Anvil of Stars

relative to the Dawn Treader by comparing the distorted frames of reference.

Now, two twenty-eight-hour days after deceleration began, they were still traveling at greater than ninety- nine percent of the speed of light. Day by day, as the Ship of the Law slowed, as its tau increased, the stars would correct themselves, the luminous belt would expand to normality, the tunneling effects fore and aft would end.

Martin was eager for that time; to see stars again, as he had seen them from Earth, though not all the same stars, not the same sky.

The small craft aligned themselves. Their pilots saw others as silhouettes against the distorted sky, and communicated by noach.

Martin remembered the lectures of years past, watching his fellows practice different formations, warming up for the exercise itself, which would be like nothing they had experienced before. The defenses could be ancient and straightforward; orbiting sentinels, kinetic energy projectiles, or…

The defenses may be sophisticated beyond anything you have trained for. Advanced civilizations are infinitely surprising in the varieties of their accomplishments, in the expansion of their knowledge, puzzling in their expertise in one area, and their lack in another. Civilizations have personalities, if we may call them such; weaknesses and strengths, talents and blindness. Even a technologically superior civilization has weak points.

That much he had learned during training; it came back with crystal clarity, as if spoken in his ear.

Killing Captain Cook. Guerrilla warfare; South-East Asians against B-52s. But theirs would not be a long-term guerrilla action. They would lay the seeds of weapons that could not be removed without performing the very actions the weapons themselves were intended for: planet killers.

He saw Theresa’s rifle glinting in the weird light of blue stars emerging from behind the Ship of the Law. Theresa was to take picket duty with five others, reaching out thirty thousand kilometers beyond the Ship of the Law. He watched the rifle dwindle. Flies buzzing around a battleship; powerful flies, but no one could know how well-matched they might be against what was coming.

That was the unanswerable question. There was a very good chance they would encounter a civilization so far advanced that the power within the Ship of the Law would be insignificant.

Martin had had nightmares about what might happen then: would they be captured like animalcules plucked by an eyedropper out of pond water? If the superior intelligence swallows the animalcules, they might cause disease, still might kill; but if the intended victim refuses to swallow, the fighters are isolated, the Ship of the Law is frozen and sectioned and examined, the children are pulled apart cell by cell and studied; harmless, defeated.

Martin banished those thoughts. The exercise was all that mattered for the moment. He strained against the membrane, the layer of water, and the surrounding field. In the actual offensive, as they performed the Job, they would be aided by makers and doers and robot craft not limited by human physiology. But one or more of the children would pull the trigger. The execution would be performed by the survivors of Earth. That was the Law— while any of the crew remained…

Paola Birdsong and Bonita Imperial Valley escorted a torus of sporangia; in actual offensive action, such a torus could carry a million makers and doers. It was their duty to guard the torus until it was ready to broadcast its contents.

“Defenses have been sighted using statistical scintillation matching,” the mom’s voice announced in his ear. He saw and felt through the rifle’s sensors radiation pulses directed at their position: crude methods but effective. The pulses were absorbed in the Dawn Treader’s skin, but observers beyond the Ship of the Law could see its absorption shadow.

Judgment: the technology was more primitive than theirs, but possibly equal in destructive force, as a crossbow may equal a rifle in killing power.

The formation changed immediately to a protective envelope around the Dawn Treader. Picket craft had made it out to only twenty thousand kilometers, leaving faint trails of reaction mass, particles and radiation that dissipated quickly, but not quickly enough. Small craft like rifles, bombships, and pickets could not use sumps to hide their drives. The Ship of the Law, in effect, was pinpointed at the center of a star of ion traces.

The picket craft veered and the Dawn Treader changed its course abruptly and abandoned the formation. One instant, the Dawn Treader was clearly visible within the formation; the next, it was gone.

There would be hell to pay within the ship; volumetric fields would keep the children still aboard from being smashed to jelly, but the side-effects would be nausea and disorientation.

A weapon was being used against the remaining craft. It was quickly described to him: a hail of anti em needles, visible only through their attrition as they encountered stray hydrogen atoms: sparkles of gamma rays and brilliant white light. Five rifles jaunted into a screen formation, but that was not effective. The five craft—William’s among them—were deactivated, destroyed, to all intents and purposes, for this exercise… And Martin was next.

He felt the voices move into his head. His neurological states accelerated, something he had long since learned to hate; but he was thinking a thousand, ten thousand times faster, as fields created virtual neurons that mimicked his thought patterns. His personality split; he left the old self behind like a shed pupa case.

It seemed entirely too real when light filled all his senses: needles striking chaff. He ejected his chaff and retreated in the direction of the Dawn Treader. Volumetric fields divided him into portions as small as molecules and kept each particle in place; the rifle accelerating at maximum power, five, ten, one hundred, a thousand g’s, darting like a hellborn flea on an undisguised pillar of light, bouncing in and out of the flowers of dying anti em needles.

Paola Birdsong still shepherded the sporangia torus. Bonita Imperial Valley had been deactivated. Through his rifle’s senses he saw three bombships on Paola’s tail, spreading chaff to intersect the needles. They would be destroyed; Paola and the torus might survive. The needles hit the spread chaff. A vicious wash of radiation deactivated the three bombships and damaged Paola’s; crippled, she tried to keep up with the torus. He saw the torus accelerating madly, leaving Paola behind, needles outstripped.

Delivered, the torus was on its own now. He thought of using the Ship of the Law itself, directing it to convert its mass to a neutronium gravity-fuse bomb and head for the likeliest inhabited world, to supplement the torus’ destruction—but the situation was not yet desperate enough for such a suicide…

More needles coming in, floods of them. He was alone, thoughts going over every possibility; out of command, out of touch, simply alone. Just an exercise. Hell of an exercise. Each surviving craft had instructions to make its way to the nearest inhabited bodies and inflict maximum damage.

Kamikazes. He hated the thought of such waste to so little potential effect. The more dangerous choice was to locate the Ship of the Law again, but his craft could not match Dawn Treader for speed. That meant he would have to decide where the ship would go, in its mad course to evade the needles. All the other children would be making similar decisions; most, he suspected, would decide to hunt for the ship, and failing that, to kamikaze.

Effectively, he was no longer Pan—no longer a leader.

He would hunt.

The residue of radiations from intercepted needles left a crazy tangle throughout a billion cubic kilometers of space, the center of the battle. How many other needles—in how many other orbital tracks—were set up for this exercise?

None of the needles are real. None of this is real. It is simulation projected for our eyes only against a real background.

No matter. To lose this exercise so completely would be a disgrace, and he could not stand to see the children disgraced before the moms, with so little time until the real Job began. Martin could not feel his body. His accelerated thought gave him long hours for every breath or pound of heart. The body was separate from him now; his present self existed as a virtual simulacrum, which would re-connect with the physical mind at the end of the exercise.

At this rate, the craft he controlled seemed positively slow and balky. And that was perhaps part of the problem; he was not matched with his capabilities, but outmatched them. He was too high powered in his head for the weapon he used. He did not need the extra acceleration to contemplate strategy for all the small craft.