Thoth’s purpose, and Lieserl’s, predated even the ancient Empire of the Shiras, but, hastily designated as a temple to Sol, it had always been maintained faithfully by the Empresses’ lieutenants. Now Lieserl’s wormhole was to be used as a weapon of war. But even this remarkable incident, Folyon knew, would in the long run be just another episode in the greater history of Thoth and Lieserl, and Sol itself.
A young woman touched his arm. His thoughts, as so often, had drifted away from the here and now. Sunchild Mura said, ‘The time is close, sun-brother.’
‘All goes well on the bridge?’ He felt anxious.
Mura was empathetic for a girl of her age and she knew his moods. ‘Everything is fine. If you were there you would only distract them all, forgive me for saying so, sun-brother.’
He sighed. ‘And so we go to war.’
‘They tell me you can see it from here. The fleet.’ She scanned around the sky – the solar light passed to human eyes by the observation deck blister was heavily filtered for safety – and pointed to a cluster of star-like points, far away above the sunscape. ‘There they are.’
The lights grew in size and spread apart a little; Folyon saw now that they were splinters, like matchsticks, each with blazing fire at one end. ‘An enemy fleet from Alpha Centauri, come all the way to the sun. How remarkable.’
Mura counted. ‘Five, six, seven, eight – all accounted for. And their GUTdrives are firing.’ This was celestial mechanics, Folyon knew; if you sought to enter the Solar System, perihelion was energetically the most advantageous place to dump excess velocity. ‘They will come near us; the projections of their trajectories are good,’ Mura said, sounding tense. ‘And they will come on us quickly. The moment of closest approach will be brief. But our response systems are automated – the reopening of the wormhole won’t rely on human responses.’ She hesitated. ‘Did you tell Lieserl what is happening today?’
‘I thought it was my duty,’ he murmured. ‘She will remember all this, after all, long after the rest of us are dust. I wonder if they are praying.’
‘Who?’ Mura asked.
‘The crew of those ships. For they worship Sol too, do they not? And now we are about to use Sol itself to kill them.’ He lifted his face, and his old skin felt fragile in the sun’s processed light. ‘Do we have the right to do this? Does even Shira?’
She grabbed his arm. ‘Too late now—’
The ships exploded out of the distance.
At closest approach solar gases hosed from the drifting wormhole Interface, turning it into a second, miniature sun. Solar fire swept over the invaders.
Mura whooped and punched the air. Folyon was shocked and troubled.
S-Day plus 4. The Oort cloud, outer Solar System.
Densel Bel wished he could see the sun with his naked eye. After all, he was among the comets now, within the sun’s domain.
He stood in the dark, peering up at the zenith, the way the ship was flying; he tried to imagine he was rising towards the sun in some spindly, superfast elevator. A light-week out from Sol, with the ship travelling at less than two per cent below light-speed, the view from the lightdome of Fist Two was extraordinary. All was darkness around the rim of the hemispherical lifedome. The only starlight came from a circular patch of light directly over his head, crowded with brilliant stars, all of them apparently as bright as Venus or Sirius seen from Earth. He knew the science well enough; the starfield he saw was an artefact of the ship’s huge velocity, which funnelled all the light from across the sky into a cone that poured down over his head.
And meanwhile the stars he was able to see were not the few thousand visible in solar space to the unaided human eye. His extraordinary speed had imposed a Doppler effect; the stars behind had been redshifted to darkness, while the ‘visible’ stars ahead, had similarly been blueshifted to obscurity. But conversely red stars, giants and dwarfs pregnant with infra-red, now glowed brightly, crowding the sky: a hundred thousand of them, it was thought, crammed into that tight disc. Sol itself was somewhere in there, of course, at the dead centre of his visual field, and he knew that the navigators on the bridge had elaborate routines to disentangle the relativistic effects. But a primitive part of him longed just to see the sunlight again, with his own unaided eyes, for the first time in so many decades—
A shower of what looked like snow sparkled over the lifedome, gone in an instant. He flinched, half-expecting the blister to crack and crumple. He called, ‘What was that?’
A Virtual of Flood appeared in the air before him, the avatar used by the ship’s AI to communicate with the crew. ‘We lost Fist One,’ Flood said bluntly.
‘How?’
‘A dust grain got it. The earthworms. They blew up an ice asteroid in our path, creating a screen of dust hundreds of kilometres wide. We have defences, of course, but not against motes that size, and at such densities. At our velocity even a sand grain will hit with the kinetic energy of a—’
‘There shouldn’t be any asteroids here. We’re out of the plane of the ecliptic.’
‘Evidently the earthworms have prepared defences.’
‘So how come we survived?’
‘The destruction of One blew a hole in the debris cloud. We sailed through.’
Densel considered. ‘Our ships follow each other in line. So even if the lead ship is taken out by further screens, it might clear a path for the rest.’
‘That’s right. And we will still achieve our objective if only three, two, even just one of the Fists gets through.’ Flood hesitated, and the image crumbled slightly, a sign of additional processing power being applied. ‘There is other news. The Third Wave ships came under fire as they rounded the sun. Two were lost.’
‘That was smart by the earthworms.’ Densel wondered if he ought to be exulting at this victory, for Earth, after all, was his home planet. But his heart was on Footprint, with the families he would never see again. He didn’t want anybody to die, he realised.
Flood said, ‘Smart, yes. But six ships survive, of eight. Meanwhile the earthworms are regrouping. Half of their ships, twelve of them, are heading for Jupiter. To win, we have to eliminate the Imperial Navy. So we have to follow. Jupiter is where the decisive encounter will come, for the Third Wave.’
‘And the other earthworm ships?’
‘Converging on the course of the Fists. Clearly they understand the danger you represent.’
Densel nodded. ‘But now, in Two, I’m in the van. The next in line for the duck shoot.’
Again that hesitation, that fragility. ‘The crews are conferring. That would not be optimal.’
‘Not optimal?’
‘For your ship to lead. The line is to be reconfigured. Fist Two will continue astern of the remaining ships, not in the lead, protected by the others.’
‘You want to give Two the best chance. Why?’
‘Because Two has you aboard.’ The avatar grinned, an imperfectly imaged, eerie sight. ‘I told you. You are useful, Densel Bel.’ Theatrically he consulted a wristwatch. ‘Subjectively you are little more than a day away from Sol. Remember, you are moving so quickly that time is stretched, from your perspective. Seven more days left for Earth. Thirty-three hours, that’s all it will be for you. Then it will be done. Try to get some sleep.’ The image crumbled to pixels and disappeared.