You could have started your own forest ring growing in and around the alien one, said Ces Ambre. Or attempted a startree sphere as other Ousters have done.
The True Voice of the Tree Reta Kasteen nodded. We had just begun attempting thatand diversifying the protogene growth centers just a few hundred kilometers from where we had parked the seedship in the leaves and branches of the alien ring, when She paused as if searching for the right words.
The Destroyer came, broadcast Far Rider.
The Destroyer being the ship we observe approaching your ring now? asked Patek Georg.
Same ship, broadcast Far Rider. The two syllables seemed to have been spat out.
Same monster from hell, added the Chief Branchman.
It destroyed your seedship, said Dem Lia. So that was why the Ousters seemed to have no metal and why there was no Templar-grown forest ring braiding this alien one.
Far Rider shook his head. It devoured the seedship, along with more than twenty-eight thousand kilometers of the tree ring itselfevery leaf, fruit, oxygen pod, water tendrileven our protogene growth centers.
There were far fewer purely space-adapted Ousters in those days, said Reta Kasteen. The adapted ones attempted to save the others, but many thousands died on that first visit of the Destroyer the Devourer the Machine. We obviously have many names for it.
Ship from hell, said the Chief Branchman, and Dem Lia realized that he was almost certainly speaking literally, as if a religion had grown up based upon hating this machine.
How often does it come? asked Den Soa.
Every fifty-seven years, said the Templar. Exactly.
From the red giant system? asked Den Soa.
Yes, broadcast Far Rider. From the hell star.
If you know its trajectory, said Dem Lia, cant you know far ahead of time the sections of your forest ring it will devastate, devour? Couldnt you just not colonize, or at the very least evacuate, those areas? After all, most of the tree ring has to be unpopulated the rings surface area has to be equal to more than half a million Old Earths or Hyperions.
Chief Branchman Keel Redt showed his thin smile again. About nowsome seven or eight standard days outthe Destroyer, for all its mass, not only completes its deceleration cycle, but carries out complicated maneuvers that will take it to some populated part of the ring. Always a populated area. A hundred and four years ago, its final trajectory took it to a massing of O2 pods where more than twenty million of our non-fully space-adapted Ousters had made their homes, complete with travel tubes, bridges, towers, city-sized platforms and artificially grown life-support pods that had been under slow construction for more than six hundred standard years.
All destroyed, said True Voice of the Tree Reta Kasteen with sorrow in her voice. Devoured. Harvested.
Was there much loss of life? asked Dem Lia, her voice quiet.
Far Rider shook his head and broadcast, Millions of fully space-adapted Ousters rallied to evacuate the oxygen breathers. Fewer than a hundred died.
Have you tried to communicate with the machine? asked Peter Delem Dem Tae.
For centuries, said Reta Kasteen, her voice shaking with emotion. Weve used radio, tightbeam, maser, the few holo transmitters we still have, Far Riders people have even used their wingfieldsby the thousandsto flash messages in simple, mathematical code.
The five Amoiete Spectrum Helix people waited.
Nothing, said the Chief Branchman in a flat voice. It comes, it chooses its populated section of the ring, and it devours. We have never had a reply.
We believe that it is completely automated and very ancient, said Reta Kasteen. Perhaps millions of years old. Still operating on programming developed when the alien ring was built. It harvests these huge sections of the ring, limbs, branches, tubules with millions of gallons of tree-ring manufactured water then returns to the red-star system and, after a pause, returns our way again.
We used to believe that there was a world left in that red-giant system, broadcast Far Rider. A planet which remains permanently hidden from us on the far side of that evil sun. A world which built this ring as its food source, probably before their G2 sun went giant, and which continues to harvest in spite of the misery it causes us. No longer. There is no such planet. We now believe that the Destroyer acts alone, out of ancient, blind programming, harvesting sections of the ring and destroying our settlements
for no reason. Whatever or whoever lived in that red giant system has long since fled.
Dem Lia wished that Kem Loi, their astronomer, was there. She knew that she was on the command deck watching. We saw no planets during our approach to this binary system, said the green-banded commander. It seems highly unlikely that any world that could support life would have survived the transition of the G2 star to the red giant.
Nonetheless, the Destroyer passes very close to that terrible red star on each of its voyages, said the Ouster Chief Branchman. Perhaps some sort of artificial environment remainsa space habitathollowed-out asteroids. An environment which requires this plant ring for its inhabitants to survive. But it does not excuse the carnage.