“They’re chimneys!” Orion declared. White vapor was oozing out of each one, twirling away above the treetops. Ozzie recalled the odd riverlike ribbons of cloud they’d seen on their approach.
Orion immediately dropped down and pressed his ear to the ground.
“Friend Orion, what are you doing?” Tochee asked.
“Listening for the machines. There must be factories in the caves down there.”
“I do not detect any electrical or magnetic activity,” Tochee said.
“Calm down, man,” Ozzie said. “Think about this: Factories to make what?”
Orion gave him a puzzled look, then shrugged. “Dunno.”
“Okay, then. Let’s not jump to conclusions.”
“There is something in the middle of the clearing,” Tochee said.
Ozzie used his inserts to zoom in. A squat black pillar stood by itself in the middle of the rustling sea of leaves. “Now that’s more like it.”
Orion got there first, leaping on ahead, each giant step sending him gliding three or four meters through the air. Ozzie took more cautious steps, keeping a wary eye out on the sky above, while Tochee slithered along at a modest speed.
The pillar was three meters tall, standing on a broad patch of bluish polyp devoid of any soil or plants A ring of symbols had been engraved halfway up, made from long thin strokes curving at all angles, with several orbital dots. All the grooves and indentations had been filled with a clear crystal. Ozzie scanned them with the handheld array, and whistled at the result. “Diamond. That’s one mother of an expensive anticorrosion application.”
“What kind of runes are they?” Orion asked. The symbols bore a slight similarity to ideograms, but not in any human language. “Is it like a signpost for paths?”
“I don’t have any reference,” Ozzie said. “How about you, Tochee?”
“I regret not.”
Ozzie began to scan the ground, which was solid enough. None of his sensors could detect any kind of cavity beneath the pillar. Nor was there any electrical activity, no circuits buried just below the surface. He gave the pillar an aggravated look as an excited Orion hurried around it, the boy’s eager fingers tracing the lines on all the symbols. Then Ozzie looked back across the open expanse of the glade, an unwelcome conclusion dawning in his mind.
“Shit!” Ozzie spat brutally. “Shit shit shit.” He aimed a kick at the base of the pillar. It hurt his toe, so he kicked it again, harder. “Ouch!” Kick with the other foot. “I do not fucking believe this, man.” All the frustration, all the rage that had been building inside him, was rushing out; vented on this one simple artifact. He hated it for what it was, everything it represented.
“What’s wrong, Ozzie?” Orion asked quietly. The boy was giving him an apprehensive glance.
“What’s fucking wrong? I’ll goddamn tell you what’s wrong.” He kicked the pillar again, not quite so hard this time. “I have spent months in the wilderness, eating crappy fruit when all I wanted was a decent steak and fries; actually, I don’t just want it, I dream of it. I’m walking around in rags like something out of the stone age. I haven’t had sex in, like, forever. I’ve been sober so long now my liver is feeling healthy. I’ve been flushed off an ocean in the biggest cosmic joke there ever was. But I put up with it, all this crap, because I know you—yes YOU—are watching and guiding me along, and manipulating the paths so that in the end we’ll meet up. But, oh no, you’ve got to have one more go at making me feel humble, one more time making me the butt of your stinking lame-ass, so-called humor.” He thrust a finger out toward the pillar. “I do not think this is funny! You got that? Are we clear on the meaning of NO, here?”
Orion gave the clearing a timid look.
“Friend Ozzie, who are you talking about? I can see no one else here but us.”
“It’s watching. Aren’t you?”
“Who?” Orion pleaded.
“The adult community. The real Silfen.”
“Are they?”
“Oh, yeah.”
Orion turned back to the pillar. “So what is this?”
Ozzie sent a long breath rattling out through clenched teeth as he tried to calm down. It was hard. If he didn’t let his anger burn, he knew he’d wind up curled up in a ball weeping in sheer frustration. “Nothing. The most stupid insignificant piece of nothing on the whole goddamn reef. I used to respect the dude who came up with the design for the gas halo, I mean it is like impressive. Now, I think they’re the most anally retentive morons in the whole galaxy. You want to know what this is? Why it’s so completely visible, standing here all by itself, with the sunlight shining on it like it’s some kind of celebrity? It’s the reef’s goddamn serial number, man.”
***
MorningLightMountain detected the approaching ships while they were still fifteen light-years distant. Twenty of them were approaching the staging post star at four light-years per hour, the fastest human ships it had observed so far. That was to be expected. They had no alternative but to send their best weapons against the staging post.
Part of its main thought routines noted that every time some part of itself encountered human starships, they always flew faster than the previous time. The rate at which humans developed and advanced their technology base was atypical of their society as a whole, which appeared so disorganized, with numerous instances of leadership class and administration class corruption. Study of the mined data and human personality animations it had enacted showed that certain small clusters of individuals were capable of high-level organization within specialized fields. During the frequent outbreak of wars while they were still confined to their original planet, the “weapon scientist” groups were always deferred to by the leadership class, and given disproportional resources to complete their tasks.
It decided the leadership class must have reverted to its old behavior pattern and allowed the weapon scientist class increased access to resources. That development would have to be watched carefully; humans with their wild imagination might be capable of producing very dangerous hazards at a strategic level rather than the tactical level that they had engaged at so far. Fortunately, MorningLightMountain still had weapons capable of devastating entire star systems, which it had so far held in reserve. With preparations for the second incursion almost complete, it was now ready to use them against Commonwealth star systems. This time there would be very little resistance from the humans. The radiation would kill them all off, while leaving their industry and buildings intact.
MorningLightMountain refined and analyzed its sensor data, learning what it could of the distortions generated by each ship, the nature of their energy manipulation process. It began to prepare its defenses, halting the flow of matériel and ships to the new twenty-three worlds. Seven hundred seventy-two wormhole generators on the three remaining original asteroids orbiting the interstellar wormhole began to adjust their configuration; as did the five hundred twenty generators so far completed on the four new asteroids it had established. Force fields were strengthened around all the settlements containing immotile groupings. Weapons installations were brought up to full readiness. Attack ships moved to their departure locations.
The human starships began to slow. They came to a halt twenty-five AUs distant from the interstellar wormhole, and emerged into real space. MorningLightMountain immediately opened twenty wormholes around each starship. Six hundred missiles were launched through each one, followed by forty ships. It then modified the wormholes again to try to prevent the starships from escaping within their own wormhole, a technique perfected during the first stage of its expansion into Commonwealth space.