Extinction

“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.”