Eleven hundred eighty-two years later, the force field vanished as abruptly as it appeared.
MorningLightMountain’s outer sensor satellites detected fluctuations in its quantum structure rippling across the surface for nearly an hour before the field finally lost cohesion. Almost immediately, every immotile launched spaceships from their asteroids and planet territories right across the Prime system. They accelerated hard, rushing to get outside the field’s previous boundary line before it reestablished itself. The eight that MorningLightMountain had held in readiness for just this occasion were among the first to leave.
With that action completed, MorningLightMountain and its allies began an extensive sensor search of space beyond the boundary. Immediately they found a huge rotating spherical structure, twenty-five thousand kilometers in diameter, orbiting along the ecliptic. The structure was larger than the homeworld, but with hardly any mass, so it couldn’t be a planet. Yet it was emitting in every measurable spectrum, and had a completely alien quantum signature. Four ships were dispatched to investigate.
Strangest of all, there was no sign of the alienPrimes. Defenses around every planetary and space territory were brought up to their full capability in readiness for the surely imminent attack. But no weapons of any kind tested them. There was nothing. All the alliances combined their sensor information. Everything remained blank.
MorningLightMountain was uncertain how to proceed. It had planned for what it considered every eventuality when the force field was removed. It could fight and flee; it had a grand alliance ready to build a fleet to exterminate all alienPrime life at the second star, and wherever else they had corrupted. That the alienPrimes would do nothing was confusing it considerably.
Its most powerful telescopes were hurriedly trained on the neighboring star for any clue of their activity. That produced the greatest surprise of all. A force field had encased the alienPrime system as well.
None of the immotiles had ever considered there might be a second alien life, one that was more powerful than Primes. Accepting the concept was a frightening thing. They watched the newly exposed stars with a considerable sense of anxiety. Still more ships were dispatched outward in a frantic attempt to establish Prime life on new worlds where the barriers would not imprison them.
Four days after the force field vanished, the most sophisticated spacial sensors that MorningLightMountain possessed reported a very unusual quantum disturbance washing across the system. The effect was traveling faster than the speed of light. MorningLightMountain considered that such an event might signal the arrival of the aliens who had created the force field. The effect wasn’t repeated, which left it deliberating how to respond: to warn the others and form the Grand Alliance to fight back against the attackers, or to attempt its own evacuation.
MorningLightMountain was still considering its options when its ordinary sensors showed it a fight between ships from TemperateSeaIsland and SouthernRockPlateau close to a cluster of asteroid bases. Even now when the Prime alliances knew they had to cooperate to face their enemy, the old conflicts still raged. Expansion had been massive throughout the last thousand years, and resources within the Prime star system were now extremely scarce. The pressure on individual territories was greater than it had ever been before. For the last two centuries, MorningLightMountain had been increasingly concerned that the immotiles would end up fighting a terminal war and exterminate themselves. It was a common worry. As a consequence, immotiles had diverted more and more effort into building and stockpiling weapons.
Almost a day later, thousands of sensors orbiting the homeworld picked up a microwave emission from a point beyond the second gas giant. The signal was crude, using patterns that had been developed for messaging long before the time when the force field appeared. A brief identification sequence revealed the sender to be MorningLightMountain17,735, who had been on board one of the early starships to visit the alienPrime star system and never returned. The content of the message was short and simple: This ship contains aliens; there are many of them, and they are dangerous. Destroy them.
The message repeated ten times, then ended. MorningLightMountain was puzzled. How had MorningLightMountain17,735 survived for so long? What was it doing on an alien ship? Why was the message so short? Not that it had many options remaining. A scan of the section of space where the message originated revealed a tiny glimmer of infrared next to a small chunk of cold rock. MorningLightMountain knew of no Prime settlement at those coordinates. Other immotiles were already ordering ships to investigate the message’s origin point. MorningLightMountain sent instructions to its subsidiary groupings on the moons of the second gas giant. Four of its most powerful ships launched on an interception course.
Alliances broke down and new ones formed as the first eight ships closed on the alien. Immotiles disagreed on how to deal with the situation. Some wanted to capture the aliens and their ship, others were keen to follow MorningLightMountain17,735’s advice and exterminate the invader.
The alien started transmitting signals at the Prime ships as they closed on it. They were incomprehensible; no immotile could understand it. Missiles were fired as alliances came into sharp conflict over how to proceed.
With the lead Prime ship approaching fast and launching a missile salvo, the alien vanished inside a huge burst of spacial distortion.
The surface-to-orbit transport ship descended vertically through the Prime homeworld’s lower atmosphere. It was a large blunt cone shape, although it made little use of aerodynamics to land. Eight fusion rockets were arranged around the rim of its base, roaring out slim two-kilometer-long jets of incandescent plasma. Between them, they produced point nine of a Prime gravity, lowering the ship gently toward the coastline beneath it.
Steam began to swirl up from the surface of the sea as the wavering tips of the plasma stabbed down into it. Within seconds, a hemispherical tempest of radiant vapor was streaking up and out from the epicenter like a squashed nuclear mushroom cloud. As the ship sank down into the supersonic storm front, force fields came on to protect the fuselage from the maelstrom it was creating. The fusion rockets died away when the ship was only a few meters above the seething surface, and its conical base splashed down with a soft bump into the boiling water.
Tugboats closed in and towed the spaceship back to the piers and loading bays that stretched for over a hundred kilometers along the coast. This was the main planetary spaceport that MorningLightMountain had built to handle the cargo flying between the planet and its offworld territories. Thousands of flights arrived and departed every year, pouring heat and mildly radioactive contaminants into the local environment. Nothing grew within a hundred kilometers of the spaceport anymore, no crops or weeds of any kind, turning the land behind the shore to a desert of sodden lifeless soil. Even the sea was dead, a choppy expanse of gray water with a thin skin of ochre scum.
Once the ship was docked, a sub-herd of soldier motiles came on board. They were slightly smaller than standard motiles, with better sight and hearing; they could move faster as well, and had a much greater agility, though they lacked any long-term endurance. Encased in dark armor they were two and a half meters tall, with electronic sensors complementing their natural ones and limb strength enhanced mechanically. Every arm gripped some kind of weapon. Under direct microwave linkage with MorningLightMountain, they approached the two bipedal alien motile captives with considerable wariness. The immotile wasn’t sure of their potential, so it was taking every precaution. The compartment they’d been confined to was heavily shielded, and they’d been under constant observation for the whole flight back from the asteroid fragment where their ship had been lurking. Physically, they had done nothing, remaining almost motionless for the whole time. Their suits, however, had been emitting those strange microwave pulses almost continually.