So it seemed the song was not to be in vain.

PART TEN

The Seven Daughters of Atlas

1

The Eye of the North

1. Braking Maneuver

A.D. 72260

All worlds when seen from space are breathtakingly beautiful.

Torment in summer was a cratered gemstone of golden sands and green crater lakes, and, in winter, an opal of white on silver as the atmosphere froze, dappled with darker azure zones of crater lakes and frozen volcanic gases.

Now, departed from her orbit forever, she sailed through the endless winter of interstellar space and was hanging in the middle of the spiral of sails sixty million miles in radius, pink at the center, purple at the topgallants.

The average velocity of the planet Torment across the abyss of 194 lightyears separating Eldsich from Ain was roughly one-tenth lightspeed. The acceleration beam contained over one hundred yottajoules per second. The precision with which it was maintained in the sails was admirable. The acceleration beam was aimed by means of thousand-mile-radius Fresnel lenses stationed in a line through the Oort cloud of Iota Draconis. The planetary vessel fell out of the beam due to microscopic Brownian jittering in the aiming lenses only ten percent of the time. Out of the millennium of flight, the time spent in free fall was less than a century, all told.

From time to time, Montrose would wake in his coffin at the world’s core and send his mind into such a body as could survive the Plutonian environment. He traveled to the aft pole.

The Scolopendra, housed in armored cybernetic cetacean bodies like living submarines, circled and swam through the liquid nitrogen on high holy days about the monstrous mountain of ultradense artificial materials they had raised directly at the aft pole. The peak reached above the thin atmosphere. A golden space elevator reared beyond sight overhead. Swarms of assembly clouds moved slowly upward over the centuries, infinitesimally shrinking the globe and extensively lengthening the infinite tower of their space elevator, and power gathered from the sail electrostatically charged the great golden length. The assembly cloud drew upon the thinnest and most insubstantial of particles and motes swept up by the world-ship’s sails as Torment flew through the infinite night.

As the journey neared completion, the tower’s length was such that it was more properly called a tail, for it streamed for millions of miles behind the body of Torment. A small section of sail directed energy against the threadlike length, building up a static electric charge greater than that found in the storm clouds of Jupiter before his fall.

Perched on the hull of the lowest section of the tower, along the insulated miles forming the base, buffeted by the cold and screaming winds of hydrogen and helium, Montrose could look down at the roiling humps and odd waves of liquid oxygen, beneath which was a second ocean, like a rippling sand plain, of liquid nitrogen; and farther down, but clearly seen through the young and pristine ocean layer, he saw the crags and glacier tops and crooked peaks of carbon dioxide ice.

Storm clouds of tiny particles formed an immense spiral sweep of colored turbulence in each direction. Here, at the aft pole, it was always noon, and the laser pinprick of dazzling light from Iota Draconis was directly overhead, and the ever-growing topless tower pointed directly at it. The closer one traveled to the fore hemisphere, the lower sank the brilliant dot of sunlight. At dusk was a terminator belt of eternal storm winds circling the whole planet. The fore hemisphere was shrouded in Plutonian night, and the gases formed a perfect dome of atmospheric ice beneath a thin blanket of liquid helium.

It annoyed Montrose that Ximen del Azarchel always seemed to be awake when he woke. Montrose sooner or later would sense or see him, hanging in a monstrous body sluglike to the vertical lengths of the tower or lounging in one of the many balconies etched into the side armor.

“Don’t you ever sleep?” growled Montrose.

“I want to see the nearby stars change position,” said Del Azarchel.

“If you expect to see background stars streaming past like telegraph poles seen from a train, that only happens in cartoons.”

“You would know, my semiliterate friend!”

“They’s too far away for parallax.”

“Ah! But I don’t speak of parallax! Look there! With eyes like these in bodies like these, one can just barely detect the deflection.”

“Funny. I don’t see any deflection…,” said Montrose. “None at all.”

“Nor do I, Cowhand. Nor do I.”

A charged object moving through a magnetic field experiences a Lorenz force at right angles to the line of motion and the direction of the field itself. The principle held true, even if the object was the size of a world and the magnetic field was generated by the dynamo of the disk of degenerate matter circling and falling into the supermassive black hole at the galactic core.

Initial measurements of polarized interstellar dust grains showed the galactic magnetosphere surrounding the star Ain was strong enough to allow the world-ship to overshoot the target, make a thrustless turn, and then, once Ain was line with Iota Draconis off their fore sail, allow them to reenter the beam Vigil was maintaining and slow sufficiently to match speed and metric with Ain.

They should have started a slow but measurable turn at this point.

“What the pox is going on, Blackie?”

“The magnetic interaction with the galactic field is insufficient.”

“You mean something or someone at Ain reached out and made the whole galactic magnetic field in this area weaker? So that we could not slow ourselves and stop by and say hello?”

“Check my calculations if you doubt me.”

“Thanks, I will.” A moment later: “Damnation and canker sores. You are right again.”

“As ever. You might also look over my calculations for using a loop of superconductor to ionize the interstellar medium and convert our momentum to heat. For that is the only other method available to us to lower our velocity, assuming no external aid.”

“I don’t need to look. Mass of a world, moving at one-tenth lightspeed? The heat would be like kissing a nova.”

“Aptly put. And am I right that we have but one course of action here?”

“Reverse the polarity on the tower to bring us back into a straight-line shot with Ain.”

“Indeed.”

“Then, pick the biggest damn object in the system—gas giant, Dyson sphere, whatever we can find—and aim right at it. Our wee tiny planet is only half the mass of Earth, but if we smite the center of their most densely populated area at one-tenth lightspeed, I reckon we can do some damage. About equivalent to a twenty-nine zettaton explosion of TNT, or the total energy output of Deneb each second. Even macroscale structures in the outer system could not survive, made of exotic matter or not.”

Blackie seemed pleased. “And to think how petty and inferior minds once complained about the infinitesimal amounts of energy I released burning an insignificant city off the globe, or two, or ten! No one now recalls the names of those cities, or the land masses on which they sat!”

Montrose rattled off the names of the cities, which he had, of course, memorized.

“Be that as it may,” said Blackie graciously, “in this case, you are not suggesting mercy, are you?”

“It’s them or us,” snarled Montrose. “And this is the star system, Ain. These are the very folk that sicced Asmodel on us. Remember him? Then Cahetel, then Shcachlil the Salamander, then Lamathon the Unkinder Twin, and finally, the worst of the worst, when Rania was getting close, and they stopped caring about any long-term prospects, they sent Achaiah. They sent the Beast. Hell, I remember how many innocent millions died each time.”