“It worked,” he proclaimed.
“Of course,” the SI replied equitably.
“Can you take out the rest?” Alan asked.
“Let’s find out.”
As far as such a thing were possible, MorningLightMountain experienced a brief feeling of trepidation as it arranged its thoughts prior to launching the expansion. The alien Commonwealth was a considerable unknown, despite the Bose memories. It remembered living there, remembered what the society was like, but had only vague notions of its true industrial and military capabilities. That gave cause for concern.
There were several other stars close to its home system that had planets capable of supporting Prime life. It had already opened wormholes to eight of them, sending hundreds of millions of motiles through to begin settlements. Life-sustaining planets were much simpler to spread across than the cold, airless moons and dead asteroids of its home system. They didn’t require machines to cocoon the new settlements in a protective friendly environment. They were cheaper to establish. Already immotile groupings were amalgamating on the new planets, integrating with MorningLightMountain’s main thought routines. In a heady taste of the future, it had now spread out to exist across hundreds of light-years.
At one time that might have been sufficient. Even the first great enemy, the unknown, would have trouble constructing barriers around so many stars. But there was more than one enemy in the galaxy. It could see what would happen when its expansion ran into the obstacle of the humans and their territory. Two incompatible life-forms competing for the same planets and stars.
MorningLightMountain knew they could not coexist in a peaceful fashion. In fact, it didn’t see how ultimately it could allow any other alien to share this galaxy, there were after all only a finite number of stars. Now that it knew how, it could join every one via wormholes, it could become omnipresent. That way it could guarantee its immortality. No matter how many stars died or turned nova, it would still be alive. And the first obstacle to that was the Commonwealth, full of dangerous independent humans and their superb advanced machinery.
MorningLightMountain opened eleven hundred four wormholes, aiming at the stellar coordinates that had come from the Bose memories. Some emerged very close to their targets, others were nearby, several were half a light-year or more distant. Sensors were pushed through, collecting positional data; the information was used to refine its star chart, locking the Commonwealth stars to precise locations. The wormhole exits were realigned around its initial target planets. MorningLightMountain was interested that the Bose memories were right about the human colonization patterns; the species grossly underused the worlds they settled. Their total numbers would barely be sufficient to fill one world, let alone hundreds. Individuality was a terrible weakness.
Bombardment projectiles were sent through, aimed at the smaller habitation zones and the perimeter of larger ones. It found other targets—the human quantum sensors, communications webs, satellites, power grids—and guided its projectiles at them. MorningLightMountain’s intention was to eliminate the humans themselves while keeping their industrial centers relatively intact. Those that survived, it wanted to drive out of their buildings and disperse ineffectually across the unused land.
Force fields came on over the cities. MorningLightMountain hadn’t expected that; the Bose memories had no knowledge of such things. It couldn’t open its wormholes inside them; over the immense distance it was operating positioning them within two thousand kilometers of a planet was as close as it could get. For precise exits, it needed gateways to anchor the wormholes.
Small flying machines,aerobots, rose up around the cities, shooting projectiles. MorningLightMountain had no choice, it increased the number of projectiles it was sending through, guiding them to create the maximum damage.
When it opened the wormholes above the major world Wessex, it encountered even stronger resistance. It could see down onto the megacity that was two-thirds industrial facilities. The scale surpassed most of its own planet-based settlements, while the efficiency of the human systems with their electronic controllers went beyond anything it had achieved.
A human starship flew above Anshun, knocking out dozens of bombardment projectiles. MorningLightMountain’s response was standard, it sent through more projectiles. When the human starship began to fall in and out of its own wormhole MorningLightMountain diverted more immotile groupings to concentrate on its own wormhole generator mechanisms, shifting the energy composition to act as an inhibitor. Tens of thousands of additional immotiles focused on the problem, taking its control ability to the absolute limit. With the starship restricted to real space, it fired an overwhelming salvo of projectiles.
Something happened to one of its wormholes above Wessex. Energy surged along the disintegrating fabric of the distortion, overloading the generator mechanism that was built on one of the four giant asteroids that orbited the interstellar wormhole at the staging post. The resulting explosion knocked out the tower storing the bombardment projectiles, and even reached out to the squadron of ships waiting above it.
MorningLightMountain urgently searched through its memory of the event. As it did, another two wormholes collapsed, their energy flashbacks wrecking the generators. MorningLightMountain realized they were actually being overloaded by an external force. It switched more immotile group clusters to the problem, increasing the power to the remaining generators to counter a further five attempts at destabilization.
The struggle evolved into a contest of power capacity. MorningLightMountain was powering its wormholes from magflux extractor disks dropped into the staging post star’s corona, transferring the induced power to the asteroids via a small wormhole. Even with those providing maximum output, there was a limit to how much the wormhole generators themselves could handle. And the humans were changing their methods of attack with a speed it could not match, modifying interference patterns and resonance amplification in nanoseconds. They, too, seemed to have unlimited power to draw on.
A further twenty-seven wormhole generators either exploded or twisted into molten ruin. MorningLightMountain ended its attempted capture of Wessex, diverting the remaining wormholes to planets where there was no interference. On most of them the results of the bombardment projectiles were disappointing. But the human defenses were slowly being beaten back by the sheer quantity of projectiles it was firing through. It halted the projectiles, and flew the first ships through into the Commonwealth.
Altogether, it had gathered a fleet of forty-eight thousand for its preliminary expansion stage.
It was getting crowded at the center of Wilson’s tactical display. The ghostly image of Elaine Doi herself had joined him, along with Nigel Sheldon, their spectral presence giving his orders supreme executive authority. To advise on tactics and technology he had the shades of Dimitri Leopoldovich and Tunde Sutton floating in attendance behind him.
Right now he would have welcomed a genuine spook, a psychic who could tell him what was coming next, or at least take a good guess. They were watching the last of the Prime projectiles rushing down over twenty-one besieged planets—he considered that ominous while everyone else was overjoyed. Wessex had successfully banished the alien wormholes, but Olivenza and Balya had dropped out of the unisphere when their station force fields were breached. The CST planetary station on Anshun had switched off their connecting gateways.