"I believe we had noticed that, Ensign," Zai offered. "What's it made of?"
"Mostly empty space, sir. It would float in water, assuming it didn't saturate. No denser than a sugar cube."
Zai noted that Tyre paused here, as if allowing for a moment of surprise, aware that her words unsettled the old psychological association between mass and power: Anything light couldn't hurt you.
"Based on the physical sampling effected by one of Marx's probes, most of the material content of the object is silicon. This silicon is structured in units about a half-millimeter across--the size of grains of sand. Each grain is composed of many extremely small layers, and doped with various other elements."
"Doped?"
"Yes, sir. Presumably to change the conductivity of the silicon. Like the semiconductor materials in a pre-quantum computer."
Zai narrowed his eyes.
"Tyre, do you think this object is one giant processor?"
"I don't know, sir."
She offered her ignorance without apology. Zai was glad to see she was not a speculator, as so many in Data Analysis tended to be.
"How does it move?"
"Before the transmission event, the motion was simply centrifugal, sir. The outer layer seems to be adhesive in some way. Like a water droplet's surface tension."
Zai nodded. Everyone had noticed how much it looked like a champagne dervish.
"But when the object. . . consumed the recon drones, that movement was obviously some other process."
"Obviously," Zai muttered. "Any ideas?"
"I, um, have suggestive data to relate, sir. And some possible interpretations to offer."
"Please," Zai said, smiling. Perhaps Tyre was a speculator after all, but at least she was a cautious one.
Tyre gestured, and a background-radiation chromograph appeared in the command bridge's table airscreen.
"This was recorded by the Lynx's passive sensors twelve minutes ago, a few seconds before the transmission event. That big spike is silicon. The smaller one up here is arsenic."
"Arsenic? So, it could be a semiconducting processor," Hobbes said. "Or at least a storage device."
Zai nodded. Of that, he had grown fairly certain. He was waiting only for the civilian transmissions from Legis to confirm his fears.
"Yes, ma'am," Tyre answered. "It's a computer. But it's a great deal more."
She gestured, and the chromograph multiplied into a time series, propagating along its z-axis to become a spiky, chaotic mountain range.
"Here are the first few seconds of the transmission event. Note that the elemental makeup of the object changes."
Tyre leaned back from the table, folding her hands.
Hobbes was the first to speak. "Changes? You mean to say it transubstantiated in a matter of seconds?"
Zai looked at the airscreen, trying to remember his stellar mechanics courses at the academy. That was the last time anyone had asked him to interpret a chromograph. "What elements are we looking at?"
"These spikes are metals," Tyre said, airmousing a set of harmonics descending from the tallest peak. "Vanadium, electrum, and titanium in correct proportions to create superplastic adamantum. And this is a bit of mercury, possibly for some sort of inertial guidance."
"Guidance? Motile alloys?" Zai said. This was too much to believe.
"Yes, sir. The structures that plucked Marx's drones from space had to have some sort of orientation device, and a powerful armature. The object's transubstantiation seems sophisticated enough to create such devices on the fly." "No," Hobbes said quietly.
Zai narrowed his eyes. The Empire had transubstantiation devices; in industrial settings, lead could be turned to gold in useful quantities. Some isolated gas-giant outposts with access to thermal energy sometimes made metals from hydrogen and methane. The process was obscenely energy-expensive, but generally cheaper than shipping bulk metals in starships. And of course, there were always exotic new transuranium elements being created in laboratories.
But this level of control--elements from across the periodic table on demand--was fantastic.
"Why didn't we realize this sooner?" Hobbes asked.
Tyre frowned. "We were too reliant on active sensors, ma'am. This process is more subtle than you'd think."
The ensign flicked her hand.
Mass readings overlaid the chromograph, a set of lines alongside the mountain range, as straight and parallel as maglev tracks.
"As you can see, the silicon grains do not change mass when they transubstantiate. The object maintains a consistent density throughout, no matter what it appears to be made of. This elemental shift is somehow virtual. Of all our instruments, only the background-radiation chromograph detected any change at all."
"Virtual?" Zai asked. "How the hell can elements be virtual?"
"I don't know, sir."
"Where is it getting the energy to make these changes?" Hobbes asked. The object had no power source that they had detected.
"I don't know, ma'am. But I don't think it takes much energy. In fact, it seems to be making more changes just now, for no particular reason. As if it were flexing its muscles."
"Pardon me?"
The static chromograph disappeared, and was replaced by one in wild motion. The spikes jittered and jumped, animating the airscreen like the chatter of a crowd run through an audio visualizer.
"This is real time, minus light-speed delay." Cod, though Zai. The thing was frantic. It pulsed and throbbed to wound the eyes. For a moment, Zai almost thought he saw a pattern in the dance of lines, as if some analog portion of his brain could grasp the internal logic of the thing's "muscle flexing."
He tore his eyes from it, but the afterimage rang in his mind. What had happened to Marx? he wondered. What had the patterns and logic of this thing done to the man? In the high-intensity synesthesia of a pilot's canopy, with his mind already weakened by hypersleep disruption, the master pilot would have been immensely vulnerable.
Marx's brain waves were active, obscenely so, but the man was still not awake.
"What the hell are these?" Hobbes said, interrupting Zai's thoughts.
The captain's eyes followed his ExO's airmouse. A new range of mountains had appeared. Coded in blue, they jutted to the end of the airscreen.