by B. V. Larson
“I suppose you think this is very funny,” said a voice above me.
I reacted with startled speed, crouching and jerking my head up. There she was, strapped to my ceiling. A dozen little black arms had grabbed her and pulled her up there ‘securing’ her. I smiled and relaxed.
“Brings back memories,” I said, “only this time you’re not naked.”
Sandra hissed at me. “If you ever want to have sex again,” she said, “you’ll get me off the frigging ceiling, Kyle.”
I got her down in a hurry.
— 26-
“You know what they do with stowaways, Sandra?”
“Who are ‘they’?”
“They work them. Very intensely.”
She half-closed her eyes and gave me a disgusted look. “And if they won’t work?”
“They get tossed overboard. Spaced.”
“You just try it. I’ll rip your arm off. Anyway, I’m not here as a stowaway. I told you I was going with you.”
“I’m not flying off on a military campaign. This is just a scouting trip.”
“I don’t care. I’m going with you anyway.”
I sighed. “You mean you don’t trust me. Okay…. How did you get aboard?”
Sandra shrugged. “You set up a knocking code. I used it to get in.”
“It’s a different code for the ship.”
“Yes, you told me.”
“When?” I asked.
“Remember when I took the injections? Do you remember that night?”
“Not much of it. I remember I was drunk-and amorous.”
“Exactly. You blabbed the code.”
“You took advantage of a drunk,” I said.
“Score one for the female side.”
We didn’t have a second pilot’s chair, but I’d installed a number of jumpseats around the walls with crash harnesses. I pointed one out to Sandra.
“Strap in, I’m going to increase our speed.”
Sandra folded down the seat and arranged the crash harness. “These things are all over the ship, aren’t they?”
“Yeah, there’s a troop-carrying area as well, a big enough bay for a fully-equipped company. Most of the ship’s interior is empty. The bulging hull is just for show to impress the Macros. I decided to make use of the space by setting up several chambers as cargo holds.”
“Why didn’t you put one of these seats in the observatory?” she asked.
“I didn’t figure anyone would be in there during maneuvers.”
“Okay, now for my real question, why are we going out to mess with the aliens?”
“Aren’t you curious? Don’t you want to know where they are coming from?”
Sandra pursed her lips. “Not if it will get us killed or start the war again. I just want them to stay away.”
“Well, it’s our job to make sure they don’t invade again. To do that, we have to know what they are up to. There are plenty of alien secrets all around us, and I want to figure them out. It’s our job.”
“What do you mean, our job?”
“If you want to come with me into space, you have to join Star Force.”
Sandra stared at me for a few seconds. I could see this comment had gotten through to her. Maybe, she’d expected me to stop her and throw her off the ship like a kid that had secretly ridden to the store in the back of daddy’s car. But I wasn’t going to do that. I’d decided to call her bluff and stop playing games with her.
“Will I have to call you sir?” she asked.
“Absolutely.”
She glared at me. “Only when we are on a mission. You can forget it otherwise.”
“You’re killing my fantasies-but okay.”
We’d traveled far past Earth as we’d been talking, heading sunward. Unfortunately, Venus was in an inconvenient position in relationship to the Earth this month. The orbital paths of the two planets were far from optimal for the trip. Since the Nano ship was capable of continuous acceleration, it could build up much higher velocities than any rocket we’d ever built on Earth. The key was the power system, which was able to generate steady thrust. With my three-engine ship, we accelerated hard for a day or so, then turned around, aiming the engines sunward, and decelerated, slowing ourselves down, for another day and a half.
In-between I let us coast for a time. We often took one-G breaks along the way, where we lowered the thrust the engines produced to give ourselves a rest. These breaks turned out to be very fruitful with Sandra, who was bored with the trip and frequently engaged me in our single source of entertainment.
Love was very different with a nanotized couple in freefall. Eye-popping achievements were reached. We created a series of new Olympic events and I’d say we swept the gold medals in all of them. It was good exercise too, I pointed out to her.
When Venus finally appeared as a disk on our forward wall, we went into the observatory to check it out with our own eyes. I made sure the cameras were recording the approach too, in case we missed something. The images could be sent to Earth for later analysis. There had been very strange things going on out here, and I wanted the details.
“What do you hope to find out here, Kyle?”
“I suspect there is something that connects our star system to others. A gateway, perhaps.”
She looked at me. “A black hole or what?”
“Nothing so dramatic, I hope. We would have felt the tug of its gravity back home if it were that sort of thing.”
“How do you know for sure?” she asked. “The Nanos have some control over gravitational effects. Remember the stabilizers you forgot to add to this ship?”
I looked at her and nodded. “You have a point. I really have no idea what we are going to find.”
“What if there is a Macro fleet gathering out here?” she asked.
“Then we run home.”
“What if they follow us?”
“We transmit abject apologies-and run faster.”
Sandra stared at me. She chewed her lower lip-something she did often when she was nervous. “It doesn’t sound like you’ve really thought this mission through.”
“Unknowns can’t be thought through. This is exploration, experimentation.”
“Why do you have to do stuff like this yourself?” she asked, suddenly intense. I could tell from her expression she wanted a real answer, not a quip.
“I think it started with these Nano ships,” I said. “There are secrets locked within these vessels. The Nanos have always driven me mad with their mysteries. I know that our scientists are working hard to analyze them-and I wish them luck. But as far as I can tell, they hadn’t made much progress. They’ve dissected the pieces, of course.”
“They have? What happened?” Sandra asked.
“I heard a team down at Los Alamos Labs in New Mexico took apart one of my fusion backpacks with disastrous results. There are several technical areas that are still uninhabitable.”
“Technical areas?”
“That’s what they call their various labs. The point is that despite the efforts of our best minds, we’ve been unable to do much more than theorize about Nano technology. We are certainly nowhere near reproducing it on our own.”
Venus was bright with reflected sunlight. Due to its orbital position relative to Earth, we were approaching it obliquely. It appeared like a half-moon from our vantage point. The atmosphere was far too thick to see the surface. What we could see was a yellowy-brown-beige swirl. The planet looked like a coffee mocha with way too much cream. Really, we were looking at the top of a mass of roiling clouds. I supposed it was beautiful-in the stark fashion of a scorched desert.
“Why can’t we figure out how these things work?” Sandra asked.
“We lack the fundamentals to analyze alien tech. Imagine this: What if we took a modern computer back in time to the doorstep of Benjamin Franklin, Sir Isaac Newton or Charles Babbage?”
She considered it. “They might trigger a technological revolution in earlier times. We might
be centuries ahead of where we are.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But most likely those learned men would have a hard time even comprehending the device. For one thing, it would run out of power within a few hours and turn into a complicated brick of strange materials. Even if we could give them the power and thus the time to really study one of our marvels, there are a thousand details and discoveries they would have to make first in order to build one of their own. At least a century of focused scientific achievement would be required.”
“You sound like a professor now,” she said.
I chuckled. “An occupational hazard. Should I shut up?”
“Nah. I want an ‘A’.”
“You’ve earned your grade in the sack a hundred times over.”
I had to defend myself, bouncing away from the incoming slap. It was a playful attack, however, so I relaxed. I looked down at Venus, which had grown imperceptibly larger beneath our feet. The glass of the observatory was very cold, so cold the molecules in my feet were burning in my shoes. I was glad they had plastic soles, which had no freezing point, or my shoes might have crystallized under my feet. I decided it was best to continue the lecture.
“Think, for example,” I began, “if someone managed to give a Model T Ford to the Romans. They could learn to drive it, but they wouldn’t be able to build one of their own. They could not machine the parts for the engine. The electronics of the ignition system would be incomprehensible. They had no rubber at that time, and no way to find any. They would have the same problem when it came to distilling gasoline to fill the tank. Such a substance was virtually unknown to them. My point is that something as simple as a car requires a dozen scientific and engineering techniques to understand and build. I personally believe that a technological gift to people in the past would be more likely to result in witchcraft trials than any early explosion of technology.”
I looked at the sole member of my audience to see if she was falling asleep yet. As an ex-prof, I’m good at reading listeners. Sandra was distracted by the sight of Venus below us. Her head was tilted downward, and she had her hair in each hand to pull it back as she studied the floor. Her pretty face was lit-up by sunshine reflected from Venus’ dense atmosphere.
“This glass is cold under my feet,” she said.
“Yeah, I didn’t build this chamber perfectly. Hopefully, we’re not getting too much radiation.”
Sandra looked up in alarm. At least I knew she was listening.
“Just kidding! The glass is lead-impregnated and the walls of the Nano ships have always blocked radiation, I’ve checked with Geiger counters.”
She relaxed and looked downward again, studying Venus. “This is pretty amazing. I’m pissed that you didn’t offer to take me along before.”
“I just built the ship!”
“But you planned to leave me home. You planned to look at this beauty alone.”
“Do you want to hear the rest of my speech or not?”
She sighed. “Okay.”
“The Nano ships are a technological gift from the future to us. It’s as if we’d given Benjamin Franklin a pallet of solar calculators-plus a few copy machines and maybe a tractor or two. Like old Franklin, are advanced enough not to believe they are supernatural, but we are not prepared to exploit the gifts fully. Taking a piece of our own current technology back in time just two hundred years would have befuddled our world’s greatest scientific minds at that time. Today we have been presented with the technology of the Blues. We have examples of Nano science in our hands we might not have developed on our own for a thousand years. Worse still, this technology wasn’t designed by human minds for human purposes. This makes the principles behind them doubly hard to fathom.”
“All right fine, professor,” she said. “Tell me why we are risking a war-and our asses, out here.”
“Because I’m hoping we can learn at least how to use the technology that’s out here. I’m hoping we can use it to get out of our star system.”
Her startled eyes met mine. “What for?”
I smiled grimly. “You can’t win a war by staying purely on the defense.”
“I thought we were at peace with the machines.”
“What if we’re not? What if there are more aliens out there, who haven’t yet made an appearance?”
Sandra stopped asking questions. I suspected she hadn’t really liked my answers all that much. We both gazed down at Venus. The planet looked marginally closer now.
The more I thought about it, the more I doubted we would penetrate the secrets of these alien marvels within my lifetime. We simply didn’t have the prerequisite science to do so. But I was determined to learn whatever I could. The American Plains Indians had figured out how to ride horses and shoot rifles, even if they couldn’t build a factory to make their own guns. We would do the same.
I tried not to think about how the story had ended for the Indians.
— 27-
We found something on the far side of Venus. I didn’t see it directly, not at first. But the Socorro knew it was there. A coppery-red contact appeared on the forward wall. I’d instructed the ship to show anything she detected out to maximum range.
“It’s on the planet surface,” said Sandra,
She sat strapped into her jumpseat. I was strapped into my pilot’s chair. I’d decided it was best we were in our seats from here on out. We were only about an hour from reaching Venus. We would go into orbit soon. If we had to make any sudden maneuvers, I didn’t want to be bounced off the walls of the ship.
I eyed the thing on the forward wall. Venus was a gray disk, about the size of a man’s hat now. Superimposed upon it was the coppery-red contact. It hadn’t been there a minute earlier. I couldn’t tell if it was behind Venus, orbiting Venus, or deep inside it. Our metallic-relief observation system was far from perfect. Optically, using the newly installed cameras and my high-def flatscreen, I couldn’t see it at all.
Whatever it was, it had to be fairly large. As Venus was about the size of a truck tire, the contact was a paperclip in comparison.
“Socorro,” I said. “Identify the contact on the screen.”
“Structure unknown.”
“Is it an enemy ship?”
Hesitation. “The structure does not fit that designation.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“The structure does not appear to be armed, thus it fails the test for enemy. The structure does not appear to have a means of propulsion, thus it fails the test for ship.”
I nodded, it was hard to refute that logic.
“What the hell is it, then?” Sandra asked.
During our journey I’d ordered the Socorro to listen to her, so it responded. “Structure unknown.”
Sandra huffed in frustration. “Why are you marking it with red if it fails the test for enemy?” she asked the ship.
“Unknown contacts are assumed hostile until proven otherwise,” said the ship, reasonably enough.
I eyed Sandra sidelong. I doubted she would ever be a successful programmer. Computers were inherently exasperating. They required patience, persistence and a very high threshold for frustration. Sandra was persistent, but she was as likely to put her nanite-charged fist through a brainbox as to put up with its nonsense.
“Socorro,” I said, “Let’s zoom in and see the structure at a magnification of ten times its current dimensions.”
The forward wall rippled. The coppery contact grew from a paperclip into a coat hanger. The surrounding disk of Venus exploded into an orb that overflowed the forward wall of the bridge.
“Now, rotate the image slowly-sunward. Spin it around so I can see it from different perspectives.
Nothing happened for a few seconds.
“I think it crashed,” Sandra said.
I hissed at her. “Never say those words to a computer.”
Slowly, the forward wall began to change. I saw it was very slow indeed. The nanites representing the rippled surface of Venus were hard-put,
bubbling and rippling to keep up. It amounted to a slow frame-rate.
“Socorro, remove the image of Venus itself from the projection for now.”
The steel-gray disk faded into smoothness. I could almost feel the nanites as they thanked me for the break I’d given them. The coat hanger-sized shape in the middle of the screen was now more detailed, and its rotating animation was faster and more coherent.
“What the hell is that thing?” asked Sandra aloud.
“Looks like-some kind of curved thing,” I said. As it rotated, the unknown object grew increasingly from a single rectangle with curved ends into an oval. After another half a minute, it was a perfect ring. Then it continued rotating and became an oval and then a racetrack-shaped rectangle again.
Sandra and I looked at each other. “It’s some kind of circle,” she said. “Some kind of ring. But what’s it for?”
“Socorro, are there any other contacts in sensor range?”
“No.”
“How close is the structure to the surface of Venus?”
“The object is embedded in the planetary crust.”
“Who the hell built that thing?” asked Sandra suddenly.
I looked at her. I had to admit, it was a good question.
“Structure origins unknown,” said the ship.
“Socorro, how much of the structure is beneath the surface?” I asked.
“Approximately fifty-one percent of the structure is buried.”
I thought about that for a few seconds. I felt the engines change their thrum and a felt a tug to the left, as we shifted our course. The Socorro was automatically going into orbit over Venus.
“What should we do now?” Sandra asked. Her voice was hushed, as if someone might hear us. She had a worried, excited look on her face, as if we had just discovered an unlocked backdoor and were discussing what to do about it. In a way, I supposed that was exactly what we had just done.
I paused looking at her seriously. “No one is around….”