Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

about that. ’Dignity?’ She stood up. ’Come on. Let’s
go and wind up the Curator. I want to know what kind of underwear he
has on under that stupid robe.’
    Laughing, they left the cabin.
     
    Saturn loomed out of the dark.
    This wasn’t like approaching Port Sol. They had come swooping down
on that much-engineered little worldlet in a flash. The largest
surviving planet in Sol system, Saturn was majestic and stately, a
misty disc painted red by the sun. Its size was obvious,
oppressive.
    The ship hurled itself through Saturn’s tremendous shadow. Symat
saw lightning crackle purple and white across the clouds, as storms
that could have engulfed the whole of Mars played themselves out.
This was the power of nature, he thought, even now dwarfing humanity
and its dreams. As he watched, Symat’s heart pumped in a kind of
retrospective panic. To think that he might have lived and died on
Mars, or even followed his parents into a booth, without seeing such
wonders as this!
    The flitter swooped away from Saturn, climbing up and out of its
deep gravity well, the energy of its incoming trajectory dumped. And
the Curator showed Symat how to look for the moons.
    Spacegoing mankind had swept like a storm through Sol system,
shattering in a few millennia the patient geological assemblings of
aeons. Saturn’s ice moons, if not taken apart altogether, had been
extensively mined. One moon was more interesting, though. The Curator
called it ’Titan’. Once this small world had had decks of clouds
beneath which complex chemical processes had played out; humans had
sent scoop-ships and trawlers to mine the air and the hydrocarbon
seas. But Titan, starved of heat, had never spawned life. Now, as the
sun brightened, Titan was at last stirring from its chill slumber. It
was a marvellous prospect, the birth of a new world right in the
middle of Sol system: even in these desolate latter days you could
still find new life. But no human scientists were studying the
miracles unfolding in Titan’s clouds. This was not an age for
science.
    They left Titan behind. And as the flitter continued to swoop
around Saturn’s gravity well, the true human purpose of this system
was gradually revealed.
    ’Can you see?’ The Curator ducked and pointed, picking out lights
scattered among the moons. ’And that one? They are drones. Sensor
stations, weapons platforms. All sentient.’
    The sky was full of them, machines that flocked like metallic
birds in the ever-changing gravity field of Saturn and its moons.
Some of them gathered into rings that girdled Saturn’s equator, which
the Curator wistfully said were an echo of an even stranger wonder of
the past, natural rings of ice and dust that had long been disrupted
by war. And once you could have seen even more spectacular artefacts,
the ruins of wormhole mouths, the remnant of a transit system that
had once spanned a Galaxy but had collapsed with the demise of its
builders, the Coalition.
    But Symat understood that the beauty of the weapons clouds wasn’t
their point. Their purpose was lethality. The whole of the Saturn
system was a fortress. And it was all because of the Ascendents.
    When the vast retreat of man had begun, even when only the most
remote of colonies had yet been evacuated, the undying with their
eerie far-flung prescience had planned the end game. Before the siege
of Earth itself began, it would be necessary to make a stand.
    Saturn had always been a military stronghold. As long ago as the
Exultants’ heroic effort to win the Galactic Core, huge war machines
had been buried in the planet’s deepest clouds, ready to leap to the
defence of Earth if any foe dared attack the capital planet. These
brooding machines, self-maintaining, self-enhancing, became known as
the Guardians.
    Now, as a far more formidable foe gathered, the Ascendents turned
to Saturn once more. Earth itself was to be corralled with
gravitation and brought out here, to circle on the rim of Saturn’s
mighty gravity well, where it could be protected. And the war
machines under those clouds, already powerful, were enhanced with the
accumulated learning of a million years of interstellar war.
    The purpose of the undying had been unswerving. But this project
was not quite as under their obsessive control as they would have
preferred. There was risk.
    ’I don’t understand,’ Mela said. ’What risk?’
    The Curator waved a hand, and the air was filled with a high-speed
chatter of automated signals.