As Quentin watched, a small, speckle-coated asteroid drifted down below the spike points and towards the surface. It took his brain a second to register the scale involved — the speckles were actually ships, and the asteroid had to be at least ten miles across and five miles thick. As he watched, the speckle-ships (which were each probably larger than the Touchback) drove the asteroid down. About a half-mile from the surface, the speckle-ships broke off, flying away from the asteroid like a slow-moving cloud of gnats. The massive rock continued its descent until it smashed into the surface with a huge, billowing cloud of dust and debris. The cloud seemed to hang in the air, floating lightly, pulled back down ever-so-slowly by The Deuce’s weak gravity.
“That is how it gets bigger,” Virak said. “Every day ships go out and find asteroids. They bring them back to add to the surface. As the mass continues to grow, so does the gravity, and so does the density of the Deuce’s core. Additional matter on the surface compresses the core. The original living levels have long since been smashed flat by gravity. Workers constantly dig new levels creating an exponentially increasing living area to accommodate a high birth rate. Immigration to the Orbital Stations fell to a near standstill after Whitok and Ionath were colonized. Now those seeking to escape the overpopulation of Quyth head to those planets instead of the Orbital Stations.”
Quentin stared at the asteroid, a small pebble in a slightly larger crater. Crater and asteroid both barely a pimple on the surface.
“How long does it take to bring the asteroids in?”
Virak thought for a moment. “It depends on the materials needed. Some trips take only a few months. Others seek out asteroids comprised of rare or vital minerals, such as platinum or iridium. Those missions can take hundreds of years. It is common for a crew to leave The Deuce knowing that they will be long dead of old age before the ship returns, and their children or grandchildren will pilot the vessel home.”
“How many ships are there?”
“Somewhere around a hundred thousand.”
“A hundred… just how long does it take to build that thing out there?”
“The Deuce has been growing for almost three hundred years, and The Ace is just over three hundred and fifty years old.”
Quentin shook his head in amazement. All his life he’d been told the Quyth were only semi-intelligent beasts. Yet here was an engineering project that rivaled the terraforming of Solomon, a race so unified in purpose that they sacrificed themselves to build a home for future generations.
“It’s not that big,” Quentin said. “I mean, for an artificial construct, it’s massive. But from a strategic perspective, I can’t see how the Creterakians could take over entire planets that were twenty times as large, but not be able to take The Deuce.”
“They took over other planets by swarming across the surface and overwhelming the enemy by sheer numbers,” Virak said. “Here, the surface doesn’t support life. They had to fight their way into the shaft to get at the living levels. They tried the same technique they used against the big ships — launching thousands of landing vessels, trying to overwhelm our shaft defenses. We slaughtered their people by the millions.”
Quentin raised an eyebrow. “You sound like you actually fought here or something.”
“I did,” Virak said. “I was born here. “When my time came, I fought not for new breeding grounds, but for defense of my birth-home.”
Virak absently brushed a pedipalp hand across a long list of short, alien words etched into the chitin of his right arm.
“What are those?” Quentin asked, gesturing to the writing.
“Names of Warriors in my fighting pack. Warriors I had lived with most of my life. They died in the battles. I lost everyone in my fighting pack, but the Creterakians paid a terrible price for their assault.”
“How many died?”
“Over two million Quyth,” Virak said. “Including all my family. We estimate around 22 million Creterakians died trying to capture The Deuce. We kept rough count up to 10 million, but they just kept coming, and counting the dead was last on our list of needs.”
Quentin tried to imagine fighting an enemy without number that came in wave after wave after wave. “That many, and they never broke through?”
“They eventually created a beach head on Shaft Two and Shaft Four. We let them bring in troops and resources, then we used nuclear weapons to destroy those shafts before they could penetrate further. Eventually, technologists from Satirli 6 were brought in to engineer a way through the two miles that separated the surface from the living levels.”
“Did they get in?”
“Yes, several times. But we distributed tactical nuclear weapons throughout The Deuce. Citizens were under strict orders — at the first sign of a breakthrough, seal off their section and detonate.”
Quentin’s jaw dropped. “At first sign? But how long did it take to evacuate the sections before you nuked them?”
Virak looked back into space. “There was no evacuation. Citizens sealed their section, then detonated.”
“How many Quyth would that kill?”
Virak thought for a moment. “Depending on the section, anywhere from 150,000 to 250,000. It did not matter — as long as the Creterakians did not establish a beachhead on the living levels, from which they could re-supply and swarm through the entire station, any sacrifice was worth it.”
“But to kill a quarter-million of your own people…”
“It was necessary,” Virak said. “The Creterakians do not control us. Freedom isn’t free.”
Quentin tried to imagine even the most hard-core Holy Man pulling the trigger on a nuke that would take out not only him, but 250,000 of his people.
“We maintained maneuverability,” Virak said. “As big as it is, the whole station can enter punch-space. We moved towards the home planet, to help defend it. The three Orbital Stations are more than just ships, they are self-contained ecosystems with planetary-level manufacturing infrastructures and resources that are inexhaustible in the short-term. That meant we were moving three full war-factories to defend the homeworld. We left the Creterakians with one choice — completely destroy the orbital stations, exterminating all life, or fight the ships the stations produced for decades to come.”
“So why didn’t they blow up The Deuce and the others?”
“We don’t know,” Virak said. “Maybe they didn’t have the technology. Relativity bombs, like the Sklorno used on Whitok, would have completely destroyed The Deuce, but the Creterakians either do not have them or did not use them. It doesn’t matter anymore. We beat them back once, we’ll beat them back again. The Quyth protect their homelands.”
There was more than a hint of condescension in that comment. The Quyth, who despite their military presence were considered the galaxy’s poor cousin of intelligence, had resisted the swarming Creterakians when all the “superior” governments had surrendered. The fact that most of the Quyth planets were irradiated wastelands seemed irrelevant, at least to them.
The conversation faded away as the Touchback maneuvered towards a massive shaft, perhaps two miles wide. Rows of lights ran down the sides, disappearing into the depths, reminiscent of the mine shafts back home. Ships, large and small, flew in and out of the huge opening. As the Touchback approached, traffic faded to nothing — exit traffic ceased, and entry traffic hovered in place.
“Why is all the shipping stopped?”
“Because they clear everything out when a bus comes in,” Virak said. “They need to prevent possible terrorist attacks. If a ship even gets within a half mile of a team bus, it is destroyed.”