Звезда Пандоры

There was no warning. No time. Raw energy punched straight through the wormhole, flowering on the other side where the generator was sited on the asteroid. The hole in spacetime closed immediately as its generator was destroyed, but not before the awesome torrent of energy released by the dying ship had poured through. Thousands of ships above the asteroid flared briefly as their hulls vaporized inside the giant geyser of radiation. Wormhole generators imploded with spasms of gravitronic twists. The entire asteroid quaked as two hundred eighty-seven collapsing wormholes wrenched at it, then shattered. Energy contained within the generators and wormholes was released in a single backlash, enhancing the already lethal deluge shining on the interstellar wormhole.

MorningLightMountain watched in horror as the massive wormhole linking the staging post back to its original system wavered and fluctuated. It diverted hundreds, then thousands of immotile group clusters to producing the correct command sequences that would calm and contain the instability. Slowly, the wild shivers of energy were tamed and refocused. The output from the surviving segments of the generator mechanism were remodeled to compensate.

It surveyed the wreckage of the staging post. One asteroid and its whole equipment complement were lost completely. Thousands of ships were ruined or disabled. Clusters of cargo units spun off into the void, molting chunks of equipment that effervesced from every surface. Over three thousand immotile group clusters of varying sizes were irradiated and dying. Nearly a hundred thousand motiles were dead or dying.

Everything could be replaced, and rebuilt, though such an effort would take time. Losing a quarter of its wormholes would definitely slow its original plan for expansion across the human worlds. Back in the home system, many immotile group clusters began to consider defenses against another suicide attack.

Meanwhile, MorningLightMountain began to realign the surviving wormhole routes to each of the twenty-three new worlds it had taken into its domain. After a while, ships flew again, carrying what remained of its supplies down to the planets. With the humans fleeing down wormholes inside their guarded cities, motiles faced little resistance in their advance across the new lands outside.

TWENTY-FIVE

As more and more time went by, so Ozzie’s confusion grew. He simply did not understand the planet they were on. For a start, the climate didn’t change, it was always the same muggy warmth with a slow breeze continually blowing in the same direction. With a tide-locked planet there should have been strong winds redistributing the heat received by the sunside to the cold of the darkside; big circulation currents that would blow perpetually around the globe, not this gentle zephyr. Of course, the island could be situated in the middle of a doldrum zone, which meant the winds were actually out there, somewhere over the perturbingly distant horizon.

Ozzie had set up small meteorological models in the handheld array, which broadly confirmed that theory. However, the modeling didn’t take into account the fact that the planet was orbiting inside a gas halo. Quite how that would affect the atmosphere close to the surface was a complete unknown. The array certainly didn’t have the kind of algorithms necessary to solve that interaction problem.

Then there was the remote gray cloud bank that was just visible squatting above the horizon. Every time they went back up the central hill to collect more wood, he checked its position. It never moved. And that was the direction from which the breeze emanated.

He also made an effort to work out the distance to the nearby islands. Using the array’s inertial guidance function he measured the sight angle from both sides of the island he was on. This rough trigonometry put the closest forty-five miles away, which made the planet improbably massive.

The gas halo itself was an even bigger enigma. He couldn’t figure out the bright specks floating around inside it. Spectrographic sensor analysis showed they were composed of water.

“Does it really matter?” Orion asked as Ozzie launched into another round of muttering about the latest batch of results from his sensors. “We know we have to get to another island to find a path out of here. So who cares what’s in the sky?”

“Yes it does matter,” Ozzie ground out. “I don’t understand how spheres of water like that form. It can’t be through droplet collision, they’re too big. Some of them are hundreds of miles across.”

“So? You said the gas halo is breathable. Why shouldn’t it have water in it?”

“That’s not the point, man. You should be asking, why is it there?”

“So why is it there?”

“I don’t fucking know!”

“It was placed there,” Tochee said through his array. “Given this whole gas halo is artificial, the builders have incorporated the water spheres for a purpose.”