Anvil of Stars

his arms, watching Hans toss bits of cake to his mouth and grab them. When he finished, Hans wiped his hands on a towel stuck in a field, pushed himself around with one hand, and faced Martin squarely.

“Well?”

“I’m asking for an investigation,” Martin said.

“Of what?”

“Rosa’s death.”

Hans shook his head. “We know who did it.”

“I don’t think that’s enough.”

“Martin, we’ve done the Job. We’ll finish here and go find someplace to live. That has to be enough.”

Martin’s face flushed. He felt as he had when confronting the moms. “No,” he said. “We need to clear the air.”

“Rex is dead.”

“Rex left a message,” Martin said.

“It’s guilt-crazed shit.”

“The crew… needs to know, one way or the other.”

“You want to be Pan again?” Hans asked, deceptively calm. Martin could read the signs: neck muscles tight, one hand opening and closing slowly, grasping nothing.

“No,” Martin said.

“Who should be Pan?”

“That isn’t my point.”

“If you believe I had something to do with Rosa’s death, then I should be… what? What penalty do you suggest?”

“Did you put Rex up to it?” Martin asked.

“Whoa. Shooting pointblank, Marty. What makes you think I did?”

“Did you?”

Hans kept his eyes focused firmly on Martin’s, said, “No, I did not put Rex up to it. I don’t know what was going on in his head. He was confused. Rosa took him in—made him a part of her group. That was her mistake, not mine.”

“You didn’t tell Rex to attack the Brother?”

“Christ, no. What good would that have done me?”

Martin blinked. Got to keep it up. Can’t give up now.

“You saw Rosa as a real threat, somebody who could divert the whole mission.”

“Yes. Didn’t you?”

“You saw yourself as the only one capable of finishing the mission.”

Hans spread his arms, stretching. “Okay. Not too far wrong.”

“Rex was your friend. He was devoted to you.”

“Bolsh. Rex was his own man.”

“You wanted to make it look that way. You ordered him to attack the Brother, take the blame, isolate himself. He agreed.”

“So now I’m some sort of hypnotist. Why would I isolate him? You think Rex wasn’t smart enough to see through such a crazy scheme? He’d know why I wanted him isolated. He was no idiot. He’d know it would be so I could jump clear if he was caught. That’s just plain crazy. Rex was not crazy.”

“Devoted,” Martin suggested.

“I don’t know about that.”

“There’s sufficient question to make an investigation necessary,” Martin said.

Hans wagged his head back and forth, eyes wide, silently mimicking him. “ ‘Sufficient question.’ ‘Investigation necessary.’ Christ, you’re an intellectual giant. Do you think the crew would have followed you into something like Leviathan? We were pissing in our pants, Marty.”

Martin could feel the nastiness building. “Will you agree to an investigation?”

“Is this revenge for my not telling you when we’d attack?”

“No,” Martin said.

“I think it is. You know why I did it that way. You were in the middle of things. There could have been little ears everywhere. Did you think I would drop all our plans right in their laps?”

“This is beside the point, Hans, and you know it.”

“Sure,” Hans said, lifting his hands. “Anything for you.” He leaned forward, one hand pushing on a field, the other pulling, and released his grip to jab a finger at Martin. “They wouldn’t have followed you, Martin, because you get people killed. You’re a regular goddamn McClellan—did you read about him, Martin? American Civil War. Made an army but refused to really go out and fight. Your instincts are bad. You think leadership is a game with justice and rules. It isn’t. Leadership is getting the most people through a hell of a time, and doing the slicking Job!”

He called up images of Leviathan’s ruined worlds until they filled his quarters like hanging sheets. “My parents didn’t make it onto the Ark. Nobody I knew made it. They were all blown to atoms. Everybody I knew!

“The Killers had thousands of years. They sent out their clever machines, then they sat back. They built their pretty castles and made their pretty creatures, they laid their traps. They defended themselves to the max because they were afraid, they were guilty, they knew we’d come for them, and someday we’d get them. How many like us failed? We didn’t fail!”

Beads of Hans’ spittle hung between them like tiny jewels. Hans leaned back, face blotched with red and drawn with white. He withdrew his finger. “I didn’t fail. I got the Job done. If you want to be Pan, you can have it. I resign. You lead us to the promised land.”

“There needs to be an investigation,” Martin said.

“I said yes. Get out of here. Let someone enjoy what we’ve accomplished.

“We lost so much,” Hans said to his back as Martin passed through the door. “So goddamned much. What more do you want?”

In his quarters, Martin folded himself in a net and stared at the dead worlds, then some of the pictures transmitted by Salamander.

Hans had ripped his heart open. He did not know exactly why he persisted in asking for an investigation, but something of his father and something of his mother pushed him. He was motivated by lessons he barely remembered learning on Earth and on the Central Ark. Primal things in his life.

In the nose, Giacomo, Eye on Sky, Anna Gray Wolf, and Thorkild Lax worked to assess the damage, tally the results, before making their final report to Hans. Unable to sleep, Martin came to them and sat in silence while they worked. They played back the war at high speed, tracking the destruction, the ineffective counter-measures, the sheer disproportion of the victory.

Martin saw again the shadowy curled ribbon writing across Leviathan’s worlds like a finger, moving even more rapidly in the playback. Picture stacked over picture, Giacomo observing with a critical half-squint, Eye on Sky coiled with head cords attentive.

They came to the endgame.

“Doers and makers seeding here and here.” Giacomo pointed to a magnified image of planetary rubble blooming against darkness. Flash of that awful finger. Tiny sparks glowed in the image like fireflies in a storm cloud. “Making interceptors from the cores of Blinker and Cueball. Now—they’re not even hiding themselves. Interceptors go out on anti em plumes.” Radiant lines of white fanning out, trails fading behind them.

The wands quickly counted interceptor traces: fifty, sixty, seventy thousand in this region alone, each no larger than a car, each seeking a Leviathan ship. No targets were visible in this image, but in another, the interceptors had found their ships, and the points of light were sharp and intense. The torch glare reflected from expanding clouds of dust and gas, like welding torches deep in a cave, on and off, winking, until they became a starfield. Enacting the Law at a distance.

Completely different rules.

Hundreds more images. Torches flickering, dying, starfields of destruction vanishing.