Things happened fast now. The helmet had already been clamped down over the Warden of Heaven’s head, and crew members had shooed away the aides and were manipulating the suit’s controls. Through the bubble the Warden’s eyes could be seen moving back and forth uncertainly, responding to inscrutable hisses and creaks from the suit as its systems came alive. His lips moved and he nodded and gave thumbs-up signs as communications were tested.

They pushed him through a pressure hatch at one end of the capsule, closed it behind him, and turned a wheel to dog it shut. He was in the airlock.

“Why’s he going alone?” I asked.

“Supposedly that’s how the Cousins—excuse me, the Geometers—wanted it,” Sammann said. “Send one, they said.”

“So we sent him?” I asked incredulously.

Sammann shrugged. “But that’s part of the Geometers’ strategy, isn’t it? If we were allowed to send a whole delegation, we could hedge our bets. But if the whole planet is allowed to send only one representative, whom do we pick? That tells them a lot.”

“Yeah, but why—?”

Sammann cut me off with an even more exaggerated shrug. “You seriously expect me to be able to explain why the Sæcular Power makes the decisions it makes?”

“Okay. Sorry. Never mind.”

Hisses and clanks and terse utterances from the crew signaled the opening of the airlock’s outer door. A small arm unfolded itself from the Geometers’ robot probe and reached toward the ship, out of view of this window. When it drew back, a few moments later, it brought the Warden of Heaven with it. The arm’s steely hand had gripped a metal bracket that projected from the suit’s round shoulder—a lifting point. The Geometers understood our engineering, and knew a bracket for a bracket.

The bogey disengaged from the capsule and fired a puff of gas to get itself drifting away, then, after a few seconds, ignited larger thrusters that accelerated it toward the icosahedron. The Warden of Heaven waved back to us. “Everything is okay,” he announced over the wireless. Then his voice was replaced by a harsh buzzing tone. A crew member turned it down. “They’re jamming us,” he announced. “His Serenity is on his own.”

“No,” said an aide, “God is with him.”

The speelycaptor zoomed in on the Warden, being drawn backwards toward the icosahedron. He was getting harder to see, even at maximum zoom, but it looked like he was gesticulating, tapping his helmet and throwing up his hands in confusion. “Okay, we get it!” Jesry said. “You can’t hear.”

“I’m worried about his pulse. Way too high for a man his age,” said a crew member.

“You’ve still got telemetry?” Jesry asked.

“Just barely. They jammed vox first. Now they are attacking the other channels…nope. Lost it. Bye-bye.”

“The Geometers are some kind of military hardasses,” Sammann said, perhaps unnecessarily.

The video went on with little further commentary until the robot probe and the Warden had shrunk to a tiny cluster of grey pixels. Then it cut out and went to black. Sammann paused it. “In the original, what follows is four hours of basically nothing,” he said. “They just sit there and wait. Your friend Jesry baits the Warden’s toadies into a philosophical debate and crushes them. After that, no one wants to talk. There is only one event of note, which is that after about one hour the jamming stops.”

“Really? So they can talk to the Warden again?”

“I didn’t say that. The jamming signals are turned off, but they can’t get any data from the Warden’s spacesuit. Most likely what it means is that the suit had been shut down.”

“Because something happened to the Warden of Heaven or…”

“Most people think he got out of the suit. Since it was no longer necessary, it was turned off to conserve power.”

“That implies…”

“That the Hedron—as people are calling it—has an atmosphere we can breathe, yes,” Sammann said. “Or that the Warden was dead on arrival.”

“The Warden of Heaven’s dead?”

Sammann started the speely playing again. The time code in the corner had jumped forward a few hours.

“New signal from the Hedron,” announced a tired crew member. “Repetitive pulses. Microwaves. High power. I’d say they are illuminating us with radar.”

“Like they don’t already know where we are!” someone scoffed.

“Cut the chatter!” ordered the voice I’d come to think of as the captain’s. “Do you think they are acquiring us?”

“As in acquiring a target for a weapons launch,” Sammann translated.

“It’s definitely that kind of a narrow-beam signal,” said the other, “but steady—not homing in.”

“Activity on the base plate!” Jesry called. “Dead center.”

The image once again wheeled to the huge circle-in-triangle. Then it zoomed. A dark mote was visible in the center. As the zoom went on, this grew and resolved itself as a circular pore.

“Give us some distance!” the captain ordered.

“Brace for emergency acceleration…three, two, one, now,” said another voice, and then everything went out of whack for a minute. People and stuff flew around. Loud clunks and hisses sounded. Everything that was loose ended up plastered against the bulkhead closest to the icosahedron as the capsule accelerated away from it. The woman holding the speelycaptor did her share of gasping and cursing. But soon enough she got it pointed back out the window. “Something is coming out of that port!” Jesry announced, and once again we were treated to a long, veering zoom-in. But this time the hole wasn’t crisp-edged and black. It was pinkish, its boundaries ill-defined. The pink part was moving; it separated itself from the base of the icosahedron. It had been cast off. It was adrift in space. The hole irised shut behind it.

“That doesn’t look like a nuke,” someone said.

“Understatement of the year,” Sammann muttered.

“Move in on it.”

“Brace for acceleration…three two, one, now.” There was another messy scene as the capsule reversed its direction and began heading back toward the icosahedron. Yet again we had to wait as the indefatigable woman with the speelycaptor made her way back to that tiny, filthy window and re-acquired the shot.

She gasped.

So did I.

“What is it?” asked one of the voices. They couldn’t see what she—what I—could see because they weren’t peering at it through magnifying optics.

“It’s him,” said the woman holding the speelycaptor. “It’s the Warden of Heaven!” She refrained from mentioning one important detail, which was that he was stark naked. “They threw the Warden of Heaven out the airlock!”

Sammann stopped it. “That has become the hip catch phrase of the moment,” he told me. “Technically, though, it’s not an airlock. It’s the port where they spit out the little nukes.”

The Warden at this point was still small and poorly resolved, but he had been getting bigger, and I had been steeling myself for what he would look like close-up. “I can keep playing it if you want,” Sammann offered, none too enthusiastically, “or—”

“I’ve seen enough gore for one day, thanks,” I said. “Don’t you explode or something?”

“There was a little bit of that. By the time they got him back into the capsule—well, it was a mess.”

“So the Geometers just—executed him?”

“This is not known. He might have died of natural causes. They found a burst aneurysm on autopsy.”

“I imagine they found a lot of burst stuff!”

“Eew!” Cord said from up front.

“Exactly—so it’s hard to say whether it blew before or after he was thrown out.”

“Have the Geometers sent out any communications since this happened?”

“We’d have no way of knowing that. This speely was leaked. Other than that, the Powers That Be have managed to control information pretty effectively.”

“Is everyone looking at this speely? Does the whole world know about it?”

“The Powers That Be have shut down most of the Reticulum in order to control propagation of this speely,” Sammann said. “So only a few people have seen it. Most people, if they’ve heard anything, have only heard rumors.”