Anvil of Stars

“Doesn’t sound like I’m being given a choice.”

“I could send Rosa,” Hans said.

Martin stared him down. “All right,” Martin said. Hakim tried to break the tension.

“It will be a very unusual journey. While we are gone, the crew will have something to do. They’ll study these pictures and—”

“Bolsh,” Hans said. “We don’t show them to anybody now. We can’t avoid letting them know there’s a ship, but everything else… zipped lips.”

“Why?” Jennifer asked, astonished.

“Our morale is so low the pictures might kill us,” Hans said. “Martin, Giacomo, you study them with Hakim and Jennifer. Nobody else sees them for now. I don’t even want to look at them. Report only to me.”

“Hans, that’s deception,” Jennifer said, still astonished.

“It’s an order, if that means anything now. Are we agreed?”

Jennifer started to talk again, but Hans interrupted.

“Slick it. If everybody wants to choose another Pan now, let’s go to it. I’ll be glad to go back to a relatively normal life, taking orders instead of giving them,” he said evenly. “Am I right?”

Nobody was willing to push the issue. They agreed reluctantly. Jennifer transferred the images to their private wands.

For the first time in their journey, one group would withhold information from another.

Numb, his gloom deeper and more perversely comforting than ever, Martin returned to his quarters and looked through the images again, trying to fathom the seriousness of what had just happened, and whether he had gone along with Hans too quickly.

He did not look forward to the journey. The pictures were devastating. The Benefactors apparently could not save this Ship of the Law; the sauropod beings were almost certainly thousands of years dead.

The Benefactors could have known about Wormwood and Leviathan for millennia.

They had sent others here before. They had surmised that much around Wormwood; now it was confirmed.

The Dawn Treader was just another in a series.

No ship had succeeded; none had even gone so far as to burn the tar baby, until now.

But what awaited them around Leviathan might be even more deceptive, even more complex, playing for much higher stakes…

The craft created within the second homeball was slightly bigger than a bombship—ten meters long, with a bulbous compartment four meters in diameter, within which Martin, Giacomo, and Hakim would spend one month —much of that time asleep or wrapped in volumetric fields.

They said their farewells. The crew still knew next to nothing—only that there was another Ship of the Law, probably a death ship, and that the three of them would investigate.

Hans withdrew from the interior of the new craft, looked at Martin with narrow eyes, and said, “You can back out if you want. This is no picnic.”

Martin shook his head. He felt foolish, being manipulated so blatantly—challenged to back away, refusing to be so weak in front of Hans. Hans cocked his head to one side. “Giacomo, keep your brain running. Maybe we can learn something they don’t want us to know.”

“Why would they have invited us to come if they wanted to keep secrets?” Hakim asked.

“I don’t know,” Hans said. “Maybe we’re being paranoid.”

“Maybe,” Martin said.

“But I doubt it.”

He shook hands with each of them. Giacomo and Jennifer had said their farewells privately.

“We’re ready,” Martin said. A journey of a trillion kilometers begins with a single step. He pulled himself into the craft, kicking free of the ladder field, into the spherical interior. Giacomo followed, then Hakim.

As they settled, Hakim said, “The Dawn Treader is giving us one quarter of its fuel.”

Martin nodded. Such profligacy seemed beside the point now.

“We will be like a fish carrying a yolk sac,” Hakim continued. “Very ungainly. And this craft is sixty percent fake matter…”

“Please,” Giacomo said. “I’m queasy enough.”

“Big adventure,” Hakim concluded with a sigh. His skin was pale and he shivered a little.

The hatch smoothed shut.

They eased out of the weapons store. Dawn Treader receded to no more than a pinpoint against the stars.

A mom’s voice spoke. “We begin super acceleration in three minutes.”

The ship was little more than an enlarged mom, Martin thought, given seven-league boots.

“You might want to see this,” Hans’ voice came over the noach.

They witnessed their departure from Dawn Treader’s point of view, a tiny dart with bulbous middle surrounded by pale green fuel tanks.

Volumetric fields wrapped the three passengers in smothering safety. Martin’s eyesight suffered, as usual, but he still watched the noach transmission. A sump swallowed their flare. Little more than a rim of intense white showed, and quickly faded.

“Bon voyage,” Hans said.

Martin passed the acceleration in a slice of nothingness in which only a few incoherent dreams surfaced— meeting girls at dances on the Central Ark, Mother and Father, basement sweepings from his brain, exhausting in their banality. When they had reached near-c, they coasted, their fields folded, and they faced each other balefully, cramped shipmates. Outside, space twisted and stars huddled into a blurred torque. The ship restored the star fields to a normal appearance for their benefit.

“How long until we arrive?” Giacomo asked, clearly not comfortable in the close quarters.

“A tenday,” Hakim said.

“You may sleep for the first six days if you wish,” the mom’s voice told them.

“Earth’s astronauts did this for months at a time,” Hakim said.

“Yeah, but we’re spoiled,” Giacomo said.

“Let’s sleep,” Martin said.

Sleep came and went, another longer slice of oblivion. Martin awoke disoriented, drank a cup of sweetened fluid, exercised in the weightlessness, observed his companions surface from their slumbers.

He had expected the journey to add even more weight to his burden of gloom. Instead, he experienced exhilaration and freedom he had never known before.

Hakim behaved as if the burden had shifted from Martin to him. He worked quietly but without enthusiasm. Giacomo spent much of his time contemplating the small star sphere.

“We’re further away from our fellows than anybody’s ever been before,” he said at the end of their second day awake. The derelict was now two days away.

“Farther,” Hakim said softly.

“Whatever,” Giacomo said. “I don’t feel isolated. Do you?”

“The Dawn Treader is pretty isolated,” Martin observed.

“Yes, but they have each other… too many to keep track of. We have just three.”

In natural sleep, Martin saw Rosa’s dark shadow entity walk through an impossibly green field, wind knocking pieces of it away like fluff from a black dandelion. It towered over trees and hills, yet it was fragile and somehow vulnerable…

Awake, he helped Hakim prepare for their investigation. The craft mom briefed them on designs of Ships of the Law launched over the past few thousand years, though without any indication of their origins or destinations. Martin thought this was make-work; indeed, he was coming to believe their presence on this journey had more to do with ship-crew relations than practical function.

But the crew was the entire reason for the Dawn Treader’s existence. Perhaps the