Extinction

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.