Nobody wanted to turn in a friend. The Psych people could lock him up forever. Their zoo of Hel-born mental mutations was a blue-chip growth industry.

The project was too delicate to risk its compromise by the unbalanced.

But the production team needed Ion. Nobody had his sure, delicate touch with the test systems. Best let it ride and hope he would come around. This thing with Melanie could be a positive if it jarred him back to reality.

Paul turned. He looked at a thin, short, weary little man who had a thousand years etched into his face and a million agonies flaring from his narrow little black eyes. Right decision? Those eyes were lamps of torment backfired by incipient madness.

Something rattled the foundations of the universe.

The snowy landscape glowed a deep, bloody red. The glow faded quickly.

Marescu turned an ashen color. He stumbled to the dome face, caressed it with shaking fingers. "Paul... That was damned close. They could have destabilized one of the test cores. We'd have been blown into the next universe."

Fear had drained Neidermeyer's face too. He mumbled, "But nothing happened."

"I'm complaining anyway. They ought to have better sense." Feeling the breath of the angel on his neck had snapped his streak of self-pity.

He stared into the darkness outside. A pale new light had begun etching the shadows more deeply. One brilliant point of light slid across the screen of fixed stars, growing more intense.

"They're coming in fast."

Hel's surface was screaming under a storm of violet-white light when the dome polarized. The glass continued to respond to the light beating against it, its inner surface crawling with an iridescence like that of oil on water.

"Doctor Neidermeyer? Mister Marescu? Excuse me a moment."

They turned. Marine Major Gottfried Feuchtmayer stood at the escalator's head. He was Deputy Chief of Security, and a man who appeared to have just stepped out of a recruiting commerical. He was the quintessential Marine.

"Bet he wakes up looking like that," Marescu muttered.

"What is it, Major?" Neidermeyer asked.

"We need your assistance in the arsenal. We need two devices for shipboard installation."

Marescu's stomach went fluttery. The butterflies donned Alpine boots and started dancing. "Major... "

"Briefing in Final Process in fifteen minutes, gentlemen. Thank you."

Neidermeyer nodded. The Major descended the escalator.

"So," Marescu snapped. "They'll never use it, eh? You're a fool, Paul."

"Maybe they won't. You don't know... Maybe it's a field test of some kind."

"Don't lie to yourself. No more than you already are. The damned bomb doesn't need testing. I already tested it. They're going to blow up a sun, Paul!" Ion's mouth worked faster and faster. His voice rose toward a squeak. "Not some star, Paul. A sun. Somebody's sun. The goddamned murdering fascists are going to wipe out a whole solar system."

"Calm down, Ion."

"Calm down? I can't. I won't! How many lives, Paul? How many lives are going to be blasted away by those firecrackers we've given them? They've made bloody fools of us, haven't they? They suckered us. Smug little purblind fools that we are, we made ourselves believe that it would never go that far. But we were lying to ourselves. We knew. They always use the weapon, no matter how horrible it is."

Paul did not respond. Marescu was reacting without all the facts. And saying things everyone else thought but did not say.

For the research staff, service at Hel Station had been a deal with the devil. Each scientist had traded physical freedom and talent for unlimited funding and support for a pet line of research. The Station was ultra-secret, but the knowledge it produced was reshaping modern science. The place seethed with new discoveries.

All Navy had asked for its money was a weapon capable of making a sun go nova.

Navy had its weapon now. The scientists had scrounged around and found a few Hawking Holes left over from the Big Bang, had pulled a few mega-trillion quarks out of a linear accelerator which circumscribed Hel itself, had sorted them, had stacked them in orbital shells around the mini-singularities, and had installed these "cores" in a delivery system. The carrier missile would perish in the fires of a star, but the core itself would sink to the star's heart before the quark shells collapsed, mixing positives and negatives in a tremendous energy yield which would ignite a swift and savage helium fusion process.

Navy had its weapon. And now, apparently, a target for it.

"What have you done, Paul?"

"I don't know, Ion. God help me if you're right."

The passageways were a-crawl with Marines, Marescu swore. "I didn't realize there were so many of the bastards. They been breeding on us? Where's everybody else?" The usual back and forth of technical and scientific staffs had ceased. Civilians were scarce.

At Final Process they were told to report to the arsenal instead.

They found three civilians waiting outside the scarlet door. The Director, though, was an R & D admiral in civilian disguise.

"This's a farce," Marescu growled at her. "Two hundred comic opera soldiers... "

"Can it, Ion," Paul whispered.

The Director did not bat an eye. "They're watching you, Ion. They don't like your mouth."

Marescu was startled. Ordinarily, even the Eagle did not bite back.

"What's going on, Kathe?" Neidermeyer asked.

Marescu grinned. Kathe Adler. Kathe the Eagle. It was one of those nasty little jokes that drift around behind an unpopular superior's back. Admiral Adler had a thin wedge of a face, an all-time beak of a nose, and a receding hairline. Never had a birthname fit its bearer so well.

"They're taking delivery on the product, Paul. I want you to work with their science officers. Ion, you'll prepare a test program for their shipboard computers."

"They're going to use it, aren't they?" Marescu demanded.

"I hope not. We all hope not, Ion."

"Shit. I believe that like I believe in the Tooth Fairy." He glanced at Paul. Neidermeyer was trying to believe. He was like all the science staff. Keeping himself fed on lies.

"Ship's down, Major," a Marine Lieutenant announced.

"Very well," Feuchtmayer replied.

"We'd better get lined out," the Director said. "Paul, pick whomever you want to help. Ion, you'll have to visit the ship to see what you'll be working with. I want your preliminary brief as soon as you can write it. Josip, get with their Weapons officers and draw up the preparatory specs for carrying mounts and launch systems. Have the people in the shops drop everything else."

Josip asked, "We have to build it all here?"

"From scratch. Orders."

"But... "

"Gentlemen, they're in a hurry. I suggest you get started."

"They brought the whole ship down?" Paul asked. Ships seldom made planetary landings.

"That's right. They don't want to waste time working from orbit. That would take an extra month."

"But... " That was dangerous business. The ship's crew would stay crazy-busy balancing her gravity fields with the planet's. If they made one mistake the vessel would be torn apart.

"It shouldn't take more than twelve days this way," Admiral Adler speculated. "Assuming we hit no snags. Let's go." She pushed through the red door.

The completed weapons had a sharkish, deadly look, looking nothing like bombs. The four devices were spaced around the arsenal floor. Each was a lean needle of black a hundred meters long and ten in diameter. They were longer than the shuttle craft intended to lift them to orbit. Antennae and the snouts of nasty defensive weapons sprouted from their dark skins like scrub brush from an old, burned slope.

They were fully automated little warships. The essentials of the nova bomb occupied space that would have been given over to crew in manned vessels. They were fast and shielded heavily enough to punch through a powerful defense.