After meeting Mike's kami, Rue no longer believed she had to let her emotions lead her. She still loved her emotional life and had great sympathy for her own feelings; but it had become clear to her that she needed to be unsympathetic to the urges that came with many emotions.
Worrying meant that she cared about her people; but right now, worrying would not help bring them back. She returned her attention to the view.
Even though they gave no light, there was no missing Apophis and Osiris. Their convoluted magnetic fields swept the black sky like invisible hurricanes. Rue's ship felt those fields, though they were millions of kilometers from the Twins. Noise from the fields made the dwarfs the brightest radio emitters for light-years.
She soon had a visual fix. The dwarfs must be ancient, for they gave no visible light at all— not the gold of Colossus nor the coalred of Erythrion. These worlds were older than the Lasa; they appeared in her scope as round holes in the starscape. They orbited one another at a distance of fourteen million kilometers; unbelievably close, considering each had a diameter of a million and a half kilometers.
No— they did give light, she realized, as she turned up the gain. Both dwarfs sported crowns of flicking auroral light around their poles.
Rue had never thought of the halo worlds as lonely before, but the Twins were different. This was a forbidding place, like a frozen tomb. The feeling reminded her of the fractured plain of Dis.
"Ambient temperature is six kelvin," said the pilot. "The Twins register at about three hundred K. But… we're picking up pinpoint infrared sources. Lots of them!"
"Show me one." She waited while the telescope realigned.
What swam into view was a long thread of light. In infrared and speckled with dimness and distance as it was, it looked to Rue like a road, winding gently through space to infinity.
"A tether." She and the pilot had spoken simultaneously. Rue laughed. "It's a power tether." It was strange to see something so familiar and homey in this place— especially knowing that humans had not created it. Then again… "How many are there? Are they broadcasting standard position data?"
"It's like… a whole galaxy of them in orbit. Around both Twins. Thousands. Tens of thousands. But no signals. I don't think they're ours."
"Well. Not a Cycler Compact colony, then… But that's probably their energy source for launching cyclers. Where are they beaming the power?"
But she could already see the answer. As the light-enhanced view pulled back, she saw the dwarfs as gray cutouts encircled by Saturnian rings composed of thousands of tiny scintillas of light. Both dwarfs were surrounded by such rings.
And right in between the dwarfs, at the fixed but empty point in space about which they both orbited, a brilliant flare of infrared shone.
Dr. Herat's voice came over the radio. "Of course! The only stable place in this system, other than low orbit around the dwarfs, is at their orbital center. It's like the axle of a wheel, gravitationally speaking. There might even be asteroids or a moon there. Let's take a look."
The telescope zoomed dizzyingly in to that bright spot. Things swam in and out of focus for a second. Then Rue saw everything she had hoped to find here— and everything she had feared to see.
THE INTERCEPTORS WERE clustered in a wall formation, pointing at the distant Lasa construction site. Behind them, a balloon habitat had been inflated and inside it Rue held a ceremony honoring the pilot and gunner whose ship had not made it through from Colossus.
As a cycler captain, she was the traditional choice to perform such a memorial. She had learned, on the Envy and in the depths of Oculus's ocean, that she was truly a captain when she forgot to doubt herself. Today, she could let the voice of tradition and centuries-long purpose speak through her. The authority was not originally hers, but it became hers through her acceptance of the role.
"We see before us the reason why sacrifice is necessary," she told the assembled fliers, who were clustered in a loose ball in the center of the habitat. "This is the origin of Jentry's Envy. It may be a Lasa colony or a machine intelligence, or something else entirely new. It appears that resources are being skimmed off the Twins and shunted to that central point— whether to build a new cycler or to feed an alien civilization, we don't know. But the starship Banshee is moored there. The men who have made themselves our enemies have come to steal from us the prize that Jentry's Envy hinted was here. If this is truly a construction shack for new cyclers, then this system is infinitely precious to us. Such new cyclers may be our last chance to restore our civilization to the greatness it once had. Our comrades, Julia Daly and Harald Siever, fell in the course of trying to guarantee a future for their children and ours. They exist now as part of the kami of this place. We will remember them, always."
In an ancient gesture, the assembled bowed their heads for a moment of silence. As the memorial broke up, Rue saw Mike hanging out at the edge of the crowd, uneasily glancing back at her. After the effort of speaking the eulogy, she felt strangely disconnected and so she felt it easy to go over to him. At the same time she was cringing inwardly at the thought that her need to save her crew had gotten two people killed and she was calculating whether the speech she had given would result in greater morale and respect for her. Her distraction allowed her to smile at him warmly, and say, "Thank you for being here."
"It's not like I had any choice," he said stiffly.
"Still. I need you with us, Mike. I… need you with me on this. We went through a lot to get to this point, and I'm sorry about the deception of the past months. But my people were— are— in danger. It was necessary."
"Yes, Captain."
Now Rue's carefully built mask crumbled. "Oh, Mike, I'm so sorry." She reached out tentatively. "Have the past months changed you so much?"
"No." He jammed his fists into the pockets of his jumpsuit. "It's you who's changed, Rue. You… don't need me. There was a time when I thought you might."
"Need you? Like Herat needs you? No, Dr. Bequith, I don't need you that way," she said hotly. "And I hope I never do. I'm not looking for a servant, I'm looking for an equal. Somebody who's with me not because of what they can do for me, but because of what we can do together." She turned away, shaking her head. "Once upon a time I imagined we could do great things together."
He flushed with anger. Rue regretted her sharp words, but damn it, none of this was her fault. She shook her head and floated over to Dr. Herat, who was floating nearby in a flock of inscape windows. "What are we faced with, Professor?"
"Crisler's here all right. And he's right at the source." Herat pointed to a window where a false-color image of the Lasa construction site glowed. "This place is pretty complex. From what I can tell, they get their raw materials from tethers that hang down into the dwarfs' upper atmospheres. They skim the elements they want off the top, which must take a long time. These tethers are powered by electrodynamic ones higher up. They bundle the scavenged materials and toss them at the orbital center of the system. There, the Lasa use something like a multilobed ramscoop to pull the packets in and feed it all into this." This was a cylinder, a kilometer long and almost half that in width, that radiated infrared at about 300 K. The Banshee was moored right next to this cylinder.
"So are they building a cycler there?" she asked, nervously twining her hands together.
"Actually, I don't think so. At any rate, I don't think they could launch a cycler using beam power. The total number of power tethers they've got in orbit around the Twins will produce trillions of watts of power, but that's not enough. It's kind of a puzzle, actually," he said happily. "The tethers produce far more power than they'd need to construct a starship or run a sizeable colony, but not enough to launch much more than a cycler cargo. There's no colony. If there's a starship, it's hidden inside that cylinder. So what are they doing with all that power? I don't know."