Now it was Hollis who stood up, but Jonathan came to the realization before she did. “God, no,” he said. “Don’t tell me this—”

“Surely you don’t carry out the orders of your servants,” Hollis finished for him. “Are you suggesting that your machines guide this ship, decide what secrets must be kept, and dictate your military strategies?”

“You stupid bastards,” Jonathan said, turning his back on the alien. “You let it all get out of hand!”

Thaw Tint inched forward. “What did I tell you? Some of your assumptions are wrong. Now gird yourselves up and know this: it is not the machines who work in our best interests or serve us or belong to us. It is very much the other way around: they keep us here and watch over us only because they find us interesting.”

“How did this happen?” Hollis demanded as Jonathan exploded into maniacal laughter. “Were they your machines in the beginning?”

Jonathan’s laughter began to drown out her words.

“Jonathan, shut up!” she shouted. “Or the machines swarm upon you from another star?”

Jonathan subsided, but Thaw Tint did not answer.

“Your people started it, then, didn’t they?” Silence.

“What happened?” Hollis demanded. “Did you allow them to evolve minds of their own? How could you have been so stupid?”

Silence.

She glanced at Jonathan, who was chuckling quietly to himself and scratching his genitals.

“You were smart enough to build starships,” Hollis pressed on, “and yet you didn’t see that it might be dangerous to have slaves who might become smarter than you?” By putting Thaw Tint on the defensive, by confronting him with the disdain of a species he obviously considered inferior, Hollis was hoping to pry more information out of her enemy turned fellow captive. But the tight-lipped alien seemed to catch on to her method and folded up like a hibiscus at midnight, leaving the priest with her questions.

26

The Black Cat

The Cat was so distant now—and had grown so small to telescopic eyes—that even with the best ‘scopes imaginable, no one aboard had to fear that the Intruders might detect the ship by its passage in front of a star or distinguish the faint blip from identical occultations of stars by the multiple billions of similarly sized rocks. The station’s surface was camouflaged with a charcoal-black regolith of carbonaceous silt, and was even pitted to give the appearance of a natural object. As the time came to put the uranium salts on line, to slowly recharge the central core of batteries, the first set of spare, disposable batteries had been drained and were being ground down to dust for rail-gunning aft.

Very carefully, the Cat began laying a faint, slowly expanding cone of dust behind itself. The cone’s engineers had realized that even a golf ballsized relativistic bomb, if hurled against them, could vaporize the entire station in an instant. Anticipating the possibility that their sector of the sky might become the target of a relativistic shotgun blast—with each pellet programmed to seek and destroy any habitat-sized object in its path—the refugees saw that a small target had the advantage of knowing within only fifty meters where a pellet was going to strike. To this advantage, Justin had added the observation that one should stop concentrating on what a relativistic bomb does to its target and consider what the target does to the bomb. It was then possible to see that even a grain of dust looked to a relativistic bomb like a crate of dynamite, and that if one scattered enough grains in its path, a golf ballsized pellet could be disintegrated thousands of kilometers behind the Cat.