Ventus by Karl Schroeder

Karl Schroeder / Ventus / Page 670
40
Sixteen battleships from the Archipelagic fleet were
scattered like jewels across the velvet of space near Ventus'
trailing trojan point. They kept the regulation two hundred
kilometers distance from one another, but to the Desert Voice,
watching from the window of a cutter approaching the flagship,
they seemed very close. Each was the size of a mountain, and
harnessed energies capable of reducing the surface of Ventus to
char. The Voice had a good grasp of the scale of things here,
and knew that even a thousand such ships could not boil the
rock of Ventus and Diadem down to the mantle, unless they
spent decades nudging asteroids and comets into a collisioncourse
with it. And that crude attack was bound to eject
colossal amounts of potentially infected debris into stellar
orbit, which could hide the escape of one or more of the
Winds’ ships now being built on the moon.
In all the boiled magma seas the navy proposed leaving
behind here, there was good odds that some tiny pocket of cool
stone would preserve grains of mecha, perhaps too small to be
seen, that might regrow all of Ventus again, given a thousand
or a million years. The corollary to that was that if 3340 had
began to infest the Winds with the algorithms of a resurrection
seed, then 3340 itself might reappear here, in a millennia or an
epoch.
Marya Mounce had told the Voice that all of Ventus had
come from a package of nanotech assembler seeds massing less