A few small cheers replied. Caitlin struck a ringing chord from her sonador and declared, "You carried us, Daniel."
"No, you all did," he answered. "Hey, Pegeen, I love you."
"Wait till I get you to myself again," she said.
Joelle is listening- By tacit agreement, conversation died away. Occasional words went around, most of them functional. Tastes in music varied too widely for a shared concert. Folk at their posts remained in their lonelinesses. Brodersen relived his latest passages with Caitlin; the first had rated twelve on the Beaufort scale, the second had been as gentle as that final union, close to dawn, in the cave beneath Mount Lorn... He even dozed for a spell. The ship roused him, changing direction, squandering chemical auxiliaries as well as expending nuclear fuel in order to keep hard on her way.
He was bobcat-alert before the response from Earth came due.
Dozsa's voice delivered it, a shout: "Missiles!"
The decision was, "Kill," Brodersen realized. Quick, or whoever is at the other end, is afraid we may have a plan.
He must sit with nothing but fingernails in his fists. Survival had ceased to be any affair of his.
At high accelerations, crossing the gap in a couple of minutes, though they changed vectors at varying intervals to confuse counterfire, the torpedoes homed on Chinook. Nobody aboard was spacesuited. If a nuclear warhead exploded near the hull, that was that.
Brodersen spied the exhaust streaks, silver and narrow. Sensors locked onto the tubes. A computer extrapolated. Zarubayev had fine-tuned the system. Fire sprayed across darkness as energygorged laser beams found their targets. An "All clear" jubilated, telling humans they would not die in the next few seconds.
The ship trembled. Von Moltke had launched missiles of her own. This was her ultimate job, to outguess a living opponent.
Chinook was not only much bigger than Alhazen, she carried throw weight out of proportion. Watchships weren't really intended for battle. Their weapons were partly a relic of the Troubles, partly a concession to vague fears... which Quick's faction strove to entrench.
The vessel surged around Brodersen, plunging toward her next way station.
Twinkles in heaven- "Gunner to captain," von Moltke intoned, "they stopped our barrage."
"They were meant to, this first time," he reminded her. "A lesson. Stef, have you got contact?... Okay, put me through."
His intention was to repeat his original threat, negotiate for the escape of his command. He did not, repeat and repeat not, wish to kill more men who were doing what they'd been assured was their duty.
The stars were beginning visibly to crawl in the viewscreen. Soon he'd be in such warped space-time that no rocket would have a prayer of tracking him down. Of course, any signal he transmitted from there would be hopelessly garbled. Well, everybody would be satisfied, sort of-
"Missiles!" Dozsa bawled. He spat an oath and rattled off RA, dec, approximate vectors. They had to be from Copernicus.
Judas priest, this was my worst fear, that Quick's influence would be strong enough to compel Janigian's honest crew- "Missiles!" Those came from Alhazen, one, one, one, one, as
fast as the tube could launch them.
"Captain," von Moltke said starkly, "I do not belieff we can strike that many in a flock."
Granville's wail: "No, I compute we cannot. Mon pere-" Joelle, like steel striking steel: "We can reach the next beacon and accelerate straight inward before they arrive."
Brodersen surged against his harness, even as weight returned. "No!" he bawled. "We'll end up anywhere-" Knowledge smote home. "Carry on."
The ship blasted. Almost, he imagined he saw the T machine grow before him, whirling and whirling.
He did see the first few splashes of flame, as Frieda parried. Then Sol was gone from its screen. The stars were an altogether different horde. The sun was not white nor yellow nor the bloodorange of Centrum, but ember-hued and shrunken. Tawny beneath colored bands, thrice the width of Luna seen from Earth, stood a planet. Frighteningly close gyred a great iridescent cylinder.
Brodersen let himself tumble for a minute into a night that roared.
Winter fell downward, white around the tower in Toronto.
"Well," Quick said at last. "They're gone."
"You are sure?" Makarov demanded through a choking haze of smoke. He lacked the scientific education to follow each detail of what had just come in.
"Yes," Quick told him. "Whatever scheme they had - if they did - I suspect they were in fact running off at random, except for trying to... to maximize their probability of- Oh, how can you estimate it?... Never mind. They were forced to make their gate entry from the spot where they happened to be. They are gone, Makarov. I beg your pardon. They are gone, Premier Makarov. Like the thousands of probes our species wasted, searching for new guidepaths. We can forget about them."
Makarov hunched his bulky frame. "You are quite certain?"
"Yes. Absolutely." Quick sagged and covered his eyes. Exhaustion shuddered in him.
"Ah." Makarov puffed. "Good. What a simplification."
Quick looked back up. "Hm?"
Makarov smiled. He seldom did. "A factor less in the equation, perhaps the least known factor, do you see?"
I see you're a mathematical illiterate, went through Quick.
He gathered strength together. A civilized man had better stay the equal of a barbarian warlord. "Right. We'll have the personnel of Alhazen and Copernicus interrogated, of course, but apparently they heard nothing they shouldn't. This leaves us Lomonosov for any special missions we decide on- plus a welcome breathing space, I'd say."
"We do not sit and pant much," Makarov warned. "In the bright light of the new situation, we act. First, after notifying our major collaborators, I think we should send Lomonosov to the Wheel. If they find no undue complication, they dispose of those who are there, including Troxell's group. Afterward we have leisure to make complete arrangements. Is this agreed?"
I've had an inferno's worth of hours to agonize over the moral issues, Quick thought. A time finally comes when the civilized man must attack alongside his ally of expediency, or be left behind and have no voice at the peace conference. "Sir, let's sleep on it and then talk further, but at the moment I am inclined to believe that in principle you are right."
XXVII
Caitlin floated by herself in the common room. A handclasp on a table edge held her against air currents that made a cloud of her unbound hair. She had turned off lights, the better to see out the viewscreens. Like big windows, they gave her the encompassing universe.
In most, stars crowded as ever before, the same god-hoard of gems in a crystal-black bowl, so many that she could not see how heaven was altered; nor did the argence of the Milky Way pour through channels greatly different from those above Earth or Demeter. In one direction the T machine was visible, but barely, a needle lost among vastnesses. Chinook had moved well clear of it before assuming a stable orbit around the planet.
The strangeness stood to right and left of her. Right was the sun disc, one-sixth the width of that which shone upon her birthland. Its red glow needed no stopping down; she could look straight at it, suffer nothing but after-images, and discern a faint, ocherous corona. She found no zodiacal lens, which turned the sight doubly foreign.
Left was the giant world. The ship happened to have emerged opposite the dayside, and at her distance would need a pair of Terrestrial years to swing once around. Hence the globe stayed nearly at full phase, broad and bright enough to shine all else out of the screen which revealed it. Unaided vision noticed how spin had flattened the disc. Tones of amber shaded subtly into each other, below cloud belts that were deep or pale orange streaked by blue-green and auburn. The shadow of a moon was like the pupil of an eye. Where night sliced off a crescent, it was not wholly dark, but a faint sheen wavered.
Mingled luminances turned the room into a cavern of soft lights and lairing shadows, a place of mystery and silence.
The stillness did not break the moment Martti Leino entered. He checked his flight in the doorway when he spied Caitlin and hung for a minute, staring at the slender, frosted form, before he almost barked, "Hello."
