Twenty minutes passed the way tense minutes passed on a ship at combat readiness, slowly and loudly through the silence between conversations. People talked in the war room. Scenarios were floated and examined and set aside. The possibility of a trap came up four times from four different people, which meant it was living in everyone's head regardless of whether they were saying it.
Kelvin had pulled up every piece of sensor data available and was running comparisons against anything in his database. The auxiliary arms moved independently of his main hands, pulling different data streams simultaneously, and even with all four working the answer kept coming back the same.
Unknown.
Then the object came into range of the fleet's visual array.
They put it on the main display.
