Book 2 Epilogue
When the System fell on Heyk, it was just the start of the real work.
Years and years of industrial labor – a reflection of distance more than difficulty – had resulted in an immense communications array floating at the edge of the star system. That far out, that the primary’s light was a wan, thin thing, and solar power required hundreds of square miles of mirror just for basic functions. Even such an enormous swath of collectors wasn’t enough for array, which had massive feathery spindles of cooling fins radiating outward from fusion generators and tanks of fuel good for several thousand years.
The dishes and emitters of the array were measured in the hundreds of square miles as well, connected to the generators by a long tether of superconductor stretching through the void. The whole apparatus looked like God’s own bola, two loose spheres of diffuse machinery connected by one single cable. Large as it was, the comms array was not underbuilt. It took a lot of power to transmit high-density messages over the distance of light-years.
Cato knew he wouldn’t get any response for a long time. He’d been plotting the relative locations of System worlds in real space, and while some of the planets were surprisingly close, even the nearest neighbors were in the range of tens of light-years. More of the gaps were in the hundreds or thousands, and some an order of magnitude above that. The System Worlds seemed to become marginally more frequent in the direction of the Large Magellanic Cloud, where star densities were generally higher, but Cato-Heyk was only concerned with his own pocket of space. Other versions of himself would have to deal with the remaining System worlds.
It would be decades yet before the transmissions reached any of the System worlds, let alone any of the worlds that had left isolated after the annexation war, but hopefully what he’d learned would help his other selves. There was no way he could send any material support — nor any purpose, either. Even if he had been willing to strip the system dry, which he wasn’t, actual travel times were centuries to millennia, and by then there was nothing reinforcements could do. Either some version of him would have everything under control, or no technology would be of any help.
He swam through the expansive and delicate emission arrays in a void-life frame, not really needing to inspect it personally but feeling better for doing so. The only ambient light came from the stars, a shade of truly heroic proportions sheltering the transmitters and receivers from direct sunlight in order to keep them as cool as possible. In that faintest of lights he concluded his inspection and guided the void-life frame back to its docking cradle, which held all the mechanisms for the swarm of maintenance drones that would be keeping the array running.
Reconciling himself back to the planetary orbits took nearly eight hours, though for the version of him back in orbit those hours were still incredibly busy. The world of Heyk was undergoing remediation on a breathtaking scale, as the System’s collapse had left it nearly uninhabitable. Or at least, it would have become uninhabitable in months without intervention, as massive flora die-offs tanked oxygen levels and the lack of any native bacteria capable of breaking down alien biomatter meant the weathered husks wouldn’t decay and couldn’t be recycled on their own.
“They’re trying to burn the grain crops again,” Leese told him the moment he finished the reconciliation process.
“How the hell can we convince them that they’re supposed to grow food?” Cato asked rhetorically. In a way he didn’t really blame the inhabitants, since they’d not been prepared for the shift away from the System. To them, he was an apocalypse, unwanted and unwarranted, though at least they were alive to appreciate it — even if they chose not to.