When he reached the site of the factory, he only knew he was at the right location because his visor displays told him so. There was no factory left: no landing pad, no power plant, no surface tracks, no machinery. Save for a bit of smashed wall jutting at an angle from the dirt, and a line of white dust that might have marked a foundation, there was nothing here but more broken ground. He saw no sign that anybody else had been here recently, none of the thousands he supposed had been dropped with this target as their objective. Perhaps the Xeelee had destroyed it, or perhaps humans had, or perhaps it had been leveled by the barrage. The artillery was supposed to have spared the factories, which were the objective of the operation; but then the barrage was meant to do many things it had failed to do.
Pirius built a small cairn of bits of rubble and set a marker on it, with an indication of where the others were sheltering. He felt quite cold, without emotion; perhaps that would come later.
He looked ahead, to the asteroid’s horizon. The bombardment continued, but far away now. The ground was full of bodies, the relics of previous assaults, and where the shells landed the bodies were hurled up by the explosions. The bodies rose up and tumbled in the dust before falling slowly down to the ground again. It was very strange to huddle there with his dry mouth and his stinking skinsuit, watching those bodies going up and down.
He shook himself alert. He made his slow, cautious way back to the ruined emplacement, where Cohl and the others were waiting.
When he got there Tili Three was weeping, utterly inconsolable. Her sister had died in her arms.
Chapter 21
The corvette completed its final FTL hop. Suddenly Pluto and Charon hovered before Pirius Red, twin planets that had ballooned out of nothing.
Nilis flinched and threw his hands up. “My eyes! They might have warned us.”
Pirius had spent his life training for combat in space. He showed no reaction before the soft old Commissary; he was much too proud for that. But he felt it too. After all, they were both products of a billion years of common evolution at the bottom of a gravity well, and when whole worlds appeared out of nowhere, something deep and ancient inside him quailed.
The twin worlds’ forms were visibly distorted from the spherical, for they were close to each other. Their separation was only fourteen Pluto diameters; Earth’s Moon was by comparison thirty of its parent’s diameters away from Earth. It was an authentic double planet. This strange little system was dimly lit by a remote pinpoint sun, and the faintness of the light gave the two worlds a sense of dreaminess, of unreality. But the worlds were strikingly different in hue, with Pluto a blood red, Charon ice blue.