Fifty children stood apart. They would remain in the Ship of the Law. Hans would stay with them.
Martin moved forward along his ladder and hung next to his assigned craft, a rifle.
“The moms have promised a target and we’ll match ourselves against it. I don’t know what the target is, or how we’ll fight it.”
“We don’t have a set drill?” Erin Eire asked. Hans looked at Martin; they had discussed this already, and Hans had expressed real reservations. Going outside without a plan the first time did not seem wise to either of them; going outside with no known adversaries, no expressed situations, seemed foolhardy at best.
“The War Mother won’t tell us what it is,” Martin said.
“That’s stupid,” Erin Eire said. The children shook their heads.
“What are they trying to do to us?” Rex Live Oak asked.
“Make us less dependent, I assume. At any rate, I haven’t designed a plan; we’ll see what they’re up to, and see how well we react. They assume we’re well trained.”
Kimberly Quartz and her craftmate, Ginny Chocolate, hooted loudly. “Pan must be confident!” Kimberly called out. Martin smiled and lifted both thumbs.
Kai Khosrau, diminutive, with long head and long arms and muscular legs, began to sing the song and a few dozen joined in. The song was a rambling medley of tunes remembered from their youth on Earth and in the Ark, with new words.
Martin let them sing, watching Theresa in her accustomed place outside the cluster, at the rear. Just to be alone with her, nothing else.
Song finished, they climbed into their craft and the hatches smoothed shut. Martin took a seat in the rifle’s black interior, felt the surface of the couch wrap around his legs, the crawl of transparent membrane around his clothes and skin. The membrane connected with air supply intakes and waste removal ducts.
He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Cool fresh air filled his lungs. A faint green field surrounded his body, leaving arms and head free. Between the membrane and the field, water poured in, making a five-centimeter cushion around his legs and torso. A faint moisture fog rose up briefly around his face, covering the outer surface of the membrane, and almost immediately cleared. The membrane, water, and field protected him from accelerations up to fifty g’s. Anything beyond fifty g’s would require a volumetric field. He had experienced the volumetric fields in training; they were bearable, but not comfortable. At very high acceleration, they controlled motion down to the level of individual molecules.
Those not in ships departed from the hemispheric chamber. Deep bass pounding: air being rapidly pumped from the chamber.
A hatch opened to darkness and oily streamers of light.
They had not been outside the Dawn Treader since leaving the Ark. The interior of the Ship of the Law had been their home, their only solid universe; all else had been projection, simulation, memory and imagination.
Ten craft broke free of their pylons, wobbling as the maneuvering drives adjusted, pale yellow glows pulsing white opposite the direction of travel like captured fireflies. The pylons withdrew to the walls. Sporangia broke loose from the walls and ladder fields reached out from their escorts to lace them tightly to craft hulls.
The craft exited Dawn Treader in close formation, almost touching.
Martin rode his rifle. Through the membrane and a port close to his face, he saw the exterior universe—not in simulation, but in actual far-traveling photons.
The reality was not appreciably different from the high-level simulations; still, he knew it was real, could feel it in the twists and accelerations deep inside his gut as the craft swung about the Dawn Treader’s third homeball.
From within, the Dawn Treader was an all-encompassing universe, with no psychologically real exterior. Seen from outside, close up, it was simply immense. The scale confused Martin, confined for so long in spaces without infinite views.
The immensity of the Ship of the Law was enhanced by the strangeness of its environment. They still traveled at close to the speed of light; the universe “outside” was still twisted and distorted, with a lateral belt of blue and red stellar luminosity that followed him wherever he flew.
When his bombship rotated, the entire exterior universe seemed to tumble and reform, as if viewed through a madman’s lens. But the children had been trained to recognize these distortions, to orient themselves along axes relative to the Dawn Treader by comparing the distorted frames of reference.
Now, two twenty-eight-hour days after deceleration began, they were still traveling at greater than ninety-nine percent of the speed of light. Day by day, as the Ship of the Law slowed, as its tau increased, the stars would correct themselves, the luminous belt would expand to normality, the tunneling effects fore and aft would end.
Martin was eager for that time; to see stars again, as he had seen them from Earth, though not all the same stars, not the same sky.
The small craft aligned themselves. Their pilots saw others as silhouettes against the distorted sky, and communicated by noach.
Martin remembered the lectures of years past, watching his fellows practice different formations, warming up for the exercise itself, which would be like nothing they had experienced before. The defenses could be ancient and straightforward; orbiting sentinels, kinetic energy projectiles, or…
The defenses may be sophisticated beyond anything you have trained for. Advanced civilizations are infinitely surprising in the varieties of their accomplishments, in the expansion of their knowledge, puzzling in their expertise in one area, and their lack in another. Civilizations have personalities, if we may call them such; weaknesses and strengths, talents and blindness. Even a technologically superior civilization has weak points.
That much he had learned during training; it came back with crystal clarity, as if spoken in his ear.
Killing Captain Cook. Guerrilla warfare; South-East Asians against B-52s. But theirs would not be a long-term guerrilla action. They would lay the seeds of weapons that could not be removed without performing the very actions the weapons themselves were intended for: planet killers.
He saw Theresa’s rifle glinting in the weird light of blue stars emerging from behind the Ship of the Law. Theresa was to take picket duty with five others, reaching out thirty thousand kilometers beyond the Ship of the Law. He watched the rifle dwindle. Flies buzzing around a battleship; powerful flies, but no one could know how well-matched they might be against what was coming.
That was the unanswerable question. There was a very good chance they would encounter a civilization so far advanced that the power within the Ship of the Law would be insignificant.
Martin had had nightmares about what might happen then: would they be captured like animalcules plucked by an eyedropper out of pond water? If the superior intelligence swallows the animalcules, they might cause disease, still might kill; but if the intended victim refuses to swallow, the fighters are isolated, the Ship of the Law is frozen and sectioned and examined, the children are pulled apart cell by cell and studied; harmless, defeated.
Martin banished those thoughts. The exercise was all that mattered for the moment. He strained against the membrane, the layer of water, and the surrounding field. In the actual offensive, as they performed the Job, they would be aided by makers and doers and robot craft not limited by human physiology. But one or more of the children would pull the trigger. The execution would be performed by the survivors of Earth. That was the Law—while any of the crew remained…