Strangely, Martin found old experiences opening to him as he spoke to his shipmates, flowers of memory suddenly revived: sucking on his mother’s breast, the warm rich smell of her like roses in a gymnasium, the smile on her face as she looked on him, cradled in her arms, an all-approving smile the moms could not produce, all- forgiving, all-loving, the soft ecstasy of her milk letting down.
He remembered the discipline and love of his father, less gentle then his mother; the guilt of his father when he punished Martin, especially when Martin provoked a spanking; his father’s solemn depression for hours after, locking himself away from wife and son while his mother sat quietly with Martin. The later years, spankings much less frequent—none after he was six—and the days of togetherness in the summers before Earth’s death, after his father’s return from Washington, D.C., investigating the river in a raft, exploring the forest around the house, talking, his father taciturn and solemn at times, at other times ebullient and even silly.
Arthur’s love for Francine, filling Martin’s childhood as a constant like sunlight. Martin did not forget the arguments, the family disputes, but they were as much a part of the picture as wrinkles in skin or mountains on the Earth’s surface or waves on the sea… ups and downs of emotional terrain.
The memories helped Martin keep that sense of purpose they had had when they left the Ark and climbed out of the sun’s basement, up into the long darkness.
“We still haven’t found anything that is obviously a defense,” Hakim pronounced on the eighteenth day. The children of
Martin hung with legs crossed at the rear of the group, Theresa beside him. He laddered to the center of the cafeteria when Hakim had finished.
“We have some choices,” Martin said. “We can drop makers and doers into Nebuchadnezzar first, then the same to Ramses, and hope they find enough raw material to do the Job. Or we can convert all of our fuel and most of the ship into bombs and concentrate on skinning one planet. Because of the lack of volatiles, we probably can’t do much damage to more than one, not right away. Just to skin one planet will probably take most of our fuel and large chunks of
“Let’s vote,” Ariel said when he paused.
“No.” He shook his head patiently. “This isn’t a matter for voting.”
“Why not?” Ariel asked, her expression languid, without passion.
“Because the Pan makes all decisions now,” Stephanie Wing Feather reminded her.
Martin half-expected Ariel to leave the cafeteria in anger, but she did not. She relaxed her arms, closed her eyes, sighed, then opened them again and watched his face intently.
“This is a tough one,” Martin said. “If we wait long enough, we might learn whether we should hit Herod, or even focus on it. If there are no defenses, if the risk is low, we can suck out all of Nebuchadnezzar’s atmospheric volatiles
“Strip the atmosphere…” Andrew Jaguar said, shuddering. “Like vampires.”
“We’re going to blow it to dust anyway,” Mei-li reminded him, small voice like a bird’s chirrup.
“Hakim, how close do we need to be to investigate?”
“I don’t think there’s any real gain from being closer than a few thousand kilometers. If need be, we can send out remotes at this distance and create a bigger baseline, gather as much information as we would if we flew right down to the surface… But obviously, we could make a bigger blip in whatever sensors they have.”
“What kind of baseline?” Martin asked.
Hakim conferred with his team for a few seconds. “We think at this distance, about ten kilometers. We could resolve down to bugs in the air, if there are any.”
“The makers and doers have to be delivered from a distance of no more than one hundred kilometers,” Stephanie said. “The bombships, fully fueled, have a range of forty g hours, and that can translate into however many kilometers of orbit we wish, if we’re patient… We know that none of us can live in a bombship for more than about four tendays without going crazy. We could induce sleep, but that wouldn’t be optimum.”
The parameters were now clear to all the children. Each advantage had to be weighed against risk; Martin had worked through the momerath days before, and found several courses equally matched for danger and benefit. Theresa had checked his calculations, as had Stephanie Wing Feather and, he presumed, Hakim Hadj.
“We send out remotes and expand our baseline,” he said. “That seems to involve the lowest risk. We can gather all the information we need in a few days. We pull in the remotes, coast in quietly, release the bombships, pick them up again after they’ve injected the weapons into Nebuchadnezzar, drop our doers to gather volatiles in the ruins, accelerate outward to Ramses as fast as possible, and execute again. If we haven’t found any further signs of activity on Herod, we rendezvous with the robots after a fast orbit around Wormwood. Then we measure our resources, report to
The children groaned. They had done much of the momerath themselves, but hearing it from Martin—losing all hope of fast action and sacrifice of fuel to boost up and out, knowing what they had already suspected, that he would choose the most conservative and practical course, however time-consuming—brought the truth home hard.
At the very least, under those circumstances, they would have to sleep. There were dangers in such a long sleep; even a Ship of the Law could grow old.
Saying the plan aloud, when he had hardly thought it through clearly himself, made it seem both more real and strangely beyond real. Young human beings saying such words, planning such things.
As if to highlight the absurdity, Mei-li giggled. Her giggle died quickly and was not picked up around the room.
“We will be in position to release the bombships in six days,” Hakim said.
Nebuchadnezzar was easily visible to the naked eye, a bright diamond among the lesser points of stars. Day by day, it became even brighter, and Martin ordered a star sphere expanded in the cafeteria. As they ate their meals, or gathered in quiet social groupings, they watched their target grow.
The remotes spread their photon-intercepting fields like webs and gathered in clear images of the brown world, as if opening an eye ten kilometers wide.
There were no bugs in the atmosphere—no life crawling on the surface, no organic chemical activity within the upper layers of soil.
Nebuchadnezzar’s subtle motions resembled a feeble, irregular heartbeat, but the profiles of the internal vibrations did not match tectonics. Unlike Ramses’, Nebuchadnezzar’s heart was cool; any internal heat had fled long before.
Martin finished examining Hakim’s figures while the other children slept, two days from H-hour.
The five inner masses remained enigmatic. From this angle to the ecliptic, they could not measure the objects in transit across Wormwood, but a chance star occultation allowed Hakim to confirm that one of the dark objects was three thousand kilometers in diameter, with a mass of approximately fourteen billion trillion kilograms, and only as dense as water. The dark objects might be clusters of neutronium with large spaces between, surrounded by a shell… or they might be balloons filled with water, a tantalizing idea, but unlikely.
“I have no idea what they are,” Hakim said, shaking his head, expression grim and exhausted. “They worry me greatly, Martin.”
Martin replayed the inner mass star occultation and associated graphics and measurement reports, trying to glean with supernatural intuition what could not be seen. “The War Mother has no suggestions?”
“The objects are outside the moms’ experience, I think,” Hakim said. He looked as if he were thinking, but would not say,
But that would be absurd.
“We should pull in the remotes now,” Martin said, shivering slightly.
