Диана Дуэйн - Lifeboats

The view switched to one of Thesba, a badly pockmarked and deeply fissured world splattered with big patches in dun and brown that Kit suspected were leftovers from old violent volcanic activity. Nita leaned toward him. “Look at that atmosphere,” she whispered.

“Sooner look at it than breathe it,” Kit whispered back. It was curdled yellow with what were almost certainly noxious gases from an oxygen-breather’s point of view.

“—both Tevaralti scientific investigation and manual data concur that Thesba was probably acquired from one of the shorter-lived stars in the local OB association. This large star became unstable within several billion years of formation and violently blew off a significant portion of its mass in the form of energetic plasma shells, thereby also dislodging various minor planets that were still in relatively early formative stages.”

“Uh oh…” Nita muttered.

The view shifted to a three-dimensional view of the interior of Thesba, produced either by wizardry or some technology more advanced than anything Kit was familiar with. Or possibly both… He squinted at it. “Wait. Has that got two cores?”

“Almost three,” Nita whispered back. “Wait till it rotates again. See that third lobe? What a mess.”

“—the irregularly formed core makes it immediately plain why Thesba’s rotational relationship with its primary has in the past been problematic,” Mamvish was saying. “The irregularity of the core masses imparts a significant wobble to the body, and its interactions with Tevaral’s mass have for many millennia involved long cycles of relative stability alternating with equally long cycles of unstable behavior in the volcanic and tectonic modes. Therefore ever since wizardry arose on Tevaral, its Planetaries have spent a great deal of time over millennia attempting to manipulate Thesba’s core masses into more stable, or at least more manageable configurations.”

“Oh no.” Nita shook her head. “Can’t have got them much of anywhere…”

The view backed off into a wider one of the two bodies, the green-gold planet and the dun-and-gold moon, swinging uneasily around one another. “These worlds have circled one another in this mode for the last few millennia without any serious alteration of their mutual status,” Mamvish said, “but over the last several hundred years both of them have become increasingly tectonically active. Indications are that Thesba’s mass irregularities have slowly been inducing non-ephemeral deep level weaknesses in Tevaral’s inner mantle structure, and these weaknesses have been becoming more serious over the course of the last century. Noting this, the then-Planetary Wizard of Tevaral urgently requested the assistance of the Interconnect Project based here at Rirhath B. It was decided that a number of world-surrogates should be located and terraformed to serve as relocation loci for the planet’s ecosystems, and possibly also as temporary havens for the planetary population when it was decided how best to intervene to stabilize Thesba’s core once and for all—since naturally the planetary population could not be left in place when so dangerous an intervention was being enacted.”

The imagery shifted to show one after another of a series of six planets, all orbiting stars similar to Sendwathesh and barren to begin with, as they were quickly altered by teamed science and wizardry to suit the Tevaralti climatic, atmospheric and soil requirements. The dominant blue-green of Tevaralti foliage crept across them, burgeoning, and all of those worlds then settled in to “cure”, waiting for their guest species to arrive. “However,” Mamvish said, sitting down dispiritedly on her back two sets of legs, “events have now unfortunately started moving faster than anyone was expecting. Approximately ten years ago, volcanic activity on both Thesba and Tevaral began spiking irregularly. More generalized tectonic activity began to spike as well. Since Tevaral is astahfrith and has been for many thousands of years, the various nations and clan/territory affiliations on Tevaral met with the Planetary to investigate possible interventional action. But the last two years have produced numerous disastrous earthquakes on Tevaral that have killed millions of Tevaralti, and it became plain that there was no alternative to a full-fledged rafting operation. The planet was going to have to be evacuated.”

Mamvish stood up again, her eyes revolving in what Kit recognized as distress. “And then, eleven days ago—”

The view flicked back once more to that image of Thesba’s interior. As suddenly as cracks in ice running across a frozen lake bed from some dropped rock, massive discontinuities picked out in blood-red in the diagram began stitching themselves across the underside of Thesba’s mantle layer. In places, the crust of the great moon began to wrinkle and crack, while underneath it the mantle writhed and shivered unpredictably. Kit winced just looking at it, finding it impossible to understand how Thesba hadn’t blown up already.

Mamvish looked down into the space occupied by the simulation of Thesba, her head weaving from side to side in a gesture of distress. “There’d been some hope of saving Thesba, or at least stabilizing it long enough to allow an orderly evacuation taking weeks or even months. But that’s now impossible. The last ten days’ work has shown us that Thesba’s internal integrity has been too severely damaged for any such intervention to succeed, no matter how powerful the wizards associated with it. Also considered was the possibility of opening a very large spatial portal through which Thesba could be removed from orbit around Tevaral, followed by the insertion of a stable substitute mass as a temporary solution. But the extreme delicacy of choreographing such an intervention, and the substantial damage already done to Tevaral’s tectonics, means there’s no guarantee the result wouldn’t be just as severe as leaving Thesba in place to do this.”

With terrible inevitability the diagram of Thesba shuddered massively apart into five huge jagged chunks, and tens of thousands of smaller ones—both old solid material, and vast volumes of new magma spewed into space and swiftly chilled to stone—began raining down onto the planet. And quite exclusive of the destruction caused by chunks of the moon falling out of the sky, the view now extended to Tevaral and showed how the ensuing tidal effects from Thesba’s breakup would devastate that world. All the coastal cities and conurbations below were drowned or wrecked by earthquakes and tsunamis, quickly or slowly: food sources were wiped out in the short term by terrible storms and weather disruptions, water tables were disrupted and the composition of the entire atmosphere denatured by volcanic activity.

Tevaral was going to die. It was just a matter how of how quickly, and whether all or even most of its population could be evacuated before it did.

Kit realized that he’d stopped breathing for a short time. Beside him, Nita had stopped watching and was actually hiding her eyes.

“So, my cousins,” Mamvish said as the auditorium’s normal interior and lighting came back. “You see the problem. Our choice of ways to intervene has been drastically curtailed. Normally, in situations like this where threat to a planetary population is extreme, we install sufficient numbers of very-wide-aperture worldgates on the planet to evacuate the entire planetary population within hours, not days. Such gates can remove terrain as well as the beings living on it, and can relocate both nonliving and living matter great distances with tremendous accuracy when wizardry is guiding them. But in this situation, that solution is denied us. Very-wide-aperture gating is only possible when powered by a SunTap conduit system that pulls energy directly from the nearest star, and Tevaral is too far from its primary for a SunTap conduit to reach the planet’s surface. Therefore we must fall back to a more old-fashioned type of intervention in order to successfully move all these people off Tevaral quickly enough to save their lives. We’ve already installed a hundred and twenty terminus gates on the planet, with their far sides anchored on each of the six new homeworlds. Each of the terminus gates is served by a transport tree of feeder gates eight to ten layers deep. Locked in open configuration, and operating at full capacity—which they must—the terminus gates will channel between fifty and a hundred thousand Tevaralti per hour off the planet to their new homes. The feeder gate trees are not yet complete; hundreds more feeder complexes will be installed on Tevaral over the course of the next several days. And as we shepherd the Tevaralti population through them to safety, you will be gatekeeping those new worldgate installations for us.”