Звезда Пандоры

“You are not getting my station,” Nigel told them uncompromisingly. He opened a multitude of command links directly into the wormhole generator machinery of three gateways in Narrabri’s station. His secure memory store was accessed, the old memories rising out to occupy an artificial neural network, giving him all the knowledge he ever had of exotic matter, energy inverters, supergeometry, quantum math. He drew on it all, loading new directives into the machinery that generated wormholes leading to Louisiade, Malaita, and Tubuai.

Limiters and feedback dampers flashed alerts at him. Not even his control system could handle three wormholes simultaneously.

“Could use a little help here,” he told the SI.

“Very well.”

Nigel let out a small breath of relief. You never could tell when the SI was going to pitch in, or whether it would stand aloof. He guessed this invasion might actually have flustered even the great artificial intelligence. After all Vinmar was physically inside Commonwealth space.

With the SI acting as interpreter and actuator, Nigel’s role was elevated to executive only. Under his direction the SI reformatted the internal quantum structure of the three wormholes he’d designated. He retracted the exits from their distant gateways, turning them into open-ended fissures twisting through spacetime.

One of the Prime wormholes reemerged above Wessex, and Nigel struck, his pseudotelekinetic control moving icons at supersonic speed. The three CST wormhole exits materialized inside the interloper in a transdimensional intersection, creating a massive distortion that instigated huge oscillations along the alien wormhole’s energistic fabric. Power from eight of Narrabri’s nuclear power stations was pumped through the gateway machinery to amplify the instability, forcing it back toward the Prime end.

The intrusive wormhole vanished in a severe gravitational implosion, releasing a burst of ultra-hard radiation. Nigel waited, hysradar scanning space above Wessex. The Primes were down to forty-seven wormholes jumping in and out of existence. Cautions from the Malaita gateway sounded loudly, warning him that the whole machine was powering down to prevent any further damage; the excessive power loadings he’d forced through had burned out a lot of components.

“It worked,” he proclaimed.

“Of course,” the SI replied equitably.

“Can you take out the rest?” Alan asked.

“Let’s find out.”

As far as such a thing were possible, MorningLightMountain experienced a brief feeling of trepidation as it arranged its thoughts prior to launching the expansion. The alien Commonwealth was a considerable unknown, despite the Bose memories. It remembered living there, remembered what the society was like, but had only vague notions of its true industrial and military capabilities. That gave cause for concern.

There were several other stars close to its home system that had planets capable of supporting Prime life. It had already opened wormholes to eight of them, sending hundreds of millions of motiles through to begin settlements. Life-sustaining planets were much simpler to spread across than the cold, airless moons and dead asteroids of its home system. They didn’t require machines to cocoon the new settlements in a protective friendly environment. They were cheaper to establish. Already immotile groupings were amalgamating on the new planets, integrating with MorningLightMountain’s main thought routines. In a heady taste of the future, it had now spread out to exist across hundreds of light-years.

At one time that might have been sufficient. Even the first great enemy, the unknown, would have trouble constructing barriers around so many stars. But there was more than one enemy in the galaxy. It could see what would happen when its expansion ran into the obstacle of the humans and their territory. Two incompatible life-forms competing for the same planets and stars.

MorningLightMountain knew they could not coexist in a peaceful fashion. In fact, it didn’t see how ultimately it could allow any other alien to share this galaxy, there were after all only a finite number of stars. Now that it knew how, it could join every one via wormholes, it could become omnipresent. That way it could guarantee its immortality. No matter how many stars died or turned nova, it would still be alive. And the first obstacle to that was the Commonwealth, full of dangerous independent humans and their superb advanced machinery.