Slow Decay - By Andy Lane Page 0,12

Hub, and she wasn’t the one who was whistling.

And if she had broken the peace and calm of the Hub at night with something as crass as whistling, it would have been soft and mystical, not an out-of-tune whine which wandered up and down several octaves apparently at random.

She tried to block it out by concentrating harder on the alien device on the table in front of her. There was something about the lavender colour and the smooth curves of the metal that made her think of Japanese art: the surface was incised in patterns reminiscent of formal calligraphy, and the colour was reminiscent of her father’s favourite Hokusai etchings. It wasn’t from Earth, of course. Her brain was just looking for comparisons, connections, similarities. But it was oddly comforting, compared with the harsh, hard-edged technology she usually ended up examining.

Toshiko had started off by using a microwave imager to get a picture of what was inside the shell. And that’s how she thought of it: a shell protecting something delicate, vulnerable. The image she got was fuzzy, in shades of green and blue, and so she had turned to an ultrasound scanner, using the vibrations from whatever was inside to map out the interior structure. The results had been ambiguous: there were definitely voids within the shell, separated from each other by denser areas, but it wasn’t as clear as she had hoped. The transmission X-ray system which she had wheeled in, based on the kind of thing used in dental surgeries but with some significant improvements of her own, had just revealed a series of what looked like grey-white whorls and spirals that didn’t really help.

And that whistling was driving her crazy. Tuneless, atonal, and yet strangely mournful.

She glared over at Owen, but he was sitting with his back to her, oblivious. He had his hands behind his head, and he appeared to be leaning back and listening to something on his headphones. Didn’t he have any work to do? Didn’t he have a home to go to?

Looking at the images from the three separate imaging systems that she had employed to no good effect, letting her eyes skip back and forth from one monitor to the next, Toshiko felt her mind teetering on the edge of revelation. It was as if there were something momentous sitting just beyond her reach: she knew it was there, but she couldn’t find a way of getting to it.

Her eyes slid from the turquoise contours of the microwave image to the grey spirals of the X-ray, and she suddenly noticed a correspondence: a curve that started off in the microwave and then apparently stopped dead, but in fact continued on in the X-ray, appearing there out of a dark void. And once her brain had made that connection, others suddenly sprang out. How could she have missed them? There was a picture, there was a coherent whole, but not revealed through any one sensor. Working feverishly, she whipped the cables out of the backs of the various monitors and fed them all into a central image-processing server. It took her ten minutes, during which she was so busy she couldn’t hear Owen’s sad whistling at all, but when she had finished she had all three images being projected at the same time onto the same screen.

And there, revealed in all its glory, was the inside of the alien device.

And it was beautiful.

‘What the hell is that?’ Owen’s voice said from behind her.

‘It’s a composite image,’ she said without turning, ‘formed by combining the images from three separate sensors. By themselves, the sensors didn’t have enough resolution to be able to map out the interior of the device – each one could see a bit of the picture, but it was only when I combined them all that I could see the whole thing.’

‘Yeah,’ Owen said, dubious, ‘but what the hell is that?’

‘I don’t know,’ Toshiko said simply. ‘But it’s beautiful.’

The image on the screen was a multicoloured structure in which there were no straight lines at all. What appeared to be a series of flat oval plates of different sizes were linked to each other and to a constellation of small spheres by cobwebbed connections, and behind it all were hints of a larger irregular mass.

‘I was expecting wires,’ Owen said. ‘A battery, perhaps. Would a battery have been too much to ask? Circuit boards, maybe? Or am I being old fashioned here?’

‘They’re there,’ Toshiko said, running her fingers gently across