The Saeculum filled the forward viewport of the Cass Meridian for the better part of six hours before Ren authorized the approach. He'd watched it the whole time. That was his habit on new wrecks — let the eye adjust before the body committed — but this one had required more adjusting than most. The vessel was large in a way that resisted measurement, its superstructure extending past standard registry dimensions by a margin that his instruments confirmed and his instincts kept disputing.
Mack had come up to the forward station twice during the watch. The first time he'd stood beside Ren without speaking, which was unusual for him. The second time he'd said, "The aft section's wrong," before the instruments had finished their sweep of it. Ren had asked him what he meant and Mack had shrugged, already walking back toward the nav console. "Wrong," he'd said again, like that settled it. Ren had logged it as crew notation and waited for the sweep to finish. The sweep agreed with Mack, though it took another forty minutes to produce the specific numbers. The aft section's mass distribution didn't match the hull geometry by any conversion Ren could run. He ran four.
Dav had stayed quiet through most of it, which was also unusual. He'd pulled the Saeculum's registry filing twice — once at the start of the watch, once about an hour before Ren called the approach — and both times he'd read through it without comment and set it down. Ren hadn't asked. There was a protocol for that: you let the crew arrive at their own assessments before the briefing, so that the briefing was a comparison rather than a suggestion.
The light coming off the Saeculum wasn't right either. Not wrong in any way Ren could file a notation on. Just not right. The hull absorbed the surrounding light the way hull material was supposed to, but the angles of return were slightly off, as though the surface were curved by a fraction that no scan confirmed. He'd checked the viewport calibration twice. He'd checked it a third time after Mack's comment about the aft section. The viewport was fine.
