Donald Moffitt - Genesis 02

their moons that we were able to get any separation on.”
    “They’re breeders!” Dal blazed. “Any piece of rock big enough for them to light on!”
    “Yes, indeed,” Jun Davd agreed. “Our resident sociobiologist, Heln Dunl-mak, tells me that she estimates the total dragonfly population of Sol system to be more than ten trillion.”
    The figure was mind-boggling—too big to grasp. Bram heard the gasps around him.
    “And they’re pushing outward,” Jun Davd went on. “If the diskworld system of Delta Pavonis represents their present limit of expansion, then they now occupy a volume of space forty light-years in diameter.”
    He was about to go on, when an alarm went off. He picked up an interphone and listened briefly. He reached out and switched on a display. “Yes, yes, I see them now,” he said.
    He put down the interphone set and faced the circle of suddenly quiet people. “That was Smeth,” he said. “Our sensors have detected the firing of launch vehicles. It appears that the dragonflies have decided that Yggdrasil is a likely-looking piece of real estate.”
     
    Bram watched through the scope as a pattern of orange sparks rose above the brown curve of the atmosphere and died out one at a time.
    “End of boost phase,” Jun Davd said from his console a few feet away. “I make that eighty-four vehicles, launched from twelve separate locations.”
    “Eighty-four!” Bram exclaimed, remembering the colony-size environmental bubbles that had tried to settle in Yggdrasil’s branches in the diskworld system. “So many for a target our size?”
    “These are relatively small multistage vehicles,” Jun Davd said. He put a computer-enhanced image on the big screen so that everybody could see it. Bram saw a flecked bottle shape with a pinched waist jiggling at the approximate center of the field. Glowing green lines showed where the computer had used its imagination to fill in the outline.
    “Designed to come up through atmosphere, with a final stage carrying no more than fifty or a hundred passengers, from its size. Probably their regular Earth-Moon bus. Their numbers, I assume, reflect those they happened to have standing by in a state of near-launch readiness. Yggdrasil is a target of opportunity. A new world that appeared suddenly out of the miraculous plenum.”
    Somebody said, “Don’t they have shuttles?”
    “No, these are throwaway vehicles,” Jun Davd said. “Typical of them.”
    On the screen, the bottle shape divided in two at its pinched waist. Bram looked through his scope again and saw a fresh shower of sparks.
    “Their parking orbit didn’t last very long,” Jun Davd said. “Not long enough, really, to qualify as a parking orbit at all. They hardly bother to calculate, do they— just eyeball it.”
    The minutes crawled by as the blanket of sparks moved perceptibly against the murky face of the planet, then slowed, then stopped moving and seemed to hover there. Jun Davd had removed the isolated ship from the big screen and replaced it with the wide view for the benefit of his visitors. What they were seeing was not strictly an honest telescopic image but one enriched by infrared, gravitational sensors, and synthetic aperture radar.
    Then the sparks went out.
    “Final velocity of somewhat over a hundred thousand miles an hour,” Jun Davd said. “They’ve done very well on their hydrocarbons and oxygen. They don’t appear to have injected themselves into Yggdrasil orbit. They’re going to try for a direct landing.”
    The visitors waited in silence, trying to make sense out of the dancing dots on the screen. But there was really nothing to see except tfie background planet.
    A voice on the edge of hysteria finally said, “Aren’t we going to do something?”
    “We’re going to have weight very soon,” Jun Davd said soothingly. “I suggest that everyone orient themselves toward the floor.”
    The floaters drifted to upright positions. People used walls and handholds to nudge themselves into foot contact as best as possible.
    Bram felt returning weight: a few ounces at first, then a steadily increasing poundage. Smeth had gotten the fusion engine going in record time.
    Yggdrasil groaned and creaked with the stresses of acceleration. The tree didn’t like this at all. It had come into this system under its own power—the ramjet having been shut down at about one hundred astronomical units— and finished the last seven percent of braking with its lightsails. It