The Dark Forest (62 page)

In that manner, the droplet struck
Infinite Frontier
at twice the third cosmic velocity, at a heading straight along the first row of the fleet rectangle.

The droplet struck
Infinite Frontier
in its rear third and passed through with no resistance, as if penetrating a shadow. The extreme speed of the impact meant that two highly regular entry and exit holes roughly the diameter of the droplet’s thickest part appeared in its hull. But no sooner had they appeared than the holes deformed and vanished as the surrounding hull melted under the heat produced by the high-speed impact and the ultrahigh temperature of the droplet’s trailing halo. The part of the ship that had been hit turned red-hot, and the redness spread from the point of impact until it covered half the ship, like a chunk of iron that had just been taken out of the forge.

After passing through
Infinite Frontier,
the droplet continued onward at a speed of thirty kilometers per second. In the space of three seconds it had crossed ninety kilometers, passing first through
Yuanfang, Infinite Frontier
’s neighbor in the first row, and then through
Foghorn, Antarctica,
and
Ultimate,
leaving their hulls red-hot, as if the warships were giant lamps lined up.

Then
Infinite Frontier
exploded. It and the four warships after it were hit in the fusion fuel tanks. But unlike
Mantis
’s conventional, high-temperature explosion, this explosion was a fusion reaction triggered in
Infinite Frontier
’s fuel. No one ever figured out whether the fusion reaction had been sparked by the droplet’s ultra-high-temperature propulsive halo or some other factor. The fireball of the thermonuclear explosion appeared at the point of impact with the fuel tank and swiftly expanded until it illuminated the entire fleet against the velvety background of space, outshining the Milky Way.

Nuclear fireballs then took shape on
Yuanfang, Foghorn, Antarctica,
and
Ultimate
in succession.

In the next eight seconds, the droplet passed through ten more stellar-class warships.

By this point, the expanding nuclear fireball had engulfed the entirety of
Infinite Frontier
and had begun to shrink, while more fireballs were lighting up and expanding on other ships that had been struck.

The droplet continued to traverse the length of the array, penetrating one stellar-class warship after another at intervals of less than a second.

The fusion fireball on
Infinite Frontier
had gone out, leaving the ship’s hull totally melted. Now it exploded, spewing a million tons of glowing, dark-red metallic liquid like a bud bursting into bloom, the molten metal scattering unimpeded in an omnidirectional storm of burning metallic magma.

The droplet continued its advance, following a straight line through more warships and leaving a line of ten nuclear fireballs behind it. The entire fleet shone in the flames of these burning small suns as if it had been set ablaze and turned into a sea of light. Behind the line of fireballs, the melted warships continued to fling waves of hot molten metal into space, as if massive rocks were being pitched into a magma sea.

In one minute and eighteen seconds, the droplet had completed a two-thousand-kilometer course, passing through each of the hundred ships in the first row of the combined fleet’s rectangular formation.

By the time the last ship in the row,
Adam,
was swallowed up in a nuclear fireball, the bursts of metallic magma at the opposite end had scattered, cooled, and spread out, leaving the heart of the explosion—the spot where
Infinite Frontier
had been a minute before—empty of practically everything.
Yuanfang, Foghorn, Antarctica, Ultimate
 … all of them vanished one after another into metallic magma. When the last nuclear fireball in the line went out and darkness fell upon space once more, the gradually cooling magma that had barely been visible reappeared as dark red lights in the blackness of space, like a two-thousand-kilometer-long river of blood.

After punching through
Adam,
the droplet flew a short distance of about eighty kilometers through empty space, then executed another sharp turn unexplainable by humanity’s aerospace mechanics. This time the angle it described was even smaller: just fifteen degrees off a total reversal, executed nearly instantaneously even as it maintained a constant speed. Then, after a small heading adjustment that brought it in line with the second row of warships in the fleet’s array—or what was now the first row, in light of the recent destruction—it sped toward the first ship in that row,
Ganges,
at thirty kilometers per second.

Until this point, Fleet Command had not made any response.

The fleet’s battle information system had faithfully carried out its mission and captured through its massive monitoring network a complete record of all battle information over the course of that one minute and eighteen seconds. The sheer amount of information was for the time being only analyzable by the computerized battlefield decision-making system, which had arrived at the following conclusion: A powerful enemy space force had appeared in the vicinity and had launched an attack on the fleet. However, the computer did not provide any information about that enemy force. Only two things were certain: 1. The enemy space force was located at the position occupied by the droplet, and 2. The force was invisible to every means of detection they possessed.

By this time, fleet commanders were in a state of numb shock. For nearly two centuries, research into space strategy and tactics had dreamed up every possible kind of extreme battle condition, but witnessing a hundred warships blowing up like a string of firecrackers in under a minute was beyond what their minds could comprehend. The tide of information surging out of the battle information system meant that they were forced to rely on the analyses and judgments of the computer battlefield decision-making system and focus their attention on detecting an invisible enemy fleet that didn’t even exist. All battle monitoring capacity was directed into the distant regions of space, ignoring the danger right in front of them. A fair number of people even believed that the powerful invisible enemy might be a third-party alien force distinct from humanity and Trisolaris, because in their subconscious minds, Trisolaris remained the weaker, losing side.

The fleet’s battle monitoring system did not detect the droplet’s presence any earlier primarily because it was invisible to radar at all wavelengths and could only be located through analysis of visible spectrum images, but visible images were treated with far less importance than radar data. Most of the fragments scattered through space in storms of exploded debris were liquid metal melted by the high-temperature nuclear blasts, upward of a million tons melted in the destruction of each ship. A fair proportion of this massive amount of molten debris was roughly the same size and shape as the droplet, which presented the computer image analysis system with the difficult task of distinguishing the droplet from the debris. Besides, practically all of the commanders believed that the droplet had self-destructed inside
Mantis,
so no one issued specific instructions to perform such an analysis.

Meanwhile, other circumstances were exacerbating the confusion of battle. Debris ejected from the explosions of the first row of warships soon reached the second row, prompting their battle defense systems to respond with high-energy lasers and railguns to intercept the debris. These flying fragments, consisting largely of metal melted by the nuclear fireballs, were irregular in size, and although they had been partially cooled in flight by the low temperatures of space, only their outer shells had solidified. Their insides were still in a fiery liquid state, and when struck, they scattered in a brilliant explosion of fireworks. It was not long before the second row turned into a flaming barrier parallel to the dull “river of blood” left behind by the exploded warships in the first, roiling with explosions as if washed in a tide of fire surging from the direction of that invisible enemy. Debris flew thick as hail, more than defensive systems could block, and when fragments slipped through and struck the warships, the impact of these jets of solid-liquid metal possessed considerable destructive power. A number of the ships in the fleet’s second row suffered major hull damage, and some were even punctured. Shrill decompression alarms blared.…

Although the dazzling battle with debris did receive notice, given the circumstances, it was hard for the computers and humans in the command system to avoid the misconception that the fleet was engaged in a fierce exchange of fire with an enemy space force. Neither person nor machine noticed the tiny figure of Death that had begun to destroy the second row of ships.

And so, when the droplet charged at
Ganges,
the hundred warships in the second row were still assembled in a straight line. A death formation.

The droplet surged like lightning, and in the space of just ten seconds, it passed through twelve warships:
Ganges, Columbia, Justice, Masada, Proton, Yandi, Atlantic, Sirius, Thanksgiving, Advance, Han, and Tempest
. As in the destruction of the first row, each warship turned red-hot after penetration, before being engulfed in a nuclear fireball that left a million tons of dark red, glowing, metallic magma that then exploded. In this brutal destruction, the lined-up warships were like a two-thousand-kilometer fuse that burned with such intensity that it left behind nothing but ash glowing a dull, dark red.

One minute and twenty-one seconds later, the hundred ships in the second row had been completely annihilated.

After passing through the last ship,
Meiji,
the droplet reached the end of the row and turned another acute angle to charge straight at the first ship in the third row,
Newton
. During the destruction of the second row, debris from the explosions had raged into the third. The tide of debris included molten metal flung from explosions in the second row as well as mostly cooled metal fragments from the ships of the first. Most of the third-row ships had by now started up their engines and defensive systems and had begun maneuvering, which meant that this time, the ships were not situated along a perfectly straight line, as had been the case for the first and second rows. Nevertheless, the hundred ships were still roughly in line. After the droplet passed through
Newton,
it sharply adjusted direction and, in a twinkling, crossed the twenty kilometers separating
Newton
from
Enlightenment,
now at a three-kilometer offset from the line. From
Enlightenment,
it turned sharply again, raced toward
Cretaceous,
which was moving toward the other side, and penetrated it. Following this broken path, the droplet drilled through the ships in the third row one after the other, never dropping its speed below thirty kilometers per second.

When analysts subsequently observed the droplet’s route, they were amazed to discover that its every turn was a sharp corner, not the smooth curve of a human spacecraft. The diabolical flight path demonstrated a space drive entirely beyond human comprehension, as if the droplet was a shadow without mass, unconcerned with the principles of dynamics, moving at will like the nib of God’s pen. During the attack on the fleet’s third row, the droplet’s sharp changes of direction occurred at a rate of two or three per second, a deathly embroidery needle sewing a thread of destruction through the row’s hundred ships.

The droplet took two minutes and thirty-five seconds to destroy the third row of ships.

By this time, all of the warships in the fleet had started their engines. Although the array had lost its shape entirely, the droplet continued to strike the evacuating ships. The pace of destruction slowed, but, at any given time, three to five nuclear fireballs were burning among the ships. Their deathly flames drowned out the glow of the engines, turning them into a cluster of terrified fireflies.

The fleet command system still had no clue about the true source of the attack and continued to focus its energies on searching for the imaginary invisible enemy fleet. However, subsequent analysis of the massive clouds of vague information transmitted by the fleet revealed that it was at this point that the earliest analysis to come close to the truth was performed by two low-ranking officers in the Asian Fleet. One was Ensign Zhao Xin, an assistant targeting screener on
Beifang,
and the other was Captain Li Wei, an intermediate EM weapons system controller on
Wannian Kunpeng
. A transcript of their conversation follows:

ZHAO XIN:
This is
Beifang
TR317 calling
Wannian Kunpeng
EM986! This is
Beifang
TR317 calling
Wannian Kunpeng
EM986!

LI WEI:
This is
Wannian Kunpeng
EM986. Please be advised, transmitting ship-to-ship voice communication at this information level is a violation of wartime regulations.

ZHAO XIN:
Is that Li Wei? This is Zhao Xin! You’re who I’m trying to find!

LI WEI:
Hi! I’m glad to know you’re still alive.

ZHAO XIN:
Captain, here’s the thing. I’ve discovered something that I’d like to transmit to the shared command level, but my privileges are too low. Could you help me out?

LI WEI:
My privileges are too low, too. But shared command has plenty of information right now. What do you want to transmit?

ZHAO XIN:
I’ve analyzed a visual image of the battle—

LI WEI:
Shouldn’t you be analyzing radar information?

ZHAO XIN:
That’s a system fallacy. When I analyzed the visual image and extracted only the speed characteristic, do you know what I found? Do you know what’s been going on?