With its drive off, the Falcon was no more than a small, oddly shaped asteroid at first. It was a little under three hundred thousand kilometers off the Adro diamond, orbiting it like a tiny artificial moon. The artifact itself was eerie: vast and green and flickering now and then with murky internal energies like storms that penetrated deep into the flesh of the object. The planet. The library. Jim knew enough about Elvi’s preliminary work that he could appreciate the supremely unnatural aspects of the thing: that it didn’t collapse under its own mass, that it was connected using the same
...more
