Heaven (43 page)

The reefwives’ messages were becoming increasingly desperate. Already their group discussions were producing majorities in
favor of the Last Resort. Only their overall mentality, when they connected their minds into a single unit, held reservations.
Will knew that he could delay no longer: No-Moon’s beleaguered inhabitants needed reinforcements—a distraction at the very
least, a decisive counterattack if all went well.

Ship set a course for the Lambda Coelacanthi system and engaged its supercharged hydrive. With luck, their arrival would catch
the mission fleet napping.

Employ Strategy #8,335
.

Talitha
was in trouble. Yes, its arrival had taken the mission fleet by surprise—but that advantage had been nullified within less
than a minute. By then Cosmic Unity had lost four disseminators, one medium monk transport, and twenty or so smaller vessels,
depleting the forces available to Oot’PurBimlin by about 3 percent. In return, the Neanderthal vessel had suffered massive
damage; Ship estimated it would take it a month to regrow all the equipment and superstructure that had been destroyed. But
at best, they had a few hours before the reefwives employed the Last Resort, and the whole point of the engagement was to
prevent that final, irreversible step. Nobody wanted a Pyrrhic victory.

At that point, No-Moon’s only working ansible went down. There were no transible platforms on the planet, and any other means
of transport would take far too long, even if the mission fleet had not been in the way.
Talitha
was no longer in communication with the reefwives. The Neanderthals’ enhanced trading ship made a superluminal retreat to
lick its wounds and review tactics. No ship in the mission fleet had a remotely comparable turn of speed, and again Ship floated
unmolested in the void.

A rather panicky council of war turned up no new ideas. Time was fast running out—it was clear that the reefwives were facing
complete annihilation, and they were determined to take Cosmic Unity’s troops with them, even if the only way to achieve that
was the destruction of No-Moon as a remotely habitable world. Cosmic Unity was now dropping much larger asteroids, disrupting
the planet’s geological integrity. The ocean floors were starting to break up altogether.

No-Moon was minutes away from annihilation.

“We must think of something that they cannot anticipate,” said Will.

“Use their own strength against them,” May muttered. “That is always how the weak defeat the strong.”

“On the rare occasions when they do,” said Second-Best Sailor. “Meself, I’d rather look for the enemy’s weaknesses.”

“The magnetotori are both a weakness and a strength,” said Sam. “They provide the power to move their ships. But without that
power . . .”

“Dream on. Magnetotori are indestructible,” Will pointed out. “Plasma. Nothing can harm a magnetotorus.”

Into the ensuing silence, Fat Apprentice dropped a single, short sentence. “That’s not quite true.”

Everyone stared at him. He hastened to explain. “I’ve just remembered. Something I came across in the library of Heaven. A
little-known bit of information that might just turn the battle our way. It was in an ecological file, not anything military.
It might just be something they don’t know about . . .” His voice trailed off. “Squirt. It won’t work. We’d have to let ’em
get right up close to have any chance of usin’ it, an’ if we do that, they’ll blast us to smithereens.”

You didn’t have to be a Neanderthal to sense the atmosphere of disappointment. But before it could turn to despair, Ship spoke
up. “Tell me your idea, Fat Apprentice. I have some abilities that you don’t know about.”

Archstrategist Oot’PurBimlin of the mission fleet clenched his talons until the sinews squealed, as the elation of imminent
victory surged through his mind.
The enemy had made a fatal mistake
.

The huge trading ship had plunged into the midst of his fleet, traveling impossibly fast and decelerating with an ease that
left him breathless.
I could use that. A pity I must destroy it
. The lone ship had mounted a last-ditch attack, throwing everything that its crew could think of at the mission fleet’s capital
warships.

Employ strategy #42
.

It worked like a charm. The commanders on the gigantic vessel weren’t battle-hardened, like he was. They didn’t have access
to millennia of strategic analysis. Predictably, they made the wrong choices. Their inexperience allowed their ship to be
englobed by the fleet’s heavy destructors. The pack was still too far from its target for it to be worth engaging the vessel
in combat, but the trading ship’s escape path was now blocked in every direction. When battle was joined, the enemy vessel
would be unable to withdraw; bombarded by what undoubtedly would be superior firepower, it would be annihilated.

The globe should now be drawn tighter, to bring the destructors close enough for the outcome to be decisive, and the remainder
of the fleet should join it, to close off even the slightest possibility of an escape route. The archstrategist always favored
massive overkill; otherwise, what was the point in acquiring overwhelming military might? Oot’PurBimlin spoke to his vessel’s
overcommand, which metaphorically tugged at the reins of the fleet’s magnetotoral steeds, and the entire mission fleet began
to converge on their solitary, helpless target, wallowing half-disabled in a cloud of fragmented ordnance.

The quantum computers of the overcommand adjusted the magnetotori’s propulsive forces so that no attacking vessel would fire
on another. Simultaneously, every beam weapon under Oot’PurBimlin’s command discharged, at maximum power.

The trading ship disappeared. Where it had been an instant before, the mission fleet’s matter detectors showed nothing material.
Only a faint smudge of radio noise, a harmless patch of nonlethal radiation, marked the Neanderthal vessel’s location.

Still converging at top speed, Cosmic Unity’s fleet plunged into the faint miasma that was all that remained of the enemy,
as the overcommand plotted courses that would terminate the engagement.

The battle, if it could be called that, was over. The Neanderthals were dead. The forces of Cosmic Unity were once again triumphant,
as they always were.

“Why are we still alive?” asked Second-Best Sailor. “And where’s the universe gone?” He had been told this would happen, in
the brief moments when they had planned their strategy, but that wasn’t the same as believing it when you saw it.

“A talent I had no reason to reveal until now,” said Ship. “We are no longer part of the normal universe. It lies a very short
distance away, in a direction that only I can perceive. The ethical threshold on board is now so high that if your lives are
threatened, I am empowered to displace myself into a dimension known only to my Precursor builders. They discovered that the
normal universe is merely a four-dimensional membrane floating in a surrounding twenty-dimensional space.”

“Come again?”

“Normal space is like an oil slick floating on an ocean. I am designed to exist in the oil slick, but I can access the ocean
beneath, when ethical considerations permit. We have now sunk an insignificant but nonzero distance below the ocean’s surface.
We are alone in a separate universe, immune from attack.”

“I’m still not quite clear on how this helps us attack the mission fleet,” said Sam.

“That is the second part of Fat Apprentice’s plan,” said Ship.
Talitha
could not use conventional weapons to attack the mission fleet without returning to the normal universe. Anticipating this
strategic difficulty, Ship had left behind an
unconventional
weapon.

Oot’PurBimlin relaxed as the fleet unraveled its tight bundle of spacetime trajectories, dissolving the globe formation prior
to regrouping in No-Moon orbit. The threat—if so strong a word could describe the pathetic force represented by the Neanderthal
captain and his solitary ship—had been eliminated. Now, with no further distractions, the massed forces of Cosmic Unity could
concentrate on the conversion of No-Moon, bringing it the virtues of tolerance and cosmic love—assuming that the planet survived
the last-ditch defense action being mounted by its inhabitants, and Cosmic Unity’s own response.

For the fifth such occasion in his distinguished career, he wondered why so many otherwise sane entities insisted on being
stubborn and stupid when faced with the weight of Cosmic Unity’s Memeplex. The benefits of peaceful universal coexistence
were undeniable. Why, then, did they try to resist the inevitability of history?

No matter. History also taught that resistance was futile. Now all that remained was an orthodox mopping-up exerc—

Alarm signals interrupted his thoughts.

The fleet’s tame magnetotorus steeds were not responding to the reins. Their normal, sedate gait had become a galloping stampede.
But—had they not been
guaranteed
tame by the torus tamers?

He dismissed the thought. Blame could be attached later. A more urgent question was, where were the magnetotori heading?

The archstrategist’s displays told him, and he chirped in disbelief.

Into the
star
?

Wild magnetotori
. Grazing the star. The mating urge, triggered by a trick so underhanded that he almost had to admire . . .

He fought down rising panic, made a rapid assessment of their chances, and instructed the overcommand to release the reins.

Too late.

Deprived not only of propulsion but of power, there was only one way for the disabled mission fleet to go.

Down.

It is often said that in space there is no up or down, but this truism is false in the presence of a gravitational field.
Up
means contrary to the field;
down
means . . .
down
. In that fatal instant before Oot’PurBimlin had cut the reins, the fleet’s magnetotoral steeds had been stampeding straight
down the local gravity gradient, into the heart of the No-Moon system’s star. The ships were doomed to follow. They had no
way to kill their momentum—their power source had vanished along with their magnetic steeds.

The commanders would not even have the option of sacrificing their underlings and having themselves transibled to safety.
Transibles needed gigantic quantities of power. There were auxiliary supplies, of course, to keep the overcommand and essential
life support running in the event of a major power failure, but auxiliary power would be far too feeble to run a transible.

Talitha
had reemerged from its refuge among the hidden dimensions, having judged it safe to do so, and the huge window of its gallery
showed the damage that its weapon had inflicted.

“They’re fallin’ into the flouncin’
sun
!” said Second-Best Sailor in awe. “Fat Apprentice—your plan
worked
!” He spoke as one whose plans never functioned entirely as intended, which was one of several reasons why he was named
Second
-Best Sailor.

“What else did you expect?” asked Will. “At the moment of our disappearance from the normal universe, Ship released the mating
pheromone. We all knew what would happen after that.”

“We knew what we all
thought
should happen,” May contradicted. “Fortunately, Fat Apprentice was right.” The pheromone had been a standing pattern of radio
waves, the one that magnetotori used to attract mates. Magnetotori reproduced by fusion—physical, not nuclear—which rendered
them unstable, so that they split into many smaller tori, which subsequently grew to adult size. Cosmic Unity’s quasi-living
engines had been primed for mating by the radio-pheromone, and they had bolted, attracted by the herds of nomadic magnetotori
grazing in the sun. “The pheromone convinced the tame magnetotori that the wild herd was sexually receptive,” May concluded.

“If it wasn’t,” said Will, “the herders will have cause for complaint. Let us hope that the herd was—”

“In heat,” said Second-Best Sailor, and failed to conceal his amusement.

They stared at
Talitha
’s gallery window, through which a disorganized rabble of once-tame magnetotori hightailed it for the grainy photosphere of
the nearby star. There was none of the calm and majesty of the nomadic magnetotorus herds. This was a sex-crazed mob.

“How long?” asked Second-Best Sailor.

“The tori or the ships?”

“Both.”

Will asked Ship to estimate trajectories. “About fifty-two hours for the tori, seventeen
days
for the ships. But the ships will burn up long before that—in about eleven days’ time, Ship informs me.”

There was silence as the horrible fate that waited Cosmic Unity’s Mission Fleet sank in.

“Serves the zygoblasts right,” said Second-Best Sailor. “I’ll squirt no glands for ’em after what they did to Short Apprentice
and all the other guys.”

“Revenge is a dangerous motive,” said May as her sense of empathy tugged her in two contradictory directions. “But in this
case, there is a greater danger: the evil of Cosmic Unity itself. A rogue religion, a perversion of its own fundamental beliefs.
Vengeance or not, their deaths are fully justified.”

“No,” said Sam.

“You cannot be serious,” Will asserted for the dozenth time. They had gathered on the beach, and Second-Best Sailor was trailing
a tentacle in the pond so that it could follow the discussion. But Will’s attention was on Sam, and the big Neanderthal was
furious. “Cosmic Unity’s invasion fleet has devastated large tracts of No-Moon and killed polypoids in their millions! Half
the landmass is aflame, the seas are toxic, and the reefwives are close to death! The very ocean floor has been ripped asunder,
becoming a wasteland of seething volcanic vents and fissures!

“No-Moon is
dying
, Fourteen Samuel! And it is but one of thousands, tens of thousands, of worlds that have been unfortunate enough to attract
the attentions of Cosmic Unity.” Will’s fists clenched as he fought to restrain himself from physical violence. “Unless this
madness is stopped, there will be thousands more.”