The long-haired man who greeted them on the ground, Menelaus realized, had not been “crew.” This was a private ship, a houseboat, not a military vessel.
A fourth figure, also a man, was dressed in the black cassock and white dog collar of a cleric, his garb from days older than Montrose’s own. It was this man who stepped forward and offered his hand.
“I am Brother Roger Juliac of Beeleigh, Society of Jesus.”
“Meany Montrose. Howdy do.”
“Yes, Highly Honored. I know of you,” intoned Brother Roger with an inclination of his head. “I am the astronomer who discovered the anomaly.”
The man had the hard and rugged face and thickset build of a boxer. Montrose could not imagine anyone who looked less like a man of the cloth, or an astrophysicist.
Montrose still had caterpillar-drive pistols in both his fists, so he took his right pistol, thrust it butt first into the surprised man’s left hand, and then clasped his right. After the handshake, he snatched his pistol back.
Sir Guiden, watching this exchange, said to Montrose over the silent, internal channel they shared, “Liege, you know the gesture of a handshake is meant to show that you have no weapon in your sword hand.”
“Really? I figure handing the friar my shooting iron shows I am even more peaceful than that. You gunna take off your helmet?”
Sir Guy said silently, “The shipmaster and his wives are dressed in hunger silk. It can be used as a weapon. The micropores can flay skin and strip proteins out of the blood and muscle exposed.”
“If these folk are so fierce, why’d we leave our goon squad below?”
Sir Guy replied, “The airskiff serpentines will protect you from attack, if you are a friend, and the men could not protect you from them, if you are a foe.”
Menelaus had noticed that the gondola did not have any armor, or locks on the ports or hatches. Since anyone hoisted aboard was wrapped in deadly metal cable, and remained in reach thereafter, and since the people aboard wore yards of smart cloth that apparently could eat a man’s face, perhaps locks and bars were not needed.
Meanwhile, at the same time, Menelaus was talking aloud to the Jesuit with his real mouth and listening with his real ears. The first thing he said was, “What anomaly?”
Brother Roger said, “This is Tessa Azurine, and her permanent paramour, Woggy Azurine, and the sexpartner is called Third, since she is between names at the moment. I am their mendicant and confessor.”
The man waved and grinned. “Gulps! Bro Ro is weight-valued, since the Giants be less like to scald flocks what have a spook-speaking man amidst. Not mendicant he!”
The taller of the two women curtsied like a willow bending, and her blue gray robes writhed like mist. “We scorn no refugee; we share lift, fire, and salt. ‘The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Adam hath not where to lay his head.’ You are a Sylph of Time as we are Sylphs of Wind, blown you know not where.”
The girl with the purple hair and the gem on her brow was pouting like a child, and her eyes were not focused on anything in the environment around her. She spoke aloud to no one in particular, “How about Trey? No? Like a card.”
Montrose grunted. “Yeah, um, pleezta-meetcha, gals, guy, nice digs. Sure hope y’all feel better soon.”
The willowy, flower-crowned woman, Tessa, said, “But we are not sick, no?”
“I ain’t touching that line with a boat hook, ma’am. Brother Roger, what anomaly?”
The Jesuit said to her, “Tessa, if you could ask the Azurine to ascend to the observatory, it should be passing through the area directly.”
Tessa said, “Azurine, my adored, acknowledge the order.”
A melodic voice answered from the wall, sounding like wind chimes. “I delight to obey, my adored. I ascend. For your delight, I play an ascension theme from your preference profile.” A haunting sequence of woodwinds and plaintive chords drifted through the air, soft and without melody, but a trumpet added a note of triumph when the airship broke through the cloud, as if through a gray floor, up into dazzling daylight.
Montrose said to the priest, “You! Now that the pleasantries are done, what poxy anomaly?”
Brother Roger said, “Energy discharges from V886 Centauri. The radiospectrography and gamma ray analysis are constant with an, ah, interplanetary event.”
“No damn point in pausing for drama, Padre, because I grade on info, not on delivery.”
Brother Roger said, “Ah. As you say. We believe the ice giant planet Thrymheim was driven into the star. The terrene matter of the superjovian world interacted with the contraterrene plasma of the star’s atmosphere.”
Thrymheim was the single planet orbiting the Diamond Star. It held a far Neptunian orbit, beyond where the antimatter in the solar wind could reach, and so was not disintegrated.
“Driven in why? As a weapon?”
Brother Roger shook his head. “Criswell mining operates by inducing a ring-current around the star by ionically charged beams oppositely directed from each other. Usually the mining satellite ring is equatorial, so that the ejection mass—”
“By Mother Mary changing baby Jesus’ stinking holy diapers, Padre! I was on the expedition, and I am a star miner, so I know how the damn process works!”
Brother Roger said, “There are dark lines in the spectrographic analysis consistent with an off-center arrangement of the mining orbitals, Honored.”
“Blight and clap! What are the vectors?”
Brother Roger said, “I have not been able to deduce, from the limited information available fifty light-years away, what the various constituent pressures—”
“You are saying the mining satellites focused the explosion like a jet engine.”
“Explosions. So we speculate, Honored.”
“Which way is it pointing? Wait. Explosions, with an s, plural?”
“Indeed, Honored.”
“She broke the damn planet into bits, made it into an asteroid stream, and is feeding in one or two earth-masses at a time. Thrymheim was fifteen hundred and ninety earth-masses, as I recall. The whole solar system, Monument and everything, has been turned into a damned Orion drive, just on a massive scale.”
Sir Guiden turned on his suit speakers, to let the people in the cabin hear the question, “Liege! How do you know it is she?”
“Meaning what?” Montrose said.
Sir Guiden said, “The Bellerophon was lighter than the Hermetic, and should have overtaken her either when they made starfall at V886 Centauri, a few months more or less. We tend to think of red dwarfs as small and dim, but a sailing ship can reflect and focus a beam of star energy to burn targets across interplanetary distances, and small stars have more than enough power for that.”
“The pursuit ship didn’t have no crew aboard, it was just Del Azarchel’s second emulation, an Astro-Exarchel, and a passel of teleoperated tools. You’re thinking Rania might have bought the farm during whatever shoot-out banged when they butted heads?
Sir Guiden said, “Liege, are you trying to be obscure? Farm?”
“Sorry. You think Rania died? No fear of that!”
Sir Guiden said, “How not?”
“I know Blackie. He don’t think this big. Oh, this is her work, all right.” Montrose threw back his head and laughed. “What a gal! Did I tell you she’s mine?”
Brother Roger said diffidently, “Honored—if you intuit the meaning of this anomaly, I would be grateful if—”
“It’s eight thousand five hundred years until the Hyades Armada arrives here. Not much time. What is the biggest block to our being able to fight them when they come? We’re too small, too weak, too stupid. What is the main thing you need to get smarts? I don’t mean one man, I mean on a large-scale, bigger-than-worlds, multiple-centuries sort of deal. Library smarts; datasphere smarts. What’s it take? Energy. It takes fuel to calculate. Fuel to think. Now, the whole damn and plague-ridden universe is made out of energy, but not in a form ready to use. I was going crazy trying to figure out how many expeditions we could make to the Diamond Star for contraterrene, how much fuel is lost in transport, how many ships, considering that a ship can tow only about as much fuel as you might like to use for a round-trip, and not too much over.”