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around
Wormwood. What these folks had around Wormwood is like a steel trap, and this
, this is an atom bomb."
"What do you think they have?" Martin asked.
"They swept us with something no, that's not right; sweep isn't the right
idea, not the right word. They queried our ship's matter and particles from
six billion kilometers. From what I can work out, we couldn't manage that
intense a scan at all, ever and if we could, we couldn't transfer that much
data in less than a few weeks."
"Impressive, but what does it imply?"
"If the moms are right, and these folks don't know everything there is to know
about us now
and frankly, I can't think of a reason why they shouldn't, except maybe
bandwidth "
"Jennifer, I'm not thinking too clearly. You woke me up and I haven't slept
since coming out of deceleration."
"I haven't either," Jennifer said, blinking.
"Well, you're superhuman, we all know that."
"Flattery won't get answers any faster," she said much too brightly, her face
flushed as if with fever. "Sorry. I'm a little giddy, too. What I'm getting
around to saying is, they could turn us into anti-matter right now
. Or just enough of us to blow our ship to pieces."
"Are you sure?"
"No. I'm not sure. And obviously, they haven't. But "
"There's nothing we can do about it."
"I know," she said. "I know that."
"Can you give me any advice about what we can do?"
"Of course, we can't let them know we understand what noach is."
"That'll be easy. I don't understand."
"Or that we know it exists," she said, knitting her brows in irritation.
"Silken Parts is working over other implications, and one of them& Are you
going to pull a Hans on me?" she asked suddenly.
"Pardon?"
"I'm going to tell you something really big, really scary. Are you going to
pull a Hans and vanish into some macho shell right now?"
"I promise, I won't do that," Martin said.
"We thought maybe the twelfth planet changing character, color, maybe that was
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more proof that parts of this system are illusory. A projection or something.
Martin, if they can do what I
think they can, it doesn't matter, there isn't any difference
. They could make a shell of fake matter around an entire planet, an entire
star
, just as solid as this ship is. They could redirect or manufacture images as
wide as this system in any direction they desired."
"Do they have the energy?"
"I'm guessing yes. They might be tapping the star. From what we can see, the
system seems to be rich with volatiles.
Maybe they've held all their resources in reserve, waiting for the main
assault."
"Do you have any good news?" Martin asked.
Jennifer grinned. "Not fond of endless David and Goliath?"
"It's a living," he said dourly.
"I can do without it myself. But I do have some wild-ass ideas that might be
encouraging. I
want to noach with Giacomo and do some momerath with him, and I want to hook
into the ships'
minds. I'm hoping we can collaborate. This is something moms and Brothers and
humans need to do together."
"I'll get you some private time with Giacomo. No sweet nothings, though," he
chided.
"Strictly business," Jennifer said.
Martin saw the
Trojan Horse/Double Seed as an ant crawling into a kitchen, staring all
unknowing at giant appliances, instruments of unknown utility, technologies
beyond the capacity of its tiny brain to comprehend&
There was so much that made no sense whatsoever.
The twelfth planet continued to change its character every few hours,
alternating between three different sets of features, all the same size, all
rocky, but radically different in all other ways.
The ninth planet had an eccentric orbit, carrying it outside the orbit of the
tenth planet. It was small, perhaps a former moon, though with no surface
features. It had an albedo of one, a perfectly reflective mirror at all
frequencies.
The eighth planet, a bright orange-yellow gas giant with a diameter of
seventy-five thousand kilometers, possessed three large moons. Cables two to
three kilometers in diameter hung from the moons to the planet's fluid
surface, leaving great whorls in their wakes, like mixers in a fantastic
bakery.
The sixth planet, eight thousand kilometers in diameter, appeared to be
covered with dandelion fluff, each "seed" a thousand kilometers tall. Incoming
space vessels never ventured below the crowns of the seeds. In close-up,
between the seed pillars, storms churned a thick atmosphere of oxygen and
nitrogen and water vapor. Hakim thought this might be a giant farm of some
sort, for raising unimaginable creatures or plants, but Martin thought that
seemed archaic;
one wondered if such powerful beings would still need to eat, much less eat
formerly living things.
"Then the creatures might have other uses," Hakim said, eyes glittering with
speculation.
"None of which we can guess," George Dempsey cautioned.
"Let us have our fun," Erin said peevishly.
Peering deeper down Leviathan's well, to the fifth planet, nine thousand
kilometers in diameter, dull gray, and like the ninth, smoother than a
billiard ball, but far from reflective.
And perhaps the most fascinating of them all: the fourth planet, one hundred
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