The bottom of the universe, perversely, was bright, and the top was dark. The Dawn Treader had fallen out of the darkness, away from the muddy twisted ring of stars, but there was still this vast cliff to descend, from three quarters of the speed of light to less than one hundredth of one percent c, a profligate excretion of momentum that must later be regained from fuel in the very system they would try to kill.
They tumbled toward the central furnace, their almost straight-line course gradually curving like an expertly drawn wire. They slowed to one half c, one quarter, one tenth, one hundredth, and now, one thousandth, one ten thousandth.
Breaking and entering. Intent to murder.
The enormous burden of momentum passed away, and the children were no longer fast gods, but pigeons in the head of a very quiet, dark bomb, stealing through the house, the solar system of Wormwood.
Martin opened his eyes and spread his arms, his fingers, savoring the freedom of no tingle, no tyranny.
Theresa leaned over him, already awake. “It’s over,” she said. “We’re here.”
In the first few hours of freedom from the cramped super deceleration space, the children reacquainted themselves with the ship. Martin led them stem to stern, following the map projected by his wand.
Tortoise had taken the shape of a squat dumbbell, the third homeball having split into two hemispheres, absorbing and redistributing the second neck to become a connecting bar between them. The nose was a mere blister on the blunt face of the fore hemisphere, and there was no tail.
Hakim set up the search shop in the nose of Tortoise to see what there was to see. The new star sphere quickly filled with information, and Hakim immediately reexamined their target worlds one by one as Martin observed: rocky Nebuchadnezzar, innermost, Ramses next, and far beyond, on the opposite side of Wormwood, Herod, the massive depleted gas giant. There were still no major surprises at this distance, half a billion kilometers from Nebuchadnezzar, but the images in the star sphere were gratifyingly crisp and clean.
“It’s very good,” Hakim told Martin. “What would we like to know?”
“The makers in the outer cloud should be ready in a few tendays,” Martin said. “We need to confirm our first target, or inform the makers by tight-beam whether we’ve chosen another.” The makers were beyond noach range; a tight-beam message would take days to reach them. “We need to know which is the most active world, and whether there are any defenses.”
Tortoise was one sixth the size of Dawn Treader, but still large enough for the children to rattle around in. The unfamiliar corridors smelled new, like fresh clothes made by the moms. Martin took in as much of the new design as he could, judging its suitability for their needs, finding it adequate, but with an intense, childish kind of disappointment, missing the huge spaces of the Dawn Treader. He put that disappointment aside.
Martin leading, the thirty-five children in the Tortoise crew echoed and laddered down a smaller, shorter neck to the redesigned, rearranged weapons store, where the pods containing the makers and doers that would infiltrate the inner rocky worlds of Wormwood had been moved to prominent position.
Paola Birdsong and Stephanie Wing Feather moved the first pod groupings into six bombships, part of the ritual demanded by the moms—that as much as possible, the children should take responsibility for their weapons, for their assigned tasks, to complete the Job. Martin confirmed the loading, and the War Mother inspected the results. Training was paying off; the work had been done perfectly.
With the first part of the Job done, Martin gave them permission to establish new quarters and manufacture those things they needed. No personal goods or pets had been transferred to Tortoise.
The first group meal would begin in an hour.
Within three days, as Tortoise slid farther down the well of Wormwood’s gravitation, all their familiarization, establishment of quarters, manufacturing of goods, might go for nothing; the ship might have to change again, to deal quickly with whatever defenses the planet killers could muster…
But until that time, Martin wanted to establish a sense of normality, to keep his children as stable and contented as he could.
Still, they all knew that their home had fled. The chances of Dawn Treader being reassembled as it had been were nil. The chances of all of them surviving… of Wormwood having no defenses, no sensors able to detect their presence… were also nil.
Hakim came to Martin in the weapons stores as he finished his inspection, waited patiently, approached the Pan with face alight with enthusiasm. “There’s news,” he said. “More information, and very interesting, too.”
Martin looked at the arrays of craft in the stores, at the bombships on their pylons and the pods of doers attached to toruses. Stephanie Wing Feather and Paola Birdsong floated between the ships like birds between two gray footballs, listening. All the children in the stores listened.
“We should all hear the news together,” Martin decided. “We’ll Update at mess.”
Hakim projected his information after their hasty meal. He showed them Nebuchadnezzar first, as seen from Hare as it streaked through the system: a tan world with spots of reddish-brown and thin ribbons of green.
“As we observed from farther out, this is the more active of the two planets, judging from its crustal vibrations,” Hakim said. “Nebuchadnezzar is very quiet, but it is definitely inhabited—if only by machines. Hare’s sensors tell us, on its pass through, that there are very likely some sorts of machines within the planet. We think the machines occupy the upper crust, nothing below, and they are very efficient. They use fields to transfer substances—possibly gases, water and other cool liquids, molten rock, molten metals, solids, slurries. We cannot judge how many individual biological creatures might be served by these machines, but there are none apparent oh the surface. The surface is deceptively calm. Too quiet, as a soldier or cowboy hero might have observed. Perhaps they feel a need to hide…”
Martin shook his head. “They’re not very good at hiding. If we can detect something, others can, as well.”
Hakim acknowledged that, and continued. “The planet, as we noticed earlier, lacks obvious weather patterns. Its air currents are fixed and stable, a highly unnatural situation. What were once ocean basins have been empty for thousands of years, and there are no reservoirs. For the most part, except for some ancient construction activity, the entire surface seems to be abandoned desert. We conclude that the water in the old oceans was either lost through abrupt weather changes—unlikely—or sacrificed to provide volatiles across thousands of years.”
“For conversion to anti em?” Martin asked.
“Perhaps,” Hakim conceded. “Here is our surprise for the day. Ships much too small to have been noticed before, much too few to really be called commerce—perhaps ten ships traveling in low-energy orbits between Nebuchadnezzar and Ramses, and only one traveling outward to Herod. They all appear to be trailing radioactive particles, indicating primitive anti em drives or perhaps fusion. The ships may be trivial, toys, like…”
“Yachts in a bathtub,” Stephanie Wing Feather suggested.
“Yes. If they are mere toys, then there is no longer spacefaring commerce in the Wormwood system… none that we can detect.”
“If there are any inhabitants, are they physical?” Martin asked.
“My guess is they are not. Not in discrete biological bodies, at any rate. All the moms’ profiles of other worlds and their development characteristics tell us that Nebuchadnezzar and Ramses are old, perhaps a billion years older than Earth, and that their civilizations, if any remain—if there are any intelligences in control of the planetary activity—have transferred to a non-biological matrix.”