Iron Sunrise

IMPACT: T zero

Just outside the expanding light cone of the present a star died, iron-bombed.

Something — some exotic force of unnatural origin — twisted a knot in space, enclosing the heart of a stellar furnace. A huge loop of superstrings twisted askew, expanding and contracting until the core of the star floated adrift in a pocket universe where the timelike dimension was rolled shut on the scale of the Planck length, and another dimension — one of the closed ones, folded shut on themselves, implied by the standard model of physics — replaced it. An enormous span of time reeled past within the pocket universe, while outside a handful of seconds ticked by.

From the perspective of the drifting core, the rest of the universe appeared to recede to infinity, vanishing past an event horizon beyond which it was destined to stay until the zone of expansion collapsed. The blazing ball of gas lit up its own private cosmos, then slowly faded. Time passed, uncountable amounts of time wrapped up in an eyeblink from the perspective of the external universe. The stellar core cooled and contracted, dimming. Eventually a black dwarf hung alone, cooling toward absolute zero. Fusion didn’t stop but ran incredibly slowly, mediated by quantum tunneling under conditions of extreme cold. Over a span billions of times greater than that which had elapsed since the big bang in the universe outside, light nuclei merged, tunneling across the high quantum wall of their electron orbitals. Heavier elements disintegrated slowly, fissioning and then decaying down to iron. Mass migrated until, by the end of the process, a billion trillion years down the line, the star was a single crystal of iron crushed down into a sphere a few thousand kilometers in diameter, spinning slowly in a cold vacuum only trillionths of a degree above absolute zero.

Then the external force that had created the pocket universe went into reverse, snapping shut the pocket and dropping the dense spherical crystal into the hole at the core of the star, less than thirty seconds after the bomb had gone off. And the gates of hell opened.

Iron doesn’t fuse easily: the process is endothermic, absorbing energy. When the guts were scooped out of the star and replaced with a tiny cannonball of cold degenerate matter, the outer layers of the star, held away from the core by radiation pressure, began to collapse inward across a gap of roughly a quarter million kilometers of cold vacuum. The outer shell rushed in fast, accelerating in the grip of a stellar gravity well. Minutes passed, and from the outside the photosphere of the star appeared to contract slightly as huge vortices of hot turbulent gas swirled and fulminated across it. Then the hammerblow of the implosion front reached the core …

There was scant warning for the inhabitants of the planet that had been targeted for murder. For a few minutes, star-watching satellites reported an imminent solar flare, irregularities leading to atmospheric effects, aurorae, and storm warnings for orbital workers and miners in the asteroid belt. Maybe one or two of the satellites had causal channels, limited bandwidth instantaneous communicators, unjammable but expensive and touchy. But there wasn’t enough warning to help anyone escape: the satellites simply went off-line one by one as a wave of failure crept outward from the star at the speed of light. In one research institute a meteorologist frowned at her workstation in bemusement, and tried to drill down a diagnostic — she was the only person on the planet who had time to realize something strange was happening. But the satellites she was tracking orbited only three light minutes closer to the star than the planet she lived on, and already she had lost two minutes chatting to a colleague about to go on her lunch break about the price of a house she would never buy now, out on the shore of a bay of lost dreams.

The hammerfall was a spherical shock wave of hydrogen plasma, blazing at a temperature of millions of degrees and compressed until it had many of the properties of metal. A hundred times as massive as the largest gas giant in the star system, by the time it slammed into the crystal of iron at the heart of the murdered star it was traveling at almost 2 percent of lightspeed. When it struck, a tenth of the gravitational potential energy of the star was converted into radiation in a matter of seconds. Fusion restarted, exotic reactions taking place as even the iron core began to soak up nuclei, building heavier and hotter and less stable intermediaries. In less than ten seconds, the star burned through a visible percentage of its fuel, enough to keep the fires banked for a billion years. There wasn’t enough mass in the G-type dwarf to exceed the electron degeneracy pressure in its core, collapsing it into a neutron star, but nevertheless a respectable shock front, almost a hundredth as potent as a supernova, rebounded from the core.

A huge pulse of neutrinos erupted outward, carrying away much of the energy from the prompt fusion burn. The neutral particles didn’t usually react with matter; the average neutrino could zip through a light year of lead without noticing. But there were so many of them that, as they sluiced through the outer layers of the star, they deposited a good chunk of their energy in the roiling bubble of foggy plasma that had replaced the photosphere. Not far behind them, a tidal wave of hard gamma radiation and neutrons a billion times brighter than the star ripped through the lower layers, blasting them apart. The dying star flashed a brilliant X-ray pulse like a trillion hydrogen bombs detonating in concert: and the neutrino pulse rolled out at the speed of light.

Eight minutes later — about a minute after she noticed the problem with the flare monitors — the meteorologist frowned. A hot, prickling flush seemed to crawl across her skin, itching: her vision was inexplicably streaked by crawling purple meteors. The desk in front of her flickered and died. She inhaled, smelling the sharp stink of ozone, looked round shaking her head to clear the sudden fog, and saw her colleague staring at her and blinking. “Hey, I feel like somebody just walked on my grave—” The lights flickered and died, but she had no trouble seeing because the air was alive with an eerie glow, and the small skylight window cast razor-sharp shadows on the floor. Then the patch of floor directly illuminated by the window began to smoke, and the meteorologist realized, fuzzily, that she wasn’t going to buy that house after all, wasn’t going to tell her partner about it, wasn’t ever going to see him again, or her parents, or her sister, or anything but that smoking square of brilliance that was slowly growing as the window frame burned away.

She received a small mercy: mere seconds later the upper atmosphere — turned into an anvil of plasma by the passing radiation pulse — reached the tropopause. Half a minute later the first shock wave leveled her building. She didn’t die alone; despite the lethal dose they all received from the neutrino pulse, nobody on the planet lived past the iron sunrise for long enough to feel the pangs of radiation sickness.

IMPACT: T plus 1392 days, 12 hours, 16 minutes

Wednesday hid under the desk, heart pounding with terror, clutching a stubby cylinder. She’d seen the body of the customs officer stuffed inside the darkened kitchen; realized he was dead, like the handwritten instructions in the diplomatic pouch said. Now the thing that did it was coming for her, and she wished -

There was a scratching click of claws on polycellulose flooring. I don’t want to be here, she prayed, fingers slipping around the sweat-lubed cylinder. This isn’t happening to me! She could see the hellhound outside, imagining it in her mind’s eye: jaws like diamond saw blades, wide-set eyes glowing with the overspill from its phased-array lidar. She could see the small, vicious gun implanted in its hollow skull, its brains governed by a set of embedded computers to override its Doberman instincts. Fist-sized overlapping bald patches, psoriatic skin thickening over diamond mesh armor. It could smell her fear. She’d read the papers in the strong room, realized how important they must be, and pushed the door ajar, thinking to leave — yanked it shut barely ahead of the snarl and the leap. Acrid smoke had curled up from the hinges as she scrambled into the ductwork, fled like a black-clad spider into the service axis and through the pressurized cargo tunnel and the shadows of the almost-empty dock, panting and crying as she went. Always hearing a scrabble of diamond-tipped claws on the floor behind her. I don’t exist. You can’t smell me!

Herman — as usual, when she needed him most — wasn’t talking.

The dog could smell her — or smell someone. She’d tabbed into a public term and watched the dog, or one of its cousins, stalk across the loading bay like the spectral, elongated shadow of a wolf — something born in frozen forests beneath a midnight sun, evolved to lope across the cyborg-infested tundra of an alien world. It had glanced at the hidden camera with glowing eyes, a glow that spun into static as it locked on and fired. It could sneeze nerve gas and shit land mines, if you believed her kid brother Jerm’s cheap third-person scripted arc-ventures; a product of a more sophisticated technosphere than Moscow’s, its muscles didn’t run on anything as primitive as actin/myosin contraction, and its bones were built for leverage — a hellhound running at full power hissed like a primitive locomotive, dissipating waste heat as steam hot enough to scald anyone who got too close.

She raised the riot cartridge, fingers tightening on the trigger switch, and pointed it at the doorway. Dim shadow of legs, too many legs. They paused, and the shadow swung across the wall, homing in. She squished down on the trigger and the canister kicked back at her hands as a terrible clatter rushed towards her and the air in front turned black. No, blue: like the dead man’s tongue, lying there. The paper said all but one copy of the data cartridge containing the customs transfer log were to be destroyed, and anyone who knew was to die. A tenuous aerogel foam bubbled and farted, rushing out into a ballooning mass as the dog lunged forward, teeth snapping, making a soft growling sound deep in its throat. It thumped against her feet in a soap-bubble cocoon, the growl turning into a deafening moaning howl of frustration.

Shuddering, Wednesday shuffled backward, pushing the heavy desk over as she stood up. She looked around wildly. The dog’s hind legs scrabbled at the floor, driving it after her. She could see a glow of rage in its eyes as it struggled with the sticky antipersonnel foam. “Good doggie,” she said vacuously, backing away, wondering inanely if she should hit it. But no, if a hellhound thought you had won, it would blow itself up, wouldn’t it? They always did that in the arc-ventures -

Something cold and wet stubbed itself against the back of her neck, and snuffled damply. She sagged, her knees and stomach turning to sacks of ice water; paw-fingers like bone clamped tight on her shoulders, holding her upright. Her eyelid monitor flickered, then died as the lights came up. The hound on the floor seemed to grin up at her — no, past her. When he spoke, his voice was surprisingly human, a deep gravelly growl converging from three directions. “Victoria Strowger, this is emergency police pack four-alpha. By order of Captain Mannheim, superintending evacuation process for Old Newfoundland, we are placing you under arrest. You will return with us to the main hub traffic bay to await uplift. I must caution you that any resistance you offer may be dealt with using weapons of nonlethal intent. Running back aboard this habitat was a senseless waste of police time.” Two of the voices fell silent, but a third continued: “And while we’re about it, why were you running away?”

IMPACT: T plus 1392 days, 12 hours, 38 minutes

Twenty-two minutes past departure time and the dogs had rounded up the last stray lamb, herding her into the service lock. Captain Mannheim had other things to worry about this instant, like topping off the number four tank and making sure Misha vented the surplus ullage pressure and kept the flow temperature within good limits. Then he was going to run the launch plan and get the hell out of this ghost system before the storm front blew in, and once clear he’d have it out with the guard dogs. (And why had they let some interfering punk kid sneak around the service core in the first place?) And then …

Twenty-two minutes! More than a thousand seconds overdue! There was room for slippage on the critical path — nobody would be insane enough not to make some allowances — but with five thousand passengers, twenty-two minutes meant all of five person-years of consumables gone just like that, virtually in an eyeblink. The refugee pods had an open-loop life-support system, there being no room for recycling tankage on this relief flight, so the whole exercise was running into millions, tens of millions. Some dumb kid had just cost the burghers of New Dresden about, oh, two thousand marks, and Captain Mannheim about two thousand extra gray hairs.

“What’s our criticality profile looking like?” he demanded, leaning over to glare at Gertrude’s station.

“Ah, all nominal, sir.” Gertrude stared fixedly ahead, refusing to meet his eye.

“Then keep it that way,” he snapped. “Misha! That tank of yours!”

“Vented and closed out within tolerances.” Misha grinned breezily from across the bridge. “The load-out is looking sweet. Oh, and for once the toilet plumbing on number two isn’t rattling.”

“Good.” Mannheim sniffed. The number two reaction motor’s mass-flow plumbing suffered from occasional turbulence, especially when the hydrogen slurry feeding it went over sixteen degrees absolute. The turbulence wasn’t particularly serious unless it turned to outright cavitation, with big bubbles of supercooled gases fizzing inside the pipes that fed reaction mass to the fusion rockets. But that was potentially catastrophic, and they didn’t have any margin for repairs. Not for the first time, Mannheim’s thoughts turned enviously to the beautiful, high-tech liner from Novya Romanov that had pulled out six hours ago on an invisible wave of curved space-time, surfing in the grip of an extremal singularity. No messing with balky, mass-guzzling antiquated fusion rockets for Sikorsky’s Dream! But the Long March was as sophisticated a ship as anything the Dresdener merchant syndicate could afford, and he’d do as well with it as was humanly possible. “Ship! What’s our sequence entry status?”

The robotically smooth voice of the autopilot rolled across the bridge. “Kerberos unit and final passenger boarding notified two minutes ago and counting. Critical path elements in place. Entry status green, no exceptions raised—”

“Then commence launch cycle immediately.”

“Aye. Launch cycle commencing. Station power and utility disconnect proceeding. Station mass transfer disconnect proceeding. Boarding pier disconnect proceeding. Main engine spin-up engaged, station one. Live cargo systems spin-down engaged, station two.”

“I hate live cargo,” Gertrude muttered. “Live cargo spin-down notification going out.” Fingers tapped invisible cells in the air in front of her face. “Hub lift interlocks to safe—”

Mannheim stared at the complex web of dependencies that hovered over the blank wall of the bridge, a meter in front of his nose. Slowly, red nodes blinked to green as the huge starship prepared to cast free of the station. It was supposed to be the last ship ever to sail from this port. From time to time, he prodded a station glyph and spoke quietly to whoever’s voice answered from the thin air: loadmasters and supercargo and immigration control officers and civil polizei, Jack in the drive damage control center and Rudi in the crow’s nest. Once he even talked to Traffic Control. The station’s robot minders plodded on imperturbably, unaware that the end of their labor was in sight, coursing toward them on an expanding shock front of radiation-driven plasma. An hour went by. Someone invisible placed a mug of coffee at his right hand, and he drank, carried on talking and watching and occasionally cursing in a quiet voice, and drank again and it was cold.

Finally, the ship was ready to depart.

IMPACT: T plus 8 minutes — 1.5 hours

Moscow system died at the speed of light, death rippling outward on a tsunami of radiation.

First to die were the weather satellites, close in on the star, watching for solar flares and prominences. Buoys built to track breezes were ripped adrift by the tornado blast of the artificially induced nova, not so much disabled as evaporated, adding their stripped nuclei to the boiling fury of the iron sunrise.

Seconds later the radiation pulse melted the huge, flimsy solar collectors that glided in stately orbit half an astronomical unit out, feeding power to antimatter generators a hundred kilometers in diameter. Robot factories unattended by humans passed unmourned and unnoticed. The gamma pulse shed by their tons of stored antihydrogen added a candle glow to the hurricane.

Eight minutes after detonation, the radiation front reached the innermost human habitat in the system: the world called Moscow. The neutrino flux was high enough to deliver a rapidly lethal radiation dose even after traveling right through the planet. The nightside fluoresced, atmosphere glowing dimly against the unbearably bright background. The gamma pulse, close behind it, flashed the dayside atmosphere to plasma and slammed it into the already melting rock. Supersonic tornadoes rippled around the daylight terminator, scouring the surface down to bedrock.

Half an hour into the nova, the process of planetary disintegration was well under way. On the dayside, Moscow’s atmospheric pressure dropped drastically, and the primary gaseous constituents were hydrogen and oxygen radicals stripped from the boiling fog that had been the boreal ocean. Cloud top temperatures were already in the thousands of degrees, while Mach waves rippled through the turgid troposphere on the nightside, crushing houses like matchwood kindling to become pyres for the dying bodies of their occupants. The night receded before a ghastly daylight, the sullen glare of an exploding star reflected off the planet’s own comet trail of air. To an observer at ground level Moscow Prime would have covered half the sky, a magnesium flare of radiant energy that would still be bright enough to burn out eyeballs tens of trillions of kilometers away. The main shock wave of the explosion was approaching by then, a wave of plasma flash-heated to hundreds of millions of degrees, barely less dense than the dissipated atmosphere and traveling outward at 20 percent of lightspeed. When it arrived, Moscow vanished — swallowed like a watermelon at ground zero in the expanding fireball of an atomic explosion.

Sixty minutes: the radiation pulse ghosted through the rings of Siberia, a huge green ice giant with attendant moons strung around it like lucent pearls. They flashed briefly and sprouted streamers of glowing gas as the rings flared violet, forming a huge glowing disk of light that jetted outward from the star, consuming the mass of a small moon in seconds. Siberia absorbed a huge pulse of energy, sufficient to melt the tundra at its core and spawn gigantic storms. Hurricanes the size of Moscow raced toward the nightside of the giant planet as it, too, sprouted a glowing cometary tail. Unlike the inner bodies, Siberia was too huge to evaporate entirely. Though it glowed white-hot and molten, and its orbital track was distorted by the tremendous shock wave of the stellar explosion, the innermost core of nickel-iron remained — a gravestone marker that would take millions of years to cool in the twilight emptiness of Moscow system. The first survivor weathered the blast at a range of ninety-eight light minutes. Sleeping in deep orbit around the outer gas giant Zemlya, a robot beacon blinked awake at the first harsh glare of energy. The beacon carried huge reserves of coolant within its faceted black-armored carapace. Designed to withstand direct hits from a battleship’s laser grid, it weathered the storm — although it was sent tumbling, blasted right out of its seventy-year orbit by the surge of heavy charged particles. The beacon was 118 years old, one of 750 in its series. Code-named TALIGENT SPARROW, it was part of the early warning system of the Strategic Retaliation Command of the recently vaporized Moscow Foreign Office.

TALIGENT SPARROW blinked and took stock. The stars were occluded by glowing gas and debris, some of them its own ablated skin. No matter: it had a task. Deep memory remembered the pattern of the seasons and turned sensors in search of Moscow. It tried vainly to swivel a high-gain antenna that had been reduced to a crumpled mass of molten tissue. Other sensors tried to distinguish the gamma flux of inbound relativistic missiles and failed, overloaded. A primitive expert system plumbed the depths of its decision tree and determined that something unknown had attacked it. Qubits trickled into entropy as TALIGENT SPARROW powered up its causal channel and shrieked murder at the uncaring stars.

Somebody heard.

IMPACT: T plus 1392 days, 13 hours, 02 minutes

The police drone was robotically curt. “We’ve found your daughter. Please come to deck G-red, zone two meeting point, and collect her.”

Morris Strowger stood up and glanced at his wife. He smiled. “I told you they’d find her.” The smile slowly faded.

His wife didn’t look up. With her bony fingers thrust together between her knees and her bowed head, Indica Strowger’s shoulders shook as if she’d grabbed hold of a live power supply. “Go away,” she said very quietly, her voice hard and controlled. “I’ll be all right.”

“If you’re sure—” Already the police drone was moving off. He glanced back uncertainly at her hunched form, then followed the insect away through crowded, human-smelling partition-runs, runs that were already deteriorating into a high-tech slum patrolled by bees with stun guns. Something about their departure, perhaps the final grim reality of dispossession, had snapped a band of tension that had held everyone together through the dark years just ended, and the solid ground of depression was giving way to a treacherous slurry of despair, hysteria, and uncertainty about the future. Dangerous times.

Wednesday was waiting at the meeting point just as the bee had said. She looked alone and afraid, and Morris, who had been thinking of harsh words, suddenly found himself unable to speak. “Vicki—”

“Dad!” She buried her chin in his shoulder, sharp-jawed like some young feral predator. She was shaking.

“Where’ve you been? Your mother’s been going crazy!” That wasn’t the half of it. He hugged her, firmly, feeling a terrible sense of hollow unease ebb away. His daughter was back, and he was angry as hell at her — and unspeakably relieved.

“I wanted to be alone,” she said very quietly, voice muffled. He tried to step back, but she refused to let go. A pang: she did that when she didn’t want to tell him something. She was no good at dissembling, but her sense of privacy was acute. An old woman behind him was raising a fuss at the harassed constable, something about a missing boy — no, her pet dog. Her son, her Sonny. Wednesday looked up at him. “I needed time to think.” The lie solidified in a crystal moment, and he didn’t have the heart to call her on it. There’d be time for that, and to tell her about the official reprimand later: trespassing off-limits on board a ship wasn’t the same as exploring the empty quadrants of a station. She didn’t know how lucky she was that the Captain was understanding — and that unusual allowances were being made for stressed-out adults, never mind kids leaving home for the first time they could remember.

“Come on.” He turned her away from the desk, rubbed her shoulder. “Come on. Back to our, uh, cabin. Ship’s undocking soon. They’ll be widecasting from the bridge. You don’t want to miss that?”

She looked up at him, an unreadable, serious expression on her face. “Oh, no.”

IMPACT: T plus 4 hours, 6 minutes

Two hundred and forty-six minutes after the Zero Incident, the freighter Taxis Pride congealed out of empty space, forty-six degrees out of the plane of the ecliptic, six light hours away from its final destination. Brad Momington, skipper, was on the flight deck, nattering with Mary Haight, the relativistics op. Taxis Pride was a three-point shuttle, connecting Moscow to Iceland Seven station, thence to the Septagonese transshipment outpost at Blaylock B. Brad had made this zone transfer eighteen times in the past seven years, and it was as routine as the mug of strong, heavily sugared coffee that Alex placed by his elbow before the jump countdown commenced, which was just then cooling down enough to drink.

Brad put out the standard navigation squawk and waited for a detailed flight path. In the meantime he pondered the food situation: the kitchen was getting somewhat monotonous, and the downside ferry would give him a chance to stretch his legs and reacquaint himself with clouds and sky again. Taxis Pride was a fast freighter, built to carry time-critical physical mail and perishables. The extremal singularity in her drive core let her accelerate in real space as rapidly as some warships: six light hours was a one-week cruise for her, not the painful odyssey an old hydrogen burner would have to endure. Mary concentrated on a backup star fix — routine, in case the traffic controllers were on strike again, just to keep her professional certification up to date. In her spare moments she was wondering if there’d be time to drop in on an old friend while they were docked for their cargo load cycle.

Then the bridge screamer went off.

“What the — get that!” Brad’s coffee went flying as he scrambled for the comm terminal. Mary jolted upright, whey-faced.

“Got it. That’s not traffic—”

“Hello, this is flight Echo Gold Nine Zero responding to broadcast squawk from, ah, Delta X-ray Zeus Seven, we have handshake. What’s the—”

“Something flaky here, boss—”

Red flashing lights blinked on the conference circuit. There was a thirty-second delay while they waited tensely for a reply.

“Echo Gold Nine Zero this is Delta X-ray Zeus Seven, emergency relay service. Admiralty signal blue four, authentication follows message. This is a systemwide military emergency. Moscow is under quarantine — the whole system is under lockdown, no exceptions. Evacuate immediately. I emphasize, get your kernel spun up and get out of here immediately! Please acknowledge.”

Brad flushed, furious. “This is some sort of fucking joke!” He waved off the authentication code and punched in the waypoint series for Moscow. “When I find the asshole—”

“Brad. Come here.” He looked round sharply. Mary was leaning over the repeater from Wang’s crow’s nest downstairs. She looked sick.

“What is it?”

“Here.” She pointed to a plot that had just shown up. Taxis Pride was a fleet auxiliary, liable for mobilization in event of war: it carried near-military-grade passive sensors. “Gamma plot, classic proton-antiproton curve, about two AUs out. It’s redshifting on us. I got a fix on that relay service buoy, Brad: it’s at the origin point for that … burn.”

“Shit!” The screen swam in front of Brad’s eyes. All of a sudden he remembered what it was like when he was nine, when his father told him his dog had died. “Shit!” Positronium was an unstable intermediate created during some matter-antimatter reactions. Redshifted, it was moving away from the reference frame of the observer at some fraction of the speed of light. Out from the star, it could mean only one thing — slower-than-light antimatter rockets, relativistic retaliation bombers cranking up for a kamikaze run on someone’s home world. “They’ve launched. They’ve fucking launched the deterrent fleet!”

They were a long-practiced team: he didn’t have to tell Mary what to do. She was already bringing back up the gravitational potential maps he’d need for the jump. Brad canceled his half-planned course and fed in the return journey jump coordinates. “Hello Delta X-ray Zeus Seven, this is flight Echo Gold Nine Zero acknowledging. We are preparing to return to Iceland Seven soonest. Can you clarify the situation for us. Other shipping may be in the queue and need warning off. Do you need assistance? Over.” Then he got on the blower to Liz, down in kernel monitoring, explaining to her that, no, this wasn’t a joke, and yes, he was going to overrun the drive maintenance cycle, and yes, it was going to put the Pride in the dock for a month and there was a good reason for it all — “Echo Gold Nine Zero, departure cleared. This is Delta X-ray Zeus Seven, relaying through NavServ buoy six-nine-three via causal channel. Situation as follows: inner system exterminated by surprise attack using weapons of mass destruction approximately two-seven-zero minutes ago absolute time. Your range three-six-zero light minutes considered marginal for survival: the star’s gone. We’re assuming one hundred percent fatalities on Moscow, repeat, one hundred percent. V-force has launched, but we’ve got no idea who did it. As of two hours ago, Moscow system is under complete interdict. Wait—” for a moment the steady voice wavered. “Oh. Oh my! That felt weird.” A pause. “Echo Gold Nine Zero, we’ve just taken a core radiation pulse. Funny, two kilometers of rock shielding outside us. Ah, shit. Off the scale. Neutrinos, has to be. Echo Gold Nine Zero, this is Delta X-ray Zeus Seven, there’s — I don’t think there’s anything you can do for us. Get the hell out while you still can — warn everybody off. Signing off now.”

Brad stared at the comm status display without seeing it. Then he mashed his palm down on the general channel glyph. “Crew, captain speaking.” He glanced at Mary and saw her staring back at him. Waiting. “We have a situation. Change of plan.” Glancing down at his panel he blinked and dragged the urgent course correction into the flight sequence. “We’re not going home. Ever.” Taxis Pride was the first ship to leave Moscow system after the explosion. Another two ships made it out, one of them badly damaged by jumping into the tail of the shock wave. Word of the explosion filtered out: several freighters were saved from jumping into a fiery grave by dint of a massive and well-coordinated emergency alert. Over the next few weeks, the inhabitants of the Iceland Seven refinery station — a mere eight light months from Moscow — were evacuated to Shenjen Principality, and as the shock wave rolled outward, more vulnerable habitats were evacuated in turn. The nearest populated planetary system, Septagon Central, was far enough away to be saved by the heavy radiation shielding on its orbital republics. Meanwhile, years would pass before another starship visited the radiation-scarred corpse of Moscow system.

IMPACT: T plus 1392 days, 18 hours, 11 minutes

“What’s your finding?” demanded the Captain.

The three dogs grinned at him from their positions around his cramped day cabin. One of them bent to lick at a patch of blue foam sticking to its left hind leg. The foam hissed and smoked where saliva ran. “There is nothing to report on the first incident, the customs officer. We regret to inform you that he must be classed as missing, presumed dead, unless we subsequently learn that he boarded one of the other ships. The second incident was a juvenile delinquent escapade committed by an asocial teenager. No trusted subsystems appear to have been compromised. I have no direct access to the cargo carried in the security zone, but you have assured me yourself that none of the black manifest packages are missing. The recorded history of the delinquent is consistent with this event, as is her subsequent behavior, and a search of the documentation corpus pertaining to socialization of juvenile adults in prewar New Moscow society indicates that territorial escapades of this kind are a not-infrequent response to environmental stress.”

“Why did she get in there in the first place?” Mannheim leaned forward, glaring at the lead hellhound with a mixture of anxiety and distrust. “I thought you were supposed to be guarding—”

“In my judgment her actions are compatible with typical human adolescent dysfunctional behavior. This search-and-rescue security unit is not authorized to use lethal force to protect bonded cargo, Captain. A secondary consideration was that her absence had been noticed by familial parties and formally reported after she was officially transferred aboard the evacuation ferry. Remanding the delinquent into the care of her parents, with subsequent monitoring and supervision for the duration of the voyage, will prevent repetition and will not invite further attention.”

The dog that had been talking jerked its head pompously. One of its fellows padded over and sniffed at its left ear. Mannheim watched them nervously. Police dogs, incredibly expensive units bought from some out-system high-tech polity, programmed for loyalty to the regime: he’d never even seen any before this voyage, was startled to learn the government owned any, much less that they’d see fit to deploy them on something as mundane as an evacuation run. And then, one of them claimed to be a Foreign Office dog, loaded onto his ship along with orders — sealed orders handwritten on paper for his eyes only — to be turned loose on the ship. Uplifted dogs designed for security and search-and-rescue, a pack hiding one member capable of killing. Exotic sapient weapons. “Did you carry out your mission?”

Number one dog looked at him. “What are you talking about?”

“Eh?” Mannheim straightened up. “Now look here,” he began angrily, “this is my ship! I’m responsible for everyone and everything on it, and if I need to know something I—”

The dogs stood up simultaneously, and he realized they had him surrounded. Gun-muzzle faces pointed at him, a thousand-yard stare repeated three times over. The FO dog spoke up: the others seemed to be under its control in some way. “We could tell you, Captain, but then we would have to silence you. Speculation on this matter by parties not authorized by the Ministry of War is deemed to be a hostile act, within the meaning of section two, paragraph four-three-one of the Defense of the Realm Act. Please confirm your understanding of this declaration.”

“I—” Mannheim gulped. “I understand. No more questions.”

“Good.” The number two dog sat down again, and unconcernedly set about licking the inside of its right hind leg. “The other units of this pack are not cognizant of these affairs. They’re just simple secret police dogs. You are not to trouble them with unpleasant questions. This debriefing is at an end. I believe you have a ship to run?”

IMPACT: T plus 1393 days, 02 hours, 01 minutes

Wednesday watched the end of the world with her parents and half the occupants of the Rose Deck canteen. The tables and benches had been deflated and pushed back against one wall while the ship was under boost. Now a large screen had been drawn across the opposite wall and configured with a view piped down from the hub sensor array. She had wanted to watch on her own personal slate, but her parents had dragged her along to the canteen: it seemed like most people didn’t want to be alone for the jump. Not that anybody would know it had happened — contrary to dramatic license, there was absolutely no sensation when a starship tunneled between two equipotent locations across the light years — but there was something symbolic about this one. A milestone they’d never see again.

“Herman?” she subvocalized.

“I’m here. Not for much longer. You’ll be alone after the jump.”

“I don’t understand. Why?” Jeremy was staring at her so she grimaced horribly at him. He jumped back, right into the wall, and his mother glared at him.

“Causal channels don’t work after a jump outside their original light cone: they’re instantaneous communicators, but they don’t violate causality. Move the entangled quantum dots apart via FTL and you break the quantum entanglement they rely on. As I speak to you through one that is wired into your access implant, and that is how you speak to me, I will be out of contact for some time after you arrive. However you are in no danger as long as you remain in the evacuation area and do nothing to attract attention.”

She rolled her eyes. As invisible friends went, Herman could do an unpleasantly good imitation of a pompous youth leader. Dark emptiness sprinkled with the jewel points of stars covered the far wall, a quiet surf of conversation rippling across the beach of heads in front of her. A familiar chill washed through her: too many questions, too little time to ask them. “Why did they let me go?”

“You were not recognized as a threat. If you were, I would not have asked you to go. Forgive me. There is little time remaining. What you achieved was more important than I can tell you, and I am grateful for it.”

“So what did I accomplish? Was it really worth it for those papers?”

“I cannot tell you yet. The first jump is due in less than two minutes. At that point we lose contact. You will be busy after that: Septagon is not like Old Newfoundland. Take care: I will be in touch when the time is right.”

“Is something wrong, Vicki?” With a start she realized her father was watching her.

“Nothing, Dad.” Instinctive dismissal: Where did he learn to be so patronizing? “What’s going to happen?”

Morris Strowger shrugged. “We, uh, have to make five jumps before we arrive where we’re going. The first—” He swallowed. “Home, uh, the explosion, is off to one side. You know what a conic section is?”

“Don’t talk down to me.” She nearly bit her tongue when she saw his expression. “Yes, Dad. I’ve done analytic geometry.”

“Okay. The explosion is expanding in a sphere centered on, on, uh, home. We’re following a straight line — actually, a zigzag around a straight line between equipotent points in space-time — from the station, which is outside the sphere, to Septagon, which is outside the sphere of the explosion but on the other side. Our first jump takes us within the sphere of the explosion, about three light months inside it. The next jump takes us back out the other side.”

“We’re going into the explosion?”

Morris reached out and took her hand. “Yes, dear. It’s—” He looked at the screen again, ducking to see past one of the heads blocking the way. Mum, Indica, was holding Jeremy, facing the screen: she had her hands on his shoulders. “It’s not dangerous,” he added. “The really bad stuff is all concentrated in the shock front, which is only a couple of light days thick. Our shielding can cope with anything else; otherwise, Captain Mannheim would be taking us around the explosion. But that would take much longer, so—” He fell silent. A heavily accented voice echoed from the screen.

“Attention. This is your captain speaking. In about one minute we will commence jump transit for Septagon Central. We have a series of five jumps at seventy-hour intervals except for the fourth, which will be delayed eighteen hours. Our first jump takes us inside the shock front of the supernova: religionists may wish to attend the multifaith service of remembrance on G deck in three hours’ time. Thank you.”

The voice stopped abruptly, as if cut off. A stopwatch appeared in one corner of the wall, counting down the seconds. “What will we do now?” Wednesday asked quietly.

Her father looked uncomfortable. “Find somewhere to live. They said they’d help us. Your mother and I will look for work, I suppose. Try to fit in—”

The black-jeweled sky shimmered, rainbow lights casting many-colored shadows across the watchers. A collective sigh went up: the wall-screen view of space was gone, replaced by the most insanely beautiful thing she had ever seen. Great shimmering curtains of green and red and purple light blocked out the stars, gauzy shrouds of fluorescent silk streaming in a wild breeze. At their heart, a brilliant diamond shone in the cosmos, a bloodred dumbbell of light growing from its poles. “Herman?” she whispered to herself. “Do you see that?” But there was no reply: and suddenly she felt empty, as hollow as the interior of the baby nebula the ship now floated in. “All gone,” she said aloud, and suddenly there were tears in her eyes: she made no protest when her father gathered her in his arms. He was crying, too, great racking sobs making his shoulders shake: she wondered what he could be missing for a moment, then caught its palest shadow and shuddered.