He watched the three worlds die. One was a metallic planet; the other two were rocky moons. The machines swarmed and multiplied on the surfaces of the moons, covering them in a plaque of specialised industrial forms. From the equators, plumes of mined matter belched into space. The moons were being cored out like apples. The matter plumes were directed into the maws of three colossal processing engines orbiting the dying bodies. Streams of refined matter, segregated into distinct ores and isotopes and granularities, were then flung into interplanetary space, arcing out along lazy parabolas.
‘That was just the start,’ Vuilleumier said.
They showed him how the mass streams from the three dismantled moons converged on a single point in space. It was a point in the orbit of the system’s largest gas giant, and the giant planet would arrive at that point at exactly the same time as the three mass streams.
‘That was when our attention switched to the giant,’ Irena said.
The Inhibitor machines were fearfully difficult to detect. It was only with the greatest of effort that she had managed to discern the presence of another smaller swarm of machines around the giant. For a long time they had done nothing but wait, poised for the arrival of the matter streams, the hundred billion billion tonnes of raw material.
‘I don’t understand,’ Thorn said. ‘There are plenty of moons around the gas giant itself. Why did they go to the trouble of dismantling moons elsewhere if they were going to be needed here?’
‘Those aren’t the right sort of moon,’ Irina said. ‘Most of the moons around the giant aren’t much more than ice balls, small rocky cores surrounded by frozen or liquid-state volatiles. They needed to rip apart metallic worlds, and that meant looking further afield.’
‘And now what are they going to do?’
‘Make something else, it seems,’ Irina said. ‘Something bigger still. Something that needs one hundred billion billion tonnes of raw material.’
Thorn returned his attention to the eye. ‘When did this start? When did the matter streams reach Roc?’
‘Three weeks ago. The thing - whatever it is - is beginning to take shape.’ Irena tapped at a bracelet around her wrist, causing the eye to zoom in on the giant’s immediate neighbourhood.
Most of the planet remained in shadow. Above the one limb that was illuminated - an off-white crescent shot through with pale bars of ochre and fawn - something was suspended: a filamentary arc that must have been many thousands of kilometres from end to end. Irina zoomed in further, towards the middle of the arc.
‘It’s a solid object, so far as we can tell,’ Vuilleumier said. ‘An arc of a circle one hundred thousand kilometres in radius. It’s in an equatorial orbit around the planet, and the ends are growing.’
Irina zoomed in again, focusing on the precise midpoint of the growing arc. There was a swelling, little more than a lozenge-shaped smudge at the current resolution. She tapped more controls on the bracelet and the smudge bloomed into clarity, expanding to fill the entire display volume.
‘It was a moon in its own right,’ Irina said, ‘a ball of ice a few hundred kilometres from side to side. They circularised its orbit above the equator in a few days, without the moon breaking apart under the dynamic stresses. Then the machines built structures inside it, what we must assume to be additional processing equipment. One of the matter streams falls into the moon here, via this maw-shaped structure. We can’t speculate about what goes on inside, I’m afraid. All we know is that two tubular structures are emerging from either end of the moon, fore and aft of its orbital motion. On this scale they appear to be whiskers, but the tubes are actually fully fifteen kilometres in thickness. They currently extend seventy thousand kilometres either side of the moon, and are growing in length by a rate of around two hundred and eighty kilometres every hour.’
Irina nodded, noting Thorn’s evident incredulity. ‘Yes, that’s quite correct. What you see here has been achieved in the last ten standard days. We are dealing with an industrial capacity beyond anything in our experience, Thorn. Our machines can turn a small metal-rich asteroid into a starship in a few days, but even that would seem astonishingly slow by comparison with the Inhibitor processes.’
‘Ten days to form that arc.’ The hairs on the back of Thorn’s neck were standing up, to his embarrassment. ‘Do you think they’ll keep growing it until the ends meet?’
‘It seems likely. If the ends are to form a ring, they’ll meet in a little under ninety days.’
‘Three months! You’re right. We couldn’t do that. We never could; not even during the Belle Époque. Why, though? Why throw a ring around the gas giant?’
‘We don’t know. Yet. There’s more, though.’ Irina nodded at the eye. ‘Shall we continue?’
‘Show me,’ Thorn said. ‘I want to see it all.’
‘You won’t like it.’
She showed him the rest, explaining how the three individual mass streams had followed near-ballistic trajectories from their points of origin, like chains of pebbles tossed in precise formation. But near the gas giant they were tightly orchestrated, steered and braked by machines too small to see. They were forced to curve sharply, aimed towards whichever constructional focus was their destination. One stream rained down into the maw of the moon that was extruding out the whiskers. The other two streams plunged into similar mawlike structures on two other moons, both of which had been lowered into orbits just above the cloud layer, well within the radius at which they should have been shattered by tidal forces.
‘What are the other two moons doing?’ Thorn asked.
‘Something else, it seems,’ Irina said. ‘Here, take a look. See if you can make more sense of it than we’ve been able to.’
It was difficult to surmise exactly what was going on. There was a whisker of material emerging from each of the two lower moons, ejected aft, against the direction of orbital motion. The whiskers appeared to be about the same size as the arc that was being built by the higher moon, but they each followed a sinuous snakelike curve that took them from a tangent to the orbital motion into the atmosphere itself, like great telegraph cables being reeled into the sea by a ship. Immediately behind the impact point of each tube was an eyelike wake of roiling and disturbed atmosphere many thousands of kilometres long.
‘They don’t come out again, as far as we can see,’ Vuilleumier said.
‘How fast are they being laid?’
‘We can’t tell. There aren’t any reference points on the tubes themselves, so we can’t calculate how fast they’re emerging from the moons. There’s no way we can get a Doppler measurement, not without revealing our interest. But we know that the flux of matter falling into each of the three moons is about the same, and the tubes are all about the same width.’
‘Then they’re probably being spooled into the atmosphere at the same speed as the arc is being formed, is that it? Two hundred and eighty kilometres per hour, or thereabouts.’ Thorn looked at the two women, searching their faces for clues. ‘Any ideas, then?’
‘We can’t begin to guess,’ Irina said.
‘But you don’t think this is good news, do you?’
‘No, Thorn, I don’t. My guess, frankly, is that whatever is taking place down there is part of something even larger.’
‘And that something means we have to evacuate Resurgam?’ She nodded. ‘We still have time, Thorn. The outer arc won’t be finished for eighty days, but it seems very unlikely that anything catastrophic will happen immediately after that. More likely, another process will start, something that might take as long again to complete as the building of the arcs. We may have many months beyond that.’
‘Months, though, not years.’
‘We only need six months to evacuate Resurgam.’
Thorn remembered the calculations they had explained to him, the dry arithmetic of shuttle flights and passenger capacities. It could be done in six months, yes, but only if human behaviour was factored out of the sums. People did not behave like bulk carg
o. Especially not people who had been cowed and intimidated by an oppressive regime for the last five decades.
‘What you told me before - that we might have a few years to get this done?’
Vuilleumier smiled. ‘We told a few white lies, that’s all.’
Later, following what seemed to him to be an unnecessarily tortuous route through the ship, they took Thorn to view a cavernous hangar bay where many smaller spacecraft waited. They hung in their parking racks, transatmospheric and ship-to-ship shuttles like sleek-skinned sharks or bloated, spined angelfish. Most of the ships were too small to be of any use in the proposed evacuation plan, but he could not deny that the view was impressive.
They even helped him into a spacesuit with a thruster pack so that he could be taken on a tour through the chamber itself, inspecting the ships that would lift the people off Resurgam and ferry them across space to Nostalgia for Infinity itself. If he had harboured any suspicions that any of this was being faked, he discarded them now. The sheer vastness of the chamber and the overwhelming fact of the ships’ existence rammed aside any lingering misgivings, at least with respect to the reality of Infinity.
And yet ... and yet. He had seen the ship with his own eyes, had walked on it and felt the subtle difference of its spin-generated artificial gravity compared with the pull of Resurgam that he had known all his adult life. The ship could not be faked, and it would have taken extreme measures to fake the fact that the bay was full of smaller craft. But the threat itself? That was where it all broke down. They had shown him much, but not nearly enough. Everything concerning the threat to Resurgam had been shown to him second-hand. He had seen none of it with his own eyes.
Thorn was a man who needed to see things for himself. He could ask either of the two women to show him more evidence, but that would solve nothing. Even if they took him outside the ship and let him look through a telescope pointed at the gas giant, there would be no way for him to be sure that the view was not being doctored in some way. Even if they let him look with his own eyes towards the giant, and told him that the dot of light he was seeing was in some way different because of the machines’ activities, he would still be taking it on trust.
He was not a man to take things on trust.
‘Well, Thorn?’ Vuilleumier said, helping him out of the suit. ‘I take it you’ve seen enough now to know we aren’t lying? The sooner we get you back to Resurgam, the sooner we can move ahead with the exodus. Time’s precious, as we said.’
He nodded at the small dangerous-looking woman with the smoke-coloured eyes. ‘You’re right. You’ve shown me a lot, I admit. Enough for me to be sure you aren’t lying about all of it.’
‘Well, then.’
‘But that’s not good enough.’
‘No?’
‘You’re asking me to risk too much to take any of it on trust, Inquisitor.’
There was steel in her voice when she answered. ‘You saw your dossier, Thorn. There’s enough there to send you to the Amarantin.’
‘I don’t doubt it. I’ll give you more, if you want. It doesn’t change a thing. I’m not going to lead the people into anything that looks like a government trap.’
‘You still think this is a conspiracy?’ Irina asked, ending her remark with an odd clucking noise.
‘I can’t discount it, and that’s all that matters.’
‘But we showed you what the Inhibitors are doing.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘What you showed me was some data in a projection device. I still have no objective evidence that the machines are real.’
Vuilleumier looked at him imploringly. ‘Dear God, Thorn. How much more have we got to show you?’
‘Enough,’ he said. ‘Enough that I can believe it completely. How you do that is entirely your problem.’
‘There isn’t time for this, Thorn.’
He wondered, then. She said it with such urgency that it almost cut through his doubts. He could hear the fear in her voice.
Whatever else was going on, she was truly scared about something ...
Thorn looked back towards the hangar bay. ‘Could one of those ships get us closer to the giant?’
The Dawn War had been about metal.
Almost all the heavy elements in the observable universe had been brewed in the cores of stars. The Big Bang itself had made little except hydrogen, helium and lithium, but each successive generation of stars had enriched the palette of elements available to the cosmos. Massive suns assembled the elements lighter than iron in delicately balanced fusion reactions, block by block, cascading through increasingly desperate reactions as lighter elements were depleted. But once stars started burning silicon, the end was in sight. The end-stage of silicon fusion was a shell of iron imprisoning the star’s core, but iron itself could not be fused. Barely a day after the onset of silicon fusion, the star would become catastrophically and suddenly unstable, collapsing under its own gravity. Rebounding shockwaves from the collapse would lift the star’s carcass into space, outshining all other stars in the galaxy. The supernova itself would create new elements, pumping cobalt, nickel, iron and a stew of radioactive decay products back into the tenuous clouds of gas that lay between all stars. It was this interstellar medium that would provide the raw material for the next generation of stars and worlds. Nearby, a clump of gas that had until then been stable against collapse would ripple with the shockwave of the supernova, forming knots and whorls of enhanced density. The clump, which had already been metal-enriched by earlier supernovae, would begin to collapse under its own ghostly gravity. It would form hot, dense stellar nurseries, birthing places of eager young stars. Some were cool dwarves that would consume their star fuel so slowly that they would outlast the galaxy itself. But others were faster burners, supermassive suns that lived and died in a galactic eyeblink. In their death throes they strewed more metals into the vacuum and triggered yet more cycles of stellar birth.
The process continued, until the dawn of life itself. Hot blasts of dying stars peppered the galaxy, and with each blast the raw materials for world-building - and life itself - became more abundant. But the steady enrichment of metals did not happen uniformly across the disc of the galaxy. In the outlying regions of the galaxy, the cycles of stardeath and starbirth happened on a much slower timescale than in the frantic core zones.
So it was that the first stars to host rocky worlds formed closer to the core, where the metals reached the critical level first. It was from the core zones, within a thousand kiloparsecs of the galactic centre itself, that the first starfaring cultures emerged. They looked out into the galactic wilderness, flung envoys across thousands of light-years and imagined themselves alone and unique and somehow privileged. It was a time both of sadness and chilling cosmic potential. They imagined themselves to be lords of creation.
But nothing in the galaxy was that straightforward. Not only were there other cultures emerging at more or less the same galactic epoch, in the same band of habitable stars, but there were also pockets of higher metallicity out in the cold zone: statistical fluctuations which allowed machine-building life to emerge where it ought not to have been possible. There were to be no all-encompassing galactic dominions, for none of these nascent cultures managed to spread across the galaxy before encountering the expansion wave of another rival. It had all happened with blinding speed once the initial conditions were correct.
And yet the initial conditions were themselves changing. The great stellar furnaces had not fallen quiet. Several times a century, heavy stars died as supernovae, outshining all others. Usually they did so behind sooty veils of dust, and their deaths went unrecorded save for a chirp of neutrinos or a seismic tremor of gravitational waves. But the metals that they made still found their way into the interstellar medium. New suns and worlds were still coalescing out of the clouds that had been enriched by each previous stellar cycle. This ceaseless cosmic industry rumbled on, oblivious to the intelligence that it had allowed to flourish.
But near
the core the metallicity was becoming higher than optimum. The new worlds that were forming around new suns were very heavy indeed, their cores laden with heavy elements. Their gravitational fields were stronger and their chemistries more volatile than those of existing worlds. Plate tectonics no longer functioned, since their mantles could no longer support the burden of rigid floating crusts. Without tectonics, topography - and hence changes in elevation - became less pronounced. Comets were tugged into collisions with these worlds, drenching them with water. Vast world-engulfing oceans slumbered beneath oppressive skies. Complex life rarely evolved on these worlds, since there were few suitable niches and little climatic variation. And those cultures that had already achieved starflight found these new core worlds lacking in usefulness or variety. When a pocket of the right metallicity threatened to condense down into a solar system with the prospect of being desirable, the elder cultures often squabbled over property rights. The ensuing catfights were the most awesome displays of energy that the galaxy had seen beyond its own blind processes of stellar evolution. But they were nothing compared with what was to come.
So, avoiding conflict where they could, the elder cultures turned outwards. But even then they were thwarted. In half a billion years the zone of optimum habitability had crept a little further from the galactic core. The lifewave was a single ripple, spreading out from the centre to the galaxy’s edge. Sites of stellar formation that had previously been too metal-poor to form viable solar systems were now sufficiently enriched. Again, squabbles broke out. Some of them lasted ten million years, leaving scars on the galaxy that took another fifty million to heal over.
And still these were nothing compared with the coming Dawn War.
For the galaxy, as much as it was a machine for making metals, and thereby complex chemistry, and thereby life, could also be seen as a machine for making wars. There were no stable niches in the galactic disc. On the kind of timescale that mattered to galactic supercultures, the environment was constantly changing. The wheel of galactic history forced them into eternal conflict with other cultures, new and old.
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