Flee.

Survive.

Rebuild.

Grow.

Come back.

Avenge.

18

In the Valley of Aton

Anjin noted the time on his pad and called out, “Skipper, they’ve just blasted our aft telescope and most of our ramjets—but it’s as we hoped: they had to open a window through the plasma before they fired, and I think I got a clear picture of their ship.”

The blip had continued to maintain a steady distance of twelve thousand kilometers, following in the magnetic slipstream of Sargenti-Peterson. The refugees knew that sooner or later the shooting would begin—and sooner rather than later. They half expected some new, non-Einsteinian physics to overtake them—faster-than-light weapons or the means for the enemy to transport aboard through something akin to subspace and warp drive. The expectation conjured up nightmare visions of the walls suddenly glowing white hot and exploding away from the very center of the ship-comet.

But nothing happened.

When at last the Intruders opened fire, they had first parted the plasma with magnetic fields, opening a valley in the Sun twelve thousand kilometers long—and it was through this opening that Anjin got his first telescopic view of the stalker.

The image was fuzzy and needed a great deal of enhancement; but it yielded a wealth of detail. The vessel’s surface seemed to reflect most if not all of the Sun’s energy, which was the antithesis of Sargenti-Peterson’s solution, whereby the energy was met head-on and converted to matter. The stalker was smaller than Sargenti-Peterson and gave the appearance of a highly reflective manta ray. Anjin wondered about the wings. At five hundred kilometers per second, flying through a tunnel of vacuum in a sea of plasma, wings made absolutely no sense. He guessed that they were somehow involved in generating magnetic fields, or in temperature regulation, or both. And it occurred to him that because of their totally reflective surface, he could obtain a very sharp image and perhaps solve the mystery of the wings with ordinary radar.

He had barely ordered the proper machinery into place when the alien ship began firing through the window in the plasma, and he was filled with a paradoxical sense of relief as he realized that the little reflective spheres racing toward him were not warping or transporting through space, but merely racing. This meant that no matter how great a technological lead the Intruder civilization had over his own, both sides were made equal by the same universal speed limit and had to play by the same unbreakable laws, on the same chessboard discovered by Albert Einstein.

The plasma tunnel was closed now. The first attempted shelling of Sargenti-Peterson had been held off by a cluster of absorbic bombs racing in the opposite direction. Tam guessed that the Intruders must have smugly expected to chip away with impunity at the comet’s stem, then punch through to the core by throwing just one stream of antimatter containers down the long, narrow corridor. She grinned, wishing she could have known what went through their minds as stores of precious antihydrogen detonated halfway to their target; and she recalled with a small measure of pride one of her more hair-raising theories about what would happen when an absorbic bomb met an antimatter bomb and they detonated side by side. It had seemed unlikely from the start, but if that particular speculation had turned out to be true, the antihydrogen, upon converting from supercooled “white cake” to energy, would have been reassembled instantaneously in the heart of the absorbic bomb as supercooled antihydrogen … until it struck the Intruder ship head-on and briefly created a second sun within the Sim.