Id like to know how he got a hold of that, Paxton growled.

She, actually, Carel said, unfazed. A girl called Lyla Neal. Nigerian, ferociously bright. The destruction of the DSM was an odd explosion, you know. Its not as if it was hit by an external weapon. Rather as if it tore itself apart from within. Well, prompted by that, Lyla constructed an expansion curve for the DSM, to show how its little universe was ended.

He pulled up a second chart. The scale was different, Bella saw, but his conclusion was obvious. The DSM expansion curve mapped the QAPs cosmic profile. Precisely, as could be seen when Carel overlaid the two.

Bella sat back, stunned. So what does this mean? I can only speculate, Carel said. Then do so, for Christs sake, snapped Paxton.

It seems to me that the DSM was destroyed by a specific and localized application of dark energy, of quintessence. It was ripped apart by precisely the force that has caused the universal expansion, somehow focused down onto this small craft. It is a cosmological weapon, if you like. Quite remarkable. He smiled. Lyla calls it a Q-bomb.

Cute, snapped Paxton. So can we stop this thing, shoot it down, deflect it?

Carel seemed surprised to be asked such a question. Why, I have absolutely no idea. This is not like the sunstorm, Admiral, which was a very energetic event, but crudely engineered. This is a barely familiar sort of physics. Its very hard to imagine we can respond in any meaningful way.

Bella said, But, Bill, what happens if this Q-bomb actually reaches the Earth?

Again he seemed surprised to be asked. Why, that must be obvious. If it functions in the same way againwe have no reason to imagine its scope of action is limitedit will be just as with the DSM. He spread his fingers. Poom.

The silence in the room was profound.

Bella glanced around the table. These old sky warriors had almost seemed to be enjoying themselves. Now they were subdued, silent. Their bluff had been called.

And what was worse, as far as she could see this cosmological technology cut right through the rickety and expensive defenses mankind had been trying to erect.

All right, she said. Weve got twenty-one months until that thing reaches Earth. So what do we do?

We have to stop it, Paxton said immediately. Its our only option. We cant save the population any other waywe cant evacuate the damn planet. We throw everything weve got at it. Beginning with our resources out at the Trojans. He glanced at Bella.

Bella knew what he meant. The A-ships. And she knew that would most likely mean committing Edna to action. She put that thought aside for now. Draw up an operation order, Bob. But theres no reason to believe any of our weapons will make a bit of difference. We have to find out more about this thing, and find a weakness. Professor Carel, youre hereby drafted.

Carel inclined his head.

Paxton said heavily, And theres something else.

Yes?

Bisesa Dutt. We missed her. Shes escaped up an elevator like a rat up a drainpipe.

That baffled Bella. A space elevator? Wheres she going?

I dont know. Shes just out of a Hibernaculum; its possible she doesnt know. But somebody does, some asshole Spacer.

Admiral, Bella snapped. That kind of language isnt helping.

He grinned, a wolfs leer. Ill be nice. But we have to find Bisesa Dutt regardless of what toes we tread on.

Bella sighed. All right. And right now I think I need to go brief a few presidents. Is there anything else?

Paxton shook his head. Lets conference-call in an hour. And, peoplewe dont want any leaks out of here.

As the meeting broke up, Bella fretted. The fact that Carel had had to force his way in here was a lesson that slickness of presentation didnt imply comprehensiveness of knowledge. And if not for this chance observation by Carels bright student, they would be nowhere near discovering the true nature of this artifact, this weapon, this Q-bomb.

What else were they missing? What else werent they seeing? What else?

14: ASCENT BEYOND ORBIT.

Almost all of the excitement of the ascent was over in the first twenty-four hours. Bisesa would not have believed it when they first left the ground, but she rapidly grew bored.

As they had continued to shed gravity, floating stuff cluttered up the place, the blankets and bits of clothing and food. It was like camping in a falling elevator, Bisesa thought. The clippings from Alexeis shaved head were particularly unwelcome. And it was hard to wash. They had enough water to drink, but this cargo cabin didnt feature a shower. After the first couple of days, the cabin smelled, inevitably, like a lavatory.

Bisesa tried to use the time constructively. She worked on her recovery from the Hibernaculum. She slept a lot, and Alexei and Myra helped her work out low-gravity exercises, bracing against the walls and floor to build up her muscles. But there was only so much time you could exercise or sleep away.

Alexei kept himself busy too. He threw himself into a routine of checking over the spiders systems, with a full shakedown twice a day. He even made visual checks of hull seams and filters. While he worked, he muttered and sang, curious, distracted little hymns to sunlight.

Still Bisesa hadnt talked to her daughternot as she wished to. She thought Myra was sinking into herself; while Bisesa had been sleeping, she seemed to have developed a black core of depression. This was business for later, Bisesa told herself.

Bisesa watched Earth dwindle, a toy globe at the end of a ribbon that now seemed endless in both directions.

Once she said, I wish the world would turn, so I could look for the other ribbons. I dont even know how many there are.

Myra counted off on her fingers. Modimo in Africa. Bandara in Australia, the mother of them all. Jianmu in China. Marahuaka in Venezuela, South America. All named for sky gods. We Europeans have Yggdrasil.

Named for the Norse world tree.

Yes.

And the Americans have Jacobs Ladder.

Alexei smiled. And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the Earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it. Genesis, twenty-eight, twelve.

Myra said, America is still a pretty Christian country. All the Native-American world-tree names were rejected, I think. They took a poll.

Why do so many cultures have myths of a world tree? It seems pretty unlikely. Alexei said, Some anthropologists say its simply a response to cloud features: ripples, waves that look like branches or rungs. Or maybe its a myth about the Milky Way. Others say it could be a plasma phenomenon. Solar activity, maybe.

Myra said, Plenty of people fear the elevators. Some regard them as a blasphemy. A short-cut to God. After all we have faced a threat from the sky in living memory.

Which is why the African elevator was attacked, Alexei said. Makes no sense, but there you go. You know a lot about Earth culture for a Spacer. Im interested. But I see it from the outside. Anthropologically, I suppose. Bisesa felt patronized. I suppose all you Spacers are as rational as computers.

Oh, no. Alexei smiled. Were working on a whole new set of hang-ups.

Still they rose. As the planet shrank from the size of a soccer ball to a grapefruit to a cricket ball, it soon became too small for Bisesa to make out even continent-sized details, and a dull sense of the immense scale of the artifact she was climbing slowly rammed itself into her mind.

Three days up they sailed through the first significant structure since the ground. They gathered at the center of the cabin to watch it approach.

It was a loose ring of inflated modules, all of them roughly cylindrical, brightly colored; they were huge, each as big as a small building, and they shone like tremendous toys in the unending sunlight. This was a hotel cum theme park, Alexei told them, as yet incomplete and uninhabited. Its official name is Jacobs. Disney is the major investor. Theyre hoping to make back some of the money theyre hemorrhaging at the old ground-based parks.

Good place for a hotel, Myra said. Only three days up, and still a tenth of a gravity, enough to avoid all the messiness of zero G.

Makes you realize what you can do with a space elevator or two, Alexei murmured. Not just cheap lift, but very heavy lift too. Lots of capacity. This theme park is trivial, but its just a start. There will be other communities, towns in the sky strung out along the elevators. A whole new realm. Its like the railways in the nineteenth century.

Bisesa felt moved to take Myras hand. We live in remarkable times, dont we?

Yes, Mum, we do.

The hotel rushed past them in an instant, and for the first time in days Bisesa had a sense of their true speed. But then it was back to the timeless, motionless, scale-less rush ever higher from the Earth, and they were soon bickering once more.

On the eighth day they sailed through geosynch. For one precise moment they were in zero gravity, orbiting the Earth as a respectable satellite should, though for days gravity had been so low it made no practical difference.

At the geosynch point was another structure, a vast wheel with its hub centered on the ribbon. It was incomplete. Bisesa could see lesser craft crawling over that tremendous scaffolding, and welding sparks flared. But elsewhere she saw immense glass panels behind which living things glowed green.

The geosynch station flew down, past, and was gone by, and they all stared down as it dwindled away.

With the geosynch point passed, the spiders effective gravity flipped over, as centripetal forces, balanced with gravity at geosynch, took over and tried to fling them away. Now down pointed away from the pea-sized Earth. They had to rearrange their cabin, so that they made the ceiling the floor, and vice versa. Alexei said cabins designed to carry passengers did this sort of flip-flop automatically.

That inversion, the rebuilding of the cabin, was the only interesting thing that happened in those days following geosynch. The only thing.

But Bisesa learned that they werent going to be hauled all the way up to the counterweight, which was all of thirteen more days past geosynch, twenty-one from the ground. And that, she learned at last, was the spider graveyard.

They need to keep adding counterweight to compensate for the growing mass of the ribbon, Alexei said. Which is why none of the spider trucks come back to Earth, save the builders.

Bisesa looked around at the cluttered hull, grimy from their occupation. She felt a stab of regret. And is that where this spider will finish up?

Oh, no, said Alexei. This beast wont be going further than the fifty-six-thousand-klick point. Twelve days out of Earth.

Bisesa glanced at Myra, who she sensed had almost as dim an idea of what was to come as she had. And then what?

Remember I told you that if the spider let go before geosynch wed have fallen back to Earth? But if we let go after geosynch Well be flung out of Earth orbit, Myra said. Into interplanetary space.

If you pick the right altitude to leave the elevator, you can use its momentum to hurl you wherever you want to go. The Moon, for instance.

Is that where were going?

Alexei smiled. Oh, a bit further than that.

Then where, damn it? Theres no point in secrecy nowas soon as we leave the elevator the authorities will know where were going.

Mars, Mum. Mars. Bisesa was bewildered. Mars? Wherewell, where something is waiting for you. But this little pod wont keep us alive all the way to Mars. Of course not, Alexei said. Well be picked up. Well rendezvous with a lightship. A solar-sail ship.

Its already on the way.

Bisesa frowned. We have no rockets, do we? Once were free of the ribbon well have no motive power at all.

We dont need it. The ship will rendezvous with us.

My God, Bisesa said. And if something goes wrong Alexei smiled, unconcerned.

Talking to Alexei through these long days, Bisesa thought she had begun to see something of his psychologythe psychology of a Spacer, subtly different from the Earthbound.

Alexei had something approaching a morbid fear of failure in the machinery around him, for he was entirely dependent on that for his very life. But on the other hand he had absolutely no doubt in the implacable working-out of orbits and trajectories and interceptions; he lived in a realm where celestial mechanics visibly ruled everything, a mighty, silent clockwork that never developed a flaw. So once his gadgets had cut them loose of the ribbon he believed he would be safe and secure; it was inconceivable to him that their lightship rendezvous could be missed. Whereas Bisesa and Myra were terrified of just that possibility.

Somewhere in there was the key to understanding Alexei, Bisesa thought, and the new Spacer generation. And she thought she would understand him even better if she could make out the peculiar prayers he seemed to chant softly while distracted: psalms to the Unconquered Sun.

On the twelfth day they sat on their fold-down chairs, with all their loose gear tied down in advance of the jolt of weightlessness that would come when Alexeis explosive bolts severed the cabin from its pulley.

Alexei eyed his crewmates. Anybody want a countdown?

Shut up, Myra said.

Bisesa looked down at the ribbon that had been her anchor to reality for twelve days, and up at an Earth reduced to a pebble. She wondered if she would ever see it loom large againand what lay ahead of her before that could happen.

Alexei whispered, Here we go There was a flash below, on the cabins roof that had become a floor. The ribbon fell away, startlingly fast, and gravity evaporated like a dream. Tumbling, loose bits of gear rolling around them, Alexei laughed and laughed.

15: LIBERATOR.

April 2069 John Metternes, ships engineer, called up to Edna from Achilles. There was another holdup. The techs down there on the asteroid still werent satisfied with the magnetic containment of the antimatter pellets.

Any more delays and the Liberator was going to miss another window for her first trial cruise.

Edna Fingal looked out of the thick wraparound windows, away from the convoluted surface of the Trojan asteroid beneath her, to find the sun, so far away here on the J-line it barely showed a disk. Surrounded by the flight decks calm hum and new-carpet smell, she chafed, restless. She wasnt good at waiting.

Intellectually, in her head, she knew she had to wait until the engineers were absolutely sure about what they were doing. The Liberator depended on a new and untried technology, and as far as Edna could tell these magnetic antimatter bottles were never exactly stable; the best you could hope for was a kind of controlled instability that lasted long enough to get you home. It was thought that a failure of containment had been the cause of the loss of the Liberators unnamed prototype predecessor, and of Mary Lanchester and Theo Woese, the A-23Cs two-person crew.

But in OutSys, out there in the dark, something was approaching, something silent and alien and hostile. Already it was inside the J-line, closer to the sun than Edna was. Edna was captain of the worlds only spacegoing warship even close to operational status, the only healthy vessel in the first Space Group Attack Squadron. She itched to confront the alien.

As she often did, she tried to relieve the stress by thinking of family.

She glanced at a chronometer. It was set to Houston time, like all master clocks throughout human space, and she mentally made an adjustment for DC. Ednas daughter Thea, just three, would be in nursery school at this hour. Ednas own home was on the west coast, but she had chosen the school in Washington so Thea could be close to her grandmother. Edna liked to be able to visualize just where Thea was at any time of the day.

Libby, please open my mail file. Of course. Visual records too? Yes. Ready?...Hello, Thea. Here I am again, waiting around as usual...

Thea would hear her words, and see pretty much what she could see, captured by visual sensors in the ident tattoo on Ednas cheek. Security was predictably tight about every aspect of the A-class warships out here on the J-line, and Thea would only ever receive a heavily censored version of her mothers letters. But it was better than nothing.

And if things didnt go well, these messages might be all Thea had left of her mother. So Edna spoke to the future.

Im sitting here waiting for our antimatter bottles to be loaded into the A-drive chamber. And its taking a long time, for we have to be very careful. Im looking down now at Achilles. Its one of the larger of the Trojan asteroids, and its here that we have been building our A-ships. Look with me, you can see the graving yards, and the big pits where weve dug out ice and rock to serve as reaction mass, the stuff that will actually push the ship forward. And there are the domes where we all live when were on the surfacethe Liberator is a lot more comfortable than that, believe me!...

The Trojans clustered at a point of gravitational stability on the J-line called L4, Lagrange 4, forever sixty degrees ahead of Jupiter itself in its orbit. There was a second such point, L5, trailing Jupiter. Earthbound astronomers had named the two asteroid camps for the competing heroes of Homers Iliad: Achilles and the other Greeks leading Jupiter, the Trojans forever following.

L4 was a useful lode of resources, an obvious place for a base, a control point. Perhaps that was why, during the sunstorm, the Firstborn had lodged an Eye here.

I wont pretend Im not afraid, Thea. Id be a fool if I wasnt. Ive learned I can put aside the fear, and get on with the job. Because I know its a job that has to be done.

Maybe you know that this ship, the fourth of the new A-class, is the first to have been given a name. Because while the others made test flights, this ship will be the first to go into combat. I suppose whatever happens she will always be remembered for that. Of course we have to get through a couple of proving flights first.

We agonized about the name. Here we are surrounded by heroes from classical mythology. But its the mythology of another age, remote from our own. In the end we settled on the name of one of the great aircraft that helped wage mankinds last pivotal war, before the coming of the Firstborn changed all the rules. I hope that in the next few weeks were going to be able to liberate mankind from an even deadlier menace. And that then Ill have a chance to come home to you. I An alarm chimed, a green light flashed on the softwall beside her. The fuel pods were at last successfully loaded; the ground crew were leaving the ship.