“Another option is to prepare the trigger, delay pressing the button until and unless we are found, and hope the enemy thinks we’re dead and never comes looking for us. We’ve got Folsome tubes, so we’ll always have food and clean water, and there’s no question that we’ve got all the energy we’ll ever need. But if what a few of us are predicting, and what the majority of you refuse to believe, turns out to be true—if all that remains of humanity is this ship and a handful of Valkyries—then if we delay too long, the last starships may already be flying home by the time we push the button. Those ships will have only enough fuel for a single deceleration from ninety-two percent of light speed. As they come home and decelerate, they will be picked off as easily as Graff, Nautile, and Melville. In the end, our hesitation, our desire to buy a little more time for ourselves, could guarantee the utter extinction of our species. But that is a second option.”

“But what if there are survivors on Ceres or Miranda?” a woman’s voice called out. “Even if there’s only a one-in-twenty chance of that being true, then it’s a one-in-twenty chance that we’ll be killing more people in this system than we could ever hope to save outside it. Besides, the enemy may already know where all our Valkyries are, in which case we are stewards of nothing.”

Tam frowned, then cleared her throat. “I know, but it’s all a probability curve, isn’t it? We know there must be survivors outside our system, but we’ve no reason to believe, with any reasonable degree of certainty, that there is anyone left within our system except us and the aliens.”

“Which brings us to a third option?” the woman asked.

“Yes. We can’t even be certain that all the Valkyries have not already been tracked down and destroyed. The only certainty is that we have survived and that our enemies are still out there. If we are all that remains of our species and we trigger the Sun, then we finish the job our enemies began and merely take a few hundred of them with us. Triggering the Sun now, or when we are attacked, accomplishes nothing unless there are humans who are going to survive outside the solar system.

“Since our own existence is all we can count on, the third option calls for building the trigger and using it only if we have been attacked, beaten, and are certain that we are down to our last three seconds. It essentially involves waiting and hoping a little bit longer than the second option allows.

“And if we survive long enough, perhaps our descendants will learn how to move stealthily out of the corona, and perhaps they will even be able to locate the star these bastards came from and, armed as they will be with the ability to trigger novae—”

“My God ..Susan interrupted. “This could have happened before. All those exploding stars in the constellation Aquila!”