To Crush the Moon

The initial excavation was much briefer than Conrad would have imagined. Two years, to dig out the burrows and caverns that would serve as entry points for the later, more profound tunneling. His crew swelled from dozens to hundreds and more, topping out around six thousand, and whenever possible he chose them from among the twenty thousand successfully revived Barnardeans. After all, even the least of them had participated in a grand terraforming experiment, albeit also a grand failure. But he was careful to balance them with the children of Sol, who needed the work at least as desperately, and were capable of great loyalty and even greater imagination. Their pent-up need for accomplishment more than made up for their lack of grit.

Meanwhile there were factories abuilding, for the production of certain specialized machineries. There had been neutronium barges scouring the heavens around Sol for fifteen hundred years, and Conrad’s people simply tweaked and reinforced the design, so that it could roll across a tunnel floor on house-sized treads and eat through solid rock rather than flying through diffuse clouds of ice and dust.

But it was fundamentally the same machine: a blunt cylinder a thousand meters long and seven hundred wide, with a yawning open mouth that could swallow literally anything. And on the day these machines were first fired up, the moon trembled and groaned beneath its wellglass domes, and the remaining population—angry holdouts defiant to the end—were evicted by their own police or, in a handful of cases where the police themselves were holdouts, by the SWAT robots of the Royal Constabulary.

Conrad’s own escort of Law Enforcers got a bit of a workout as well, when Fatalist or naturalist saboteurs succeeded in bringing a tunnel down on top of him. His body was crushed beyond repair, and he would just as soon have died and reprinted, but the Enforcers managed to save his head and toss it, fainting and throbbing with agony—into the nearest fax.

“Don’t,” he tried to tell them, but without breath or vocal cords he didn’t make much of an impression, and the Enforcers either couldn’t read lips, didn’t care to, or had been programmed to ignore his dying wishes. Still, they needn’t have bothered; this “rescue” saved a grand total of five hours’ stored experience, of which the pain itself was the only thing he would really remember.

Conrad was later to mark this event as the end of an era—one of many he’d encountered in his long strange life. His beheading coincided with the start of a time crunch that no amount of plurality could really abate. Being in five places at once was all well and good, but the real trick was coordination, and for that he had to know everything, instantly. He did the best he could, which really wasn’t bad, and he made an effort to keep up his home life as well. And with love, money, recognition, and meaningful work, it wasn’t a bad way to live. Just a very, very busy one.

Soon, the months and years and decades were passing in a kind of daydream; his world never changed, or rather it changed slowly and at his own command. In the outer universe, art and fashion and politics morphed swiftly by comparison, when he bothered to notice. Which was rarely, and this is truly saying something, for his own wife had become a politician herself! He breathed her air, listened attentively to her stories, and yet remained somehow detached or aloof.

Was this what it felt like to be Bruno de Towaji? Consumed by the practical difficulties separating plan and theory from hard reality? Anchored only by the love of a good woman? For her part, Xmary seemed to understand; Conrad had never been happier, and a part of each of them suspected he never would be again. “These,” she told him once, “are the good old days. Savor each one, for they’ll never come again.”

Not that it was a peaceful time. Far from it! More and more tunnels collapsed, some by accident and some by malevolence, but most because that was how they were supposed to work: the neutronium bores would hollow out the ground and then bring it crashing down behind them. Deaths and manglings by misadventure were a part of the monthly routine; by its very nature, this workplace could not be made safe, any more than a shifting volcano of boulders and razor-sharp knives could be safe. Rest assured, through their labors the project’s burgeoning crew learned a thing or two about pain and loss and recovery.

But in the best of worlds, learning does modify behavior. Few of Luna’s workers died more than twice. It became, in a way, a rite of passage, except for Conrad himself, who well remembered his faxless days on Sorrow and could not be bothered to die even once. “I hope to lead by example,” he told his crew on several occasions, when Bell Daniel teased him about it.

And so, year by year the moon changed and shrunk as the mass beneath its surface was squozen into neubles and packed down into diamond plates near the solid core. And as the lithosphere’s diameter approached its final value, the bores’ work became slower and more precise. A traditional sculptor cuts first with a jackhammer, then with a chisel, then an awl, and finally with a rasp and a file and a block of heated wellstone to smooth and polish. Such was the role of the destruction crew in those last eighty years: finessing the rubble of Luna into something new and wonderful.

Of course, an odd thing was happening by this point: the moon had begun to retain air. It wasn’t much at first—just a bit of outgassed oxygen, combining with a bit of hydrogen from the solar wind. The pressure could be measured in microbars—millionths of a breathable atmosphere—but overnight it seemed to change the texture of the soil and rocks at the surface, which had never before felt the touch of anything but vacuum.

And then the first of the gigantic atmosphere-processing faxes had been lowered into place along the Nearside equator. Tied to a network gate, it called down nitrogen from Titan, carbon dioxide from Venus, methane and heavy nobles from a spherical station adrift in the atmosphere of Jupiter. The Elementals grew wealthier still, for who but they could arrange such enormous transfers of purified mass? And then, before the atmosphere had achieved even a tenth of its final density, a second fax was placed on the Farside to crack additional oxygen from the soil itself, and to combine some fraction of it with the carbon and hydrogen and nitrogen to produce a gray, reeking smog of water and hydrocarbons, fats and other complex organics which would be useful in conditioning the soil for the arrival of life.

And indeed, life was not far behind; soon the surface was crawling with dainty labor robots, spreading and raking and watering and fertilizing a powder of microscopic spores. This had few visible effects, but on the visceral level it struck a deep chord: for the first time in its 4.5-billion-year history, this world was waking up. Suddenly it had a smell, a feel, a sky under which you could walk without protection. Whether the Fatalists and naturalists liked it or not, the history of Luna would be forevermore shaped by living things.

Which was good, because the flow of refugees from the colonies now exceeded the Queendom’s own population growth by an order of magnitude, and was expected to continue increasing. If crushing the moon had once been a forward-thinking solution to long-term problems, it was now a grim and immediate necessity. But that was a political matter, and Conrad felt justified in letting other people worry about it. After all, he was just an architect.

“Don’t lose too much contact with reality,” advised King Bruno on one of his status-check visits, when Conrad made some comment along these lines. “Believe me, even on Maplesphere things are easier when I keep the end users in mind. I’ve wasted years of my life solving the wrong problems, and now I should like to have them back. I’ve lost arms inside a wormhole, lad, but never my entire self.”

But in spite of the king’s warnings, Conrad found himself spending less time on Grace—his nominal home—and more here on this squozen moon, whose lifelessness had begun, suddenly, to seem precious even to him, in the way that all things become precious when their time is nearly over. Another era of his personal history—and Luna’s—was drawing to a close. And not only theirs; all the Queendom seemed to be drawing its collective breath, preparing for some new spasm of change. And as Conrad became aware of this, as his gaze turned finally outward, he found all the eyes of the Queendom looking in at him with worried impatience.

What have you built for us, Architect, in this hour of need? And the answer that came to Conrad was a strange one indeed, for he found he didn’t know. His job was to deliver the skeleton of a world; its final flesh and purpose had never been his to decide.

Said Rodenbeck, “History is a blind toboggan. A single man can sometimes steer it, much to the trees’ dismay, but a billion dragging feet will have their say as well.”

Chapter Twelve in which a frontier is finally opened

Was it a sad moment? A happy one? A moment of triumph or the passing of a triumphant age? Was it all of the above?

The kilometer-wide neutronium bore was a cylinder of mirror-bright impervium, and as it chewed its way through Lunar bedrock—consuming oxides of iron and silicon at one end and excreting neubles at the other—it made a sound like the end of a world. A never-ending detonation of antimatter, yes, a crushing of atomic bonds and atomic nuclei, a crushing of matter itself into dense neutron paste.

Architect Laureate Conrad Ethel Mursk stood behind it at a safe distance, along with his wife, Governor Adjudicate Xiomara Li Weng, and the very closest members of his construction crew’s inner circle. Watching and thinking, celebrating and mourning. Not talking, because the sound had already tattered their eardrums, pulverized their fibrediamond-reinforced hearing bones. If they stood here long enough, the sound—still skeletally conducted through the ground—would deafen them at the cerebrum level as well, and finally bruise the soft meat of their brains into unthinking goo. In Conrad’s outfit, sound levels were measured not in decibels but in Minutes To Kill, and this one pegged the meter at MTK 15.

There were no standards or limits per se, although it was generally recognized that at levels higher than this, useful work became a lot more difficult. Even 15 was pushing it, hard. But the people of Sol were tough, and the survivors of Barnard tougher still, and with a fax machine handy the assembled group had little thought for its safety.

Nor were they afraid of the dark, here in the deep, deep bowels of the world. Which was fortunate, because dark it was, and dark it would remain. Thousands of kilometers long, the winding tunnel was wide enough to swallow any conventional flashlight beam, and this dig was too transient to bother installing the usual bright track lighting. So Conrad and Xmary, Bell and the others carried “rock burner” lamps—multispectral lasers which cast white spots whose apparent size and brightness was independent of range. Thirty-six degrees of arc—no more, no less. To accomplish this, the beam power could ratchet all the way up to fifty kilowatts—which at short range was enough to vaporize human flesh, to melt most ordinary metals, to discolor exposed stone. Rock burner, yes. The devices were smart and accidents were correspondingly rare, but the name served to remind its wielders what a powerful and dangerous piece of equipment it really was.

And by the light and shadows of these bright, bright lamps, playing over the stern of the kilometers-distant bore, they watched a neuble fall from the bore’s mechanical anus and settle—under the influence of straining gravity lasers—to the tunnel floor.

WHUMP. The ground rippled at the impact, and dimpled impressively despite the grasers’ carrying fully 99.999% of the weight.

And that was that. The last neuble. The thundering machine—the last of its kind still operating—rumbled to a halt.

The moon lay silent for the first time in two hundred years. In the one hundred and fifty-first decade of the Queendom of Sol, crushing operations on the world of Luna had just officially ended. Or would later today, when this tunnel was collapsed.

HUZZAH! said the scrolling marquee across Bell Daniel’s space suit.

“Well done, all,” Conrad replied, speaking aloud in words only his suit could hear. They appeared immediately on his own marquee.

Xmary offered her CONGRATULATIONS!!!!, and the four others exchanged the visual equivalent of small talk, complimenting one another on the excellence and timeliness of their work.

COULDN’T HAVE DONE IT WITHOUT YOU, BOSS, Bell offered, and Conrad wondered why he bothered kissing up like that, on his last day of work. From now on, Luna—or rather Lune—would belong to the seismology and hydrology and ecology teams. Aside from a few temporary structures on and near the planette’s surface, there would be no meaningful construction here for another twenty years.

THANKS, AND LIKEWISE, Conrad assured him. THE ERIDANI REFUGEES WILL BE GRATEFUL WHEN THEY ARRIVE. SHALL WE HAVE THE CHAMPAGNE?

ASSUREDLY, Bell agreed, and Lilly Frontera, his executive assistant, dutifully passed out the bottles, which were made from a frangible soda-silica-lime material—old-fashioned breakable glass that no fax machine would dispense without authorization. And Conrad’s crew dutifully smashed these against the tunnel floor, or hurled them—with more enthusiasm than hope—toward the bore and the distant walls of polished basalt.

Conrad and Xmary, for their part, clinked their own two bottles together and popped the corks, then raced to dump the liquid over each other’s suits before it boiled away in the vacuum. They were grinning, and Conrad was pretty sure he was chuckling as well, but there was a seriousness to it just the same, for change was upon them once again. These crush-the-moon days—harried and hopeful and deeply fulfilling—would be replaced by something new, and nothing would ever be the same.

And it was a funny thing, how sad such moments could be, for the alternative was to live forever with no change at all. And that was a kind of death—a lame and sorry one that anyone should be glad to avoid for a little while longer. But Conrad had never gotten used to change, and if he welcomed it, it was in the way that a man welcomes a familiar enemy.

Ah, well.

CALL SHIPPING TO PICK UP THE NEUBLE, he said unnecessarily. I WANT THAT LAST PLATE FILLED AND SEALED BY CLOSE OF BUSINESS.

SURE, BOSS, Bell said, with all the poignancy a two-word text message could convey.

That was the really private ceremony. The semiprivate one occurred four hours later, on the surface, where Conrad addressed a staff of thousands, including a few hundred retirees who’d wandered away from the project before its completion.

They were in the bowl of a shallow crater in Nubia Province, sucking dry, barely breathable air that stank of methane and sulfur. The sunset was gray.

“You’ve done excellent work here,” he told them all. “And God willing, we’ll see each other again someday, on a grander project still.”

“Crush Venus! Crush Venus!” the crowd chanted happily in reply. And then a woman off toward the rear called out “Crush Mars!” Then everyone was shouting: Melt Europa! Ignite Jupiter! Reconstitute the asteroid belt! And finally the noise dissolved into argumentative laughter.

None of these things were possible, of course; King Bruno wasn’t exactly out of money, but he wouldn’t be playing sugar daddy to the Queendom again for another few centuries. The workers were just letting off steam, kidding themselves that it could all keep going.

“We’ll do something,” he assured them, “and when we do, I’ll know exactly who to call. The best damned crew in the universe!”

They cheered at that, of course.

Was there anything else to say? He shook the hands that needed shaking, then wandered off into the barren hills to let his people—his former people—sort it out on their own. He wasn’t their boss anymore.

“You should be happy,” Xmary said, walking alongside him.

“I am,” he assured her. “Very.” And it was true. “I’m just… I don’t know, more tired than anything. My willpower’s browning out. Which is bad, because there’s a lot of work still to be done. And a lot of refugees streaming homeward, expecting a place to live.”

At that, she patted him on the rump and smiled wickedly. “I know what you need, Architect. Around that withered soul you’re still young and virile. A body like that requires attention.” And that was true, too.

Although the planet had shrunk beneath it, Luna’s actual crust hadn’t gotten any smaller. But it had only one-fourth the area to cover, so over the years of its settling it had folded and wrinkled and cracked, raising jagged mountain chains, broad steppes, and vast, broken plains. Even here in the relative flat of the former Mare Nubium, it wasn’t hard to find a little valley so secluded that it would be visible only from directly above.

“We start pouring the oceans tomorrow,” he told his wife. “Faxed ice from Callisto, mostly. And for the first year or two the water will simply sink into all these voids in the crust. The surface will be as dry as ever, but with the water to lubricate them, and explosives to jar them loose, the rock plates should settle together, smoothing out all these jags and spines.”

“All?”

“Well, a lot of them. We still want some contour, obviously, and with the highest mountains reaching twelve whole kilometers above the plains, we’ll definitely still have some. But the geo boys are having the time of their lives, figuring out where to plant all the bombs. We’ll go after the biggest voids with subnukes and aye-ma’am, and over time the water will be squeezed back out to the surface. Truthfully, with a fixed mass budget we’re not sure how deep the oceans will be when it’s all said and done. But there’ll be enough to stabilize the climate and the ecosystem. And there’ll be beaches.”

“Sounds lovely,” Xmary said, in a we’re-done-talking-now kind of way. Her clothes, sensing the moment, peeled away and fell to the dusty ground. Conrad’s did likewise. Soon the two of them were on their clothes, rolling and wrestling, feeling the dry air soak up their sweat. The love they made together was excellent, as always.

There were more failed couples in the universe than successful ones, and conventional wisdom thus insisted that two people simply couldn’t get along forever. But Conrad had never understood this. He was barely old enough to deprogram facial hair when he’d met Xmary, and they’d become lovers within the year.

Later, they’d tried it apart for what seemed like a long time, but their flexibility hadn’t been up to the task. Like two trees that had grown together, they simply couldn’t disentangle. Not without damage, without broken hearts and limbs and skyward-pointing roots. And eternal youth or no, who had time to recover from a thing like that? Who would want to?

True love is immorbid, Conrad wrote once in his diary. You can kill it, but it never gets old. It’s stronger than petty anger or lust. Stronger even than boredom, and that’s a strong force indeed. Or maybe he, personally, was just weak. His love for Xmary belied any notion of free will; he could leave her, yes, but he couldn’t want to.

“I can’t imagine my life without you,” he told her now, murmuring into a sweaty ear.

“Enough,” she said. “Talk later. Let’s enjoy this planet of yours.”

The ground shook a little then, as if in agreement or—as Conrad would later see it—in warning.

And Xmary, perhaps sensing this, added, “While it’s still ours. Before the homeless arrive and things get interesting. It’s not enough to crush the moon; you’ve got to decide how you’re going to love it.”

Lune. The name—chosen democratically and ratified by royal decree—seemed strange, musical, and somehow appropriate. Luna took twice as long to say, for a world twice as wide. “Ash,” by contrast, was a drab moniker for the outermost of this new world’s planettes, poised at the L1 Lagrange point and stabilized there by a network of orbiting collapsiters.

Ash itself, though, was anything but drab. The planette Varna, orbiting thirty thousand kilometers closer to Lune, was blue and green and steamy, like a little tropical Earth. Beneath that was the grassy Kishu and—visible just now off the limb of Lune—the desert Harst, glowing like a little beige pinpoint.

But Ash’s biosphere was dominated by reds and yellows: snapdragon and bougainvillea, cardinals and canaries, foxes and howler monkeys and fluorescent yellow mice. The trees were engineered specifically for the site, and were like nothing ever seen on Earth or in the colonies. Tall and sparse as autumn poplars, prickly as cacti, stronger and more flexible than bamboo, they rose from the dome-shaped ground like pillars of flame, waving brightly in the breeze.

And in Ash’s pearl-gray sky, the spectacular blue-green orbs of Earth and Lune were almost exactly equal in size. Their impending eclipse, two days hence, would see the glare of Sol line up perfectly behind the Earth, which would cast its shadow across Lune and turn it red as well. The red of sunset, of sunrise, of beginnings and endings.

And per the queen’s proclamation, the sixty-two minutes of the eclipse’s totality were to mark the formal opening of Lune to human settlement. But the queen had declined to run these dates by her architect laureate, and in Conrad’s professional opinion they were utter hooey. He’d been building that world for long years, and he needed another eighteen to complete the job properly. At least eighteen!

“Be realistic, Your Highness,” he said to Tamra, by the light of the sun and the Earth and of Lune itself. “Be reasonable. This party is several years premature.”

This was the official celebration, to which none of Conrad’s crew were invited, despite his strenuous objections. They were of course welcome to attend the public celebration during the actual eclipse, except that at full capacity the planette could comfortably hold only eighty thousand people, and for a construction worker the tickets would cost a year’s salary at least. So in fact they’d be watching the ceremony on TV, or via neural sensorium, or maybe just skipping it and going straight to their own drunken revelries. It seemed a shame.

“The official commencement will be a simple dinner party,” the queen’s invitation had told him primly, “for a few close friends and relations. Since your wife is also invited, you needn’t bring a guest. Her Majesty understands your concern, but is she to share her table with every rigger and wrench-boy in the Queendom? She loves them all equally, but she hasn’t the time to love them individually. She could dedicate a score of copies to that purpose alone, and never make a dent in the problem. And what would she do with the memories? Summarize them, or be hopelessly clogged, or forget them entirely. And wouldn’t that defeat the purpose?”

“Not for the workers,” he told it. “They’d treasure the experience forever.”

“Presumption is rude, Architect,” the invitation had chided. Then, “Come now, you owe the luminaries of Sol a chance to congratulate you.”

So here they were, seated at a pair of long, arch-shaped tables that followed the curve of Ash’s surface. Forty people, only half of whom Conrad knew at all well. But Feck was here, and Eustace, and a handful of other revived Barnardeans who’d made good in the stodgy old Queendom. The king was here too, of course, and so were Donald and Maybel Mursk and, rather surprisingly, Xmary’s parents as well.

Since Mimi and David Li Weng had disowned their daughter after the Revolt, Conrad had never actually met them. Nor wanted to, though it wasn’t a position he’d considered overmuch. They were historical figures more than anything, and though Xmary was largely ignoring them, their presence did lend an odd authority to the proceedings. Their daughter, the Governor Adjudicate of Central Pacifica and wife of a celebrated architect, was no longer an embarrassment to them.

“Hi. I hope you burn in hell,” Conrad had told them both brightly when the queen had introduced them, and it felt good to get that off his chest. Really.

“Be reasonable. I would say the same to you, Architect,” the queen answered him now, forking a bit of cheese-draped sausage into her mouth and chewing thoughtfully. Seconds later she touched a napkin to her lips and added, “You really must try the cheese. That woman over there—in the green frock, yes—is perhaps the most brilliant flavor designer in human history.”

“High praise indeed,” Conrad allowed, taking a nibble. Damn, it was good. Melting in his mouth, almost vaporizing, it had a taste at once fatty and ethereal, rich and salty and yet somehow subtle as well. His eyes closed for a moment, of their own accord.

“Immorbidity demands novelty,” the queen opined. “Else it’s bread and water forever. Bless our flavor designers, every one.”

And to that Conrad could not help answering, “We did without them on Sorrow, Majesty. But aye, not forever.”

Tamra nodded solemnly. “You see my point, then. Shall we consign ourselves to no better a fate? Will you not surrender yon world to me? Our population crisis continues to grow. Our middle-class homeless now number in the tens of millions, and the political pressure to open a new frontier—any frontier—is overwhelming. Am I to resist the will of the people? The need of the people? They don’t require a perfect world, and your quest for one—though admirable—consumes precious time. And money. Endings are always difficult, but there comes a point when the engineers and craftsmen must disperse, and find new projects.”

“No doubt, Your Highness,” Conrad hedged, “but is that day truly upon us? We’ve only just sealed the last of the neutronium plates. The lithosphere above them is full of voids and faults, which store a tremendous unwanted energy. Over time they will settle, with unpredictable results.”

“That’s been understood for some time,” the queen countered, “but you can relieve these pressure points at leisure, with minimal disruption at ground level. True? I’m informed that the largest tremors will cause only minor damage at the surface.”

“Possibly, Your Highness, but none of us can say that with confidence. We’re speaking of probabilities, in a world of imperfect knowledge. The first Ring Collapsiter was considered safe as well, and we know how that turned out.”

“Cunning sabotage,” the queen said dismissively, “at the deepest levels of design. We trust you, sir, to eschew such scheming.”

“Do you? Then trust me that Lune is incomplete, Majesty. The biosphere is another problem, immature and unstable. On Sorrow and Pup we’ve seen what that can do. How much suffering has our impatience created there?”

“Your point is duly noted, Architect. However, as on Sorrow and Pup, we’re installing town-sized fax plates to churn out fresh gases and creatures, keeping the ecology in crude balance. Yes? And unlike those worlds, we’ve the infrastructure of an entire civilization to draw upon. Mars and Venus are better analogies, for in their early civilized histories they prospered with no biosphere at all. As did Luna herself, for a dozen centuries and more. In any event, these risks are mine to assess, and I have more brains to pick than yours alone. You will prepare the moon for immediate habitation.”

And here the king added his own voice to the fray: “It’s no use, lad, to argue with the facts. Focus on the work itself, yes, but remember who pays your salary. Your job is not to run the new world, but to deliver it.”

“Aye, Your Majesty,” Conrad said, unconvinced and unconvincing.

“Come now,” the king expounded, tossing a grape onto Conrad’s plate. “Do you think you’re the first? Has no engineer before you surrendered his treasures to a witless society? I do know the feeling, lad. How many deaths linger on my conscience, do you suppose, from the discovery of collapsium alone? When I finally get these wormholes working, do you think I expect there to be no accidents? No malice? All systems are subject to failure, but the mere possibility should not shackle our striving.”

He tossed another grape, and another. “Will you choke on these? Are they poison? Will they beguile you and squander your time, as mass-stabilized wormholes have squandered mine? I could let you starve, lad, for fear of what a grape might do. Or we could get on with the party, and see what happens.”

“You’ve become quite the orator,” Conrad said. “When did that happen?”

Such a comment might easily have been taken as rudeness, but the king just laughed. “With fifteen hundred years of life, my boy, one does eventually learn to speak.”

At that, Conrad’s old friend Feck chimed in. “Don’t let the refugee crisis escape your attention, hmm? We’ve got six million in storage, and three billion on the way. At present deceleration, Perdition is only two months out, with fifteen percent of the load. I would say there are risks in every course of action, and especially in responding too slowly.”

And Conrad, being a refugee himself, could hardly argue with that. The remaining colonies were simply collapsing. They were up to their armpits in dead and mortal children, and had turned their spasm-wracked economies to the sorry task of triage: shipping “home” as many as possible, by whatever means possible, and leaving the rest to their fate. Whatever that might be.

Conrad sometimes wondered whether this trend had been inevitable all along. Had the colonists carried out with them the seeds of their own destruction? Or was this simply a fad, a mass surrender, a herd action inspired by the traitorous flight of Newhope? If so, then Conrad and Xmary and Feck had a lot to answer for: the death of billions. The death of hope itself.

“Have there been any further communications with the Perdition or the Trail of Tears?” Conrad asked, for no matter what Feck said, he was poignantly interested in the refugee crisis. He was just out of step with the news. But Feck was the queen’s Minister of Colonial Affairs, and would know everything.

“Communications, yes,” Feck said, sounding both chagrined and incensed. “Meaningful dialogue, no. Eridani breeds angry, suspicious men. And women, too, one supposes, but since they’re cloistered, we never hear from them. At any rate, the Eridanians’ journey has been a hard one, and they’re not eager to park their butts in Kuiper Belt storage when they finally arrive.”

“Nor would I be,” Conrad said. He’d visited Eridani twice in virtual form, and remembered it as a place of sharp contrasts: molten metal and frozen gas, wild anger and wilder compassion. Eridani boasted no habitable worlds, and like all the colony stars it was richer than Sol in stormy radiation. And the outer system’s Dust Belt was treacherous—it could grind even the proudest of habitats to rubble in a matter of years. Even the inner system was full of flying crap. Eridani had thousands of times more asteroids and comets and random small meteoroids than Sol; its planets had been battered all to hell, and still endured several large impacts each year.

So the people, in their tens of billions, lived deep underground in Aetna, the moon of Mulciber, and ventured only rarely to its cratered-upon-cratered surface. To compensate for their bleak, cramped quarters, they had opted for a gradual reduction in body size, and while they were at it they’d added new metabolic pathways and—they claimed—new modes of thought which opened their minds to a greater spiritual awareness. And why not? What the hell else did they have to do under there?

But they were also energy-rich and element-rich and lived like kings in their stifling burrows. Or they had, anyway, before the fax machines started giving out. Theirs was a sad history, as fraught with broken promise as Barnard’s own.

“What are we supposed to do?” Feck demanded suddenly, taking the comment as a barb. “There are a dozen asylum-seeking vessels parked in the Kuiper Belt already, and if we wake their sleepers only as new living space becomes available, we’re accused of breaking up families and friendships, of scattering the refugees out over time and space. Of destroying their culture.

“But if we hold them in storage, awaiting a world of their own, then we’re pushing them off into some indefinite future. Which is a kind of murder, for many suspect we’ll never wake them at all. And that’s a valid question, Conrad, because even Lune cannot absorb the colonies’ entire human flux. How long will those worlds take to die, and how many of their children will they dump on us beforehand?”

The queen cleared her throat. “These decisions are also mine, Minister Feck. You’ve done very well for your charges, and argue their case most effectively. But their fate is not yours to choose. This is the point of monarchy, you see: to concentrate blame. You may sleep soundly, your conscience untroubled.”

Feck looked ready to argue that point, but finally thought better of it and dropped his eyes to his dinner. “Of course, Your Highness. My apologies.”

“Accepted,” she said, favoring him with the smile that had earned her the love of billions.

“The day grows late,” warned the red-haired Wenders Rodenbeck, in a tone that managed to convey at once a personal sadness, an official gravitas, and a semiamused kind of told-you-so. “A stiff wind rises at last, and we find our house of straw less sturdy than we’d hoped.”

“Don’t gloat, Poet Laureate,” the queen said, clearly annoyed. “It shows off the food in your teeth. If we’d listened to you all these years, I suppose the Queendom would still be a paradise, and never a tear would be shed?”

“No indeed, Majesty.” The playwright’s voice was, to Conrad’s ear, rather shrill, but in a way that enhanced rather than detracted from his air of authority. “I would suggest a more careful reading of my oeuvre, when time permits. In fact, my own paradise would likely have collapsed by now as well, for reasons we couldn’t imagine at the outset. Such is the fate of human endeavor; our vision is not extended merely by the stretching of our lifetimes.”

“Go on,” the queen said skeptically. “You have my attention. What remedies do you propose?”

“Why, none,” said Rodenbeck, spreading his hands as if this should have been obvious. “Who has taught me to plan for the long, long term? Where shall we draw our lessons, when this civilization of ours has outlasted all that came before it? The Queendom rose from the ashes of Old Modernity, which sprang from the embers of Rome, which drew upon the lessons of Greece, and Egypt before her. Indeed, Highness, Egypt had the Minoan example to emulate, and fair Atlantis was a focused echo of the civilizations of Indus and Jomon, drowned in the Deluge at the closing of the Ice Age.

“History is not linear, I’m afraid, but cyclic, for sustainability has never guided human affairs. And in banishing death, we simply condemn ourselves to observe the cycle from within. To live, as it were, in the filth we’ve excreted, with the sound of falling towers all around.”

“Ah,” said Tamra, “so we needn’t listen to you, then.”

“Not at all, Majesty. I am but a mote in the vastness, amazed by all that I perceive. Let’s do take a moment, though, to congratulate ourselves for all that we’ve accomplished. Even this ghastly destruction of Luna, yes, for it speaks to grand intentions. And here at the end of the day, we shall need a warm thought like that to remember ourselves by.”

“Quite,” the queen agreed, in a tone that closed the subject. And then, to Conrad: “We do have evidence, Architect, that Perdition is in regular contact with someone in the Queendom. Does that make you feel better?”

“Um, well,” Conrad said, “that depends on who they’re talking to.”

The queen’s smile deepened. “Someone charming, I’m sure. Shall we have dessert?”

Chapter Thirteen in which the demands of beggars are voiced

It was, of course, the Fatalists with whom Perdition communicated, and while the details of their exchange were quantum-encrypted and thus impossible to decipher, archaeologists and historians agree on this much:

First, that the exchange was hundreds of petabytes long in both directions—more than adequate for a self-aware data construct to be passed back and forth several times. Or, alternatively, for several constructs to make the crossing once.

Second, that the Queendom recipients of these messages were, without a doubt, located well away from Earth and Mars and Venus. Mercury and the moons of Jupiter are considered unlikely but cannot be ruled out altogether. Almost anywhere else in the system is possible; no physical traces have ever been found.

Third, that the virus released into the Nescog on Lune Day was of Eridanian origin, or evolved from an Eridanian template which in turn traced its heritage back to the early Queendom. Sol had endured crippling network attacks during the Fall, and the “Eridge” plague showed a cunning grasp of both the strengths of that ancient assault, and the weaknesses of the contemporary network.

These weaknesses were few and slight, so the virus spread at only a tiny fraction of the classical speed of light, and was not truly lethal in its effects. Still, it was stealthy, and raised no conclusive alarms until it had wormed its way to the heart of every switch and router, collapsiter and precognitor in the system.

Conrad Mursk first learned of the attack indirectly, faxing home from a meeting with the Europan Ice Authority. As he stepped out of the print plate into his penthouse apartment in the city of Grace, he found himself staggering for a drunken moment. This was not entirely unheard of, for Grace was a floating city, and the Carpal Tower at its center was very slightly flexible. On windy days, you could feel the roll and sway of the city here as nowhere else.

But never this much. Though his balance reasserted itself, Conrad felt at once that something was wrong. For one thing he was covered with a fine white dust, like talcum powder. For another thing, the evening lights of the city below were not all lit. Some were flickering; others were simply out.

Worse, he had the distinct sense that there was something different about him. Inside, in his mind or his memories or his immortal soul. Nothing monumental—he was still Conrad Mursk of Ireland and Sorrow, Lune and Pacifica—but it seemed to him that he was suddenly peppered with small absences. With tiny half-remembered things, now wholly forgotten. Or was he imagining it?

“Call Xmary,” he said to the ceiling, but he needn’t have bothered, for moments later she spilled out of the fax in person. This was, after all, dinnertime, and she’d’ve called him already if her gubernatorial duties required her to be late, or to spawn an extra copy or two.

She was also covered in powder, and looked startled and subtly off-kilter.

“What just happened?” she said, fixing her eyes on Conrad, her hands on the black hair hanging down past her neck.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Are you all right?”

“I…” I think so, she’d been about to say. But something stopped her. She didn’t think so.

“Maintenance,” Conrad instructed the apartment. “Fax diagnostic, now.”

“All functions nominal, sir,” the fax said, sounding ever-so-slightly offended.

“Seconded,” said the ceiling. “No sign of anomalies.”

“Not here,” offered the floor. “But look at sir and madam. They’re quite disturbed. Perhaps they encountered a transit glitch.”

“Impossible,” the fax replied.

“Improbable,” the floor countered, “and yet—”

“Everyone shut up!” Xmary commanded firmly. “Conrad, do you feel…”

“Funny? Full of holes? Dusty? Yes. Something’s happening.”

Xmary looked up at the ceiling. “News.”

“Today’s top story: Travelers report fax anomalies. No details available. Please propagate this message on supraluminal channels where possible.”

Well, that was helpful.

“That could mean anything,” Xmary grumbled. “What travelers? Where? Us? Update the top story every time it changes, please.”

“Yes, madam. Today’s top story: This is a travel advisory. Travelers in the vicinity of Earth and Mars report minor cellular injury after Nescog transport. Citizens are advised to avoid Nescog travel wherever possible. No further details available. Please assign this story top priority on all civilian supraluminal channels.”

And then, on the heels of that: “Today’s top story: Her Majesty has declared a state of emergency. Please remain where you are, or limit necessary travel to licensed air, ground, and space vehicles. The Nescog is hereby reserved for authorized emergency personnel.”

“Damn,” Xmary said. “I’d better get back to the office.”

“How?” Conrad wanted to know. The Central Pacifica governor’s office was on Cooper Ridge Construct, eight hundred kilometers away.

“I’m emergency personnel,” she pointed out. “I must be.”

“But do you want to risk the damage? It could be permanent. For all we know it could be fatal.”

“Hmm. I could take a glider, I suppose. Or maybe a boat. There are boats here, right? It’s an island.”

She was spared any further thought on the matter by a crackling from the fax machine behind her. It coughed out a cloud of dust, then a sizzle of blue sparks, and finally the staggering body of a heavy, bearded man.

Bruno de Towaji, the King of Sol. Presently, he put an arm out and fell flat on his face.

“Blast,” he said woozily, “that is a nasty smack, isn’t it? Am I still me?”

“Your Highness!” Conrad and Xmary said together. “What are you doing here?” Conrad added, while Xmary asked, “Are you all right?”

“Scrambled,” the king said, picking himself up, brushing the dust from his eyebrows and beard. “If that’s the worst they can do I’ll be happy, but still. How dare they do their worst!”

“What’s happening?” Xmary asked him. “Why are you here?”

“I set up a point-to-point filter between this apartment and the Beach Palace, but someone had to go through it first. As a calibration article.”

“Why?”

He didn’t answer, but turned groggily back toward the fax again. “I’m close to a breakthrough on the wormhole front. I can feel it! But Maplesphere and Earth are suddenly very far apart. It’ll take us months to filter this irritant from all possible routes. Indeed, it may be quicker to purge the virus entirely than to design emergency workarounds.”

“What virus?”

“Eh?” Bruno looked over his shoulder. “The one they’ve attacked us with.”

“Who?”

“The Fatalists. The Eridanians. The dark angel of unintended consequences. My errors return to me, young lady, a thousand times magnified.” To the fax he said, “Royal Override. Apply calibration results and clear your buffer. Begin point-to-point transfer.”

The Queen of Sol stepped out of the plate, with no more fuss than if she’d stepped through an ordinary doorway.

“Thank you, darling,” she said to her husband. “I appear to be intact. And you?”

“I will be,” he said, “when I can get my hands on a previrus backup. They’ve taken down the first-tier error correction. The damage is minor but… disconcerting.”

“All right,” she said brusquely. “Give me safe passage to Malu’i. For two.”

Malu’i. Protector. The navy’s flagship.

“Are we under attack?” Conrad asked stupidly. He’d fought a dozen battles in his life, and they were all different, all surprising. But they shared this characteristic: he never really believed they were happening until he was in the thick of it, fighting for his life or his freedom or for some empty principle he’d barely remember afterwards.

“Play message Doxar twenty-one,” the queen said to the apartment walls, instead of answering Conrad directly. “Full exchange, half duplex.”

A hollie window appeared near the fax, and in it the face of an Eridanian man. There was no mistaking the Eridanians, for their heads were overlarge and overround, their dark eyes glaring out from beneath bushy white eyebrows and thick manes of curly silver hair. Their skins were as pale as chalk, except in the shadows and creases, where they were as black as coal. This was a trick that helped them radiate excess body heat, but it made them look… exaggerated. False. Like comic drawings designed to highlight particular emotions: here is HAPPY! Here is ANGRY! Here is FILLED WITH THE ENNUI OF TOO MANY CENTURIES IN A CAVE! Their small size—about two-thirds the height of a natural human—only exaggerated the effect.

This particular Eridanian was ANGRY.

“I am Doxar Bagelwipe,” he said self-importantly, “of Humanitarium Perdition. Y’all poseth unacceptably, y’hear? We will not end our travail in forgettable parking orbits, for yet more centuries of unlife. To prove the sincerity of our conviction, we assail your teleport network. Consider it declared: no less than full sanctuary is acceptable, for all persons stored cold or warm aboard this vessel.”

Next, Queen Tamra’s own image replaced Doxar’s. “Captain,” she said calmly, “the people of Eridani will be resettled in the Queendom of Sol as space and resources permit. Your impatience is understandable, and in sympathy with your plight we’re doing all we can to prepare new worlds for habitation. But this sabotage is counterproductive, and can only hurt your standing with the people of Sol. Please reverse it immediately, and proceed to your designated orbit.”

Doxar reappeared then, for his message was interactive, and carried with it the full force of his personality. Why wait for the speed of light, when you can send your image to negotiate in your stead? Particularly when your position is inflexible, and no persuasion can hope to alter it. “Unacceptable. We declare the right to escalate,” Doxar’s image said, and then winked out.

Damn.

The king said to Conrad, “If they actually enter the Queendom, right now and all at once, they’ll destabilize the economy. We must delay them. Meanwhile, my boy, you and I are traveling to Lune, and thence to Callisto and Europa. Just in case things go astray, we’ve got to get as much water onto that dustball of yours as we can in the next seven weeks.”

When Perdition was due to arrive. With guns blazing?

Said Queen Tamra to Governor Xmary, “You captained a starship for hundreds of years. You know how starship crews think, how they react. And you have actual combat experience, correct? You fought a space battle.”

“Once,” Xmary protested.

“Not a police impoundment,” the queen pressed. “Not a simulation or staged maneuver, but a to-the-death battle against a determined and capable opponent. From the forces of my son, King Bascal.”

“Once!”

“That’s once more than anyone else, Governor. You won the fight, correct? You survived, and your opponent didn’t.”

“That’s accurate, yes.”

“Then come with me,” the queen said. And to Bruno: “Is the fax machine ready?”

“It is.”

“Then kiss your husband good-bye,” the queen instructed Xmary. “Your respective duties may keep you apart for some time. I wish I could say how long.”

Conrad reeled. Was this truly happening? Was Xmary being drafted right in front of his eyes? Sent off to fight for her life in the wilds of space?

“I—,” he said, but nothing else came out.

“Don’t,” Xmary told him, turning into his arms, putting a finger to his lips. She looked scared and somewhat dazed, but fully in control of herself. “You know how these things go. All we need is a show of force, then a show of compassion, and then a get-to-know-you coffee in the observation lounge. I’ll see you soon.” She kissed him then as he had rarely been kissed, in a thousand years of life.

“Be careful,” he said, clutching her in his arms, unwilling to let go. But she extricated herself anyway, and answered, “Always.”

She nodded to the queen then, who was kissing her own husband good-bye. Then the two of them—the strongest women Conrad had ever known—stepped into the fax plate and vanished.

What happened next is history, in all the great and small senses of the word, for it is written in the Ballad of Conrad Mursk, “They faxed from the house / the queen and his spouse / and he never saw neither no more.”

Chapter Fourteen in which consequences are weighed and chosen

The error-correction virus turned out to be merely the first salvo in a battle that would later be known as Eridge Kuipera. The damaging effects on travelers turned out to be incidental to the bug’s real purpose, which was to prop open a small vulnerability in the Nescog, paving the way for further attacks.

The second and third viruses rebounded from a growing thicket of Queendom defenses, but the fourth one—named by different authorities as Heater, Snaps, and Variant Delta—managed to pick its way through the obstacles and squeeze itself into some twenty percent of the Nescog’s scattered nodes. Its effects were rather more serious, being fifty percent lethal to traveling humans and, ominously, to their buffer images and unsecured backups as well.

As a precaution, citizens were advised to back themselves up at their earliest convenience, at any of the Queendom’s thousands of secure, off-network repositories. But with tens of billions of customers flooding in all at once, the Vaults were overwhelmed, and waiting lists quickly grew from weeks to months to well over a decade.

Meanwhile, Perdition continued downsystem on a course that could only be described as belligerent, for its exhaust of coherent gamma rays cut straight through the heart of the Queendom, sweeping dangerously close to the Saturnian system and in fact bathing several asteroid-belt settlements with sublethal but highly obnoxious radiation. Shipping lanes were disrupted; ring collapsiter segments flickered and flashed with secondary Cerenkov emissions.

And unless the starship’s course was altered, that beam would eventually—if briefly—play right across the Earth at much closer range, sickening tens of billions of people on the ground and, in all probability, vaporizing anyone in orbit, where the shelter of a planetary atmosphere was moot. Plant life would not be much affected, but the animal toll on the worst-hit continent of South America would be steep.

Too, the atmosphere itself would heat up in a hurricane-sized bullseye pattern—elevated by ten or twenty degrees Kelvin at the center—and the oceans beneath would warm slightly as well. This would be enough to play havoc with the weather for months, or perhaps longer. And then Perdition itself would ease into a high orbit, from which further assaults on the Earth would be trivially easy.

These Eridanians meant business.

So did the crew of Malu’i, though, and the queen to whom they answered. Tamra had never asked to rule this system, but she’d never shirked from the responsibility, either, and damn if she’d let some gang of colonial hooligans tear the place up, no matter how sad their story might be.

“If we’re forced to target your engines,” Tamra tried explaining to the invaders, “there may be considerable hazard to your passengers and crew. And even if you escape without injury, you’ll be moving through the Inner System at several hundred kps. You’ll fly right through, and back out to interstellar space before we can arrange to decelerate you. A rescue operation could then take weeks to mount, and years to bring you to the park orbit we’ve already assigned.”

“Prick yer five holes, y’all shite-bathed daughter of pigs,” replied the image of Doxar.

Given the length of the Queendom’s history and the size of its population, we can assume that fouler curses than this had been directed, from time to time, at Tamra-Tamatra Lutui. If so, however, no record of them has survived. Certainly, the immediate shock and indignation of the men and women on the bridge of Malu’i suggests that such outbursts were rare indeed.

Nevertheless, Tamra’s response was well measured. “Such language may be commonplace in the caverns of Aetna, Captain, but here in the cradle of humanity we’ve found that mutual respect yields better results. And surely you understand that with the security of our citizens and biospheres at risk, we’re quite prepared to fire on your vessel.”

“And we’m prepared to crash your Nescog, missus. Completely and utterly, I kid you not. Y’all think we can’t?”

“I suspect you can,” she conceded. “Or your agents here in the Queendom can. You’ll find them dangerous allies, I daresay, but they’ve certainly inconvenienced us before.”

“Then give. Because I will not.”

“No one surrenders so easily,” said Tamra coolly. “We’re not inflexible, Captain, but neither are we stupid, nor craven, nor weak. You will alter your course, and divert your drive beam away from populated areas. Then we’ll negotiate. From receipt of this message, you have five minutes to comply. Or rather, the true Captain Doxar does. You, his pale shadow, may fly back to him now with my regards.”

She blanked the hollie, ending any further communication with Doxar’s image. It could hang around if it wanted to, but the real Doxar’s reply would overwrite it in any case. Of course, Perdition and Malu’i were five light-minutes apart, so with round-trip signal time it would be fifteen minutes before anything actually came of this exchange.

“Well played, Majesty,” said Brett Brown.

“Thank you,” she acknowledged, mindful of his pride, his authority before the bridge crew, and indeed before the whole of the navy itself. “I’d like to discuss the matter with you later, if you have time.”

In fact, Brown had nothing but time, and while his strategic and diplomatic skills were not in question, this was unarguably a tactical situation. Still, appearances mattered, for he had been this vessel’s captain for nearly six hundred years, and his sudden replacement by Governor Li Weng—a comparative greenhorn—was bound to raise eyebrows, even if Tamra had promoted Brown to admiral in the process.

Fortunately, the past two weeks had proven Tamra right, for Xmary was a cunning fighter who’d steered Malu’i onto a vector that took maximum advantage of her maneuverability, and minimized the options of the faster but much heavier Perdition. Brown had fought in thousands of simulated engagements, and won the vast majority of them, but bloodlessly. He had never once witnessed an actual permanent death, whereas Xmary had seen hundreds, and personally caused at least twenty. More, if Fatalist ghouls were to be counted. So if it came to blows—and it might!—Tamra figured the safe money was on known killers.

“I’ll check my schedule,” Brown answered carefully. “Meanwhile, with your permission, I’ll recheck the status of fleet maneuvers.”

“Later,” Tamra suggested. “I prefer your attention to be more tightly focused.” Which was true, for she did value Brown’s tactical opinion. He was without doubt her second or perhaps third choice for the job. And anyway the “fleet” right now consisted of just Malu’i and a pair of lightly armed and largely inconsequential grappleships. There were other assets en route, but the closest of them was still six light-minutes downsystem of here. A really high-powered nasen beam could of course strike from that range, but not with precision. Not without absurdly high risk to the two hundred million human beings onboard Perdition. So for the moment, Malu’i was effectively alone in the conflict, and must act carefully indeed, or else wait two days for backup.

To Xmary the queen said, “Have you formulated a plan of attack, Captain?”

Xmary looked up from the console in her armrest. “Working on it, Majesty.” Then, to Brown’s Information officer, “Where’s that blueprint, Lieutenant? I need to know exactly how much antimatter is in there, and exactly where.”

“That’s difficult, ma’am. I can show you mass concentrations and annihilation signatures, but anything else is guesswork.”

“Deductive guesswork,” said Xmary. “But if you lack the necessary skills, then forward me your data.”

“Aye, Captain,” Information replied, suitably chastened. “My preliminary analysis is also appended.”

“Thank you. Ah. This is good. Your Highness, I propose a three-pronged attack. We can litter the space in front of Perdition with radar-bright proximity mines. We’ll dial them to minimum yield—they shouldn’t even penetrate the aft nav armor—but Doxar won’t know that. He’ll have to assume the worst, and that will tie up his propulsion. He’s flying backwards, right? Decelerating toward the planet he covets. He’ll be juking laterally, and holding the gamma-drive exhaust out in front of him to clear the path. And even so, he’s likely to suffer a near miss or two. Give him something to worry about.”

“Hmm,” Tamra said, considering that. “And meanwhile?”

“Meanwhile, we launch a salvo of ertially shielded grapplets, minus the warheads. At maximum acceleration, they should reach Perdition in under thirty minutes. Targeting the drive section, one hit could slice the magnetic choke clean off, with almost no collateral damage.”

A grapplet was a munition whose only propulsion was a gravity laser. It fell to the target under its own artificial pull, and if the grapplet was ertially shielded then it fell very quickly indeed. Malu’i only had five such weapons in its inventory, though, and could produce no more, for their shields were of collapsium and could not be faxed.

“Those are unstealthed munitions,” protested Admiral Brown. “Their release will give away our position.”

“Briefly,” Xmary conceded. “But we’ll maintain evasive maneuvers throughout the deployment, under full invisibility. The last time I did this I was inside the chromosphere of a star, where heat dissipation and signature management were nearly impossible. This’ll be a lot easier, for Perdition, on her pillar of flame, cannot hide from us at all.”

“Hmm.”

“The third prong is right out of the navy textbook: a nasen beam to the external engine assemblies. We have to be very careful not to destabilize the aye-ma’am plumbing, or the whole ship will go up. But again, it should be possible to take a scalpel to their magnetic choke, after which the failsafes will simply shut down the drive. Uncontrolled reactions should be limited to a few kilotons—hardly noticeable.”

This all sounded plausible enough to Tamra, but just to be safe she turned to Brown and said, “Opinion?”

“Standard doctrine calls for a breaching of the enemy’s hull, Majesty,” Brown replied at once. “However, given the refugee status of this opponent, Perdition’s crew is unlikely to be backed up on any sort of durable medium. Any deaths we inflict will therefore be permanent. Under these assumptions, then, Captain Li Weng’s plan strikes me as both humane and effective.”

Xmary added, “We’d need to launch the first two waves now, Majesty. There isn’t time for debate—not unless you’re willing to erode our positional advantage.”

“Hmm.” If there was one thing in the universe Tamra hated, it was snap decisions. Still, sometimes they were necessary, and delaying them was itself a snap decision. “Very well. You may proceed, Captain.”

The appropriate orders were given, and within the minute both salvos were away.

“There is one additional danger,” Xmary noted. “There could be spies aboard Malu’i who are capable of revealing our position. This information is of limited value to Doxar, given ten minutes of round-trip signal lag”—She checked a reading, and then amended—“sorry, nine minutes’ lag. But it would give him a fighting chance. With all that aye-ma’am onboard, he’s got a lot of energy to throw around.”

Admiral Brown coughed out a chuckle at that. He was a good man, and a kindly one, but Tamra had the distinct impression he enjoyed catching out his replacement in a statement like that. “You hardly need worry, madam. This crew—this exact crew, save for yourself—has served together for centuries. We’re as much a family as we are a military unit. If there were criminals or Fatalists, turncoats or sympathizers among us, we should know it before now.”

“Of course, sir,” Xmary said.

More was said and done after that, but there was an air of busywork about it, until finally the fifteen-minute mark drew near.

“Do you suppose they’ll go quietly?” Tamra asked Brett Brown.

“They’re overmatched,” Brown said, as though that answered the question.

“They’re desperate,” Xmary countered. “They’re prepared to die, to kill, to cripple our networks. You can’t imagine the conditions they’re leaving behind.”

And as if in agreement, Doxar’s face reappeared in the hollie. “Y’all seem not to comprehend. Possibly we’m explained it badly. You’re thinking, ‘We can survive without Nescog.’ Maybe so. But we can break it and send the pieces tumbling. Very dangerous.”

“Just divert your course,” Tamra said to him, firmly and reasonably.

But was there time for that message to travel back and forth? She’d given a deadline, and could not now retract it. She killed the hollie and asked Xmary, “Time to nasen beam firing?”

“Ten minutes, Highness. That’s all the grace period they get.”

There was no point wishing it otherwise; the great-grandchildren of Sol had returned, broken and furious, blaming Tamra for all that had befallen them. And shouldn’t they? Who, if not she, had crafted their fate? Who else could possibly have changed it? And now here she was, preparing to punish them—perhaps to kill them—for her own failures.

Her anger vanished in a sudden wash of guilt. Her sense of duty remained as strong as ever, but her sense of what her duty was had come unglued. How did it come to this? What was she to do?

Of Brown and Li Weng she asked, “What are the odds we’ll blow up that ship?”

“Unknown,” Brown said without delay. “The number of variables—”

“Make an estimate,” Tamra instructed. Then wondered: did her people even know how?

“Thirty percent,” said the governor-captain, who was herself a refugee from the stars. A victim of Tamra’s failed policies, of imperfect data and shortsighted advisors. Of simple hubris.

Tamra nodded, absorbing that. “I see. And the chance that we’ll kill at least one person? Permanently, irrevocably? For no greater crime than the seeking of asylum?”

“That’s all but certain,” Xmary said quietly.

Tamra brooded, and would have wept if she didn’t still need her face for negotiating. She’d been fifteen when they made her Queen of All Things. An orphan, grieving for her drunken, foolish parents. Was it any wonder she’d made mistakes? How could she not? She grieved now—she ached for that lonely girl, on whom such burdens were heaped. What a bitter cup to drink from!

To Xmary she said, “Tell me if that ship changes course. If they twitch, if they move at all, I want to know about it. Immediately.”

“Aye, Majesty.”

“Time to nasen firing?”

“Six minutes.”

A while later: “Time?”

“Four minutes.”

Later still, Xmary piped up with a guarded, “Perdition is turning, Majesty.”

“Oh, thank God,” Tamra said, feeling suddenly clammy and limp. “Stand down all weapons and prepare to destealth.”

But Xmary remained rigid in her captain’s chair. “Ma’am, the maneuver could be defensive. It could be offensive. It could mean anything.”

“Yes, yes. Is their drive beam pointed through the heart of civilization?”

A pause, then, “No.”

“Does it impinge on any habitats?”

“No.”

“Then we’ve room to de-escalate this encounter. Stand down all weapons and prepare to escort Perdition into high orbit over Lune.”

“But Majesty,” Brown protested. “The economy—”

“Will muddle along somehow. Stand down all weapons, Xmary. That’s a decree.” Then: “Navywide transmission: Royal Override, all channels, all devices. Cease hostilities and escort Perdition to Lune.”

History records this command as Tamra’s greatest—and final—mistake, and perhaps that is so. But erring on the side of compassion had always been her way, and if nothing lasts forever, then at least a queen should die as she has lived.

Was there a spy onboard Malu’i? A saboteur? Was there perhaps some superweapon onboard Perdition, whose design and function has since been forgotten? In any case, these words were Tamra’s last, for Malu’i exploded three seconds thereafter, in a flash of light so brilliant it was visible to telescopes as far away as Eridani itself.

And then the Nescog fell.

The last official act of the Queendom of Sol was a simple radio message eleven hours later, from a King Bruno mad with grief. “The speed of light is hard upon us, my friends. God forgive us our sins. I cannot rule, with confidence, any region larger than the Earth and moon together. Full legal authority is hereby transferred to the regional governors for the duration of this emergency. Royal Override on all channels, all devices. Be brave, and uphold the ideals for which we’ve stood.”

And so they did, those citizens of the Queendom, for the bravely fought decades it took the shattered Nescog—nearly a trillion miniature black holes, equaling the mass of several Earths—to alight upon the planets of Sol, one by one, and crush them to oblivion.

Accipe signaculum doni Spiritus Sancti.

“A denouement gives flight to mere incident,” Wenders Rodenbeck wrote in the classic Past Pie Season, “freeing us at last from the rigid rail of time. Berries wither, leaves fall, and the mourning dove bows her head, with a song of distant spring beating frozen in her breast.”