Silence.
"God damn you all!" Ariel cried out. The children hunched their shoulders and looked back at her resentfully, but she stayed in the room.
Martin gingerly lowered himself, feeling a moment of vertigo. "We already voted to go in," he said, voice softer. "This doesn't change anything. We just have to work harder. "
"Time is short," Hans said. "We work up a drill schedule now, and we drill by our own designs. We workshop what we might expect to find in this system, and we planfor it, and we take whatever help the moms offer!"
Martin's heart went out again in a perverse way to Ariel, standing in the back of the room, face shiny with tears. He had done his performance and they had agreed, tacitly at least, to continue; he had exerted leadership and had molded consensus of a sort. How long would it last, though, and how strong was their resolve?
In that sick moment, he knew he was wrong to agree with the moms, not demanding a stand-down, not calling their bluff—and that Ariel was right.
He stood on the floor and took a deep breath. Hans came up to one side. Behind him, Stephanie Wing Feather and Harpal Timechaser sat on benches, not looking at him. Finally Stephanie turned.
"Way to go," she said.
"Ignore them," Hans said.
"You've got them dedicated now," Stephanie said without sincerity as Martin turned to walk away. His entire head felt warm. He turned back suddenly, back muscles twinging. "What would you have done, God damn it?"
Stephanie kept her seat as he approached.
"What would you have done?" Martin repeated, less loudly. The other children had filed out now, leaving only Stephanie, Harpal, Hans and Martin in the cafeteria.
"I don't know," Stephanie said, swallowing. "I might have tried harder."
"No," Martin said, wiping his eyes and straightening. "No. You wouldn't have."
Stephanie got up from the bench and ran her hands down the sides of her overalls, smoothing the fabric. "It's the weight, Martin," she said. "I didn't mean to be sarcastic. Sorry."
Martin's anger wouldn't go so easily. He backed away, glanced at Hans, who pursed his lips and shook his head. "I'm sorry, too," he murmured, and left the room, Hans following three steps behind.
In five days, as they flew through the pre-birth cloud surrounding Wormwood, the children would reach the next point of decision—to judge whether the system had been the source of the Earth-killing machines, and decide whether to split Dawn Treaderinto Hareand Tortoise.
Through the tendays of oppressive weight, the children drilled endlessly. Martin actually looked forward to time in the craft, to the relief of volumetric fields. Hakim pushed the search team patiently, trying to absorb as much information as possible about Wormwood before they pulled in the remotes.
Hakim could shed little light on the unresolved problem of the five dark masses close in to the star, orbiting in nearly perfect circles.
Martin pondered all this alone, preparing the preliminary order of battle in his quarters. He had not seen Theresa for eighteen hours; had not slept for thirty. Love-making was out of the question.
The children engaged in routine drills without him. He had to finish his work soon—in a few hours at most—to give time for final practice and one final external drill before they entered the pre-birth cloud.
They had flown for five and a half years, and yet there was the inevitable urgency and panic now, something that proved their humanity. He half-suspected the external drill had been deliberately arranged to be disastrous, that the moms in their subtle way were shocking the children, guiding them into battle-readiness…
But he could not assume that. The moms might be as coolly unconcerned as they seemed in conversation, relying entirely on the passion of the children to carry out the Law. Do the Job.
He rubbed his sweat-matted hair. Sometimes he could hardly think; he would curl up on the floor, eyes tight shut, trying to ignore exhaustion, frustrated desire for Theresa, and concentrate.
Despite these distractions, he was coming to a conclusion about the plan of battle.
Pan was in charge of general planning. No votes would be taken after the judgment had been made by all the children; Pan and Christopher Robin would have complete control, acting through the division leaders, the five former Pans. Each division leader would oversee a team of fifteen or sixteen children; each team would be assigned a task. Two teams would stay with the Hare. Three teams would fly Tortoise.
Tortoisewould accomplish the main objective. Makers cast into the pre-birth cloud would use the available raw materials to manufacture weapons, gravity- or proximity-fuse neutronium bombs that would comprise a second automatic assault, in case the initial assault failed.
Tortoisewould launch small craft. Their task would be to divert and/or destroy any defenses and accomplish reconnaissance. Two ex-Pans would lead these small craft teams.
Martin suffered a deep conflict when studying strategy and tactics. Too many possibilities occurred to him; he could not see his way through to a clear line of attack. With some chagrin, he knew the reason for his conflict: he regarded the massive destruction of space war, the necessary total vanquishing of an enemy, as an essentially immoral act. Yet he desired justice for the Earth's murder as much as any of the children.
Clear thinking on the matter was very difficult; he simply did not trust his own instincts.
Many children had created and filed theoretical tactics over the years; Martin had consulted nearly all of them, particularly those created by Theodore Dawn.
Theodore had been a kind of brilliant child, wise in some respects, but supremely strong willed and irresponsible in others, a complement to Martin's indecision and second-guessing. More effectively than Martin ever could, blithely ignoring questions of morality, Theodore had created a mathematics of space war tactics that used nearly all the features of the momerath to great advantage. His schemes covered many contingencies, all suggested by the principles taught by the moms. Basics of space warfare, as taught by the moms, had flowered in Theodore's mind into a graceful dance devoid of consequences.
In Theodore's plans, concealment was the only armor. Concealment, what Theodore called "silence," was a fine art among high-technology civilizations. Silence meant complete damping of radiation; invisibility meant unaberrated replication of incident radiation. Advantages over an adversary could be measured mathematically by how silent each was. Silent delivery of weapons—and the silence of the weapons themselves—was next in importance.
Theodore had studied manuals of submarine warfare on Earth. But space was far more dangerous than a deep sea, because it was vast, transparent to all radiations, and a perfect medium for weapons delivery. Yet space had many advantages over ocean; it was three-dimensional without limit, travel paths were limited to orbits, and even the largest unconcealed weapons platform, given sufficient distance, was tiny compared to the background.
Interstellar space had no weather, and rarely changed its character during a period of confrontation. Interplanetary space—the region most likely to be assaulted and defended—was subject to the vagaries of stellar atmospheres and stellar particle streams, but advanced spacefaring civilizations were not bothered by them.