Greg Bear Anvil of Stars

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mother; the guilt of his father when he punished Martin, especially when
Martin provoked a spanking; his father's solemn depression for hours after,
locking himself away from wife and son while his mother sat quietly with
Martin. The later years, spankings much less frequent none after he was
six and the days of togetherness in the summers before Earth's death, after
his father's return from
Washington, D.C., investigating the river in a raft, exploring the forest
around the house, talking, his father taciturn and solemn at times, at other
times ebullient and even silly.
Arthur's love for Francine, filling Martin's childhood as a constant like
sunlight. Martin did not forget the arguments, the family disputes, but they
were as much a part of the picture as wrinkles in skin or mountains on the
Earth's surface or waves on the sea& ups and downs of emotional terrain.
The memories helped Martin keep that sense of purpose they had had when they
left the Ark and climbed out of the sun's basement, up into the long darkness.
"We still haven't found anything that is obviously a defense," Hakim
pronounced on the eighteenth day. The children of
Tortoise floated around him in the cafeteria, listening to the latest search
team report. "Planetary activity hasn't increased or decreased. We haven't
been swept by electromagnetic radiation of any artificial variety we can
detect. We seem to be catching them by surprise."
Martin hung with legs crossed at the rear of the group, Theresa beside him. He
laddered to the center of the cafeteria when Hakim had finished.
"We have some choices," Martin said. "We can drop makers and doers into
Nebuchadnezzar first, then the same to Ramses, and hope they find enough raw
material to do the Job. Or we can
convert all of our fuel and most of the ship into bombs and concentrate on
skinning one planet.
Because of the lack of volatiles, we probably can't do much damage to more
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than one, not right away. Just to skin one planet will probably take most of
our fuel and large chunks of
Tortoise itself. Or we can sleep and wait for the makers and doers in the
pre-birth cloud to send their weapons down."
"Let's vote," Ariel said when he paused.
"No." He shook his head patiently. "This isn't a matter for voting."
"Why not?" Ariel asked, her expression languid, without passion.
We all wear killing faces.
Faces showing nobody home, nobody responsible
.
"Because the Pan makes all decisions now," Stephanie Wing Feather reminded
her.
Martin half-expected Ariel to leave the cafeteria in anger, but she did not.
She relaxed her arms, closed her eyes, sighed, then opened them again and
watched his face intently.
"This is a tough one," Martin said. "If we wait long enough, we might learn
whether we should hit Herod, or even focus on it. If there are no defenses, if
the risk is low, we can suck out all of Nebuchadnezzar's atmospheric volatiles
before the planet is destroyed much easier and faster than after blowing it
up& "
"Strip the atmosphere& " Andrew Jaguar said, shuddering. "Like vampires."
"We're going to blow it to dust anyway," Mei-li reminded him, small voice like
a bird's chirrup.
"Hakim, how close do we need to be to investigate?"
"I don't think there's any real gain from being closer than a few thousand
kilometers. If need be, we can send out remotes at this distance and create a
bigger baseline, gather as much information as we would if we flew right down
to the surface& But obviously, we could make a bigger blip in whatever sensors
they have."
"What kind of baseline?" Martin asked.
Hakim conferred with his team for a few seconds. "We think at this distance,
about ten kilometers. We could resolve down to bugs in the air, if there are
any."
"The makers and doers have to be delivered from a distance of no more than one
hundred kilometers," Stephanie said. "The bombships, fully fueled, have a
range of forty g hours, and that can translate into however many kilometers of
orbit we wish, if we're patient& We know that none of us can live in a
bombship for more than about four tendays without going crazy. We could induce
sleep, but that wouldn't be optimum."
The parameters were now clear to all the children. Each advantage had to be
weighed against risk; Martin had worked through the momerath days before, and
found several courses equally matched for danger and benefit. Theresa had
checked his calculations, as had Stephanie Wing
Feather and, he presumed, Hakim Hadj.
"We send out remotes and expand our baseline," he said. "That seems to involve
the lowest risk. We can gather all the information we need in a few days. We
pull in the remotes, coast in quietly, release the bombships, pick them up
again after they've injected the weapons into
Nebuchadnezzar, drop our doers to gather volatiles in the ruins, accelerate
outward to Ramses as fast as possible, and execute again. If we haven't found
any further signs of activity on Herod, we rendezvous with the robots after a
fast orbit around Wormwood. Then we measure our resources, report to
Hare
, drop doers to mine what few resources there are on Herod, and boost out. The [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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