Anvil of Stars (59 page)

"Hans got it done," Martin said.

Paola sucked in her lips dubiously, decided against arguing the point, and took his arm. "Let's go," she said.

Eye on Sky and the other Brothers resembled bundles of dry sticks. Recovery was harder for the Brothers; the cords had to heal themselves, which meant frequent disassembly and individual care for each cord.

Martin began to understand why war and conflict had played a much smaller role in the Brothers' history. Braids were not robust; their existence as intelligent beings was delicately balanced, and violence quickly reduced them to an animal level. Wars fought between cords could not last long.

So why did the Benefactors send them in the first place?

Because everybody deserves a chance at justice, no matter how slim the chance might be.

"We we congratulate you on survival," Eye on Sky said.

"We're sorry to see you leave," Martin said. He touched Eye on Sky's broad trunk. The Brother shivered but did not shrink back.

"I'm very sorry," Paola said.

"You can join us," Strong Cord said.

"I won't," Martin said.

"I haven't decided," Paola said.

"You, Paola Birdsong, would be very welcome," Eye on Sky said. "You as well, Martin."

"Thank you," Martin said.

"The destruction is frightening," Eye on Sky said. "Simply thinking of it risks disassembly. We hold such power now."

"If the moms let us keep it," Martin said.

"Will they?"

"I hope not."

"Where will humans go now?"

"We'll survey the system. See what evidence we can find.

The ships will scoop up fuel. Then… we'll explore. Find a planet we can live on."

"You will not return to your world, to Mars?"

"I don't think so. We'll vote on it, but by the time we get back, almost a thousand years will have passed. Nobody we know will be alive… At least, I don't think they will."

"Other humans have come to visit we us," Eye on Sky said. "Have expressed regret. Perhaps more will come with Shrike than go with Greyhound. "

Martin didn't think, when it came right down to it, that anybody would accompany the Brothers. The mood had changed since the war.

"How many humans can you stand?" Martin asked with a faint grin.

"It is a problem," Green Cord said. Eye on Sky slapped his flanks with tip of tail—something Martin had never seen a Brother do to another. Green Cord expelled a faint odor of turpentine, then baking bread. Upset, propitiation.

"Martin, your presence would be good, as well," Eye on Sky said. "I we think of this, and to have you with we all us, that would not cause pain or upset, but linking and harmony."

Martin shook his head. "I appreciate the invitation, but I don't think I'll go with you."

Eye on Sky smelled of licorice and salt air.

"Polite disappointment," Paola murmured.

"Thank you for asking," Martin told Eye on Sky.

It was a dangerous time, but Martin could no longer be circumspect. He had survived too much, seen too much, to let certain small things go by.

On the bridge, Hans ate his meal with measured motions, ignoring Martin. Martin crossed his legs and folded his arms, watching Hans toss bits of cake to his mouth and grab them. When he finished, Hans wiped his hands on a towel stuck in a field, pushed himself around with one hand, and faced Martin squarely.

"Well?"

"I'm asking for an investigation," Martin said.

"Of what?"

"Rosa's death."

Hans shook his head. "We know who did it."

"I don't think that's enough."

"Martin, we've done the Job. We'll finish here and go find someplace to live. That has to be enough."

Martin's face flushed. He felt as he had when confronting the moms. "No," he said. "We need to clear the air."

"Rex is dead."

"Rex left a message," Martin said.

"It's guilt-crazed shit."

"The crew… needs to know, one way or the other."

"You want to be Pan again?" Hans asked, deceptively calm. Martin could read the signs: neck muscles tight, one hand opening and closing slowly, grasping nothing.

"No," Martin said.

"Who should be Pan?"

"That isn't my point."

"If you believe I had something to do with Rosa's death, then I should be… what? What penalty do you suggest?"

"Did you put Rex up to it?" Martin asked.

"Whoa. Shooting pointblank, Marty. What makes you think I did?"

"Did you?"

Hans kept his eyes focused firmly on Martin's, said, "No, I did not put Rex up to it. I don't know what was going on in his head. He was confused. Rosa took him in—made him a part of her group. That was her mistake, not mine."

"You didn't tell Rex to attack the Brother?"

"Christ, no. What good would that have done me?"

Martin blinked. Got to keep it up. Can't give up now.

"You saw Rosa as a real threat, somebody who could divert the whole mission."

"Yes. Didn't you?"

"You saw yourself as the only one capable of finishing the mission."

Hans spread his arms, stretching. "Okay. Not too far wrong."

"Rex was your friend. He was devoted to you."

"Bolsh. Rex was his own man."

"You wanted to make it look that way. You ordered him to attack the Brother, take the blame, isolate himself. He agreed."

"So now I'm some sort of hypnotist. Why would I isolate him? You think Rex wasn't smart enough to see through such a crazy scheme? He'd know why I wanted him isolated. He was no idiot. He'd know it would be so I could jump clear if he was caught. That's just plain crazy. Rex was not crazy."

"Devoted," Martin suggested.

"I don't know about that."

"There's sufficient question to make an investigation necessary," Martin said.

Hans wagged his head back and forth, eyes wide, silently mimicking him. " 'Sufficient question.' 'Investigation necessary.' Christ, you're an intellectual giant. Do you think the crew would have followed you into something like Leviathan? We were pissing in our pants, Marty."

Martin could feel the nastiness building. "Will you agree to an investigation?"

"Is this revenge for my not telling you when we'd attack?"

"No," Martin said.

"I think it is. You know why I did it that way. You were in the middle of things. There could have been little ears everywhere. Did you think I would drop all our plans right in their laps? "

"This is beside the point, Hans, and you know it."

"Sure," Hans said, lifting his hands. "Anything for you." He leaned forward, one hand pushing on a field, the other pulling, and released his grip to jab a finger at Martin. "They wouldn't have followed you, Martin, because you get people killed. You're a regular goddamn McClellan—did you read about him, Martin? American Civil War. Made an army but refused to really go out and fight. Your instincts are bad. You think leadership is a game with justice and rules. It isn't. Leadership is getting the most people through a hell of a time, and doing the slicking Job!"

He called up images of Leviathan's ruined worlds until they filled his quarters like hanging sheets. "My parents didn't make it onto the Ark. Nobody I knew made it. They were all blown to atoms. Everybody I knew!

"The Killers had thousands of years. They sent out their clever machines, then they sat back. They built their pretty castles and made their pretty creatures, they laid their traps. They defended themselves to the max because they were afraid, they were guilty, they knew we'd come for them, and someday we'd get them. How many like us failed? We didn't fail! "

Beads of Hans' spittle hung between them like tiny jewels. Hans leaned back, face blotched with red and drawn with white. He withdrew his finger. "I didn't fail. I got the Job done. If you want to be Pan, you can have it. I resign. You lead us to the promised land."

"There needs to be an investigation," Martin said.

"I said yes. Get out of here. Let someone enjoy what we've accomplished.

"We lost so much," Hans said to his back as Martin passed through the door. "So goddamned much. What more do you want?"

In his quarters, Martin folded himself in a net and stared at the dead worlds, then some of the pictures transmitted by Salamander.

Hans had ripped his heart open. He did not know exactly why he persisted in asking for an investigation, but something of his father and something of his mother pushed him. He was motivated by lessons he barely remembered learning on Earth and on the Central Ark. Primal things in his life.

In the nose, Giacomo, Eye on Sky, Anna Gray Wolf, and Thorkild Lax worked to assess the damage, tally the results, before making their final report to Hans. Unable to sleep, Martin came to them and sat in silence while they worked. They played back the war at high speed, tracking the destruction, the ineffective counter-measures, the sheer disproportion of the victory.

Martin saw again the shadowy curled ribbon writing across Leviathan's worlds like a finger, moving even more rapidly in the playback. Picture stacked over picture, Giacomo observing with a critical half-squint, Eye on Sky coiled with head cords attentive.

They came to the endgame.

"Doers and makers seeding here and here." Giacomo pointed to a magnified image of planetary rubble blooming against darkness. Flash of that awful finger. Tiny sparks glowed in the image like fireflies in a storm cloud. "Making interceptors from the cores of Blinker and Cueball. Now—they're not even hiding themselves. Interceptors go out on anti em plumes. " Radiant lines of white fanning out, trails fading behind them.

The wands quickly counted interceptor traces: fifty, sixty, seventy thousand in this region alone, each no larger than a car, each seeking a Leviathan ship. No targets were visible in this image, but in another, the interceptors had found their ships, and the points of light were sharp and intense. The torch glare reflected from expanding clouds of dust and gas, like welding torches deep in a cave, on and off, winking, until they became a starfield. Enacting the Law at a distance.

Completely different rules.

Hundreds more images. Torches flickering, dying, starfields of destruction vanishing.

"I we see no surviving escape vehicles," Eye on Sky said, scenting the air with something like cinnamon and fresh-dug dirt.

"I don't either, but we have to expect them. The ones we took out might even be decoys. Maybe they transfer to some point outside the system by noach. You know, wholesale pattern transfer. Mind across the void."

"That is not a confirmed possible," Eye on Sky said.

Giacomo shrugged. "I'm trying to think of everything."

"Ship has already thought of everything," Eye on Sky said.

"I won't argue that," Giacomo said. At the heart of a planet's dust corpse, he pointed to more sparks and red glows. "Signature of quark sex reactions, right?"

Martin had no idea what that might be.

They worked for an hour, ignoring Martin. When they took a break, however, Giacomo climbed along a field to hang beside Martin. Eye on Sky and the others went aft.

"Jennifer's back with us tomorrow," he said. "She told me what happened on the Trojan Horse." He clenched his jaw, lowered his voice. "Not right, Martin."

"You didn't know about it?"

Giacomo looked away, tilted his head. "I had so much new stuff to think about, having the ships' minds really open up, go all out for us… Hans made the decision. The weapons were ready, we'd already seeded some planets with noach engineering while you were down there talking. Hans said he wouldn't let them trap us this time, wouldn't let them fool us." His eyes gleamed.

"Hans said nothing about our not knowing… that it was starting?"

Giacomo shook his head, still fired by the buzz of memory. Nostrils flared. "You should have been here. It was a real circus. I mean, I had worked out some of the momeraths, and so did Jennifer and Silken Parts and a lot of the others… But the ships' minds are working, then the moms and snake mothers bring out these plans… Makers at a distance, nothing in between. Just delude some matter into rearranging its form, ordering itself by your design. Fantastic.

"That was what the Killers were trying to do to us. But they couldn't find us. We were small, they were big. Our chief advantage."

"Did we discover these new weapons with the help of the moms, or were they already in the ships' minds?"

Giacomo shrugged. "I asked the moms that question twice. No real answer." He mimicked the flat neutrality of a mom's voice: " 'You are given what you need to enact the Law.' I'll say this much—I had a long time to think things over, even before Jennifer and I jammed. The momeraths I did pointed to some pretty scary things."

"Like?"

"All by myself, seeing the planets, trying to figure out Sleep, and Blinker, I came up with"—he circled his hands—"persuasion. It's a principle, like deluding matter through hidden channels. Space is like matter—has its own bookkeeping, its own channels. I don't think the moms knew what I was thinking, I mean, I don't think the Benefactors… the ships at least… Christ, Martin. I'm getting all tangled."

"They didn't know about persuasion, whatever it is."

"Right… until we saw Blinker, saw their noach range out to fifty billion klicks."

Martin nodded. Giacomo was still drunk with the knowledge, the power.

"Space can be persuaded to get out of the way, shrink its metric, collapse atomic diameters to create quark matter. All by myself, without the ships' minds, I saw that quark matter makes neutronium look like a gas. By tweaking internal bits in the quarks—a whole level below particle bits—quark matter can be split into really fanatic lovers. One must have the other, or, you know, the universe will end. You put anything between the lovers… what stands between ceases to exist. The privileged bands get incredibly vicious. The books must be balanced.

"Martin, the way it went, I don't think the moms or the ships' minds had to know anything. I saw it. The ships' minds worked through a couple of hundred lifetimes of my thinking. They were way ahead of me. I talked to the moms, the ships' minds talked to me, I talked to Jennifer, compared notes, and… There it was. Then the ship went to work making the weapons."