Initial measurements of polarized interstellar dust grains showed the galactic magnetosphere surrounding the star Ain was strong enough to allow the world-ship to overshoot the target, make a thrustless turn, and then, once Ain was line with Iota Draconis off their fore sail, allow them to reenter the beam Vigil was maintaining and slow sufficiently to match speed and metric with Ain.
They should have started a slow but measurable turn at this point.
“What the pox is going on, Blackie?”
“The magnetic interaction with the galactic field is insufficient.”
“You mean something or someone at Ain reached out and made the whole galactic magnetic field in this area weaker? So that we could not slow ourselves and stop by and say hello?”
“Check my calculations if you doubt me.”
“Thanks, I will.” A moment later: “Damnation and canker sores. You are right again.”
“As ever. You might also look over my calculations for using a loop of superconductor to ionize the interstellar medium and convert our momentum to heat. For that is the only other method available to us to lower our velocity, assuming no external aid.”
“I don’t need to look. Mass of a world, moving at one-tenth lightspeed? The heat would be like kissing a nova.”
“Aptly put. And am I right that we have but one course of action here?”
“Reverse the polarity on the tower to bring us back into a straight-line shot with Ain.”
“Indeed.”
“Then, pick the biggest damn object in the system—gas giant, Dyson sphere, whatever we can find—and aim right at it. Our wee tiny planet is only half the mass of Earth, but if we smite the center of their most densely populated area at one-tenth lightspeed, I reckon we can do some damage. About equivalent to a twenty-nine zettaton explosion of TNT, or the total energy output of Deneb each second. Even macroscale structures in the outer system could not survive, made of exotic matter or not.”
Blackie seemed pleased. “And to think how petty and inferior minds once complained about the infinitesimal amounts of energy I released burning an insignificant city off the globe, or two, or ten! No one now recalls the names of those cities, or the land masses on which they sat!”
Montrose rattled off the names of the cities, which he had, of course, memorized.
“Be that as it may,” said Blackie graciously, “in this case, you are not suggesting mercy, are you?”
“It’s them or us,” snarled Montrose. “And this is the star system, Ain. These are the very folk that sicced Asmodel on us. Remember him? Then Cahetel, then Shcachlil the Salamander, then Lamathon the Unkinder Twin, and finally, the worst of the worst, when Rania was getting close, and they stopped caring about any long-term prospects, they sent Achaiah. They sent the Beast. Hell, I remember how many innocent millions died each time.”
“So you say wipe them all out and die in the process?”
“You gotta pay the devil when his hellish bill comes due. Fair’s fair.”
“It is at times like this that I recall why I admire you, Cowhand. You are as bloodthirsty as I am. I, ah, take it you are convinced this unexpected decrease in the local interstellar magnetic field is a deliberate phenomenon, an attempt to prevent us from making starfall? We can, after all, manipulate the smallest part of a topgallant to form a lateral beam, and send out one-way probes, or, with slightly more ingenuity and effort, dispatch the Emancipation like a side boat, and test the galactic magnetosphere to each side of us, and see if the effect is natural.”
“What’s it matter? Natural or not, we now got no way to stop our momentum, unless the Principality at Ain cooperates and either puts back a magnetic field or hoists a deceleration laser.”
“So you say threaten them with ramming if they do not cooperate?”
“Hey. You read the Monument same as me. They got rules about cooperation and collaboration. The Ain Principality has to stop us, and then we owe them.”
“Ah! We must pay the cost of the beam we will threaten them into directing at us, after all, and, as you say, their Cold Equations cover this eventuality. Such was my thought. So you agree to sell this world into indentured servitude…?”
Montrose pondered for at least a century before he answered.
“Ain’t there no damn way to escape these star monsters and their damned system of serfdom and slavery? What gives?”
“Space is cruel, my friend,” mused Del Azarchel. “It is very large and very cruel.”
“The body you got on ain’t got no face, but I can tell you are smiling.”
“Well. Space reminds me of—”
“Don’t say it.”
“—me!”
“Space is smaller than your damned ego, Blackie.”
“I will take that as a compliment. Shall we get on with our astrocide? Stellarcide? Is there a word for the willful destruction of a whole solar system?”
2. Collision Vector
A.D. 72360 TO 73040
Torment, and the one fraction of her population awake and thawed in her many buried cities and habitats, waited and watched with growing anxiety as no change appeared in the magnetic field and no beam came.
The world-ship rotated in preparation for the nonexistent deceleration beam so that her sails were behind her. The endless tower that had been the tail of Torment now reached ahead, a bowsprit longer than the radius of the orbit of Mercury. At the tip of this tower was the tiny point of approaching Ain, growing brighter as years turned into centuries, orange as a coal in a grate.
The giant had a tiny companion star roughly two lightyears away, and taking at least half a million years to orbit each other.
The star Ain itself was an orange-red globe of simply titanic size, ninety times brighter than Sol and burning helium at its core. There were many clues that some sort of industrial structures and coherent energy patterns existed in the core and along the surface of the star, but what these engineering elements were meant to do, even Torment could not guess.
There was a third body in the system. This was a sphere larger than a gas giant, orbiting Ain in an orbit as eccentric as that of Wormwood, now a memory far behind them. The body itself was hidden in massive clouds, black as ink, an opaque sphere extending in each direction some eighty thousand miles. From the energy signals and behavior patterns, it was clear the black clouds were intelligent: cognitive matter, either nanotechnology assemblers or something finer. Oddly, this supermassive gas giant was the only exoplanet the astronomers could detect throughout the Hyades Cluster. The other stars were barren.
That world was the target. Had their velocities been similar, so large a body could have absorbed Torment with no more disturbance than a stone cast into a pond. A few ripples in the cloud layer might pass, and then, nothing. But at one-tenth lightspeed, the disturbance would be akin to a bullet passing into a man, or, more to the point, a bullet passing into a powder keg, since every particle would be liberated in a wash of total conversion if the world did not slow to a stop.
Years passed, and the star system with its single massive planet grew ever closer, their mutual speed undiminished. The invisible point which it was not possible to arrest the motion of the Torment without destroying the planet or the sail array also grew ever closer.
Astronomers could see more of the system. There was no ringworld or strandworld circling the star, but there were clouds of tree-shaped macroscale structures, forming a set of four distinct rings around the star. Two rings were circular, an inner and an outer, both in the orbital plane of the superjovian; one ring was oval, with the primary and superjovian at its focal points; the remaining cloud was not a ring at all but a hyperbolic sweep, a smear of azure and cerulean, sapphire and cobalt forests that looped around Ain like a vast open rainbow.
These macroscale structures looked like leafless trees, or nerve cells, or the skeletons of parasols. Each structure consisted of a long trunk pointing away from the sun and three equally spaced branches pointing toward, and each branc
h was tipped with three smaller branches, and those smaller branches in turn tipped with three smaller yet, and so on. Some of the dendrite structures were orbiting in pairs, triads, rings, or complex dances of rings within rings, waltzing epicycles, and braids of orbits were woven in and out of each other in an inhuman complexity of the ring structures.
The average tree-shaped structure was some twenty-five thousand miles long, more than twice the length of a diameter piercing the Earth, or nearly two-thirds such a line drawn through Neptune. These structures were the height of worlds, but not the volume. The cylindrical trunks were at most nine hundred miles in diameter.
It was from these structures that the only sign of intelligent activity or energy use came: radio pulses, the infrared shadows of some form of biological or mechanical action passing from branches to trunk, or bursts of neutrinos. Only about one in a hundred of these countless dendrites displayed these actions.
The rest were as still and silent as trees in a winter graveyard, merely orbiting the great orange star.
There came a period where a second planet was seen in the system. It was an ice giant, the size and composition of Neptune, and it followed that belt or band of dendrite bodies forming a hyperbola around Ain.
The giant world came out of the interstellar space from the direction of Iota Tauri, a white dwarf star and an outlying member of the Hyades Cluster. For forty-five years, it sailed along a hyperbolic orbit, passed like a slingshot around the sun.
During a few hours at perihelion, the ice giant came to life. Torment could detect activity, flares of radiation, tiny packages of matter moving at high speed leaving the atmosphere. Energy emissions from the sun flashed into the thawed atmosphere. In opposition, on the far side of the star system, the black superjovian body stirred into life as inky black clouds leaped into ever higher orbits; a red dot of immense heat was detected at the core of the body whenever the black clouds parted for a moment. The neutrino count detected by receivers on the sail of Torment registered a high number of encounters during this period.
Meanwhile, the dendrite objects opened fire on the ice giant, sending out white-hot needles of material from their forward arms toward the Neptunian body. Whether this was an act of war or of commerce was unclear. Perhaps it was a method of delivering material rapidly to the gas giant’s atmosphere.
The solar system lapsed into silence after about ten hours of activity. The black superjovian grew quiescent, and the neutrino count dropped.
The ice giant was visible for another forty-five years heading outward again, still following the path of the dendrite cloud. It was lost to sight heading in the direction a pulsating variable star called V1362 Orionis, another member of the Hyades Cluster.
And still, there was no sign of any reaction from whatever form of intelligence—Principality or Virtue or Host—ruling this star system, to the threat posed by the vast speed of Torment.
The invisible point of no return was passed, and still there was no sign.
Once and twice and thrice during these years, increasingly desperate attempts were made to thaw Montrose and discover his opinion and advice. In annoyance, he told whoever woke him, man or machine, to relax.
“They is playing chicken with us, is all.” He snorted. “Let me sleep, you leprous scabnails! I don’t give a damn what your problem is. Solve it without me.”
An agent speaking for Torment said, “But we are passed the point where a laser from the sun could decelerate us safely, sir!”
“These damn things are like machines. They ain’t got no souls. They are controlled by their equations. The equations say they have to bring us to a halt. And they don’t give a damn neither.”
“We are on collision course for the superjovian body! If you are wrong—”
“Damn your eyes! If I were wrong on a simple thing like this, I would have been dead before your race was a twinkle in the eye of a scabby Hermeticist, you asinine sumpsuckler! Now shut your yap. I have had a long, hard, wearisome life, and I get to sleep the sleep of the just! Well, hmm, maybe not that. At least I can sleep the sleep of the I don’t give a damn.”
On he slumbered. On they sped toward collision.
3. Concubine Vector
A.D. 73723
Menelaus woke and saw the year, and before he opened his biological eyes, he examined the immediate environment of the hermit’s cell he had fashioned for himself in a bubble of metal near the core of the planet. Someone had disarranged certain of the mementos and coin collections he had carefully placed on the shelves before entering slumber, and the flag of Texas was hanging from one tack, a triangle of fabric drooping down in defeat. The coffeepot was cold, as if the automatic circuit had forgotten to prepare for his waking.
His glass pistols were missing, a fact he found more disturbing and disorienting than he could account for.
Through remote instruments he saw the frozen sea, and a sky that was half a dome of cold stars, and half a dome of vast pink sails like rose petals filling all space between zenith and horizon.
The cell now included a wardrobe of bodies into which his brain information could be downloaded. After much hesitation, he selected to be reincarnated as a Patrician.
Waking into a Patrician brain was like stepping into a stream of shockingly cold ice water. The neural arrangement seamlessly merged high-speed inner thoughts at the picotechnology level with his nanotechnological and biological architecture so that not only was each nerve cell working to keep his thoughts coordinated, but the chemicals in each cell stored additional information and the electron shells of each fluorine atom in those molecules as well. The normal confusion, self-deception, memory stalls, and waiting times of multilevel consciousness was minimized by the unique architecture or eliminated entirely.
He also decided to wear the traditional garb of the Patricians. His dress consisted of anointing himself with a gel of aurum vitae, the same substance of which Myrmidon flesh was made, which coated and melded to his skin, giving him the characteristic golden hue of the Patrician race; and over that he threw the severe white mantle of the Fifth Men.
With his new brain and its new outlook, he understood the reason for Patrician simplicity of dress: the intuitive and pattern-recognition side of his consciousness was more active in this neural structure, making it easier to see symbols and symbolic relations. While, on the one hand, this allowed for him to think in three new shorthand neural encoding systems, as well as in his old human system and four other long-term and more elaborate neural languages, on the other hand, the rapid-fire method of seeing symbols and patterns made him more easily distracted by things like designs and colors in clothing and tempted him to see meanings where there were none.
The body itself was more compact and complex than a Swiss Army knife, able to adapt to nearly any surroundings. He was not surprised at his ability to exit his cell, soar up a depth-train chimney through the mantle and crust, swim through the liquid oxygen hydrosphere, fly through the cold helium atmosphere, and rocket through the upper stratosphere. The aurum altered with each environment, as did specialized organs inside his new body, inflating or contracting as need be. The Patricians had the ability to place any unused organ into its own miniature slumber, pale white buds coated in frost, and to reroute any vital functions to the analogous organ thawed and put into use.
The white mantle formed an energy parachute to allow him to ride a convenient heavy particle fountain issuing from the polar supermountain of the planet like a bowsprit. Up and up he rose. He eventually reached the position in low Torment orbit where the world’s magnetic fields had been warped into a vacuole of electromagnetic silence. All the radio noise and energy discharges from the buried cities of slumberers at the core of the planet, or from flotillas of armored Scolopendra, faded into inaudibility as he penetrated the vacuole.
Here was an orb of ice, small as one of the moons of Mars. The globe of Torment filled a third of the sky, rising and falling once an hour as the moonlet rotated. Torment was w
hite as Pluto beneath her winter shroud, and her circular crater lakes were dapples of dark purple.
Standing upright on a low hillock of snow, like a spear driven into a rock, was a narrow column of blue-green material, neither metal nor ceramic nor any other substance Montrose could name. It was roughly thirty feet tall. From the top lifted three smaller branches of the same material, perhaps nine feet long, and from each of the ends of these smaller branches three wands issued; and each wand had three spokes, and each spoke had three twigs, and each twig had three hairs, and so on. With his new, Patrician eyes, Montrose could see the pattern recurring, ever small and smaller, down to the molecular level.
The tiniest of the end hairs were plucking particles out of the surrounding near-vacuum and combining them into molecules, and the molecules into crystals. These crystals were fed into tubules leading into the spearhead of the object. Looking down and through the layers of the transparent ice moon to the other hemisphere, Montrose saw three other branched spears like this one, impaled into the substance of the ice moon, each equidistant from the others like the points on a caltrop.
Beneath this dendrite, seated on a chair made of human bones, was a living image of Torment, wearing a bridal dress and veil, and in her hands, a bouquet of septfoil flowers.
Torment had set, and the vast pale light from the world was shining upward upon the throned figure as smoky beams of light seeped through the transparent ground.
Montrose stood staring at her for a moment, rapidly turning off and on various internal senses and several nervous systems to examine his new organs. Some of them seemed to control powerful electric charges and nucleonic forces, nanotechnological and picotechnological vectors and assemblers. He was looking to see which could do the most damage in the least amount of time. He raised his golden hands, an intolerable brightness trembling between his fingers, calculating whether it would be easier to direct the energy in a straight beam, cutting through the moonlet crust, or to curve the beam around the close horizon.
Torment waited, one eyebrow raised in a skeptical arch. She spoke by means of a directed energy beam into receiving cells in the auditory sections of his Patrician nervous system. “You have expensive habits.”