Anvil of Stars

“When the time comes,” it said, “my presence will not be obvious.”

Without warning, the mom made a peculiar noise like a trumpet blat and gently toppled to one side, rebounding against the floor. The crew stared in surprise; before anyone could react, it made a similar noise and rose again, stabilized. “This vessel has been searched for high-density weapons. Examination may have been conducted by noach. My functioning was temporarily interfered with.”

“How do they search by noach?” Jennifer asked, voice squeaky.

“They may query selected atoms and particles within our vessel for their state and position.”

Jennifer looked as if she had just opened a wonderful Christmas present, and she turned to Martin, gleeful, clearly believing that her work and theory had been confirmed.

Martin was struck by how much they acted and sounded like eager, frightened children, himself included.

“Will they know the ship has a fake matter core?” he asked the mom. “Could they know you’re here?”

“Unless I am mistaken, which is possible but not likely, such a noach examination can only reveal extremes of mass density.”

Jennifer slapped her right hand against her thigh; it was obvious she wanted to do more momerath and plug in these new clues.

“Jennifer,” he said, “you have work to do?”

“Pardon?”

“Go do it. You’re making me nervous.”

Jennifer grinned and left the bridge.

“So they know we’re not armed with anything lethal,” Martin said. “Why did you quit for a moment there?”

“I am not sure.”

Martin looked at the mom intently, then returned his attention to the projected images. “Put us into orbit around the fourth planet,” he told Hakim and Silken Parts.

Hakim did his momerath and drew the best path and points of drive bursts; the path closely matched that suggested on the transmitted charts. “Steady deceleration of five g’s, we will be in orbit within five days, thirteen hours and twelve minutes,” Hakim said.

Silken Parts did the same calculations using Brother math, reported the results to Eye on Sky, then turned to Martin. “We agree within a few seconds,” he said.

“Noach our plans and the messages to Shrike and Greyhound,” Martin said.

Martin’s cabin aboard the Trojan Horse was less than a fifth the size of his previous quarters and contained only his sleeping net. The crews had not yet finished adding homey touches to the masquerade; he scanned the walls and imagined perhaps posters of Brothers and humans frolicking on beaches beneath a blue-green sky. That isn’t too bad. He’d mention the idea to Donna Emerald Sea, who with Long Slither was in charge of ship design now.

He twisted into the net and closed his eyes. He was instantly asleep and in no time at all, it seemed, his wand chimed. It was Jennifer. In long-suffering silence, he crawled from the net, assumed a lotus in mid-air to keep some sort of dignity, and told her to come in.

“Their noach is better than ours,” she said. “Much higher level, more powerful than the moms’ noach, I mean.”

“That’s obvious,” he said, still groggy.

“I just had a long talk with Silken Parts. We swapped theories on Benefactor technology. Martin, we’re going to be way outmatched down there—far more than we were around Wormwood. What these folks had around Wormwood is like a steel trap, and this, this is an atom bomb.”

“What do you think they have?” Martin asked.

“They swept us with something—no, that’s not right; sweep isn’t the right idea, not the right word. They queried our ship’s matter and particles from six billion kilometers. From what I can work out, we couldn’t manage that intense a scan at all, ever—and if we could, we couldn’t transfer that much data in less than a few weeks.”

“Impressive, but what does it imply?”

“If the moms are right, and these folks don’t know everything there is to know about us now—and frankly, I can’t think of a reason why they shouldn’t, except maybe bandwidth—”

“Jennifer, I’m not thinking too clearly. You woke me up and I haven’t slept since coming out of deceleration.”

“I haven’t either,” Jennifer said, blinking.

“Well, you’re superhuman, we all know that.”

“Flattery won’t get answers any faster,” she said much too brightly, her face flushed as if with fever. “Sorry. I’m a little giddy, too. What I’m getting around to saying is, they could turn us into anti-matter right now. Or just enough of us to blow our ship to pieces.”

“Are you sure?”

“No. I’m not sure. And obviously, they haven’t. But—”

“There’s nothing we can do about it.”

“I know,” she said. “I know that.”

“Can you give me any advice about what we can do?”

“Of course, we can’t let them know we understand what noach is.”

“That’ll be easy. I don’t understand.”

“Or that we know it exists,” she said, knitting her brows in irritation. “Silken Parts is working over other implications, and one of them… Are you going to pull a Hans on me?” she asked suddenly.

“Pardon?”

“I’m going to tell you something really big, really scary. Are you going to pull a Hans and vanish into some macho shell right now?”

“I promise, I won’t do that,” Martin said.

“We thought maybe the twelfth planet changing character, color, maybe that was more proof that parts of this system are illusory. A projection or something. Martin, if they can do what I think they can, it doesn’t matter, there isn’t any difference. They could make a shell of fake matter around an entire planet, an entire star, just as solid as this ship is. They could redirect or manufacture images as wide as this system in any direction they desired.”

“Do they have the energy?”

“I’m guessing yes. They might be tapping the star. From what we can see, the system seems to be rich with volatiles.

Maybe they’ve held all their resources in reserve, waiting for the main assault.”

“Do you have any good news?” Martin asked.

Jennifer grinned. “Not fond of endless David and Goliath?”

“It’s a living,” he said dourly.

“I can do without it myself. But I do have some wild-ass ideas that might be encouraging. I want to noach with Giacomo and do some momerath with him, and I want to hook into the ships’ minds. I’m hoping we can collaborate. This is something moms and Brothers and humans need to do together.”

“I’ll get you some private time with Giacomo. No sweet nothings, though,” he chided.

“Strictly business,” Jennifer said.

Martin saw the Trojan Horse/Double Seed as an ant crawling into a kitchen, staring all unknowing at giant appliances, instruments of unknown utility, technologies beyond the capacity of its tiny brain to comprehend…

There was so much that made no sense whatsoever.

The twelfth planet continued to change its character every few hours, alternating between three different sets of features, all the same size, all rocky, but radically different in all other ways.

The ninth planet had an eccentric orbit, carrying it outside the orbit of the tenth planet. It was small, perhaps a former moon, though with no surface features. It had an albedo of one, a perfectly reflective mirror at all