“Sir?” The captain had appeared in the door of the lounge. “They can destroy us, sir, if they want to. We have no defenses.”
Toby smiled at her. “I know. This was never going to be an even match.”
“But what is this place?” She ventured into the room. The woman was as intimidated by Toby as was the rest of her crew, but at least she wasn’t a fanatical Toby worshiper: she was worried about the safety of her people. “Sir, I’ve been in the lockstep navy for twenty years and I never heard so much as a rumor that this … this fortress”—she nodded at the window—“existed.”
“I expect if you looked it up, you’d find that Rockette was private property,” said Toby. “Owned by my family. And I doubt there’s a single human being manning those lasers and ships.” They were invisible to the naked eye, but radar had revealed thousands of them, as well as mines and missiles, forming a cloud around Rockette far larger than the comet itself. “Rockette’s important to the McGonigals. That’s all I can tell you right now. But tell your men they’re safe. None of that firepower is directed at us.”
“Very good, sir.” She bowed in midair.
“Could you get a boat ready? My brother’s arriving soon and I want to meet him on the comet.”
“Yes, sir!” She flew gracefully out of the room.
“Hmm.” Jaysir scratched his head. “None of it directed at us? Yeah, I kinda think it’s all aimed at us. And anybody who finds out this place exists.”
Shylif was taking it all in calmly; after Sebastine Coley’s trial and punishment, nothing seemed to faze him. “But Jay, you yourself said we’d be safe.”
“Yeah, and you believed me? How long have you known me, Shy?”
Toby grinned at them, but he was hugely anxious. He’d made a guess on Thisbe about why he was able to override Evayne’s commands to the lockstep systems. Jay agreed that he’d guessed rightly, and now as their little courier ship had approached Rockette, Toby had issued a command to its defenses to stand down. If his guess was wrong, then yes, they really could be blasted out of the sky at any moment.
Even if it was right, he was safe only while it was just him and Peter at Rockette. When Evayne arrived in a few days, he’d be helpless.
He might be heading into a tearful reunion with his siblings—or an interrogation. Knowing them as he did, Toby suspected this meeting would be a bit of both.
“Tell me again,” he said to Jaysir, “why this is going to work?”
The maker shrugged. “I never said it would.”
“Yes, but—”
Jaysir tilted his head from side to side, noncommittal. “The McGonigal security system is a black box. People have been poking at it from outside for thousands of years, but beyond a certain point, we just don’t know. Your mom built well.”
“Yeah.” Toby let out a long, ragged sigh. “Thanks. Can I have a minute or two alone before I…?”
“Oh, sure.” Jaysir pulled Shylif toward the door. “You know I’d say good luck, but that would just be stupid. How about, don’t get ’em any madder at you than they already are?”
“Great. I’ll remember that.”
They all laughed, and the other two left.
So there it was: the little comet he’d been on his way to when he got lost, fourteen thousand years ago. It didn’t look like they’d built much on its surface, which was still painted crimson by radiation-baked organics. Those took millions of years to build up; in its tiny gravity field, he was sure he could find two little stones balanced precariously atop one another somewhere, that had been balancing that way since before the time of the dinosaurs. Next to the inhuman aeons that passed between a pebble wobbling and falling on Rockette, all the events of the last fourteen millennia were just an eyeblink. As far as Rockette was concerned, Toby wasn’t arriving late at all.
He shook his head and turned away.
Nobody spoke to him on his way to the little inflatable lifeboat, and he made eye contact with no one. He felt like an intruder; they were well rid of him. Surely if Halen had been here, he would have organized banners and speeches and a photo op, and would have demanded of everyone present that they swear some weird blood oath or brand themselves to mark the occasion. That was the sort of thing you did with living gods. Toby was far happier sneaking out.
In the red light of a tiny utilitarian airlock he let a suit build itself onto him, as he had so many times before. Doing his checks and cycling through the airlock made him feel much better because the familiar chore reminded him of days—not so long ago, for him—when he’d cycled himself through Thisbe’s airlocks to attend to some minor repair problem on the little world’s surface. Funny thing was, he’d always grumbled about leaving Consensus to do those chores. As he settled into the ship’s little lander, he found himself smiling, just a little.
The next few minutes passed in silence, too, save for the occasional radioed flight plan update from the ship’s bridge. He acknowledged with a terse yes or no and kept his eyes on the approaching comet, where a landing field was now lit in pinpricks of light. When he did set down, nobody human was waiting for him, only a few bots that directed him into a deep slot in Rockette’s regolith. Down there was another airlock.
He never remembered, later, going through that lock, nor could he recall removing his suit or sailing down the long, dark passages into the heart of the comet. Toby was running on automatic, absolutely sure of what he was going to find here but his thoughts shocked silent by what it would mean.
As he’d expected, all the passages led to one chamber, a spherical room in the most protected heart of the comet. There was nothing ceremonial or even comfortable here, only coils of frost-covered hose, tangles of faintly humming machinery, and, tethered in the very middle of the space by wires and cables and pipes like the kernel of a seed, a single closed cicada bed.
Toby drifted up to it and, after a momentary hesitation, put out his hand to rub the frost from the top part of the canopy.
“Hi, Mom,” he said.
TOBY COULD TELL IT was Peter because of the way he moved. Forty years had bulked him up and slowed him down a little, but Toby could have picked him out of a crowd even if he’d been facing the other way.
That bullet head, though; it still threw him. “You look good,” Toby called, his heart meanwhile threatening to go off the rails. “Shame about the hair, though.”
The Chairman was accompanied by some milbots, mostly big human-shaped types with guns. “You know I thought about doing that,” said Toby, pointing to them. “I guess if I didn’t know it was really you, I might take precautions.”
“Yeah, well I don’t know who you are,” said the Chairman. He started to say something more but stopped when he saw the status indicators on the cicada bed. He swore and moved down with surprising agility for (Toby tried not to think it) an old guy. Placing both hands on the bed’s canopy, while his bots encircled Toby, he swore again and then commanded it, “Shut down! Go back to sleep.”