Anvil of Stars

“Where are you going?”

“With Harpal. To pick rifle pilots.”

“Then let’s go,” Ariel said. “We have to keep moving.”

She treated his pain as something trivial. His hatred for her burned like fire. But he followed her along the neck to the aft homeball, still bleak, but at least moving, doing.

Paola Birdsong and Liam Oryx volunteered to take the rifles out. Their journey would last a day, as planned by Hans and Harpal.

Hans and Ariel accompanied the chosen pilots to the new weapons store. There were only thirty craft in the smaller space, all newly made after the destruction of William’s bombship. The designs were familiar, however. Martin and Ariel watched the two volunteers enter the slender craft, checked out their systems through the wands, stood behind ladder fields as the ships pushed through the hatch on pylons.

The rifles began their journey of hundreds of thousands of kilometers.

“I feel guilty about keeping my room temperature above freezing now,” Ariel said. “We have so little fuel. I hope this is really worthwhile.”

Martin shrugged and left the weapons store for the schoolroom.

“Where are you going?” Ariel asked. He told her. “Can I come with you?”

Martin was surprised into a long, even a rude, silence. “You can go wherever you want,” he said. “We’re gathering to see if anything happens to Nebuchadnezzar.”

“You need company. I don’t want to see you bleak again.”

He closed one eye, squinted at her, and again, without thinking, said what was on his mind: “I can’t figure you. You were such a bitch when I was Pan. Now it’s sweetness and light. Are you crazier than I am?”

She backed away, stung, then said, “Probably. What’s it matter now?”

To that, he had no answer.

The crew gathered around the star sphere in the schoolroom, all but Hakim and Luis Estevez Saguaro, who stayed in the nose to keep working. “What we learned in training makes us think this planet’s really sick with our doers,” Thomas Orchard explained, pointing out large brown and red patches on Nebuchadnezzar. “Whatever turned our people into and em may have been failing to start with—it didn’t stop some pods from dropping doers. And it didn’t convert all our ships. Now we think the machinery, the defenses, are completely gone.”

“How long until it blows up?” David Aurora asked.

“It won’t blow up,” Harpal said. “It’s just set to cook.”

“That’s what I mean,” David said, smirking. Martin watched the crew closely, uneasy, still bleak despite Ariel’s company.

“Any minute now,” Thomas said.

“Then we got a win,” David continued, raising his fist in a victory salute.

“Fat lot of good it does us,” Ariel said. “Two more planets to go, and so little fuel we can’t escape.”

“It’s something,” Harpal said.

“I don’t think it’s much,” Erin Eire said at the rear. Martin had not even seen her since the awakening, not closely enough to pull her apart from the crowd. “I think we all know this place isn’t the real target.”

“What makes you think that?” Thomas asked.

A mom entered the schoolroom. The crew fell silent as it floated to the center, but when it said and did nothing more, they resumed.

“Wormwood’s a tar baby,” Erin said. “We got stuck. We might blow off the tar baby’s arm or leg. But it will still be sticky enough to get those who come after.”

“A seed carrier signals by noach that demolition is beginning,” the mom announced. The crew cheered, but not as lustily as they might have. “We will see the results visually within ten minutes.”

Thomas shifted from the planet view and caught the rifles on their way to the nearest orbiting cylinder. His wand sang and a message appeared for his eyes only. “That’s Hakim,” he said. “Things are happening again…”

Martin followed Thomas to the nose. Hans floated with arms wrapped around legs, watching the search team put together their information.

Hakim played the wands and the data banks like musical instruments.

“Get Jennifer Hyacinth up here,” Hans said. Thomas called Jennifer to the nose.

Martin quickly read the information projected by Hakim’s wand. The five inner orbiting masses had diffused into elongated clouds.”

Harpal had closed his eyes. The air smelled of tension. Hans seemed a still point in the swirl of motion around the star sphere. He faced the projected information with unmoving eyes, not really seeing it. Martin knew what Hans was up to: he was trying to put together a clear picture through the clutter and uncertainty.

Jennifer Hyacinth arrived in the nose a few minutes later. She squeezed in beside Hans to be in the best position to see the information.

“The masses are the next part of the trap,” she said, frowning.

“Good girl,” Hans said. “We’re in close, the planet is going, so we’re obviously dangerous and they don’t want us to escape. They don’t know how much fuel we have left, or what we’re capable of…”

“We’ve done better than previous contenders,” Martin said.

“Maybe,” Hans said. “Harpal, what—”

“The dark masses could be loose-packed neutronium bombs,” Jennifer said. “The measurements are about right.”

“Good Christ,” Harpal said. “That many bombs could wipe out every planet in the system five, ten times over. If we could gather them—”

“They’re falling into Wormwood,” Hakim said.

Fresh diagrams floating in the air showed the rearrangements of the inner masses, their drift toward the star, estimates of time of entry into the heliosphere. “They’re being pushed in,” Jennifer said. “I think—”

“Wormwood’s going to go,” Hans said. “Jennifer, work up some momerath on what that will mean for us. Martin, coordinate with the moms. Tell the rifles to come back in, fast.”

“Wormwood’s particle wind is partially channeled to the poles,” Jennifer said. “There must be powerful fields controlling its interior. When it blows, if those fields are still in place—and I don’t think they could just be switched off—it won’t expand as a sphere…”

Martin pulled back and spoke through his wand to the moms.

Hakim pulled up a picture of Nebuchadnezzar’s surface glowing from the internal plasma of their seeds, but that seemed inconsequential now; the second part of the trap was indeed about to close.

The Dawn Treader orbited less than two hundred million kilometers from Wormwood. If the star went supernova, a tremendous burst of neutrinos would blow away the star’s outer layers.

Neutrinos in normal quantities were less substantial than any ghost, capable of traveling through light year thicknesses of lead unimpeded. But if they were present in such huge numbers, their interactions with matter—with the Dawn Treader and everything else in Wormwood’s vicinity—would become deadly.

Martin had no idea what so many neutrinos would do to their chemistry, but the sheer force of the neutrino blast could tear them to pieces.

Jennifer seemed lost in an ecstasy of calculation.

A mom appeared in the nose. “If this information is correct,” it said, “there is both danger, and extraordinary opportunity.”

Jennifer’s face lit up. “There could be channeling of the blast in different areas,” she said. “Neutrinos will pour out in all directions, but most of the star’s mass may push through the poles, making two jets, like a quasar.” She linked her hands and used two thumbs up and down to show the flow.

“I concur,” the mom said.

Hans looked between Jennifer and the mom, biting his lower lip, and slowly uncurled, stretching his arms. “What do we do?”

“We use all available fuel for rapid acceleration into a new orbit to pass over the star’s south pole,” the mom said.