Anjin could just barely see the alien ship, and was struggling hard to get a clear picture when, where the ship had been, the whole tunnel seemed to collapse and a dark spot appeared. It was a darkness of such intensity that he could see nothing except its blackness and its expanding dimensions.

Tam whispered, “You might as well give your soul to Jesus, stranger. Because your far-from-sorry ass is mine!”

But Anjin did not feel like rejoicing. The intense globe of black, with a surface temperature approaching absolute zero, had spread across ten thousand kilometers; and as it continued to swell over the horizon, Anjin realized with horror that it was also bursting toward him.

“Oops!”

“What do you mean, ‘oops’?” Tam asked. “Did we kill them or what?”

“Mostly or what,” Anjin answered.

Tam watched the hole in the chromosphere eating up more and more of the pad’s field of vision. “What’s the range on that thing?” she asked.

“Ground zero is more than eleven thousand kilometers aft. Its edge is moving at four hundred klicks per second. We’re keeping just ahead of it at five hundred”—his voice wavered—“but it won’t matter.”

“Chain reaction?”

Anjin bowed his head. “God help us, Captain. I’m afraid we just blew up the Sun.”

19

Gaius

Astronomy was full of such intriguing but unbreakable laws. To ground-based observers, an object— or even news of an event—could no more exceed the speed of light than a propeller-driven airplane could break the sound barrier in horizontal flight through sea level air; so a full eight minutes passed before the light of the battle in the chromosphere, traveling at 305,040 kilometers per second, brushed over the Earth. But no creature stared up from the great wasteland that was the world. On all continents and in all seas there was not a single soul to watch the spreading black stain on the face of the Sun.

Four hours away at the speed of light, on the icy plain of Triton, the last Bardo cone was being snapped into position. The ship’s dorsal surface was a hastily assembled pile of tanks filled to their brims with liquid hydrogen and oxygen. The gases were derived directly from Tritonian ice. They burned with a dull light and leaked no neutrinos; and after the tanks were empty, they and the engines that emptied them would be thrown overboard by the spidery automatons that crawled over every meter of Gaius’s hull. It was thus hoped that its crew of four could lift off stealthily from their icebound research center, and avoid becoming just another gamma burst in Sunspace.

Lenny, Sharon, Vinny, and Robyn were, like the crew of the Cat, members of the Lunarians, a corporation with roots in an eastern American science fiction society. The Lunarians had made their fortune by purchasing a Pacific island no one else wanted and taking advantage of the bargain basement fares offered to anyone willing to risk payloads on the first production model of Powell’s gas-powered space cannon. Tons of black, ultrathin Mylar composites were fired into Earth orbit, each package programmed for self-assembly into a slowly spinning disk more than 850 kilometers across. A ring of solar collectors near the disk’s center powered an ultralight engine, and when at last the object settled into a geosynchronous orbit fifty thousand kilometers high, both disk and Sun displayed for Earth the same apparent diameter. Each day at noon, the patent-protected disk produced a total eclipse over the isle of Lima, whose tourist and real estate value had, overnight, shot up astronomically.