Belt Three

‘Mr Glass is right. They’re Planetary Age artefacts. There are only so many left and when they’re gone, they’re gone. They’re important, people are just…’ she shrugged, ‘people.’

Vazoya leapt across the table at her, scattering foil plates and sending the coffee cup spinning onto the floor. Olzan grabbed her around the waist and held her back as she struggled to reach the other woman. Keldra had sprung up, ready to return the blows.

‘Pack it in, both of you,’ Olzan shouted. ‘This isn’t up for discussion. We do the job Mr Glass pays us to do.’

‘Tell Mr Glass he can go fuck himself,’ Vazoya said, directing her anger towards Olzan now, or rather towards the implant they all knew sat at the base of Olzan’s skull. ‘I know you’ll watch this recording. You can go fuck yourself. I’ve had enough of this outfit. I’m getting off at the next rock.’ She stormed off down the corridor towards her quarters. Olzan let her go. She’d be back. She needed to vent, but she’d follow orders.

Brenn hesitated and then went out after Vazoya. Tarraso shrugged.

‘Ah, what’s it matter anyway? All be the same when the last rock’s gone.’

‘Doesn’t have to be.’ Keldra seemed to be talking to herself.

‘What was that?’ asked Olzan.

‘We should fight them. Don’t have to let them win.’

Tarraso laughed. It wasn’t a sarcastic or mocking laugh. He had genuinely found Keldra’s comment funny. ‘Can’t fight the Worldbreakers,’ he said as he left.

Keldra didn’t respond. She stayed seated, staring at the table.

Olzan watched her for a moment and then walked back to his cabin. ‘All right,’ he said under his breath, for the recording. ‘We’re on our way.’

‘What are the Worldbreakers?’

Jonas looked up from his terminal as Keldra strode onto the bridge. With a click of her fingers she summoned an image of a Worldbreaker onto the screen. It was a simple diagram, a black dodecahedron with its edges picked out in green wireframe. One of its twelve faces had five lines meeting in the centre where the Worldbreaker’s mouth could open, and from that face a faint wireframe extended inwards, sketchily showing what little was known of the Worldbreaker’s internal anatomy.

He stopped work and closed down his bridge terminal. He had a feeling this would take a while. ‘No one knows,’ he said.

‘Wrong.’ Keldra walked past her control nest, and stood in front of the screen like a schoolteacher giving a lecture. She stared critically at Jonas, as if expecting another response.

‘People say different things about them,’ he said. ‘Scribers believe that they’re angels, sent to usher us into Paradise.’

‘They’re wrong. They’re idiots.’

Jonas remembered the earnestness on Gabriel’s face, shining through the smoke from his incense burner as he’d talked about his beliefs. ‘They might be wrong, but they’re not stupid,’ he said carefully, not letting any emotion show.

‘The Scribers are idiots,’ Keldra repeated, as if she had just cut through all the complexities of their beliefs and settled the matter. ‘What else do people say?’

Jonas decided there was no point in arguing about Gabriel’s honour now. He pushed Gabriel’s memory out of his mind and tried to recall the other religions’ beliefs about the Worldbreakers. ‘The Arkites say they’re a second Flood.’ He had only a vague idea what the first Flood was meant to have been; he had trouble visualizing enough water to cover the surface of a planet. ‘Once the belts are gone, God will make the planets re-form and people can start again.’

‘Hah. Any day now, I’m sure.’

‘The Eternalist groups believe that they’re part of the natural order,’ Jonas said. ‘The planets are made and un-made on an endless cycle. The True Belters say that there never were any planets – they’re a myth – and the Worldbreakers and the belts have always been there. Some people say they’re a natural phenomenon and it’s nothing to do with God, if there even is a god.’

‘Wrong, wrong, wrong,’ Keldra said. ‘What do you believe?’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t believe anything.’

‘You believe whatever works best for your persona, I bet.’

‘Sometimes,’ he said. He let a little of his annoyance show. ‘Are you going to get to a point? If you’re so sure everyone is wrong, I assume that means you’ve got it all figured out.’

‘They’re not angels, or demons, or gods,’ Keldra said. ‘But they’re not natural either. They’re machines.’

He gave her a disdainful look. ‘Machines. Built by people?’

‘Built by aliens.’

‘Machines built by aliens.’

‘It’s not so far-fetched. It’s obvious, if you look at the data rather than listen to the babbling of the churches.’

‘Really.’

‘I’m not even the first one to have this idea. It was the scientific consensus, back in the first century after the Worldbreakers came. Back when there were still universities and researchers.’ Her voice dripped venom. ‘The information’s out there, on the city datanets, if you know where to look. But no one does look. They’d rather believe in angels and gods.’

‘So what is this information?’

Keldra clicked her fingers again. The Worldbreaker disappeared from the screen, replaced by a belt chart, concentric circles around the yellow orb of the sun. But instead of the normal five belts, there were nine, and instead of the normal hazy toroids, all but one of the belts was a fine line with a single circle standing out on it like the jewel on a necklace.

‘This is the solar system before the Worldbreakers arrived,’ she said. ‘Four inner rocky planets, the primordial belt, four outer gas planets. Plus other minor bodies; this is a simplification.’ She snapped her fingers and a line appeared on the edge of the chart, arrowing in from interstellar space. ‘That is the first sighting of the Worldbreaker Cluster. It arrived from another star system. It didn’t just appear.’

‘That doesn’t mean anything,’ Jonas said. ‘Angels could come from another star system.’

‘Shut up,’ Keldra said. ‘You don’t need angels to explain the Worldbreakers. Look at what they do.’ She waved at the screen and the circles began spinning, fast-forwarding through time. The Worldbreaker Cluster moved in towards the planets and then split into countless red lines, like the tendrils of a microgravity adjusted plant. In Jonas’s day, each Worldbreaker travelled alone, independent of the others, but the ones on the screen moved in swarms, hundreds or thousands strong. The largest swarm went straight down towards the sun. Others swerved towards the jewel-like dots on the belt lines: the planets.

One by one, as the Worldbreaker swarms reached them, the planets winked out.

‘They need two things,’ Keldra said. ‘Raw material and energy. Energy they get from the sun. That’s why they get so close to it. Raw material they get from the planets. They blew them up, and then they started scooping up the debris.’

‘What do they need it for?’

‘To keep running. They’re self-sustaining; they make more of themselves. My point is, they’re not magic. They’re technological artefacts. Machines.’

‘They don’t look like any machines I’ve seen,’ Jonas said.

‘That’s because they weren’t made by us. They’re much more advanced, maybe by millions of years.’ She brought back the Worldbreaker diagram. ‘I think they’ve learned to manipulate gravity somehow. They use that for both their weapon and their reactionless drive. I don’t know how it works, but I don’t think it breaks any physical laws. They can’t create something out of nothing; they still need energy and raw materials.’

‘All right. Supposing that’s true, why would anyone want to build these machines?’

‘To destroy us,’ Keldra said. The image on the screen changed again, this time filling with stars scattered through three-dimensional space. ‘Someone else out there must have spotted us. We were broadcasting from Earth for hundreds of years before the Worldbreakers arrived; maybe they heard us. Or maybe it was longer ago, and they just spotted a planet with life on it in our system. I think they saw us as a threat. As competition. They wanted to wipe us out before we became too powerful.’

‘Or maybe they had a reason we can’t imagine,’ Jonas said.

‘However alien your mindset, kill or be killed will always apply.’

‘Maybe.’