Anvil of Stars

Ariel tightened her jaw and said no more. Martin felt a sudden perverse tug for her.

“It’s done,” he said. “The children have voted. We go.”

Martin ate in the cafeteria with the day’s drill group when the maneuvers began.

The children felt it first as a deeper vibration through the ship, singing in their muscles and bones.

“Oh, man,” Harpal Timechaser said. He brought out his wand and let it drift in the air. Slowly, precessing this way, then that, as the ship maneuvered to bring its drives to bear, the wand spun slowly, drawing their complete attention.

The vibration increased. The Dawn Treader’s hull made a melodic singing noise, deep and masculine, as all the stresses of the drive pushed through its fabric. The wand began to settle, first toward one wall. They felt themselves “pushed” with it, and they yelled with excitement, then groaned as the room oriented within the ship, as if spun on gimbals, one flat wall becoming a floor, the other a ceiling.

A gentle ten percent g as the drives came alive, stretched, clearing their throats.

“I’m going to be sick,” Paola Birdsong said. “Why don’t they smooth it for us?”

“Because we hate that more than this,” Martin reminded her.

Half an hour later, the ship sang again, on an even deeper note. Martin saw the ship in momerath, felt its load of fuel decreasing steadily, flare of particles and radiation disappearing into the bottomless darkness of the ship’s external sump, a way to conceal their wastes by scattering them across the surrounding light years as an increase in the energy of the vacuum.

They were going where fuel would be difficult to find.

Full gravity returned. The halls and quarters filled with complaints, more excitement; painted, half-dressed children running, stumbling, cursing, grimacing, trying to leap; falling, cursing again.

Two children broke bones in the first few hours. Their casts, applied by a mom in the dispensary after bone- knitting therapy, served as warning notice for the rest. Martin called a general meeting in the full-gravity schoolroom and the injured showed off their trophies.

The injured would be well within two days… The moms’ medicine was potent. But until the casts were off, they could not participate in most of the drills.

The ship transformed itself subtly like a living thing, usually when no one was watching. Throughout, rooms oriented to the end of weightless coasting.

Once past their initial excitement, the children did not find the change disturbing. Psychologically, it was a return to the old patterns of the Ark, and to their year-long acceleration to near light speed away from the Sun. Not to mention their years on Earth…

More changes would come soon—two g’s, a heavy burden—and if they decided to go for orbital insertion into the Buttercup system, the action would be spectacular.

They had never before experienced the Ship of the Law demonstrating its full power and sophistication…

The Dawn Treader was a single virus about to enter a highly protected and extremely powerful host, with unknown capabilities. Martin would report to the moms every day now, and a mom would be constantly available in the schoolroom; the same mom, with an identifying mark painted on it by Martin, at the suggestion of Jorge Rabbit and Stephanie Wing Feather, who thought it would boost morale.

The marking ceremony was attended by all the children. Just before his suicide, Theodore Dawn had written of this expected time: “We’ll get dressed up in war paint and war uniforms, and we’ll swear an oath, like mythic pirates or the Three Musketeers, and it won’t be all nonsense, all childsplay. It will mean something. Just wait and see.” The search for a meaningful ceremony had come too late for Theodore, Martin thought.

But now that moment had come for the rest of them.

The children gathered on the tiers of an amphitheater that had risen from the floor of the schoolroom at Martin’s command. They wore black and white paint on their faces and forearms, “To eliminate the gray feelings, the neutralities, the indecisions.” Even Martin wore the paint.

A mom floated near the middle of the schoolroom. Within the star sphere, a red circle blinked around the white point of the Buttercup star. Martin approached the mom with small pots of black and white paint in one hand, and a brush in the other.

“To show our resolve, to show our change of state, to strengthen our minds and our courage, we appoint this mom a War Mother. The War Mother will be here to speak with any of us, at any time.

“Now is our time.”

Martin applied the brush thick with white paint to one side of the mom’s stubby, featureless head. The other half he carefully painted black. Then, to complete the effect—something he had thought of himself—he painted a divided circle where the “face” might have been, reversing the colors, black within white, white within black. No grays, but cautious judgment of alternatives.

Painting completed, the War Mother decorated, Martin turned to the children on the risers. They stood quietly, no coughing, breathing hardly audible in the stillness, strong and beautiful and grim-faced with thoughts and memories. He stood before them, looking into their faces.

“Luis Estevez Saguaro and Li Mountain of the search team have suggested names for the star systems. They think the Buttercup star should be called Wormwood, the Cornflower Leviathan, and the Firestorm, Behemoth. Any other suggestions?”

“They’re good names,” Joe Flatworm said, scratching his sandy growth of beard.

No one objected.

“We’ve been training for years, but we’ve never exercised outside, in real conditions. I’m making a formal request of the moms, right now, that we begin external exercises as soon as possible, before this day is out if we can.”

The moms had always turned that request down. Martin had not conferred with them; by asking them now, in front of the children, he was taking a real risk, operating only on a hunch.

“You may begin three days of external drill,” the War Mother replied. “You may conduct a full-level exercise in the region around the ship.”

Hans’ face lit up and he raised his fist in a cheer, then turned to the children behind him. All but Ariel cheered, even Erin Eire. Ariel kept her face blank.

“We’re in it now,” Hans said to Martin as the group broke up. He smiled broadly and rubbed his hands together. “We’re really in it!”

“What kind of drill are you planning?” Martin asked the War Mother when the room was almost empty.

“That must be determined at the time of the exercise,” the War Mother said. Martin backed away, confused.

“No warning?”

“No warning,” said the mom.

During the coasting, Martin’s primary quarters—once shared with Theodore—had been spherical, nets at one end filled with the goods manufactured by the moms to give the children a feeling of place and purpose: paper books, jewelry. Since the deceleration began, Martin had redesigned the quarters to have several flat ledges he could sit on or brace against. His sleeping net had been swapped for a bag and sling hung between two pillars.

Theresa came to him in his primary quarters in the second homeball after a ten-hour period of self-imposed isolation. She stood at his closed hatch, inquiring discreetly through his wand whether he was available. With a groan, conflicting emotions making him ball up his fists and pound the yielding floor, he swung down from a ledge and opened the door.

“I didn’t want to bother you…” she said, her face tight, hair in disarray, skin glistening. “We’ve been exercising. Harpal and Stephanie told me you were here…”

He reached out for her and hugged her fiercely. “I need you. I need someone to balance me.”

“I’m glad,” she said, burying her face in his shoulder. She wore workout cutoffs, blue shorts and loose-fitting top. “The exercises are good,” she said. “We’re really into them.”

“I’m in the boneyard,” he said, sweeping his free arm at electronic slate and books piled into his sleep corner. What they called boneyard was everything human stored in the Dawn Treader’s libraries.

“Tactics?” she asked.

He grimaced. “Call it that.”