by Greg Bear
“The planet’s still there. Either they haven’t come in yet, or they were deactivated. Can we signal them?”
“They should pick up the noach,” Harpal said. “If they haven’t been destroyed.”
“Let’s do it,” Hans said. Hakim made the arrangements on his wand. The results were almost instantaneous; a signal sent out, a signal returned from a seed carrier to the ship’s noach receivers. The carrier reported that eleven seeds had been delivered to Nebuchadnezzar’s interior, sufficient to cook the planet’s entire surface to a depth of fifty kilometers. Detonation of the seeds was imminent. Seeds would be delivered to Ramses within two tendays.
“I’ll be damned,” Hans said. “We’ve come to just in time for a show.”
The search team and Martin moved closer to the star sphere.
“Let’s send out remotes and take a closer look,” Hans said. “We’re how far?”
“Four hundred million kilometers from Ramses. Two hundred and fifty million from Nebuchadnezzar. Nebuchadnezzar must be a very sick planet,” Hakim said. “We were more successful than we ever hoped.”
“I trust in nothing,” Hans said. “Martin didn’t make any obvious big mistakes, and we still got whipped badly. I have to be that much better.” He smiled almost shyly at Martin, suggesting that they might share some secret joke, and his smile actually took a weight from Martin’s shoulders; he was not anathema, at least not to Hans. “If the planet’s sick, and if our doers have jammed its defenses, we don’t have to worry—but we haven’t dropped doers on Ramses, and anything could happen there when the seeds arrive to be inserted. Am I right?”
Harpal and Martin nodded. Hakim was busy releasing remotes to increase their baseline. “What about those orbiting dark masses?”
“They have not changed,” Hakim said, interrupting himself. “The same orbits, the same masses, the same sizes judging by occultations.”
“And the small craft?”
“We are actually not far from one such,” Hakim said. “They are still in orbit. They have returned to status quo.”
“I’d like to see the close one,” Hans said.
“I have records from the past few tendays, recorded by the ship,” Hakim said. “I will play them back.” The star sphere sectioned and they watched a small bright point grow in size in compressed time to a long, blunt cylinder, gray in color, featureless, barely ten meters long. “It is coasting,” Hakim said. “Quiet, no drives.”
“Can we take it out?” Hans asked.
Hakim looked to Harpal and Martin.
“I suppose,” Harpal said dubiously. “Why waste the effort?”
“I want to try,” Hans said dryly. “I guess I give the order, am I right?” He lifted his wand. “We’re how close to this little slicker?”
“Two million kilometers.”
“I want two rifles to waste a little fuel, see if we can destroy it. That’ll wake the sons of bitches up if they’re still sleeping, or if they’re just logy from dealing with our doers. If they don’t react, we know something…”
“What?” Martin asked.
“That these orbiting ships aren’t important, or…“Hans shrugged. “That the planets are sitting ducks.”
“Or something else,” Harpal said.
“Keep it up,” Hans said, not unkindly. “Keep badgering me. What else?”
He’s getting into this much more quickly than I did. Good, Martin thought.
“Or they’ve got another trap set.”
“That’s what I think. But…I’m about to make the same mistake Martin did. I’m going to spring their trap and see what they can do to us. We survived the first one. Maybe we can survive the second. And if not, well…” He rubbed his palms together, as if scrubbing away dirt. “Our grief is shorter, hm?”
Martin shivered. Here was something he had never felt as Pan: fatalism. Hakim sensed it too, and looked away, swallowing. It was a reaction the others might embrace; a Wagnerian dedication to duty, a mighty blow against the enemy, valiant but useless, ending in death.
“Too strong, huh?” Hans asked, as if Martin had said something. “All right. I’ll tone it down, but I still want two rifles out there. Kill it.” He looked to Harpal. “Go to it, CR.”
Harpal left the nose. Hans concentrated on the cylinder for a moment, frowning. “I can’t imagine what purpose they serve, except…Hakim, could they work as mass detectors? Very sensitive to orbital changes caused by anything large entering the system?”
Hakim considered this. “I cannot say for sure, but I think there would be better ways to do that…”
“You could ask Jennifer,” Martin suggested.
“She gives me the shivers,” Hans said briskly. “But you’re right. What other purpose? They accelerated hours before our assault…Psychological weapons. I can’t buy that. These things don’t give a damn about our psychology. They just want us dead.”
“I have an idea,” Thomas Orchard said. The other members of the search team had been keeping a low profile, taking Hans’ measure now that he was Pan.
“Give it to me,” Hans said.
“I think they’re remote signaling stations. Something goes wrong in the trap, they survive a little while longer…They don’t attract much attention because they are small, because they seem to have primitive drives.”
“And…” Hans said, tapping his little finger again, “they accelerate just before an attack to be ready to zip out of here, if everything goes to hell…” He smiled and ran his hand through his stiff blond hair. “God damn. I like that. It makes sense.”
“But we can’t be sure,” Thomas said, proud to have Hans’ approval.
Born leader, Martin thought with a twinge.
“We can be sure of nothing in this miserable place,” Hans said. “I say we try to take one out, and if they’re vulnerable, we’ll take them all out. Meanwhile, one planet down…maybe. I’ll be interested to see how Ramses responds.” He lifted his fist and grimaced. “Slick ‘em all!”
Away from the nose, going with Harpal to choose two rifle pilots for the job, Martin broke into a sweat. He lingered a few meters behind Harpal and wiped his face on his sleeve.
Ten years. Theresa and William had been dead ten years—and the others. Yet he had seen Theresa just a few days ago. She was fresh in his mind, her words were fresh.
A private and selfish bitterness came over him. He stood on the edge of a mental gulf filled with emptiness. He closed his eyes and actually saw this gulf, melodramatic imagery nonetheless real and painful. Guilt at this private bitterness could not drive it away. Others grieved; why should his grief be any the worse?
Martin told himself to catch up with Harpal, now almost one third of the neck ahead. His body refused to move.
“What are you doing?”
He turned and saw Ariel. The despair on his face must have been obvious. She backed away as if he were contagious. “What’s wrong?”
Martin shook his head.
“Tired?” she asked tentatively.
“I don’t know. Bleak.”
“Be glad you’re not Pan,” she said, not forgiving but not accusing.
“Hans will do a good job,” Martin said automatically.
“Something’s wrong,” Ariel pursued. “What is it?”
“Nothing for you to worry about.”
“You’re having a reaction, aren’t you?” she said. “You were strong and stalwart, and now you’re paying for it.”
He grimaced. “You were always so full of bullshit,” he said before he could think to keep quiet.
“That’s me, bullshit babe,” Ariel said softly. “At least I don’t get trussed up like a lamb for my own slaughter.”
“I’m okay,” he said.
“Where are you going?”
“With Harpal. To pick rifle pilots.”
“Then let’s go,” Ariel said. “We have to keep moving.”
She treated his pain as something trivial. His hatred for her burned like fire. B
ut he followed her along the neck to the aft homeball, still bleak, but at least moving, doing.
Paola Birdsong and Liam Oryx volunteered to take the rifles out. Their journey would last a day, as planned by Hans and Harpal.
Hans and Ariel accompanied the chosen pilots to the new weapons store. There were only thirty craft in the smaller space, all newly-made after the destruction of William’s bombship. The designs were familiar, however. Martin and Ariel watched the two volunteers enter the slender craft, checked out their systems through the wands, stood behind ladder fields as the ships pushed through the hatch on pylons.
The rifles began their journey of hundreds of thousands of kilometers.
“I feel guilty about keeping my room temperature above freezing now,” Ariel said. “We have so little fuel. I hope this is really worthwhile.”
Martin shrugged and left the weapons store for the schoolroom.
“Where are you going?” Ariel asked. He told her. “Can I come with you?”
Martin was surprised into a long, even a rude silence. “You can go wherever you want,” he said. “We’re gathering to see if anything happens to Nebuchadnezzar.”
“You need company. I don’t want to see you bleak again.”
He closed one eye, squinted at her, and again, without thinking, said what was on his mind: “I can’t figure you. You were such a bitch when I was Pan. Now it’s sweetness and light. Are you crazier than I am?”
She backed away, stung, then said, “Probably. What’s it matter now?”
To that, he had no answer.
The crew gathered around the star sphere in the schoolroom, all but Hakim and Luis Estevez Saguaro, who stayed in the nose to keep working. “What we learned in training makes us think this planet’s really sick with our doers,” Thomas Orchard explained, pointing out large brown and red patches on Nebuchadnezzar. “Whatever turned our people into anti em may have been failing to start with—it didn’t stop some pods from dropping doers. And it didn’t convert all our ships. Now we think the machinery, the defenses, are completely gone.”
“How long until it blows up?” David Aurora asked.
“It won’t blow up,” Harpal said. “It’s just set to cook.”
“That’s what I mean,” David said, smirking. Martin watched the crew closely, uneasy, still bleak despite Ariel’s company.
“Any minute now,” Thomas said.
“Then we got a win,” David continued, raising his fist in a victory salute.
“Fat lot of good it does us,” Ariel said. “Two more planets to go, and so little fuel we can’t escape.”
“It’s something,” Harpal said.
“I don’t think it’s much,” Erin Eire said at the rear. Martin had not even seen her since the awakening, not closely enough to pull her apart from the crowd. “I think we all know this place isn’t the real target.”
“What makes you think that?” Thomas asked.
A mom entered the schoolroom. The crew fell silent as it floated to the center, but when it said and did nothing more, they resumed.
“Wormwood’s a tar baby,” Erin said. “We got stuck. We might blow off the tar baby’s arm or leg. But it will still be sticky enough to get those who come after.”
“A seed carrier signals by noach that demolition is beginning,” the mom announced. The crew cheered, but not as lustily as they might have. “We will see the results visually within ten minutes.”
Thomas shifted from the planet view and caught the rifles on their way to the nearest orbiting cylinder. His wand sang and a message appeared for his eyes only. “That’s Hakim,” he said. “Things are happening again…”
Martin followed Thomas to the nose. Hans floated with arms wrapped around legs, watching the search team put together their information.
Hakim played the wands and the data banks like musical instruments.
“Get Jennifer Hyacinth up here,” Hans said. Thomas called Jennifer to the nose.
Martin quickly read the information projected by Hakim’s wand. The five inner orbiting masses had diffused into elongated clouds.
Harpal had closed his eyes. The air smelled of tension. Hans seemed a still point in the swirl of motion around the star sphere. He faced the projected information with unmoving eyes, not really seeing it. Martin knew what Hans was up to: he was trying to put together a clear picture through the clutter and uncertainty.
Jennifer Hyacinth arrived in the nose a few minutes later. She squeezed in beside Hans to be in the best position to see the information.
“The masses are the next part of the trap,” she said, frowning.
“Good girl,” Hans said. “We’re in close, the planet is going, so we’re obviously dangerous and they don’t want us to escape. They don’t know how much fuel we have left, or what we’re capable of…“
“We’ve done better than previous contenders,” Martin said.
“Maybe,” Hans said. “Harpal, what—“
“The dark masses could be loose-packed neutronium bombs,” Jennifer said. “The measurements are about right.”
“Good Christ,” Harpal said. “That many bombs could wipe out every planet in the system five, ten times over. If we could gather them—“
“They’re falling into Wormwood,” Hakim said.
Fresh diagrams floating in the air showed the rearrangements of the inner masses, their drift toward the star, estimates of time of entry into the heliosphere. “They’re being pushed in,” Jennifer said. “I think—“
“Wormwood’s going to go,” Hans said. “Jennifer, work up some momerath on what that will mean for us. Martin, coordinate with the moms. Tell the rifles to come back in, fast.”
“Wormwood’s particle wind is partially channeled to the poles,” Jennifer said. “There must be powerful fields controlling its interior. When it blows, if those fields are still in place—and I don’t think they could just be switched off—it won’t expand as a sphere…”
Martin pulled back and spoke through his wand to the moms.
Hakim pulled up a picture of Nebuchadnezzar’s surface glowing from the internal plasma of their seeds, but that seemed inconsequential now; the second part of the trap was indeed about to close.
The Dawn Treader orbited less than two hundred million kilometers from Wormwood. If the star went supernova, a tremendous burst of neutrinos would blow away the star’s outer layers.
Neutrinos in normal quantities were less substantial than any ghost, capable of traveling through light year thicknesses of lead unimpeded. But in such huge numbers, interactions with matter—with the Dawn Treader and everything else in Wormwood’s vicinity—would become deadly.
Martin had no idea what so many neutrinos would do to their chemistry, but the sheer force of the neutrino blast could tear them to pieces.
Jennifer seemed lost in an ecstasy of calculation.
A mom appeared in the nose. “If this information is correct,” it said, “there is both danger, and extraordinary opportunity.”
Jennifer’s face lit up. “There could be channeling of the blast in different areas,” she said. “Neutrinos will pour out in all directions, but most of the star’s mass may push through the poles, making two jets, like a quasar.” She linked her hands and used two thumbs up and down to show the flow.
“I concur,” the mom said.
Hans looked between Jennifer and the mom, biting his lower lip, and slowly uncurled, stretching his arms. “What do we do?”
“We use all available fuel for rapid acceleration into a new orbit to pass over the star’s south pole,” the mom said.
Jennifer laughed as if this were the funniest thing in the world. Tears came to her eyes. “Right, right!” she said.
“We can protect the ship’s contents against most of the effects of a neutrino storm,” the mom continued. “We will use neutrino pressure to propel us out of this system.”
“We’ll be like a seed in the wind,” Jennifer said. “If we hold together, we’ll be blo
wn out into deep space.”
“The post-explosion environment will be rich with volatiles from Wormwood,” the mom continued. “We will gather volatiles even as we are propelled outward.”
“They want to destroy us, but they may save us!” Jennifer said.
“Then why are they doing this?” Harpal asked. “Why give us this gift?”
“Very likely, they will destroy us,” the mom said. “But the opportunity exists, if we are skillful, and very quick. Alert the crew to field confinement and super acceleration. We will begin in a few minutes.”
Martin watched the star sphere. Haze covered Nebuchadnezzar’s surface now, shot through with flashes of intense white light. The neutronium and anti-neutronium seeds deep within heated the body’s surface to plasma; there would not be sufficient energy released to place any of the planet’s material in orbit about itself, as had happened with Earth; indeed, Nebuchadnezzar would keep its spherical shape. But for the next few million years, the planet’s surface would consist of cooling magma.
Martin could not exult at this small victory. Assistance in a suicide was no triumph; self-immolation designed to trap arsonists was comically absurd. But to have the fire offer them a chance at life, a chance to move on and finish the Job…
He began to laugh. Jennifer joined him. Harpal grimaced and left the nose to coordinate the crew. Hans stared at them as if they were crazy, then shook his head vigorously, and whooped.
Theresa would have appreciated this, Martin thought. William would have simply loved it.
They recovered their craft and prepared for the storm.
Wormwood’s death-throes took seven hours. The star’s magnetic field—restructured to push the solar wind up through the poles—whipped about like hair blown in the wind, clearly visible as the surface layers boiled and churned and cast up dancing streamers. The star began to resemble a fiery turnip with leafy top and frantic roots.
Within, billions of neutronium weapons ate through the star’s dense inner layers and ended their unseen, unknown orbits mated positive to negative, anti em to matter. The ambiplasma generated by these deadly copulations marched steadily outward.
The moms timed everything.