Hex by Allen Steele Page B

skipper,” he replied, not looking up from his console. “Judging from its energy signature, though, I’d say it’s using a negmass drive.” He hesitated. “My guess is that it’s hjadd .”
    Andromeda turned toward the com station, only to see that it was vacant as well. Hell of a time for this to happen, with most of the bridge crew off duty and only a couple of officers standing watch. Perhaps it was just as well that Anne was in her bunk; her failure to make contact with the danui had been giving her fits, and another unanswered communiqué would only vex her even more. Andromeda decided to let her sleep.
    â€œWhere’s the second starbridge?” she asked.
    â€œThat, I can tell you.” Jason typed a command into the navtable keyboard. An instant later, numbers appeared beneath the new ring, with a green line appearing as a parabolic curve between it and the first starbridge. “How interesting,” the first officer murmured, staring at the computations. “The two starbridges are in the same equatorial orbit, half an AU from Hex and exactly 14,602,140.88 miles apart.” He hesitated, then pointed to an empty point in space one-third of the way around Hex. “I’ll bet anyone here their dessert for the next week that there’s another starbridge right there... same orbit, same distance.”
    â€œWhat makes you think that?” Rolf asked.
    â€œWith something this big, why settle for having only two starbridges to get here?” He shrugged. “Or even three, for that matter.”
    Neither Andromeda nor Rolf took him up on his wager, which was wise on their part. A day later, the existence of the third starbridge was confirmed when another starship—most likely nord , judging from its lightsails—came through it, and it wasn’t long after that before they realized that the first officer was right. In all, six starbridges were in equatorial orbit around Hex, each one located at equal distances from its nearest neighbors.
    It soon became apparent why the danui had chosen to build six different points of entry to their system.
    By the fourth day, Hex completely filled the forward screen until nothing else could be seen. The sheer size of the thing was staggering: 93 million miles in radius, 186 million miles in diameter, with a circumference of 584,336,233.568 miles and an estimated volume of 1.086 17 miles. As abstract as the figures were, they were the only way Andromeda could comprehend just how bloody huge the sphere was.
    Except for the small gas giant in close orbit around HD 76700, the only other object in the danui system besides its sun was Hex. If Tom was right, and the sphere had been built more or less on the same principles originally postulated by Freeman Dyson, then any other planets that might have once existed here had long since been destroyed, their mass used for the sphere’s construction. Indeed, the amount of matter and energy—not to mention time—required for such an effort was utterly mind-boggling. Andromeda knew that she would’ve deemed such a feat to be impossible had she not seen it with her own eyes.
    Once the ship was within ten million miles of Hex, D’Anguilo was able to study its hexagons a little more closely through Montero ’s optical telescope system. Their dimensions were identical; each of their six sides were one thousand miles long and one hundred miles in diameter, giving them a total perimeter of six thousand miles. By then, it was obvious that Hex revolved around HD 76700 at a rate that would produce an internal surface gravity of 2 g’s for the hexagons at the equator and nearly none at all for those at its poles. It was difficult to tell exactly how many hexes made up the sphere, but D’Anguilo estimated that Hex was comprised of approximately six trillion hexes.
    Even more astonishing, it appeared that the sides of a given hex were individual cylinders,