Firstborn

of thirteen more days past geosynch, twenty-one from the ground. And that, she learned at last, was the spider graveyard.

“They need to keep adding counterweight to compensate for the growing mass of the ribbon,” Alexei said. “Which is why none of the spider trucks come back to Earth, save the builders.”

Bisesa looked around at the cluttered hull, grimy from their occupation. She felt a stab of regret. “And is that where this spider will finish up?”

“Oh, no,” said Alexei. “This beast won’t be going further than the fifty-six-thousand-klick point. Twelve days out of Earth.”

Bisesa glanced at Myra, who she sensed had almost as dim an idea of what was to come as she had. “And then what?”

“Remember I told you that if the spider let go before geosynch we’d have fallen back to Earth? But if we let go after geosynch—”

“We’ll be flung out of Earth orbit,” Myra said. “Into interplanetary space.”

“If you pick the right altitude to leave the elevator, you can use its momentum to hurl you wherever you want to go. The Moon, for instance.”

“Is that where we’re going?”

Alexei smiled. “Oh, a bit further than that.”

“Then where, damn it? There’s no point in secrecy now — as soon as we leave the elevator the authorities will know where we’re going.”

“Mars, Mum. Mars. ”

Bisesa was bewildered. “Mars?”

“Where — well, where something is waiting for you.”

“But this little pod won’t keep us alive all the way to Mars.”

“Of course not,” Alexei said. “We’ll be picked up. We’ll rendezvous with a lightship. A solar-sail ship. It’s already on the way.”

Bisesa frowned. “We have no rockets, do we? Once we’re free of the ribbon we’ll have no motive power at all.”

“We don’t need it. The ship will rendezvous with us. ”

“My God,” Bisesa said. “And if something goes wrong—”

Alexei smiled, unconcerned.

Talking to Alexei through these long days, Bisesa thought she had begun to see something of his psychology — the psychology of a Spacer, subtly different from the Earthbound.

Alexei had something approaching a morbid fear of failure in the machinery around him, for he was entirely dependent on that for his very life. But on the other hand he had absolutely no doubt in the implacable working-out of orbits and trajectories and interceptions; he lived in a realm where celestial mechanics visibly ruled everything, a mighty, silent clockwork that never developed a flaw.

So once his gadgets had cut them loose of the ribbon he believed he would be safe and secure; it was inconceivable to him that their lightship rendezvous could be missed. Whereas Bisesa and Myra were terrified of just that possibility.

Somewhere in there was the key to understanding Alexei, Bisesa thought, and the new Spacer generation. And she thought she would understand him even better if she could make out the peculiar prayers he seemed to chant softly while distracted: psalms to the

“Unconquered Sun.”

On the twelfth day they sat on their fold-down chairs, with all their loose gear tied down in advance of the jolt of weightlessness that would come when Alexei’s explosive bolts severed the cabin from its pulley.

Alexei eyed his crewmates. “Anybody want a countdown?”

“Shut up,” Myra said.

Bisesa looked down at the ribbon that had been her anchor to reality for twelve days, and up at an Earth reduced to a pebble. She wondered if she would ever see it loom large again — and what lay ahead of her before that could happen.

Alexei whispered, “Here we go—”

There was a flash below, on the cabin’s roof that had become a floor. The ribbon fell away, startlingly fast, and gravity evaporated like a dream. Tumbling, loose bits of gear rolling around them, Alexei laughed and laughed.

15: Liberator

April 2069

John Metternes, ship’s engineer, called up to Edna from Achilles.

There was another holdup. The techs down there on the asteroid still weren’t satisfied with the magnetic containment of the antimatter pellets.

Any more delays and the Liberator was going to miss another window for her first trial cruise.

Edna Fingal looked out of the thick wraparound windows, away from the convoluted surface of the Trojan asteroid beneath her, to find the sun, so far away here on the J-line it barely showed a disk. Surrounded by the flight deck’s calm hum and new-carpet smell, she chafed, restless. She wasn’t good at waiting.

Intellectually, in her head, she knew she had to wait until the engineers were absolutely sure about what they were doing. The Liberator depended on a new and untried technology, and as far as Edna could tell these magnetic antimatter bottles were never exactly stable; the best you could hope for was a kind of controlled instability that lasted long enough to get you home. It was thought that a failure of containment had been the cause of the loss of the Liberator’s unnamed prototype predecessor, and of Mary Lanchester and Theo Woese, the A-23C’s two-person crew.

But in OutSys, out there in the dark, something was approaching, something silent and alien and hostile. Already it was inside the J-line, closer to the sun than Edna was. Edna was captain of the world’s only spacegoing warship even close to operational status, the only healthy vessel in the first Space Group Attack Squadron.

She itched to confront the alien.

As she often did, she tried to relieve the stress by thinking of family.

She glanced at a chronometer. It was set to Houston time, like all master clocks throughout human space, and she mentally made an adjustment for DC. Edna’s daughter Thea, just three, would be in nursery school at this hour. Edna’s own home was on the west coast, but she had chosen the school in Washington so Thea could be close to her grandmother. Edna liked to be able to visualize just where Thea was at any time of the day.

“Libby, please open my mail file.”

“Of course. Visual records too?”

“Yes. Ready?… Hello, Thea. Here I am again, waiting around as usual…”

Thea would hear her words, and see pretty much what she could see, captured by visual sensors in the ident tattoo on Edna’s cheek. Security was predictably tight about every aspect of the A-class warships out here on the J-line, and Thea would only ever receive a heavily censored version of her mother’s letters. But it was better than nothing.

And if things didn’t go well, these messages might be all Thea had left of her mother. So Edna spoke to the future.

“I’m sitting here waiting for our antimatter bottles to be loaded into the A-drive chamber. And it’s taking a long time, for we have to be very careful. I’m looking down now at Achilles. It’s one of the larger of the Trojan asteroids, and it’s here that we have been building our A-ships. Look with me, you can see the graving yards, and