Our targets, those Black Ships, were some sort of organic structures, their origins
obscure, their motivations equally obscure. This briefing covered their life cycle.
A Black Ship arrived in a system and immediately shed dozens or hundreds of
daughters who scatter to scoot about for generations, or lifetimes, visiting asteroids,
comets, gas giants, and planets harvesting specific minerals and caching them like honey.
In the process, the Black Ships multiply and produce even more caches.
This process continues until the cache quantity reaches some critical value. Then,
following some strange instinct, a carefully-timed sequence sends cache after cache into
the star, disrupting its fusion cycle. In the final stages, the Black Ships swarm at specific
distances from the star, and the last caches are dispatched to trigger a nova stage.
Now a thousand Black Ships swarm, a hundred each at ten distinct distances from the
star, and they ride the outrushing blast, absorbing energy and transitioning into jump. The
closer to the star, the greater the jump.
I shook my head in disbelief. I knew jump could cover a handful of parsecs. High
tech naval ships might do Jump-5, maybe Jump-6. I had seen popular vids talk about
Jump-9, but no one knows how to do that.
This briefing said the swarm farthest out, that absorbing the least energy, would do
Jump- 1 to Jump-9. The next swarm in would do up to 10 squared: 10, 20, 30, 90 parsecs.
Did my mind made the extrapolation, or was it the wafer? Ten distances. If distance 2
was 10 squared, then distance 10 was 10 to tenth. 10, 20, 30, 90 billion parsecs. The edge
of the visible universe is 30 billion parsecs. Some of these Black Ships would, after a
week in jump, be beyond the edge of the visible universe.
I am sure that my own mind constructed the inverse: these swarms conceivably came
from beyond the edge of the universe. I paused that concept as the replay of briefing
continued.
A hundred Black Ships would randomly scatter to a hundred locations within ten
parsecs. Some would arrive in deep space, fail to find resources, and die. Those that
reached other systems would probably take root, and then across many generations,
explode those stars. The briefing estimated that interval at three thousand years.
Another hundred would scatter to locations within a hundred parsecs: theoretically
reaching all of the Spinward Marches, indeed all of the Domain of Deneb.
Yet another hundred would fly up to thousand parsecs. One could reach
Vland, Home, Capital, or Terra.
Some would fly ten thousand parsecs and reach the core of the Galaxy.
It was cold comfort that some would die in intergalactic space. Some would reach
Andromeda. Some would reach beyond.
What is the chance that one of these Black Ships would destroy Terra? Is it any less
of a threat that that potential destruction was three thousand years in the future?
