As Vinny saw it, Lenny was spiraling down into deep paranoia, at first not really believing what deeds the Intruders might be capable of performing, then believing in them as one believes in the powers of a god—which was much worse than paranoia. Lenny was far beyond a reality that was bad enough.

At the heart of comet Sargenti-Peterson’s largest salt vein, in the cabin that had been Tam’s laboratory, some dozen members of the ship’s scientific party converged on what was now a dimly lit control room. Some of the men and women wore bandages and casts. Two, including Susan Skurla, were brought in on stretchers; and all of them displayed various scrapes and bruises from the second attack wave.

When they had assembled, and after they had waited ten minutes beyond the agreed time, Tam called the meeting to order.

“All agreed on stepping up production?” she said.

There were grave “ayes.”

“Opposed?”

Silence.

She gave a nod to Anjin, and he opened the lines to every pad in the ship.

“This cannot be a command decision,” Tam told the attendees. “If we don’t all agree on the option, we’re sure to have mutineers, if not outright warfare in the corridors. So I’m putting it to the vote.”

Christ no, she thought. All her scientific and political training had not covered a situation like this. An ironic smile crossed her lips, and she addressed the pads.

“I shall be brief. As you know, I am diverting most of the ship’s resources to the more-intensive production of absorbic bombs. As you are also aware, we just came perilously close to creating a stellar chain reaction. My scientific advisers believe that as few as forty more absorbic detonations could have turned the trick, converting all the Sun’s energy into matter and causing a stellar collapse that would not have stopped until it burst forth as a nova. For two or three days this solar system would have shone more brightly than a galaxy. The planets and any of our surviving brethren, and the enemy within our Sunspace, would have ceased to exist.

“Which brings me to the first of three possible futures.

“We will, very soon, have sufficient numbers of absorbics to convert this ship into a trigger for the largest hydrogen bomb ever assembled. Mutual destruction may not be the most elegant way of cleaning the enemy out of our Sunspace, but it’s certain to do the job, and it is one option.

“Most of you believe that a few people still survive on Earth or inside Ceres or somewhere in this system. A few realists say not, and I’m with them. There are, however, a half dozen Valkyries, each with a husband-and-wife team aboard, scattered as far away as Epsilon Eridani and sixty-one Cygni. If, by the slimmest of chances, any of these expeditions has gone undetected by the enemy, they will probably be safe until, after a decade or two exploring some alien world, they restart their engines and begin the voyage home—at which point their engines’ neutrino and gamma glow will make them visible. If they see it in time, a nova might just stop them from getting tangled up in all this.