Strapped into his couch in the cabin’s cramped operations segment, Captain McClain Gilbert reviewed the data that the starship’s sensors were picking up. The gas giant’s third moon was twenty thousand kilometers away, a heavily cratered ball of rock, three thousand kilometers in diameter. There was no atmosphere. As the visual sensors scanned it, a profile of its surface built up. A recognizable topography of mare plains and hills was revealed, dating back to the moon’s origin. Lusterless peat-brown regolith was scattered thinly over rock strata of dark gray and black. Thousands of craters had mangled the smooth hills, ripping out vast slabs of jagged rock to form vertical cliff ramparts.
There had been no change in the two hundred years since CST’s exploratory division had performed its quick scan.
“Our survey records check out, such as they are,” Mac said; he turned to look at Natasha Kersley in the couch next to him. “There’s nothing alive around here. Is that what you wanted, Doc?”
“Looks good,” she said.
“Can I begin the satellite launch?”
“Yes, please.”
Mac sent a flurry of commands into the ship’s RI. Modified missile launch tubes in the Moscow’s forward section opened and spat out eighteen sensor satellites. Their ion rockets pushed them into a bracelet formation orbiting the nameless moon, allowing them to cover the entire surface simultaneously. Once their coverage was established they’d be able to determine the exact power of the quantumbuster they were here to test.
“So far so good,” he muttered.
“Absolutely. Here’s hoping we don’t have a Fermi moment.”
“A what?” Mac really didn’t like the uncertainty in her voice.
“During the Trinity test of the very first atom bomb, Fermi wondered if the detonation would ignite the Earth’s atmosphere. They just didn’t know, you see. We think the quantum disruption won’t propagate. If it does, then the whole universe gets converted into energy.”
“Oh, great, thanks for sharing.” He gave the doomed moon a deeply troubled glance.
“It’s really not very likely,” Natasha said.
It took two hours until Mac was satisfied the satellites were correctly placed, and their communications relay systems were locked together. “Okay, Doc, you’re on.”
Natasha drew a quick breath, and fed her launch code into the prototype quantumbuster warhead. The missile was hurled out of its launch tube by a powerful magnetic pulse. When it was ten kilometers from the starship, its fusion drive ignited, accelerating it hard toward the moon.
“All systems functional,” Natasha reported. “Target acquired. I’m authorizing activation.” She sent another code to the weapon, and received confirmation. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Amen to that,” Mac muttered.
The Moscow opened a wormhole and quickly slipped inside. Five seconds later, and two million kilometers out from the moon, the starship slid back out into real space.
“Receiving satellite data,” Mac said as the communications dish picked up the signal. “Switching to high capacity recording.”
“Two minutes to impact,” Natasha said. “All systems operational.”
“We’re going to see it from here, right?” He was aligning the starship’s sensors back on the moon.
“Oh, heavens, yes. The quantumbuster field will initialize just before the missile hits the surface. That should give us an intersection over several hundred meters of the moon’s mass. It works out to quite a substantial volume.”
“And the whole thing just turns to energy?”
“Any piece of matter inside the field, yes. That’s the theory: the effect completely breaks down quantum-level cohesion. The discharge radiance will be on a scale we’ve never seen before.”
“Discharge radiance,” Mac said with a smile. “You mean explosion.”
She gave him a nervous grin. “Yeah.”
Mac turned his whole attention to the visual spectrum image that was being projected in front of his face. The moon was a simple dark circle framed by stars. All the sensor satellites were watching eagerly. They showed a tiny purple-white spark sinking toward the surface.
Mac had brought the Moscow out of hyperspace on the other side of the moon from the target zone. If the Seattle Project weapon worked as advertised, the radiation blast would be lethal even at two million kilometers. The Commonwealth would have a decisive weapon to use against the Primes.
“Do you think they’ll negotiate?” he asked.
“If they see this in action, they’d be truly crazy not to,” Natasha said. “I don’t care how bizarre their motives are, they face extinction if we use this against them. They’ll talk.”
Mac desperately wanted her to be right. The way he’d worked his way to the navy’s vanguard, he was pretty sure he’d wind up with the mission to take a quantumbuster to Dyson Alpha.
He checked the moon again, worrying about the whole Fermi moment idea. The missile was seconds away from its brown and black mottled surface. I should have positioned the Moscow on the other side of the gas giant.
The quantumbuster activated its effect field. Light flared around the moon, creating a perfect white halo. It was as if the ancient sphere of rock was eclipsing a white dwarf star. The edges began to dissolve as the glare poured across the cratered surface like an advancing tsunami. Dazzling cracks appeared, opening deep into the moon’s interior. Low rolling hills heaved, transforming into volcanoes that jetted debris hundreds of kilometers out into space. Dusty plains crumbled as they separated ponderously from the highlands surrounding them.
Slowly and inexorably, the moon disintegrated inside its cocoon of lurid stellar light.
“Jesus, Doc,” Mac barked. “You were just supposed to blow the bloody thing out of orbit.”
***
Giselle Swinsol herself was sitting at the front of the bus when it arrived to collect them. It was a fifty-seater Ford Landhound, with luxury seats and a small canteen in front of the washroom cubicles. Two other families were sitting in it, looking lost and vaguely apprehensive. Mark recognized the expression. He’d seen it in the bathroom mirror that morning.
Giselle waited until the porterbots had loaded all the Vernons’ bags and boxes into the luggage compartment at the back. “Don’t look so worried; this isn’t a long trip.”
Mark and Liz swapped a glance, then tried to settle the excited kids.
The bus drove back down the highway toward Illanum. It joined a convoy of vehicles, slotting in behind a forty-wheel transporter carrying one of the completed starship compartments, and in front of three standard container trucks, empty after dropping their loads at a factory. Once they had passed the back of Rainbow Wood the compartment transporter turned off along a long curving slip road; the bus followed it. The slip road fed onto another three-lane highway wide enough to handle the transporters. After another eight kilometers, another slip road joined it, bringing more of the giant transporters.
“I didn’t know there were any other towns on Cressat,” Mark said.
“There are five assembly centers here,” Giselle said. “Biewn and two others are responsible for life support and cargo; one is fabricating the hyperdrives; and the last provides general systems, the starship’s spine if you like.”
Mark began to reevaluate the project yet again. The scale was larger than he’d imagined. So was the timescale; this had to have been going on for a long time prior to the Prime invasion. As for the cost…
The highway was heading directly for the base of a low hill where a circle of warm pink light was shining at them. Mark felt the slight tingle of a pressure membrane as the bus passed through. Then he, Liz, and the kids were pressed against the window, anxious to see the new world.
They’d emerged high up in some mountains, giving them a view out over a flat plain that must have been hundreds of kilometers wide. It had strange yellow rock outcrops, and a jagged volcanic canyon running away diagonally from the mountains. The ground was completely bar
e, with a thin covering of gray-brown sand scattered over dark rock. Right away on the far horizon were some rumpled dark specks that might have been more mountains; the planet’s lavender-shaded sky made it difficult to tell.
They were on a broad ring road that curved around the human settlement, whose clean new buildings stood out against the mottled brown landscape like silver warts. The town had an outer band of factories, similar to those that Mark had worked in back in Biewn, several condo-style accommodation blocks, and five sprawling housing estates. Construction sites made up a good third of the area, swarming with bots. A wormhole generator and four modern fusion stations dominated the skyline opposite the gateway back to Cressat.
Mark couldn’t see any vegetation at all on the ground alongside the ring road; the land was a desert. Then he looked again at the topaz patches daubed on the plain below. At first he’d assumed they were unusual rock formations. Each one was circular—perfectly circular, now that he was paying attention. They had steep radial undulations, like the folds in an origami flower. His retinal inserts zoomed in, allowing his e-butler to do some calculations. They measured over twenty-four kilometers wide. A triple spike rose out of the center of each one, reaching a kilometer into the air.
“What the hell are those?” he asked.
“We call them the gigalife,” Giselle said. “This planet is covered in the groundplants. They come in many colors, but they all grow to about this size. I’ve seen bigger ones in the tropical zones. And there’s a waterplant variety which floats on the sea, though they are made up from a mesh of tendrils rather than the single sheets you can see here. There’s nothing else alive on this world.”
“Nothing?” Liz queried. “That’s an unusual evolutionary route.”
“Told you this would be right up your street,” Giselle said with gratification. “The gigalife has nothing to do with evolution. I wasn’t joking when I said there was nothing else here. We haven’t found any bacteriological or microbial traces other than the ones we brought with us. This planet was technoformed with an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere and freshwater oceans specifically to provide a place for them to grow. Up until about twenty thousand years ago it was just a lump of inert rock naked to space. Someone dumped the atmosphere and oceanic water here, presumably through gigantic wormholes; we found evidence of a local gas giant’s moons being strata mined for its crustal ice.”
“Do you know who did it?”
“No. We named them the Planters, because the only thing they left behind was the gigalife. Presumably they are some kind of artwork, though we can’t be sure of that, either. It’s the lead theory because we haven’t found a practical application for them, and the Dynasty has been researching them for over a century now.”
“Why?” Liz asked. “This is a fabulous discovery. They are the most extraordinary organisms I’ve ever seen. Why not share it with the Commonwealth?”
“Commercial application. Gigalife isn’t quite genuine biological life. Whoever produced them has overcome Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle; there is some kind of nanonic fabrication system operating inside the cells. Look at those central spires. They’re made up from a conical mast of super-strength carbon strands which the cells extrude. The leaf-sheet is simply draped over it. Gigalife is a fusion of ordinary biological processes and molecular mechanics, which we’ve so far been completely unable to duplicate. The implication if we can crack the nanonic properties is incalculable. We’d get everything from true Von Neumannism to bodies which can self-repair. Human immortality would become integral rather than dependent on the crudity of today’s rejuvenation techniques.”
Liz wrinkled her nose in disapproval. “How long do the groundplants take to grow?”
“We’re not sure. The current structures are about five thousand years old, and just maintain themselves. We’ve never seen one in its growth stage. Several are decaying faster than their regeneration process can cope with. Again, we don’t know if they’re actually dying, or if they’re in a cycle. They could be like terrestrial bulbs and simply recharge their kernels for the next time around.”
“You mean they don’t produce seeds?”
“Who knows? They have a kernel which is the size of a twenty-story skyscraper. Best guess is that they were manufactured and placed in position by the Planters. If they were produced as seeds, how would they ever spread? They’d either need wheels or rockets.”
“Good point,” Liz admitted.
“Can you eat them?” Barry piped up.
“No. We haven’t found one with proteins that a human can consume. Of course, we haven’t sampled more than a tiny percentage so far. We use noninvasive investigatory techniques, which is why our progress is slower than some in the Dynasty would like. But Nigel and Ozzie both agreed we didn’t want the Planters to return and find we’d damaged anything. Any species possessing this kind of knowledge base is best left unannoyed.”
“You’re very knowledgeable about this,” Liz said.
“I used to be director of the gigalife research office.”
“Ah.”
Giselle gave Mark a taunting smile. “Here comes the good bit. Look out over there. Up in the sky. The first one will be rising into view any moment now.” She pointed over the plain to the west.
Mark didn’t like the tone—it was too smug—but he looked anyway. He thought he would be seeing a starship assembly platform, which he was actually looking forward to. The prospect of working in orbit was one that fired him.
It wasn’t an assembly platform. Mark watched in utter disbelief as a moon slid up over the horizon. It moved fast, and it was huge. “That’s not possible,” he whispered. All the kids in the bus were shrieking and pointing with excitement.
The moon was a stippled magenta globe, with a profusion of slender jet-black creases snaking across its surface. It was several times the size of Earth’s moon. Too big, Mark knew instinctively: anything that big that close would produce tidal forces that would rip continents apart and haul a permanent tsunami around the globe in its wake. This wasn’t even disturbing the few wispy high-altitude clouds. Then he began to understand its texture. The multitude of black creases were actually fissures, walled by the same magenta material that colored the surface. It was only in the deeps where the sunlight couldn’t reach that they actually turned black. The moon wasn’t big, just in a low orbit, neither was it solid; it was a gigantic spherical ruff, sheets of thin purple fabric crumpled up against each other.
“Oh, no,” Mark said. He looked from the purple moon down to the topaz groundplant gigalife, then back again. “No way.”
“Yes,” Giselle said. “The third variety of gigalife, the spaceflower. The Planters put fifteen asteroids into a two-thousand-kilometer orbit, and dropped a kernel on each one. They don’t mass more than about a hundred million tons each. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when the kernel runs out of raw material to convert. Some of us think that will be when the Planters come back.”
“They sculpted moons,” Mark said in astonishment.
“Grew them,” Giselle corrected. “Essentially we have a planet which has giant cabbages for moons. Who said aliens don’t have a sense of humor?”
***
As soon as the committee room doors opened, Justine rushed out. Surprised expressions followed her. It wasn’t quite seemly for a senator to run.
She just made it to the lady’s washroom, and threw up into the porcelain bowl. There was a discreet cough outside the cubical. “Are you all right, ma’am?” the attendant asked.
“Fine, thank you. Bad food this morning.” She heaved again. Her forehead was damp with sweat, and she felt inordinately hot. The tension that had racked up during the committee meeting hadn’t helped her delicate stomach.
Ramon was waiting for her outside when she finally emerged. “Something we said?” he asked with a raised eyebrow.
“Something I ate,” she told him around yet another antacid tablet.
“I hope not. With
all the paranoia around here, people will think assassins are trying to poison you.”
“Not a bad thing. It would get our fellow senators to cut down on the dining-room food.”
“Now that is pure wishful thinking.”
She glanced down at his chest. Ramon was wearing a very modern business suit, tailored to deemphasize his stomach. Normally when he was in the Senate Hall he was careful to wear tribal robes. But then the Security Oversight Committee was not one that permitted any media coverage. “I see you’re really sticking to your diet.”
Ramon let out a sigh. “Don’t start.”
“I’m sorry,” she said contritely.
“Now I know something’s wrong.”
“No there isn’t. I’ll survive. And thanks for supporting me in there this morning.”
“The African caucus does not automatically do as the Halgarths wish, nor any other Dynasty for that matter.”
“What about Grand Families?”
He smiled broadly. “It depends on the deal which is offered.”
“Rammy, I need to ask you something.”
“Personal or business?”
“Business,” she said with a sigh. “Always business these days.”
He reached out and gave her cheek an affectionate stroke. “Thompson will be back soon.”
“Not soon enough.” She finished the antacid tablet, and they walked down the broad deserted corridor toward the Senate Hall’s main lobby. “That weekend at Sorbonne Wood, who exactly came up with the idea for parallel development shared between Anshun and High Angel?”
Ramon stopped to stare at her. “Why do you need to know?”
“There are certain aspects about the navy formation that we have to clarify.”
“What aspects?”
“The groupings, Rammy, come on. You have to admit, for a venture that size it all came together remarkably smoothly.”
“Thanks to you. It was a Burnelli weekend if I remember rightly.”
“We’re worried we might have been outmaneuvered.”
“Ha! That would be a first. I know how Gore operates. Nothing is left to chance.”