“Trojan Horse broke up and split. Something’s following you. It sure isn’t bothering to hide, and it’s right on your ass. You and two others are all they’ve managed to tail. I’d say they’re using you to try to find something bigger. If you don’t lead them to us—and you won’t, my friend—you’re dust.”
“We have broken this vessel into ten units and accelerated them in different directions outward from Leviathan,” the ship’s voice said, almost irrelevantly at this point.
We are still more valuable as clues to where the big ships are. They know us. They know our psychology; they figured it out right away, that we wouldn’t deliberately sacrifice ourselves, that at some point a rescue would be attempted.
“Hold on a moment,” Hans said.
Ariel reached out a hand and Martin took it. “He’s going to sacrifice us,” she said.
“Show me something,” Martin told the ship, whatever kind of ship it was, whatever size. “Show me the outside. What’s following us.”
A small screen appeared against one wall. A white sphere filled the screen, pocked by glowing blue dots.
“Harpal has your tagalong’s coordinates,” Hans said. “We’ll get it. You should see this, Martin. It is in-credible!”
The white sphere blistered like a plastic ball hit by a torch. The blisters spread open and the sphere diminished. Curls of darkness blanked the whirling stars, streaming from the sphere, reaching toward them.
“Super acceleration,” the ship’s voice said. Fields seized again, and Martin screamed. The scream was forbidden and died as a hollow glurp in his throat.
He heard and saw again an unknown time later.
Harpal’s voice in his ears. “We got your dog, Martin. Thought you should know.”
They have Gauge on Greyhound. My dog is waiting for me? No—
“We noached it straight to hell,” Harpal said. “It’s a beautiful streamer of plasma about fifty thousand klicks long. Christ, these weapons are unbelievable.”
The craft following them had vanished. In its place wafted a wide, striated shower of glowing debris, each piece fanning out in a straight line, vapors like rays of sun through clouds.
Martin still held Ariel’s hand. Slowly, she opened her eyes and looked at him with an expression of intense grief.
“You’re safe for the time being,” Harpal said. “You’re really rocketing. Can’t talk now. They haven’t pinned us yet, but they’re trying, wow are they trying…”
Silence, long minutes, before Martin realized the noach message had ended.
Martin let go of Ariel’s hand.
“They’re doing it, aren’t they?” she said.
Martin nodded. “They divided Trojan Horse.”
“Who?”
“I didn’t give any order. The moms. The ship itself.”
“We’re out of the action. Hans screwed you over double,” she said.
Martin shook his head. “What?”
“By not letting you do the Job with him. And by cutting all of us out of the decision.” She turned away. “Will they pick us up?”
“I don’t know.”
Magnified images: a rocky planet, Lawn, sparkling fire snaking over its surface. Greater magnification: strange superheated forests burning like carpets of magnesium, ribbons of shredded land rising as if cut from paper, something moving over the surface, dark and immense, not a shadow, more like a finger drawing chaos in the rock.
Another: Big City, the finger moving yet again. God’s finger taking vengeance.
Much smaller in the screen, another rocky world, not immediately familiar to Martin, this one dying in a particularly violent display, throwing chunks of itself into darkness as if being chewed apart by immense beasts.
“Blinker,” the ship’s voice said. “It will consume itself. Nothing living or ordered will survive.”
“How?” Martin asked. “How can we do this?”
“Remote manipulation of forces within atomic nuclei,” the ship’s voice said. “Blinker is particularly vulnerable, as a noach station of immense power. Greyhound has found the main weakness, and exploited it.”
“How much can Greyhound destroy?” Martin asked.
“Uncertain. Defenses are not fully deployed.”
Sleep appeared, surrounded by immense seeds with brushy tops, much like those released from Puffball, reminding Martin of immune response in humans, although on an astronomical scale. “Explain.”
“Not clear. White objects in orbit around this world may try to confuse targeting of noach weapons.”
Noach weapons. Confirmed.
A haze as fine as dust in air spread out with incredible speed—visible even on this scale—-from the scattered seed-puffs. A seed-puffs crown glowed brilliant orange, then faded to green and vanished, leaving the thousand-kilometer “stem” to precess slowly. As the minutes passed, another headless stem came into view around the limb of Sleep and fell toward the planet. Its lower extremity touched atmosphere. Slowly, slowly, across more minutes, the stem bent over and laid itself in the atmosphere and across the surface, surrounded by ripples of mixed crust and ocean, all vapor now, glowing dull red with bursts of pink and white.
Soon all of Sleep became enveloped in a nacreous halo, plasma thousands of kilometers thick turning it into a dim star. Radiation scoured the surface; falling seed-puffs stirred it like mud, a mud of continents and oceans.
Martin could not believe that Greyhound alone was responsible for this.
“Are we getting help… from somebody outside?” he asked, face pale. Memories of watching Earth. Same scale, but even more destruction.
“There are no other combatants,” the ship’s voice said.
Gas Pump showed in the display now, immense plumes of mined volatiles spreading out of control, white plasma shooting through, green and blue surfaces turning muddy yellow.
“What can we do?” Martin asked.
“Escape is our only option,” the ship’s voice said.
Martin’s fingers curled. Ariel wrapped her arms around herself, watching with haunted eyes.
Hours.
Neither Martin nor Ariel expressed hunger, but they were fed anyway, a meager paste that tasted of nothing in particular.
The display projected their path across a diagram of the system. They were actually moving closer to the star at this point, but a journey across the width of the system would take them almost three days, through the thick of the battle, across the orbits of thousands of vehicles they had never had time to catalog or examine, whose purposes they might never know.
“Are we going to accelerate again?” Martin asked.
“All fuel is expended,” the ship’s voice said. “Reserves are for keeping you alive.”
During his thousands of hours of research into war and human history, Martin had read about a man with a striking name-Ensign George Gay. Ensign Gay had flown an airplane in the Battle of Midway, during the Second World War. He had been shot down, and had floated for hours in the midst of ships and planes trying to destroy each other.
“How long is it going to take?” Ariel asked.
“The war? I don’t know. Could be weeks. Months.”
“It doesn’t look like it will take nearly that long. I’m tired.” She sounded like a child.
Martin cradled her in his arms.
Number eight, the gas giant Mixer, expanding like a sick, bruised balloon, shell upon shell of brilliant gases like the petals of flowers. Thousands of years of construction and technology and how many individuals, how many beings even more developed than the staircase gods? Imagine so many possibilities not shown. Who is winning