Exodus by Peter F. Hamilton

Author:Peter F. Hamilton [Hamilton, Peter F.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Worlds
Published: 2024-09-17T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

—

“I know I keep saying it everywhere we go,” Ellie said, “but I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

She and Finn were in the owner’s quarters, watching the Diligent’s external sensor feed as the ship decelerated into a two-thousand-kilometer orbit above Kajval. They’d detected seventeen ships already orbiting the war-wrecked world, all of them Traveler ships.

Below them, the planet’s old continents were dark, laced with a multitude of slim lines glowing an insipid orange. There were no gleaming white polar caps, nor clouds, either. But the ocean basins—their glitter was dazzling.

“Kajval is the only place this happened, thank Asteria,” Finn said. “There’s only ever been one Crystal Gun event.”

“Is that the weapon that did this?”

She watched in fascination as his face ran through a range of expressions; it was like seeing his decision process.

“The Crystal Gun is the name humans have for it,” he admitted eventually. “It kinda seems right. One giant badass space weapon, and when the Kajval Celestials refuse the ultimatum to surrender, some psycho admiral yells: Fire! Kaboom!”

“How many Kajval Celestials lived here?”

Finn’s bonhomie faltered. “Maybe a billion?”

“And they all died?”

“Some would have escaped, if they were quick enough, but the majority: yes. They all died six thousand years ago. It was fast, thank Asteria.”

She nearly said: asphyxiation isn’t that fast. But he’d know that. “So the Crystal Gun destroyed the atmosphere?”

“Yeah. The Crystal Gun is a good name, too; it condensed the atmospheric gas molecules into tiny crystals. It probably used a derivative of the method Celestials use to produce their ultrabonded material.”

“So that’s why the oceans glitter like this now.”

“They’re not water oceans anymore; they’re the residue of the atmosphere. The air crystals it produced are the same size as a grain of flour, and frictionless. So first they just fell to the ground, or into the oceans, like a super-fine snow powder. The crystals that landed on the ground started sliding down whatever slope they were on, which took them into the rivers, and from there into the oceans. And right after the Crystal Gun attack was when the ocean surface started sublimating, because the surface of Kajval was now in a vacuum. All that water vapor was exposed directly to the solar wind, which ionized it and stripped it away, off into interplanetary space. It took about five hundred years for the oceans to evaporate. So what you can see glittering between the continents now is actually what the atmosphere became.”

“Crap. What was the war about?”

“We don’t know. The only people who know are the Ratarajan Celestials, and they aren’t telling—certainly not to humans.”

“So the Crystal Gun’s not around anymore?”

“Who knows? If it is, no Traveler ship has seen it—or if they did, they didn’t recognize it. Besides, I’m not convinced it was a single weapon. Kajval’s entire atmosphere was eliminated in one go; more likely it was millions of drone platforms englobing the whole planet.”

“Makes sense.” She turned back to the screens. “And those glowing lines?”

“Lava rivers.”

“Seriously? But they’re everywhere.”

“Yeah.

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