Prophets

The voice accompanying the image was shaky. “The thing has taken hits from every missile we have. I have no idea how, but it has a mass-capable Emerson field.”

Alexander spoke to the comm in his hand, “Can you please repeat the damage?”

The speaker took a deep breath and said, “We lost the mining lasers and crew. It . . . ate . . . two of our outbuildings closest to the impact site. The shield you see there is two hundred seventy-five meters in diameter.”

“Has it grown? Moved?”

“No.”

“Then conserve your weapons. Let us consider it.”

“Did you hear me? The mining crew is gone. We don’t even have bodies.”

“Conserve your weapons.”

“Yes, sir.”

Alexander remuted the comm and looked out at the Grand Triad. “It seems,” he said, “we face a larger threat than we anticipated.”

The debate erupted again. This time Alexander waited only until the first obvious lines of argument played themselves out. When he spoke, he was the first one to mention nukes.

It was admittedly drastic, but he was protecting their whole way of life.

PART THREE

Prodigal Son

More individuals are born than can possibly survive.

—CHARLES DARWIN (1809-1882)

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Test of Faith

Sometimes you get a miracle. Don’t expect another one.

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

It is not necessary to hope in order to undertake, nor to succeed in order to persevere.

—CHARLES the BOLD (1433-1477)

Date: 2526.6.3 (Standard) 750,000 km from Salmagundi-HD 101534

For the first time in her life, Parvi physically felt when a ship fired its tach-drive. A very slight physical jerk as all the indicators on the console in front of her soared toward the red. None showed dangerous levels, but the drive came out of the jump hotter than it should have. The one damping coil that they’d gotten back up to 75 percent capacity was much too narrow an aperture to cool off the drives. The indicators were still edging upward.

Parvi held her breath until, one by one, very slowly, the readouts started going back down.

“Isn’t that a beautiful sight?” Wahid said, and Parvi silently agreed.

Then she realized that he wasn’t talking about the fact that the Eclipse’s engines weren’t going to melt. She looked up and saw a blue-green planet filling most of the holo above the bridge console.

“I have radio traffic all over the place,” Tsoravitch announced. “Video, audio, data traffic. Our sensors are completely saturated. I have commsats, and at least half a dozen major population centers on the coast of the main