Firstborn

were to come at us out of the ecliptic — I mean, away from the plane of the sun and planets?”

“I walked on Mars,” Paxton said dangerously. “I know what the ecliptic is. As it happens the present bogey has come sailing in along the plane of the ecliptic. For the future we’re considering out- of-plane options. But you know as well as I do that the energy costs of getting up there are prohibitive. Yes, Professor Carel, the solar system is a mighty big place. Yes, we can’t cover it all. What else can we do but try?”

Carel almost laughed. “But these efforts are so thinly based it’s virtually futile—”

Paxton glowered, and Bella held her hand up. “Please, Bill.”

“I’m sorry,” said Carel. “And then there is the question of the ef-ficacy of all these preparations against the threat we actually face—”

“Fine.” Angrily Paxton cleared down his displays. “So let’s talk about the anomaly.”

Bella longed for fresh coffee.

After his long and detailed discussion of Fortress Sol, Paxton’s presentation on the anomaly was brief.

He briskly reviewed the principal evidence for the bogey’s existence. “Right now this thing is passing through the J-line, the orbit of Jupiter. In fact we have a window to intercept it, because it’s fortuitously passing close to the Trojan base, and we’re working on mission options. And then it will sail on through the asteroids, past the orbit of Mars, to Earth, where it seems to be precisely targeted.

But we still have no idea what it is, or what it might do if and when it gets here.”

When he sat down there was a brief silence.

Bill Carel looked at Paxton, and around the room, as if expecting another contribution. “Is that all?”

“That’s all we got,” Paxton said.

Carel said softly, “I did not dream you would have so little — it is as well that I came. If I may, Admiral?”

Bob Paxton glared at Bella, but she gave him a discreet nod, and he gave the floor to Carel.

“In a way,” Carel said, “my involvement with this ‘bogey’

began in the years before the sunstorm, when I worked with an astronomer called Siobhan McGorran on a probe we called QAP.” He pronounced it “cap.” “The Quintessence Anisotropy Probe…”

Paxton and his Patriots shifted and grumbled.

The Quintessence Anisotropy Probe was a follow-up to a craft called the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, which in 2003

had studied the faint echoes of the Big Bang, and had established for the first time the proportions of the basic components of the universe — baryonic matter, dark matter, and dark energy. It was dark energy, called by some “quintessence,” that fueled the expansion of the universe. Now the purpose of the QAP was to measure the effects of that cosmic inflation by seeking the echoes of primordial sound waves.

“It was really a very elegant concept,” Carel said. “The primordial universe, small, dense, and ferociously hot, was an echo chamber full of sound waves propagating through a turbulent medium.

But then came the expansion.” He spread his delicate hands.

“Poom. Suddenly there was room for things to cool down, and more interesting physics.

“As the expansion cut in those ancient sound waves were dissipated. But they left an imprint, their pattern of compression influencing the formation of the first galaxies. And so by mapping the galactic distribution we hoped to reconstruct the primordial sounds. This in turn would provide clues as to the physics of the quintessence, the dark energy, which at that time—”

As the uniforms got more restless, Bella said gently, “Perhaps you should get to the point, Bill.”

He smiled at her. He had a softscreen of his own that he spread out over the table; it quickly interfaced with the table’s subsystems.

“Here is a profile of the cosmic expansion.” It was a spiky graph, plotted on logarithmic scales, an upward curve. He spoke of how this curve had been established by analyzing old light seeping from the deepest sky, and by taking correlations of the structures to be observed on a variety of scales. The “frequency” of the patterns of galactic formation mapped back to the frequencies of those lost sound waves.

This time Paxton cut him off. “Jesus Christ, Poindexter, put me out of my misery. Where are you going with this?”

Carel tapped his softscreen. “It was one of my own students who fortuitously came across an animation of the destruction of DSM X7-6102-016. ”

“I’d like to know how he got a hold of that,” Paxton growled.

“She, actually,” Carel said, unfazed. “A girl called Lyla Neal.

Nigerian, ferociously bright. The destruction of the DSM was an odd explosion, you know. It’s not as if it was hit by an external weapon. Rather as if it tore itself apart from within. Well, prompted by that, Lyla constructed an expansion curve for the DSM, to show how its little universe was ended.”

He pulled up a second chart. The scale was different, Bella saw, but his conclusion was obvious. The DSM expansion curve mapped the QAP’s cosmic profile. Precisely, as could be seen when Carel overlaid the two.

Bella sat back, stunned. “So what does this mean?”

“I can only speculate,” Carel said.

“Then do so, for Christ’s sake,” snapped Paxton.

“It seems to me that the DSM was destroyed by a specific and localized application of dark energy, of quintessence. It was ripped apart by precisely the force that has caused the universal expansion, somehow focused down onto this small craft. It is a cosmological weapon, if you like. Quite remarkable.” He smiled. “Lyla calls it a

‘Q-bomb.’ ”

“Cute,” snapped Paxton. “So can we stop this thing, shoot it down, deflect it?”

Carel seemed surprised to be asked such a question. “Why, I have absolutely no idea. This is not like the sunstorm, Admiral, which was a very energetic event, but crudely engineered. This is a barely familiar sort of physics. It’s very hard to imagine we can respond in any meaningful way.”

Bella said, “But, Bill, what happens if this Q-bomb actually reaches the Earth?”

Again he seemed surprised to be asked. “Why, that must be obvious. If it functions in the same way again — we have no reason to imagine its scope of action is limited — it will be just as with the DSM. ” He spread his fingers. “Poom.”

The silence in the room was profound.

Bella glanced around the table. These old sky warriors had almost seemed to be enjoying themselves. Now they were subdued, silent.

Their bluff had been called.

And what was worse, as far as she could see this “cosmological”

technology cut right through the rickety and expensive defenses mankind had been trying to erect.

“All right,” she said. “We’ve got twenty-one months until that thing reaches Earth. So what do we do?”

“We have to stop it,” Paxton said immediately. “It’s our only option. We can’t save the population any other way — we can’t evacuate the damn planet. We throw everything we’ve got at it. Beginning with our resources out at the Trojans.” He glanced at Bella.

Bella knew what he meant. The A-ships. And she knew that would most likely mean committing Edna to action. She put that thought aside for now. “Draw up an operation order, Bob. But there’s no reason to believe any of our weapons will make a bit of difference. We have to find out more about this thing, and find a weakness. Professor Carel, you’re hereby drafted.”

Carel inclined his head.

Paxton said heavily, “And there’s something else.”

“Yes?”

“Bisesa Dutt. We missed her. She’s escaped up an elevator like a rat up a drainpipe.”

That baffled Bella. “A space elevator? Where’s she going?”