His weakness passed, and he put it down to Justin’s power of suggestion. His friend knew the truth of things—of what was and should be—but he did not know what to do about it.

Joshua asked, “So you think we’ve become fanatics?”

“Does it matter?” Cherene replied.

“It’s a wheel, my friend,” Justin said, “killers beget killers,” and Joshua beheld again a widening rift, and suspected that he and Joshua might one day no longer be friends. If Justin’s ideas prevailed, the new colony might not last long. Cherene could think for herself, but even with her it could go either way, and being right might not be the side of survival.

An overwhelming sense of new danger came into him, filling him with dismay and self-doubt, but mostly with fear. He did not want Justin or Cherene to see him this way. He needed time to calm down and think. Without a word he turned away from them and walked off toward the bridge, trying to force from his mind all the grief-stained thoughts of the dead Sunspace aft and setting his mind on the maelstrom ahead. It was useless to try, of course, as always. He might just as well have tried beating back the tide with a sword.

He came onto the bridge and found one young man on watch. It was Al’s oldest son, Gerd, and while Joshua was coming to view the next generation more and more as an army, it seemed to him that this boy was incapable of harming a fly. Gerd nodded to Joshua as he sat down in the command station.

The nova was displayed front and center. Nothing of dying showed in Sunspace, except for the dimishing output of the star. Not only were we expelled from Paradise, Joshua reminded himself, but it was destroyed behind us as we fled. He wondered if any Intruders had been caught up in the explosion, then switched the view forward, calling up the latest color-enhanced map of the dwarf’s ring system, and struggled again to force Sunspace from his mind.

A sudden shift in the constantly updating spectrum revealed that a large iceworld orbiting between two rings might possess a thin, nitrogen atmosphere not unlike Triton’s. At once his imagination saw open skies, rolling hills, and blue oceans—and they tormented him with their loss, reminding him that his lifetime and at least several to come would spend themselves with an awesome discipline as the refugees made a life for themselves in the deeps of the black lake ahead. From that cauldron, he told himself, something even more powerful than the Intruders, and perhaps a little more clever—and certainly much angrier—was going to blaze forth. And yes, Justin was right, the black womb would birth a new killing kind …

He stood up violently. “Disaster,” the brother of Jesus cried out to the impassive stars. “Disaster for you all!”

Afterword: Reality Check

by George Zebrowski

The science has to “click” or the plot must change accordingly. That is the rule we laid down at this book’s inception. And we adhered to it— religiously. If we wanted to have a scene in which a Toyota Celica was required to drive backwards at one hundred kilometers per hour and it turned out that a Celica could not sustain one hundred kilometers per hour in reverse, the ground rules required that we find a car that could (a 1967 Dodge Dart slant-six) or rewrite the scene. Be assured, therefore, that when you read about a given planetary position in a given year, or about an object flying at a given speed a given distance from (or inside) the Sun, that the numbers are based upon actual calculations. Some of the rockets described in this novel are true, advanced preliminary designs, and such odd bits of hardware as the rope braking system deployed by the ill-fated Gaius team were in fact flight tested on models (specifically for this novel and for Charles Pellegrino’s first novel, Flying to Valhalla).