The Rossem Project

Return to Kronosia - Part 3

     Karog muttered to himself under his breath as he squinted along the range finder, measuring the apparent diameter of Kronos. "If we continue on this course and at this speed," he said, "we will pass in front of Kronos in five minutes and thirty seconds."

     "So we're still on course?" gasped Gunther in relief.

     "Yes," confirmed the trog. "However, at that point we will be only one hundred and seventy miles above the surface of Kronos, and since Kronos is moving at three and a half miles a second, that means we will only be fifty seconds from smashing into it, or rather having it smash into us. Only thirty seconds from the moment we enter teleportation range. You will have that long to deactivate the levitation spells and teleport us in."

     "Perhaps I can change course a little, so that we arrive a little above or below Kronos," mused Gunther thoughtfully. "It would take a very delicate adjustment, though. Overdo it and we'll miss, never passing close enough to teleport." He agonised over it for almost a full minute. "I'll leave it," he decided at last. "I can do it. Fifty seconds is plenty of time."

     "You understand that that's only an approximation," warned Karog, though. "It's based on the diameter of Kronos, which is known only approximately." Gunther nodded that he understood.

     Kronos continued to grow, but its motion against the background stars slowed and Gunther felt the tension in his neck ease a little. He reduced the strength of the levitation spells, leaving them with just enough strength to counteract the pull of Tharia's gravity, although Kronos’s feeble gravity was probably a greater factor now, if there was enough time for it to have any perceptible effect on their motion. Their forward momentum continued to carry them forward, and Karog carried out further measurements with the range finder, fine tuning the calculations he'd made earlier. "Bang on," he said at last with a smile. "You've now got fifty seconds."

     Gunther now only had to wait a few more seconds for the tiny moon to move into teleportation range and, counting under his breath, he took the opportunity to examine its surface. From the surface of Tharia Kronos looked like a tiny sphere, a smaller version of the two larger moons, but now that they were close enough to see it properly the wizard was surprised to see how lumpy and knobbly it was. From this vantage point, seeing the tiny moon from the side, an angle from which it was never visible from the ground, they could see that it was roughly egg shaped, with the bulge pointing towards Tharia, but there were other bulges and depressions in its surface, some of them a quarter the size of the whole moon, their shape made dramatically visible by the shadows and highlights the slanting sunlight made on its surface.

     One depression was brighter than the others, and lay at the centre of a radiating pattern of lines; straight in places, wavy and branching in others. Fissures, thought Gunther in astonishment. Great cracks in the structure of Kronos. That crater must be where the comet hit, the comet that caused the great disaster. He saw that one of the fissures ran to the tiny moon's north pole, the location of the city of Kronosia. Maybe it was the very same fissure that had destroyed half the city and left the Agglemonian refugees marooned for two hundred years.

     The hemisphere of the tiny moon facing away from Tharia was darker than the side facing the planet, he saw. So dark that it was hard to see it against the darkness of space, as if it had been covered by a layer of soot. He puzzled over this for a moment before realising that it was the moon trog light funnels. Billions of them, covering the entire hemisphere. Capturing the sunlight and taking it inside where it was used to light their tunnels and power their industry. He gaped in astonishment as the size of the accomplishment came home to him for the first time. The sheer magnitude of what they had done. They're scared of us? he thought in amazement. It's we who should be afraid of them! If they could capture all that sunlight and direct it down to a target on Tharia… He thought of a small boy using a lens to burn a hole in a piece of wood and shuddered.