“Coincidence?”

“What do you think?”

“Not in a million years,” she said.

Ystebo scratched his belly. “I’d offer you longer odds than that… I think we’re dealing with another of those damn causal loops. Somebody, far enough downstream, has the technology to reach into the past to deflect the path of a quark nugget just so, to make it arrive right on cue to save the day. It may have been traveling a billion years, just to get here and play its part. The ulti-

mate deus ex. machinal

“And that makes you feel…”

“Awed. Terrified.”

“Dan, are they threatening us?”

“Not directly. But, look: if we don’t cooperate, the children will know in the future, when they grow up, when they get downstream. I mean, they’ll remember what we did, and they’ll send more quark nuggets from the Big Bang and get what they want anyhow, maybe causing a lot more damage.” He seemed to be shivering, despite the heavy warmth of the sun. “If you think about it, it could happen any moment, depending on the decisions we make. It won’t even be necessary to wait for consequent actions to flow; the children will know. Representative, we can’t be sure what we’re dealing with here. A multiheaded monster spanning past, present, and future. The children have, effectively, unlimited power…”

The thought of the children, their grown versions, in the future — in the far downstream, with much enhanced powers — reaching back with some kind of time-manipulation technology to right the wrongs they suffered here was startling. Children have been victims throughout history, she thought bleakly; maybe all children should have such power, and we would treat them with respect.

But then she found herself thinking like a politician, as someone responsible for her nation’s destiny: Now, assuming this threat from the downstream children is real, how would you go about eliminating it?

Why, by making sure the children never reach the downstream. Of course.

Immediately she filed that ugly logic, its foul conclusion, in the back of her mind.

But she knew it would be with her, part of her calculation, from now on; and she hated herself for it.

“So,” Dan said. “What do we do now?”

“The same as always,” Maura said briskly. “We try not to do too much damage while we wait to see what happens next. Oh. Is there any way we can contact the mother? Tom Tybee’s mother?”

Dan laughed. “Don’t you know where she is right now?”

They walked on toward the security fence, where their car was waiting.

June Tybee

The throwing-up had started when Bucephalus was still on the

ground.

That was nerves rather than space sickness. But it began in earnest once the injection to Earth orbit was complete, and the crew were put through the complexity of docking with the preor-bited tanks of fuel required to reach Cruithne. Then when the diarrhea cut in, the recycled air filled with a stench so powerful June knew they would be living with it for the rest of the trip.

And you couldn’t open the windows, not once.

June suffered herself. Most of the troopers did. But she got over it four, five days out.

Not everybody adapted so well, however. Eight troopers — sixteen percent of the total — -just kept barfing and shitting and getting weaker and weaker, unable even to hold down a morsel of food. So they had been allocated a corner of one of the decks, screened off from the rest, and were basically treated as casualties, nonfunctional for the duration of the voyage, all the way out to Cruithne and back.

The rest of the troopers endured tough exercise regimes: three or more hours a day on treadmills, on elasticated ropes for stretching against, and so forth. Even so, the medics said, they would likely suffer some longer-term physiological damage: bone calcium depletion and other shit. But that could be treated later, when they got back to Earth. On their return in glory, after the medals and the handshakes from the prez, they would all be retired on fat pensions, with a full entitlement to sell their stories to the highest bidders. Plenty of time to put right a little calcium loss then.

What was more important now was getting through the mission in one piece, so June could get back to Bill and Tom and Billie and the rest of her life.

A week out, the troopers dismantled the interior of this big five-deck troop module, opening up a giant cylindrical space like a huge oil can, and they began their zero G exercises in earnest.

At first her head felt like a bag of fluid that just sloshed about every time she moved. But that passed, and she soon found herself ricocheting back and forth across the oil can, practicing landing, deploying the pitons and tethers that would hold her to the asteroid’s surface, readying her weapons, smoothly working up .to a fully suited drill. All of these maneuvers were basically impossible on Earth, despite the efforts at simulation in the big NASA flotation-tank facilities.

June found, in fact, that once she was over her sickness she reveled in the freedom of zero G — to be able to fly through the air, free to move in three dimensions, without the clinging resistance of water.

Some of the troopers groused when, three weeks out from home, they started exercises sealed up in their full space suits. But June welcomed it. Sealed off from the rest of the troopers, she only had to smell herself — a sour stink of sweat and determination.

Despite the distraction of the training, the long journey out soon became pretty hellish. She was out in the middle of interplanetary space, after all; she really hadn’t expected this sense of confinement, even claustrophobia.

And the tedium of life aboard a spacecraft was dismaying: the hours she had to spend every day on the dull, repetitive exercises or, worse, cleanup duties — scraping algae off of the walls, fixing water-recycling systems that had proven balky since they left Earth, and so on, a lot of such work in this thrown-together, gremlin-ridden ship.

The troopers’ spare time, what there was of it, was taken up with what you’d expect. TV, card games (Velcro strips on the back), and a surprising amount of casual sex — hetero, homo, bi, solo, couples, and larger groups — much of it exploring the possibilities of the zero G regime. June had avoided all of that, and nobody had bothered her; the fifty-fifty male-female ratio saw to that.

Instead, she spent a lot of her time reading.

The accounts of the early astronauts, for instance. Not the flash-bang glory of Apollo and the rest of the early U.S. program, but the Russians: dogged cosmonauts with names like Dobro-volsky, Patsayev, Volkov, Lazarev, Makorov, Popovich…

From as early as 1971 the cosmonauts had endured hundreds of days in low Earth orbit in Soviet space stations, the Salyuts and the Mir, just boring a hole in the sky, nowhere to go, trying to keep themselves alive and sane. Some of those old guys had traveled farther and longer than she had — if not in a straight line — and they had only dubious tractor-factory technology to rely on. And some of the cosmonauts hadn’t come home.

Reading their accounts somehow made the Bucephalus less of a prison, for her.

That and thinking about Tom and Billie.

Faster than Reid Malenfant, the Bucephalus streaked across space toward Cruithne.

Maura Della:

Open journal. March 3,2012.

It was, of course, the extraordinary incident at Nevada that led to the decision — the right one, I think — to shut down the Blue education centers. The idea was to try to liquidate the threat, eliminate the unknowns, represented by the Blue children. Those responsible for the safety of the nation had no other choice.