Detective Ray Mercer had been drinking since four in the afternoon, which meant by the time the phone rang at nine-thirty he was beyond drunk and into that peculiar clarity that comes when the brain gives up pretending it's sober.

Mr. Mercer? The voice on the other end was female, clipped, expensive. This is Victoria Shaw from the federal government. I understand you are the man who asks the right questions.

Ray took a pull from the bottle. I'm the man who asks questions people don't want answered. There's a difference.

Is there? She paused. Then ask me this: what's a fifty-thousand-kilometer metal ring doing in low Earth orbit?

Ray set the Bottle down quickly, the way a man puts down something dangerous. Where are you calling from, Miss Shaw?

That's not -- Mr. Mercer, three weeks ago a man named Gregory Voss hired you to investigate anomalous gravitational readings around his yacht. You found data that shouldn't exist. You reported it to your editor at the Herald, and the Herald reported it to the city, and the city reported it to us, and now I'm calling you at nine-thirty to tell you that there is a structure in space, larger than any man-made object ever built, and it is eating hydrogen.

Ray looked out his office window. The East River was black and moving slow. He could see the lights of cargo ships on it, and he thought about how none of them knew that something was coming that would make harbors and oceans and ships and all of human civilization look like what it was: a brief, bright arrangement of molecules on the surface of a rock.

Can I meet you? Victoria Shaw said.

I don't meet with feds anymore, Ray said. Too many rules.

Then don't meet. Just listen. We've been tracking this object for eighteen months. We call it the Circle. We don't know what it is. We don't know where it came from. We know it's moving toward Earth. We know it's consuming the solar system's hydrogen supply. In approximately forty-two years it will be at Earth's orbital distance. When it arrives it will take our atmosphere, our oceans, our hydrogen, everything that contains hydrogen, and it will process it. We don't know what it does with it. We don't know if it stops.

And you called me because?

Because Voss's data showed us something the satellites didn't. The Circle has structures on its surface. Lights. You can see them from Earth on a clear night. Someone built this thing, Mr. Mercer. And if someone built it, someone knows what it's doing. And if someone knows, there's a chain of people who know, and chains have weak links, and I need you to find the weak link.

Ray picked up the bottle again. How long do I have?

Six months.

Then I'm going to need a lot more scotch than I currently have.

He hung up. He finished the bottle. He slept for three hours and dreamed of rings -- wedding rings, bicycle rings, rings of fire, rings closing around his throat.

When he woke at noon, he called Miriam Sato, a physicist who worked at a lab in Brooklyn and owed him a favor from a case involving stolen plutonium.

Ray? It's noon. Who are you investigating this time?

Miss Shaw. He told her everything.

Silence. Then: She's telling the truth.

I didn't ask -- The Circle. It's real. My colleague at NASA saw the data. It's the largest object ever constructed. By whom, we don't know. The engineering alone -- the tensile strength required to keep something that size from flying apart -- it's beyond anything we can do. It's rotating. It's generating artificial gravity. It's powered by nuclear fusion. Ray, this is not a natural object. Someone built this.

Where?

That's the thing. We think it was built in another star system. The material composition is not anything in the periodic table. It's an alloy of something we haven't seen. Ray, this is --

Alien, Ray said.

Yes.

He sat on the edge of his bed. The apartment was quiet. A siren wailed somewhere in the distance. How long? he said.

Until it reaches Earth? Miriam's voice was very small. Forty-two years, give or take.

Ray hung up. He shaved. He put on a suit. He went to his office and opened a drawer and took out a revolver he hadn't fired in two years and checked that all six bullets were still in the cylinder. Then he opened the false bottom of his desk drawer and took out a notebook filled with questions he'd been compiling for three weeks, ever since Voss's yacht data first arrived.

The weak link, Victoria Shaw had said. Ray looked at the revolver, looked at the notebook, and picked up the phone. He had questions to ask.

---

OBJECTIVE TENSOR CODES (OTMES v2):

[Code] V-03 | The Man Who Knew | NYC Hardboiled TI: 72.4 (T2 Disillusionment) | theta: 180 degrees M: [7.0, 1.0, 7.0, 4.0, 6.0, 6.0, 4.0, 8.0, 1.0, 5.0] N: [0.60, 0.40] | K: [0.40, 0.60] V:0.80 I:0.80 C:0.40 S:1.00 R:0.10 OTMES-v2.0 code: V03-MWK-NYC-1960-T2 Simil. class: Noir / Investigation / Cynical Awareness