Battle Station

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My scattered fleet looked like broken shards of glass, glinting in the wan light of a distant star. Counting my own ship, the surviving task force consisted of twenty-three destroyers and seventeen frigates. I’d arranged them in a circular pattern around an alien artifact of unknown origin. This artifact was known to us as a ring, a vast loop of dark material, similar in nature to rock, but closer in density to the collapsed matter found at the core of dead suns.

The ring orbited a small world which was the last in a long line of planets, the furthest from the system’s single yellow star. While unusual, it was not unprecedented to find a ring associated with a planet. We’d found other cases that were similar. The Venus ring was buried in the planet’s crust, and a small ring back on Helios had been located at the center of one of the termite-mound cities of the native population.

The icy world below was composed primarily of nickel, iron and frozen ammonia. It orbited a yellow star I’d named Eden. The planet’s surface was heavily frosted by cyrovolcanoes that periodically spewed out unpleasant liquids. These events were dramatic spectacles. Ammonia and methane bubbled up from the planet’s guts when tidal forces heated up the interior. Once these liquids reached the surface, they quickly froze into vast crystalline plains.

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