Usurper of the Sun (10 page)
Mark fired his thruster to close the ten-kilometer gap between him and the Ring. In the footage he was sending, it was almost impossible to distinguish the inky surface of the Ring from the blackness of space.
After some time, his searchlight finally began to reflect off the surface of the Ring, producing a circle of light that gradually grew brighter. Aki wanted to look away, but she needed to see the Ring.
“The surface is silvery velvet. Firing my thruster, on the Ring… creating waves rippling away from the contact. I’m at three meters and closing in… Okay, I’ve just touched down.”
For a moment, Mark’s stuttered breathing was all they could hear.
“It’s incredible, a mirror that goes endlessly in all directions. I’m a dimple on the surface. I weigh one kilo, but it’s enough to cause the surface to sink where I’m standing. I’m standing on an enormous pillow, a cloud.” There was a choked sob.
A warning light appeared on the monitor mounted on the arm of his suit. The red glow was visible on the monitor before he looked down and
“Uh-oh. Feeding has begun, boots are changing color. A spiderweb is wrapping itself around me, moving on its own,” he said with a calm unlike anything Aki had ever heard from him before.
“Into my suit. A mouse crawling around in here. Depressurization has stopped. There’s no pain…”
His voice began to murmur as if he were drifting into sleep. “Aki, can you hear me?”
“Yes. Yes, Mark, I can hear you.”
“I’m sorry. There’s so much more I wanted to say to you.”
“I know. Don’t worry about that now.”
Two minutes later all readings transmitting from Mark’s suit ceased.
The image coming from the telescopic camera on the
Phalanx
showed a human-sized caterpillar’s cocoon resting in the center of a large indentation on the Ring. It was shrinking in size. Eventually, Aki looked away.
She could not find a use for her feelings. Aki regretted being on the ship and on the mission. After forty hours, she finally emerged from her cocoon. Per and Kindersley found her, grabbed her by the wrists and wrapped their arms around her. She pressed her face onto their shoulders and hugged them back, crying like she had not cried since she was a child.
THE UNSS
PHALANX
shifted to a battle footing and launched its first attack. It sent a nuclear missile whizzing toward the Island, beyond the horizon of the Ring, some four million kilometers away.
The graser protecting the Island shot down the missile at the line of defense, disintegrating it in a microsecond, which was exactly what the crew had expected. Shortly after, the ship was hit with the massive surge of electricity that was released when the graser fired. Half the electrical systems suffered some sort of damage. After emergency procedures were performed, the ship and her hound made their way toward the Island, but the functional capabilities of both crafts were substantially impaired.
Aki put on a pressurized safety suit and secured herself in place in her cocoon. She kept a close eye on the infrared image being transmitted by the hound as it scouted their route. The Ring appeared on the screen as a plain gray field with subtle variations in color. After some time, the small bump of the Island appeared on the horizon.
“The hound is about to enter graser range. Make sure that all data files are closed,” ordered the commander. The backup electronics had been fried in the surge. If they were hit again, they would be crippled and in serious trouble.
Aki and Per had estimated that the graser would need 147 hours to recharge. It was an estimate based on a few too many assumptions that were based on suppositions that were based on guesses. There was no guarantee that the estimate was even close to correct. They waited in tense silence. After about five minutes, Per dared to speak.
“It is not firing.”
“So it really does shut down while it recharges.”
“Proceed?” asked Per.
“I don’t see any reason not to. What the hell else can we do?” Kindersley said.
FIVE HOURS LATER
the Island was within visual range. The graser still had not fired.
Their probehound was floating directly above the Island. Commander Kindersley ordered the hound to make its descent. Aki controlled the telescopic camera. The Island rose up from the surface of the Ring to form a cliff three hundred meters high. The edge had appeared rounded in observations made from Earth, but viewed up close it was a sharp vertical wall. The top of the Island resembled a mirrored plane stretching beyond the horizon.
More like a continent than an island
, Aki thought to herself.
The opposite end of the Island was out of visual range, over 130,000 kilometers away. According to the readings that the sensors were producing, the Island was a table large enough to hold ten planets the size of Earth and still have room left over.
The telescopic camera revealed a web-like pattern covering the surface. At maximum zoom, it looked like the walls of a honeycomb, a collection of hexagonal-shaped pillars, each about four meters across with their surface covered in a translucent, viscous substance.
“If I did not know any better, I would say we are looking at the wall of a colossal bee hive dripping with honey,” Per said after clearing his throat.
Aki panned the camera to have a better look at the outside edge. The surface had no distinguishing features except for a gray border several meters thick around each cell in its matrix. There were no railings, no catwalks, no emergency exits. Aki had the camera trace a path around the edge of the cliff. A protruding object that resembled a lighthouse slowly came into view.
“Could that be a telescope?” asked Per.
“I bet it is the graser battery,” said Aki.
The commander moved the hound in for a closer look.
It appeared to be a stubby telescope atop an altazimuth mount. Double-checking the scale gauge connected to the distance meter, Aki confirmed that the diameter of the aperture was unbelievably large—about the length of a football field. The muzzle contained a concentric circle that looked like a collimator. The structure was seamless, completely smooth.
As she looked for even a trace of details or distinguishing features, Per noticed a miniature version of the battery on top of the barrel. “That must be the optical telescope—their viewfinder,” said Per.
“You’re probably right. A viewfinder to target incoming objects,” Kindersley said.
Examining the long-range images sent back by the hound in closer detail, the exact same object appeared again nine thousand kilometers in the distance. The structures lined the Island at equal intervals.
“Now’s the moment of truth, crew. Press on or turn back? You know where I stand, but I want to hear you on this one.”
“Continue,” Aki replied immediately.
Per took a bit longer. “I do not see any reason not to. Why wait?”
“The base of that graser battery is our target. Set the ship for final approach. Aki, prepare for an EVA.”
“Of course, sir.” Aki propelled herself out of her cocoon and began donning her space suit.
She and Per had talked about it. The mission would continue. Aki had volunteered to take over Mark’s duties. She would stand on the Island with her own two feet if that was what it took to obtain a sample and send the data to Earth.
The risk of contamination appeared to be low. The Builders seemed content to leave the Ring unguarded, perhaps due to its regenerative abilities. The Island, as it was protected by the graser, was perhaps not capable of self-repair. This was the best working theory the crew had to go on. Although the head of a simple planarian worm will grow back when it is cut off, the same cannot be said of a human. Similarly, it would be much more difficult to outfit the Island—a much more sophisticated construction than the exoskeleton of the Ring—with the capacity to regenerate itself when damaged.
It was likely that the nanomachines responsible for the fabrication and maintenance of the Island were still wandering its surface. Unlike the nanomaterial composing the Ring, the Island’s machines did not go about their work blindly. Aki pictured them emitting and receiving messages for propagation direction control, powered by something beyond human invention and understanding. Perhaps even Maxwell’s Demon had finally been constructed, and the nanobots were harvesting molecular-level power from the minute differences in temperature and energy across the Island’s surface.
“EVA prep completed,” she said.
Before the other two could come to the airlock door to see her off, Aki stepped in, depressurized, and opened the craft’s external door. The stern of the ship was pointed straight at the Ring. A continuous weak blast from the engines of the orbital maneuvering system counteracted the gravitational force of the Ring and the Island, allowing the ship to maintain a constant distance.
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.”