“I’m trying,” Mark whimpered. “I’M TRYING!” His vision blurred completely as tears swelled across his eyes. He blinked them away. The last few luminous green lines were running across his virtual vision. A patch he’d written to monitor feedback anticycle safety directives in Ulon Valley auto-pickers was slipped in. He could smell the moist air, the sugar scent of the vines as he told the program to run.
Something turned from red to green.
“It’s working!” Thame screamed. “Power initiation sequence enabled. Mark, you fucking did it.”
In front of Mark’s visor, red lights on the power feed casing were turning to green. A judder of relief ran down his body. His e-butler routed copies of the program into every regulator power feed on the frigate.
“Fantastic job.” Dutton-Smith patted Mark on his shoulder. “Let’s go.”
Mark didn’t move. Couldn’t. His muscles had packed up. He was curling into fetal position.
“Okay, Mark,” Dutton-Smith said kindly. He tugged his boss out of the tiny crawl space. They only just got clear as a heavy manipulator arm slid the hull section into place. Eight identical sections were being fixed by the assembly bay RI over the frigate’s other flux regulators.
Dutton-Smith clung to the gridwork as it slowly retracted from the Charybdis, holding Mark’s inert form away from the umbilical bridges as they telescoped back. The frigate slid past them in a smooth, aquatic motion out into open space. There was no exhaust, no crude rockets roaring flame from bell-shaped nozzles; the Charybdis moved by direct gravospacial manipulation. Its perfectly black bulk blotted out a few dim stars. Then it vanished.
The response of the human navy class to the start of the second incursion matched MorningLightMountain’s predictions. Their missiles and beam weapons were more than adequate to protect the planets in the star systems had it opened its wormholes in close orbit again. Instead, it sent its fleets of ships into the star systems a long way clear of the human-colonized worlds. They launched their superluminal missiles at once, but the flight time enabled MorningLightMountain to send hundreds of ships through before there was any danger of interception. When the missiles did get close, it switched the wormhole locations and sent more ships through.
With the fleet dispersal proceeding as planned, MorningLightMountain began stage two.
Wormholes opened as close as possible to the stars of each new incursion system. Strong beams of light shone back through, brightening the asteroids and equipment that orbited the interstellar wormhole at the staging post. Ships were dispatched through to the dangerous environment, forming a protective perimeter. As predicted, the humans had not thought to station any defenses around their stars.
MorningLightMountain began firing its corona-rupture machine at the forty-eight new stars. The covering ships began their interference strategy.
Only at one star, Hanko, did the humans dispatch a starship to investigate. MorningLightMountain could do nothing more now but watch and wait. The corona-rupture machines were the most heavily automated apparatus it had ever built. It would never be able to place an immotile cluster in one of the small vessels, so it had to rely on electronics, which was a point of concern.
Several rival immotiles had developed their own versions of the corona-rupture technique during the centuries before the barrier imprisoned them. None could ever test it; to do so would be to kill all Prime life on the homeworld. It had remained a theory for over a thousand years, until the imprisonment ended.
When it wiped out the other immotile groups, MorningLightMountain was surprised that several of them had actually built and maintained corona-rupture machines. Investigation of their dwindling thoughts showed they were concerned about its own dominance, and believed the machines to be the last deterrent. With wormholes open to other star systems, MorningLightMountain had begun a comprehensive research project, firing the different kinds of corona-rupture machines at its disposal, and observing the results, using them to refine the design. It was gratifying to discover its own design was among the best.
Now it watched as the ruptures began, evolving into solar flares that jetted out vast clouds of particle radiation that would soon envelop the Commonwealth worlds. All the non-Prime life dwelling on the planets would sicken and die. It was the simplest, most effective solution to the problems it was facing. MorningLightMountain had suffered unexpected setbacks as it began to grow its crops on the new twenty-three worlds. Often it would see the seeds germinate, only for the young shoots to suffer some unknown malaise and wither away. The malady was different on every planet, and often varied from continent to continent.
Strangely, it was data that it mined from human sources that gave it the reason. Soil bacteria was different everywhere: non-Prime. Something it hadn’t realized, but it was obvious with hindsight. In addition, there were a myriad of spores and viruses, micro-organisms, and insects that would consume or clash with Prime-life plants. Humans countered this problem with genetically modified terrestrial crops that could grow on their newly acquired worlds. They twisted their food symbiosis plants into nonterrestrial versions; crops looked the same but their cellular biochemical functions were subtly different. Nothing humans did surprised MorningLightMountain anymore; but it was unable to understand how they could betray their biological heritage so casually. Did the integrity of their evolution mean nothing to them? Apparently not.
The human starship at Hanko had jumped away from the growing flare, but now it returned, emerging so close to the star that MorningLightMountain had trouble tracking it. A sensor on one of its covering ships detected a pulse of electromagnetic energy that might have been the starship firing something with a fusion drive. Then the ship jumped clear again. MorningLightMountain waited to see what would happen. It could not envisage a weapon capable of destroying a corona-rupture machine.
After the flare radiation had scoured each of the new forty-eight planets clean of its antagonistic alien life, MorningLightMountain would introduce Prime life onto all of them. It would be the true beginning of Primeforming the galaxy. With their food dead and rotting, the humans would be forced to abandon their worlds, leaving their valuable industrial equipment behind them. Should they choose to stay and fight for possession of their dead planets, the fleets were ready to overwhelm their defenses without any risk to itself. This was an economic method of incursion. MorningLightMountain had expended an inordinate amount of resources to rebuild and salvage from the wreckage of conflict on the new twenty-three, as well as countering all the guerrilla sabotage. Human equipment and technology were useful, but it was paying too high a price for acquiring it. And this second incursion included the Big15 world, Wessex, with its expansive industrial facilities. This time, MorningLightMountain would not be beaten back.
The violence of the explosion was extraordinary. MorningLightMountain thought the sensors on its ships were simultaneously malfunctioning. The surface of Hanko’s sun heaved. A titanic crater bulged downward into the photosphere, overwhelming the still-rising flare. From the center, a gigantic sphere of plasma leaped upward, as if the star were giving birth to an infant of its own kind. Hard radiation from the middle of the explosion sliced clean through the force fields on every ship MorningLightMountain had sent through to provide cover, vaporizing them instantly.
For a moment MorningLightMountain had no way of knowing what was happening to Hanko’s star. When it reopened the wormhole five million kilometers away and cautiously extended sensors through, it saw the photosphere crater wall collapsing, sending a circular wave racing out across the star’s surface. The plasma sphere had separated from the corona, racing into space at near-relativistic speed and expanding fast. MorningLightMountain could no longer detect the flare amid the conflagration raging within the corona. Nor was their any indication of the quantum effect that its machine produced.