The Mission to Quinta
An escalation timeline

DEUS pilots the Hermes through deceleration and hides the ship in the shadow of Juno, the system's outermost gas giant. The first long-range view shows Quinta girdled by an unstable ice ring of trillions of tons.

The crew captures two derelict Quintan spacecraft: a century-old, 200-ton satellite ("the moth," armored like a turtle) and a fresh 5-ton radar-absorbing "cigar" with a melted combat wound. Dissection reveals silico-amino acids — a "technobiology" halfway between machine and tissue, evidence of necroevolution: weapons speciating like organisms. The fresh damage means the war is ongoing.

Disguised as a comet in a foam cocoon, the Hermes lands reconnaissance on Quinta's moon, tracking the "plasma flame" — a nuclear fireball racing between craters, caged in a monstrous magnetic field. It finds a massive underground energy installation, hurriedly abandoned and sabotaged. The Captain concludes that studying wreckage is futile and decides to ask openly for dialogue.

Five probes reconnoiter the moon. Two vanish at periselenium; three are attacked by small Quintan interceptors, escape into a self-made sodium fireball, and then deliberately atomize themselves by head-on collision so nothing can be captured. Their fate convinces the Captain that "gifts of greeting" would never reach the surface.

The orbiter Ambassador beams laser greetings, logic primers, and reply instructions at Quinta for three weeks, in every modulation and wavelength. The answer is silence. The visual survey reveals a world "intentionally dead": metropolis-sized structures with no night lights, transport lines with nothing moving on them, "forests" that are engineered light-traps.

The council votes, over Monk's objections, to shatter Quinta's moon as a harmless, unanswerable demonstration. A warning is broadcast — the moon will be shattered, no harm will follow, and a deadline is set: the first ultimatum. No signal comes back.

Monk shames the Captain out of firing the newly built solaser as a weapon, recasting it as a child's pocket mirror. Pilot proposes a wordless picture-story — composed by DEUS around hunting, battle, and a closing dance — projected onto every continent's clouds for three days, gambling that any technological civilization was once a cave-painting one.

A hollow, perfect mock-up of the Hermes — its arrival announced by neodymium laser — lands at the spaceport while the real ship hides behind Sexta, watching through microscopic "bee's eyes." Four seconds after its drive shuts off, it is destroyed by a strike calibrated to kill passengers but preserve the hull for capture and study.

Monk pleads for retreat and names the ending aloud: fiasco. The Captain instead fires the solaser for six minutes at the ice ring, prying it from equilibrium. Trillions of tons of ice fall planet-wide; millions die. The ultimatum follows: seventy hours to receive a human envoy and return him safely, or planetoclasm.