Free Anvil of Stars by Greg Bear Page B

decelerate at different rates. Tortoise, the smaller, would begin super deceleration—one thousand g's—days before reaching the system, and would enter at maneuvering speed. The larger, Hare, would shoot through the system at three quarters c, conduct reconnaissance while passing between the two inner rocky planets, relay the information to Tortoise, then escape the system and wait for results. It would decelerate more gradually, reaching maneuvering speed some hundreds of billions of kilometers on the other side of Wormwood.
    If Tortoise was severely damaged or destroyed, Hare could continue, hunting for fuel around the other stars in the group.
    Before then, the Ship of the Law would pass through a section of Wormwood's outlying haloes of pre-birth material: what around the Sun had been called the Oort and Kuiper clouds. It was possible that Wormwood's inhabitants had mined even these outer reaches of the pre-birth material, probably in the youth of their civilization, when comets were used by "hitch-hikers" to ride far beyond the orbits of the outer planets. It was also possible that the clouds had never been rich with volatiles; even the rocky pickings were slim by comparison to the Sun's cloud.
    The Dawn Treader would release makers and doers into these diffuse haloes to manufacture weapons of mass destruction. If the judgment was guilty, the makers and doers would push these weapons inward toward the planets. The weapons would take time to accomplish their backup mission of destruction, should Hare and Tortoise fail, and at a net energy loss.
    The energy required to make and move the weapons would come from conversion of carbon and silicon to anti-matter—what the children called anti em. Elements heavier than silicon did not convert with any energy gain. Elements between lithium and silicon converted with a marginal energy gain.
    To make up for the clouds' paucity, they would have to give the makers and doers substantial portions of the Dawn Treader's fuel.
    They desperately needed to find more fuel within the system.
    They would enter as black as the Benefactors' technologies allowed. Entry would be an extremely dangerous time; dangerous even should the children decide Earth's Killers did not live here. How would the defenders of these stars know they had been judged innocent or guilty, or whether the Dawn Treader was itself a killer, a wolf between the stars?
    The children filed into the weapons store, apprehensive. Martin led the way, and the children went to their craft in a welter of voices, calling names, moving on ladders to their vessels in the up and downness. Paola Birdsong lost her grasp and almost fell; Harpal Timechaser caught her halfway to the fore side of the hemisphere. Seeing her safe, the children hooted at her lack of attention. Paola crawled red-faced to her ovoid bombship and hooked both elbows in the ladder's softly glowing field.
    Martin stood beside his ship, watching his brothers and sisters find theirs, watching Theresa climb to her rifle, watching William join with Umberto Umbra in their cylinder cluster, called an Oscar Meyer by some, and a cigar box by others.
    Fifty children stood apart. They would remain in the Ship of the Law. Hans would stay with them.
    Martin moved forward along his ladder and hung next to his assigned craft, a rifle.
    "The moms have promised a target and we'll match ourselves against it. I don't know what the target is, or how we'll fight it."
    "We don't have a set drill?" Erin Eire asked. Hans looked at Martin; they had discussed this already, and Hans had expressed real reservations. Going outside without a plan the first time did not seem wise to either of them; going outside with no known adversaries, no expressed situations, seemed foolhardy at best.
    "The War Mother won't tell us what it is," Martin said.
    "That's stupid," Erin Eire said. The children shook their heads.
    "What are they trying to do to us?" Rex Live Oak asked.
    "Make us less dependent, I