Authors: Sean Williams,Shane Dix
Lucia?
He felt dizzy for a moment. The presence of the spindle was a great enough mystery on its own, but that it was broadcasting Lucia’s voice was an even greater one—one he couldn’t immediately get his head around. How had she persuaded one of the mighty spindles to break orbit and travel to pi-1 Ursa Major? What the hell had happened since they’d left the Alkaid Group?
The view shifted yet again. They were hanging near one of the inner worlds. Four massive Trident ships were visible at varying distances and attitudes, silhouetted against the sun. There were myriad other vessels gleaming in the bright light. The ring around the star continued to bind its waist tight, although the effect was less visible from a distance. The only obvious symptom was a flaring of coronas from the poles. Vast feathers of multicolored energy stretched with deceptive laziness out of the stellar atmosphere, reaching for the stars.
“My makers are concerned,” said the Asteroid.
“We’ve given them no reason to be concerned,” assured Axford.
“There is reason to suspect that we have been misled.”
“We haven’t misled you!” Gou Mang’s expression was one of outrage.
“I can see why they might believe we have,” said Axford, half-turning to address her. “We tell them the Spinners are here in pi-1 Ursa Major. We send them god knows how far to investigate, and there’s nothing here. Then a spindle shows up, trying to hail them. That creates a connection between the Spinners and us that already existed before—on all the colonies they’ve destroyed.”
“They think
we’re
the Spinners?” said Gou Mang, her tone caught between incredulity and amusement.
“Probably not.” Axford shrugged. “But we could be evidence of something more than just coincidence.”
The Asteroid spun back and forth for several seconds. “My makers suspect you have led us into a trap.”
Alander shook his head, a feeling of unreality creeping over him. “That wasn’t our intention, I assure you.”
“We’re just trying to save our people,” said Sol from
Eledone.
“My makers were lured here.”
“We didn’t
lure
them anywhere!” Alander could feel the situation quickly slipping out of their hands.
“If you believe that we did,” said Gou Mang carelessly, “why don’t you just leave and be done with it?”
The Asteroid promptly disappeared at the question, leaving Alander to supply the obvious answer.
“Because the makers don’t see any real threat here.”
“None they can’t handle,” added Axford. The ex-general indicated the incredible view. It was shifting with increasing frequency, taking in all the major worlds and many of the Lagrange points. There were cutters and Tridents everywhere, mingling among ships of an infinite variety of shapes and sizes. It seemed inconceivable that such a fleet could ever be seriously threatened by anyone or anything.
The changeable view made Alander feel light-headed and uneasy.
“Asteroid, you said there was nothing in the system,” said Axford, his voice seeming to come from a great distance away.
The Asteroid returned but, strangely, didn’t respond.
“I wonder if you’ve considered threats from
outside
the system,” Axford pressed. “That strikes me as an obvious source of attack.”
The Asteroid spun as though seeking a response to a dialogue it wasn’t designed to pursue.
Behind it, the viewpoint of the Starfish returned to pi-1 Ursa Major’s primary, the blinding, yellow-hot star and its belt of lights. Energy streamed from the poles in gouts of blue and green. Whatever the Starfish were doing, it was going to have a lasting effect on the sun, its magnetic properties, and the flow of its solar wind. The rounded, stubby prongs of a Trident vessel hung silhouetted against the fiery atmosphere, moving slowly across the view.
Alander knew something was going to happen seconds before it did. He could feel it in his bones, in the instincts his engram was supposed to have left behind with his original body on Earth. The engram entrapment program was supposed to have been the final proof of the nonexistence of the soul, of psychic phenomena—for how, the researchers had said, could they re-create human minds with such accuracy and verisimilitude out of nothing but numbers if the originals they were copying consisted of anything more than that?
And yet, Alander
knew.
He opened his mouth to shout a warning, but it was too late. Behind the Trident, the sun swelled like a dumbbell-shaped balloon, impossibly fast, swelling out and around the ring of lights about its waist and sending two enormous globes of novalike energy exploding across the system. The Trident silhouetted against it vanished in a wave of energy, and the viewpoint of the Starfish shook violently.
“What the fuck—?” Gou Mang exclaimed, staggering back from the blaze of energy.
“It has begun,” said the Asteroid.
2.3.3
The explosion of pi-1 Ursa Major took Lucia completely by
surprise. She had just arrived at a new location, almost directly above the sun’s north pole, and was marveling at her new perspective on the system. There wasn’t time to sightsee, though. Her ftl “ears” were still ringing with the destruction of Zemyna, which had been hit by the Starfish within an hour of her arrival at pi-1 Ursa Major. Jumping backward and forward in an attempt to avoid the Starfish defenses, she’d been doing her best ever since both to hail the aliens and warn them off.
What more did they
want?
She felt powerless to express her anger and frustration. Dodging the furious energies flung at her consumed most of her concentration, but she still had time to wonder at the motives of the twin forces squeezing humanity to destruction between them. Why weren’t the Spinners reacting to the presence of the Starfish, as they had to humanity’s hole ships? And why weren’t the Starfish calling off their advance while they checked the Spinners’ hideout?
Her first clear glimpse of the band tightening around the sun had given her reason to pause and wonder. She had no idea what it was, either. A power source? A defensive mechanism? Some sort of AI architecture? It was impossible to say.
Then, suddenly, the north pole of the sun had expanded to almost fill her field of view. Her first panicky thought was that the sun itself was moving, coming right at her. Only when she leapt to a safer spot, with virtual heart hammering, did she see that it wasn’t the star moving at all. It was blowing into two halves, sending two bulging hemispheres of stellar material boiling up and over the ecliptic with impossible speed. Even at her fastest clock rate, and even though the gas was confined to sublight speeds, the rate at which it was expanding was absolutely terrifying. Main Sequence G-type stars just weren’t supposed to behave like that!
The Starfish fleet close in to the sun vanished into the boiling plasma. Radiation swamped whole electromagnetic bands, blinding her in some senses. She shied away from the billowing shock waves, jumping down into the ecliptic, where the solar winds were less affected by the sudden turmoil. As the explosion ripped the star apart, a fiery ceiling and floor spread out over the system. Within hours, the stellar storm would render the system completely unrecognizable—and uninhabitable for anything unprotected by advanced technology.
She didn’t know what effect the sudden discharge of matter would have on the orbits of the planets, but Jian Lao would never again be the paradise she had imagined. Its atmosphere would boil away if the fiery clouds came too close, or it would freeze if its orbit shifted too far out and the stellar remnant—if any would remain—cooled. The dream of her and Peter standing together on some gently rolling hills watching the sunset would be lost forever.
“This is Lucia Benck of the United Near-Earth Stellar Survey Program Mission 391. Please respond.” She kept up the beacon, hoping against hope for a reply from either the Starfish or Thor. “I repeat: this is Lucia Benck of the United Near-Earth Stellar Survey Program Mission 391, hailing the visitors to this system. Please respond.”
Silence was her only reply. What had happened to the mission sent to contact the Starfish remained a mystery. But for Thor’s ftl message and the fact the Starfish had arrived at pi-1 Ursa Major, she would have felt safe assuming them dead. There had been no transmissions since, and no sign of any kind to suggest they were alive.
She jumped at random around the ecliptic, dodging cutters and Tridents and the weapons they sent after her. She saw no sign of the hole ships that the Unfit and the mission supervisors back at Sagarsee were surely sending to keep an eye on things, but she was diligent in reporting to them by ftl. The continued silence suggested that the entire system was somehow being jammed. That the Starfish were responsible for this, as well as the detonation of the sun, seemed the logical assumption. The ring they had put around the sun’s waist had already altered its chromosphere immediately prior to blowing up. Perhaps they had suspected the Spinners to be sheltering deep in its core—an amazing thought, but again not out of the realms of possibility for these beings—and blowing off the outer layers was intended to flush them out
She did her best to record what happened, knowing that the astronomers among the engrams would never forgive her for missing such valuable data—if they survived long enough to study it. It was easy enough to chronicle the unfolding of the polar nebulae, although much harder to see through them to what lay within. She detected shapes lurking in the billowing clouds, strange shadows flashing in and out of space-time, sending great bubbles of gas collapsing and expanding. It was impossible to tell what they were. Some looked like Tridents or other Starfish vessels; others were lumpier, more organic in appearance, with sweeping fins and winglike appendages.
Exactly like starfish,
she thought
designed to surf the atmosphere of stars.
When a second star blossomed in the ecliptic, just outside the first gas giant’s orbit she wondered if she was getting a little out of her depth. Then all hell broke loose, and leaving wasn’t an option she could seriously consider anymore.
* * *
Sol had entertained an uneasy suspicion about the location of
the Starfish point of view with respect to their own position in the scheme of things. That was confirmed when the roiling bubble of the nova clouds hit their apparent position, as surrounding them in the Trident. Barely a second after everything lit up around them, a faint tremor rolled through the walls, floor, and ceiling of the concealed space containing them.
“Damn them,” she cursed through gritted teeth. “We’re on the fucking front line!”
The view changed, not, as she had previously supposed, reflecting a shift in perspective to another viewpoint but probably, she now realized, indicating a
real
shift in location. The Trident carrying them dropped down into the ecliptic, where space was relatively clear, then up again, into the shock wave’s leading edge. Magnetic field lines snapped and twisted with incredible ferocity as the star came apart from within. Plumes and jets of tortured gas rose and fell around them, as though they were standing on the lip of an active volcano. The Trident rocked as its massive cross-section rode the wave of energy with ill-designed grace. Its distinctive back-scratcher shape, tens of thousands of kilometers long, wasn’t intended for such an environment.
“Asteroid,” she heard Alander calling. “We want to know what’s going on!”
The sphere didn’t reappear or respond. A sudden, more energetic jolt was followed almost immediately by a jump to another part of the system. The light there was different: cleaner, more intense than that of the billowing star.
“That’s the Source of All!” Samson exclaimed, pointing out the hard white, sunlike object blazing to one side.
“What the hell’s
it
doing here?” asked Inari.
The Trident jolted again as something flashed across the field of view—a lime-green, tapering triangle with a glint of silver at its aft end. The thing appeared to be traveling backward.
“Peter, get yourself back in the hole ship,” she said.
“Way ahead of you,” said Alander. She could see now that all three of them were already moving.
Alander stumbled as the floor shook beneath them. Under fire, the Trident jumped yet again, to a point far from the Source. It joined a swarm of cutters and other Tridents gathering near Jian Lao, the planet that would have been the colony world for the
Andre Linde.
Ghostly webs of energy enveloped the giant ships, glowing like marsh light in the glare of the nebulae. Sol found it almost impossible to make out exactly what was happening.
“Who blew up the sun?” Inari asked.
“Your guess is as good as mine, at this stage,” said Sol. “
Eledone!
Any readings?”
“Passive sensors are not detecting anything beyond the walls of this chamber.”
“I think it’s time we started using active sensors again.” She eyed the view with a feeling of deep misgiving. “Whatever’s going on out there, I want to know about it before it hits us.”
“Surely we’d be safe in here?” said Samson. That she phrased it as a question indicated her doubt. Sol had no reassurances for her.
More of the green triangles swept into view, trailing white points of light that scattered and vanished then reappeared in waves aiming for the gathering of Starfish vessels. A responding wave of red darts, blue whips, and other exotic weapons rose up to meet them. Space knotted and writhed as the two waves collided, tangling vicious energies in a multicolored, almost beautiful display. The arena was large enough for light-speed lags to have an effect on how it was reported. Explosions that might originally have occurred simultaneously seemed to come in waves: craft appeared out of unspace apparently seconds before they’d moved, in response to distant events that weren’t yet visible.
Sol did her best to follow it all. The triangles were being picked off with relative ease, but there were many of them. She looked around, trying to locate their source. None was immediately obvious. As dozens of cutters spun to join the attack, the Trident they were in jumped to the outer system, where in frosty darkness a new battle line was forming. The antagonists this time were snakelike threads of a shimmering gray many hundreds of kilometers long that spat bolts of energy from their ends. They looked impossibly thin but were in actual fact dozens of meters across. When severed, they disintegrated into showers of debris loaded with nanotech mines and other traps. Sol saw Starfish vessels explode from the inside out as the mines spread exponentially through them, others flew sluggishly, their guidance systems disrupted and proving easy picking for the green triangles. As more and more of the gray threads were destroyed, the fragments reassembled to replace them, snapping unpredictably out of debris clouds.