“And that’s why you work so hard here.”

“Analysis now, Madeleine?” Dorothy asked dryly. “I also work to live, as must we all… But still, yes, I failed Malenfant, there on the Cannonball. I used to be a priest. If ever there was a soul in torment, in his own silent, lonely way, it was Reid Malenfant. And I couldn’t find a way to help him.”

Madeleine scowled, irritated. “What happened on the Cannonball was about Malenfant, Dorothy, not about you and your guilt. Malenfant was a victim. A tool of the Gaijin, dragged across the Galaxy, part of plans we still know nothing about. Why should he put up with that?”

“Because he knew, or suspected, that it was the right thing to do, if the Gaijin had any hope—” She waved a gloved hand at the damaged sky. “ — of changing this. The rapacious colonization waves, the wars, the trashing of worlds, the extinctions. If there was even a chance of making a difference, it might have been right for Malenfant to sacrifice himself.”

“But he’s just a man, a human. Why should he give himself up? Would you?”

Dorothy sighed. “I’m not the right person to ask anymore. Would you?”

“I don’t know.” Madeleine was chilled. “Poor Malenfant.”

“Wherever he is, whatever becomes of him, I hope he isn’t alone. Even Christ had the comfort of His family, at the foot of the cross. You brought refugees here, didn’t you?”

Madeleine grunted. “I’m told that everybody here is a refugee. But here we are as safe as anywhere.”

Dorothy barked laughter. “You don’t get it yet, do you? Obviously you haven’t spoken to Nemoto… She’s still alive. Did you know that? Centuries old… Of all the places to come — this, Mercury, as the last refuge of mankind? Wrong. ”

“Mercury is deep in the inner system. So close to the Sun the Gaijin don’t want to come here.”

“But the Gaijin are not the enemy,” Dorothy hissed. “You have to think things through, Madeleine. We think we know how the Crackers work. They manipulate the target star, causing it to nova…” A nova: a stellar explosion, releasing as much energy in a few days as a star would have expended in ten thousand years. “The Crackers feed on the light pulse, you see,” Dorothy said. “They ride their solar-sail craft out to more stars, scattering like seeds from a burst fungus, sailing past planets scorched and ruined. We used to think novae were natural, a question of a glitch in a star’s fusion processes, perhaps caused by an infall of material from a binary companion. Now we wonder if any nova we have observed historically has been natural. Perhaps all of them, all over the sky, have been the responsibility of the Crackers — or foul species like them.”

And Madeleine started to see it. “How do you make a star nova?”

“Simple. In principle. You set a chain of powerful particle accelerators in orbit around your target star. They create currents of charged particles, which set up a powerful magnetic field, caging the star — which can then be manipulated.”

“…Ah. But you need a resource base to manufacture those thousands, millions of machines. And a place to make your new generation of solar sailing boats.”

“Yes. Madeleine, here in the Solar System, what would be the ideal location for such a mine?”

A rocky world orbiting conveniently close to the central star itself. A big fat core of iron and nickel just begging to be dug out and broken up and exploited, without even an awkward rocky shell to cut through…

“Mercury,” Madeleine whispered. “What do we do? Do we have to evacuate?”

“Where to?” Dorothy said, comparatively gently. “Meacher, remember where you are. We’ve already lost the Solar System. This is the last bolthole. All we can do is dig deep, deep down, as deep as possible.”

Something about her emphasis on those words made Madeleine look hard at Dorothy, but her face remained obscured.

“What are you doing here, Dorothy? You’re planning something, aren’t you?” Her mind raced. “Some way of striking back at the Crackers — is that what this is about? Are you working with Nemoto?”

But Dorothy evaded the question. “What can we do? The Crackers have already driven off the Gaijin, a species much older and wiser and more powerful than us. We’re just vermin infesting a piece of prime real estate.”

“If you believe we’re vermin, you really have lost your faith,” Madeleine said coldly.

Dorothy laughed. “Compared to the Gaijin, even the Crackers, what other word would you use?” She peered up at the sky, her face obscured by scuffed glass. “Remember, Madeleine. Tell them to dig deep. That’s vital. As deep as they can…”

She went back to Carl ap Przibram to discuss the issue of the Aborigines. Interstellar war or not, they still had no other place to go.

“Please be straightforward with me. I appreciate you’re trying to help. I don’t want to offend you, or imply—”

“ — that I’m some kind of immoral bastard,” he said tightly.

The archaic term surprised her. She wondered what thirty-eighth-century oath lay on the other side of the chattering translators.

“This isn’t an easy job,” he said. “People always find it hard to accept what I have to tell them.”

“I sympathize. But I need you to help me. I’m a long way from home — from my time. It’s hard for me to understand what’s happening here, to progress the issue.” She pointed to the ceiling. “There are two hundred people up there. They’ve come all the way in from Triton, the edge of the Solar System. They have absolutely no place to go. They are completely dependent, refugees.”

“We are all refugees.”

She grunted. “That’s the standard mantra here, isn’t it?”

He frowned at her. “But it’s true. And I don’t know if you understand how significant that is. I haven’t met a traveler before, Madeleine Meacher. But I’ve read about your kind.”

“My kind?”

“You were born on Earth, weren’t you? At a time when there were no colonies beyond the home planet.”

“Not quite true—”

“You are accustomed to think of us, the space dwellers, as exotic beings, somehow beyond the humanity you grew up with. But it isn’t like that. My home society, on Vesta, was fifteen centuries old. My ancestors spent all that time making the asteroid habitable. Centuries living in tunnels and lava tubes and caves, cowering from radiation, knowing that a single mistake could kill everything they cared about… We are a deeply conservative people, Madeleine Meacher. We are not used to travel. We are not world builders. We, too, are a long way from home.”

“You got here first,” Madeleine said. “And now you’re driving everybody else off.”

He shook his head. “It isn’t like that. If not for us, this — a habitable corner of Mercury — wouldn’t be here at all.”

She stood up. “I know you’ll do your job, Carl ap Przibram.”

He nodded. “I appreciate your courtesy. But you understand that doesn’t guarantee I will be able to let your party land here. If we cannot feed them…” He steepled his long fingers. “In the long run,” he said, “it may make no difference anyhow. Do you see that?”

If the Crackers win, if they come here. That’s what he means.

He studied her face, as if pleading for help, for understanding.

Everybody does his best, she thought bleakly. How little it all means.