January 2838
It was not a thermonuclear blast. No one knew precisely what it was, or what caused it. Antimatter explosions were ruled out when the analysis of the discharges' spectra was completed and found to contain no gamma rays. This was doubly interesting: the temperature of the explosion was measured to be several million Kelvins, and the law of blackbody radiation said a copious amount of hard radiation should have been generated.
But it wasn't. The energy discharges consisted of several trillion candelas worth of visible light. No UV. No infrared. Not even any microwaves. (These were all generated later as the surroundings absorbed the energy, of course, but none came from the light itself.)
It was assumed, in the hush that followed the destruction of the Peruvian Andes and the Egyptian desert, that these blasts were the product of an alien species, far more advanced than the human race. Later, as the data were reanalyzed by a small research facility in southern California, it was discovered that the light contained a sequence of modulated waves: a transmission.
The altered wavelengths were a compressed squirt several microseconds long, with a standard polarization modulation. It was determined that the primary waveform precisely matched an opening code sequence-- an obsolete one-- used five to ten years previously as a combat channel by the Imperial Knights.
The researchers were unable to decode the sequence. The transmission, while recognizably of human origin, was completely alien to even the most skilled communication theory specialists. For one thing, the transmission contained millions of distinct, separate waveforms, in a complex array. Someone suggested that the transmission was similar in structure to the multiphase emissions of the human brain. The theory was confirmed when the transmission was fed through a captured supercomputer designed to initiate the Methuselah Transfer, a machine "lifted" from the Brotherhood by certain TDF elite forces just after the Starsiege. Without knowing the original source of the message, and indeed, without having the person's synaptic patterns, it was impossible to decode it. The ultimate cipher.
The blasts, centered on two of the TDF's most likely positions of the Emperor Petresun's hiding place, were disturbing. If the Emperor was indeed where the TDF thought he was, he was certainly dead. A flyby of the Egyptian site showed a haunting image of a vast, glassy crater smoking with the heat of the Earth's mantle. A fraction of a kilometer deeper, and the crater would have exploded with the power of a Richter nine tectonic event, likely triggering a chain reaction of quakes in the area and blowing Egypt itself off the map. As it was, the scientists studying the discharge gazed at their screens in horror as their calculations showed just how close the blasts had come do doing catastrophic damage to Earth.
Whatever set them off had to be deliberately testing the limit.
The Peruvian site was not much better. It was a vast crack in the mountains near Nueva Lima, a crack filled with boiling lava that poured down river channels and out into the Pacific. The explosion displaced a slab of rock hundreds of kilometers long, weighing untold trillions of tonnes. The block sank deeper into the continental lithosphere underlying South America, and other parts of the continent showed measurable uplifting. The tsunami that resulted sent a wave several dozen meters high rolling across the South Pacific, and did significant damage to the islands of Tahiti and New Zealand, continuing on to rip chunks of ice off the Antarctic glaciers.
Again, the force that had set the explosion off skirted dangerously close to the edge of the ice shelf's tolerance. If the explosion had been ten percent more powerful, the Ross Sea's unstable ice would have collapsed, raising a tsunami kilometers tall, wiping out half the world's population in one big splash.
A week later, the variable star eta Carinae, after centuries of imminent destruction, was seen in Earth's skies to go supernova. The human race looked up to the dying star as for several weeks it shined nearly as bright as Earth's full moon. After a few months it faded from sight, leaving astronomers with the first record of a nearby supernova since the 4239 Sagittarii explosion of 2653.
The researchers in California, still without results in their research of the explosions on Earth, fed some of the spectrographic results from the supernova scans into the Methuselah Transfer program, and were shocked to find a fifty percent correlation between the visible-light spectra of the supernova and the unexplained explosions.
But one thing made it seem impossible: the speed of light. For Earth to detect the distant supernova meant that the unstable star had exploded six thousand years ago, well before the Devastation that marked the beginning of recorded history. If it had anything to do with the explosions, they could only be some mysterious side effect traveling on the neutrino wave, undetected, before the main energy shock hit.
What could cause such a thing completely baffled the scientists.
They struggled to find another explanation: what force could set a star to supernova, and then six thousand years later wreak such havoc on Earth?
And what should be made of the sudden reappearance of the long-lost Long Patrol torchship Farsight, burning sunward at an insane rate after being lost for decades in the darkness of the Oort Cloud?
"The Farsight? Nae bloody way!" Captain Ralpha McInnis, of the interceptor Stiletto, said disbelievingly as his scan officer made the report.
"Sorry Cap, checked it already. Three times. The bird's inbound to inner Sol sys at acceleration... hmm."
"Out with it!" McInnis was not a patient man, and now his face was nearly as red as his hair.
"Accelerating at about ten times lethal limit. It's gotta be on autopilot."
"Eh. Vector?"
"Seems to be a Jovian slingshot with an ultimate destination... Earth itself, apparently."
"Eh. Threat analysis?"
"It's a threat. And we can't even do anything about it. The thing's going at one hell of a cee-fractional, and even if we were to call the Jovian defense systems they'd not receive the message in time to mobilize. The thing'll loop around Jupiter, barely bending course, then either blast by Earth at point five cee... or into it."
"Armageddon."
"Warn Earth?"
McInnis scowled. "Yeah. Get on the horn to the Naval command, as secure as you can get it then encrypt a few more times. Let's hope they have the bloody brains to keep it to themselves."
"Don't think they're so stupid as to want to cause a panic."
"You never know, with the Navy..."
"And should I also try to get in touch with the Jovians?" "Who's even there these days?"
"Um... the Tarazedi Alliance is mixing it up with the remnants of that Io glitch force and some new Cybrid revival movement, the Exemplar Guard... they have quite a substantial force there."
"Well hail them too."
"Alright... I have the main frequency for the Navy on. Ready to record."
McInnis nodded, cleared his throat. "Naval One, this is ISS Stiletto. Advise inbound bogey on Earth approach, vectors enclosed, at substantial cee-fraction velocity. Acceleration rules out human crew. Respectfully suggest blowing the thing out of space before it smacks Earth outta the solar system. Out."
"I think I have the main Tarazedi frequency... records for them are very erratic..."
"Put it through. We don't have the option of fiddling with the tuner dial."
"You're on, sir..."
"Jovian space forces, this is ISS Stiletto. Advise inbound bogey on Jupiter approach. Vehicle is traveling at extreme velocity and acceleration, data enclosed. If you can intercept the thing when it reaches Jovian space and boot it into one of your stupid little moons, you'll save Earth a lot of trouble. Out."
The tactical officer spoke up. "The Farsight? Where have I heard that name before?"
The captain grunted. "The thing was an outer-system torchship. Very distinguished record in the Cybrid-monitoring ops field. Last time the captain brought it home, half the crew were dead, and she died a few weeks later in a duel or something. Then the ship launches outta Madrid spaceport at full speed, on automatic, outruns the Orbital G interceptors, and bugs outta Earth space altogether. Titan spaceport tracks it powerless in a cometary orbit, heading to the outer Oort cloud way above the ecliptic. With the speed the thing was going, it had to have got a couple thousand AU out..."
