Extinction

-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….”

“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.”