“So you say wipe them all out and die in the process?”

“You gotta pay the devil when his hellish bill comes due. Fair’s fair.”

“It is at times like this that I recall why I admire you, Cowhand. You are as bloodthirsty as I am. I, ah, take it you are convinced this unexpected decrease in the local interstellar magnetic field is a deliberate phenomenon, an attempt to prevent us from making starfall? We can, after all, manipulate the smallest part of a topgallant to form a lateral beam, and send out one-way probes, or, with slightly more ingenuity and effort, dispatch the Emancipation like a side boat, and test the galactic magnetosphere to each side of us, and see if the effect is natural.”

“What’s it matter? Natural or not, we now got no way to stop our momentum, unless the Principality at Ain cooperates and either puts back a magnetic field or hoists a deceleration laser.”

“So you say threaten them with ramming if they do not cooperate?”

“Hey. You read the Monument same as me. They got rules about cooperation and collaboration. The Ain Principality has to stop us, and then we owe them.”

“Ah! We must pay the cost of the beam we will threaten them into directing at us, after all, and, as you say, their Cold Equations cover this eventuality. Such was my thought. So you agree to sell this world into indentured servitude…?”

Montrose pondered for at least a century before he answered.

“Ain’t there no damn way to escape these star monsters and their damned system of serfdom and slavery? What gives?”

“Space is cruel, my friend,” mused Del Azarchel. “It is very large and very cruel.”

“The body you got on ain’t got no face, but I can tell you are smiling.”

“Well. Space reminds me of—”

“Don’t say it.”

“—me!”

“Space is smaller than your damned ego, Blackie.”

“I will take that as a compliment. Shall we get on with our astrocide? Stellarcide? Is there a word for the willful destruction of a whole solar system?”

2. Collision Vector

A.D. 72360 TO 73040

Torment, and the one fraction of her population awake and thawed in her many buried cities and habitats, waited and watched with growing anxiety as no change appeared in the magnetic field and no beam came.

The world-ship rotated in preparation for the nonexistent deceleration beam so that her sails were behind her. The endless tower that had been the tail of Torment now reached ahead, a bowsprit longer than the radius of the orbit of Mercury. At the tip of this tower was the tiny point of approaching Ain, growing brighter as years turned into centuries, orange as a coal in a grate.

The giant had a tiny companion star roughly two lightyears away, and taking at least half a million years to orbit each other.

The star Ain itself was an orange-red globe of simply titanic size, ninety times brighter than Sol and burning helium at its core. There were many clues that some sort of industrial structures and coherent energy patterns existed in the core and along the surface of the star, but what these engineering elements were meant to do, even Torment could not guess.

There was a third body in the system. This was a sphere larger than a gas giant, orbiting Ain in an orbit as eccentric as that of Wormwood, now a memory far behind them. The body itself was hidden in massive clouds, black as ink, an opaque sphere extending in each direction some eighty thousand miles. From the energy signals and behavior patterns, it was clear the black clouds were intelligent: cognitive matter, either nanotechnology assemblers or something finer. Oddly, this supermassive gas giant was the only exoplanet the astronomers could detect throughout the Hyades Cluster. The other stars were barren.

That world was the target. Had their velocities been similar, so large a body could have absorbed Torment with no more disturbance than a stone cast into a pond. A few ripples in the cloud layer might pass, and then, nothing. But at one-tenth lightspeed, the disturbance would be akin to a bullet passing into a man, or, more to the point, a bullet passing into a powder keg, since every particle would be liberated in a wash of total conversion if the world did not slow to a stop.

Years passed, and the star system with its single massive planet grew ever closer, their mutual speed undiminished. The invisible point which it was not possible to arrest the motion of the Torment without destroying the planet or the sail array also grew ever closer.

Astronomers could see more of the system. There was no ringworld or strandworld circling the star, but there were clouds of tree-shaped macroscale structures, forming a set of four distinct rings around the star. Two rings were circular, an inner and an outer, both in the orbital plane of the superjovian; one ring was oval, with the primary and superjovian at its focal points; the remaining cloud was not a ring at all but a hyperbolic sweep, a smear of azure and cerulean, sapphire and cobalt forests that looped around Ain like a vast open rainbow.

These macroscale structures looked like leafless trees, or nerve cells, or the skeletons of parasols. Each structure consisted of a long trunk pointing away from the sun and three equally spaced branches pointing toward, and each branch was tipped with three smaller branches, and those smaller branches in turn tipped with three smaller yet, and so on. Some of the dendrite structures were orbiting in pairs, triads, rings, or complex dances of rings within rings, waltzing epicycles, and braids of orbits were woven in and out of each other in an inhuman complexity of the ring structures.

The average tree-shaped structure was some twenty-five thousand miles long, more than twice the length of a diameter piercing the Earth, or nearly two-thirds such a line drawn through Neptune. These structures were the height of worlds, but not the volume. The cylindrical trunks were at most nine hundred miles in diameter.

It was from these structures that the only sign of intelligent activity or energy use came: radio pulses, the infrared shadows of some form of biological or mechanical action passing from branches to trunk, or bursts of neutrinos. Only about one in a hundred of these countless dendrites displayed these actions.

The rest were as still and silent as trees in a winter graveyard, merely orbiting the great orange star.

There came a period where a second planet was seen in the system. It was an ice giant, the size and composition of Neptune, and it followed that belt or band of dendrite bodies forming a hyperbola around Ain.

The giant world came out of the interstellar space from the direction of Iota Tauri, a white dwarf star and an outlying member of the Hyades Cluster. For forty-five years, it sailed along a hyperbolic orbit, passed like a slingshot around the sun.

During a few hours at perihelion, the ice giant came to life. Torment could detect activity, flares of radiation, tiny packages of matter moving at high speed leaving the atmosphere. Energy emissions from the sun flashed into the thawed atmosphere. In opposition, on the far side of the star system, the black superjovian body stirred into life as inky black clouds leaped into ever higher orbits; a red dot of immense heat was detected at the core of the body whenever the black clouds parted for a moment. The neutrino count detected by receivers on the sail of Torment registered a high number of encounters during this period.

Meanwhile, the dendrite objects opened fire on the ice giant, sending out white-hot needles of material from their forward arms toward the Neptunian body. Whether this was an act of war or of commerce was unclear. Perhaps it was a method of delivering material rapidly to the gas giant’s atmosphere.

The solar system lapsed into silence after about ten hours of activity. The black superjovian grew quiescent, and the neutrino count dropped.