Ione gave Kempster Getchell a questioning look. A planet? Here?
A wayward smile formed on his lips, he appeared indecently happy about the revelation. It does look that way. We checked the star and planet positions gathered from the spacecrafts sensor array most thoroughly. The system we saw is definitely this one. The Laymil home planet used to orbit approximately one hundred and thirty-five million kilometres from the star. That does put it rather neatly between the orbits of Jyresol and Boherol. He pouted sadly. And here Ive spent thirty years of my life looking at stars with spectra similar to this one. All the time it was right under my nose. God, what a waste. Still, Im back on the cutting edge of astrophysics now, and no mistake. Trying to work out how you make a planet disappear ... ho, boy.
All right, Ione said with forced calm. So where is it now? Was it destroyed? There isnt an asteroid belt between Jyresol and Boherol. There isnt even a dust belt as far as I know.
There is no record of any extensive survey being made of this systems interplanetary medium, Kempster said. I checked our library. But even assuming the planet had literally been reduced to dust, the solar wind would have blown the majority of particles beyond the Oort cloud within a few centuries.
Would a survey now help? she asked.
It might be able to confirm the dust hypothesis, if the density is still higher than is usual. But it would depend on when the planet was destroyed.
It was here two thousand six hundred years ago, Renato Vella said. We know that from analysing the position of the other planets at the time the memory was recorded. But if we are to look for proof of the dust I believe we would be better off taking surface samples from Boherol and the gas giant moons.
Good idea, well done, lad, Kempster said, patting his younger assistant on the shoulder. If this wave of dust was expelled outwards then it should have left traces on all the airless bodies in the system. Similar to the way sediment layers in planetary core samples show various geological epochs. If we could find it, we would get a good indication of when it actually happened as well.
I dont think it was reduced to dust, Renato Vella said.
Why not? Ione asked.
It was a valid idea, he said readily. There arent many other ways you can make something that mass disappear without trace. But its a very theoretical solution. In practical terms the energy necessary to dismantle an entire planet to such an extent is orders of magnitude above anything the Confederation could muster. You have to remember that even our outlawed antimatter planetbuster bombs dont harm or ablate the mass of a terracompatible-sized planet, they just wreck and pollute the biosphere. In any case an explosionmultiple explosions evenwouldnt do the trick, they would just reduce it to asteroidal fragments. To turn it into dust or preferably vapour you would need some form of atomic disrupter weapon, probably powered by the starI cant think what else would produce enough energy. That or a method of initiating a fission chain reaction in stable atoms.
Perfect mass-energy conversion, Kempster muttered, his eyebrows beetled in concentration. Now theres an idea.
And why wasnt the same method used against the Laymil habitats? Renato Vella said, warming to his theme. If you have a weapon which can destroy a planet so thoroughly as to eradicate all traces of it, why leave the remnants of the habitats for us to find?
Yes, yes, why indeed? Kempster said. Good point, lad, well done. Good thinking.
His assistant beamed.
We still think the habitats destroyed themselves, Parker Higgens said. It fits what we know, even now. He looked at Ione, visibly distressed. I think the memory may show the start of the planets destruction. There is clearly some kind of conflict being enacted on the surface as the ship leaves orbit.
Surely that was an inter-clan dispute, wasnt it? Qingyn Lin asked dubiously. Thats what it sounded like to me.
You are all mistaken in thinking of this problem purely in terms of the physical, Lieria said. Consider what we now know. The planet is confirmed to have been in existence at the same time the habitats were broken. The Laymil entity whose memory we have accessed is concerned about the transformation in the life-harmony gestalt which is being propagated across an entire continent. A drastic metaphysical change which threatens nothing less than the entire Laymil racial orientation. Director Parker Higgens is correct, these events cannot be discounted as coincidence.
Ione glanced round the group. None of them looked as though they wished to contradict the Kiint. I think Id better review this memory myself. She sat in the chair next to Malandra Sarker. Show me.
As before, the Laymil body hardened around her own, an exoskeleton which did notcould neverfit. The recording quality was much higher than before. Oski Katsura and her team had been working long hours on the processors and programs required to interpret the stored information. There were hardly any of the black specks which indicated fragmentary data drop-outs. Ione relaxed deeper into the chair as the sensorium buoyed her along.
The Laymil was a shipmaster, clan-bred for a life traversing the barren distance between the spaceholm constellation and Unimeron, the prime lifehost. It hung at the hub of the ships central life-support ovoid as the drive was readied for flight. There was nothing like the human arrangement of decks and machinery, present even in voidhawks. The protective metal shell contained a biological nest-womb, a woody growth honeycombed with chambers and voyage-duration pouches for travellers, creating an exotic organic grotto. Chambers were clustered together without logic, like elongated bubbles in a dense foam; the walls had the texture of tough rubber, pocked with hundreds of small holes to restrain hoofs, and emitting a fresh green radiance. Organs to maintain the atmosphere and recycle food were encased in the thicker partitions.
The all-pervasive greenness was subtly odd to Iones human brain. Tubular buttress struts curved through the chamber around the Laymil body, flaring out where they merged with a wall. Its three hoofs were pushed into holes, buttocks resting on a grooved mushroom-stool; its hands were closed on knobby protrusions. A teat stalactite hung centimetres from the feeding mouth. The position was rock solid and immensely comfortable, the nest-womb had grown into a flawlessly compatible layout with the shipmasters body. All three heads slid around in slow weaving motions, observing small opaque composite instrument panels that swelled out of the wall. Ione found it hard to tell where the plastic began and the cells ended; the cellular/mechanical fusion was seamless, as though the womb-nest was actually growing machinery. Panel-mounted lenses projected strange graphics into the Laymils eyes, in a fashion similar to human AV projectors.
As the heads moved they provided snatched glimpses into other chambers through narrow passageways. She saw one of the Laymil passengers cocooned in its voyage-duration pouch. It was swaddled in translucent glittery membranes that held it fast against the wall, and a waxy hose supplying a nutrient fluid had been inserted into its mouth, with a similar hose inserted into its anus, maintaining the digestive cycle. A mild form of hibernation.
The Laymil shipmasters thoughts were oddly twinned, as though the recording was of two separate thought patterns. On a subsidiary level it was aware of the ships biological and mechanical systems. It controlled them with a processors precision, preparing the fusion tube for ignition, maintaining attitude through small reaction thrusters, computing a course vector, surveying the four nest-wombs. There was a similarity here to the automatic functions a humans neural nanonics would perform; but as far as she could ascertain the shipmaster possessed no implants. This was the way its brain was structured to work. The ships biotechnology was sub-sentient, so, in effect, the shipmaster was the flight computer.