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“Go on guess what it is”

He looked up at the huge black shape sitting in the middle of a chrome metal gantry, it had a rough symmetry, roughly elliptical in cross section, but not artificial enough to shake him from believing it was a big a rock. It’s texture was like sandstone, though on close examination, the grains were of any size, though their colour was a uniform jet black. The shape loomed above him it must have easily been over thirty meters tall, and ten wide, though craters and gouges along its length made the whole shape irregular.

“A rock…”

“Try again”

“Ok it looks a bit symmetrical, and you called me here under extreme secrecy, more than just the usual paranoia you get in the Federation high xeno-archaeology departments. So its obviously made, an artefact, not unless I am right in which that it is a rock, which would be another of the Federation’s hilarious cock-ups.”

“We’ve checked thoroughly, its made, not a rock”

“So its made, its seems to be made of a uniform solid, so its either very primitive, Neolithic or the like, or very advanced. I’d fancy that you would not dig up a monolith and bring it here, so it’d be advanced right?”

“Onto a good start”

“Right, so its advanced, driver coil, computer?”

“Neither and both”

“Well that’s just acting very obtuse”

“Well ok let me tell you where we found it” They both walked right up to plinth, it was only about half a metre tall, its function only to prevent the thing resting on the floor, their was a slight chill in the air immediately next to the object, whether this was real or perhaps a feeling generated in the observer standing next to its bulk was not clear, the instruments had been slid back into their recesses in the brightly lit hall. “It was identified by a Hawk craft on the outskirts of the Hasardi Amorok Relic ground, not floating free in space but stuck to the side of an asteroid that passed through that region about two thousand years ago, it was at the time buried under a layer of dust, the Hawk spotted the anomaly, and detected a spatial distortion around the object, it was later recovered by the Federation salvage vessel Hulk-thief . From there it was shipped first to Melcor where it was checked for biological contagion, and cleaned, up and then to here.”

“You still haven’t told me much, accept for the fact that this is one of these ultimately prized Amorok-Hasardi relics, but I am presuming because it was interned there that is ultra high tech.”

“Well I didn’t tell you it was from the Relic-ground, but all evidence points to it, needless to say that particular rock has since been examined under extreme scrutiny, alas to no extra artefacts”

“Why did it allow this thing to be lost? Surely whatever controls the Relic-ground would have shifted out of harm’s way.”

“That’s the particularly niggling fact we have been forced to consider the possibility that this is not from the Relic-ground as such, anyway I have not told you what it is.” There was a short pause, the big black edifice radiated it’s timelessness.

“You still haven’t”

“I was trying to build up a dramatic effect, it’s a starship.” He pointed. Another pause, this time the penetrating stare was fighting the black immensity, one would have to break before revelation.

“A starship? Entirely solid state?”

“Nanitic actually.”

“Whoa, that thing is a nanite construct, we safe here?” If it was possible for the shape to contrive to look menacing it did.

“It’s completely inert, we actually don’t quite understand why it isn’t active, the individual machines themselves are by in large intact, and there is enough ambient energy to at least power some systems if it is as advanced as we suspect.”

“You do realise if that thing comes around we may as well kiss this asteroid goodbye if it is malign, God damn! You researchers are so foolhardy, you know damn well what I think of current Federation nanotechnology-”

“It is partially for these reasons that you are here.”

“Damn it man, I can’t believe you recovered it, you hadn’t considered the fact that this thing may have been intentionally activated by the Relic-Ground entity because it was dangerous”

“Have you not considered that this thing may hold the key to huge expanses of local space heritage, both speculation, and neither yet has any evidence”

They had by this time retreated to a broad windowed lounge that looked into the vast cube that housed the gantry and the mysterious starship. Where as the project member was reclined in a chair, the visiting professor was pacing along the length of diamond windows, glaring.

“Is that thing entirely solid? No reaction chambers or storage tanks”

“Completely, totally solid state, density is a shade greater than 7 grams per cubic centimeter”

“So that is solid nanite, that’s enough for sentience to occur, in fact enough for a whole multiplicity.”

“We were kind of banking that this was so, we are still thinking about starting it up”

“You know exactly how I feel about that, what’s to stop it breaking confinement and reducing this asteroid, the planet, the Federation into a myriad copies of itself, we wouldn’t stand a chance of fighting it if it was hostile.”

“We may seem foolhardy but our confinement is quite good, we can collapse the whole hall into singularity if we need to, but if we do lose confinement we would have a hard time fighting a nanite war. In fact I am almost certain we would lose.”

“So why don’t you blast this thing to kingdom-come now while you can.”

There was a pause, the seated figure bent up and extended a graphical tablet towards the pacing figure, he snatched it. A few moments passed as he read it.”

“Fah! Ethical concerns! So what if it is carrying artificial intelligences!”

“There are a lot of people who would hold opinions on that comment, especially artificial intelligences, anyway if you look at the carrying capacity that thing could be  home to thousands if not millions of conscious entities, to destroy this now could be tantamount to murder.”

“Don’t give me the ethical line, the Federation although moral can’t be this stupid, this could be the greatest threat we have encountered since the war.”

“There is of course a more… practical interest in the object.”

“Ah-ha!”

“Firstly that if there are any entities on this vessel, then we may learn a great deal, at the very least it is a few thousand years old, and this period has not been clearly defined. At the oldest estimate this thing could in fact pre-date all other known civilizations.”

“And of course hold the key to enormous technological and scientific treasures.”

“And admittedly of course could hold the key to enormous technological and scientific treasures, but we are not so monomaniacal. Except in our thirst for knowledge.”

“At the price of wisdom.”