"Sir."
"I can't risk them not being ready when we emerge from compression. We must not be caught unprepared."
Right, Lawrence thought, like Thallspring has moved and we 're going to finish this flight early. Final tailoring took a couple of hours per suit, at max. "I understand, sir."
And so it went. Bryant was obsessed with details; everything any experienced commander would leave to his sergeants to sort out he wanted a say in. He had to have the operation running perfectly along the standard track, a dead giveaway that he was concerned more with the impression he generated within the company than with the practicalities of the situation they'd be facing. He even wanted Oakley to cancel a request he'd made for more remote sensors when they went groundside. His platoon had been assigned to sweep through an urban area that was all narrow roads in a maze of cheap housing—and that was from a ten-year-old map; it could have decayed a lot since then. In other words, a perfect ambush territory for the local badboys. And they'd have a lot of bravado before Z-B established themselves and obtained their good behavior collateral. Lawrence would have wanted the same security those remote sensors could provide. But despite Z-B's vaunted policy of loop involvement, the beachhead plan already contained the number of sensors considered relevant. Bryant did not want anything to alter at this stage.
Oakley said yes, and got his bracelet pearl to rescind the request. They moved on to the landing operation's tuning and how Bryant didn't want them to suffer undue delay on their way out of the drop gliders.
* * *
A gentle warm rain had been falling on Memu Bay for most of the day, the second unseasonable downpour in a fortnight. It meant Denise had to keep the children out of the garden and at the tables and benches sheltered by the roof. In the morning she'd handed out the big media pads and got them to paint the shapes they saw in the clouds, which resulted in a splendid collage of strange creatures in glowing blues, reds and greens. By the afternoon, when it was obvious the clouds weren't going to blow away any time soon, she settled them in a broad semicircle and sat on one of the tables in the center.
"I think it's time I told you about the planet of the Mordiff," she said. "Even though Mozark never actually visited it himself."
There were several sharp intakes of breath. The children gave each other excited looks. The dark history of the Mordiff planet had only ever been hinted at before whenever she talked of the Ring Empire.
Jedzella stuck her hand up. "Please, miss, it's not too horrid, is it?"
"Horrid?" Denise pursed her lips and gave the question some theatrical consideration. "No, not horrid, although they fought terrible wars, which are always evil. I suppose from where we are today, looking back, it's really quite sad. I always say you can learn the most from mistakes, and the Mordiff made some really big mistakes. If you remember what they did, then, I hope, you'll be able to avoid those same mistakes when you grow up. Do you want me to go on?"
"Yes!" they yelled. Several of them gave Jedzella cross glances.
"All right then. Let's see: Mozark never went there, although he did fly close to the Ulodan Nebula where the planet and its star were hiding. There wasn't a lot of point to him going. Even in those times the Mordiff were long gone, and nothing they'd left behind could have helped him in his quest for a grand purpose in life. Although, in a way, a very warped and twisted way, the Mordiff had an overriding purpose. They wanted to live. In that they were no different to all the rest of us: humans today and the sentient species of the Ring Empire all want to live. But by fate, or accident, or chance, or even luck, the Mordiff evolved on a planet in the middle of the darkest, densest nebula in the galaxy at that time. They had daylight, just as we do. The nebula wasn't thick enough to blank out their sun. But their night was absolute. The night sky on that planet was perfectly black. They couldn't see the stars. As far as they knew, they were completely alone; their planet and its sun were the entire universe."
"Didn't they send ships out to find other stars?" Edmund asked.
"No. Because they had no reason to explore. They didn't know anything else existed, and observation backed up the whole idea, so they didn't even know they could go looking. That was their downfall, and it's the lesson we must learn from them. You see, like most sentient species, they thought in the same fashion we do, even though their bodies were very different. They were big, almost as big as dinosaurs, and they had very clever limbs that could change shape. It meant they could slide their bodies along the ground, the way a snake does, or they could swim like fish by turning the limbs into fins, and some Ring Empire historians and archaeologists even thought they could fly, or at least glide. But that didn't stop them from having an ordinary civilization. They had a Stone Age, and an Iron Age, just like us; then they went on and had a Steam Age, and an Industrial Age, and an Atomic Age, and a Data Age. And that was where their troubles started. By then, they had developed their whole world, and they had good medicine that gave them a long healthy life. Their population was expanding all the time and consuming more and more resources. Whole continents became giant cities. They built islands miles across that were just floating buildings. All of their polar continents were settled. There was no room left, and all the surface was being exploited. It meant they had wars, horrible, terrible wars that killed tens of millions of them every time. But they were always pointless, as all wars are. After entire nations were destroyed, the victors would just move into the ruins, and within a generation the land would be full again. All the while their technology, especially their weapons technology, grew more powerful and more deadly. The wars they fought became worse, and more dangerous to the rest of the planet "Then one day, the biggest nation, which was ruled by the greatest Mordiff overlord, discovered how to create a worm-hole."
The children let out a fearful Ooooh.
"Did they invade the Ring Empire, miss?"
"No, they didn't invade the Ring Empire. Have you forgotten? They didn't know it was there. They made their wormhole go in a very different direction. You see, worm-holes are formed from a distortion of space-time. We use ours to create a tunnel through space so we can fly to the stars. The Mordiff traveled in time. Because the Ulodan Nebula denied them a vision of space, time was all they knew. The overlord ordered a single giant wormhole terminus to be built, standing at the center of his nation. It was the greatest device the Mordiff had ever constructed, for not only did the terminus generate the wormhole, its own structure was self-sustaining. As long as it had power, it would never decay or fail. And it got its power from the way it distorted space-time. In other words, it was eternal, almost like perpetual motion."
"My daddy says that's impossible," Melanie said with haughty self-confidence. "He says only fools believe in it"
"It is impossible," Denise said. "But that's the best way to describe how the Mordiff's terminus worked."
Edmund sneered at the girl, then turned to Denise. "Why did the overlord build it, miss?"
"Ah. Well, that's where the terror and the tragedy of the Mordiff begins. When it was finished, the overlord ordered an exodus of his whole nation. An armada of flying craft carried them all into the terminus, millions and millions of Mordiff. And when they were all safe inside, the overlord's personal guards set off the most terrible weapons the nation possessed. All of them, all at once. They were so bad, and so powerful, that they killed every living thing on the whole planet, and turned all the cities to rubble, even those of the overlord's nation."
The children stared at her, awed and troubled.
"Every Mordiff nation had the same awful doomsday weapons; some spread deadly diseases while some simply exploded hard enough to open up cracks into the magma below the continents," Denise said. "The overlord knew it would just be a matter of time until somebody used them. By then, each of the nations was so desperate for new land and resources that not using the doomsday bombs would mean they'd collapse from within.
"So now the overlord's nation was inside the wormhole, traveling
further and further into the future, away from the time of the planet's death. Some of them, a scouting party, emerged a hundred thousand years later, flying out of the terminus—which had survived the explosions and radiation, of course. To the scouting party it was only minutes since they'd entered the wormhole, but as soon as they came out they found a sterile planet, with the ruins of the megacities crumbling into dust. By then, the radiation had decayed, and the plagues had died away. These Mordiff scouts dumped bacteria and algae over the surface and flew back into the terminus. Then they came out another thousand years later, when the bacteria had spread everywhere, bringing the soil back to life. This time they scattered seeds before they went back into the terminus. The third time they emerged, they left breeding pairs of animals and fish. A thousand years after that, the world had returned to the state it was in before their Industrial Age, with huge grassy plains and forests and jungles. That's when the whole of the overlord's nation came out of the wormhole. They'd only been flying inside the worm-hole for a couple of hours, while outside a hundred and twenty thousand years had rushed past.
"They looked around at this beautiful, clean new world, and they rejoiced and thanked the overlord for delivering them to this wonderful place. Many of them forgot the crime that had been done to give them this chance at a fresh life and settled down to rebuild their original society. So once more they mined the land for metals and minerals, and their cities began to grow again, always expanding over the wilderness. After a few generations, some of the Mordiff forgot the debt they owed to the overlord family, which still ruled the original nation, and began to break away and form new nations of their own. Two and a half thousand years later, the planet was once again covered with cities. Once again, wars were being fought. So, the overlord of that time did what his ancestor had done. He gathered his nation into flying craft and sent them through the terminus. Behind them, the doomsday weapons exploded yet again.
"This wretched cycle turned another three times. Whenever the world grew too crowded to support the billions of Mordiff who filled the cities, the overlord's nation would escape through time and kill everyone left behind. But after the last time they fled into the terminus, the scouts came out a hundred thousand years later to find something unexpected had happened. Their sun had changed. When they looked at it, they could see dark sunspots swelling and bursting all across its surface. It was reaching the end of its main cycle and growing colder. Of course, as they'd never seen the other stars in the galaxy, they didn't know what was happening. They never knew that stars change and die; they'd assumed that their little universe was static and eternal. The physicists among them began to speculate and produce theories at once, and they probably worked out what was happening, because they were smart, don't forget But knowing what's happening and being able to do anything are very different things.
"So the scout group took measurements and recordings of how cold the air was becoming, and how frigid the land had turned, and went back into the wormhole to report to the overlord. At first, he didn't want to believe what they told him, but, eventually, he came out and witnessed the star's winter for himself. By now, the ground and ruins were covered in a thick layer of frost, which glittered in the dimming sunlight, and the seas were frozen solid. For a long time the overlord raged against what he thought of as supreme injustice before he regained his senses. Scouts were dispatched far into the future: two hundred thousand years, five hundred thousand, a million, two million, even ten million. They all came back with worsening reports of how the sun grew colder and colder, swelling into a huge red monster that covered a fifth of the sky. At no time did it ever show signs of returning to its original state."
"Can stars do that?" Melanie asked quietly. "Get better, I mean?"
"No, dear, they can't. Not by themselves. There are stories that some kingdoms in the Ring Empire tinkered with the interior of stars when the Empire was at the height of its powers, but they're only stories. And for all their knowledge and technology, the Mordiff were never as strong and wise as the Ring Empire. So the overlord had no choice, he had to order his people out of the wormhole as soon as the effect of the doomsday weapons had faded away, and while the sun still had some warmth. In that respect, he was a good leader, doing the best he could. He ordered that the new cities were to be built under protective domes. Their technology, he said, was enough to turn back the tide of night. Which, in truth, it was. They could still live on their planet, protected from the cold under skies of crystal. Fusion power would provide them with all the light and heat they could ever want. But these enclaves were harder to build, and took even more resources to maintain. It was a difficult life, and by now, the Mordiff had evolved for war and conquest. They knew nothing else. After so many generations devoted to endless conflict the outcome was inevitable. Once their population began to expand again, the ordeals and depravation hit them harder than ever before. The domed cities fought each other. It was insane, because they were so much more fragile than the open cities of old. And this time there was nowhere to flee if anyone let off the doomsday weapons. The only thing in their future now was cold and darkness.
"According to the Ring Empire archaeologists, the last of the Mordiff died out less than fifteen hundred years after they emerged from the terminus for the final time. The Ring Empire explored the Ulodan Nebula twenty-five million years later and found a few fractured remains amid the ice that shrouded the whole world, all that was left of a species that had covered their planet with cities and marvels."
The children sighed and shivered. Many of them glanced out at the sky for reassurance that their own sun was still there, as bright and warm as ever. The clouds were clearing above Memu Bay now, shredded by the offshore wind into gravid streamers. Broad white-gold sunbeams prized then-way through the ragged gaps to chase over the land. Denise smiled with them in reassurance at the water that glistened so refreshingly on the plants in the garden and the trees outside.
"That was scary," Jedzella announced. "Why did they all have to die?"
"Because of their circumstances. The nebula meant they could only ever look inward. We're luckier than that. We know the stars exist. It should help us develop a more enlightened attitude toward the way we live and behave." Denise tried hard to keep the sarcasm out of her voice.
One of the girls waved urgently. "What's enlightened?"
"It means being nice and sensible, instead of being stupid and violent." She paused and smiled round. "Now, who wants to go out on the swings?" It was still too wet, and she'd get a telling off from Mrs. Potchansky for letting them get their clothes damp. But they were at their happiest when they were gallivanting around outside: she couldn't bear to take a moment of that away from them.
They pelted out from under the roof, cheering and racing each other to the swings. Denise followed at a slower pace. Running the Mordiff tale through her mind always conjured up a melancholic mood. The story of their tragedy had too many resonances with humanity. There but for the grace of God... Not that she believed in gods, human or alien.
Her Prime alerted her to a priority spacecom alert diving through the datapool. Two fusion plasma plumes had been detected eight million kilometers out from Thallspring. Spacecom was scanning for more. Data traffic rates between then-offices and tracking satellites doubled inside fifteen seconds, then doubled again, increasing almost exponentially.
Denise's hand flew to her mouth as she looked round at the children. Their carefree shrieks, giggles and smiles pounded into her consciousness, and she was suddenly fearful for them. She tilted her head back, searching the section of sky that spacecom's coordinates indicated. In relation to herself, it was a nine-degree window just above the western horizon. There were too many clouds in the way to permit any sighting of the tiny blue-white sparks she knew were there. But their presence acted like an eclipse on her heart, making her world colder and darker. It had begun.
* * *
Captain Marquis Krojen sat back in what he liked to think of
as the command chair on the Koribu's bridge. In practice, it was just another black office chair equipped with freefall restraint straps and bolted to the decking behind a computer station. There were eleven other identical stations in the square compartment, arranged in two rows of six, facing each other. Nine of them were currently occupied in readiness for exodus.
When he was a junior officer on his first couple of starflights, he'd managed to get a place in one of the observation blisters in the forward drive section for exodus, his captain of the time agreeing he wasn't essential for the operation. He'd waited spellbound with his fellow young officers as the moment approached, putting up with cramped limbs and stuffy air just for the chance to witness the transition. In the end it was as uneventful as most events aboard a starship. The wormhole wall, a blankness that wasn't quite black, slowly faded away, allowing the stars to shine through, almost like a lusterless twilight creeping up on a misty evening.
That had been thirty years ago. He hadn't bothered with visual acquisition since, preferring the more precise story of the display screen graphics and his DNI grid. Five of his own junior officers were currently crammed into the observation blister, a reward for reasonable performance of duties during the flight. They'd learn.
"Stand by for exodus," Colin Jeffries, his executive officer, announced. "Ten seconds."
There were so many displays counting down that the verbal warning was completely unnecessary. Tradition, though, like so many things on board, orchestrated the crew's behavior, helping to define the chain of command.
His DNI showed him the ship's AS powering down the energy inverter. The plasma temperature in the tokamaks began to cool as the magnetic pinch was reduced. Power levels fell toward break-even, producing just enough electricity to keep the ancillary support systems up and running.
All around the Koribu, the drab monotony of the worm-hole faded away to be replaced by normal space. Holographic panes on top of the bridge computer stations turned black, showing the steady gleam of stars relayed from external cameras. The AS activated various sensors, aligning them on Thallspring. Several of the bridge officers cheered as the bright blue-and-white orb materialized on their panes.