It was worse than anything he could have anticipated.
Wolves had reached Epsilon Eridani, the Yellowstone system. The evidence from departing ships suggested that their depredations had begun only recently. Three light-months from Yellowstone, expanding outwards in all directions, was a ragged shell of lighthuggers: the leading edge of an evacuation wave. He saw them in the display when the scale was adjusted to include the entire volume of surrounding space to a light-year out from Epsilon Eridani. The ships each marked with its own colourfully annotated symbol—ship ID and vector—looked like startled fish racing in radial lines away from some central threat. Some had pulled slightly ahead of the rest, some were lagging, but the one-gee acceleration ceiling of their drives guaranteed that the shell was only now beginning to lose its symmetry.
On either side of the wave there were hardly any ships. Those few vessels further out must have left Yellowstone before the wolves arrived. They were on routine trade routes. Some of them were travelling so fast that it would be years before news of the crisis caught up with them. Further in, there were a handful of ships—the last to leave, or perhaps they had been unable to maintain their usual acceleration rate for some reason. Closer to Epsilon Eridani, within a light-week of the system, there was no outbound traffic at all. If there were any starships left down in the still-hot ruins, they were not going anywhere in a hurry. There was no indication of in-system traffic, and nor were there any signals being received from the system’s colonies or navigation beacons. Those few ships that had been on approach patterns when the crisis erupted were now engaged in wide, lazy turnarounds. They had heard the warnings and seen the evacuees streaming out in the other direction; now they were trying to head back into interstellar space.
It had taken the wolves a year to sterilise every world around Delta Pavonis. Here, Scorpio doubted that more than half a year had passed since the onset of the cull.
This, however, was a different kind of cull from that which had obliterated Resurgam and its fellow worlds. Around Delta Pavonis, an earlier cull—a million years previously—had already failed, so the Inhibitor elements tasked with the current clean-up operation had gone to extraordinary lengths to make sure the job was done properly this time. They had ripped worlds apart, mining them for raw materials to be assembled into an engine that murdered stars. They had turned it on Delta Pavonis, stabbing deep to the star’s heart and unleashing an arterial gush of core material at fusion temperatures and pressures. They had sprayed this hellfire across the face of Resurgam, incinerating every organism unfortunate enough not to be shielded beneath hundreds of kilometres of crust. If life was ever to arise again on Resurgam, it would have to start almost from scratch. Faced with the unambiguous evidence of two prior extinctions, even other starfaring cultures would want to give the place a wide berth.
But that was not the Inhibitors’ usual modus operandi. Felka had revealed to Clavain that the wolves were not programmed simply to wipe intelligent life out of existence. They were more cunning and purposeful than that, and their task was ultimately more difficult than wholesale extermination. They were designed to hold back the eruption of starfaring life, to keep the galaxy in a state of bucolic pastoralism for the next three billion years. Life, confined to individual worlds, would be shepherded through an unavoidable cosmic crisis in what the wolves viewed as only the moderately distant future. Then, and only then, could it be allowed to teem unchecked. But the preservation of life on the planetary scale was just as much a part of the wolves’ plan as its desire to control expansion on the interstellar scale. To this end, the sterilisation of fertile systems like Delta Pavonis was a tool of last resort. It was a marker of local incompetence. Wolf packs vied for prestige, competing with each other to demonstrate their subtle control over emergent life. Having to destroy first worlds and then a star was a sign of slippage, an unforgivable lapse in attention. It was the sort of thing that might result in a group of wolves being ostracised, denied the latest tips in extinction management.
Around Epsilon Eridani, events were taking place on a more subtle, surgical scale. The attacking efforts were concentrated around the infrastructure of human presence rather than on the worlds themselves. There was no need to sterilise Yellowstone: the planet had never been truly inhabitable in the first place, and the only native life was microscopic. The human colonies on its surface were tenuous, domed affairs. They drew minerals and warmth from the planet, but this was only an expediency: had those resources not existed, the colonies could have been as totally self-sufficient as space habitats. It was enough for the wolves to target them and leave the rest of Yellowstone intact. Where Ferrisville had been, and Loreanville and Chasm City, all that now remained were glaring, molten craters of radioactivity. They winked through the thick yellow smog of the planet’s atmosphere. No one could have survived. No thing could have survived.
It was the same around the planet. Before the Melding Plague, the Glitter Band had been the local name for the twinkling swarm of orbital habitats encircling the planet. Ten thousand jewelled city-states had swung around Yellowstone, nose-to-nose, many with populations in the millions. The Melding Plague had taken the shine off that glory, but Scorpio had only ever known the Glitter Band in its post-plague days, when they renamed it the Rust Belt. Many of the habitats had been airless shells by then, but there were still hundreds more that had managed to hold on to their ecologies, each a festering little microkingdom with its own laws and uniquely tasty opportunities for criminal adventuring. Scorpio hadn’t been greedy. The Rust Belt had been more than sufficient for his needs, especially when he had access to Chasm City as well. But now there was no Rust Belt. A glowing ring system now hung around Yellowstone, a bracelet of cherry-red ruins. There was nothing left larger than a boulder. Every single human artefact had been pulverised. It was horrifying and beautiful.
Not just the Rust Belt, either, but all the way out. The Inhibitor machines had smashed and sterilised all the other human habitats in near-Yellowstone space. Scorpio identified their ruins from their orbits. No Haven, now. No Idlewild. Even Marco’s Eye, the planet’s moon, had been pruned. There was no sign that any structure larger than an igloo had ever existed on its surface. No cities, no spaceports, just a local enhancement in radioactivity and a few interesting trace elements to puzzle over.
Elsewhere in the system, the same story: nothing remained. No habitats. No surface encampments. No ships. No transmitters.
Scorpio wept.
“How many got out?” he said, when he could face reality again. “Count the ships, tell me how many survivors they could have carried.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Vasko said.
“What the fuck do you mean, it doesn’t matter! It matters to me. That’s why I’m asking you the fucking question.”
Khouri frowned at him. “Scorpio… she’s only six.”
He looked at Aura. “I’m sorry.”
“You don’t understand,” Vasko said softly. He nodded at the holographic sphere. “It’s not real-time, Scorp.”
“What?”
“It’s a snapshot. It’s the way things were two months ago.” Vasko looked at him with his too-adult eyes. “Things got worse, Scorp. Let me show you what I’m talking about, and then you’ll understand why it doesn’t make much difference how many got out.”
Vasko ran the holographic display forwards in time. Time-code numerals, logged to worldtime, tumbled in one corner. Scorpio saw the date and felt a lurch of disorientation: 04/07/2698. The numerals were meaningless, too far removed from his own days in Chasm City to have any emotional impact. I wasn’t made for these times, he thought. He had been yanked from the ordinary flow of time and now he was adrift, unmoored from history. He realised, with a shudder of comprehension, that it was precisely this sense of dislocation that shaped the psychologies of Ultras. How much worse must it have been for Clavain?