by B. V. Larson
I nudged the ship forward until we were about a half-mile from the ring. I made sure we approached it at the center point of the donut-hole opening. As the hole was miles wide it made an easy target.
“What if we go through the wrong way?” asked Sandra nervously.
“What do you mean?”
“There are two sides to this thing. How do you know we are going through in the right direction?”
I thought about it. We really didn’t know. “It probably doesn’t matter,” I said.
“I bet that’s the last thought that goes through a dog’s brain before he wanders out onto a highway.”
I chewed a lip. “Maybe we can make an educated guess. Venus rotates very slowly, and it does it backward.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning the sun rises in the west and sets in the east, and it takes nearly two hundred and fifty Earth days to do so.”
“I like when you say smart things,” she said.
I looked at her, and saw a certain look in her eye. I loved that look, but right now I was in no position to take advantage of it. Sad, missing such opportunities.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Nothing. Anyway, the Macros were gathering here about nine months ago, about one Venus day in the past. So, if we look at how they gathered, maybe we can tell which side is which.”
“You’ve got video of the event?”
“Not close-up. I’ve got all the recordings that Kerr had from their telescopes. They knew for a long time they were massing up out here and hiding behind this planet, forming their fleet, getting it up to full strength before they made their move on Earth.”
“Bastards.”
I shrugged. “Basic AI tactics. Mass-up in an unexpected location. Roll out by surprise and hit the target en masse.”
“You are talking about gaming tactics. This isn’t a game, Kyle.”
“To a computer, every game is life or death,” I said. “They don’t know the difference. They play games and real life with equal determination.”
I brought up an interface with a remote and paged through recordings. I brought up the vids that showed ships arriving and hiding behind Venus. I played them. They were long, however, and I had to fast forward through hours of disk files to get to a scene where something actually happened.
“Hey, there it goes!” said Sandra.
She’d come over to my chair and sat on the armrest for a better view. I found her distracting. I looked back at the screen, fumbling for the pause button.
“Let me do it,” she said, taking the remote and backing it up more slowly. “Whatever it was, it flickered by very fast.”
I felt the momentary shock of loss all men feel when a remote is plucked from their fingers. I let her do it, however. She’d seen the thing, after all. She backed up the recording until something did flicker across the screen. We played it again and watched. The ship rose up out of the thick atmosphere and slid behind the planet.
I studied the recording and played it back several times. “We are seeing this from the point of view of Earth. According to the documentation, the telescope was oriented so that north and south are true on this recording.
“What?”
“Up is north, down is south. It looks like the ships are arriving on the left side of the world-the west side. That makes sense, because it was about one Venus day ago, and this structure should be about in the same position. And indeed, we are on the west side of the world from the point of view of Earth.”
“Because it takes one of our years for Venus to rotate once?”
“More like nine months, but close enough.”
“Okay…” said Sandra slowly. “Then which end of this ring is the right one?”
I shook my head. “Still unclear. It looks like they are flying up without turning around. That would mean we are facing the right way right now.”
“You can’t tell?” she asked, distraught.
“Not really. The Macros could have come out the other side and then turned around under the cloud layer and gone behind the planet after they left the atmosphere.”
She looked at me, her face worried. Her eyes squinched up. “Best guess?”
“We are aimed the right way now.”
“What are the odds?”
I opened my mouth to tell her it was only a guess, and it upped our odds about ten percent-max. In truth, we were either one hundred percent right or one hundred percent wrong. And we didn’t know if it meant our deaths or nothing at all.
“No,” she said, putting up a hand. “Don’t even tell me. I don’t want to hear anything about the odds. We’re going to be fine.”
I smiled. “Exactly. We are going to be fine.”
She kissed me, passionately. This went on for nearly a full minute. I turned my head to free my lips for a second. “Get into your jumpseat,” I told her gently.
She looked pained and I had to wonder if the kissing had all been a ruse to keep me from giving Socorro the order to fly. If so, it had nearly been successful.
“Socorro,” I said, looking at my love. “Full ahead. Fly us through that ring.”
The ship lurched, and Sandra bounced off me. She strapped herself in and stared wide-eyed at the forward wall. The ring grew closer to the yellowy contact that was our ship. Then we passed underneath it and everything changed.
— 29-
I’d read theories about what would happen if you really did fly through a wormhole. That’s all they were, of course-theories. We’d never done it, and our astrophysicists hadn’t thought we’d be doing it anytime soon. In fact, even now that I was flying through some kind of gateway to what I assumed would be a distant star system, I really didn’t know if the wormhole theories applied at all. What I knew for sure is that we reached the other end very quickly-almost instantaneously to my senses.
There was a sensation when we went through the ring-in the moment of transition to someplace else. The feeling reminded me of the small earthquakes every Californian experienced now and then. When a tremor hit, I often felt a bit dizzy. A little off-center. I’d look around the room and see a hanging plant swinging, or a fan that was switched off slowly turning by itself. For the most part, the sensation was in the inner ear, and it felt as if you were sitting in an office swivel-chair while a ghost gently nudged it.
The forward wall of the ship rippled, the first indicator that we were in for a big change. The new version of reality was similar to what we’d left behind. There we were, a tiny yellow contact in the center of the big wall. But the gray disk that had been Venus, complete with some raised bumps of metal that represented a relief map of scorched mountains, had vanished. As far as I could tell, we were in space and there was nothing in the area except the ring and our ship.
“Where did we go?” Sandra asked in a whisper.
For the first time, hearing the fear in her voice, I felt bad. She was really scared, and I’d risked both our lives, not just my own. I should have reversed the ship and flown her home the moment I’d found her hanging on the ceiling of the observatory. At least, I comforted myself, she wasn’t likely to try the stowaway thing again if we ever got home from this little adventure.
I pointed to the wall. “Venus is gone. We have to be somewhere else. I’m guessing a different star system.”
Inside, I was filled with a mixture of panic and exaltation. We’d made it to another star? I wanted to whoop aloud! Even better, we seemed to be alive and intact. I would have relaxed and cracked open a brew, but I had a whole new set of knots growing in my gut. Where exactly were we? Who was detecting us even now and heading in our direction?
“Socorro, show me a scaled schematic on the forward wall of this entire star system.”
The ship hesitated. “Requested job incomplete. Not all sensory data accessible. Some objects are suspected, but unobservable from current coordinates.”
“Just show me what you can and use best-guess estimates for the rest.”
&nb
sp; The forward wall shimmered, twisted. Things bubbled into relief, expanding and contracting in size as we watched. I suspected I was giving the ship’s processors a workout.
“Warning: the projected schematic includes incomplete-”
“I know, Socorro,” I said gently. “Just complete the command as best you can, no warnings are required on incomplete data when I’ve approved their inclusion.”
“Poor thing,” Sandra said. “You’re freaking her out.”
The image became increasingly clear. As it did so, I squinted hard, my eyes flicking over every inch of it. This was vital data, something no one had ever seen before. There was a big disk in the center, presumably the star at the center of the system. There were smaller bodies floating around, more than a dozen of them.
“Kyle, open up the cameras,” said Sandra. “Let me see out!”
“Just a second,” I said, breathing hard. That star in the center looked kind of-big. Too big.
“Socorro, what is the class of the main star in this system?”
“The closest star is spectral class B.”
I blinked in surprise. “A blue giant?”
“Can I see it?”
“Absolutely not,” I snapped. “Socorro, increase the hull thickness. I need more anti-radiation shielding.”
The ship hesitated. “Insufficient mass available.”
“Increase the mass around the bridge, then. Thicken the walls and make the densest wall the one facing the blue giant.”
“Specify mass increase.”
“I want it thick enough to stop all radiation from that star,” I said.
“Mass unavailable.”
“Cannibalize the mass from the troop cargo hold,” I ordered. “And from primary holds A and B. Begin shielding now. Get it as thick as you can with available mass.”
“Working.”
“What’s wrong, Kyle?” asked Sandra leaning forward in her jumpseat.
I turned to her and gave her a shaky smile. I tried not to look as if I was sweating-but I was. “I should have thought of this. I should have thought of a lot of things. We came out near a blue giant.”
“So?”
“So, they are big stars that pour out a lot of radiation. We could be frying.”
“Wouldn’t we feel that?”
“Probably not instantly.”
Sandra blinked at me and turned to look at the back wall of the ship. There, the wall was bubbling, as if it were a pot of mercury on a stove. I followed her gaze. The wall grew thicker as I watched.
“The ship is moving mass from other parts of the vessel to that wall, in order to protect us.”
“Is it lead?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Just talk to the ship. Keep me from frying.”
I nodded and stared at the wall that bubbled up behind my chair. I imagined the ship had jettisoned all those seats I’d put in the back for carrying troops. So much for that idea.
Sandra made a strangled sound. I snapped my head back to her. Had she gotten a heavy dose? Had she felt it first because I had the pilot’s chair between me and the blazing star behind us? I knew that blue giants could be twenty times as big as our sun, and worse, they could be 100,000 times brighter.
When I looked at Sandra, however, she was pointing at the forward wall. I followed her finger and saw red contacts floating there. Some of them were heading in our direction.
“Identify incoming contacts!” I ordered.
“They are Macro ships. Detailed identification pending. Six vessels are converging on our location.”
“Maybe we can talk to them,” I said, thinking aloud. I’d taken the time to transfer to my ship everything I could from the neural nets of the brainboxes I had available. We’d lost most of the Nano knowledge of the universe when the Nano ships had left us. I constantly berated myself for not having copied Alamo’s big, experienced brainbox and kept it as a backup. What kind of a computer teacher couldn’t be bothered to backup software? Fortunately, this ship had learned enough from the brainboxes that ran the factories on Earth to speak the primitive binary language of the Macros. With my edits to the communication script, we should at least be able to talk to them.
“We’ve got to run, Kyle,” Sandra said.
“Running away may not be our best choice,” I said. “I think they are programmed to be cautious when confronted by brazen behavior. That’s worked so far.”
“You are theorizing with my life.”
“The stakes are much higher than that,” I said. “I’m gambling with our entire species. Let me think for a second.”
I looked at the trajectories of the ships. They seemed to be coming from various planets-one from each. Could they be mining ships?
“Are the incoming ships armed, Socorro?” I asked.
“Unknown.”
“Do they have any weapons ports you can detect at this time?”
“Their range is too great for configuration data.”
I narrowed my eyes. “How far away are they? How long will they take to get into our weapons range?”
“The closest is approximately three hours from longest effective range.”
I relaxed a fraction. We had some time to think. I studied the schematic of the star system. “How long would it take to visit the closest of these neighboring bodies?”
“One hour.”
I nodded appreciatively.
“No way, Kyle. Don’t you even think about it,” said Sandra.
“Socorro, put us on a course for the nearest planetary body,” I said, not looking at Sandra. “Execute.”
“Kyle, dammit, we should just run.”
“Why? They already know we’re here. We can scout a planet then come back to the ring and run before they can even reach us.”
“You want to know why we shouldn’t spend a few hours sniffing around in their territory? I can’t believe you even have to ask, but I’ll give you a reason: What if they turn the ring off, Kyle? Did you think about that?”
“Good point. But I still think it’s worth the risk. We came here to scout the system. We’ve learned a lot-but I want to know more.”
“Do you really want to restart the war?”
“If we’ve done that by coming here, then we need the intelligence all the more.”
Sandra looked terrified. I began to worry about her health. This little adventure seemed causing her a lot of stress.
“When we get home, I think you need a vacation,” I told her.
“Yeah. That’s what I need. Let’s take our next radiation bath on the beach.”
For an hour, the red contacts grew closer. More appeared as well. There were nearly twenty by the time we reached the dark, gloomy rock we’d been flying toward.
“Socorro, move us behind the planet so the blue giant is on the far side.”
We were whisked away to the night side of the barren, nameless world. Huge growths of crystal loomed toward us. I could only imagine the treasure trove of strange minerals they represented. Perhaps heavy elements that were fantastically rare on Earth would be commonplace here.
“Ship positioned,” Socorro said.
When we were shaded by the planet, on the dark side of it and thus shielded from the radiance of the blue giant, we went into the observatory where Sandra had first stowed away. I scanned everything and took many pictures, storing them for the spooks back home to analyze. There were some amber contacts on this nameless rock with us. Ground-based machines, the Socorro told me. I had the ship take us to examine one of them close-up. It was busy sucking at the surface of the planet. Leeching valuable minerals. It was a mining robot, something bigger than any machine I’d ever seen. It was nearly a mile long and looked like a beetle with twenty spherical wheels. The wheels weren’t normal either, being covered with vicious spikes. Each spike was fifty yards long. Some of the spikes were broken. All were gleaming and worn from stabbing into rubble.
“Kyle, that is about the creepiest thing I’ve
ever seen,” said Sandra after we watched the spike-wheeled robot churn and probe for several minutes. The machine ignored us completely as we glided around and observed it closely.
“Only another robot could love it,” I agreed.
“The Macros must need lots of steel to construct more of themselves,” she said.
“These machines aren’t hunting for steel. Common elements like iron, nickel and carbon are easy to come by. I think they are hunting for heavy metals-radioactives and unusual alloys.”
“Let’s look at the stars from here. Maybe we can recognize some of the constellations and tell where we are.”
“Excellent idea,” I said. I had the ship turn us upside down. Standing on what had been the ceiling, we gazed upward from our tiny, cold observatory into an alien star system. Perhaps we were the first humans to ever have done so. I started snapping pictures. We moved the ship at various angles and shot thousands of images.
“Do you recognize any of the stars? There are some close ones, really big ones.”
I eyed the sky in concern. There were other big ones, blue-white. We were probably in some kind of small cluster of new, young stars. Blues often were born in groups of superhot, short-lived clusters.
“I don’t see the big dipper,” I said, “or the seven sisters, or anything easy like that. I think that’s the Milky Way, at least,” I said, pointing to the band of brighter light that crossed the sky. “That means we aren’t in the center of the galaxy, or another galaxy with a different configuration.”
“But isn’t the Milky Way brighter than it should be?”
“Definitely. But since this world has no atmosphere, I’m not sure if that means we are closer to the galactic center or not.”
“I think it’s bigger, too,” she said stepping up and cocking her head. “Thicker.”
I nodded slowly. I had to agree with her, and that gave me a chill. If we were close enough to the galaxy center that we could visibly see a difference in the size of it, then we were many light-years from home. Probably thousands of light-years away from Earth. I didn’t mention this to Sandra, however. She was freaked enough as it was.
“We’ll just take every reading and image we can home and let the pros figure it out,” I said with a confidence I didn’t feel.