Only Captain Laurent Zai had proven so perverse.
Marx took his hands from the drone's controls and cupped his eyes in his palms, grabbing a few seconds of blackness to salve his primary sight. But the object was still visible in synesthesia, its bizarre undulations worsening his disorientation. He pushed his sensor sub-drones out a bit farther for better parallax, trying to grasp the enormity of the Rix thing. But increased perspective only made it worse, made it more real.
The whole bridge staff and all of Data Analysis were watching over his shoulder. Their hushed voices were filled with awe, so Marx knew he wasn't completely crazy. But he still didn't believe his second sight.
The object looked like an ocean. An uninterrupted, boloid ocean, without benefit of exposed land mass or iron core.
More than a hundred klicks across at its widest point, it spun like a champagne dervish. Almost everyone in the Navy had attempted the trick at some point. In drunken zero-gee, pop a bottle of sparkling wine, catching the unavoidable ejected froth in one hand. Use a straw or a pair of eating sticks to prod and coax, to herd the fizzing liquid into a stable, spinning freefall globule. Pulsating and twisting like a liquid tornado, each champagne dervish had its own personality, its own Rorschach symmetry of stability. Cheap, sweet champagne was the best, with its slightly stickier surface tension. And if cheap stuff wound up splattered across the room, at least the financial damage would be limited.
But the giant thing assaulting Marx's sensibilities wasn't composed of wine. It wasn't properly liquid at all. The megaton mass readings and chromographs indicated that it was mostly composed of silicon. The moving wavelets that propagated across its surface suggested the arciform shapes of dunes, as if the object were a huge, floating desert brushed by ethereal winds. But the thing had no atmosphere. Data Analysis had told Marx that the dune movement was caused by internal motion. There must be wild currents and stormlets inside. The whole thing was spinning around itself: a quasi-liquid planetoid, a wobbling gyroscope, a champagne dervish of dry sand.
Master Pilot Marx sent a tiny probe toward the object. His drone 169 was configured for leisurely, unarmed recon, and had a considerable number of subprobes. Unless the object decided to take a shot at him, Marx could easily keep his main craft out of danger.
The thing didn't seem to have weapons or a drive. Data Analysis said it was completely undifferentiated, desert through and through.
But what the hell was it for?
The unidentified object had come in on the same path as the Rix battlecruiser, moving along at almost the same velocity. It had a far greater mass than any ship, though. Some very powerful drive must have accelerated it and slowed it down again. Otherwise, its trip here from Rix space would make it very ancient indeed.
Marx's probe struck the object softly, sending up a splash, a raindrop in a puddle. A few droplets from the impact trailed away from the object, their bond of surface tension broken, and Marx assigned another pilot to maneuver one of his satellite drones in pursuit of the wayward sand-stuff. Actual spoor from the beast would be helpful.
The master pilot turned his attention to the readings from inside the thing. The probe tumbled helplessly in the interior currents, spun by a thousand minor eddies, carried in a greater circle by the Corio-lis force of the object's overall rotation.
Sampling data came back. The object was indeed mostly silicon, but in some sort of bizarrely complex granular structure. And it was hot inside the whirling desert. As the probe was drawn into its center, spiraling inward like a floating speck down a bathtub drain, the temperature climbed. That didn't make sense; the thing was hard-vacuum cold on the outside, and showed no evidence of internal radiation. It wasn't nearly dense enough for gravitational compression, and the friction from the eddies of sand shouldn't be as hot as the readings Marx was getting. He concluded that some sort of power source was working inside.
Before it was a quarter of the way to the core, the probe's faint signal was swallowed by heat-noise and the object's inherent density.
"Moving in closer," Marx said. He brought his subdrones into position surrounding the object.
He split his second and tertiary sight among the various viewpoints of his entourage, forming a single image composed of every angle.
The exercise addled his brain for a moment as the overlays of shifting sands twisted in a moving moire. Marx increased his view's resolution, sending spiderwebs of sensory filaments out from each of the subdrones for maximum reception.
Although the Lynx's processors were still damaged, the master pilot had priority. Without an entire battle to run, the frigate's surviving columns of silicon and phosphorus were still quite formidable. Soon, the master pilot's vision became comprehensible, meshing like the frames of a stereograph when the eyes align.
Now Marx could really see the shape of the object, began to feel the period and flow of the sandy ocean. The dunes' motion was similar to the roiling clouds of smoke he watched through his microscope when he studied air currents for small-craft flight. Marx let his mind relax, almost drifting back into the dream state from which Hobbes had so harshly yanked him. He reveled in the patterns of the sand-ocean, and unconsciously guided his various craft about the object, drinking in its form. There was something seductive in the fluid mathematics of the thing.
The master pilot's tired mind began to grasp it.
Suddenly, the overlaid images stuttered, then multiplied before Marx's eyes. The flexing of dunes increased in speed, their dance accelerating madly. A barrage of new colors played across the sands, filled the master pilot's three levels of vision with a cascade of lightning that flashed across the spectrum. Pictures formed, piling onto each other in a way that should have been simply noise. But somehow he could simultaneously comprehend images of countless faces, window vistas, data icons, security cams. His secondary hearing blared with the chatter of a million conversations, confessions, jokes, dramas. It was synesthesia gone mad. Instead of three, Marx had a hundred levels of sight, each discernible as a separate view. It felt as if a whole world were being shoved through his mind. He reached for the cutoff, but his hand froze, his mind crammed too full to react.
The layers of synesthesia began rolling across each other, commingling as did the dunes of the object below. Sight and sound collapsed into a single torrent, pulled themselves apart to address eye and ear 171 again, and finally tattered like a flag driven down the throat of a tempest, unraveling into a thousand separate threads.