“Captain,” Peretti's Legacy’s intelligent puter said with a soft voice. “I think I have something you might be ied in.”

  Captain Balmar stirred in his chair. “What is it, Torque?” he asked, turning his head to look at the rge s to his left. It was filled with a myriad of dots and symbols, each representing an inactive et they were charting. At the far end of the s, one of the dots was blinking.

  “I’ve noticed an anomalous reading in the gravity field mapping,” the puter expined. “Object 256709QED appears to be signifitly dehan expected.”

  That was iing indeed, Captain Balmar thought. The field geor onboard the Legacy wasn’t just able to manipute local gravity gradients; it could also detect how the existing gradients farther out ied with the modified local gravity field, effectively turning it into a very precise gravity detector. This had been the crew's main tool for the past four months to deteknown etary bodies out here in the belt. Even in this paratively dense region of the star system, the mean distances between ets were still measured in millions of kilometers. If you simply looked out the window, you’d never even know you were sma the middle of a etary belt. But to the puter trolling the field geor, the small masses of these tiial bodies stood out against the ftter gravity gradient of interpary space like fireworks in the sky.

  Given that ets typically don’t gee artificial gravity, these readings correted directly to the mass of the objects they were surveying. If you khe mass and volume, you could easily determihe density of the unknown object.

  The problem was, of course, they didn’t know the volume.

  “What makes you say that?” he asked, feeling both fused aed at the same time.

  The puter responded without dey. “I’m mostly just guessing,” it admitted. “Call it a gut feeling. But most of the ets in this part of the belt are fragments, typically less than half a kilometer ih. If I assume this object has a simir size, I make an educated guess of its density. And it’s way higher than I expected.”

  Captain Balmar mused on that for half a minute before speaking agaiher that, or the object is much rger than those we typically run into here,” he cluded.

  “It might be,” Torque admitted. If it was offended by the captaiioning its reasoning, its voice didn’t betray those feelings in the slightest. “If it’s that rge, we might even be able to spot it visually.”

  “Alright, here’s what we’ll do.” Balmar wasn’t fully vihis warraheir attentio, but looking wouldn’t cost them much. “Retask the 80 cm Cassegrain to observe the object. If you ’t see it with that, we’ll take the ship in for a closer look.”

  “Sounds like a good pn, Captain,” the puter said. “I’ll let you know what I see.”

  Thirty mier, Peretti's Legacy was on the move. As the puter had expected, the object had remained invisible, proving it was small enough to make its paratively rge mass anomalous. In other words, whatever was out there was made of metal, not ice. And an object made of metal could only meahing: it was a ship. If it turned out to be abandoned, it could be salvaged, providing the crew with a mueeded sedary source of ine.

  As the Legacy drifted closer to the unknown ship, some of the crew started to gather in the observation lou first, the telescope image on the s showed nothing more than a dot of light, but as the distance decreased, details began to emerge. It was a rge and elongated ship, perhaps half a kilometer from bow to stern. The damage it had sustained—rge parts of its side ripped open—made it clear it was indeed abandoned.

  “There is no radio bea active on the wreck,” Torque informed them after listening through the radio spectrum for several minutes. “And I ’t match the visual profile of the ship with any known models produced by the Terran Federation.”

  So it was alien, Captain Balmar thought. He wasly surprised. If the Sunguard or any other tractor w for it had lost such a rge ship in this system, ces were they’d have heard about it by now. The question was, which of the alien races in the viity had had a reason to visit the Gliese 556 system?

  “Alright,” he ahe puter. “Extend the search to ships produced by all races entered during the Sed Expansion.”

  That would probably take some time, as those records weren’t kept onboard. But the search should cover every known type of ship made within 50 light-years. If that didn't e up with a match—well, then, this was big news indeed. And big news meant big money, if they pyed their cards right. Captain Balmar was starting to feel excited. Looking around at the gathered crew, he could see it was a feeling shared by the women and men he employed.

  Twenty mier, they had their answer.

  “Sorry it took so long, Captain,” the intelligent puter said apologetically. “The Sonmai database wasn’t publicly avaible. I had to buy access first, and it took a little time to iate a reasonable price with the seller. Ially, I had to pay them with my own private funds, so I expect you’ll reimburse me once we’ve salvaged the ship, eh?”

  “Sure, Torque,” Balmar answered absentmindedly. The added expense of a few terabytes of hyperspace database access was nothing pared to the mohey were about to make here.

  “Thank you, Captain,” Torque said, the relief audible in its voice.

  “Well,” it tinued, “you’ll be happy to know that I couldn’t find a match to the ship’s profile in any of the databases. It’s not just alien—it’s from a civilizatioerran Federation hasn’t yet entered.”

  “We o report it,” his first mate interjected. She was a Terran woman in her early thirties, with short blond hair and gray eyes that missed nothing.

  “Not yet,” Captain Balmar cautioned. “If we report it now, the Sunguard will just waltz in here and take over, and we won’t get more than a finder’s fee. Maybe not even enough to cover our losses from deying the survey mission. I’m sure Special Agent Watanabe and his men will be all over the wre a matter of hours once we tell the Federation about it. That doesn’t give us much time to remove artifacts from it before the military moves in. The longer we wait, the more parts we sell off first.”

  He knew what he was talking about. In a previous career, he had made a killing selling cars he had… acquired. And it had always been a better deal to chop them up ahem in parts rather than just finding a single buyer for the whole vehicle. Captain Balmar was certain the same would be true here.

  By now, they were close enough to the alien ship to be able to see it with their own eyes. Captain Balmar noticed his ground sample specialist, an older Ker male with shoulder length bck hair, standing close to the rge observation window, seemingly deep in thought.

  “What is it, Pv-tor-fel-mak?” he asked. “You’re seeing something I don’t?”

  The small, blue lizard turned around to face the hairy Jerrassian. There was a look on his scaly face that, at first, seemed like but upon closer iion was more akin to ption.

  “The ship is old, Captain, bless your fur,” Pv-tor-fel-mak said. “See the shape of it? The curves? It’s majestic. Beautiful.”

  Balmar wasn’t surprised that was what the specialist had focused on. The Ker had always had an eye for beauty. Captain Balmar imagihe tough little man was sitting in his making cy sculptures of weeping children, or something like that, when he wasn’t hing it with the rest of the crew. Balmar didn’t mind that in the slightest—having a crew member with an eye for the fihings had been to their be—and to the Sunguard’s detriment—more than once.

  “But no one builds a beautiful ship for their first expedition into ielr space. Or their sed, for that matter,” Pv-tor-fel-mak tinued. “Just look at our own ships. We’ve been flyiweears for five hundred years now—the Etarians, bless their heads, a few turies more than that, even—a our ships are still ugly, funal monstrosities. Boxy or drical, without ay to them at all. You don’t spend the resources making your ships look aesthetically pleasing until you’re fident you’ve first mastered ielr flight.”

  Captain Balmar turned his head to take a sed look at the ship. Though not an artist himself, he could certainly see what the specialist meant. Despite the damage to the hull, it was clear whoever had built the alien ship had spent siderable effort on its looks. If this wasn’t the result of an act that had befallen an early expedition of theirs but rather a disaster striking a race that had been traveliweears for millennia, it could only meahing: the ship was old, and the race that had built it even older. In all likelihood, it predated all the known civilizations by a thousand years or more.

  It all made Captain Balmar even more certain he was right in his decision to explore the wreck before rep it to the Terran Federation.

  MvonStz