Ozzie frowned, horribly intrigued despite every liberal moral he possessed. “That’s an impossible feedback.”

“Not quite. It only has to hold together for a fraction of a second. Conversion is almost instantaneous. That gives us a loophole.”

“No.” Ozzie put his hands to his temples, shaking his head hard enough to make his hair wave from side to side. Realization of what was about to happen was affecting his body far worse than any little sober-up tablet forced down his throat. He really did think he was going to be physically sick. “No, no, I don’t give shit about the mechanics. Nigel, you can’t do this, man. You can’t kill MorningLightMountain, it is the Primes now, their whole species.”

“We’ve been through this, Ozzie; the War Cabinet, Dynasty heads, the StPetersburg team; we looked at every tactical scenario, every option. There’s nothing else we can do. MorningLightMountain is trying to exterminate us, just like the Starflyer planned. Maybe you should have tried a little harder to get me to take notice of Johansson instead of playing the romantic underdog. Not that you ever were that, Ozzie, it just suits you to pretend so you can get laid more often. Well, wake up and smell the coffee; we’re not college students anymore, Ozzie, we left California behind three and a half centuries ago. Grow up; I had to—and I get laid more than you because of it. Why do you think I used your name in the War Cabinet announcement? People trust you, Ozzie, they like you. If you’d kicked up a fuss back when you met Johansson, they would have listened; Heather would have busted the Starflyer’s corruption apart like a jackhammer on glass. Don’t go around blaming me and calling me a warmonger. You knew, Ozzie, you goddamn knew about a threat to the entire human race, and you didn’t fucking tell anyone. Who’s to blame, Ozzie? Who backed us into this corner, huh? Who took away our options?”

Ozzie had sunk back into the chair as Nigel’s voice grew louder. It wasn’t often Nigel, the original calculating iceman, lost his temper, but when he did it was best not to interrupt—people had been ruined, or worse, for making that mistake. Besides, there was a nasty taste of guilt spreading around Ozzie’s brain like a fast-acting poison. “It’s genocide, man,” he said simply and quietly. There was no logical argument he could come up with to counter the tirade. “It is so not what we are.”

“You think I don’t fucking know that,” Nigel stormed. “I wore the same T-shirts as you, I went on the same marches. I hated the military industrial imperialism that ran the world back then. Now look where you’ve put me!”

“Okay.” Ozzie raised his hands. “Just calm down, man.”

“I am fucking calm. Anybody else, Ozzie, and I mean anybody, and they would have been wiped from history by now. Nobody would question what happened to you, because you would never have existed.”

“I’ve seen it happen, man,” Ozzie whispered. “I walked one of the ghost planets. I witnessed their history; I felt them die, Nigel, every last one of them. You can’t let it happen. You just can’t, I’m begging you, man. I’m on my goddamn knees, here. Don’t do this.”

“There is no other way.”

“There’s always another way. Look, Clouddancer said the barrier generator was only disabled, not destroyed.”

Nigel gave him a startled look. “It was a variant on the flare bomb, we think; it altered the generator’s quantum structure.”

“There, see! The generator is still there. We’ve just got to repair it, get it working again.”

“Ozzie!” Nigel gave his friend a weary, despairing look. “You’re grasping at straws. It’s not you.”

“We have to try.”

“Ozzie, think it through. The barrier generator is the size of a planet, and we’ve got days, maybe only hours before MorningLightMountain strikes back at the Commonwealth. If it does, it will kill us, it will genocide the human race. Do you understand that?”

“Let me try,” Ozzie implored. “You’re sending a ship, right, the one with the nova bomb?”

“Yeah. We developed something new, Ozzie, this drive is something else again. It doesn’t use any of our old wormhole technology; you really do just jump into hyperspace. MorningLightMountain can’t detect it.”

“Perfect! Let me go on it. I can take a look at the generator. You know if anyone can work it out, I can.”

“Ozzie—”

“MorningLightMountain won’t know I’m there. If it starts an attack on the Commonwealth I’ll fling a nova bomb into its star myself. But we have to try this. Let me go, Nigel. It’s a chance. I know you, man; you won’t be able to live with yourself if you don’t at least consider it.”

“Ozzie, every physicist in the Commonwealth has been studying the data which the Second Chance gathered on the generator. We don’t even know what some of the shells are, let alone what they do. And we certainly don’t know how to build sections of them. Not inside a week. Get real here.”

“I can do it, I know I can. There must be a self-repair function, something that can undo the damage. Yeah! Clouddancer said it should outlive the star itself. If the Starflyer could have destroyed the generator, it would. That gives us a chance.”

“You’re not going, Ozzie.”

“Give me one good reason.”

“I don’t trust you.”

For a moment Ozzie thought Nigel had hit him—his skin certainly went numb the way it did after a sharp blow. He couldn’t hear anything either. The air in the study had turned dead. “What?” His voice was a piteous croak.

“I don’t know if you’re a Starflyer agent or not. If it’s going to take a last shot at defeating us, then this would be absolutely perfect. So read my lips: you are not taking our two most secret weapons into the MorningLightMountain star system by yourself. They are the only guarantees of racial survival we’ve got.”

“I’m not a Starflyer agent,” Ozzie said meekly. “You can’t really think that.”

“You’re either a friend of Johansson’s like you said, or a Starflyer agent. Those are the only two reasons for stopping the Far Away cargo inspections, because both groups need to get their equipment through without drawing any official attention. Right now, Johansson is out of contact on his way to Far Away, so I can’t confirm your story short of a memory read. I don’t want to do that, even if we had the time—which we don’t. So for now, I’m doing what any good friend would do, and quarantining you. When Johansson gets back, he’ll be able to vouch for you. I’m sorry, Ozzie, but we’ve learned the hard way just how deep the Starflyer has penetrated our society. I’m even partly to blame for that. I let that sonofabitch Alster fool me, which is going to take some serious piety on my part to recover from. And we both know how hard that will be.”

“You really mean this, don’t you, Nige; you’re not going to let me go.”

“I can’t. If this was reversed, you wouldn’t either.”

“Oh, man. This is the only chance we’ve got to save our souls. We can’t commit genocide.”

“We have to.”

“Look, will you at least tell the captain to take a flyby of the generator?”

“Sure thing, Ozzie. We’ll do that.”

Ozzie knew that tone, Nigel was just humoring him. “You son of a bitch.”

Nigel stood up. “You and your friends will stay here until this is settled. I can’t give you unisphere access, but if there’s anything you want, just ask.”

Ozzie almost told him where to stick his hospitality. “All the data on the generator. I’m going to look at it anyway.”

“Fair enough, Ozzie.”

“And if I find a way of fixing it…”

“I’ll bend over and you can kick my ass into orbit.”

“Damn right I will. Oh, and Nigel, get the boy a girl, will you? A sweet one, not some fifth-lifer.”

Nigel gave him an irritated glance. “Do I look like a pimp?”

Ozzie smiled.

“This is only going to take a week,” Nigel said. “He can wait.”

“Hey, come on, man, we could all be dead by then. The kid’s never been laid. Now you’ve gone and flung him in jail. Five-star, sure, but it’s still the pen. Give him a break.”