Belt Three

by John Ayliff

  Jonas continued to help Keldra with her modifications to the hab systems. He could hear the cooling fans whirring in the corridors, but even so, the air felt warm and stuffy.

  Halfway between Belts Two and One, the heat radiation fins became overloaded, spewing red warning messages all over the bridge consoles. Keldra had anticipated it, and a gang of servitors were working on a new heat-radiation system in the cargo bay. The system channelled excess heat into one of the cargo containers that filled the bay, some of them still containing mining equipment she had stolen from the Coriolis Dancer, and would now never have a chance to sell. Heat was pumped into each container until it glowed red hot, then the servitors pushed the container out of the cargo bay doors. The container tumbled away starward on the bridge screen, taking the excess heat with it and cooling the ship overall.

  Keldra jettisoned the Seagull along with the first cargo container, with an orbit-keeping and collision-avoidance programme loaded into its thruster controls. Someone should pick it up eventually, and it would most likely end up in a true-born’s collection. There was no need for it to be destroyed along with the Remembrance.

  Belt One was almost uninhabited. The only human settlements here were a few specialist mining outposts, almost entirely automated, powered by big solar energy collectors. No comms chatter greeted the Remembrance of Clouds as it passed through, only a few lonely navigation beacons. Not many true-born entrepreneurs set up operations down here. Power was cheap, but the costs of transportation back to the inhabited belts could negate that, and besides, most people didn’t feel comfortable being so close to Worldbreaker territory.

  The Remembrance passed through without slowing. The rocks of Belt One shrank away starward, blinding in the reflected light of the close sun. The sun itself was a wall of fire filling half the sky: the bridge screen’s filters made it red, and patterns became visible on its surface, as if it was becoming old and cracked. Great areas of hotter gas moved across its face, churning and swirling, combining and breaking apart. Here at the heart of the solar system Keldra had found the last real clouds, and they were clouds of fire.

  One more belt stood out against the burning wall. Countless tiny black dots, moving slowly past one another in their different orbits, some of them clustering around large bodies, others breaking off and heading starward towards the inhabited belts. There were no rocks here, except ones that had been devoured and processed and built into something unnatural. Jonas felt a weight on his chest as he watched them, an instinctive loathing that cemented his determination to strike back. Floating at the edge of the sun’s corona, this was Belt Zero, domain of the Worldbreakers.

  Creaking under the bombardment of sunlight, trailing red hot cargo containers and cradling its stolen gravity bomb, the tiny tramp freighter fell towards the sun.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Jonas was startled awake by a rapping on his cabin door. He pulled a robe around himself and opened it, wincing, as the corridor light hit him. ‘What is it?’

  Keldra tapped the side of her head, indicating her implant. ‘Intercept alarm.’ She turned and whirred along the corridor towards the bridge.

  He trailed behind, rubbing his head to wake himself. ‘Who is it? It can’t be the Iron Dragon. Is it a Belt Two pirate?’

  ‘It’s not a ship.’

  Jonas had known this was coming, but he felt a chill run through him even so. Keldra focused the screen on the Worldbreaker as soon as they entered the bridge. They were viewing its sunlit side, but even this close to the sun it looked black, little more than a hole in the stars. It was heading sunward more quickly than the Remembrance of Clouds, and the red cone of its predicted course swept over that of the ship. It would pass within a few thousand kilometres of them.

  Jonas sat down at his console. ‘Is it targeting us?’ Unconsciously, he found himself whispering, as if speaking too loudly would cause the Worldbreaker to notice them.

  ‘No,’ Keldra said, but her voice was hushed as well. ‘There are thousands of them at this level, heading up or down. It’s not surprising we’d pass close to one.’

  ‘But we’re here, and we’ve got the bomb. It might know.’

  ‘It won’t. Worldbreakers never notice people.’

  They watched together as it slid silently across the stars. As it passed them its facets caught the light one by one, white pentagons flashing briefly in the hole in space.

  ‘Are you scared of dying, Jonas?’ Keldra asked, quietly.

  ‘No,’ Jonas replied.

  ‘You’re fucking stupid, then. Everyone’s scared of dying. Every living thing. Only the Worldbreakers aren’t.’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘Of course, I am. I just don’t let it stop me.’

  The Worldbreaker fell past them, moving on the belt chart like a bead along the string of its predicted course. The bridge screen tracked it as it became a silhouette in front of the wall of flame.

  ‘I told you.’ There was an edge of bitterness to Keldra’s voice. ‘Worldbreakers never notice people.’ She raised her hand and mimed a gun with her fingers, aiming it at the Worldbreaker and then firing. ‘Pssh!’ She smiled.

  Jonas smiled along with her.

  ‘What are you doing with the shuttles?’ Jonas asked as he entered the bridge. It was a few days after they had passed the Worldbreaker. Keldra had involved him in most of her modifications to the ship, but there was something going on in one of the shuttle bays that didn’t fit into their overall plan.

  ‘Mmm?’ Keldra didn’t look up.

  ‘You’ve got servitors working in the shuttle bay on the second ring. They wouldn’t let me in.’

  ‘I’m cannibalizing them for comms equipment. Building a comms buoy. I’ll release it with the next heat package.’

  The bridge was filled with deep red light, like the sunset in the Aurelian’s garden. The screen showed a much magnified view of the sun’s surface, filtered down to a red haze. Black dots drifted in a line across it, moving around and past one another like insects crawling on the screen.

  ‘Why?’ Jonas asked.

  ‘We’re down in the veil now,’ Keldra said. ‘There’s too much radiation for our signal to get out on its own.’

  ‘I mean, what are you transmitting?’

  ‘Everything.’ She waved a hand at the crawling dots. ‘We’re getting a closer look at the Worldbreakers than anyone has for centuries. No one’s interested in studying them, but if anyone decides to, they should have our data.’

  ‘And you want everyone to know what you did.’

  She looked at him with an expression that was half a frown, and half probing. She had been doing that a lot since they had passed Belt Two, studying his face as if trying to read him, when previously, she had never been interested in his emotional state. ‘Sure, why not?’ she said. ‘That’s what you want, too, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  She raised her hands in front of her and mimed an explosion. ‘They’ll be able to see the explosion from Belt Three. One big flash of light, bright against the sun. The Scribers will probably think it’s a message from their god. Hah.’

  Jonas faked a little laugh as he sat down at his console. Peering forward, he could see that the shapes on the screen were still fuzzy. They were still too far from Belt Zero to get a clear picture through the electromagnetic interference of the veil. ‘What can we see?’

  ‘There are big clusters of activity,’ Keldra said, gesturing to the screen and zooming the view. The screen focused on a black spherical mass surrounded by an elliptical swarm of smaller shapes that stretched out before and behind it on its orbit, giving the impression of an enormous eye. Most of the surrounding swarm was composed of pinprick-like dots – individual Worldbreakers, Jonas guessed – in their uncounted thousands.

  ‘Assuming they’re spread evenly around the sun, there are seven of these clusters,’ Keldra said. ‘Each one has the mass of a small moon.’

  Or, in his terms, the mass of millio
ns of city-sized rocks, Jonas thought to himself. The size of these constructions – the number of Worldbreakers they must each contain – was too big for him to get his head around. For now, they were just dots on a screen to him.

  ‘That’s a lot of mass,’ he said. ‘Would one Sphere be enough to destroy it?’

  ‘It doesn’t need to.’ Keldra conjured a diagram over the image, showing the cluster’s orbit and the surface of the sun as two gently curving lines. ‘None of the Worldbreakers are going any further sunward than this,’ she said, drawing another dotted line in between the two, only slightly closer to the sun than the cluster’s orbit. ‘If they could retrieve material from the sun then they wouldn’t need our planets. So we don’t need to destroy it…’

  Jonas nodded, catching on. ‘We just need to knock it over that line. Can we do it?’

  ‘I think so,’ she said. ‘We have to try.’

  He studied the chart on the bridge screen. In addition to the big cluster, there was another body, further out, not much further sunward than the Remembrance. Jonas gestured to it. ‘What’s that?’

  Keldra brought a lidar model of the body onto the screen and set it slowly spinning. At first, it looked like a disc, but as it rotated it became clear that it was a shallow bowl. The scale markers showed it to be 1,000 kilometres across.

  ‘I think it’s a telescope,’ she said. ‘The dish is a reflector. It’s pretty thick, but I think that’s to act as a radiation shield, this close to the sun. There’s probably something at the focus point picking up the reflected image, but I’m not detecting it yet.’

  ‘We’re going to pass very close to it,’ Jonas observed.

  ‘That’s the other thing I’m stripping comms equipment for. I’m building a probe to launch at that focus point. I want to see what the Worldbreakers see.’

  The comms buoy tumbled away with the next heat package, a spider-like splay of antennae protruding from a thick radiation-proofed shell. The steady beep of its transponder cut through the veil’s interference. It would only last a few days, but that was all the time it would take for Jonas and Keldra to complete their mission.

  The image of the telescope became clearer. It was a shallow bowl, 1,000 kilometres in diameter and dozens thick. As they closed with it, the Remembrance’s lidar made out a tiny body, about the size of the Remembrance itself, floating at the apex of the dish. The telescope rotated slowly as it orbited the sun, remaining fixed on a particular point in space.

  The Remembrance’s structure shuddered around them as the ship entered the telescope’s shadow and its metal was able to cool. They could see the surface of the dish un-magnified on the bridge screen, a wall of dark grey made of hexagonal facets, hundreds of metres across.

  A couple of Worldbreakers also floated across the face of the dish. Worldbreakers were passing them regularly now, coming down from the belts fully laden or heading back up, empty. Keldra had stopped paying attention to her intercept alarm. Whichever way the Worldbreakers went they gave no sign of being aware of the Remembrance of Clouds.

  They passed a few hundred kilometres from the body at the telescope’s focus point. It was a tiny black disc, not physically attached to the telescope but keeping station using the Worldbreakers’ mysterious gravity manipulation drive. There were no obvious openings, and Jonas couldn’t see any way it could receive the signal reflected by the dish, but he didn’t expect Worldbreaker technology to have explicable workings.

  At a calculated moment during their approach, Keldra launched the probe. Jonas felt the missile launcher rumble, and caught a glimpse of an awkward lopsided cylinder shooting out in front of them, sprouting aerials and thrusters.

  ‘Will we be able to make sense of the signal?’ he asked. ‘I mean, the Worldbreakers are aliens, won’t it be in an alien format?’

  ‘It’s a giant reflector,’ she explained. ‘Any processing happens later. We’re getting the raw signal.’

  The probe curved towards the telescope’s focus point, firing the thrusters to slow itself. It didn’t come to a complete stop at the focus point, but it passed through slowly, spending a few seconds picking up the signal. It relayed its data back to the Remembrance in a dying burst, then shut down and drifted away on its own solar orbit.

  The Remembrance’s computer set to work processing the signal, and after a few moments, a hazy image appeared on the screen. One big central blob, surrounded by a scattering of smaller ones; Jonas thought he could see twelve, although some were hard to tell apart from the fuzz of background radiation. It was obvious that he was looking at a star with planets. He wasn’t surprised, but he felt an unexpected anger welling up inside him, mixed with resentment. Anger at the thought of another system prey to the Worldbreakers’ mindless hunger; resentment at the thought that that system, not his own, still had its planets.

  ‘They did target us,’ Keldra said. Her voice mirrored the anger he was feeling.

  ‘We don’t know that,’ he said. ‘They could just be targeting stars with planets.’

  ‘There’s more you can’t see on the image,’ she said. She was looking down at the screens on her nest, although she wasn’t touching the controls; she controlled everything through her implant most of the time. She waved a hand in an ellipse in front of her, indicating the orbits of some of the planets. ‘Based on that star’s temperature, two of those planets are in the liquid-water habitable zone.’

  ‘It could be a coincidence.’

  Keldra glared at him.

  ‘We’ll never know,’ he said.

  She settled back in her nest, staring at the star system on the screen. ‘If those planets do have life, if they have civilizations…we could be saving them,’ she said. ‘That’s got to be worth something.’

  Jonas nodded. The idea seemed too distant to be real, but he knew she was right. That would be a great deed. That would be enough.

  They lost the sail soon after the Remembrance left the shadow of the telescope. Even Earth-tech had its limits, and the sail hadn’t been built for the pressure of a close solar approach. The strands of nanomaterial coupling the sail to the bud snapped, and the sail was whisked away; a blinding sheet that twisted and crumpled slowly in on itself. It curved starward shockingly quickly without the mass of the Remembrance holding it back. If it retained its shape, it might be carried past the orbits of the inhabited belts and out of the solar system. Keldra watched it go with a faint smile, as if bidding it a good voyage. Jonas felt a sense of finality. There went their last chance to change their minds.

  Keldra fired up the reaction drive, running it above its safe maximum thrust in order to make sure the Remembrance curved sharply enough to meet the Worldbreaker cluster. The Worldbreakers continued to pay them no attention. The drive placed even more strain on the heat regulation system, which was already coming apart: the original heat fins were melting, and the heat-pumped cargo containers had to be launched every twenty minutes now. The system would collapse after a couple of days of this, but it didn’t have to last even that long.

  Jonas and Keldra pored over the images of the Worldbreaker cluster as they became clearer, relaying everything through the buoy to be broadcast to the belts. Keldra had records of previous surveys of the Worldbreakers, but no one had sent a signal from this deep for a hundred years. The Worldbreakers had been building since then.

  The smallest bodies all appeared to be individual Worldbreakers, the same design as the ones that came up to the belts to devour cities and rocks. The central mass also appeared to be made up of Worldbreakers, hundreds of thousands of them, clustered closely together; a black sphere with a surface of sharp dodecahedral lumps.

  ‘It’s nearly as big as the cluster that first arrived in our system,’ Keldra said, peering at the diagram on the screen from her nest. ‘I wonder if they’re planning to leave soon.’

  ‘A good time to stop them,’ Jonas said.

  She smiled cruelly.

  The other, medium-sized bodies came in a variety of shapes.
There were strings of flat structures like petals trailing in front of and behind the cluster, linked by threads. Solar power collectors, most likely. These were linked by taut cables to big polyhedral structures like giant versions of Worldbreakers, with enormous constantly open mouths. Ordinary Worldbreakers spewed material into them; streamers of compacted rubble propelled by the green gravity beams. Green lights flickered from within the mouths of the large structures, and occasionally, a new Worldbreaker would emerge and float down to join the central cluster.

  Jonas and Keldra kept broadcasting until they lost contact with the comms buoy. They were too deep in the veil now for their signal to get out even that far. Afterwards, they sat and watched as the Worldbreaker cluster loomed closer and closer. They were approaching it at an angle, not from directly starward, and as they came close enough they could see the deep orange filtered light glinting infernally off the millions of flat surfaces.

  Eventually, Keldra help up her hand and mimed a gun once more, holding it close to her eye, as if she was aiming over it at the cluster. She fired, once, and a smile crept slowly over her face.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘It’s time.’

  She detached her chair from her nest, then paused in the doorway for a last look around the bridge, taking in her nest and Jonas’s console. Her eyes flickered momentarily to the place where, in Olzan’s memory, she had lain, after the ship had been struck by the debris from Konrad’s Hope. She looked up at the painted clouds for several seconds, her smile mixing with nostalgia, and then rolled out of the bridge.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Keldra’s garden was dying. The sun panels in the ceiling were at their maximum filter setting: they would be opaque against Belt Three sunlight, but they were thin enough that the sunlight here could force its way through and fill the room with golden light. The air was hot and stuffy, and the water trickling from the irrigation system was warm. From the walls and ceiling came the muffled roar of the overloaded cooling fans. The plants were dead or dying, brown leaves wilting over the sides of the troughs.