by B. V. Larson
“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….”
“Yeah?”
“Maybe we should fly through this hoop. Maybe we should see what’s on the other side.”
“You really are crazy,” she said.
I shrugged. “I get that often.”
“There could be like—space mines or something,” Sandra said. “There might be probes—an alien alarm system. Maybe it will send us on a one-way trip to some other star system crawling with robots or bugs or—I don’t know.”
“I’ll leave you home next time,” I said.
“You’d better not.”
I turned my attention back to the forward screen. “Socorro, return the forward screen to normal mode.”
The wall transformed, turning to silvery liquid, then reconfigured itself into Venus. The planet was much bigger now, as big as a truck tire. We were coming in fast.
“Increase rate of deceleration, but keep the G-forces under three point zero.”
The ship shuddered and I felt like I weighed seven hundred pounds—because I did. Sandra grumbled and struggled to get comfortable in her jumpseat. It was an impossible task. Her neck compressed as she strained against the gravity. Her mouth hung open slightly, revealing gritted teeth. Even with our nanite-enhanced strength, three Gs was uncomfortable.
“I’ll install a second pilot’s seat when we get home,” I told her.
“You damn-well better,” she managed to grunt out.
We endured hard G-forces and slowed down our approach considerably. I didn’t want to be surprised by an enemy and have to fight our own inertia to turn around and run. We were so far from any kind of support from our fledgling fleet back on Earth, I couldn’t hope to win a combat situation. All I could do is run for it, and hope our three-engine ship had the thrust to escape whatever came after us.
Conversation was impossible for the next few minutes as we decelerated hard. I decided that future designs had to have stabilizers, if they were to be fast ships. I wasn’t even sure how much acceleration this ship was capable of. I’d never dared to tell the ship to apply full emergency thrust. For all I knew, it might kill us if I gave the order. I knew a prolonged force of six Gs could cause humans to shut down. This was especially true if the force was applied unevenly, as was happening right now to Sandra. She didn’t have proper support in that jumpseat. I made a mental note to give a new emergency script to Socorro in case everyone aboard blacked out.
About ten painful minutes later, we were parked in orbit and the deceleration stopped crushing us down. Venus had grown to dominate the forward wall. In fact, we were a bug crawling across the face of her. Underneath us was the archway, or buried ring. The optical systems still showed nothing, of course, being unable to penetrate the thick, storming atmosphere.
“Why haven’t our probes and telescopes noticed this structure?” Sandra asked.
“I’m not sure. The atmosphere is thick, but radio telescopes can penetrate the gases. Maybe it’s been hiding itself somehow. Or maybe it wasn’t here the last time we sent a probe out to investigate. Europe sent a probe out here in the early 2000s, as I remember.”
“You think the Macros built it since then?”
I didn’t answer right away. I didn’t like the thoughts that were swirling in my mind. Several things were clear, despite the long list of unknowns. We knew that the Macros had formed their fleet here and come to attack Earth from this point. We also knew they had responded quickly to their failure to take us out with their first attacks. Within months they had gathered new forces to try again. That indicated they had to either be coming to our star system at faster than light speeds, or they were already here.
I’d ruled out the idea their fleet was sitting around in our Solar System at full strength all along. If they’d had such a fleet handy, they would have used it—all of it. They were not subtle machines.
Logically, that left me with only one conclusion: they were able to achieve FTL travel, and the entry point they had come from was right here, on the surface of Venus. The ring on the surface of the world, however it had come to be here, had to be the way they were traveling to our system from other stars.
“It’s a portal of some kind,” I said. “It has to be. The Macros must have built it or found it or something, and they have been using it to come in and out of our system from some other star.”
“From where?”
“I have no idea, but I think I know how to find out,” I said.
“If you try to fly us through that thing, you don’t know what’s going to happen, Kyle.”
“No, I don’t. That’s the point of experimentation. We need to explore the differences between our theories and reality.”
“This isn’t science. We’re more like a pair of monkeys playing with a handgun.”
I sniffed. “I prefer being compared to a gorilla.”
“We’re gonna die,” she said.
I considered her words. She had a point. But then again, I hadn’t come all this way for nothing.
“Socorro,” I said. “Take us down into the atmosphere. Take us down closer to the unknown structure.”
-28-
Before we went down, I formed up a message to General Kerr’s team. He was a spook now, but I still thought of him as a General. I told him what was going on, and reported every detail we had on the ‘unknown structure’ we’d found on Venus. I didn’t tell him we were going down to mess with it. If we survived and returned home, I could tell him what I’d learned later. If we didn’t come back, he was smart enough to figure out it was dangerous.
This was my first time exploring an alien planet. Lucky me—Venus was one of the nastiest worlds in the solar system. The surface was extremely deadly. The atmosphere was thick, ninety-two times as thick as Earth’s. The pressure at the surface was equivalent to being a half-mile deep in the ocean. As a bonus the ‘air’ was poisonous, made up primarily of carbon dioxide and nitrogen. The high-level, opaque clouds that coated the world were made up of sulfuric acid. Just to keep things interesting, the acid clouds were continuously blown around the planet by two hundred mile-an-hour winds. Conditions were even worse down on the ground. The surface temperature was a toasty nine hundred degrees Fahrenheit. That was hot enough to melt zinc on a sunny day—but there weren’t any of those on Venus, either.
I had a pricey digital recording system connected to the exterior cameras and I switched them all on to record our approach. I figured I would give the data to the science boys back home as a goodwill gesture. But I was worried the cameras wouldn’t be able to tolerate the heat and pressure of Venus. The cameras were all behind military-grade ballistic glass. They were built to operate on spy planes, but not under such extreme conditions. When we reached the upper layers of the atmosphere, I ordered the Socorro to cover all external ports with a layer of nanite-metal, including the glass floor of the observation chamber. We would be flying down blind except for the ship’s sensors and the forward wall display.
As we bumped our way into the atmosphere, I watched Sandra’s eyes grow increasingly alarmed. The winds buffeted our big, empty tin can of a ship, making it heave and roll. The eng
ines rumbled and whirred softly, fighting to keep us from going into a spin.
“It feels like we’re in a washing machine!” she shouted over the roaring winds.
“That’s the acid-cloud layer,” I shouted back. “Things should smooth out when we get closer to the surface.”
“What acid-clouds?” she screamed.
“Want to go home?”
Sandra nodded. Her eyes were huge. She said something else, but I couldn’t make it out.
“Too late now!” I shouted, smiling at her.
Sandra gave me the bird. At least we could still communicate.
I was nervous too, but I tried to appear calm for her sake. I had plenty of reasons to worry. Venus was just one of them. The unknown ring structure on the planet’s surface was another. The Macros were the third. What if this thing had an automated defense system? It hadn’t lit us up with a beam or fired a missile, but maybe that was because we hadn’t irritated it enough yet. If it was a gateway, as I suspected it must be, did it have an off switch? Was it operating right now, or was it dormant? If we tried to use it, were there necessary precautions we didn’t comprehend, such as radiation shielding? What if it was some kind of worm-hole device, and we went into it without any inertial stabilizers? Would that be a deadly mistake?
Then there was the biggest question of all. If we did fly through this portal—if that’s what it was—who would be waiting for us on the other side? Would they be happy to see my little Nano ship nosing around? Somehow, I doubted it.
The winds died down as we broke through the clouds into the hazy brown lower layers. I could hear Sandra again.
“That was crazy,” she said.
“I know,” I said. “We made it through though, didn’t we? Down here beneath the acid-clouds the winds are relatively mild. At the surface, the gases are thick and soupy, and the winds are only a few miles an hour.”
“You have to stop saying ‘acid-clouds’ okay?”
“Okay.”
We were only a dozen miles from the ring now. I could see it on the forward wall, a looming arch that seemed huge from our perspective. I couldn’t make a precise measurement, but I figured it had to be at least three miles in diameter. Its lower half had sunk down into the surface of the world and was invisible to anything except the passive sensors of the Nano ship.
“Socorro,” I said, “halt the ship and hold our position.”
We were thrown forward as the ship braked, redirecting its engines.
“Is the structure active?” I asked the ship.
“Specify.”
I thought for a second. “Is it releasing energy from an internal source?”
“Yes,” the ship said.
“Socorro, do you know how to activate this structure?” I asked, hoping.
“No. The structure is unknown.”
“I think the ship already made that one pretty clear, but you had to try,” Sandra said sympathetically.
“Yeah,” I said, trying to think. “If we had Alamo, I bet she would know what to do. Those ships charged off into the farthest reaches of the Solar System the day they left. I’m pretty sure they went to find something like this out there in the void.”
“Why don’t we just fly through it? I mean, I know you are going to do it anyway. If we just sit here maybe a Macro will show up.”
I thought about that. I sighed, then nodded. After all, the artifact was a giant ring. What else could you do, other than fly through it?
“Socorro, what would happen if we flew through the center of the structure?” I asked, hoping again.
There was a familiar hesitation. I suspected I was giving the ship’s fledgling mind a workout. “Assumption: non-specific pronoun we refers to this ship and crew. Analysis based on assumption: The ship would exit on the other side.”
“No kidding,” said Sandra.
I frowned. “Socorro, where is the other side?”
“Unknown.”
“That’s great,” said Sandra, crossing her arms. “Well, are you going to do it?”
“Do you want to?” I asked.
“It doesn’t matter what I want. You always do whatever you want to anyway.”
“It might kill us, so I’m asking.”
Sandra looked at me. “You admit this is dangerous?”
“Of course it is.”
She looked unhappy to hear me admit it. I wondered if she had been terrified all along and making jokes to keep control. Perhaps I’d blown it by asking what we should do. Perhaps she relied more than I realized on my self-confident exterior.
“You are going to let me decide?” she asked. “What do you think?”
“We have to try it. We have to learn about every piece of alien tech we run into. We can’t sit back and hope it will be explained to us, or that it will go away.”
“Let’s do it, then,” she said, looking scared.
I nodded. “Socorro, remove the metal skin over the forward camera. I want to record this.”
“Won’t that melt the camera?” asked Sandra.
“Maybe,” I said, shrugging. “We can always put another camera into the ship when we get home. This is an opportunity worth the risk.”
The flatscreen flickered into life as the camera fed it digital images. The world was dark, hazy. The surface was cracked and reminded me of salt flats baked by heat. The sky was a yellowish orange. We stared at the images for several seconds in awe. Then I remembered to push the record button on the digital video recorder.
“Direct the camera toward the ring structure, Socorro,” I said.
“Orientation achieved.”
I squinted, but could not see the structure.
“Maybe we are too far away,” said Sandra. “The atmosphere looks—smoky.”
“Let’s get closer,” I said. “Socorro, take us down slowly.”
As we went lower, the air pressure on the hull grew. We were buffeted by the atmosphere as we glided down toward the rough surface. The ground was less than a mile beneath us. The black, rocky, outcroppings undulated below. Apparently, slowly meant something very different in Socorro’s young brain. I figured we were moving as fast as a small plane might on Earth.
“There it is,” said Sandra. Her voice was hushed. “It looks like the St. Louis Arch.”
I nodded. I’d been there years ago and this thing, whatever it was, did remind me of the Arch. But it was black, not silver, and there were no seams in the metal that I could see. I wondered if it was even made of metal.
“Socorro, circle the structure, keeping our forward camera aimed at it so we can see it from all angles.”
We began to glide to the left and we rose up higher. As we passed over a mountain peak that seemed close enough to scrape the bottom of the ship, I realized the ship had automatically gained altitude in order to both comply with my order and avoid destruction. Sandra noticed it, too. She sucked in a breath and held it.
“You have to be more careful,” Sandra said. “You told it to destroy us.”
“It’s okay,” I told her. “I’ve put in plenty of safeguard programming. She knows enough to automatically edit commands that endanger the ship.”
“So, we’re trusting our lives to your programming skills?”
I smiled. “You trust a programmer with your life every time you get on an airplane. Not to mention a dozen engineering people.”
She nodded and tried to relax. “I do trust you to build a good ship. But I don’t trust that thing out there or the Macro robots who built it. What if it is nothing but a trap, a lure?”
I shook my head. “No. They had all the power to crush us when they had the fleet here. They would have done it then, if that was their intent. They are not subtle robots.”
“Okay, what do we do now?” she asked.
“Socorro, give me a compositional analysis on the structure.”
“Non-reflective matter. The material is condensed star-matter.”
I looked up in surprise. “Like from a neutron star?�
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“Source of material is unknown.”
“What is keeping it physically intact, then? The gravity here is not enough to compress matter.”
“Unknown.”
“What’s going on?” Sandra asked.
“The ship thinks it’s neutronium, or something like it.”
“What the heck is neutronium?”
“When we get home, I’m enrolling you into an online astronomy class. It might serve the world if you pass.”
“Of course I’ll pass. Now, answer the question, professor.”
“It’s a name for the matter on neutron stars, or at the center of any star. The gravity is so intense, it crushes matter down into a collapsed, super-dense state. No one had actually seen it first hand—until now. But we have theorized it must exist on burnt-out, collapsed stars. Most of the matter that is left is made up of neutrons. The existence of this substance has always been suspected. That ring must weigh as much as the rest of Venus.”
“Wouldn’t that throw the planet off its axis?” asked Sandra.
I looked at her, eyebrows upraised. “Interesting point. Maybe it has some kind of gravitational field control that holds it together and prevents it from wrecking the planet at the same time.”
I stared at it while we circled around. It was confounding.
“What’s the matter?” Sandra asked me.
“This technology… it’s daunting. If the aliens are this far ahead of us—this isn’t like a few fusion generators. This is amazing. I feel like an ant pondering a lawnmower and trying to figure out what it’s going to do next.”
“That’s easy,” said Sandra. “It’s going to suck us up, whirl us around a few times, and then smash us to pulp. Just like ants in a lawnmower.”
I nodded. She could be right.
“Socorro, was this structure constructed here, or was it brought here and placed in this spot?” I asked my ship.
“Unknown.”
“How long has it been here?”
“Unknown.”
“I think I’m sensing a pattern in the ship’s responses, Kyle,” Sandra said. “I really think she doesn’t have a clue about this thing. She’s just a baby computer, give her a break.”
