“Aye, aye.”
“How long were we in stasis?”
“I cannot tell. Needle’s chronometer stopped, of course. I will signal the probe to send data, but the lightspeed delay is sixteen minutes.”
“How fast were we moving?”
“Five point eight one miles per second.”
“Then take us up to five even and hold us there while we see what we’ve got.”
The signals from the lander resumed as Needle approached the surface. Fire still surrounded the lander. The autodoc was still closed. Chmeee should have emerged by now, Louis thought.
Blue light grew around them. Needle broke free of the ocean and surged upward into sunlight. The deck barely quivered as the ocean dropped away at twenty gravities of acceleration.
The view aft was instructive.
Forty or fifty miles behind them, huge combers rolled across the flat beach that had been an undersea continental shelf. A grooved line ran straight back from the shore. Needle had not struck water. The fireball had struck land and kept going.
Farther back, the beach became grassland. Farther yet, forest. It was all burning. Thousands of square miles of firestorm, flame streaming inward from all sides, pouring straight upward in the center, like the steam rushing in over a sunflower patch far, far away. Needle’s impact could not have caused all of that.
“Now we know,” the Hindmost said. “The meteor defense is programmed to fire on inhabited territory. Louis, I am awed. The power expended compares to nothing less than the project that set the Fleet of Worlds in motion. Yet the automatics must do this repeatedly.”
“We know the Pak thought big. How was it done?”
“Don’t bother me for a while. I’ll let you know.” The Hindmost disappeared.
It was annoying. The puppeteer had all the instruments. He could lie his heads off, and how would Louis know? At this point the puppeteer couldn’t even change the arrangement…
Harkabeeparolyn was tugging at his arm. He snapped, “What?”
“Louis, I don’t ask this lightly. My sanity flinches. Forces batter me, and I can’t even describe them. Please, what has happened to us?”
Louis sighed. “I’d have to tell you about stasis fields and the Ringworld meteor defense. Also about Pierson’s puppeteers and General Products hulls and Pak.”
“I am ready.”
And he talked, and she nodded and asked questions, and he talked. He couldn’t be certain how much she understood, and of course he himself knew a lot less than he wanted to. Mostly he was telling her that Louis Wu knew what he was talking about. And when she was sure of that, she became calmer, which was what he was after.
Presently she took him to the water bed — ignoring the presence of Kawaresksenjajok, who grinned at them over his shoulder, once, then went back to watching the Great Ocean move past.
In rishathra there was reassurance. Spurious, perhaps. Who cared?
There sure was a lot of water down there.
From a thousand miles up, one could see a long way before the blanket of air blocked the view. And for most of that distance, there wasn’t a single island! The contours of sea bottom showed, and some of that was shallow enough. But the only islands were far behind, and those had probably been underwater peaks before Fist-of-God distorted the land.
There were storms. One looked in vain for the spiral patterns that meant hurricane and typhoon. But there were cloud patterns that looked like rivers in the air. As you watched them, they moved: even from this height, they moved.
The kzinti who dared that vastness had not been cowards, and those who returned had not been fools. That pattern of islands on the starboard horizon — you had to squint to be sure it was really there — must be the Map of Earth. And it was lost in all that blue.
A cool, precise contralto voice eased into his thoughts. “Louis? I have reduced our maximum velocity to four miles per second.”
“Okay.” Four, five — who cared?
“Louis, where did you say the meteor defense was located?”
Something in the puppeteer’s tone… ”I didn’t say. I don’t know.”
“The shadow squares, you said. You’re on record. It must be the shadow squares if the meteor defense can’t guard the Ringworld’s underside.” No overtones, no emotion showing in that voice.
“Do I gather I was wrong?”
“Now, pay attention, Louis. As we passed four point four miles per second, the sun flared. I have it on visual record. We didn’t see it because of the flare shielding. The sun extruded a jet of plasma some millions of miles long. It is difficult to observe because it came straight at us. It did not arch over in the sun’s magnetic field, as flares commonly do.”
“That was no solar flare that hit us.”
“The flare stretched out several million miles over a period of twenty minutes. Then it lased in violet.”
“Oh my God.”
“A gas laser on a very large scale. The earth still glows where the beam fell. I estimate that it covered a region ten kilometers across: not an especially tight beam, but it would not normally need to be. With even moderate efficiency, a flare that large would power a gas laser beam at three times ten to the twenty-seventh power ergs per second, for on the order of an hour.”
Silence.
“Louis?”
“Give me a minute. Hindmost, that is one impressive weapon.” It hit him, then: the secret of the Ringworld engineers. “That’s why they felt safe. That’s why they could build a Ringworld. They could hold off any kind of invasion. They had a laser weapon bigger than worlds, bigger than the Earth-Moon system, bigger than… Hindmost? I think I’m going to faint.”
“Louis, we don’t have time for that.”
“What caused it? Something caused the sun to jet plasma. Magnetic, it has to be magnetic. Could it be one function of the shadow squares?”
“I wouldn’t think so. Cameras record that the shadow square ring moved aside to allow the beam to pass, and constricted elsewhere, presumably to protect the land from increased insolation. We cannot assume that this same shadow-square ring was manipulating the photosphere magnetically. An intelligent engineer would design two separate systems.”
“You’re right. Absolutely right. Check it anyway, will you? We’ve recorded all possible magnetic effects from three different angles. Find out what made the sun flare.” Allah, Kdapt, Brahma, Finagle, let it be the shadow squares! “Hindmost? Whatever you find, don’t curl up on me.”
There was a peculiar pause. Then “Under the circumstances, that would doom us all. I would not do that unless there was no hope left. What are you thinking?”
“There is never no hope left. Remember.”
The Map of Mars was in view at last. It was farther away than the Map of Earth — a hundred thousand miles straight to starboard — but unlike the Map of Earth, it was one compact mass. From this angle it showed as a black line: twenty miles above the sea, as the Hindmost had predicted.
A red light blinked on the lander’s instrument board. Temperature: a hundred and ten Fahrenheit, just right for a spa. No lights blinked on the big coffin that held Chmeee. The autodoc had its own temperature controls.
The kzinti defenders seemed to have run out of explosives. Their supply of firewood seemed infinite.
Twenty thousand miles to go, at four miles per second.
“Louis?”
Louis eased himself out of the sleeping field. The Hindmost, he thought, looked awful. Mane rumpled, the garnets rubbed off along one side. He staggered as if his knees were made of wood.
“We’ll think of something else,” Louis told him. He was wishing he could reach through the wall, stroke the puppeteer’s mane, give reassurance of some kind. “Maybe there’s some kind of library in that castle. Maybe Chmeee already knows something we don’t. Tanj, maybe the repair crew already knows the answer.”