Aki was five hundred meters above the surface of the Ring. She held the railing. Her hands would not want to push off. She visualized the process so she would be ready when the moment came. The cliff surrounding the Island soared upward from the surface of the Ring about two kilometers ahead. A graser cannon was perched at the crest of the precipice.
Aki tried to keep from looking in the direction she could not help but think of as “down.” When she finally managed to push off, fear caused her breath to hitch.
“There is a red light on the Ring. It is targeting us.” Aki considered her options, then realized where the mirror-like surface of the Ring was facing. Her red target light was actually a reflection of Alpha Orionis, the red star Betelgeuse. Her sigh of relief echoed inside her helmet. The ship proceeded forward steadily until it was directly above the Island, its floodlight slicing across the top of the graser battery. The Ring’s gray and shiny surface was no longer below her feet. She dangled above what look like the compound eye of an enormous insect. An eye that extended into the distance farther than she could see.
“Starting descent.”
“God bless,” said Commander Kindersley.
Aki pushed herself away from the stationary railing, the jet on the back of her suit allowing her to drift straight back. A blast from one of the five-meter wide NERVA III engines could expel primary coolant from the nuclear reactor with over five tons of force. Aki had no intention of getting in its way. The readout from her suit’s radiation counter was increasing quickly enough to give her cause for concern. She was unsure what to do if it continued to escalate.
In the first minute, she descended 150 meters toward the Island. The graser battery passed by as she continued to drop. Landing on an area that was light gray in color, the boots of her suit touched down against the hard surface of the Island. It felt like polished marble, but Aki did not feel the density she was used to under her feet. Gravity was low; even taking a normal stride could mean reaching escape velocity. She gave a few blasts from her jet to propel her toward one of the hexagonal wells.
“The hole is approximately four meters across. The interior is a perfectly smooth cylinder with a reflective coating along its walls. This is interesting… From what I can see, it is not completely perpendicular compared to the Ring’s exoskeleton. It is somewhat tilted, perhaps aimed toward something.”
Aki peered deeper into the hole.
“There is something down there, about one hundred meters down. I am leaning over…I can see it now. Three arms are securing a disk in place.”
“Your helmet’s transmission gives a good look. It is probably the secondary mirror of a reflecting telescope,” Per said.
“I don’t think so, Per. I know scopes. The inside would be black to absorb any stray light that got trapped inside it. This is not even close. It is white and reflective.”
“It does not absorb light and gives it off instead?”
“Is it some kind of firing device for a diffuse laser?”
That explanation made more sense. This had to be the complex laser’s guidance mechanism. With the Island 130,000 kilometers across, if fired at once, the blasts would produce a bundle of amplified beams the size of Jupiter.
“What could it be for?” Aki asked. “We have already seen the graser. I cannot understand why the Builders would want this much power.”
“Maybe it’s for communication.”
“Too big, Per. It must be a propulsion system for laser sails. But where is the ship?” If it is for a ship, what could be massive enough that someone would need this much power to mine it or carry it away? The solar system did not have any precious resources or rare elements that were not readily available throughout the universe. She tried to visualize what the Builders could want. The Builders were advanced enough that they should appreciate that the solar system had life. She could not understand why they would ignore humanity or the rest of Earth’s species and build a device that could destroy it. The Ring was at a specific angle that reduced the amount of light that could reach Earth. It could not have been coincidental and was not the sort of information that such a meticulous design and construction process would have otherwise overlooked.
“Aki, what if the ships are not being built here because the ships are coming from somewhere else? Somewhere outside the solar system?” Per said.
“You’re not making sense. I was trying to think about how the—”
“What you’re sending back. That is not a propulsion system. It is for braking.”
“I have a pretty good—”
“No. The extrasolars will beam the lasers against sails to slow down, not to speed up. Based on a system capable of directing this much energy, like bomblets, it would be enough power to slow down an armada.”
Aki lifted her head and looked out into the stars. Orion, with Betelgeuse, the blue of Rigel, the Orion Nebula and Barnard’s Loop, all were in the direction the cylinder pointed.
“What would they…?” She was not sure how to finish her sentence or her thought. The Builders had to come from one of this countless mass of stars. One of those infinite pinpricks in the darkness had to be their sun. Aki understood that Per was correct. Somewhere out there, near whatever star was their home, there would be a replica of this structure she was standing on. It would launch the ships, providing acceleration to start their journey, and this would bring that fleet to a stop. With massive yet lightweight sails, ships like theirs would eliminate the need to carry their own engines or propellants. A civilization that could build such a system would have no problem constructing the Ring from such a remote distance.
“It is simple. How do you stop a photon-sail ship? We tossed that concept long ago for lack of an answer,” Per said. “Now you are standing on it.”
“I read that they’ve run tests on the idea.” The commander’s tone showed he did not want to sound as out of his depth as he was.
“The physicist and writer Robert L. Forward proposed light-sails and eventually came up with an idea for braking, reflecting the laser onto the front of the sail to slow the ship. His model had problems too. A laser beam loses strength in proportion to the square of the distance covered. It is hard to project a beam that remains strong enough for when it is time to begin deceleration. It is not applicable to long-distance trips. There are also problems presented by having the enormous sail mounted to the ship throughout the voyage.” Aki stepped back from the hole in the Island.
“I see what you mean,” said Commander Kindersley.
“The solution, as we are seeing here, is using nanotechnology. The Builders launch lightweight nanomachines from the ship once it is on course. By accelerating them to a speed just slightly greater than their ship’s speed, the nanomachines arrive years before the ship does. These nanomachines land on Mercury, use its resources to replicate themselves, and then fabricate everything we see here before their ship has even arrived. It’s quite slick,” said Per.
“Why would they send a fleet of ships, Per?” asked Aki.
“Look around. This is far more massive than one ship would need,” answered Per. “A single sail-ship, or small ones, could just use solar pressure to decelerate. The sun is a fine source of photons.”
“I suppose you are right.”
“Aki,” said the commander. “Measure the optical axis of the laser as accurately as possible. Aki? Come in, Aki,” he repeated.
Aki had been lost in thought, thinking of Per’s solution and considering its ramifications. “Yes, sir. Uh, got it.”
“Relax, Aki. Use the gyro in your handy-cam. As accurately as possible.”
“Yes, sir.”
Aki tried to concentrate. When the ship received the measurements, they cross-referenced them to the star catalog. HD 37605 was a star forty-three parsecs away —a perfect match. It was in the K0V spectrum, one class redder than the earth’s sun, peaking within the visible spectrum, which meant its temperature was somewhere between three thousand and six thousand Kelvin.
It was part of a dual system with a red dwarf but in a planetary system that had been previously unknown.
Aki directed the flow of plasma from the nozzle of her torch and extracted several samples of the Island’s material. She placed them into a triple-layered container that had been designed to produce a warning if corrosion was detected. Since the Island was immune to the destructive powers of the Ring’s contaminants, understanding the corrosion process might allow duplication of its properties. Similar shielding could allow them to come into contact with the Ring without consequences.
Making her way around the graser battery, Aki dislodged another sample. She wished she had time to investigate how its gamma-ray laser and convergence mechanism functioned. She inspected the sighting telescope on the cannon. It was not that different from the telescopes found at public observatories. Wondering why it had both a short and a long lens, she hypothesized that one was long range and the other wide angle. Aki found it odd that there were no screws to adjust the optical axis and no actuator. Then she realized that their technology was self-correcting and removed the need for manual adjustments. Builder technology was not incomprehensible, just expressed in scales beyond easy imagining. Uneasy imagining, Aki thought to herself. Aki started to leave but glanced at the telescope. She felt an idea trying to take shape but could not formulate what it was.
“Well done, Aki. Return to ship.”
“Yes, sir.” Aki was about to fire her jet but stayed her hand. The answer to her idea was coming. She wanted to ignore it and get back to the Phalanx, but she could not let go of what was nagging at her. “The aliens are already on their way?” she said.
“The Builders? I am certain,” said Per. “Once this finishes prepping for their arrival, I doubt they would let it gather dust. They are probably closer than anyone thinks.”
Aki knew that without their braking system they would hurtle through the solar system with no means of slowing, speeding like an express train past a local stop. Humanity would be robbing them of their only opportunity to come to rest, damning them to a never-ending, one-way drift past the edge of the visible universe.
I can do this. I am capable of destroying this. The graser, the Island, the Ring…Aki tried to convince herself.
“Aki, pull out of there. The graser could come back online any second.”
This was my dream. I wanted to touch what the Builders created. The Builders are not trying to harm us. They just have different values; they exist on scales both nano and mega. We do not have time to try to set it to a new angle, one that would spare us. The ailing earth cannot wait, but can I just destroy them? Can we find a way to leave it? What choice do I have? Mark was so committed. He would not waver, not when it mattered this much. He would not let his conscience stand between him and the task at hand.
“Aki, can you hear me? Return to ship.”
“I am going to need more time.”
“You’ve done your job. Come back to ship.”
“Just a few minutes. Please. There is something I have to try.”
ACT XII: FEBRUARY 23, 2022
THE PHALANX CONTINUED its long journey back. They had left the Island twenty days ago. Eight million kilometers from the Ring, they sent their faithful probehound to retrace its steps and return to the Island. From their cocoons, the three surviving members of the crew watched the telescopic images from thirty seconds in their own past.
“The graser’s reacting, aiming at the hound. Aki, here’s hoping your hunch was right,” Commander Kindersley said.
The section of the Ring that they had severed was fully repaired; there was not even a trace that it had been damaged. They were certain that the graser had recharged. Their hound sped on, making a direct trajectory to cross the line of defense. There was a flash of static on the screen. The image cut out abruptly. The ship was engulfed in the electric surge from the graser discharge, though the damage was minimal this time because of the distance from the Ring. The image returned.
The area on the Ring where the Island had stood was a valley of incandescent and molten scrap. The material had vaporized, forming a shockwave that spread in all directions, leveling the entire structure and expanding concentrically like a ripple in a massive black pond. The sighting telescope was trained directly on the hound as it should have been. The muzzle, however, had been pointing directly at the Island. Before leaving, Aki had sliced off the sighting telescope with her plasma torch. With slight misgivings, yet knowing it was paramount, she had welded it back on at a new angle that aimed the graser at itself. With all the advanced technology at the Builders’ command, her intuition had been correct. It was simple to sabotage their handiwork because the Builders had never considered the possibility of another species intervening in their Ring’s systems. The telescope had lacked any built-in adjustment device. Since the Builders’ creations were regenerative and responded to stimuli without a complex heuristic that could take into account the possibility of false input, fail-safes had not been incorporated into their designs.
The Island was demolished. The propulsion system that had supported its mass came to a sudden stop. The Island collapsed inward as the gravitational pull of the sun grabbled hold of it. Having become unstable, the Island toppled and crashed into the Ring. In an upheaval of heat and light, the sun consumed the Island. A massive solar flare made a blinding light. The fires surged and spat out a plasmatic blast wave. The solar ripple expanded outward across the solar system, finally dissipating in interstellar space. If anything remained, it would not be enough to regenerate the Ring.
COMMANDER KINDERSLEY CALLED Aki and Per into the crew area. To their surprise, he had smuggled aboard a large bottle of whisky.
“We are not out of these dark woods yet. With the cannibalistic tinfoil factory still parked on Mercury, it will keep replicating and fabricating until it constructs another Ring,” Per said. Considering his usually flat and detached manner, Aki could not tell if he was expressing relief or frustration.
“Then we blow that one to hell too. The Builders are bound to run out of raw material sooner or later. We’ll take out their whole operation long before they figure out how to handle us,” said the commander as he unscrewed the tightly sealed bottle with his teeth.
Eventually, one of them said, “Our bravery makes us look like saviors,” but that was most likely from the effects of alcohol in zero gravity. Their plastic suction bottles made soft thumps for the last toasts. Aki felt whisky was too elegant to drink from such utilitarian containers, but that did not seem to stop her. Eventually she squirted some into the air and savored it drop by drop as it floated in front of her. The aroma wafted into her nose as she inhaled. She leaned forward and caught wet, burning beads of alcohol on her tongue, warmth permeating her body. Aki had never been much of a drinker, but now, this moment in time and space, out of the infinity of moments in her life, had to be worth celebrating, even if she could not help but view her action with some regret.
“I wonder if we will be able to use the same trick again. The Ring generators are probably smart enough to learn from this experience and make modifications to protect the next iteration of Ring construction,” Per said. Even intoxicated, his mind examined the task and considered options, but he was all cheer regardless.
“We outsmart it again. That’s the advantage of being an intelligent, living being. I’m more worried about this fleet of ships on its way,” said the commander, slurring just a bit.
The smartest of the intelligent living beings back on Earth were hard at work solving new questions inspired by the crew’s experiments. An archeoastronomer found something very interesting recorded in, of all places, a farmer’s almanac from the Ming Dynasty. The manuscript contained a drawing that depicted a blazing star that had suddenly appeared next to Orion’s belt in the year 1424. It shone brilliantly for fourteen years and then disappeared just as mysteriously in 1438.
If the ancients had known they were looking at the bundle of light from thousands of lasers pro
pelling their neighbors into the start of an interstellar voyage, it would have changed the course of civilization. At forty-four light years away, regression analysis deduced that the Builders had departed in 1380 CE. Assuming that the deceleration lasers were about to activate and that the ships would need another fourteen years to slow and stop, their planned arrival would have been sometime around 2036, a 650-year journey.
That meant that the cruising speed of their voyage would be nearly 6 percent of the speed of light and the ships were only four-tenths of a light year away from Earth, which would have the Builder armada passing through the Oort cloud. Based on further analysis of the potency of the sail brakes and the projected velocity of the ships, the size of the fleet could be as large as five hundred Island Three O’Neill cylinder space habitats, which could accommodate several hundred million human-sized life-forms.
Without the Ring or the planned deceleration, the Builders would arrive at the inner solar system in as little as eight years instead of fourteen. Aki wondered what the life-forms would feel as they sped by the location where their ingenious Ring should be, as their planned destination receded in the distance and only endless void greeted them.
“Do you think they’ll accept their fate with dignity and fly by peacefully?” asked Commander Kindersley as he polished off the whisky.
“They will have plenty of time to think it through. I bet they figure out that their laser system was disabled fairly soon.”
Aki felt a lump in her throat. She had made a conscious decision, but felt the consequences were bittersweet.
Their purpose is not to explore or trade. The Builders launched a massive fleet without even sending a scout. They are seeking safety, traveling blind across space to cling to life. All they want is survival.
“They did not know there was intelligent life here. Their grasers were just a defense against meteoroids. They were not out to destroy us. And if that is true, then it means that…”
Usurper of the Sun Page 7
