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Pribadium always keeps an excess of nanites for such occasions. She releases
enough to encompass Sora in a vacuum suit, as well as herself. When he takes
her hand, she teleports them into orbit. The two Teaguardian ships here are
powering their weapons, and it will do enough damage to the planet to still
kill the two of them. She has cleared the signal jammer, so her
consciousness has begun streaming to her backups again, but it will take
some time before the update is complete. Besides, she has to protect this
dumbass. So she keeps teleporting them until they’re far enough away.
From this vantage point, they watch as the weapons reach critical mass and
converge on a single spot on the world below them. They seemed to have been
aiming for the settlement, so everyone living there is already dead. The
Teaguardians don’t have to keep going. Yet they do. In minutes, it’s quite
clear that they’re planning to obliterate Doma Tertius. But there’s a reason
Pribadium chose not to do it this way in the first place. It might be
quicker, but it won’t last. The gravity well is too strong.
Every celestial body holds something known as gravitational binding energy.
If you want to break it apart, you need any amount beyond that binding
energy. If you don’t reach this threshold, it may still break apart, but
then it will just come back together. Even if it takes years, it will
recoalesce because the total mass has not changed. That’s why they
constructed a stellar shotgun on Ross 154, because they needed a shit ton of
energy to get it done. What the Teaguardians are doing here is only making
things worse. The whole point is to get at all of the raw material without
having to dig themselves out of the gravity well every time they want to
redistribute it. Now that’s what they will have to do. But there’s an even
greater problem. It’s all about safety.
You can’t just go blowing up planets without any regard for what else is
around. The energy beams are coming from several light years away. They knew
exactly when they were going to deploy, and what the Gatewood system would
look like when that energy finally arrived. In order to protect the people
who needed to live and work here during the blasts, they determined where
the safe zones were. For the last several months, in preparation for the
demolition, everyone was moved to a handful of little pockets of safety.
These were calculated, recalculated, verified, and reverified by literally
thousands of independent entities. All of those precautions are no longer
viable. If she doesn’t undo this, the entire star system will have to be
abandoned for decades.
Pribadium sighs. “I really have never heard of Tertius or Aeterna,” she
begins, “but I am not surprised. A number of people were born with the
ability to manipulate time or space in various ways. Others became that way
later in life. I had to discover the power through years of science and
exploration. Time travel is real, Sora.”
“You can go back and undo this?” Sora asks. “You can save my people?”
“No,” she answers. “But you can. The only way to stop the Teaguardians from
shooting the planet is by not giving them a reason to. Only you can do
that.”
“Was this all part of the plan?” Sora questions. “Was it nothing more than
an elaborate ruse? Were you just trying to trick me into changing the past?”
“You think I blew up a planet just to get you to help me undo it? Mr.
Shimizu, that makes no sense. I could have teleported you all offworld
whenever I wanted. I was going for diplomatic avenues. I never wanted you to
know the truth. So how about it? You wanna help me save the world? Or are
you gonna be, like, a dick about it?”
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