Ironman Stirs

In 2660 Dr. Dylan Yarlburo published a 15,000 page volume with the ponderous title Ironman: A Survey of 100 Years of Study. It was met in the academic world with deafening silence. Ironman had become junk science. Its study had occupied many careers and had banished many promising scientests to obscurity.

Ironman simply defied the best minds in in the Galactic Aliiance. Even after 100 years of constant surveillance with the best technology the dark hulk was as big a mystery as ever.

The consensus of scientific opinion was that Ironman was a very powerful alien device constructed for an unknown purpose. An artifact of an ancient race whose purpose and motives humanity could only guess about.

By 2677 the Alliance senate questioned the need to continue funding ongoing scientific and military surveillance of the object. The military was able to stave off cuts because of their considerable investment in support installations in the system.

The study of Ironman had become the academic graveyard. Only underacheiving grad students or scientests trying to resurrect flagging careers could be recruiting to man the research station that monitered the hulk.

On April 3, 2681 a graduate student named Carl Grant was dozing while sitting at the main console of the research station located on the moon simply known as 11-C. The instruments came to life starting him. Ironman's power generation went up 11,000%.

On the surface of Ironman a huge ice flat vaporized in an instant and a tight blue beam reached out to the gas giant below.

Over the next few hours Grant watched as Ironman greedily devoured several hundred billion liters of liquid hydrogen from the gas giant below.

Three hours and twenty-two minutes later, the beam ceased almost as suddenly as it began.

A thick cloud of foggy gas covered Ironman making it look even more mysterious than ever.

Nervous calls went out. The fleet base went on alert and all available ships slipped their moorings and took up position several million kilometers from Ironman. Someone on Admiral Jamison's staff orddered a news blackout after the research station had already begun transmitting data to the various institutes in the Alliance that still had research interests in Ironman.

Despite the communications blackout, the news of Ironman's awakening spread like wildfire. The military's blackout fueled rampant speculation by conspiracy theorists across the Alliance. Rumors began to spread about military leaves being cancled and ships unexpectedly moving out. Galactic News reported that the Alliance Fleet had been mobilized for wargames.

After Ironman fed on the gas giant, it began to do things that no one had seen it do over the century that it had been under close observation.

Whole regions of ice vaporized. New features began to appear on its surface. Rows of blue, green, red and white lights appeared. After spiking during those first four hours, the objects power output came down but stabilized at a much higher level than had ever been observed.

Ironman began to emit a powerful regular pulse in the subspace communications bands.

Special teams of first-contact specialists tried desperatly to communicate with Ironman. They sent prime numbers. They sent mathematical symbols. They sent everything they could think of. Ironman may have been talking but he wasn't talking to anyone human.

Alliance Fleet Intelligence identified the signal. It was a beacon.