Oh my Lord, my Lord, might I applaud. How does your garden grow?

With ancient bells, and armoured shells, and my blind maidens all in a row. So see how they run. Oh, see how they run. How they all flee from my immortal wife, who cut off their tails with a starlight knife. Did you ever see such a thing in your life, as that cruel blow?

CHAPTER 2: ONE THOUSAND YEARS IN THE MAKING

"Are you ready?" She asked over the radio. "This is where things get wild."

The habitat inspection drone swung around the lonely brick tower overlooking the sea, listening to their conversation. It was an extension of the tremendous orbital space platform that was their home. Finding no one there, the drone darted away along the granite cliffs that hung over tumultuous, frothing waters. Then, feeling adventurous, the drone dipped down, zipping between tall trees that reached out into the briny wind with leafy arms, before swinging out over the bay.

Drifting banks of mist concealed the sea's largest inhabitants. They broke the surface, bodies arcing as they slid into the air. Jets of vapour burst from their breathing holes, expelling salty waters before filling their lungs. Majestic, their elders kicked their fins and circled their youngest, who played, oblivious to the silent aircraft above.

The drone swept its senses over the scene. LiDAR and scanning eyes flickered. It picked out a flock of birds accompanying the pod, climbing in the fog and screaming at one another. There, below, was a seacraft, floating at a respectful distance from the wild animals.

"Beautiful," her companion broadcasted.

It found them a little way out from the seacraft, submerged in the cool waters, kept warm by drysuits and able to respire with chemical rebreathers. It quickly scanned their equipment whilst they were distracted by the passing giants, determining that everything was in order. Taking one last survey of the scene, the drone knew the peaceful animals posed no threat to the tiny humans that had joined them in the sea. So it skipped up out of the fog and into the sky.

The drone accelerated again once it was a safe distance from biological life. Then, finally, it kicked hypersonic, the air liquifying and shocking its metallic shell. Slipping in and out of layers of feathery cloud backlit with soft, pink light, it reached the expanse of the upper atmosphere. High up here, the light came from all directions because this was not an ordinary world.

Above the drone hung the planet of Merlinst, Aft Teh Desht TonDer Nile. A population of 3,134,006, a long terraformed world with verdant continents. It was dotted with ancient habitats of gold from when Caretaker Desht first arrived and started seeding human life. Around the planet wrapped a ribbon of light. It extended from the entire horizon out to beyond needle-thin in the distance. The drone recognised it as the very orbital it dutifully helped to maintain. It was an artificial ring circling the world from high above. In this space habitat, most of life in this solar system resided. Though the planet supported a paltry few million people, this ring system supported tens of billions living in artificial paradise.

However, something troubled the drone's senses. Distantly, the orbital shuddered. All along its span, lights flickered and dimmed before going out.

That wobble reached the thousand-kilometre platform which the drone flew over. Below it, a series of sharp impacts were detectable. Though distant, the drone could sense them through the diamond shell walls of the habitat's upper sheathe and in its primary and secondary substructure. Alarms issued in sound, and radio emissions burst into life before quickly failing, falling back into silence.

Unable to make sense of what it was sensing in the electromagnetic spectrum, the drone threw up its virtual field antenna. At 55km, simulated, it noticed no unexpected gravitational waves. Kicking it up to 11,111km, there was no sign of remarkable neutrino sources.

What is happening?

8ms had elapsed since the alarms died when the habitat inspection drone decided to flair its engines, turn sharply and direct itself back down towards the surface.

Shouting through electronic channels, the drone transmitted handshakes. When it received only noise, it urgently pinged every address that should have been on its network. But, again, it received nothing that passed even a simple checksum. As it broke the cloudline again, it decided that its only recourse was to try and make a physical connection with the orbital's Caretaker and receive further instructions.

The atmosphere pulsed again. Another series of impacts kicked up a crosswind. The screaming air brought with it vaporised metal, burned carbon fibre and diamond film, and the heavy compounds issued from subliming superconductor cabling. Following soon after came the heavy compounds from burning organic matter. Even as the drone rushed down, the clouds were pulled up around them. Turning a sensor to scan in its wake, it saw the diamond walls that contained the habitat's surface-atmosphere were being peeled away. The destruction exposed everything on the habitat's inner surface to the vacuum of space. Swinging its sensors in every direction, the drone still found nothing; whatever assailant was responsible was all but invisible, except for the ruin it left behind.

The drone rushed down towards the bay, kicked its braking surfaces and gimballed its engines. Then, it cut an arcing path over the water at the last moment. The sea's surface boiled as the pressure dropped, the atmosphere dispersing into orbit. The foam froze in mere moments. Where the animals now struggled, the ice was stained red with their violent decompression. Over the radio, the drone could hear both humans scream. The fearful sound broke into unconscious gurgles. Barotrauma filled their bloodstreams with gassy and fatty embolisms. It sheered their fleshy tissues with concussive force as it slowly killed them.

The drone refocused on the horizon before it, racing over the cliffs and past a lonely stone tower. Then, horrifically, it saw the ribbon of habitat stretched hundreds of thousands of kilometres ahead severed, swinging distant and delicate, trillions of tons let loose. A burst of light around the damaged section showed that the habitat was trying to stabilise itself with fields and subfields, but it was all but futile. The forces involved were colossal. It was the end of the world.

Another hard brake and sudden turn. Threading itself through a crack in the earth, the drone perfectly drifted into a narrow companionway. Accelerating, it rocketed down into the exposed metal substructure, turning again and again, crashing through columns of air that pressed back against it. Finally, a hundred more metres down, it exited into the cavernous upper echelons of the undercity. Evading scrambling maintenance services and the movements of emergency materiel, the drone screamed down on its engines, and it came to a halt on top of one of the kilometres tall living spires.

Connecting to an array, suddenly, it was flooded with alerts. An unexpected assault had been made upon the entire planetary system of Merlinst and its Caretaker. There had been no warning, and no terms had been given. The responsible party was unknown. All active infrastructure support drones, including this one, were instructed to provide emergency relief and support.

It had only just kicked back into the air and flipped over the edge when the next blow was struck. The drone picked up pulses of radiation blasting into the undercity from various directions as it raced down towards the base of the living spire. The drone extended its virtual field antenna and felt the habitat's inertial field wobble uncertainly. A shell of neutrinos swept through the undercity. The drone could only infer that the habitat returned fire from recognising the various spectra.

The detonation that followed was so sudden that the drone's sensors didn't register it. One moment, it was trying to reach the evacuation bays. The next, it was crushed between two metal and reinforced glass sheets. Dark, it flashed its single light that still functioned, sensors buzzing, failing but reinitialising. Both surfaces moved in different directions, causing the drone to scrape and roll between them. Crushed and tossed around, it bounced away as the heavy wreckage parted. The drone then realised that they were previously two very separate sections of the undercity.

The entire interior of this section of the habitat had been torn apart and then slammed together. In fact, as far as the drone could see, the whole orbital had been bisected and then collapsed. However, there was no sign of the Caretaker Desht's fields this time, no glow to indicate that it was trying to keep the habitat intact. Instead, the falling pressure told the drone that this place would soon be as uninhabitable as the inner surface plate.

Regarding its internal warnings, the drone then tested its systems. Discerning that its engines might have a nominal function, it worked their gimbals and applied a light thrust. Then, flicking its light around, the drone's sensors made out the pulverised remains of the spires and their support structures. It all but crawled between exposed struts, laced together, mangled remains of the undercity.

The path out was blocked by the tangled steel and countless taut cables. Filled with a sense of urgency, wary of another collapse, the drone realised that it had to break free. Testing its tiny field cutter, its separating tool projected an arc of bright warning light around the hazard zone. Ascertaining the device was functional, the drone introduced it to the wreckage and broke apart the ruined structure. Once it was sure the debris was loose enough, it fired its engines and shunted its hard shell through, groaning as its alloyed surface was strained.

Then, with a crunch, it was through.

Its light found pieces of people, and their home spilt out into the void. Then, numbed, the drone moved on. It slowly progressed through the open doorway to their living quarters. Where there would have been a corridor was now empty space, this side of the building simply gone.

The entire habitat peeled apart with a shudder, exposing the drone to orbit. It turned off its light and dared to look beyond, damaged sensors adjusting and virtual antenna switching between linear and dish, then back again. It was still unable to detect the threat, sweeping a slow and deep gaze around. Eventually, hundreds of thousands of kilometres away, the drone resolved the burning of an interplanetary transportation vessel. Gutted, its atmosphere and contents were not content to simply drain into the hard vacuum; it had ignited.

Further out, the drone bore witness to the arrival of Caretaker Desht's daughter craft. Eleven of them moving as one, each of them wore the appearance of silver spheroids, featureless fields armouring and hiding their interior makeup. At last, a sense of hope touched the drone's mind. These were amongst the most advanced sentients ever to achieve creation, designed with technology that its simple neural mind could not even comprehend. They could fix this. At their head was the eldest, the largest, who began to generate a spiralling, fractally incursive pattern out of its post-physical surface.

It fired.

Millions of kilometres away, the enraged daughter's weapon impacted. First, the blast exceeded the system's star. Then, even half in the shade, the drone felt its exposed surfaces begin to vaporise, kicking it back. Compensating with its engines, the drone fought to remain stationary. It took its sensors and field antenna offline to prevent damage.

Adjusting for a much lower EM capture rate, it peered back out to watch.

Together, the daughter craft poured so much energy into their perceived adversary that the drone's field antenna detected tears in underlying space. They induced singularity.

And it was over.

The sudden darkening forced the drone to increase its capture rate again. There was no sign of attack left. It swivelled its field of view back and froze when it resolved the exposed shapes of the daughter craft without power. There were no field arrays; now, they resembled long cones brushed with projectors and open bays. All of them were crushed and broken in impossible ways, given the mere microseconds that had elapsed. They spilt their interior mass out, gutted from fore to aft, spiralling dead and out of control.

For all of their rage and hopes for justice or revenge, the most advanced minds of the Nile stem systems had proven to be nothing more than monkeys trying to throw stones at the threat. They had been ended just as quickly.

The drone searched its records for what to do. There was no plan for such an obscene scenario, no expected course of action for such complete devastation, for such a destructive and utterly inhumane attack on this incredible scale. Eventually, the drone settled on the deepest of its routines, instructions recorded more than a million years ago in the advent of the first star-faring sentient. Passed down ever since that ancient time, the simple guidance, humanity must survive.

Kicking itself free and out into open space, the drone fired its damaged and exhausted engines. Then, after clearing the immense wreckage of the dead habitat, it began bleeding its orbital velocity. Calculating its course, the drone had decided that even if this orbital was destroyed, perhaps it could help someone on the planetary surface. With the state of its engines, it would take days for the drone to lose that much speed and fall to the surface of Merlinst, but it had to try.

Merlinst, a perfect world, slowly turned beneath the drone. It orbited slowly, picking out various surface habitats, small towns, and cities. It calculated the quickest route to a population centre from where it would fall, then double checked and triple checked just to be sure.

Daring to look back, the drone saw the habitat being torn apart. Yet, from a distance, the damage seemed to simply appear. There was no weapon fire, no projectiles, or visible field pressure. The drone made the mistake of extending its virtual field array. It saw gravitational waves issuing from tremendous dark mass, shepherding the wreckage into paths that would eventually accrete into a vast moon, disrupting the planet below.

That realisation was the last thought that the drone ever experienced. Its virtual field antenna was detected, and, without warning, the bonds between its constituent subsystems simply vanished. The hot contents of its engines span apart, and all that remained was a mindless cloud of debris.