"Callisto. An explosion. One holy hell of an explosion. Gigatons, easy."

"No, I missed-" She was cut off by Bob pointing at another explosion on Callisto, then suddenly dozens, and then scores on Ganymede and Europa, too.

"Mass conversion bombs. They're strafing the whole system with mass conversion bombs. With over a million ships." The words trickled out, and even as they emerged from his mouth, Bob couldn't believe what he was seeing. He'd just left Ganymede a few days ago. Now, huge bombs were striking with such frequency that the surface of the world was lost in the glare. "Everyone there is dead already. Over a million-"

"Bob!" Nikki was shaking him. "Snap out of it, dammit! We have to get out of here."

"Shit. Yeah. Sorry," Bob said. He expanded the view on the Dykdar screen. Being a top-of-the-line luxury liner, the Vegas Star had a marvelous sensor array. After a few minutes it soon had an appalling display, time lags corrected, of the Phinon onslaught. "We're safe in the shadow of Sinope until they decide to hit it. But we'll have to look for an opening in this wave or we won't get out at all."

"Where's that monitoring ship now?" Nikki asked. The Patrol and the BDF both had ships positioned ten to fifteen million kilometers outside the Jovian system to gather data.

"I'll raise them," Bob said. "But lightspeed delay for a back and forth will be around two minutes." "Just ask them to look for a gap. Hey, who the hell is that?" A light blinked on the board-there was another incoming message.

"-asking permission to dock. Vegas Star, this is Reggie Dukes. I'm the skiff pilot. Dammit, let me dock. Then we can all get the hell out of here!"

"What? Listen you stupid little shit! You're-"

"Nikki, Nikki, let him board," Bob interrupted. "It's the quickest way to get rid of his missiles. And we need all the pilots we can get. Boy, is the mayor going to be mad!"

Bob turned his attention back to the communications console. He didn't want to look at the monitors, didn't want to look out the windows. The three giant moons visible from their position would all be glowing now. No doubt Io would look the same once she emerged from behind Jupiter.

If there was anything left to emerge. Just how many bombs in the giga- or teraton range would it take to destroy a moon of Jupiter? One, if they use it on Sinope, Bob thought."I've called the guys down below. They're letting Reggie come aboard," Nikki said. "How are things on your end?"

"I've made contact. They were in thorough disarray over there, too. Just looking out the windows, I

guess. We should have something in a couple of minutes."

They both had to look outside again. But the enormity of what they were watching had no scale to compare it against. Four million souls and a whole moon system, dead and gone. And this attack would go on for two days, seven ships a second to wreak destruction.

They were both looking at Himalia when it shattered.

A telltale went off on the comm board. "Data dump coming in," Bob said. With relief he left the view and sorted through the information.

There was good news and bad news.

"Nikki, there's a gap coming. In, er, 302 seconds, mark. If we go then, there won't be a Phinon ship close enough to blast us. One problem. We have to boost at twenty-nine gravities for eight minutes."

"But we can only compensate to twenty. After that-"

"Twenty-nine real gees will feel like seven-and-a-half."

"We have thousands of people on board, Bob. Hundreds of children. No acceleration couches. Most of them could die." Nikki closed her mouth into a thin, determined frown.

"It's your call, Commander. The alternatives are to stay or to leave at twenty gees and hope they don't fire at spaceships," Bob said. It didn't feel any better not to have the weight of command on his shoulders-not in this situation.

With resignation, Nikki said, "We can't risk either. Do it. I'll call below. I'll tell them to secure for seven point five gees in . . . damn . . . four minutes."

"Nikki, your hands are shaking," Bob said.

"I know."

Bob sat at the ready while Nikki made her call, staring at his nav display. Suddenly the sphere that represented Ananke disappeared from the screen. So this is what it means to be between the devil and the deep blue sea.

The ship was properly oriented for drive. Nikki, with thirty seconds to go, finally sat down in the Captain's chair. The chairs on the bridge were no more designed for high gee travel than any other chairs on board, but they were better than what their passengers had.

On the mark, the Vegas Star leapt from behind Sinope. The ship ramped up from twenty gees to twenty-nine in less than a minute, but it was the absolute maximum amount of time Bob could allow.

Bob and Nikki were crushed into their chairs, like astronauts from that nearly forgotten era before the Moon Rush days. The seats gimbaled so that the floor became a wall. Like all great ships in the era of artificial gravity, the Vegas Star's thrust axis was perpendicular to her internal gravity. Nikki's hands weren't shaking now. They couldn't, not with the crushing weight of acceleration upon them. They both knew what hell this must be for their passengers. Fortunately, just trying to ride out the high gee minutes themselves kept their minds off it. After forever, the internal acceleration dropped to zero on the mark, and all that remained was the standard one gee of the artificial gravity.

They got up. Bob hurt all over. With several groans of pain he went and looked at his nav display. "Just in time," he said. "Now Sinope is gone."

"We have to go below," Nikki said. "We have to see how bad it is."

They went down the stairs from the bridge to the main corridor. They could hear the wails on the other side of the door coming through the bulkheads. Kids were crying. Babies were screaming. Bob opened the door.

It was worse than watching Jupiter die.

The passengers and the staff had lined the walls with cots in a pitiful attempt to provide some relief from the acceleration. The flimsy cots had caved in within moments of the onset of high gee. There was swearing and screaming, they saw the crying children, and limbs bent in funny ways, and blood and vomit fouling every floor and every wall.

"Oh, God! It's like underground at Deepguard," Nikki said. "Oh, God!"

Bob was afraid she was going to collapse. He felt like throwing up himself, but he put his arm around her and held her up.

"I ordered this," she said. "I ordered this," she cried.

A man stood up in the hallway. He was holding a tiny, broken rag doll, cradling it to his chest. He spotted Nikki. "You! You're the captain!" He pointed at her in accusation. He turned the rag doll so Nikki could see. The doll had been a beautiful little girl-Nikki even recognized her, had noticed her when she came aboard, carrying a ragged blanket and a new teddy bear. "She was my girl," he screamed at Nikki. "She was my baby. Do you know what you stole from me! Do you know what you did!"

Bob got Nikki back to the bridge. He relieved her of command. She didn't notice.

Dykstra had been in this particular conference room many times. It was a favorite among the Intelligence staff. Three of the four walls were given over to display units. At the moment, the Jovian carnage was playing on two of them. To Dykstra's right glowed the remains of Ganymede. On the back wall, a cluster of Callistean fragments. But to the left, a diagram of the Solar System showing a continuous update on the status of the Phinon fleet was running.

It was like the handwriting on the wall. The fleet was turning. The Phinons were heading for Earth.

The conference table had ten chairs around it. Two of them were empty. One should not have been. That's where Pops would have been, Dykstra thought.

He looked around at his fellow conferees. Samantha MacTavish-she'd lost her husband to the war. Sammi had been pensive since the genano test on the live Phinon. Her moods reminded Dykstra of Jenny's. Beside Sammi sat Nikki. She had been sad and perpetually distracted since returning from Jupiter two days ago. Bob had told him what had happened on the Vegas Star. Sad thing. Nikki thought she'd been tested to the limit when Luke got killed. And then to have killed so many of the innocent herself. It's never going to matter to her that she had no choice.

There was Rick Vander Kam. He had a new love in his life. Dykstra smiled inside. Or maybe not. These things flare up in wartime, and like a flare, can go out just as quickly. And Lieutenant Nachtegall-Bob was in line for a promotion and a chest full of medals. He's the modern equivalent of a Knight of the Round Table. Arie Hague-an unprecedented man for an unprecedented time. Wayne Vander Kam, president of the most powerful corporation in the Solar System. He could never get enough of Dr. Seuss, Dykstra recalled fondly. Finally, Colonel Knoedler-there was a man with the weight of the world upon him.

And I, Chris Dykstra. How stupid of me to have cried over losing my house. Look at those images. Sigh. I lived just long enough to see the Saint's prophecy fulfilled. Will I also see it made moot?

Knoedler stood and began the meeting. "This is all of us," he said. "Along many different paths and by many different routes, Destiny has awarded to us the responsibility for the conclusion of this war. I've come to rely on all of you for your knowledge and your insight, and whatever we decide in this room will be the strategy that I recommend to the Joint Command of the Belt and System Patrol that we pursue with respect to the Phinons. And that's the same as saying that's what we're going to do, because the Joint Command isn't going to have any other plan."

He turned and gestured around the room. "You're all aware of what the Phinons did to the Jovian system. No need to elaborate on that, although sometime after the six hundred thousandth ship went through, they stopped bombing. Wasn't enough left by then. Our analysis of the attack shows that each ship released only one bomb on its pass through. Each ship could easily hold another fifteen to twenty bombs. We don't know. We also have video of spaceships caught out during the Phinon attack. The first Phinon ship within range destroyed them. Anything in orbit was also fired upon. For any of you wondering whether or not Lieutenant Commander Le and Lieutenant Nachtegall had any choice in subjecting their passengers to crushing gee forces, the answer is that they did not." Dykstra noticed that Knoedler was deliberately not looking at Nikki when he said that. Dykstra did look. Nikki was staring into her lap.

The colonel continued. "Dr. Hague has been able to interpret a good deal of the Phinon ship-to-ship communications. Their chatter is uncommonly prosaic. But it's clear that on their way to Jupiter they picked out their second target, the most heavily populated place in the Solar System-Earth-Luna.

"We have long planned on using genano warfare against the Phinons if necessary. To that end, Dr. MacTavish has developed a genanite that will kill the aliens quite efficiently. But it's no longer clear, given the Phinons' attack philosophy, that the genano agent will prevent the Solar System from being destroyed no matter what we do with it." Knoedler resumed his seat. "The floor is now open for comment, though I would recommend that we allow Dr. Dykstra to speak first."

"Thank you, Colonel. What I wish to point out is that the Phinons are a purely operant intelligence. That is, despite the technological sophistication, they are creatures of habit and instinct and learned responses. They are tool users, but then, some species of crows make tools out of stones and twigs. Give the crows a billion years, and . . ." He shrugged. "But evolution is an undirected process, completely lacking in foresight. The way the Phinons are attacking us-it's grossly inefficient, terribly wasteful of resources, and entirely unnecessary since we would have been willing to live with the Phinons, even to simply ignore them. Now that we have hyperdrive, our species will care only about the volumes within Hague Limits. The space between the stars would belong to the Phinons forever. But they didn't ask us what our intentions are.

"Thus, to save ourselves, we are going to have to find some way to promote the Phinon flight reflex. If we can trigger it, their departure will be instant and unreasoned. But can we do it?"

"They didn't flee inside the asteroid," Rick piped up. "They just kept coming and coming."

"But they were defending their home," Sammi said, with emphasis Dykstra found surprising. "Where else were they going to go? I mean, haven't we been assuming that the Phinons flee to assure that the knowledge that 'something is out there that can kill a Phinon' gets back to the rest of them? They didn't need to run and tell anyone once you were there."

"I see Sammi's point," Bob said. "But might they not also flee out of self-preservation? In Nikki's case, the other Phinon split when it saw its partner was dead. It might also have been thinking, 'fifty percent casualty rate sustained.' That would be a good time for a retreat."

"What I want to know is why did they attack now?" Wayne asked. "They've been out there for God only knows how long. What did we do to set them off?"

"We demonstrated that we were at a technological level that could start to utilize the Oort cloud," Dykstra answered. "To them, we're just an infestation that started to happen, and the Phinons reached down deep into their stimulus-response bucket and pulled out their old 'build reaction drive ships and go in there and kill them' solution. Were you aware that these ships don't even have artificial gravity? They're not retrofits after all. The pattern for building them may go back to the earliest years of Phinon development."

"But they look like the eight-man ships," Bob said. "And the comet we infiltrated didn't have gravity, either."

"Yes it did. Down on the lower levels," Sammi told him. "The biology group was certain it had to be there since the Phinons you brought back showed no signs of sustained low-gee living. We found the emission signatures in data the Hyperlight brought back."

Wayne Vander Kam, who had been looking progressively more and more annoyed since Knoedler had opened up the discussion, asked, "Why are all of you so damn certain that the Phinons can't be reasoned with? Pardon me for coming late to the party, but it looks to me that if we can't talk them out of destroying us, then we're all toast. We can't fight a million ships, nor can we infect that many with Dr. MacTavish's miracle genano Phinon killer."

And then, for only the second time in Dykstra's memory of him, Hague spoke lucidly. "Because it would be like talking to spiders," he said. Seconds went by with everyone else silently looking at him, then he added, "Oh yes. Spiders."

Spiders, Dykstra thought. That's how Richard Michaels first described them. As unfathomable as spiders.

The discussion continued for some time, all put in their two cents worth, but it was clear soon enough that the only thing they could think of to do was to introduce Sammi's genanites into as many of the lead ships as possible and hope that word of the hideous effects got back to the other ships, and they turned tail.

"The genano agent is ready," Sammi said. "As ready as Andy and I could make it." Andy had actually managed to become quite helpful of late. "But how do we introduce it into their ships?"

Very softly, but before any of the other military men present could respond, Nikki said, "Wirasinghe Maneuver."

"Which is?"

Bob filled Sammi in. "Shortly after Dykstra shields were developed, a pilot named Sulari Wirasinghe figured out that if she let her shield overlap her adversary's, the shields would nullify at the interface and she could fire through the resulting gap. Our airdams work on the same principle-that's why a ship can pass through without any air escaping."

"Of course, once word got out, shields were redesigned to either hop frequency or strobe. Anyone trying it today would be committing suicide," Knoedler added.

"Except that Phinon shield units are not capable of frequency shifting," Dykstra said. "Another of those obvious things they never developed."

"Shields but not artificial gravity?" Wayne asked. "But they're just variations of the same thing."

Dykstra shrugged.

"But won't the Phinons be able to shoot back through the same opening?" Sammi pursued.

"Probably," Knoedler said. "We'll need a ship to engage each targeted Phinon craft, and a piggyback

skiff to perform the Wirasinghe Maneuver and pop a biomine loaded with your bugs through the hole. For most of the skiff pilots, it likely will be a suicide mission."

After very little more discussion, it was agreed with sickening finality that this was to be their plan. "Thank you, everyone," Knoedler said. "I'll inform my superiors of our decision, and put out a call for volunteers to pilot the skiffs."

"Who's going to volunteer for that?" Sammi mused out loud."I am," Nikki said.Dykstra heard, then glanced over at Knoedler. The colonel didn't seem to have been listening.So, you're going to tell the Joint Command of our plan, Colonel. But are they aware of yours? Dykstra wondered.

The meeting broke up and Dykstra made his way over to Wayne Vander Kam, gestured that he wanted

to talk to the man alone, and silently the president of Capitol Products followed him into an adjoining room.

"Wayne, what happened at the black docks after I left?" Dykstra asked. "Why weren't more ships

converted over to the new drive?"

Despite the long history between the two men, Vander Kam refused to tell him all he knew. "Chris, I'm only going to tell you three things. First, Knoedler stopped the ship conversions practically the minute

you returned to the Moon. Second, an awful lot of stuff is leaving our facilities, all of them, and going sunward to Mercury."He hesitated after that and Dykstra prompted, "That's only two.""And third . . . Chris, trust Knoedler on this one. He knows what he's doing."

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Interlude II

The baby Phinon sure seemed like it was curious as it aggressively wandered around the glass tank to which the biology section had confined it. Flitting from side to side and over obstacles of pipes and blocks, the tiny quadruped learned its environment, but the rods and pistons of the limbs made the thing look for all the world like something out of the toy "build a robot insect" kit Sammi had played with as a child.