February 14, 2011: Tevaral

Elsewhere in the Milky Way galaxy, in the planetary system of a star of the great OB association near mu Cephei, otherwise known as Erakis, matters progressed to their inevitable conclusion. And as usual, when reality reasserted itself after wizardry had so tightly held sway over Thesba for so long, the natural processes there that had been baulked for so long turned out to have their own surprises up their sleeves.

The wizardly team who had been holding Thesba together through the final weeks of the Tevaral Rafting Intervention were naturally unwilling to simply remove all the safeties at once. Best practice in such events mandated that when discontinuing a wizardry that had been changing or maintaining the structural integrity of an entire astronomical body, the constrictions and controls applied to it should be removed in reverse order to that in which they’d been applied.

One by one, power feeds were gradually reduced to the complex webwork of wizardries that had been holding the warped and damaged cores of Thesba in the same relationship to one another, then to the ones that had been maintaining those cores’ integrity relative to the moon’s inner mantle and its outer one, and then to the largest and most powerful of the wizardries, those that had been holding the crust in place over the restless, molten substructure. Finally the last connections between those wizardries and the hundreds of wizards who had been fueling them were cut. Everyone for whom breathing was a normal function of their physiology then held that breath to see what would happen next.

For some long minutes Thesba seemed to do nothing in particular—merely continued on its normal course around Tevaral, heading for what in Kit’s gates’ location would have been its second rising of the day. Many of the wizards involved in monitoring the decommissioning of the management wizardries, at least those who were of a betting temperament, began laying wagers with one another as to how long this process would continue. Others, more deeply versed in planetary and orbital mechanics, or with a better instinctive feel for events of this type, didn’t bother.

Approximately six minutes and forty seconds after power was withdrawn from the final maintenance wizardries that had been holding Thesba in one piece, a fissure began to develop in the crust on Thesba’s leading side, stretching from about halfway up into its northern hemisphere to just south of its equator. Other similar fissures began to develop on the opposite side of the moon, but the first one continued to grow, stretching longer, pulling wide, deepening with astonishing speed. Through the already-hot glow of the revealed upper mantle, hotter material from deeper inside the moon began to spew out. The great longitudinal fissure pulled wider yet, stitching up into the polar regions, across them, and down into the northern hemisphere on the other side.

Though wizardly data recorders were functioning and analyzing every movement of mass in real time, with merely visual senses it quickly became impossible to grasp exactly what was happening. The moon’s atmosphere had kindled, and the flammable gases in it began oxidizing at such a rate that within a very short time all of Thesba’s surface became invisible under a planet-wide sheet of fire.

It took some minutes more of the moon’s transit along its already disturbed orbital path to make it possible to tell what was going on. Thesba’s overall shape seemed now more transversely ovoid than spherical as it sailed along in an obscuring cloud of its own rapidly combusting atmosphere, trailing burning gases and outthrown magma behind it in a long disastrous trail. But then came the unexpected thing—terrible in the way that only events of such magnitude can be, fascinating even though frightening, a sight that would leave the analysts working out the moments of inertia behind this particular event for months if not years to come. Through the ruin of Thesba’s structure, past the split shell of the mantle layers and the shattered crust, the misshapen iron core slowly shouldered bodily out of the moon that had hidden it since it coalesced, tumbling as it came, rotating more quickly now that it was freed from the pressure of the quintillions of tons of mass that had so long held it in check. Slowly the core began to draw further and further away along the orbital path, making its way ahead of the broken halves of Thesba that were now ever so gradually beginning to fall behind it, trailing further and further in its wake.

The general prediction of what would come next, once this had happened, was straightforward enough. The two great halves of Thesba would remain in orbit a while, tumbling, fragmenting, some of the fragments rebounding into one another. A debris field somewhat congruent to the moon’s old orbit would form. But it would not remain in that form for long. The core, plowing through Thesba’s shattered remnants again and again in its early orbits as the fragments began to decelerate due to their lesser mass, would impact over and over with the larger pieces—some of them becoming briefly gravitationally associated with the core again, some being caromed violently out of its way in what to a player of the Earth game “billiards” would have recognized as massively destructive bank shots. Those impacts, brutally inelastic and as subject to the laws of motion as anything else, would themselves change the rogue core’s orbit more than once, deforming that orbit, bumping it into a more elliptical configuration and finally into one that would be terminally parabolic. It would be the core’s acceleration, increased by interactions with Tevaral’s mass and a serendipitous angle with the system’s white-giant primary, that would finally bring the core plummeting into Tevaral’s southern hemisphere in sixty-three days’ time—the bullet-like impact of a three quintillion-ton mass of spinning metal into the body of a dying world already racked by weeks of massive earthquakes and tsunamis.

The Interconnect Project wizards and scientists most skilled with numbers and probabilities would be exercising their skills at the betting end of things for several weeks to come over the issue of whether Tevaral itself would survive that impact as a single body, or itself break up as Thesba had, its shattered mass slowly becoming the source of a vast asteroid field that would someday occupy its orbit around Sendwathesh. But on the day Thesba shattered, the world called Tevaral, identified (in Earth’s astronomical nomenclature) as 11848 Cephei IV, was proactively struck from the records of all extant Galactic and interstellar associations of the Orion Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy, and formally declared uninhabitable…

…and its dominant species and biosphere classified as “successfully resettled without undue loss of life”.

THIRTEEN:

Date: 2015-12-24; view: 608