The obstruction to her view was not part of the ship—it was what she had spent her life waiting to see. Aki was staring at the blackness of the Ring.
She had expected shiny silver, but the object she was looking at was as dark as space itself. Aki was mesmerized. As her eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, she noticed that the surface was less jet-black that it had originally appeared. There was a modicum of light from the surrounding stars that reflected off the surface, shimmering like an afternoon breeze blowing across a grassy meadow. The flickering of the light was most likely caused by pressure fluctuations from the solar wind that deformed the surface of the ultra-thin material enough to cause the reflecting starlight to twinkle. The view was more breathtaking than Aki could have possibly imagined.
She drew a connection between the phenomenon she was observing and the aurorae seen in the polar regions when Earth’s magnetosphere acts as a funnel and causes particles carried on solar winds to converge and collide with the upper atmosphere. What she saw was caused by raw and undiluted solar wind. The particles danced on a screen as wide as twenty Earths lined up in a row. Even with such a difference, the shimmering light here appeared, oddly enough, more similar to the aurora borealis than she had expected.
Aki was pulled from her thoughts by a noise from the other side of the bundles of cables and air ducts. Mark, she thought. By now, she was able to tell which crewmember was coming out of his cocoon by the sound of his footsteps.
“Am I interrupting?”
“Not at all. Please come in.”
Aki pushed herself back to share the tiny twenty-centimeter wide window.
“I was afraid we took a wrong turn at Venus,” he said, staring out at the Ring. “You wanted this for your wedding band?”
“I do not think it would fit on my finger, with the flab I have gained in the last six months.”
Mark laughed heartily. He always tried to encourage witty comebacks from her. After a pause, he returned to staring out the window. She expected him to come on to her because it seemed like the perfect moment, but he did not. If it came to it, Aki was pretty sure a cocoon was large enough for two people. During the past six months, Mark had flirted with her often. Once he was even blunt enough to say, “If it’s a matter of contraception, we have some on board.”
Mark was always honest, considerate, and even able to show a sensitive side when he wanted. The line about contraception had not been his shining moment, but he did have moments that made Aki wonder about the possibilities. Physically, his face could not have been more handsome if it had been chiseled from marble. No matter how hard Aki looked, she could never find flaws in Mark, even though she wondered if he would give her the time of day if the world had been different, if the era of organic life’s dominance on Earth were not limping to a close.
Despite all that he offered, Aki had turned Mark down multiple times. She kept her sexual self so bottled up in the name of pursuing her research that she feared what might happen if she were to unleash herself on any man, especially in this environment. She wanted nothing to interfere with the long-awaited encounter with the Ring. The Ring was out there, finally right outside the window. She knew that they talked about her behind her back—man talk—saying that she was “married to the Ring.”
Neither Aki nor Mark could turn away from the window.
“Looking after nuclear subs with missiles, I was in charge of enough power to torch the world,” Mark said. “Now I’m on this ship. It’s my job to deal with these reactors, but my work always seems linked to the end of the world.”
“It hasn’t ended yet, Mark. We are not here to end the world.”
“If we destroy the Ring, humanity gets to live. Unlike any war we’ve ever faced or simulated in doomsday scenarios, this one isn’t humanity turning against itself. There has never been a war with such clear-cut objectives and there has never been a war with such perfect moral clarity. We win at all costs.” Mark attempted a comforting smile.
She knew that his last sentence could have included the phrase, “even if we end up martyrs,” but they shared that sentiment without saying it. For a second, they both looked away from the window.
“That’s why I applied,” Mark said. “I thought, ‘Here’s a job where I can finally use the craziest thoughts that run through my head. All I need is to figure out how to destroy that thing.’”
“Our mission’s about that for you—the joy of morally acceptable mass destruction?” Aki asked.
Mark gazed at Aki for a moment. “I love what goes through that pretty little head of yours.”
“If you were at war with Italy, could you bring yourself to bomb Florence, to ruin the Uffizi Museum?”
“If the artwork inside it were a threat to me and mine? Then, yeah, I could bomb it to hell and sleep like a baby.”
“I guess you are lucky that your head can overrule your heart.”
Aki felt her excitement for the Ring drain out through her pores. She was surprised by how bitter they both sounded. She was doing the one thing the crew had been advised to avoid—starting a heated debate in cramped quarters.
“Tell me, Aki, what can I do to see the Ring like you do, like a masterpiece in the Uffizi that deserves protection?”
“The problem is that you do not know anything about it. What you need is to try to understand the Ring. You have to want to understand. It is like how you feel when you look at a painting or a sculpture. It is here for us to understand, to interpret, not just to annihilate. You look at beauty because it is one of the few profound things that humans can do. To destroy without even trying to understand is the impulse of instinct, not a result of cognition.” Aki looked away, frustrated and angry. “Finding joy in annihilation is fundamentally inhuman.”
SEVENTY-TWO HOURS later one of the probehounds was launched. The hound’s propulsion jet nozzle could be seen in the lower part of the monitoring screen. In front of that was the small reflection of the faithful dog going out to sever the Ring. The probe dropped in freefall to a point about twenty meters away from the Ring’s outer surface. When its small NERVA IV fired, there was a flash of light that whited out the screen until the automatic brightness control adjusted to the new level of input.
The hound’s rear leaned slightly toward the ship and began moving at an angle that would minimize its exposure to solar radiation. When the blast from the hound’s nuclear-powered engine hit the Ring, the Ring melted like butter hit by a blowtorch.
“Looking good! Let’s double the speed and see what happens. Per and Aki, keep an eye on the part that was cut,” said Commander Kindersley.
“Yes, Commander,” Aki said.
Aki lined up the images taken so far. Quick analysis showed that the edges of the burn had been bent inward but were slowly shifting back to their original shape and reintegrating with the curve of the Ring. Aki had never imagined such a resilient system. She was unsure whether any human had ever conceived that such technology might exist.
If massive stress were put on a substantial portion of the Ring, the strain might cause the structure to collapse, but it seemed to Aki like compromising the structure of one part of the Ring would be insufficient to affect the rest of its surface. Every square micrometer of the Ring was maintaining a perfect balance between the light pressure it was giving off and the weight created by the pull of the sun. Even carpet-bombing, while it would cover the Ring with holes, would only produce localized damage. Aki presumed that even a slew of holes would get repaired quickly.
“It looks like it has started to regenerate already. I wonder by which mechanism the Ring restores itself to its original shape,” Aki said into her intercom.