Pop's Cabin

In the last episode we learned how Pop became Ted the Red and how that led to the gift of his cabin.

Sis’s earlier discovery of Big Tooth has foretold the chance that this beautiful planet may be able to survive its conjunction with the asteroid. Yet survival may depend heavily on an evolutionary event that depends on keeping the planet as it is.

So begins the struggle - against the Hiver’s destructive paper making, against any threat conjured by the inhabitants of the galaxy...

 In the endlessly remote past arms stretch out from the core of an endlessly remote galaxy. Ever moving, ever changing one arm whips in a corkscrew motion where active particles lock inside the massive energy of the arm’s movement. Particles as dust become denser as the corkscrew twists. This radiant dust cannot withstand the pull of its mass and unique energy. Gradually the densifying dust clusters in small dark spheres that grow by the same accretion until the weight of each becomes so immense that minute parts within minute particles begin to race relentlessly out of control as if to celebrate the power of natural forces. One force mixes with another in a inevitable event lasting less that a billionth fraction of relative time. This emergence of energy cannot resist its evolving destiny to electrify and explode into light and heat so cleverly simple that its perfection becomes its ability to live on and on and on.

To this purpose these bright bodies cannot hold back the need to evolve and replicate. To this end they spawn artfully more complex forms of their original parts rushing them off in flaring winds until time is able to assume new forms and life which at some point gain the ability to look back see the original cloud and lights of its birth.

Yet nothing lives forever.

And at some point two of these bright bodies come face to face through inevitable odds locking in an embrace that will mean their end is near. One smaller, brighter body accretes its basic element onto its surface signaling the companion to respond in kind. The larger, cooler friend accretes other kinds of elements in a ceremony of sorts. The rings of their joining reach a specific uncontrollable level where once more the forces of nature take hold.

The explosion is witnessed by the senses of their ancient offspring offering a rare assurance that even the darkness of night can be broached by the first dying cry of their parents.

This massive event will repeat and repeat until all of the companions’ essence is spent. The dying will be witnessed by other generations whose records of the event will likely be lost in between.

At last all light ceases. Whatever remains will be dark and heavy. Yet all universal elements will be represented as testimony of the brightness that brought them into an endless darkness.

Among these elements one will occur as a near perfect distillation of a once powerful and explosive origin.

* * *

Ted and Aldo have taken young Lee back to his home on Fithian. On the return trip they visit an interplanetary bizarre called a mirror market. This is where one may obtain any number of things outlawed on one world, legal in another. They have no trouble finding what they need and soon make their trek back to the cabin.

Hidden from detection, they have set up a control center link aboard the Starbirds where Aldo is able to re-direct TGMS survey buoys to monitor every corner of the planet. Funny, Aldo makes his first and only illegal act without any of his normal Fifthian angst.

Sis has sent her petition to de-clear the planet to hundreds of politicos, organizations, governments aligned to the Universal Treaty. Pop constantly reminds her of the futility of this effort.

"You know, don’t ya, the only way to move them buggers out is force, pure and simple," he advises over and over again.

In frustration she takes one of the boats and zooms back to the channel where she and Aldo first encountered Big Tooth and the Hiver’s pulping operation.

The destruction has spread. Creatures are gone. Sis reels at the shock realizing Big Tooth and her nest may be lost forever.

Now, she knows, the bow must be strung tight.

She zips back to the cabin to get Pop and an unopened bottle of uni-malt.

They race over to Ted and Aldo.

Under the glow of the planet’s only satellite, they pass the bottle and offer

each other a plan of action.

Aldo has scanned sixteen clear-cut areas, two reduction mills under construction are about to be fired up and operational. Fifthian buoys can de-juice every single techno devise at any site on the planet, except weapons. Pulse smashers could be re-targeted as long as a meteor event doesn’t occur and alarm Grid Systems monitoring. He cautions such an event will indeed happen during two periods during the upcoming soladiem. They will have to look into another option.

"How bad can we hurt ‘em?" Pop asks in his normal, direct inquisitiveness.

"Depends," Aldo gives Pop a definitely unsatisfactory answer giving himself a little bargaining room though some wouldn’t know it.

"Old Fart doesn’t mean to kill anybody. Right?" Sis bargains in Pop’s behalf staring him in the eyes.

"You don’t want to make dese guys mad enough to shoot back," Ted offers his spare change. "Remember, we can’t shut down their weapons."

Sis: "Les agree on something."

Pop: "All right. Nobody dies"

Ted: "Nobody’s hurt."

Pop: "Horseshit."

Aldo: "Systems off. Buzz cutters welded into slag and something extra."

Sis: "No way to cut, no way to make paper. Ted? Pop?"

Aldo: "Drink to it."

Ted: "Pop, you first."

"It’s not enough..." Pop guzzles a big one.

Sis whispers into Aldo’s ear. "You know he’s never really killed anybody."

* * *

Early the next morning, Pop corners Aldo back by the shit hole.

"What do ya know about Hivers."

"Some, maybe more."

"Aldoni, I want you to take what I say as something serious. Paper is to Hivers same as the bow is to us. Tradition. More dan dat. It’s culture, religion. Try to take my bow from me. What do you think I’d do? Fight. Get it."

"We can’t fight them."

"No what we can do is discourage ‘em. Aldoni, what’s lesson number one in Spaciotemporal theory?"

Aldo doesn’t have to think. "Interplanetary travel is nothing more, nothing less than simple economics. Profit outweighs cultural, scientific and religious needs in relationship to time, material, technology and trajection... I know."

"Aldoni, you’ve been talking about breaking their machines. But to win you’ll have to destroy any chance of making a profit...we’ll have to take out their mills. But, like I keep sayin over and over, Hivers will take every step to protect their ability to make paper. Dis time listen. The guts of the Hivers’ reduction mills are super hard alloy that can only be destroyed by heat in the range of stars. Aldoni, how in hell can we produce that kind of heat without burning up the whole damn planet?"

"Pop, I think I already have a plan."

Two days later they move on it. Ted stays back to control the uplink to the buoys. He and Aldo preset target coordinates. And Ted’s needed to make sure fire sequences are timed and linked to plan.

Pop’s Starbird shuttles them halfway across a hemisphere in a blink. Their arrival at the first mill is announced by a sharp irritation that forces their eyes to tear.

Lights from the Hiver’s reduction mill illuminate a grossly unnatural jumble of metallic buildings that gradually form a cube covered pyramid at the base of spiraling exhaust stack. The place stinks of acrid rottenness. Vats hold a vile liquid that steams while reacting with the air. The only thing that appears remotely natural is a gigantic heap of wood chips.

Pop drops Sis and Aldo at opposite points around the base of the heap. Darkness assists their stealth as they set Magnim charges around its diameter. Hovering over the peak of the chip mountain, Pop aims a pulsesmasher that quickly digs a deep hole. He drops a large canister charge inside.

Back on board Aldo keys a message to Ted who sets the timer to the fire sequence. Before the charges explode, they repeat the sabotage at the only other mill on the planet.

Inside every one of the charges sub fuses will ignite radiation that will in turn ignite a extremely rare element called Magnim. Magnim comes from the dense debris field of dead stars. It is a condensed element surrounded by fused minerals that protect it from burning up when a white dwarf goes novae. Magnim has a profound ability to burn in a range close to nine-tenths the heat of its original star.

Once lit the heaps of wood chips will burst into plasma.

And the Hivers will have no chance to react and save the spoils of their labor.

They will have been warned by a Grid System alert generated by the orbiting TGMS buoys. They will have already left the planet to save themselves from the event named in the false warning. Before they begin to return the fires will end up devouring every piece of the mills.

This is just a part of Aldo’s overall plan. Magnim ignition is an incredibly dangerous act. After all each mill sits surrounded by wide plains of wood slash. Any fool could come up with a way to set such a fire. Aldo’s plan specifically attends to a way to put the damn things out.

"Trust me, it will work." Aldo feels confident since in a way his plan is a circle of related events intended to save the planet and everyone’s ass at the same time.

Pop’s shaking his head at this moment, not as much about doubting Aldo’s plan. Rather, it’s disbelief over the fact that he’s put his hat into a ring created by of all things, a Fifthian.

Shortly after Aldo and Ted procured the Magnim at the mirror market, the Fifthian had considered a way to recreate the closure of a novae. Buoys could be programmed to create gravity fields. The problem was the size of the field. All the buoys would be needed to create one single field with the force to suck a Magnim fire out of the atmosphere. That would leave the other fire burning. It would surely be out of control by the time the buoys redirected. But...always, but... Magnim heat was necessary to destroy the mills. Nothing else would come close. Both mills had to be fired at the same interval. Otherwise they’d be quite in jeopardy of revealing the intelligence behind it all. Worse. The Hivers would probably catch on. They’d be mad as swarm of pollenizers.

The answer clicked when Ted found a new turn on the Curve Continuum at its closest point to the planet’s stellar system. A turn ironically created as a shortcut by the Hivers of all things. Totally illegal, the turn had been created by an equally illegal pulse station to rapidly ferry material needed to cut and process wood.

Right smack through the stellar system, dangerous as hell, the shortcut sped so close to the planet that a very large containment ship might spike its orbit. Here was enough badness to close down the Hiver’s operation for good, lest the weight of bureaucracy. That wait was the hedge the Hivers held in their gamble to cut and process every single tree before they could be held accountable.

They surely didn’t count on this Fifthian’s intuitive problem solving ability.

Buoys were divided into three groups of five, two in orbit over each mill.

The third group hovered next to the shortcut’s perigee with the planet. >From this group originated a level seven Trisecular Grid Monitoring System’s alert.

9 7781 377/89 93 CC!!! 937

"Dat’ll wake up the smelly assholes!" Pop exclaims with pure joy.

The decoded message said in effect that a rupture in the Curve Continuum had been detected in Trisect 9. Numbers aside, it basically said that a sidewinder - a wild, loose-swinging snakelike energy pulse - was about to whip through the atmosphere of a recently "cleared" planet.

It’s pretty much commonly known: this was an event that always created devastating out-of-control fires.

This is the prettiest part of Aldo’s circle.

Predictably in a blink the Hivers launch speeding as far and as fast as they can.

A moment later Ted sends another coded message to the first and second group of buoys. He counts to three out loud.

Suddenly the buoys respond with a frenzy of data. Surely to those monitoring the grid at this moment, the planet just went novae.

Just as suddenly, Aldo, Pop, Sis and Ted realize they’d be in doubt of this plan clear to moment the super fires were truly dead out.