“The station’s good,” said Susan Kendall. “No damage, except a few bits of equipment and glassware that broke when they fell over. Bao's still fuming over his new space alloys, but at least he's still got most of his experiments.”

Paul and Lauren exchanged a glance at the frustrated tone of her voice. She'd lost most of her own experiments during the recent excitement. “Thanks,” said the commander. “The displays all say the same thing, but it was good to have it confirmed visually. How's ROMIS?” she asked Paul.

“Seems okay. Diagnostics are all green.”

“Then let's check the station exterior. The solar panels, the radiator fins, the whipple shield, everything. If that all checks out as well, we can get back to normal operations.”

“We can get back to normal operations when we’ve been refuelled,” said Paul. “Having dry tanks makes me nervous. If we see something big bearing down on us, we can’t get out of its way.”

“There’s still the laser,” pointed out Susan.

“If we have enough warning. And even the laser won't help if the object's more than the size of a golf ball.”

“Something that big, radar would have spotted it long ago.”

“Yeah, but it’s all in different orbits now. How long ‘till they’ve got it all tracked down again?” He shook his head. “Heide’s tool bag could be whizzing towards us right now.”

Lauren chuckled. The twelve kilogramme tool bag had been dropped by an astronaut aboard the International Space Station during a spacewalk several decades before and was still orbiting the earth. “I wish it was,” she said. “We could use another grease gun.” She glanced at the radar display. “No sign of it, or anything else,” she said.

“The shield would be able to handle something that big, wouldn't it?” asked Susan. Those parts of the space station facing forward in its orbit around the earth were covered with layers of protective material, named after its inventor, the American astronomer Fred Whipple. It was designed to make an impacting object explode into tiny fragments before they could reach the main skin of the space station, rendering them harmless, but it was very much a last resort for when everything else failed. Even if it suffered an impact that it prevented from harming the station, both the crew and the ground controllers would consider it a failure and there would be hell to pay for whoever had allowed the object through in the first place.

“If it didn't, we’d be the first to know,” replied Paul, referring to the fact that the command module was located in the forward part of the space station.

Susan grinned nervously. Even despite all the recent advances in safety, space travel was still inherently dangerous. Like all the rest of them, Susan had accepted the risks when she applied to join the astronaut program, but this was a new risk that no-one had taken into account and she was suddenly reminded of all the other risks she routinely faced every day.

“Have you found Lockyer yet?” she asked. The Lockyer platform was a small module that had been floating alongside the space station, connected only by a fibre optic data cable. It had been running those experiments so delicate that the vibrations caused by people moving around would have ruined them. The data cable had snapped during the emergency course correction, though, and the platform had drifted away.

Lauren nodded. “I'm afraid it’s in a degrading orbit, brushing the atmosphere. They're looking at whether they can get the mule to it and drag it back to us before it falls back to earth.”

“How long have we got?”

“A couple of days maybe. Atmospheric friction is fierce that far down.”

“They have to save it! I’ll lose six months work if it goes down!”

“They have other priorities I'm afraid. There’re plenty of satellites that are approaching the end of their lives, almost out of propellant. They need the mule to get them back into their proper orbits and still leave them with enough fuel to de-orbit when they reach the end of their lives. Since Lockyer is coming down anyway...”

“But we don't want it coming down!”

“You yourself told me how delicate your helium crystals are. The vibrations caused by being accelerated back up onto a higher orbit...”

“If just a few survive I can carry on with my work. It took me six months to grow them. I was almost ready to begin some serious work on them. Then this happens!”

“They say they may be able to get the mule to it, give it a nudge, on its way between one satellite and another. It depends on which satellites they want to save the most.”

“Can I speak to them, tell them how important it is?”

“I've already had that conversation with them. I told them...”

“I'd like to talk to them myself. I doubt you had the passion that I have. They probably told you no and you just said oh okay and that was that. I’d like to tell them just how important it is.”

Lauren's eyes flashed with anger. “As I said, I've already had that conversation and I did tell them how important it is. If they can save it, they will and if they can't they can't and we just have to accept it. Bao has an experiment on Lockyer as well. If he can accept the loss, so can you.”

“Bao has plenty of other experiments. Everything I have is on Lockyer!”

“You yourself said that most of his work has been ruined.”

“But he still has all his equipment! He can run his experiments again!”

“I know how frustrating it must be for you, but I've done everything I can. We're lucky to still be alive. We could have lost the whole space station! And you've still got three months worth of results. You’ll just have to be satisfied with that.”

Susan glared at her, then turned and pushed her way through the air towards the hatch into the next module with an angry kick of her feet. If it had had a normal door, she would have slammed it on the way out.

“I think she's forgotten that she's the one who insisted on an independent platform in the first place,” said Paul with an amused smile. “She was offered a spot in the Vulcan module and she turned it down. Kicked up such a fuss that they coughed up another hundred million for Lockyer. Remember how pleased she was when they told her? I bet she's wishing she’d been a bit less pushy now.”

“Haven't you got a robot to prep?” snapped the commander, and Paul grinned as he moved over to the ROMIS workstation.

☆☆☆

Susan kicked her way angrily through node five, past the entrances to the two habitation modules and through the hatch into the recreation and exercise module. She strapped herself into the rowing machine and began pedalling furiously in an attempt to burn off her frustration in hard physical exercise. Jayesh Gudka, their resident doctor, looked up from the tablet on which he was updating the crew's medical records and watched with sympathy. “No joy?” he said.

“They're more concerned with getting the sports channels back on the air than they are with scientific research that might change the world.” She pedalled faster, grimacing with anger. “I have nothing to do up here now. I'm basically a passenger. Like one of those millionaires in the space hotel. I've got nothing to do but stare out the window at the view.”

“I expect they'll find plenty of things for you to do. You're one of only three of us qualified for EVA and you’re an experienced space mechanic. You won't have much free time, I can promise you.” He took a suck from the tube of coffee he'd just made for himself.

“And while I'm tightening bolts and spraying sealant like a common grunt, my helium crystals will be burning up. Probably the only critical phase helium crystals in the universe. The whole god damned universe!”

“You believe in God, do you not? So you must believe that it’s happening for a reason.”

“It's happening because those fat heads in Beijing are more concerned with money than with pure research. If Bao's work was in Lockyer, it would be back here already.” The Chinese scientist already had several big companies interested in his exotic alloys, and the ESA, who would jointly own the patents along with the Chinese National Space Administration, were all set to make a huge profit.

“If that were true, they would never have funded Lockyer in the first place. They must have a lot of faith in your research, and that means they'll give you another chance. Either another Lockyer or space on the station itself. You've had a setback, yes, but consider how close we just came to losing our lives. No doubt your God would want you to count your blessings.”

“Don’t tell me what God would want! How would a Hindu know anything about God?”

“We have Gods too,” the Indian pointed out.

“Yes, hundreds of them, and none of them real.”

“Actually there are thirty three million of them, but I share your opinion regarding their existence. I am a scientist. So are you, for that matter.”

Susan stopped pedalling and glared at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“How long ago was the solar system formed?”

“You want me to say six thousand years, right? And then you’ll bombard me with a ton of scientific evidence saying how old it really is. You people cannot begin to understand the true meaning of faith.”

“Are you saying that you actually believe the solar system is only six thousand years old?”

“I don't want to discuss my faith with you.” She began pedalling again. Patches of dark sweat began to appear under her arms.

“I thought Christians were supposed to convert heathens like me to your faith.”

“I know a lost cause when I see one. You'll know how wrong you are when you’re dead.”

“When I'm burning in hell for the crime of not believing what you believe?”

Susan didn't reply, though. She flashed him one last angry look with her steely grey eyes, then began pedalling harder. Jayesh watched her for a moment or two, then turned back to his tablet.

☆☆☆

The Remote Operated Maintenance and InSpection unit, or ROMIS as it was better known, was a robot tele-operated by either one or two members of the space station crew, depending on the complexity of the task that it was being asked to undertake. It had four limbs, all of which ended with a dexterous hand that could do pretty much anything that a human hand could do. It usually used two hands to keep a firm grip on the space station, while using the others to perform the job it had been sent out to do. At the moment, though, it was just inspecting the station, looking for damage, and that was a simpler enough task that Paul usually did it by himself.

With the virtual display goggles over his eyes and the data gloves transferring every movement of his hands and fingers to the robot, it almost felt to Paul as if he was actually out there! The gloves had advanced haptic feedback, so that it even felt as though he was touching the surfaces with his real hands. He could feel the coldness and hardness of the steel handholds he was using to move his way along the outside of the farm module. He could feel them vibrating ever so slightly as the pumps moved water and nutrients among the crops being grown inside, and every now and then came the coarser vibration as the hydroponic beds were moved, bringing each in turn to the front where Benny Svanberg, the European shuttle pilot who acted as their resident farmer while aboard the space station, could inspect them, treat them for various conditions as necessary and, in the fullness of time, harvest them.

Everything looked good on the outside of the module, Paul was pleased to see. One new pit, a centimetre wide and about half that deep, had appeared in the outer hull, the result of a collision with a small piece of space junk. It might even have been a natural micro meteorite, a tiny piece of sand left behind by a comet. Even today, not all the junk circling the earth was man made. Whatever had made it, though, it wasn't deep enough to be of concern and so he just made a note of it and moved on.

That completed his inspection of the inhabited modules. The solar panels were next. Having an area of over ten thousand square metres, they were by far the most prone to damage, but at the same time they were the most resilient. An impact with one of the pressurised modules severe enough to cause an air leak was a problem that had to be dealt with as a matter of urgency, but the solar panels were designed so that they could be riddled with holes and still deliver enough power for the station to function. A three percent loss of power, therefore, meant that something out of the ordinary had happened the day before, and so the systems manager was alert for whatever he might find.

The ROMIS made its way along the support superstructure moving hand over hand like a gibbon swinging through the branches of a forest. Paul had been using the robot for months now, and had practiced many times down on earth before coming up to the station, and he was able to move with considerable speed. Lauren tended to frown at this kind of haste. The robot had a small rocket pack that would allow Paul to guide it back to the station if he missed a handheld and sent it sailing off into space, but reaction mass was expensive to replace and he would find himself facing a severe dressing down from the commander if he wasted any.

He reached the solar panels without mishap, though, and paused to give them a looking over from a distance before moving closer. From this distance they looked pristine, as if they had been assembled only yesterday. They gleamed like gold in the light of the sun, like a vast sheet of the precious metal, so huge that they seemed to form the surface of a world, as if he could walk on them and never reach the horizon.

Unable to resist the temptation, Paul moved the robot through the gap between the panels and the Heineman module, the module that served as the station's machine shop. Then, as he had done a hundred times before, he turned the robot's head so that its cameras were facing down, towards the earth. He could see it any time he wanted through one of the station's many viewing ports, of course, but they were small, just little round portholes no more than fifteen centimetres across. The robot's cameras, though, the images displayed through the virtual reality goggles, allowed him to see a wide panorama as though he were out there himself, seeing it with his own eyes.

They were currently over South America, he saw. Irregular patches of what remained of the Amazonian rain forest, interspersed with farmland and the light brown wastelands of mines and oilfields, curved away towards the horizon in all directions. Tributaries of the river Amazon snaked their way through it, shining like silver in the sun, and the whole was partially obscured by the brilliant, almost blindingly bright white of clouds, curving and coiling like the brushstrokes of a titanic artist. There was a storm system towards the east, he saw, coming into view as the space station flew towards it in its orbit. Someone down there was getting wet.

The view was awesome, breathtaking! A man could stand there and watch for hour after hour, hypnotised by it. Even the view through the station portholes was captivating, to the point that standing orders required that anyone seen looking through a porthole for more than five minutes at a time was gently urged to stop. Nobody wanted another Sam Crystal, who had become so addicted to the view that he'd repeatedly neglected his duties and still craved it fifteen years after he'd returned to earth. Paul had heard that he'd taken up mountain climbing, that being the closest he could come to recreating the experience.

Aware that others might be sharing his view through the robot's cameras, therefore, Paul pulled himself away from the vista and returned his attention to his reason for being out there (as he thought of it. The sensation of actually being there was so real!). He took the robot back through the gap to the sunlit side of the solar panels and then along the guide rails that had been provided for it.

He began to see small holes in the thin, golden material almost immediately. Each one made by a tiny fleck of material drifting through space. Some were natural. A speck of dust left behind by a passing asteroid or comet, or blasted off the surface of the moon by one of the impacts it had suffered over the aeons, but the majority were man made. Flakes of paint from a rocket booster, tiny crystals of frozen propellant or even, unbelievably, the debris from satellites that had been deliberately destroyed in earth orbit, an act that, today, would result in the nation responsible being subject to worldwide condemnation and heavy fines.

As he went, Paul compared the image he was seeing with the record he'd made the last time, putting the two images side by side on his display so that he could make a direct comparison. As always, the new image contained new signs of damage which the computer highlighted, numbering them and using them to calculate the amount of litter the space station had encountered since the last survey. As always since the space debris directives has been introduced, the amount had lessened as drag from the earth's atmosphere pulled them down and burned them up. Further up, higher above the atmosphere, solar radiation was doing the job, slowly pushing the tiny particles up and away until they left orbit and drifted away into their own orbits around the sun. It would take a long time yet, but nature was gradually sweeping away the mess that mankind had made in the twentieth century and the first couple of decades of this one.

Music played in Paul's ears as he continued the inspection. It was a long job, and some people would have found it boring, but he rather enjoyed it. The robot had originally been intended to undertake the task automatically, using its own on-board artificial intelligence, but after it had lost its grip for the fifteenth time and burned up precious propellant returning to the station Lauren had decreed that a human take over. Paul had protested at first, but had soon found the task rather restful and soothing. A new update for the automatic system was supposed to be ready sometime soon, and when it was Paul would be expected to give up the job, but he thought he'd probably keep on doing it, if time allowed.

He took the robot outwards along strut a1, back along a2 and out again along a3, working his way along the length of the immense structure. When he reached the end he worked his way back, outwards along strut b22, back along b21 until he was back alongside the Heineman module. It took about an hour, and then there were the other three sails to go.

He hummed along to the music as he went, making the robot walk, hand over hand, along the delicate latticework of support beams and girders and Lauren, doing an inventory of the station's consumables at the next workstation, smiled to herself. When everyone else was happy, she was happy. It was good when everything was ticking along the way it was supposed to, everything going smoothly...

Then the humming stopped abruptly. Lauren looked over to see her deputy sitting rigidly in his chair, staring ahead at something only he could see. "What the hell..." he said under his breath.

"What is it?" she asked. She touched an icon on the screen to bring up an image of what he was seeing. He was looking at a support girder, one of the thick ones. One of the sturdy beams of aluminium that gave the solar panel array most of its structural strength. There was a hole in it, not quite circular, running through the bar of metal at an angle of about thirty degrees and offset from the centre. It looked machined, a deliberate part of the design, and her first thought was that it must have been an attachment point for something that had been left from the final design, perhaps to save weight. "What is it?" she asked again. "What's wrong?"

"That hole," said Paul. "It's not supposed to be there. It wasn't there last time."

"Are you sure?"

"Just a minute."

There was a pause as Paul adjusted the image of that part of the structure taken during the last inspection, the week before. Lauren watched as he put both images side by side on the screen. He was right, he saw. There was no hole in the older image. "How did that happen?" she asked.

"I don't know." He moved the robot to examine the hole from another angle. A number of power cables ran along the underside of the strut, they saw, and those of them in line with the hole had gaps in them precisely corresponding with it, as if all matter in a long cylinder had been neatly cut out and removed. "You said that the power from the solar cells fell by three percent yesterday, and that the power fell in five discrete steps," he said. "I think we just found one of the steps."

"Get closer," said Lauren. "Get a closer look."

Paul did so and the hole grew on the screen. The image flickered as he magnified it further, placing an array of lenses in front of one of the cameras. The picture changed from a binocular, three dimensional view to a flat microscope image showing only one side of the hole.

The original surface of the strut had machine marks and scratches made during its manufacture, they saw, but the inner surface of the hole was perfect, shining in reflected earthlight like a mirror and marred only by some faint striations that precisely followed the line of the hole.

"That wasn't made by any normal piece of space debris," said Paul, his voice soft with awe. "I've seen holes like that made by a mechanical punch. One of the ones that applies tons of pressure very quickly. The object has to be braced in place, held immobile, or the punch just pushes it away or bends it."

"A very dense object, moving very fast," said Lauren, her eyes fixed to the image. "Iron, perhaps, travelling at a good fraction of the speed of light?" She tried to imagine a small, iron meteorite passing too close to a black hole, being torn apart and the fragments scattered blindingly fast across the universe. It might have been travelling for millions of years before passing through the solar system.

"It wouldn't have to be that dense if it was moving fast enough," said Paul, though. He removed his goggles to look at the commander. "A piece of foam would do that if it was moving fast enough. You think it's connected with the satellite disruption?"

"It must have happened at around the same time, that can't be a coincidence. Remember we thought it might have been caused by a massive object passing close by the earth." She looked back at the hole displayed on the screen. "Bao thought it might have been a cluster of mini black holes. What if he's right? What if one of them made that hole?"

"This wasn't caused by a black hole," said Paul, though. "The hole it made would have been perfectly circular. This was caused by a solid object of some kind. Maybe something exotic. Super dense, super massive. Neutronium? Something like that?"

"I don't know if it's stable at normal pressures. Take it out from the heart of a neutron star and it might expand back into normal matter. Maybe it's strange matter or something like that. Maybe something we've never imagined. Get the others in here. We've got to show them this."

"And then we've got to examine the rest of the solar panels. There were five discrete drops in power, remember? So that probably means four more severed cables, plus a lot more impacts that did less serious damage. We might have suffered up to twenty impacts. Maybe more! Shit! If even one had hit one of the living modules..."

"They have a much smaller area. The solar panels are huge." The narrowness of their escape left her wide eyed and trembling, but there was excitement as well. If they were right, they'd made an awesome discovery! Found evidence of something nobody had ever dreamed possible! Until now they'd just been a typical crew of astronauts whose names would have been lost among hundreds of others, but now they would be remembered. People would talk about them for centuries to come.

"We need to tell the guys on the ground as well," pointed out Paul. "They'll want to know about this straight away."

"I'll take care of that," said Lauren. "You get the others in here. Tell them we've discovered something incredible."

Paul nodded and touched an icon on his touchscreen to activate the intercom while the commander opened the communications link to Canberra.