B. Larson: Battle Station

But that just wasn’t good enough for me. I felt a place hadn’t truly been explored until a human eye had examined it in person. I’d always been bored by the endless army of roving little robots NASA sent out to roam over Mars or swing around between Jupiter’s moons. The human experience could not be discounted. Moreover, this ring was only a mile or two from my ship. It seemed like a crime to ignore it, to pass up the thrill of that first investigation.

Once I was outside the ship, I didn’t see much other than Socorro’s smoothly curved hull. The yellow sun glared from the surface, blinding me if I looked in that direction. Stretched below was the dark, icy hulk of Hel. It gleamed brightly with reflected frost on the sunward side, while the other half was encased in clinging shadows.

Marvin slid away down Socorro’s hull to the underbelly of the ship. There, something dark and angular was attached to the hull. Marvin conjoined with this mass, and I frowned as I watched it. Was it a suit or a miniature spaceship? I supposed it was a little of both.

“Marvin, I don’t recall giving you permission to build anything like this. I thought we’d clipped your wings. Where did you get these materials?”

Marvin made a hissing sound. I realized after a bemused second he was shushing me. A long, snaking tentacle came out to attach itself to my suit. It was a com-line. The intercom light blinked on my HUD, so I activated it. We were now able to converse suit-to-suit, over a nanite wire, without making any transmissions.

“I feel we should dampen all our emissions from now on, sir,” Marvin said.

“Why?”

“Not everyone will approve of our mission.”

“Since when did this become our mission?”

“The point of pronoun conversion occurred when you gave me permission to accompany you.”

I would have grumbled further, but I knew it was useless. “Okay, so what is that thing you are climbing into?”

“The largest problem I had to solve was one of propulsion,” Marvin explained. “Emissions from any normal form of energy or mass expulsion cause a visible signature.”

“I solved that one myself,” I said.

“How?”

I pulled up a reel with a winding chain of nanites on it. The nanites were organized into a thick, long strand that resembled a quivering hose. “This nanite strand has been trained to operate like an intelligent rope. I plan to attach one end to me, and apply a tiny amount of thrust on this side of the ring. After reeling me out on this tether, it’s programmed to draw me back to this side of the ring after a preset time, or if I give the nanites a signal.”

Marvin made a clicking sound of disapproval. “No, too dangerous.”

“Why’s that?”

“The ring will be activated the entire time you are on the other side, using that plan.”

“Ohhh,” I said, drawing out the sound. I thought hard, and realized he was probably right. The rings normally gave off a blip of power whenever any object passed through them. This wasn’t anything special to worry about, as drifting bits of debris commonly floated through and were transferred to the other side. But if I used my nanite-tether, and stayed on the far side for ten minutes, that would mean the ring would be active for all that time. The Macros might well notice and come to investigate that sort of anomaly.

“Well-maybe you’re right. But you still haven’t explained your solution.”

“Some kind of mass or energy must be expended to reverse course and return. I simply went with the least detectable form of emissions. In this case, frozen ammonia.”

“Frozen ammonia? From the planet surface?”

“Yes.”

“When did you go down there?”

“When you weren’t paying attention.”

I snorted. “All right, so you rigged up some kind of jet that sprays out frozen ammonia, which should look like a natural occurrence. And that pressure is enough to blast you back to this side of the ring?”

“I believe all my calculations are correct.”

I hesitated, mulling it over. His contraption looked like a bobsled. He’d already gotten himself wrapped up in it. “Is there enough gas for two bodies to ride on that thing?”

“In anticipation of this possible situation, I’ve built the system with a second berth.”

I laughed, wondering how I’d gone from being the man with the plan, the man in charge, to hitching a ride on Marvin’s ice-ship. I climbed into the framework of dark tubing and clamped my battle suit’s gauntlets on the railing. “How much thrust does this thing-”

I didn’t finish the sentence. Marvin’s little space-scooter shot away from Socorro’s hull and in moments we were plunging toward the ring. We had to be doing fifty miles an hour before he cut off the frosty blast of pressurized gas that plumed behind us.

“Too fast!” I shouted at him. “Remember, we have to turn around and blast our way back to this side.”

“We are simulating a recent passage of matter through the ring. If we are moving at too slow a rate, and they have radar systems detecting us, we’ll be noticed by the software.”

I reflected on his worry. He had a point. When you were driving on the highway, doing thirty miles an hour was at least as noticeable as doing ninety.

I didn’t have much more time to protest in any case, because about then we passed through the ring, and everything around us changed.

The first thing I saw was the twin suns. It was impossible not to look at them, as they were quite close and bright, and immediately caught the eye. The two stars were near one another. The larger of the two was a white F class star, slightly bigger and hotter than Sol. Next to it floated a tiny red dwarf. The smaller, dimmer star circled the waist of its bigger sibling, and I detected a gleaming stream of plasma which connected the two.

“Fantastic,” I said. “They are close enough to transfer mass.”

“It would appear so.”

“Any idea how far we are from home, Marvin?”

“That depends. Where would our home be, exactly?”

It was an interesting philosophical question, but I was too entranced with the view to answer him. I kept staring at the two stars, wondering at their beauty. In all likelihood, I was the first human in this region of space and I didn’t want to waste the opportunity to absorb the fresh vista.

I’d been in a triple-stellar system before, the one we figured was Alpha Centauri. But this was my first binary system. Most star systems are multi-star systems, I knew from my recent interest in astronomy. Binary systems alone were more common than single star systems like our own sun.

It was only after a minute of checking out the suns through my shaded visor that tilted my helmet downward to examine readings from my sensor unit. I frowned at what I was seeing. There appeared to be only three large planets. The world closest to the star was the only one that could support a surface temperature that would allow liquid water. I manipulated the controls, focusing in on this planet in the habitable zone. It was a smallish gas giant, circled by a dozen or so moons of various sizes.

Closer to our current locale at the ring, there was a lot of floating debris nearby. Metallic readings of some kind surrounded us.

“Are you getting this data, Marvin? What’s this particulate mass around the ring? Dust?”

“Too large to warrant that classification. Terms such as ‘fragments’ or ‘shrapnel’ would be more accurate.”

“Fragments? Of what?”

“Some form of artificial structure. Nowhere near planetary or even asteroid-sized in volume.”

“You are telling me they are blown-up ships? I don’t see any Macros. Are these fragments what’s left of the Macros? Or have they left the system?”