“Not so,” I said cheerfully.
Mangan cackled, then he turned his back to me, and then he At this moment, I am bound to relate, I foolishly lost my temper.
Jak
Albinia closed her eyes. I watched as she sank into a trance.
Her worry lines faded, her angry look disappeared. She was, once more, radiant.
I could see on my phantom control display the images she beheld via Explorer’s riftscope. Glimpses of planets and suns and black wildernesses of space and U shaped galaxies and oval galaxies and spilled-milk galaxies and fast-whirling galaxies and exploding stars.
“Three civilisations in subsector 412, planet O431,” said Albinia, through her trance.
We saw, on our display screens: stars, then planets, then seas, then fields, and plains, and savannahs, forests, mountains, cities, walkways, flying vehicles, temples, houses, shops and, finally, images of three kinds of sentients.
Furred bipeds with three arms, living in the cities.
Scaled polypods with tusks, dwelling in the savannahs.
And feathered aerials nesting in clouds made of excreted webbing, above the forests.
“Three Grade 2 civilisations on one planet?” I asked.
“It looks that way.” Albinia murmured.
“Any of them aggressive?”
“Perhaps. Perhaps not. Can’t tell.”
“Any artefacts? Jewellery? Artworks?”
“Too soon to say.”
“Do they have shifting-sands technology?”
“Yes. Maybe. No. I don’t know.”
Albinia’s head twitched. She was seeing the not-real as well as the real; visualising shards of possibilities that existed on the other side of the rift, of worlds and civilisations that might in fact not exist.
“Set the coordinates,” I said.
“We have an incoming message,” said Phylas.
“Take the message, then get ready for rift flight,” I said.
A face appeared on the screen; I recognised it as a FanTang.
(This memory comes to me now laden with such terrible ironical agony; for those loathsome murderous creatures did perhaps deserve to die. But not us; we did not deserve it! Not all of us.)
“We wish you wealth and health, and success in all your dealings,” I said formally to the FanTang.
“You betrayed us!” roared the FanTang, with the hysterical rage so typical of his species.
“We may,” I admitted, “have out-negotiated you. It’s a cultural thing: we see no harm in it, you see.”
“You brought death and destruction to our planet!” roared the FanTang.
I hesitated.
And then continued to hesitate.
“What are you talking about?” I eventually asked, baffled.
“Earthquakes have ravaged our land! Fires from the sky have-”
The transmission was interrupted.
I blinked, totally at a loss. “What was that about?”
“I have no idea,” said Morval.
“A hoax?” suggested Phylas.
“A trap?” suggested Galamea.
“No,” said Albinia. Her eyes opened. “Explorer has accessed other such messages, sent to other Olaran vessels. We have also made contact with the Fleet. There is a story is emerging about what has befallen the planet of the FanTang.”
“And what is that?” I asked, impatiently.
“Apocalypse.”
The sun of the FanTangs had exploded. Or rather, to be more precise, it had flared to an exceptional degree; coronal mass was billowing forth, and a vast proton swarm had radiated into the stellar system, where it was wreaking terrible havoc on the various planets and asteroids and space towns where the FanTang dwelt. Our sensors told us that there were now no traces of organic life in the entire stellar system.
And the home world of the FanTang was a fireball. As we flew our cameras closer, we could see that the forests were ablaze. Volcanoes were spewing their hot lava into the atmosphere. Even the seas burned. The seas?
“How can that be?” I asked. “The oceans on fire?”
I and the rest of the ship’s officers were watching camera images transmitted from Explorer via Albinia’s mind; images that were being filmed by robot scouts that flew through the cloud and into the depths of the inferno.
“It’s possible,” said Phylas, “but only if-”
“Do we have the technology to do such a thing?” I snapped.
“No,” Phylas conceded.
The robot scouts flew down closer. We could see lava spurting out of cracks in the planet’s crust. The cities were wrecked, and entire mountain ranges had been demolished after devastating crust-plate shifts ripped the planet apart. FanTang military aeroplanes had fallen from the sky like snowflakes ablaze, and the remnants of futile missiles were scattered on fields and plains wherever we looked. Mushroom clouds from nuclear explosions billowed and their clouds merged to form an ugly grey shell in the sky.
And the streets of the cities and smaller settlements were covered in corpses, and already-whitening skeletons. All the dead were FanTang or Jaimal, and many wore heavy body armour or exo-skeletons.
The people of this planet were warriors and they had marched into battle against some implacable foe. Billions if not trillions had died; yet our cameras did not see the corpse of a single enemy combatant.
It was carnage; token of a defeat so absolute it beggared belief.
“That’s a Trader craft,” said Morval, and the scout ship flew lower and we saw the wreckage of a Trader vessel on the ground, its complex bottle-curves shattered by some hammer blow. There were corpses lying near the wreckage. They were clearly Olaran.
“Retrieve the bodies,” I said, and the scout ship levitated the corpses and swallowed them in its hull.
“Who did this?” asked Galamea.
The image on the screen began to flicker.
“What’s wrong?” I said.
Albinia screamed, and screamed, and her eyes snapped out of trance, cutting her link with the metal minds.
“The planet,” she murmured.
Phylas changed the sky-eye image, and now we saw hovering in mid-air a more distant view of the blackened smoking globe of the planet of the FanTang.
“The planet’s going to blow,” said Phylas, taking the readings.
Pillars of flame started to burst upwards from the planet’s surface. Black clouds gathered and dispersed, then re-gathered. The blue of the seas and the red of the fields slowly vanished; until nothing could be seen except a black haze of smoke that mingled with the mushroom clouds.
“The sun!” screamed Phylas, and an image of the sun appeared before us.
The sun was changing colour, and its corona was flaring even more wildly, expelling gobbets of plasma like the vomit of a dying Olaran. I looked at my instruments and saw that we were being drenched in solar radiation.
“Supernova?” I said.
“I believe so,” said Phylas.
Now, the process seems wearily familiar; then, it was a horror like nothing we had ever seen.
After hours of devastating volcanic activity and earthquakes that ripped the land to shreds, the planet itself shattered -it broke into a million parts, as if struck a terrible blow, and the fragments drifted in space.
And then, in a ghastly slow ballet, the moons too detonated, one by one; like spools of cable unwinding, leaving sad haloes of light behind where once life had dwelled.
And finally, the sun of the FanTang turned supernova; an eruption of light like a universe birthing; a vision of nature’s fury such as I had never seen before.
Ten years previously I had travelled to this stellar system and raged at the ignorance and brutal violence of that wretched species, the FanTang. Now they were a memory; their bodies interstellar debris; and I was chilled at the breathtaking malice of such an act of planetary genocide.
“The FanTang,” Albinia announced, “left a dying message; they blame us for their downfall.”
“No one will believe that,” said Albinia.
“Some may,” conceded Morval.
“They accused us of betraying them; ambushing them; and destroying their planet,” said Albinia.