Extinction

-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 engines 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?”

“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.”

“Yeah,” I said. “For the first time in a long while I’m missing Alamo. She was smarter than this ship. I bet she could tell me a lot about this arch—whatever it is.”

The screen went dark in front of us. The heat from outside had finally gotten to the forward camera and burnt it out. I scratched my face, then sighed. I’d run out of excuses for waiting around.

“You’re really going to fly us through, aren’t you?” asked Sandra. “I can’t believe it.”

“Every minute we stay, the risk of being discovered by the Macros grows. I’m not sure how they will react if they find us here.”

“How are they going to react if we pop into existence orbiting their home planet?”

“If that happens, I’ll run.”

“And if you can’t? Or if they follow and they are pissed?”

I shrugged and smiled. “Then I guess it’s time to start talking fast.”

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.