Cixin Liu - Death's End

Before departing the fleet base, former Commander Rovinski, former Lieutenant Commander Schneider, and about a dozen other officers returned under guard to Bronze Age for the last time to assist with some details of the handover of the ship to her new crew.

For more than a decade, this ship had been their entire world. They had carefully decorated the inside with holograms of grasslands, forests, and oceans; cultivated real gardens; and built fishing ponds and water fountains, turning the ship into a real home. But now, all that was gone. All traces of their existence on the ship had been wiped away. Bronze Age was once again just a cold stellar warship.

Everyone they encountered in the halls looked at them coldly or simply ignored them. When they saluted, they made sure their eyes did not waver, to make it clear to the prisoners that the salute was for the military police escorting them only.

Schneider was brought to a spherical cabin to discuss technical details of the ship’s targeting system with three officers. The three officers treated Schneider like a computer. They asked him questions in an emotionless voice and waited for his answers. There was not a hint of politeness, and not a single wasted word.

It took only an hour to complete the session. Schneider tapped the floating control interface a few times, as though closing some windows out of habit. All of a sudden, he kicked the spherical wall of the cabin hard, and propelled himself to the other end of the chamber. Simultaneously, the walls shifted and divided the cabin into two halves. The three officers and the military policeman were trapped in one half, and Schneider was alone in the other.

Schneider brought up a floating window. He tapped on it, his fingers a blur. It was the control interface for the communications system. Schneider brought the ship’s high-powered interstellar communications antenna online.

A faint pop. A small hole appeared in the cabin wall, and the cabin was filled with white smoke. The barrel of the military policeman’s gun poked through the hole and aimed at Schneider.

“This is your last warning. Stop what you’re doing immediately and open the door.”

“ Blue Space, this is Bronze Age. ” Schneider’s voice was quiet. He knew how far his message could travel had nothing to do with how loudly he spoke.

A laser beam shot through Schneider’s chest. Red steam from vaporized blood erupted from the hole. Surrounded by a red fog made of his own blood, Schneider croaked out his last words:

“Don’t come back. This is no longer your home!”

Blue Space had always responded to Earth’s entreaties with more hesitation and suspicion than Bronze Age had, so they had only been decelerating slowly. Thus, by the time they received Bronze Age ’s warning, they were still heading away from the Solar System.

After Schneider’s warning, Blue Space instantly shifted from decelerating to accelerating full speed ahead.

When Earth received the intelligence report from the sophons of Trisolaris, the two civilizations had a shared enemy for the first time in history.

Earth and Trisolaris were comforted by the fact that Blue Space didn’t currently possess the ability to engage in dark forest deterrence against the two worlds. Even if it tried to broadcast the locations of the two solar systems to the universe at full power, it would be almost impossible for anyone to hear it. To reach Barnard’s Star, the nearest star that Blue Space could use as a superantenna to repeat Ye Wenjie’s feat, would take three hundred years. However, it hadn’t shifted its course toward Barnard’s Star. Instead, it was still heading toward NH558J2, which it wouldn’t reach for two thousand more years.

Gravity, as the only Solar System ship capable of interstellar flight, immediately began to pursue Blue Space . Trisolaris brought up the idea of sending a speedy droplet—formally, it was called a strong-interaction space probe—to pursue and destroy Blue Space. But Earth unequivocally refused. From humanity’s perspective, Blue Space should be dealt with as a matter of internal affairs. The Doomsday Battle was humanity’s greatest wound, and after more than a decade, the pain had not lessened one whit. Permitting another droplet attack on humans was absolutely politically unacceptable. Even though the crew of Blue Space had become aliens in the minds of most people, only humanity should bring them to justice.

Out of consideration for the ample time that remained before Blue Space could become a threat, Trisolaris acquiesced. However, Trisolaris emphasized that, since Gravity possessed the ability to broadcast via gravitational waves, its security was a matter of life and death for Trisolaris. Therefore, droplets would be sent as escorts, but would also ensure an overwhelming advantage against Blue Space.

Thus, Gravity cruised in formation with two droplets a few thousand meters away. The contrast between the sizes of the two ship types couldn’t be greater. If one pulled back far enough to see the entirety of Gravity, the droplets would be invisible. And if one pulled close enough to a droplet to observe it, its smooth surface would clearly reflect an image of Gravity.

Gravity was built about a decade after Blue Space. Other than the gravitational wave antenna, it was not significantly more advanced. Its propulsion systems, for example, were only slightly more powerful than Blue Space ’s. Gravity ’s confidence in the success of their hunt was due to their overwhelming advantage in fuel reserves.

Even so, based on the ships’ current velocities and accelerations, it would take fifty years for Gravity to catch Blue Space.

Cheng Xin gazed up at her star from the top of a giant tree. It was why she had been awakened.

During the brief life of the Stars Our Destination Project, a total of fifteen individuals were granted ownership of seventeen stars. Other than Cheng Xin, the other fourteen owners were lost to history, and no legal heirs could be located. The Great Ravine acted like a giant sieve, and too many did not make it through. Now, Cheng Xin was the only one who held legal title to a star.

Though humanity still hadn’t begun to reach for any star beyond the Solar System, the rapid pace of technological progress meant that stars within three hundred light-years of the Earth were no longer of mere symbolic value. DX3906, Cheng Xin’s star, turned out to have planets after all. Of the two planets discovered so far, one seemed very similar to Earth based on its mass, orbit, and a spectrum analysis of its atmosphere. As a result, its value rose to stratospheric heights. To everyone’s surprise, they discovered that this star already had an owner.

The UN and the Solar System Fleet wanted to reclaim DX3906, but this couldn’t be done legally unless the owner agreed to transfer the title. Thus Cheng Xin was awakened from her slumber after 264 years of hibernation.

The first thing she found out after emerging from hibernation was this: As she had expected, there was no news whatsoever about the Staircase Program. The Trisolarans had not intercepted the probe, and they had no idea of its whereabouts. The Staircase Program had been forgotten by history, and Tianming’s brain was lost in the vastness of space. But this man, this man who had merged into nothingness, had left a real, solid world for his beloved, a world composed of a star and two planets.

A Ph.D. in astronomy named 艾 AA [3] Translator’s Note: This is a name written in a mix of Chinese characters and English letters. The “艾” is the surname and is pronounced “Ai.” had discovered the planets around DX3906. As part of her dissertation, AA had developed a new technique that used one star as a gravitational lens through which to observe another.