Alik’s taut face crumpled up in confusion. ‘You mean Odd Quint is hiding from the onemind?’
Jessika shrugged. ‘When you’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’
‘So what the fuck is it doing?’
Morgan
Olyix Sensor Station
The battle had lasted three days. It wasn’t one giant fight between the two opposing sides; essentially it was over within the first two seconds when the armada’s generators captured the wormhole that led back to the Olyix enclave. After that, it was basically a mopping-up operation. There were dozens of Resolution ships guarding the seven concentric rings of the Olyix habitat. They were no match for the superior numbers and weapons of the history faction, but surrender was clearly not part of the Olyix genetic code. Every one of them fought to the end.
Some Resolution ships tried to escape, presumably to try to reach and warn other Olyix outposts. They started accelerating outsystem hard within minutes of the armada emerging through their expansion portals. They had to be chased down, which took days. Ainsley took the lead on catching two of them.
The station’s defensive formation of Resolution ships was eventually wiped out, leaving the seven rings exposed. Troop carriers from the Morgan flew in, escorted by armada battleships. The human squads even got into the rings, fighting their way through the honeycomb of chambers inside. They were backing up teams of corpus mobility weapons, which the squads had nicknamed ‘marines’. Working together, they’d managed to corner and subdue individual quint bodies. None of the raids lasted long. The Olyix had fought back in a frenzy, their huntspheres demolishing whole sections of the rings’ interior in their desperation to resist.
It ended badly for the Olyix, with the corpus armada attack cruisers using antimatter blasts and graviton pulses to smash up the station rings and vaporize the larger surviving chunks. The rapidly expanding debris cloud absorbed the vapour plumes that used to be Resolution ships. With the station eliminated, attack cruisers swooped on the giant radio telescopes. Once they had disintegrated, the armada’s attention turned to the giant hoop spinning around the star’s equator. A flotilla of fifty battle cruisers powered into a three-million-kilometre orbit above the extraordinary artefact. The corpus humans were interested in analysing its composition and structure; their probes determined the outer structure had a unified quantum signature.
‘You mean the shell is one atom?’ Yirella asked.
‘That interpretation is too crude,’ Immanueel said. ‘It is an expansion of classic duality, which in effect makes it a singular wave while simultaneously unifying multiple particles. Both states coexist within the modified quantum field. A clever solution to the stress that the loop is subject to – not only the extreme radiation and thermal loading from its proximity to the sun, but also for something that large retaining its physical integrity while it spins. Ordinary matter would simply break apart.’
She watched dispassionately as Ainsley arrived in orbit two million kilometres above the star. His white fuselage had turned silver, making it look as if a fragment of the star itself had broken free to hang above the rowdy corona. The corpus exploratory flotilla backed off fast, high-gee acceleration propelling them into the safety of the expansion portals. They emerged within the umbra of the star’s single rocky world, where the majority of the armada was flocking around the safety of its Lagrange Two point.
Ainsley fired a lone missile armed with a quantum-variant warhead. It detonated barely a thousand kilometres above the loop’s upper surface. The superhot gases of the chromosphere warped abruptly, forming a twister vortex around the missile as they underwent dissolution. Then the effect struck the loop.
The entire edifice shattered at the speed of light, the annihilation effect racing in two waves around the circumference in opposing directions. A trillion fragments flew outwards, blazing like nuclear comets as they went spinning off across interplanetary space and then beyond. Ainsley dodged them by simply rising up out of his ecliptic orbit.
‘Great Saints,’ Yirella whispered. ‘We are become death, destroyer of stars.’
‘Not yet,’ Immanueel said. ‘But soon.’
‘The devastation,’ she said, surveying the expanding debris cluster that was once the seven-ring habitat; the smaller glowing haze patches that had been Resolutions ships. Nimbi of whirling rubble evidenced where the sedate radio telescopes had once orbited, while the radiation bursts from collapsed wormholes were already shrieking their demise out across interstellar space. ‘The scale is frightening.’
‘Come now, corpus and Olyix are Kardashev Type Two civilizations at war over the future liberty of a galaxy. Our battlefields will awe and perplex alien astronomers for millennia to come, no matter what the ultimate outcome. If there is any validity in our struggle, it is that magnificence.’
‘I guess so. Nobody will ever forget us now.’
‘Ever is too long. But we will leave our mark one way or another.’
‘Do you think the God at the End of Time can see what we’ve done?’
‘If it can, then we will have failed to kill it before it is born.’
‘Paradox.’
‘Always.’
‘I like to think of it as a condemned man on death row, watching the dawn arise on his execution day. It knows it will cease to exist, but there is nothing it can do to stop the sunrise.’
‘It will try. You know that, don’t you?’
‘I do. But it’s not here yet.’
‘No. Your sun is still rising.’
*
The noise and swirls of movement made for a hard impact on Dellian as he walked out of the troop ship. For all the high-stress charging around inside the Olyix habitat ring, the quick and lethal contacts with the enemy, adrenalin and terror, their combat had been inaudible. His helmet insulated him from the probably deadly sounds of high-energy discharges – beam, kinetic, plasma-blast. A quiet war, then, if not particularly civilized.
Then on the ship travelling
