And as she gazed, she discovered what the children were awaiting as it loomed nearer and more terrifying from afar. The realization tightened her stomach. Even from fifteen years ago… it was she–for she had come with the Mayflower H. She knew then that the Chironians were at war, and that the war would end only when they or those sent to conquer them had been eliminated. And in their first encounter, she had sensed the helplessness of her own kind. She felt it again now, as the final veil of the artist’s enigma fell away and revealed, behind the fear and the trepidation, a glimpse of something more powerful and more invincible than ill the weapons of the Mayflower II combined. She was staring at her own extinction.
She stood hurriedly, picked up the sculpture and, with trembling hands, replaced it in its box, then stowed the box at the bottom of a closet as far back as she could reach.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
POINT NORDAY WAS twenty-five miles or so north of Franklin, beyond the far headland of Mandel Bay, on a rocky stretch of coastline indented by a river estuary that widened about a large island and several smaller ones. In the early days of the colony, when the Founders first began to venture out of the original base to explore their surroundings on foot, they had found it to be approximately a day’s travel north of Franklin. Hence its name.
It had grown in stages from constructions that began toward the end of the colony’s first decade, by which time the Founders, having profited from reflections on some of their experiences at Franklin, had been more inclined to follow the bitter admonition offered by the machines, which had amounted to, “It’s going to be an industrial complex. If you mess around with it, it won’t work.” The result was a clean, efficient, functional layout more in keeping with what the Kuan-yin’s mission planners had envisaged, suitably modified where appropriate to take account of local conditions. Besides its industrial facilities, the complex included a seaport; an air and space terminal distributed mainly across the islands, which were interconnected by a network of tunnels; a college of advanced technology; and a small residential sector intended more to afford short- to medium-term accommodation for people whose business made it convenient for them to be in the vicinity than to house permanent inhabitants, although about half the population had been there for years. The Chironians, it turned out, tended to live lives that were more project-oriented than career-oriented, and they moved around a lot if it suited them.
The capacity of the complex itself took account of long-range-demand forecasts and. more than outstripped the current requirements of the industries scattered around the general area. Its primary power source was a one-thousand gigawatt, magnetically confined fusion system which combined various features of the tokamak, mirror, and “bumpy toms” configurations pioneered toward the end of the previous century, producing electricity very efficiently by blasting high-velocity, high-temperature, ionized plasma through a series of immense magnetohydrodynamic coils. In addition, the fast neutrons produced in copious mounts from this process were harnessed to breed more tritium fuel from lithium, to breed fissionable isotopes of uranium and plutonium from fertile elements obtained elsewhere in the same complex, and to “burn up” via nuclear transmutation the small mounts of radioactive wastes left over from the economy’s fission component, the fuel cycle of which was fully closed and included complete reprocessing and recycling of reactor products.
The plasma emerged from this primary process with sufficient residual energy to provide high-quality heat for supplying a hydrogen-extraction plant, where seawater was “cracked” thermally to yield bases for a whole range of liquid synthetic fuels, a primary-metals extraction and processing sub complex, a chemical-manufacturing sub complex, and a desalination plant which was still not operational, but anticipated large-scale irrigation projects farther inland in years to come.
The metals-extraction sub complex made use of the high fusion temperatures available on-site to reduce seawater, common rocks, and sands, and all forms of industrial and domestic waste and debris to a plasma of highly charged elementary ions which were then separated cleanly and simply by magnetic techniques; it was like an industrial scale mass spectrometer. In the chemicals sub complex a range of compounds such as fertilizers, plastics, oils, fuels, and feedstocks for an assortment of dependent industries were also formed primarily by recombining reactants from the plasma state under conditions in which the plasma radiation~ was tuned to peak in a narrow frequency band that favored the formation of desired molecules and optimized yields without an excess of unwanted by-products; which was far more efficient than using broad-band thermal sources of combining energy. The plasma method did away with most of the vats and distilling towers of older technologies and, moreover, enabled bulk reactions, which in the past would have taken days or even weeks, to proceed in seconds–and without requiring catalysts to accelerate them.