Hakim's wand projected graphics and figures for Martin. Assay fit very closely indeed. "We've been looking through the stellar envelopes and we've put together a picture of the birthing cloud in this region. Shock-wave passage from a supernova initiated starbirth about nine billion years ago, and the supernova remnants seeded heavy elements along these gradients… " Hakim's finger traced a projected purple line through numbers describing metals densities, "metals" meaning elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. He jabbed at a clustering of numbers. "The Buttercup is right in this gradient, right in this magnetic pool, to receive the only dose of exactly these proportions." Red numbers bunched within a dip in the galaxy's magnetic field, where gases might collect, waiting to be condensed into stars. "No other star system within a hundred light years matches the Buttercup's assay."

Martin felt numb, not yet realizing with all of his faculties how significant this was.

"Time for another gathering," he said thoughtfully.

"I'll report to the moms," Hakim said.

* * *

They had never before seen more than three moms together, although they had suspected there could be many more. Several times the children had kept track of their whereabouts in the Dawn Treaderand tried to count them, as a kind of game, but they could never be surehow many there were. Now, all eighty-two children—Lost Boys and Wendys-—gathered in the schoolroom to make the final decision, and there were six identical moms, all with the same patient, neutral voices.

More than anything that had happened before, this gave Martin chills. He had personally estimated there were no more than four moms in the entire ship. It seemed likely to him now that the Dawn Treadercould manufacture the robots at will; but that meant the ship itself was a kind of giant mom.

Putting six into the schoolroom was a symbolic action, surely… And it communicated to Martin, at least, with full force.

Four moms hovered at the periphery of the schoolroom, silent and unmoving, like sentinels. Two moms floated in the center of the schoolroom, beside the star sphere. They waited patiently until the children were quiet, which took less than a minute. Martin saw Ariel enter with William and Erin just as the first mom began to speak.

The mom at stage left advanced and said, "The information on the candidate stellar group has increased. If the ship alters its course now, and begins deceleration, you are less than three months from this system, ship's time. Deceleration will use most of our reserves, and we will need to refuel within one of the stellar systems, the Buttercup or the Cornflower. There are unlikely to be sufficient volatiles available in the Firestorm system."

A diagram of their orbital path and velocities spread before the children. Deceleration for three tendays at one g, ship's reference, which would drop their speed to about ninety percent c and increase their tauconsiderably, bringing them into a position to enter the Buttercup system. Then deceleration of two g's for twenty-three days. They would enter the system at just over three fourths the speed of light, crossing the system's diameter of eleven point two billion kilometers in just under fourteen hours.

Martin noted that their trajectory would take them through the dark haloes of pre-birth material, through the plane of the ecliptic, and then under the Buttercup's south pole, considerably below the plane of the ecliptic. They would pass within two hundred million kilometers of one rocky world, and a hundred million kilometers of the second, directly between them, when both were nearly aligned on one side of the system.

"The remotes have given your search team more information. You will now be provided with the expanded figures to make your next decision."

Ariel watched Martin from across the room. Her expression said nothing, but he could feel her disapproval.

Hakim Hadj pushed forward from the search team. "The information is wonderful… Very provocative." He raised his wand, and the wand of each sang in tune, and projected images into their eyes.

They saw:

That the two yellow stars had altered stellar envelopes—that the streams of particles flowing outward from the stars' surfaces were being gathered and twisted like hair in braids, forming streamers above and below the poles. The magnetic fields of the stars were being altered to control their surface activity, and to allow fine tuning of their radiation output. None of the planets were swept by particle storms any more, nor were they subjected to the vagaries of stellar interiors. This helped explain the altered stellar signature—spectrum versus size and brightness—that had first pointed to the presence of an advanced civilization.

Other details could be discerned around the nearest yellow star, the Buttercup: altered planetary orbits, with a single gas giant world pushed in closer to the Buttercup, perhaps to allow easier mining of volatiles. The gas giants were even more depleted of volatiles than they had first estimated; refueling would be difficult around this star.

Between the Buttercup's outermost rocky world and the nearest depleted gas giant orbited a million-kilometer-thick halo of flimsy structures largely made of silicates. One or more rocky worlds, or perhaps an entire asteroid belt, might have been sacrificed to make the halo; what purpose it served could not be known yet. Hakim speculated they might have been enormous mirrors to refocus energy on the inner planets, or perhaps to deflect radiation from the red giant in its more violent phase.

The farther yellow star showed no high-tech activity. "Someone might be hiding," Hakim said, "but we have no way of knowing that."

He saved the most impressive displays for last.

"Some of the information we're about to show you was gathered by the Benefactors long before Earth was destroyed," Hakim said. "Several thousand years ago… The moms have given this to us."

In simulation, they saw dim flares around the two yellow stars, as viewed from hundreds or even thousands of light years away: the expenditure of vast energies necessary to move the planets and alter the stars. The flares had lasted only for a matter of decades—a mere instant on the time-scale of the galaxy, but obviously, eager eyes and ears had caught the flicker.

The transformation of the two solar systems had taken place simultaneously, about a hundred years before the Firestorm—twice the mass of Sol—went through helium flash to become a red giant, a hideous lively bloating that swallowed five planets. They watched in silence as the red giant cast away immense cloaks of gas, its face becoming pocked and ragged like a burning, decaying skull.

Hans Eagle spoke out. "If the Killers live here, did they send out machines before or after they made these changes?"

"Probably before," the first mom said. "In our experience—"

"Nobody knows how much experience you've had, or how long," Ariel said, voice chilly.

"Please, Ariel," Hakim said, infinitely patient.

"In our experience," the mom continued, "beings who build killer probes usually do so before they have mastered the techniques necessary to perform large-scale stellar reconstruction."

"Then it's been thousands of years since the probes were launched," Hans continued.

"Very likely."

Hans nodded, satisfied.

The last display traced the paths of intercepted killer machines, but covered a thousand light years rather than a dozen; their known and postulated victims were marked by red dots, and the systems they had merely passed through glowed green. Approximate dates relative to Earth's death and distances of these events from the three-star group were given in flashing white.