by David Nabhan
Tacticians had imagined dozens of warships engaged in hundreds of overlapping dogfights within an enormous three-dimensional battlefield. The goal would be to force an opposing warship into the destructive radius of an exploding tactical nuke, while keeping one’s own vessels outside these danger zones. Many factors would affect the outcome of this type of war of attrition: speed and angle of attack, numbers and disposition of forces in the Field, and of course, the quantity of nuclear firepower stored on board in magazines. Just as important would be the morale and toughness of the combatants; war games showed that a grinding slug fest was the likely scenario. Repeated blasts from nuclear explosions would eventually and inevitably melt and crack the molyserilium coating on wounded vessels and those vulnerable spots would show up on enemy scanners, drawing laser fire from any opponent with a clear line of sight. Unprotected sections of stricken ships would have to be jettisoned, and quickly. The new molyserilium exteriors, laid bare by the loss of the destroyed compartments, would now be an integral part of damaged vessels’ laser reflector—hopefully.
A warship could go on fighting, theoretically, for as long as its crew could stand being pummeled with non-stop g forces, while slowly losing parts of itself and squads of its crew, until a vital section were lost and every crewman on board was killed. The greatest advantage a manned warship had was due to the old-fashioned, hard-to-beat human capacity for patching and fixing on the fly. Fire ships and unmanned decoys were also part of the fleet, adding a further layer of complexity to the grueling match. Military scientists on both sides imagined a fight like that in store for the Terran and Borelian fleets closing on each other.
The great contest ended with even less than a whimper though, because it never took place at all. Borealis had other matters with which to contend now, and laying claim to the Object fell from the highest order of the most crucial undertaking of the state, to below worth mentioning directly as the order to disperse was issued. There was no base to which the prize might be brought home. Borealis, within hours, was to be converted into a puppet-state of the Terran Ring, a Vichy, only providing helium-3 to the conquerors instead of wine.
Standing and fighting now had very much the look of cavalry charging tanks. It had been done in history supposedly, but not too well, not lately. The Borelian fleet followed the last order of the Council, abandoning the Object to the victorious Terrans, fleeing toward the Outer, their morale matching their situation.
ONE OF THE FEW of the 12,657 indicted by Terra yet not in custody on the Ring was Clinton Rittener. There are those who say that the canister he rode off the Moon only escaped being instantly vaporized by the circling Terran fleet because they had orders not to fire. This hard-bitten, pessimistic scenario has Rittener far from a reformed mercenary trying to make amends for his life with a lasting peace, and rather as an agent of Terra after all, superbly ensconced now within whatever remained of the Borelian resistance. In their suspicious, world-weary view, Terra permitted him to be sent straight into the bosom of the last remaining cadre of armed resistance—the Borelian fleet. The truth was quite a bit different from this spine-tingling, clandestine double-agency. Like many truths compared to the speculation though, the simple facts didn’t need to be adorned.
No one had ever taken a suicidal ride off the Moon inside a helium-3 canister. Strapped in, cushioned with foam, and injected with a concoction of pharmacons that played dangerous games with internal organs and blood vessels, Rittener, even as the sedatives took effect just before launch, didn’t hold much hope himself.
“This doesn’t have a chance of actually working, does it?” Rittener groggily asked the chief engineer before the hatch was slid shut and locked.
“Just lay back and keep your fingers crossed,” the chief answered, stowing the barest of essential supplies and tugging on the belts and straps. He added with a false bravado, “We’ve got a few tricks up our sleeves to get EMMA to go a little easier on you.” Since it had never been attempted it was certainly true, “We’ve never lost anyone yet.”
The cartridge would have scanned something like a normal helium-3 canister, being mostly gas; and there was no weaponry, machinery, or complicated circuitry within. It was headed away from the fleet, in the direction of Mars. And, unbeknownst to conspiracy theorists, there was an order to refrain from firing on outgoing helium-3 canisters. The Terran Ring was eager to show the entire Solar System that there was nothing terrible transpiring in this little fuss between themselves and Borealis. All was going to be well, better even, with Terra now firmly at the helm. Helium-3 was on its way, like it always was. So thanks to Terran politics, and the fog of combat, by hook or by crook, Clinton Rittener made it off the Moon, eclipsing escape velocity, and coasting toward the emptiness of black space.
Aside from the few refugees on the few warships of a state that existed no more, everyone with any sense in the Solar System was cowed by this tremendous upturn in the fortunes of the Terran Ring. The people of Earth, Mars, the Asteroid Belt, and the Jovian moons, and as far out as Titan, had all only just been stunned with the news of the Object’s existence. Now they found that Borealis had been extinguished over it, by the use of weapons beyond the ken of current military technology, perhaps it quite realistically and frighteningly seemed now, developed by the use of super advanced extraterrestrial sources to which Terra had access.
If everything was moving too fast, it wasn’t moving too quickly for diplomats everywhere to quickly adopt the same position: the surrender was immediate and total. No one lifted a finger or said a word in Borealis’ defense, each state outdoing the other in its slavish pronouncements of allegiance to Terra. A truly new age had dawned and anyone could see that it was to be the Terran Ring that would be the protagonist in the chronicle to be written.
IT WAS AN ASIAN Alliance ship, Kasuga, under Captain Kanda Minoru, who picked him up. It was safer for fleeing Borelian warships to keep their distance, so the last gambit of having an allied vessel link up with Rittener seemed more prudent. Minoru, who knew Rittener personally, having served with him in Asia, probably would have been faithful to his erstwhile comrade, as would have been the Asian Alliance. Like most bellicose states on Earth, not knowing when to quit, and always keeping the dream alive of somehow, some way getting a blow in on Terra, their real policy hadn’t changed—even now. The proof of that is that Minoru didn’t deliver the body to Terran authorities, or even apprise them of his demise. Instead he consigned the body to burial in space, with full military honors, befitting a fallen commander in the Borelian Service.
Rittener, like so many of his generation, like so many children of groaning Earth in his age—starved, beaten, dispossessed, impoverished—didn’t leave a scrap of physical evidence behind of his having even existed. There is one thing though that he accomplished that will last for an eternity. In a way, he’d placed into perpetuity a very poignant monument to Earth, one that should remain circling Sol long, long after the Terran Ring itself ceased to be. He carried with him into his final orbit, forever circling the Sun in the dead, somber space between Earth and Mars, a token of a turn mankind should have made at the beginning of the killing centuries before it was too late. His far-removed ancestor and some unknown British Tommie had known that, and here was the proof on his dead finger, floating tens of millions of miles above the senseless battlefields of the Western Front—a red salmon, leaping happily over three blue waves—the insignia of the Second Corps, but really the symbol of mankind’s age-old, unrequited dream of . . . peace.
COSMOLOGISTS KNOW THAT HUMANITY and Earth have both ridden quite an amazing lucky streak. A bit closer or further away from the Sun and the blue paradise planet would be frozen or broiled. But for her weighty satellite, Moon, to steady her axis, and Earth’s roiling, turbid, molten core to generate her radiation blocking magnetic shield, the planet would have remained a barren and lonely place. At every step of a billions-year-long saga, whenever the die were cast, with survival or death in the balance, Earth’s l
ife force overcame all no matter how long the odds. No lucky streak lasts forever though.
It was bad luck, indeed, that the Object detonated precisely when it did, when Earth’s eastern hemisphere had wheeled under the section of the Terran Ring to which it had been orbitally nudged and quarantined. The last time an explosion this violent and strong occurred, in these environs of the Solar System, was four billion years ago when the proto-Earth collided with Mars-sized Theia to create the Moon. The blast instantly vaporized half of Terra, the entire semicircular section of the Ring, ninety degrees in both directions from the epicenter of the detonation. The force of the explosion tore through the Terran Ring like a sledgehammer through a cloud, and reached down to the surface of the planet to boil off the top layers of the oceans below, and to sterilize Europe, Africa, and Asia. The Old World disappeared—just like that.
On the other side of the Ring, the sections above Earth’s western hemisphere, death came just a few heartbeats later. For the Terran Ring was no longer a “ring”; half of it had been erased. What remained was a shattered, fracturing, boomerang-shaped reservoir of potential energy that was now going horrifically, unbelievably, wildly—kinetic. It wobbled awkwardly, surreally, spinning once around the globe, playing out its inertia, before plunging to Earth in a ghastly dive, a fall so terrifying and unthinkable that the sound alone shattered the eardrums of most of the people still alive on Earth.
The sky—actually—was falling.
It was falling, and coming down on South America. Country-sized pieces of the Ring crashed to the ground at what had once been Ecuador, Peru, Venezuela, Colombia and Brazil. These places, along with almost all of Amazonia, which burned for months, disappeared as identifiable locales, their former identities pounded beyond recognition as trillions of tons of steel slammed into them with enough kinetic energy to alter the rotation of Earth.
The rest of what remained of the Ring splashed into the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, pieces many hundreds of miles long, some thousands of miles in length, raising tsunamis of unfathomable height, extent, and power. Coastlines around the planet were drowned. Central America was overtopped; all the land from Panama to Mexico completely submerged as immeasurable quantities of water sloshed out of the oceanic basins and then receded again.
Humanity had taken a savage punch, meant to be a killing blow. It didn’t exterminate the human race, however, but it did send Earth stumbling backward several centuries. And, of course, the Terran Ring, with its five billion inhabitants, was just—gone. When those survivors still alive on Earth, mostly in the heartland of North America which had been spared, summoned the temerity to cautiously leave their homes and gaze up, a dumbfounded look was written across their faces. That same expression could be seen for many, many years whenever people looked up toward the equatorial skies, still not really sure that such an eternal feature in the heavens was actually, in fact—just gone.
The Terran Ring was gone, and with it went its age. Everything changed.
Borealis survived, actually was saved by the “Event,” as it was called. Yes, at first there was a period of unrestrained rioting and disorder, as mobs hunted down and exterminated any of the unfortunate Terran overlords who had barely arrived to administer the newly acquired province. These ill-fated taskmasters now couldn’t care less about helium-3 or any of the other great questions that had animated them yesterday. Their only concern now was how to manage to go on breathing hour by hour. When the bloodlust abated and cooler heads prevailed, Borealis was forced to appreciate how important these former conquerors were. The pool of scientists, engineers, doctors, administrators, and others necessary to efficiently run a society had been dangerously thinned, with billions of them just recently having been evaporated. Borealis’ entire intelligentsia, sadly, had been among them, incarcerated on the Ring—Nerissa, too. They also realized that the Terran Ring’s own storm trooper tactics, which had wrested the Object from Borealis’ grasp, was ironically the very means by which the city had been saved, while the Ring destroyed. A marriage of convenience was hastily arranged and the last several thousand Terrans alive were assimilated into Borelian society.
That society was irrevocably sent down a different path. The price of helium-3 plummeted as fast as the Ring had fallen. Simply put, Borealis’ customers were all dead. There was still a demand for it in the Outer and piddling amounts were sent to clients on Earth. The consignments for Earth, though, in a morbid yet telling way, were designated “American.” Mother Earth, laid so low, having been downgraded from a world to just a continent, now almost lost her very name, the Borelians giving that catch-all moniker to anyone living on the planet below, including the few Australians, Argentines, and Chileans left with whom they also did business. But business was bad, and getting worse all the time.
The Event produced the profoundest effects in the Outer though, its aftermath forging the path of the course history was to follow. No matter the dreadful result, Mars, Titan, the Jovian colonies, and all the rest had seen everything unfold with their own eyes. The Object did move at just a fraction below light speed, must have somehow combined astounding amounts of anti-matter with matter—measured in the equivalent firepower of millions of tons—to effect such an explosion, and gave tantalizing clues as it streaked toward Earth that it certainly wasn’t propelled by helium-3 but by quite a different energy source. Harnessing the power of vacuum fluctuations had been a dream with roots stretching as far back as the 20th century. It now became a real goal. The bizarre irony of the Event was that, in destroying Earth, it was the single greatest impetus transforming humanity into the anchorless, space-faring people that they became. If it had been the purpose of the Object to exterminate mankind, the result of the attack not only failed to snuff out completely the cradle of human civilization, but strengthened its reign tenfold, a hundred fold, by sending its tentative shoots out in every direction toward the stars. Titan was the first to construct an actual, working quantum ramjet. The colonies on the Jovian System followed up this astonishing achievement by mining anti-matter, and appreciable quantities of it, from . . . well, from nothing. The void itself—endless, ubiquitous, eternal—became the new larder to satisfy man’s hunger for energy. This pantry could never run out.
Borealis in time became nothing more than a curiosity, with visitors taking in the place for the history, but wondering what people actually did here. The city was more museum than anything else. The great mansions were still there, but like grand saloons in ghost towns, even children could tell something was missing that used to be here. Parents explained things by taking their youngsters on excursions outside the city. The Field was one of the most visited tourist attractions in the Solar System so at least the Moon was left looking handsome and well-groomed. The harvesters had raked the lunar surface neatly—great, continental-sized sections of the Moon—squeezing Luna dry of helium-3, and in their wake leaving the greatest Japanese rock garden in the universe.
“What was helium-3? Did they burn it?” the young would ask. It was easy for children to confuse it with the one before. “No, it was petroleum they burned,” came the corrections.
The greatest lessons however for the children of Earth were suavely combed into these cornrow lines scratched into the surface of her satellite, clues to the question that had been posed by every ten-year-old who ever heard the old, old epic tale. If the first Trojan horse caused a city to be razed, the second had eviscerated an entire planet.
“Who built the Object? Who built it, and why did they do that?”
“No one knows who built it,” parents told their sons and daughters. “Nor how old it was, nor even if it was meant specifically for humanity. It may simply have been patrolling space to wipe out in advance any up-and-coming civilization that might be a potential adversary to them, whoever they were—or are.” Some of the more lunatic ideas said it might have been constructed on Earth, by humans, but from a very, very distant past age. “No one knows though.”
Parents scru
tinized adolescent faces for acknowledgement of understanding. It wasn’t just a story about heroes like Clinton Rittener, or guarding against dangers such as the unspeakably evil alien beings who’d brutalized Earth in ages past.
“Do you understand how Borealis’ and Terra’s and Earth’s rivalry left them vulnerable to the greatest danger?”
As for Earth, well, for the first time in centuries it had peace. Cynics explained the phenomenon by pointing out that there were too few able-bodied men left on Earth to field an army. The Event, as mind-numbingly awful as it was, still was but the last and most brutal in a series of seemingly unending blows of death and destruction that had rained on Earth. It was, though, the tipping point. Whether mankind’s cradle was to take this new opportunity to begin again properly, by disavowing violence finally and forever, by husbanding its resources suitably, by becoming astute stewards finally of the planet to which they’d fallen heir—all of this slowly, strangely, inexorably lost its power to interest even. Humanity, as if finally falling out of love with a dysfunctional paramour, was starting to look the other way: outward.
It didn’t happen in a great rush, like so many for gold, oil, and land. It was more like spores on a soft but steady breeze rustling through a meadow on a fine day. From Titan the Sun was nothing more than the brightest star. The other billions in the Milky Way at long last had grabbed hold of mankind’s undivided attention. The center of gravity of civilization had moved away from the Sun, its warmth and power ultimately, after so many eons, having lost the allure to hold its children spellbound any longer. And those on the far edges, slowly, inevitably, cautiously, simply let go.