Extinction

-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.”

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.

“How long are we going to hang around?” asked Sandra as a few more minutes slipped by.

“We’ve seen enough,” I said. “Socorro, move all the shielding to the forward wall of the bridge.”

The process of shifting shielding from one part of the ship to another took several long minutes. We left the observatory and strapped ourselves back into our seats. The forward wall shimmered, bubbled and thickened while we watched. On the way back to the ring we would be flying toward the blue giant, so I wanted all our shielding in front of us, not behind us. This was another reason I’d come out here to this rock. It had allowed us to hide on the dark side of the planet to reconfigure the ship’s mass without getting an extra dose of radiation. It was like stepping into shade to adjust one’s hat and sunglasses. When the ship had finished moving all the mass we had forward to create a shield between us and the blue giant, we headed back toward the ring again. I made a mental note to bring extra shielding on future scouting trips—if there were going to be any.

“Now, cover all the cameras again, and accelerate at three Gs back toward the ring.”

The ship did as I ordered. We both grunted in discomfort as the forces of acceleration pressed us back. I almost gave up my chair to Sandra for her comfort, but I figured if one of us was destined to pass out, it should be her, not the pilot. We were in a combat situation.

“Next time I’ll set you up with a nice chair like mine,” I promised her. “If there is a next time.”

“Why wouldn’t there be?” she asked. “Do you think they’ll catch us and shoot us down?”

“Maybe, but there are lots of other things that could go wrong.”

“Like what?”

“We’ll find out soon enough,” I said.

“Just tell me.”

I sighed. “Okay. I’m worried about time-dilation.”

“What?” she asked.

“It’s a relativistic effect.”

“A whats?”

I took a few deep breaths. Under heavy acceleration, just talking wasn’t easy. “You know that we must be lightyears from Earth, right?”

“Sure.”

“Well, I’ve done little bit of investigation on my computer. The closest type B stars I know of—blue giants—are Regulus and Algol. They are less than a hundred lightyears away from home, but still pretty far.”

“So, you are saying we are at least fifty lightyears from home?”

“More than that,” I said, nodding.

Sandra stared at me with big, brown eyes. Her skin suddenly looked a little green.

“Is this acceleration making you sick?” I asked.

“Just keep talking.”

“Okay,” I said. “You know that we aren’t supposed to be able to travel faster than the speed of light, right?”

“Yeah, but we just did.”

“Maybe.”

She stared at me. “That trip didn’t take fifty years!”

“Not to us, no. But maybe it did in reality. As you get closer to the speed of light, time slows down. It could be that we did spend many years coming out here and—well….”

“When we get back home everyone we know will be old?”

“Well, not exactly. You see, we have to travel back the same distance, for the same amount of time.”

Sandra’s pretty brown eyes focused on nothing as she grasped what I was saying. She looked even greener than before. “A hundred years. More than a hundred years. They’ll all be long dead.”

“Maybe,” I said.

I watched her as the implications sank in. “That’s why we keep running into alien machines instead of life forms, isn’t it? They don’t care about the time differences. They just keep going, more or less immortal.”

“Yes, but don’t freak out yet. It’s just a nagging worry. I don’t think time dilation fits all the facts. You see, the Macros responded to us very quickly by sending out more ships after we defeated the first one. If relativistic effects were in play, they would not have been able to react so quickly. They would not have known for many years that we had won and they needed to send more ships.”

“That’s a pretty thin thread, Kyle. They could have some technology aboard their ships we don’t have. This is their ring. They know how it works. They could have something to counter the effects that we know nothing about.”

I shrugged. “Yeah. Like I said, it’s something to think about. We’ll know soon enough.”

Sandra was quiet for a long time while we flew toward the ring. The contacts slowly grew closer, but they could not catch us. I was increasingly glad I’d loaded this ship with engines and little else.

When we were a few minutes out from the ring, Sandra finally spoke up again. “What are we going to do if it’s been more than a century?”

“We’ll have each other,” I said brightly.

She didn’t look happy. In fact, she looked pissed. “Do you want to know what I’m going to do if we get home and everyone I’ve ever met is dead, Kyle?”

“No.”