Chapter 3
This is what I knew about the Slow, the day qe came to Tu-mdo:
The quans referred to the Slow as “qe”, saying that “it” was the pronoun you used for an insentient object, like a kettle or a biscuit tin, whereas qe was very obviously alive and thinking.
The Shine disapproved of such nuance, rattling off the usual nonsense about souls and sacred flesh and so on.
But even the Shine knew better than to ignore the Slow, when qe deigned to speak.
The Slow qimself did not come to Tu-mdo, instead sending qis messengers, black boxes tumbling through space, propelled by no-one-was-quite-sure-what but that pundits grumbled was probably “some sort” of ion drive.
Six of qis messengers entered sub-light broadcast range of the planets Cha-mdo, Ber-mdo, Tu-mdo and Yu-mdo and the orbital habitats Reio-tu and Khd-tu before astronomers detected them.
The military immediately wanted to shoot them down, as militaries do, but the diplomatic corps bartered them down to merely imposing total comms blackout with nuclear strikes a poised backup.
By then, other systems in the wider Accord had also discovered the black boxes entering their magnetic space.
Adjumir was the first to formally announce its sighting, followed by Haima and four quan outposts scattered between Ho’aka and the Eyrie.
In the end, seventeen systems admitted to having detected the messengers of the Slow.
The scale of the visitations, the varied points of origin, the time in which these boxes must have been travelling all added to consternation among observers, a sense of something significant about to happen.
Pundits pundited; conspiracy theorists grew irate.
There was enough time between spotting the objects to their final deceleration for everyone to get really rather stressed.
A few observers pointed out that the Slow’s messengers were descending upon points within an eighty light-year radius with a clear and obvious centre, but their observations were dismissed – not because they were implausible, but because their implications were too alarming to consider.
This is a flaw I have observed many times – people will expend vast energies in ignoring the obvious terrifying thing because it terrifies them so.
It is a trait that fascinates me to this day.
On Tu-mdo, of course, we had no idea that any of this was happening.
This turned out to be a mistake on the part of the Executorium, for on reaching stable orbit above the planetary surface, the Slow’s messenger proceeded to immediately, and seemingly without actually transmitting anything detectable in the electromagnetic spectrum, hijack every communication device within the system.
PEOPLE OF TU-MDO! qe proclaimed. IN ONE HUNDRED YEARS, THE BINARY STAR SYSTEM LK-08091881 WILL COLLAPSE IN UPON ITSELF. THE RESULTING SHOCK WAVE WILL TRAVEL OUT AT THE SPEED OF LIGHT AND OBLITERATE ALL LIFE WITHIN AN EIGHTY-THREE LIGHT?YEAR RADIUS. YOU HAVE UNTIL THEN TO PREPARE.
The wording was largely the same on every planet above which the Slow’s messengers came, with a few tweaks for localisation.
On Adjumir, for example, the binary star system was identified as the Lovers – a sentimental bit of common colloquial that made itself immediately understood to the waiting populace.
And on Haima, the radius of destruction was given in localised “qika” metrics rather than the more broadly used light year, with the phrase “obliterate all life” expanded to include the metric “of all degrees of sentience, constitutionally acknowledged and otherwise”.
Above orbital platforms and nascent moon-worlds, the Slow gave qis warning. In the darkest corners of the blackest mining belts; above the glittering capitals of triumphant civilisations, qe proclaimed the fate of billions, and those billions listened in enraptured silence and dread.
At Tu-mdo, sixteen seconds after the Slow began qis transmission, the authorities opened fire and blasted the messengers from the sky before they could squeak another word.
Regrettably, I was on the night side of the planet when the transmission went out, and thus slept through the entire thing.