“I’m tired,” Sandra finally admitted.
“I know.”
“I’m not used to this.”
“You did very well,” I told her. “You might be better than the very worst marine in my outfit.”
“Really?”
“Nah. I was just trying to make you feel better.”
Sandra hissed and slashed at me with her plastic knife. I caught her wrist and kissed her. We half-wrestled and half-made out until the duty Sergeant cleared his throat. I looked up.
“I suppose you’ll be wanting these,” I said, handing over the practice weaponry.
“Thank you, sir,” the Sergeant said, trying not to smile at us. He failed and grinned hugely. I couldn’t blame him.
-42-
The next ring surprised us. We’d been floating along for nearly a week, crossing the breadth of the Alpha Centauri system—if that’s where we truly were. Suddenly a new contact appeared on the big table, a tiny flickering oval shape on our projection of the star system. It wasn’t near any planet. It could have been a station, or a larger ship. I was summoned to the command brick the minute the staffers saw the anomaly.
The first thing I noticed was the binary star clump was on the opposite side of the table. The second thing was that the velocity meter on the board was half what it had been the last time I was in the command brick. We’d been taking measurements of distance and position continually to every celestial body we had contact with. By measuring their relative distances to our position, we could tell we were now moving more slowly.
“We’ve changed our attitude?” I asked.
“The Macros flipped the ship around, sir. They did a one-eighty and they have the engines pointed in the opposite direction. We’re decelerating hard,” Major Robinson confirmed.
I put my hands on the big screen and drew them apart with a spreading motion. I zoomed in as closely as I was able with our imperfect sensory apparatus.
“It could be a ring,” I said, staring at the oval thing.
The rest of the command staff huddled around us. “What should we do, sir?” asked Major Robinson.
I looked at him. “Do? We aren’t flying this ship.”
“I mean, should we ask the Macros if that’s a ring?”
I thought about it and shook my head. I figured the Macros were only good for so many questions disguised as demands per day—per year, maybe. I’d never gotten the feeling they liked us, and they certainly didn’t like talking to us.
“To the Macros, we are wild beasts, Major,” I said.
“Sir?”
“I mean, we are something they plan to let loose upon their enemies. But they don’t want to pal around with us. They aren’t our friends, our teammates. Every time I communicate with them, I increase the relative cost and risk of associating with them. They think of us as cargo, remember? I plan to be good cargo for the rest of this trip. Good, quiet cargo.”
“That doesn’t seem like your style, sir,” remarked Captain Sarin.
I looked at her with raised eyebrows and she looked down, embarrassed.
I nodded and grinned. “You’ve got a point there, Captain. But I want to make it home again. The only way we’re going to achieve that, I figure, is by keeping the Macros happy.”
No one offered any more arguments. We approached what we calculated must be the next ring. Over the next three hours, a slight curve began shaping our course. We continued to decelerate.
“It looks like we are going to fly right by it,” I said.
“The opening in the center of the ring isn’t quite lined up with our angle of approach,” said our navigator. He was another fellow who had had little to do on this trip. Finally, his hour had come. “You see, to shoot through the ring, we have to change our trajectory, curving into it at an angle. That’s probably why we are slowing down, too.”
“We might be slowing down because there’s an atmosphere on the far side,” suggested Captain Sarin.
“I doubt that,” I said. “We are still going too fast to hit a planetary atmosphere. We’d burn up if there was a wall of gas to run into on the far side. What’s our current velocity? About two hundred thousand knots?”
“More than that, sir. Even after many hours of braking,” Major Robinson confirmed.
The braking and the gentle curving of our course continued for another hour. It was hard to leave the bridge. I had my staff calculate the point when we’d hit the ring and they put a timer up on the boards. I had them relay that timer to every screen in every brick. When we had less than half an hour left, I got out on the PA system and spoke to my troops.
“Marines, this is Colonel Riggs. You might have noticed the timer on the overheads. In twenty-eight minutes, we believe we will blink to another star system. That star system may well be our destination. I want everyone safely strapped into their assigned brick with every stick of equipment stowed and secured by the time that timer hits zero. Riggs out.”
The twenty-eight minutes crawled like twenty-eight hours. But finally, the last seconds ticked away. I felt a tiny shudder. I knew, before the screen in front of me went blank, that we were in a different place now. We were somewhere new.
A big star grew to my left on the screen. It kept growing as the computers measured its gravitational pull and radiation emissions, adjusting their estimates. It was a huge star, bigger than the blue giant had been. The circle looked the size of a hubcab lying on the computer table. There was only one of them, at least. As we watched, more contacts swam into place. Planets. The first ones to appear were the largest of them. The gas giants, I figured. The planets kept popping up like bubbles as they were sensed and positioned. Things kept moving on the table, too, reshuffling. I knew that part of our sensory algorithms required the ship to move, so we could take readings from multiple locations and thus have a better conception of the environment.
“It’s a red giant, sir,” said the navigator in a hushed voice. “Another new system. If only I could see where we are. I wish I could just get someplace and look out a window.”
I chuckled. I looked at the navigator in sympathy. He was a tall, thin fellow with hair that was naturally brown at the roots and the color of honey at the tips.
“Flying blind in these ships can be maddening,” I said. “I’ve done a lot of it.”
“Sir, look,” said Captain Sarin, pointing to the screen. There was a small planet growing there as the sensors worked out its location and mass.
“We’re almost in the planet’s far orbit now,” said Major Robinson.
We felt something new then. Something we’d never felt on this long journey, something we’d always expected, but never experienced. The ship itself vibrated and a deep thrumming sound could be heard.
Everyone looked at the walls.
“Crash-straps, deploy!” I ordered. Almost immediately, nanite arms reached down from the ceiling and grabbed each of us by the hooks that ringed our belts. More arms looped down and attached to our wrists and ankles. These arms would allow us to move freely, but not suddenly. Any sudden motion would be instantly restrained by the thin, black arms, preventing injury. They were scripted to react to shocks the way a shoulder harness did in a car back home, tightening when forces were applied that might throw us off-balance.
“Report, Major. What was that impact?”
“Felt like something big, sir. Sensors, Raphim?”
“Ah…” said the sensory officer, flustered. “It wasn’t the Macro engines, sir. Something hit us.”