"Jennifer, I'm not thinking too clearly. You woke me up and I haven't slept since coming out of deceleration."

"I haven't either," Jennifer said, blinking.

"Well, you're superhuman, we all know that."

"Flattery won't get answers any faster," she said much too brightly, her face flushed as if with fever. "Sorry. I'm a little giddy, too. What I'm getting around to saying is, they could turn us into anti-matter right now. Or just enough of us to blow our ship to pieces."

"Are you sure?"

"No. I'm not sure. And obviously, they haven't. But—"

"There's nothing we can do about it."

"I know," she said. "I know that."

"Can you give me any advice about what we can do?"

"Of course, we can't let them know we understand what noach is."

"That'll be easy. I don't understand."

"Or that we know it exists," she said, knitting her brows in irritation. "Silken Parts is working over other implications, and one of them… Are you going to pull a Hans on me?" she asked suddenly.

"Pardon?"

"I'm going to tell you something really big, really scary. Are you going to pull a Hans and vanish into some macho shell right now?"

"I promise, I won't do that," Martin said.

"We thought maybe the twelfth planet changing character, color, maybe that was more proof that parts of this system are illusory. A projection or something. Martin, if they can do what I think they can, it doesn't matter, there isn't any difference. They could make a shell of fake matter around an entire planet, an entire star, just as solid as this ship is. They could redirect or manufacture images as wide as this system in any direction they desired."

"Do they have the energy?"

"I'm guessing yes. They might be tapping the star. From what we can see, the system seems to be rich with volatiles.

Maybe they've held all their resources in reserve, waiting for the main assault."

"Do you have any goodnews?" Martin asked.

Jennifer grinned. "Not fond of endless David and Goliath?"

"It's a living," he said dourly.

"I can do without it myself. But I do have some wild-ass ideas that might be encouraging. I want to noach with Giacomo and do some momerath with him, and I want to hook into the ships' minds. I'm hoping we can collaborate. This is something moms and Brothers and humans need to do together."

"I'll get you some private time with Giacomo. No sweet nothings, though," he chided.

"Strictly business," Jennifer said.

Martin saw the Trojan Horse/Double Seedas an ant crawling into a kitchen, staring all unknowing at giant appliances, instruments of unknown utility, technologies beyond the capacity of its tiny brain to comprehend…

There was so much that made no sense whatsoever.

The twelfth planet continued to change its character every few hours, alternating between three different sets of features, all the same size, all rocky, but radically different in all other ways.

The ninth planet had an eccentric orbit, carrying it outside the orbit of the tenth planet. It was small, perhaps a former moon, though with no surface features. It had an albedo of one, a perfectly reflective mirror at all frequencies.

The eighth planet, a bright orange-yellow gas giant with a diameter of seventy-five thousand kilometers, possessed three large moons. Cables two to three kilometers in diameter hung from the moons to the planet's fluid surface, leaving great whorls in their wakes, like mixers in a fantastic bakery.

The sixth planet, eight thousand kilometers in diameter, appeared to be covered with dandelion fluff, each "seed" a thousand kilometers tall. Incoming space vessels never ventured below the crowns of the seeds. In close-up, between the seed pillars, storms churned a thick atmosphere of oxygen and nitrogen and water vapor. Hakim thought this might be a giant farm of some sort, for raising unimaginable creatures or plants, but Martin thought that seemed archaic; one wondered if such powerful beings would still need to eat, much less eat formerly living things.

"Then the creatures might have other uses," Hakim said, eyes glittering with speculation.

"None of which we can guess," George Dempsey cautioned.

"Let us have our fun," Erin said peevishly.

Peering deeper down Leviathan's well, to the fifth planet, nine thousand kilometers in diameter, dull gray, and like the ninth, smoother than a billiard ball, but far from reflective.

And perhaps the most fascinating of them all: the fourth planet, one hundred and two thousand kilometers in diameter, with six moons, three of them larger than Earth, its dark reddish-brown surface radiating heat steadily into space, covered with liquid water oceans with narrow ribbons of continent and low mountains between like stripes on a basketball.

"Thirty-two billion square kilometers," Ariel said in wonder. "If the land is ten percent of the surface, that's over three billion square kilometers." Pause for quick figuring. "Earth had about one and a third billion square kilometers of land. How many people could live here?"

"At two g's, not me," Cham said.

"The physics don't make sense," Hakim said. "Not dense enough to support a solid surface… The density below the rocky shell must be less than one and a half grams per cubic centimeter. How is this done?"

"How is anyof it done?" George Dempsey asked.

The images and charts were noached to Greyhoundand Shrike. Hans' voice replied: "We're almost at maximum range. Soon be out of touch for a while. How is it?"

"I think they must be treating us like nursery school kids—if not like stray insects."

"We've been looking over the mug shots of the citizens of Leviathan," said Hans. "The crested critter is pretty audacious. They like to repeat themselves, don't they? Anybody prepared to make a judgment now?"

"I think we're close."

"What more do we need?"

"The final dotted iand crossed t."

Hans chuckled. "I'll settle for frontier justice and getting the hell away."

"We've come this far," Martin said. "We've been invited to orbit the fourth planet, and we've already set our course. We'll be down there in twenty-seven days."

"Godspeed," Hans said.

"How's politics?" Martin asked hesitantly.

"My worry, not yours, Martin."

"Just curious."

"We're prepared for whatever you ask of us. Count on it."

"Any idea who killed Rosa?" Martin asked.

"Time enough after the Job's done."

"Jennifer wants some extended time with Giacomo. She thinks she may have something interesting to present to the ships' minds."

"I can't wait," Hans said. "Not more super-physics doom and gloom, I hope. We're getting enough of that here, every time we look at those damned planets."

"She says it might be good news."

"Put her on, then. Giacomo's in the nose with me."

Jennifer came forward and said she wanted the bridge empty while she talked with Giacomo. Humans and Brothers left, all but Silken Parts, who was collaborating on the problems using Brother math.

"Hans doesn't sound good," Erin told Martin in the hall outside the bridge.

Ariel concurred. "I hope he's keeping it together."