There was a long period of silence as the Watcher deliberated that question. Sarah felt the dizziness indicating that the Watcher was trying to enter her mind. She rejected the effort, her anger giving her strength.
A shrill tone of warning came from the weapons system. A screen flashed. The planet busters were armed and ready. Vinn set about overcoming the firing fail-safes.
"We are your Creators," Sarah said, as she watched Vinn's fingers. "And as your Creators we order you to cease your vigil. Your duty has been done. The balance is not endangered."
"You gutted and ruined your original planet of settlement," the Watcher said.
"We have restored Terra II," Sarah said. "It is true that we used up her resources during the centuries that it took for us to rebuild a technology and to get back into space, but we have healed the scars we left."
"Millions of species perished."
"There was only vegetation on Terra II when our ancestors landed there," Sarah said.
"Only rank weeds grow on your Earth," the Watcher said.
"We saved those who remained, the New Ones, the mutated ones. They are an integrated part of our society, quite valuable, as a matter of fact.
The wrongs that our ancestors did were in the far past," Sarah replied.
"A moment in time," the Watcher said.
Sarah felt belittled by being forced to plead for her life, but it was not her life alone. She was thinking of her children.
"You think that you will persuade me to let you live," the Watcher said.
"That is a vain hope. You, Vinn, you prepare some weapon to be used against me. That too, is futile. You will be ready to fire your puny weapon with two more keystrokes, but before you push the last key you will be dead. Not that your weapon could do more than minor harm. What will you do, destroy another of the freezer units? Blast through the ice and earth in an effort to reach me?"
"Do it," Sarah said.
Vinn punched a key. Now there remained only one final keystroke, a very simple one. He held his finger poised over the key.
"I will show you weapons," the Watcher said, and on the largest screen there appeared an image of a good, blue world. A tiny streak of light slashed down from the darkness of space. For long moments nothing happened, then the planet's crust swelled outward and ruptured.
Both Vinn and Sarah had seen the old film of the destruction of Zede worlds in the last space war. This was the same. The planet fragmented.
The molten core flowed and shattered.
"Thus will I restore the balance," the Watcher said.
"You don't have the means," Vinn said, his finger poised, shaking, over the firing key.
Now the screen showed row after row of small ships. Ports opened.
"I will allow you to see the launching of the fleet before I silence you," the Watcher said.
"Now," Sarah said.
Vinn's finger plunged downward, but before it could touch his entire body went limp as the Watcher detonated power inside his skull so forcefully that the milky soup that had been his brain cracked his skull and forced itself out through the cracks, through his ears, through his nose and mouth and eyes. He sank to the floor.
Sarah screamed.
"Can you resist that?" the Watcher asked. "Can you resist that as you reject my presence?"
"I don't know, you son-of-a-bitch," Sarah said, "but we're going to find out." She moved her finger toward the keyboard. The alarm that warned of the readiness of the planet busters was loud in her ears. The firing light blinked glaring red. She steeled herself for oblivion, felt the Watcher's presence. She stabbed down with her finger and the ship shuddered as the missiles carrying the busters sped away, accelerating under power. She felt pressure inside her head, staggered. The viewscreen showed the two weapons burning a bright downward arc through the thin atmosphere of the ice planet, and then there was nothing.
The Watcher saw the two missiles leaving the orbiting ship and accelerate. Counter missiles blasted, but the oncoming weapons were past them and thundering toward the surface ice before the planet's defenses could react.
No matter. The damage would be minimal, even if the invaders had armed their insignificant weapons with thermonuclear warheads. That, the Watcher reasoned, would be the limit of the technical ability of the trespassers.
But why wasn't the woman dead?
Sarah sat up. Her hand went to her forehead. Her head ached fiercely.
She looked up at the screen. She had not been unconscious long, for the busters were still driving down through atmosphere. She knew that on-board instruments were taking the measure of the planet. She knew, also, that she was in grave danger because she was too near. She was the last one left. Someone should go back to tell the story to X&A's scientists, but it was not duty to mankind that motivated her to live. Everyone was dead. Poor Vinn was dead. Only her children were left. That thing down there had taken from her everything but her children, and she was not going to let it take them from her through her death.
She was not sure that she was doing it right as she punched in a short blink. Even though she was in danger of dying with the Watcher's planet,she wanted to see that thing down there die, or, more properly, be silenced. She pushed the button and the Crimson Rose disappeared even as the onboard computers caused the diving missiles to vanish as well.
The Rose came back into normal space at a distance of two hundred thousand miles. It took Sarah a few seconds to activate the screens.
The ice planet swam serenely in the darkness of space, sun side reflecting light glaringly. Sarah adjusted the optics, compensating for the glare. She was able to see the first swelling of the icy crust. Not one but two weapons designed to destroy a world had blinked instantly to the planet's core.
The red of molten metal was seen briefly as the world shattered from the inside out. There was steam as ice melted and then the planet simply disintegrated into flying chunks of rock and cooling core material.
Sarah was breathing rapidly. Her head ached.
"You killed my mother, my father, my brothers and sisters," she whispered to the dying world. "You killed my husband and my friends."
She believed in a divinity, if not in the preachers who took it upon themselves to be spokesmen for God. She prayed, as she watched the particles of the deep freeze planet go their separate ways, that those who had made the Watcher were now burning in an old-fashioned Christian hell.
She buried Vinn and Kara in space, sending them off toward the sun with the words of the ancients. She spent a few hours making sure she understood the process of locking onto a distant blink beacon. The Crimson Rose's generator was fully charged when she punched a button and, with a sigh of relief, found that the ship lay quite near the first of the Rimfire beacons.
She was going home. It would be up to X&A to worry about whether or not there were other Watchers. She had things to do. She found it difficult to believe that she'd left her children in the care of others for so long, even if they were with her closest friends. She knew, rationally, that she had been influenced by the Watcher's spatial extensions, but that was no excuse. Her first duty was to her children.
And then there was the election that would be coming up in less thanfour years. If she started her campaign very soon after getting back home, she'd be in fine shape to be elected. She had three young ones in T-Town schools. They deserved the best education available and she intended to see that they got it. After all, they would need all the knowledge they could absorb to insure that the human race would survive if the U.P. worlds ever encountered the Sleepers who had long ago awakened and vanished.