Firstborn

know what was coming to build the shield. This time there’s nothing we can do. You can spare people the disruption of knowing as long as this final option is still available. And then, when there really is no hope—”

“So we lie to the human race.”

“Say it was a weapons test gone wrong. Why, that’s almost true.”

Bella pointed to Edna’s image. “Thales, I want to send a message to Liberator. Your highest level of security.”

“Yes, Bella.”

“Look, Cassie, are you free for the next few hours? I think I’d like to talk a little more.”

Cassie was surprised. But she said, “Of course.”

“Channel opened. Go ahead, Bella.”

“Edna, it’s me. Listen, dear, I have a new mission for you. I need you to go to Mars…”

As she spoke, she glanced at her calendar. Only months were left. From now on, she sensed, whatever happened, the tension would rise, and the pace of events accelerate inexorably. She only hoped she would be able to exercise sound judgment, even now.

Part 4 DECISIONS

47: Options

July 2070

Yuri came running in. He spread his softscreen out on the crew table. “At last I got the stuff downloaded from Mir…”

The screen began to fill up with images of worlds, blurry photographs, and blue-green pencil sketches.

Wells Station’s Can Two, the “house,” had one big inflatable table, used for crew meals, conferences, as a work surface. The table was modular; it could be split up into two or three. It was another bit of confinement psychology, Myra understood. The crew didn’t even have to eat together, if they chose not.

Right now all the bits of the big table were pushed together. For days it had been used as the focus of a kind of unending conference.

Yuri was trying to make sense of the alternate-Mars images Bisesa’s phone had slowly, painfully returned through the low-bandwidth Eye link. Ellie was slaving over her analysis of the Eye’s gravitational cage. Only Hanse Critchfield wasn’t working on some aspect of the Q-bomb threat, insisting he was more use with his beloved machines.

And Myra, Alexei, and Grendel Speth, with comparatively little to contribute, sat glumly at the scuffed table, cups of cool low-pressure coffee before them.

There was a sense of shabbiness in this roundhouse on Mars, Myra thought, compared to the expensive, expansive, light-filled environs of Cyclops. Yet, as Athena kept assuring them, they were at the focus of a response to a danger of cosmic proportions. The detonation in the asteroid belt had been visible on all the human worlds. Much of Earth had shut down, a civilization still traumatized by the sunstorm huddled in bunkerlike homes, waiting.

But time was running out. And on Mars there was a sense of rising panic. The Earth warship Liberator was now only days away, and they all knew why it was coming.

“All right,” Yuri said. “Here’s what we’ve got. As I understand it, the consensus among us is that the Mir universe contains a set of time-sliced samples. A showcase of solar life at its optimum on each world.”

“All Sol’s children at their prettiest,” Grendel said. “But it can’t last. I mean, both Venus and Mars must have reached their peak of biodiversity in the early days of the solar system, when the sun was much cooler. As best anybody can tell, the Mir sun is a copy from the thirteenth century. That sun is too hot for these worlds. They can’t last long.”

“But,” Yuri growled, “the point is, here are the worlds of the solar system as they were in the deep past. The question is how they got from past to present, what happened that made them as they are today. Now, look at Venus. We think we understand this case,” he said. “Right? A runaway greenhouse, the oceans evaporating, the water broken up by the sunlight and lost altogether…”

Once Venus had been moist, blue and serene. Too close to the sun, it overheated, and its oceans evaporated. With the water lost to space Venus had developed a new thick atmosphere, a blanket of carbon dioxide baked out of the seabed rock, and the greenhouse effect intensified until the ground started to glow, red-hot.

“A horror show, but we understand it. For Venus, our models fit,” said Yuri. “Yes? But now we turn to Mars. Mars was once Earthlike; but, too small, too far from the sun, it dried and cooled.

We understand that much. But look at this.”

He displayed contrasting profiles, of the ancient Mars on which they stood, and the young Mars of the Mir universe. The northern hemisphere of ancient Mars was visibly depressed beneath the neat circular arc of its younger self.

“Something happened here,” Yuri said, his anger burning.

“Something hugely violent.”

Myra saw it. It must have been like a hammer to the crown of the skull, a tremendous blow centered here, at the north pole. It had been powerful enough to create the Vastitas Borealis, like a crater that spanned the whole of the northern hemisphere.

They all saw the implication, immediately.

“A Q-bomb,” Alexei said. “Scaled to Mars’s mass. And directed here, at the north pole. This would be the result. By Sol’s tears. But why? Why hit Mars, and not Venus?”

“Because Venus was harmless,” Yuri snapped. “Venus was a water-world. If intelligence rose there at all it would have been confined to some seabed culture, using metals from geothermal vents or some such. They just didn’t put out the kind of signals you could see from afar. Roads, cities.”

“But the Martians did,” Myra said.

And their reward had been a mighty, sterilizing impact.

Grendel was growing excited. “I think we’re seeing elements of a strategy here. The Firstborn’s goal seems to be to suppress advanced technological civilizations. But they act with —economy. If a star system is giving them cause for concern, they first hit it with a sunstorm. Crude, a blanket blowtorching, but a cheap way of sterilizing an entire system. I bet if we dig deep enough we’ll find a relic of at least one more sunstorm in the deep past. But if the sunstorms don’t work, if worlds continue to be troublesome, they strike more surgically. Just as they targeted Mars. Just as they’ve now targeted Earth.”

“You’ve got to admit they’re thorough,” Yuri said.

Alexei said, “And we know from Athena and her Witness that we aren’t the only ones. The Firstborn’s operations are extensive in space and in time. ‘A fire devoureth before them; and behind them a flame burneth: the land is as the Garden of Eden before them, and behind them a desolate wilderness; yea, and nothing shall escape them.’ The Book of Joel.”

Myra raised her eyebrows. “Let’s not be hypocrites. Maybe the megafauna of Australia and America felt much the same way about us. ”

“They’re like gods,” Alexei said, still in apocalyptic mood.

“Maybe we should worship them.”

“Let’s not,” Yuri said dryly. “The Martians didn’t.”

“That’s right,” Ellie said now. She came bustling into the room with a softscreen. “The Martians struck a blow. And maybe we can too.” In the midst of their huddled, fearful gloom, Ellie was grinning.

“Remember this?” Ellie spread out her softscreen so they could all see a now-familiar string of symbols: