“Still green, according to the board,” said Champlain.
“Send someone down there,” I said. “I want an eyeball inspection.”
Heidi had already moved the Quetzalcoatlus so that the remaining singleships were between her and the planet; the ground-based cannon couldn’t get her without going through its own people.
The remaining Nidichar fired at us again, but—
Way to go, Nguyen!
A good, clean blast severed the habitat module from the two engines—a lucky guess about which was which had paid off. The habitat went pinwheeling away into the night, atmosphere puffing out of the connecting struts.
We swung around again, carving into the remaining singleships. Heidi was doing the same; there were only fifteen of them left.
“Incom—” shouted Kalsi, but he didn’t get the whole word out before the disruptor beam from the planet’s surface shook us again. An empty gray square appeared in the holobubble to my right; the cameras along the starboard side of the ship had been destroyed.
“We won’t survive another blast from the planet’s surface,” Champlain said. “It must take them a while to recharge that cannon, or they’d have blown both of us out of the sky by now,” Heidi’s hologram said. “It’s probably a meteor deflector, never intended for battle.”
While we talked, Nguyen took out four more singleships, and the Quetzalcoatlus blasted another five into oblivion.
“If it weren’t for that ground-based cannon…” I said.
Heidi nodded once, decisively. “We all know what we came here to do—and that’s more important than any of us.” The holographic head swiveled; she was talking to her own bridge crew now. “Mr. Rabinovitch, take us down.”
If there was a protest, I never heard it. But I doubt there was. I didn’t know Rabinovitch—but he was a Star Guard, too.
Heidi turned back to me. “This is for Peter Chin,” she said. And then, perhaps more for her own ears than my own, “And for Craig.”
The Quetzalcoatlus dived toward Altair III, its sublight thrusters going full blast. Its force screens had no trouble getting it through the atmosphere, and apparently the ground-based cannon wasn’t yet recharged: her ship crashed right into the facility housing it on the southern continent. We could see the shockwave moving across the planet’s surface, a ridge of compressed air expanding outward from where the Quetzalcoatlus had hit.
Nguyen made short work of the remaining singleships, their explosions a series of pinpoint novas against the night.
And Altair III spun below us, defenseless.
Humanity had just barely survived five hundred years living with the nuclear bomb. It had been used eleven times on Earth and Mars, and over one hundred million had died—but the human race had gone on.
But our special cargo, the Annihilator, was more—much more. It was a planet killer, a destroyer of whole worlds. We’d said when Garo Alexanian invented the technology that we’d never, ever use it.
But, of course, we were going to. We were going to use it right now.
It could have gone either way. Humans certainly weren’t more clever than Altairians; the technology we’d recovered from wrecked ships proved that. But sometimes you get a lucky break.
Our scientists were always working to develop new weapons; there was no reason to think that Altairian scientists weren’t doing the same thing. Atomic nuclei are held together by the strong nuclear force; without it, the positively charged protons would repel each other, preventing atoms from forming. The Annihilator translates the strong nuclear force into electromagnetism for a fraction of a second, causing atoms to instantly fling apart.
It was a brilliant invention from a species that really wasn’t all that good at inventing. With the countless isolated communities that had existed in Earth’s past, you’d expect the same fundamental inventions to have been made repeatedly—but they weren’t. Things we now consider intuitively obvious were invented only once: the water wheel, gears, the magnetic compass, the windmill, the printing press, the camera obscura, and the alphabet itself arose only a single time in all of human history; it was only trade that brought them to the rest of humanity. Even that seemingly most obvious of inventions, the wheel, was created just twice: first, near the Black Sea, nearly six thousand years ago, then again, much later, in Mexico. Out of the hundred billion human beings who have existed since the dawn of time, precisely two came up with the idea of the wheel. All the rest of us simply copied it from them.
So it was probably a fluke that Alexanian conceived of the Annihilator. If it hadn’t occurred to him, it might never have occurred to anyone else in the Trisystems; certainly, it wouldn’t have occurred to anybody any time soon. Five hundred years ago, they used to say that string theory was twenty-first-century science accidentally discovered in the twentieth century; the Annihilator was perhaps thirtieth-century science that we’d been lucky enough to stumble upon in the twenty-fifth.
And that luck could have just as easily befallen an Altairian physicist instead of a human one. In which case, it would be Earth and Tau Ceti IV and Epsilon Indi II that would have been about to feel its effects, instead of Altair III.
We released the Annihilator—a great cylindrical contraption, more than three hundred meters long—from our cargo bay; the Quetzalcoatlus and the Rhamphorhynchus had had Annihilators, too, each costing over a trillion credits. Only one was left.
But one was all it would take.
Of course, we’d have to engage our hyperdrive as soon as the annihilation field connected with Altair III. The explosion would be unbelievably powerful, releasing more joules than anyone could even count—but none of it would be superluminal. We would be able to outrun it, and, by the time the expanding shell reached Earth, sixteen years from now, planetary shielding would be in place.
The kill would go to the Pteranodon; the name history would remember would be mine.
They teach you to hate the enemy—they teach you that from childhood.
But when the enemy is gone, you finally have time to reflect.
And I did a lot of that. We all did.
About three-quarters of Altair III was utterly destroyed by the annihilation field, and the rest of it, a misshapen chunk with its glowing iron core exposed, broke up rapidly.
The war was over.
But we were not at peace.
The sphere was an unusual sort of war memorial. It wasn’t in Washington or Hiroshima or Dachau or Bogata, sites of Earth’s great monuments to the horrors of armed conflict. It wasn’t at Elysium on Mars, or New Vancouver on Epsilon Indi II, or Pax City on Tau Ceti IV. Indeed it had no permanent home, and, once it faded from view, a short time from now, no human would ever see it again. A waste of money? Not at all. We had to do something—people understood that. We had to commemorate, somehow, the race that we’d obliterated and the planet we’d destroyed, the fragment left of it turning into rubble, a spreading arc now, a full asteroid belt later, girdling Altair.
The memorial had been designed by Anwar Kanawatty, one of the greatest artists in the Trisystems: a sphere five meters across, made of transparent diamond. Representations of the continents and islands of the planet that had been Altair III (a world farther out from that star now had that designation) were laser-etched into the diamond surface, making it frostily opaque in those places. But at the gaps between—representing the four large oceans of that planet, and the thousands of lakes—the diamond was absolutely clear, and the rest of the sculpture was visible within. Floating in the center of the sphere were perfect renderings of three proud Altairian faces, one for each gender, a reminder of the race that had existed once but did no more.