Earth Song: Etude to War

by Mark Wandrey

  When the field had grown to the point that it began to touch at the planet below, Ted told the computer to begin the next phase of the operation. Tendrils of gravitic energy linked Remus to Romulus and formed a fulcrum to anchor against the planet. Finally almost all the power was directed at the sun as it began to push.

  On the planet’s surface nothing was immediately apparent. Display screens showed power flowing and technicians noted the increases in power. The numbers being bandied about were almost beyond comprehension.

  Minu’s attention moved from screen to screen, straining her scientific knowledge to its limits to stay on top of what was happening. She heard a tinkle and looked down at her desk. Her water glass was shimmying, and the water inside was no longer level. It had a noticeable tilt to it. “Oh wow,” she whispered.

  “We have movement confirmed,” one technician yelled, “one meter per second and increasing.”

  “Confirmed,” Bjorn said, then laughed. “We’re moving the planet!” A round of cheers went up around the room. And then the first alarm sounded.

  “Report!” Minu demanded.

  “Seismic activity in the southern hemisphere,” one of the monitors replied.

  “How bad?”

  “About a 4.5 on the Richter scale,” Bjorn came back. “No population with a hundred kilometers. We’re feeding the data to RomulusNet.”

  “Field is updating,” Ted said from the moon.

  A second later the tremors mitigated, only to be followed by another, and another. The glass danced on her table and she grabbed the arms of her chair as the shaking built in intensity. “Bjorn!”

  “We’re feeding in the corrections.” More and more technicians bent over their consoles, each feeding in coordinates of tremors all over the planet. In only five minutes every data tech on the floor was punching in corrections.

  “Velocity ten meters per second and continuing to increase,” someone announced.

  “Power reserved depleted by five percent,” A Rasa said from Remus.

  And alarm. “Major seismic event, Equatorial Ocean, seven point nine on the Richter scale!”

  “Tsunami alerts issued to the Peninsula tribe,” another person said. Minu grimaced. The Peninsula tribe was some of the last holdouts against the plan. This would likely validate their fear.

  “Ted, it’s getting bumpy down here.”

  “We’re inputting changes as fast as we can,” he replied. “I suspect this was an automated process when the Lost did it.”

  For fifteen minutes they battled the planet and increasingly powerful quakes until Ted announced they needed to alter their momentum.

  “We need more angular momentum to stabilize the orbital shift,” he told them. And a moment later dozens of alarms started screaming.

  “Tectonic instability in the eastern continental plate!” Bjorn yelled.

  “We’re compensating,” Ted came back.

  The ground shook under the bunker. The eastern continent was where Steven’s Pass was, as well as the majority of the population of the planet.

  “Instability is increasing,” warned their geological expert, a civilian scientist.

  “I’m afraid we’re going to have to call this off,” Bjorn was the first to admit. The technicians were falling behind logging tremors and the first damage reports were starting to come in from around the planet. Minor so far, but that wouldn’t last.

  “Ted,” can we mitigate this instability further?” Minu asked.

  “I don’t believe so,” his solemn reply came a moment later.

  “Tectonic stresses are peaking,” the geologist warned.

  “Terminate the project,” she ordered, reluctantly.

  “We’ll lose part of the progress,” Bjorn warned.

  “I know,” she said. A second later, the vast banks of gravitic planers were spun down to inactivity. Within moments, the warning lights and tremors reports diminished, and stopped all together.

  An hour later they had an after-action meeting about the project. In the one hour and twenty minutes in which the moon’s gravity generators were pressing them outwards from the sun, they’d moved Bellatrix a grand total of two hundred kilometers of stable distance while expending enough power to run their world for one hundred years. While no real damage had occurred, and only a few minor injuries, the project had to be declared a failure.

  “We don’t have the computing power to counter the effects,” Ted told them as a group.

  “If we scaled up the push, faster and more directed?” Minu wondered.

  “We’d rip the planet apart,” their geologist said simply. Minu looked around and all the other nodded in agreement.

  “I’m afraid it’s the best we can do,” Bjorn summed it up. “We’ll need to purchase a Concordian mega-computer to come close. It’s probably the cheapest option.”

  “Okay,” she said, “investigate that option and get back to me.” She sighed and stretched. “For now, I have a lengthy report to write for a few thousand politicians and reporters.” She hoped they would take it well, they’d become used to the Chosen accomplishing miracles.

  The reports in the press were less than favorable, while at the same time acknowledging that the Chosen attempted the near impossible. Minu softened the blow by announcing that the tidal energy harvesting mechanisms of Remus would be tapped to start providing power to Bellatrix. “The result will be an immediate twenty percent decrease in the amount of power we are buying off world,” she’d proudly told them. That was received with positive approval worldwide. She didn’t go into much detail of how the savings were to be spent on a computer to try the planetary movement project again later.

  The long, long day finally over, Minu retired to her second office in Steven’s Pass and found the small cot in the back. It had previously been Jacob’s office; now she seldom sat foot in it. She took a quick shower before pulling on some pajamas against the usual cool building (especially in the fall) and climbed into bed.

  Lying there in the dark she tried to simply clear her mind and fall to sleep, then she felt something. At first she thought it was just a random muscle twitch in her abdomen, then it happened again and she sat up, flicking the little light on. She pulled up her pajama top and looked at the little bulge of her belly. And there it was again, a slight twitch.

  “My baby,” she said in a delighted, wonderful whisper. “Our baby,” she said, and then all the shoring up of her emotional separation failed, and the ceiling caved in. “Oh, Aaron!” she sobbed and hugged her tummy. “Why?! I’ve lost too many I loved! When will it end?”

  In the darkness of Steven’s Pass, there was no answer to her questions. Only the occasional and gentle movements of her unborn baby.

  Epilogue

  Two hundred fifty light-years from where her mother lay wrapped in the joys of motherhood, and the pains of loss, Lilith and her ship sailed through space at 15,000 times the speed of light. At that maximum cruising speed she was only a little over one day from home in Bellatrix.

  She’d listened to her mother cry out in pain finally over the loss of her husband, a man she’d loved first and most in her life. Lilith also felt his loss, but in her own way. Her emotions hadn’t been nurtured to develop like other human children. The pain of loss was there, she just didn’t have the same mechanisms to deal with it as other humans.

  “Lilith,” came a hissed summons over the Kaatan’s intercom.

  “Yes, Kal’at?”

  “I am getting unusual readings from the sensors. Please check the data I’m sending.”

  A part of Lilith’s mind had been preoccupied with memories of her father, almost like a sort of logic loop. She had difficulty in banishing those thoughts. With an effort, Lilith cleared her mind and let the data feed into her analytical brain. “A ship passed through here recently,” she noted. “We are close to Bellatrix. This is worth noting.”

  “Are they getting closer to our new home?” Kal’at wondered.

  “Not that I have notic
ed. Our star system is not an industrial one, so of little interest to the other star-faring species of the Concordia.”

  Kal’at took his digital leave and Lilith was again floating alone in the void of her CIC zero gravity cocoon. She noted the ship’s course and energy expenditures from the buffer of data in our ancillary mental processors. Had anything been out of ordinary, it would have been moved up in import. The ship’s course traced across her consciousness, a line in space leading from nowhere to home.

  Then she realized where her course was taking her near. Just a point in space like so many others, but a place of significance to her, even if she’d never been there. Less than a light-year from her course, it would only cost a couple extra hours. A tiny shifting of the gravitic lens drive and their course changed subtly.

  In less than two hours, the Kaatan passed through the Oort cloud of a star system, her shields glowing slightly as it brushed through a storm of particles each thousands of meters apart. At the fantastic speeds of the Kaatan, it was like a semi-solid wall, yet still of no real notice to the powerful ship of the line.

  At over two and three quarter trillion kilometers per second, the Kaatan left the outer edge of the solar system behind and dove towards its star. They passed two planets, an ice ball and a tiny gas giant, then two more gas giants orbited. Lilith decreased speed to only a dozen times the speed of light. As the second gas giant fell behind, a massive thing with a curious eye storm three hundred times the size of Bellatrix raging she swept the system for more details.

  Her sensors swept the system and found the orbit she was looking for. Lilith altered course again and as she passed a dead planet that never held life she made a final course alteration. She’d been so busy fine tuning her course that the barrage of electromagnetic noise caught her completely by surprise.

  The spectrum was alive for huge bands of the kilohertz and megahertz bands, even some in the gigahertz. She struggled to understand for several long moments, until her destination came into range.

  “This is not possible,” she said in the darkness of her space. Quickly, she altered course once more. In the depths of space, the Kaatan raced past a world of rich swirling seas and bright white clouds. Its night side was alive with tens of thousands of twinkling lights from the cities of all the teeming billions that lived there.

  At twelve times the speed of light, the Kaatan passed completely unnoticed and returned to deep space before accelerating to full cruising speed. Her combat intelligence remained in a confused moody silence for the final two hundred and forty-three light-years to home.

  The End