It annoyed Montrose that Ximen del Azarchel always seemed to be awake when he woke. Montrose sooner or later would sense or see him, hanging in a monstrous body sluglike to the vertical lengths of the tower or lounging in one of the many balconies etched into the side armor.
“Don’t you ever sleep?” growled Montrose.
“I want to see the nearby stars change position,” said Del Azarchel.
“If you expect to see background stars streaming past like telegraph poles seen from a train, that only happens in cartoons.”
“You would know, my semiliterate friend!”
“They’s too far away for parallax.”
“Ah! But I don’t speak of parallax! Look there! With eyes like these in bodies like these, one can just barely detect the deflection.”
“Funny. I don’t see any deflection…,” said Montrose. “None at all.”
“Nor do I, Cowhand. Nor do I.”
A charged object moving through a magnetic field experiences a Lorenz force at right angles to the line of motion and the direction of the field itself. The principle held true, even if the object was the size of a world and the magnetic field was generated by the dynamo of the disk of degenerate matter circling and falling into the supermassive black hole at the galactic core.
Initial measurements of polarized interstellar dust grains showed the galactic magnetosphere surrounding the star Ain was strong enough to allow the world-ship to overshoot the target, make a thrustless turn, and then, once Ain was line with Iota Draconis off their fore sail, allow them to reenter the beam Vigil was maintaining and slow sufficiently to match speed and metric with Ain.
They should have started a slow but measurable turn at this point.
“What the pox is going on, Blackie?”
“The magnetic interaction with the galactic field is insufficient.”
“You mean something or someone at Ain reached out and made the whole galactic magnetic field in this area weaker? So that we could not slow ourselves and stop by and say hello?”
“Check my calculations if you doubt me.”
“Thanks, I will.” A moment later: “Damnation and canker sores. You are right again.”
“As ever. You might also look over my calculations for using a loop of superconductor to ionize the interstellar medium and convert our momentum to heat. For that is the only other method available to us to lower our velocity, assuming no external aid.”
“I don’t need to look. Mass of a world, moving at one-tenth lightspeed? The heat would be like kissing a nova.”
“Aptly put. And am I right that we have but one course of action here?”
“Reverse the polarity on the tower to bring us back into a straight-line shot with Ain.”
“Indeed.”
“Then, pick the biggest damn object in the system—gas giant, Dyson sphere, whatever we can find—and aim right at it. Our wee tiny planet is only half the mass of Earth, but if we smite the center of their most densely populated area at one-tenth lightspeed, I reckon we can do some damage. About equivalent to a twenty-nine zettaton explosion of TNT, or the total energy output of Deneb each second. Even macroscale structures in the outer system could not survive, made of exotic matter or not.”
Blackie seemed pleased. “And to think how petty and inferior minds once complained about the infinitesimal amounts of energy I released burning an insignificant city off the globe, or two, or ten! No one now recalls the names of those cities, or the land masses on which they sat!”
Montrose rattled off the names of the cities, which he had, of course, memorized.
“Be that as it may,” said Blackie graciously, “in this case, you are not suggesting mercy, are you?”
“It’s them or us,” snarled Montrose. “And this is the star system, Ain. These are the very folk that sicced Asmodel on us. Remember him? Then Cahetel, then Shcachlil the Salamander, then Lamathon the Unkinder Twin, and finally, the worst of the worst, when Rania was getting close, and they stopped caring about any long-term prospects, they sent Achaiah. They sent the Beast. Hell, I remember how many innocent millions died each time.”
“So you say wipe them all out and die in the process?”
“You gotta pay the devil when his hellish bill comes due. Fair’s fair.”
“It is at times like this that I recall why I admire you, Cowhand. You are as bloodthirsty as I am. I, ah, take it you are convinced this unexpected decrease in the local interstellar magnetic field is a deliberate phenomenon, an attempt to prevent us from making starfall? We can, after all, manipulate the smallest part of a topgallant to form a lateral beam, and send out one-way probes, or, with slightly more ingenuity and effort, dispatch the Emancipation like a side boat, and test the galactic magnetosphere to each side of us, and see if the effect is natural.”
“What’s it matter? Natural or not, we now got no way to stop our momentum, unless the Principality at Ain cooperates and either puts back a magnetic field or hoists a deceleration laser.”
“So you say threaten them with ramming if they do not cooperate?”
“Hey. You read the Monument same as me. They got rules about cooperation and collaboration. The Ain Principality has to stop us, and then we owe them.”
“Ah! We must pay the cost of the beam we will threaten them into directing at us, after all, and, as you say, their Cold Equations cover this eventuality. Such was my thought. So you agree to sell this world into indentured servitude…?”
Montrose pondered for at least a century before he answered.
“Ain’t there no damn way to escape these star monsters and their damned system of serfdom and slavery? What gives?”
“Space is cruel, my friend,” mused Del Azarchel. “It is very large and very cruel.”
“The body you got on ain’t got no face, but I can tell you are smiling.”
“Well. Space reminds me of—”
“Don’t say it.”
“—me!”
“Space is smaller than your damned ego, Blackie.”
“I will take that as a compliment. Shall we get on with our astrocide? Stellarcide? Is there a word for the willful destruction of a whole solar system?”
2. Collision Vector
A.D. 72360 TO 73040
Torment, and the one fraction of her population awake and thawed in her many buried cities and habitats, waited and watched with growing anxiety as no change appeared in the magnetic field and no beam came.
The world-ship rotated in preparation for the nonexistent deceleration beam so that her sails were behind her. The endless tower that had been the tail of Torment now reached ahead, a bowsprit longer than the radius of the orbit of Mercury. At the tip of this tower was the tiny point of approaching Ain, growing brighter as years turned into centuries, orange as a coal in a grate.
The giant had a tiny companion star roughly two lightyears away, and taking at least half a million years to orbit each other.
The star Ain itself was an orange-red globe of simply titanic size, ninety times brighter than Sol and burning helium at its core. There were many clues that some sort of industrial structures and coherent energy patterns existed in the core and along the surface of the star, but what these engineering elements were meant to do, even Torment could not guess.
There was a third body in the system. This was a sphere larger than a gas giant, orbiting Ain in an orbit as eccentric as that of Wormwood, now a memory far behind them. The body itself was hidden in massive clouds, black as ink, an opaque sphere extending in each direction some eighty thousand miles. From the energy signals and behavior patterns, it was clear the black clouds were intelligent: cognitive matter, either nanotechnology assemblers or something finer. Oddly, this supermassive gas giant was the only exoplanet the astronomers could detect throughout the Hyades Cluster. The other stars were barren.