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
“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.
— 29-
I’d read theories about what would happen if you really
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.”
