Gates

It started with a low rumble that continued far too long to be normal. As it continued, the frequency rose and the amplitude spiked in increasingly shorter intervals, causing the volume to pulse faster and faster as the rumble climbed into a ringing, rising tone.

In all the years that the Gravity Wave Research Center had been recording and converting gravity waves to sound waves, this anomaly was a first. The duration and non-randomness of it pointed to the possibility of intelligence behind the still-increasing waves.

“I’m telling you, it’s the collision of a pair of pulsars. I’m working on the model now.” Andre typed away at his laptop, heavily chewed pen in his teeth.

“I don’t think so,” Liz said. “We’re either looking at something made by…someone…or we have a whole new thing to learn about in cosmology.”

Andre raised his hands to either side of his face with a mocking grin. “Aliens!”

Liz sucked her teeth at him. “Okay, be that way. Where’s the data from KGOT?” The Kuiper Gravity Observer Telescope was the furthest gravity wave telescope humans had deployed yet, in hopes of getting more and better data.

“Huh?” Andre removed the pen from his teeth. “You sure it’s in position for that?”

“Pretty sure.” Liz pointed to her monitor, where a solar system map with the position of every planet and every man-made object outside of Earth’s orbit. “We picked it up first at Jupiter…JGOT. Then us, at the same time as the message from JGOT. Then Mars is here, where MGOT picked it up twenty minutes after us. That gives us a general direction.

“Following that back, it takes us directly to KGOT.”

“Wonder if there’s a comms issue. I’ll look into that,” Andre said. “In the meantime, can we turn down the speakers? It’s giving me a headache.”

Andre sent a system test message to the gravity telescope near the Kuiper belt, knowing it would be an eight-hour round trip. That out of the way, he went back to work trying to make his model of colliding pulsars match the gravity waves they were still seeing going on close to three hours now.

“Um, Andre, I think you should really check the logs for the KGOT.” Liz’s voice was tense with worry.

Andre switched tasks to look at the logs. They showed that the telescope was sending its regular messages every half-hour for the entire time that they had been recording the anomaly.

“How…how could we pick it up here, but not there? I wonder if there’s a malfunction.”

“Maybe—,” Liz started, but fell silent as the wave ceased. “It’s done. Whatever it was.”

“I’m still trying to get these models to match. It may not be colliding pulsars, if the results I’m seeing are any indication.”

As the hours passed, Liz and Andre worked hard on trying to make some sense out of the strangeness of the wave. They had given up on hearing anything more from the anomaly, until an alert from KGOT showed up.

“Liz! KGOT started picking it up…uh…around four hours ago.”

“Can you give me a more precise time?”

“Yeah, according to the logs, it started at 01:13:22.93114 Zulu.”

Liz entered the data into her solar system model showing the track of the gravity wave. “That would mean it came from—”

“From what?”

“Inside the solar system. Jupiter L4 Lagrange point to be exact.”

“Impossible. There’s not enough matter in the entire solar system for a wave like that, much less the Trojans there.” He returned to his model. “It would take at least a supermassive black hole to generate a wave of that magnitude and duration.”

The videoconference phone chimed with its annoying song. Andre answered and looked to the screen. “Yeah?”

“Hey gravity nerds, I take it you have something big, right?” The screen didn’t show the caller, but a visual telescope view that looked warped, out of focus somehow.

“Hey Janice, what do you have?” Liz asked. “Need help to focus your telescope?”

“Nope. It’s focused perfectly.”

Andre snorted. “If that’s the case, why does it look smeared?”

“Let me zoom out.” The warped look stayed confined within a circle in the middle of the view, limned with a sparkling, blue light. Beyond the light, the rest of the view looked normal.

“Where…where are we looking?” Andre asked.

Liz answered, “Jupiter L4, I bet.”

“Ding! Ding! Ding! You win a prize! I knew you were the smart one.”

“Stow it, Janice. Any idea what it is?” Liz asked.

“Well, this is going to be huge, but I thought I’d show you guys first. I recorded this about ten minutes ago.” The view zoomed back in on the warped, distorted look through the center of the anomaly.

The warped view slowly began to redraw itself as a software algorithm tried to compensate for it. “Either I’m off my rocker or it’s a gateway...to a bunch of other gateways.”

Where once was an image of smudges of light, there was an image of hundreds of glowing circles with distortions at their centers. There were no other lights in the view; no stars, no reflecting nebulae, just the glowing circles.

“There’s no way this is natural,” Liz said.

“Well, maybe,” Andre said. “But still, I think you were right when you said we’d have something new to learn about in cosmology.”

“Just wait,” Janice said. “Here comes the good part.”

A bright shape, like an elongated triangle, came out of one of the glowing circles and moved into another. With no sense of scale there was no way of determining its speed.

“If those are the same size as the one here,” Liz said, “that ship is the size of the moon. I first estimated its speed as three-quarters C, until I realized that the gates…or whatever you want to call them…seem to heavily warp space in their vicinity.”

“What does that have to do with the velocity of the ship?” Andre asked.

“It’s three-quarters C relative to our view, but with the way the space between the gates is warped, the distances we think we see between them can be completely wrong. They may be right beside each other with the ship traveling at a leisurely fourteen thousand kilometers an hour. We just don’t know.”

Ho—how many gates do you see in there?” Andre asked.

“From this vantage point, we count just shy of seven hundred,” Janice said. “I think it’s safe to assume thousands.”

“What…or who made these?”

“That’s the real question,” Liz said. “That’s what’s going to keep us up at night until we know.”