Tides of the Continuum 1: Making History (12 page)

18

The freighter lifted from the deck plating, ready to fulfill its mission. It rose a hundred feet into the space above the rest of the remaining ships. It turned carefully toward the opening in the wall. Though it had neither a pilot nor eyes of its own, it moved with exact form. It was flying on command from Athena. It slowly accelerated toward the impending abyss. Racing from the side bay of the Legion, just before the door sealed behind it, the small ship, doomed to become a hero, traveled true to course.

It traveled on a very erratic path, as erratic as it could, that is. Being filled with over ten thousand canisters of protomatter, each weighing slightly more than five hundred kilograms, the freighter had to maneuver over five thousand metric tons, not including its own bulk.

If Gracchus saw his death coming, he didn’t show it.

He sat back in his seat, sipping a potent drink. He knew that his enemy’s time was limited, and the amount was small. All he had to do was defend his ship and himself for a few more minutes before the final stand of the Earth ship Legion. He considered the name, Legion. In an Earth tongue, it meant a group of warriors that numbered between three and six thousand men. But he knew there were many more warriors than that number onboard it. He’d have to be careful to make sure he got them all before he let his guard down and felt safe.

Gracchus had planned to end the days of the Planet Earth in one fell swoop, though he would have to seriously damage this current enemy, he chose not to kill them all yet.

Earth’s protectors had made a very valiant stand against the soon-to-be ultimate power in the galaxy. He felt that they should have the honor of watching him take his final revenge on the world that culled his people. Earth had ostracized his ancestors to the farthest reaches of the known galaxy, without a second thought for their welfare.

Had Gracchus had his own way, he would have exacted his justice years before, when the
Earth was still young and stupid, before it was defended by the cretins charging him now. But he had to wait. For years he had waited, planning, plotting, placing spies, preparing for an unfailing indefatigable assault.

Yes, his nemeses were valiant, but stupid. Who would dare challenge one, like himself, with all power over space? Whoever they were, they would never meet face to face with their executioner.

Gracchus reached for his comlink circuit. “Kellan, you fool. Power the rift emitter.”

Other lights flashed on his console, signaling a new weapon in use. An evil smile crept onto his lips as he began pressing his fire command. One by one, the tiny pests racing around him were being pushed into another layer of space, one where laws of physics prohibited matter from existing. As each was thrust out of sight, a small flash could be seen, their material being ripped in twain from the force. But this weapon would offer no threat to something as massive as the Legion. Long were the explanations of its mechanism, complicated the math. Suffice it to say the target’s mass played into the weapon’s effectiveness.

All stared in horrified awe as the fighters were nullified, each in turn. The sight before them was one of incomprehensible unfairness. Aurora
thought the universe was cruel for not giving warning about their enemy’s array of weapons. When finished with one, he pulled another from secrecy into use.

Their enemy seemed to have a weapon capable of pushing his enemies into oblivion, a process against which she was certain the Legion could not defend. She turned to her Colonel, her friend, and could only silently wait. She knew that once the freighter came into range of this new weapon, it would be dispatched, as well, in the same fashion.

Lincoln turned to meet her gaze, seeming to read her thoughts. “Don’t worry, it’ll get through,” he reassured her. Secretly, he hoped he was right.

The Legion was on its way to its own course change, the pivotal point when it would fire its cannons on the freighter, to rupture its holds, and detonate its cargo. “This situation may hold a ray of light to our advantage,” reported Athena. “I’ll give my explanation later, and I’m pretty sure you’ll all be around to hear it.”

The small, unmanned ship raced onward, not realizing there was an object in its path, one with very vile intentions. It had one minute before impact, but was never going to reach that point. The Legion powered its vast array of particle cannons, preparing for a very precise drive-by shooting. Athena changed her courses and speeds constantly, anticipating her final goal. The hundreds of small fighters, swarming around the enemy, broke off simultaneously, all grasping free trajectories as fast as they could maneuver.

As planned, the Red Nova targeted the freighter with both of its rift emitters, intent on its devastation. Athena sensed the process, and supplying proper time for shot travel, she fired her entire vestige, one blast each.

The particle charges flew as if thrown from the maelstrom, slowly coalescing on the same path, sweeping toward the targeted ship.

As soon as the cannons had fired, Athena ignited the Legion’s engines and accelerated them to maximum cruise velocity. All the remaining ships had been given orders to gradually bend their courses toward the Earth system, to regroup in Neptune’s shadow. Athena calculated the last fighters would arrive at the meeting point three days after the first ones. The viewers had all been trained on the events of the star system, in the hopes of witnessing the end of an era.

Gracchus slammed his fist on the table and screamed, "Why is everyone leaving? Those cowards! How dare they dishonor my victory by fleeing their own destruction!" As he scanned the fleeing ships, his eyes fell upon the only stalwart craft not cowardly departing.

He fired the rift emitters at this lone ship and curiously looked on as the expected annihilation didn't immediately occur. As the energy from his weapon splayed off its hull like sparks from a fire, he recalled some of the early tests of the rift weapon and how its effectiveness was proportional to the size of its target. The experiments against heavier targets had disastrous consequences. Many lives were lost.

The evil one realized only too late that he had followed his prescribed part, like a marionette puppet. Enraged, he threw maximum power to the gravity field creators, knowing that he would probably cause a very large explosion, taking his own life and those of his crew in the process.

His intention was to also take the lives of the ship, now fleeing the scene. Gracchus had always known he would go out in a blaze of glory, however, he hadn’t imagined it quite like this. It took a few seconds for the effect to begin, due to the target’s sheer momentum. The nose started to dip into subspace, as Gracchus caught sight of the other objects, just coming into his view.

The alarm sounded signaling full power to the Black Core. The next events happened in slow motion in Gracchus’s eyes. The freighter was waist deep in the rift between spatial layers. The fifty energy bursts from the enemy ship all impacted the freighter at once. The flash of light from the explosion was blinding to his eyes. The shock wave was almost too fast to see because of the short distance it traveled before it completely destroyed all electronic equipment on the Red Nova; all, that is, except the gravity field generators, and its main reactor.

With no target specified to unleash its destructive power, the core of the gravity weapon continued to gain density. As every second passed, the contained energies grew closer to breaching the compression field. This would allow the artificial gravity in its heart to tear apart the Red Nova from the inside.

The gravity well crushed the matter that used to compose the Red Nova to the size of a molecule, and packed it onto the ultra compact core of the artificially born black hole. The trapped gases onboard the Red Nova could not escape in any other direction but into the well, adding to the already confused stew of atomic fusion. Because the phenomenon was man-made, it didn't have the sustainability of a natural black hole. Eventually, the fabric of space would recoil and the gravity well would lose cohesion, but it did exist long enough to draw flaming matter from the stars 36 Oph A and B.

Slowly at first, then in clouds, and then in vast swirls of superheated gases, the gravity consumed the two stars. Not even light itself escaped the maelstrom of natural forces at their worst. The only thing to be expelled from the phenomenon was radiation, in the form of x-rays, caused by the act of atoms being ripped apart as they were passing the event horizon, or the point of no return. But not all the stars in the system were affected. 36 Oph C sat too far outside the pull of the singularity, and so was relatively unaffected.

The two stars’ orbits started to degrade. In another hour, they collapsed completely, allowing the bulks of the stars to be compressed into infinitesimal sizes, adding to the mass of the gravity well. The effect wasn’t perpetual, however, for once the black monster consumed the matter, its appetite was satiated. The well lost cohesion, and began to expand on an exponential scale. The energy release appeared glorious, as the matter expansion took place at an unparalleled rate.

The wave front superheated cosmic dust, ignited gas clouds, incinerated everything it passed in an ever-growing spherical shockwave. The colors it displayed to viewers at safe distances were brilliant. Clouds of cast-off hydrogen and nitrogen glowed blue, oxygen a vibrant green. Red and purple swaths rich in sulfur also appeared.

For the first time in universal history, a man had caused a phenomenon capable of being classed as a nova. No other weapon created by the hand of man, currently in existence, can claim to have the kind of power there displayed. The energy field given off by the death of a star has the potential of powering civilization, in all its complexity, until the end of time.

By the time the stars had begun moving toward each other, the senior staff had all lifted from their seats and were standing in a line ten feet back from the energy curtain that they used as a view screen.

Aurora stood motionless, her gaze locked on the ethereal view screen. The entire explosion lit up the room as if the viewer were a window. Though the true brightness had been tamed somewhat by filtering buffers, the scene was still mesmerizing. Softly Aurora spoke when she could, when the show slowed a bit from its original grandeur. "How can such destruction, something so devastating, so cataclysmic, be so beautiful?"

No one disagreed, as their own mouths remained agape at the things they saw. After what seemed like hours, Lincoln spoke up without looking away, "Are-are we a safe distance from it?"

Athena answered, "We have reached a safe distance for now, but we should move in a few hours. The shockwave formed a spherical front which will never stop expanding, though it will lose some power with time and distance."

"Will other stars be affected by it?" asked Chief Ambrose.

Athena answered again, "In four hours the shockwave will envelope 36 Oph C, the last star in this system. It'll probably have a catastrophic effect upon it. And in nineteen and a half years, these events will start to be visible from Earth."

"I wonder how they'll explain it away," said Aurora, more to herself.

"Explain it away?" asked Athena.

"Well," began Aurora, "to their distant view, a normal star system in an apparently stable orbit pattern suffers a collapse and, for no reason at all, two of them collide and then explode. They won't know a thing about us, nor will they be able to see evidence of ships here, notwithstanding the size of the Legion. So I was just curious about how earth-based astrophysicists would mistakenly adjust their sciences to explain why this event happened."

"Good point," said Lincoln as people began to regain power over their bodies. He continued, "They'll probably come up with something believable. After all, it'll never occur to them that this could have been put into motion by intelligent beings. That possibility would be beyond their comprehension, and farther still beyond their belief."

Aurora spoke up as the group made its way back their seats. "It'll probably go down in the history books as simply another unexplained phenomenon in space."

Lincoln interjected, "The scholars will probably say, 'We neither know how it happened nor why, and we probably never will know. The only reason it happened is because it did.’"

“I wonder how beings on other worlds will explain it.” Aurora spoke up to the ceiling, "How long until the cloud is a lightyear across?"

The answer came quick, "In slightly more than 67 years. It'll continue to expand and lose power and visibility forever. In more than thirteen hundred years, the energy and particles from the explosion will enter Earth's space, but by that time there will be no way to tell the difference between it and the gases and dust already there."

The trip home was fraught with work, both replacing and repairing the damaged or destroyed systems and components. All artificial crewmembers that were needed were called to service. There were some androids employed in repairing other androids, for a great many had been affected by the gravity distortion racing through the bowels of the Legion.

In the process of cleaning up the wreckage of the intruder's shuttle, sweeper teams discovered the enemy's method of communication. The bay door, which was supposed to block enemy signals, did not deter the tactical robots. They had actually used the door as their antenna by attaching an ultralow frequency oscillator to its surface.