lost in the void.

Her thoughts ebbed like a dying tide as she made contact with the artifact while coming to a halt. She followed in Jan's steps, anchoring herself to the closest tug before resting her eyes on the dark surface. The object really looked like some kind of ancient weapon and for a split second, she felt like she was standing on the blade of a long-lost dagger having belonged to a dead god. Then her perspective changed, and she found herself climbing alongside a pillar lost by a deep space temple.

"Rani's made contact," announced Jan on the radio, "we are approaching the central bulge."

This area of the artifact was of special interest to Rani; while the rest of the needle was rock-solid and filled with this weird concrete-steel substance, the central section had a lower density, which alluded to the possible presence of a usable section.

"I'm anchored at the bulge," specified Rani while grabbing a small probing tool attached to her waist. It was a device made for geologists and asteroid miners, used to scrape samples from the surface of an object in zero-g. While getting into position she briefly considered the fact that the Moon Communes had always assumed this object was a spaceship of some sort, leading to the great question: where were the engines? But after all, thought Rani, there was nothing to prove that it was a vessel. In truth, the needle could have been anything. A piece of debris. A work of art. An unpowered probe. Perhaps, even, some kind of weapon. And then, as Rani was getting ready to take a sample, the structure of the needle gave way as if the central area had been made of foam. Her left foot impacted the surface and the slight momentum she had built up while getting in position was enough to carry her through the central area. When she finally realized what was happening and stabilized herself with her thrusters she had already penetrated several meters inside the central area of the needle.

"Rani! Are you alright down there?" asked Jan on the radio while orbiting around the artifact to link up with her.

"I'm alright, I'm alright..."

Rani blinked once again.

Something lay inside the needle, like a caterpillar wrapped in a cocoon. It was a cube, about half a cubic meter in volume, made of a crystal-like substance that gleamed slightly in the void. For a split second Rani felt as if it was pulsing alongside her heart.

Above her, a billion stars were watching in awe.