"I am not as good with words as other Pans have been. I don't know if a pep talk from me will do you any good. We have our own tragedies to face, our own… evil to deal with. But all that has to be put aside for now. It can't knock us off the road.

"This is the anniversary of the day we left the solar system. The road takes us to meet Earth's Killers. I knowwhat I have to do. You all know what you have to do."

Enough was enough. "Let's go," he said.

Humans and Brothers, the crew of the Trojan Horseentered the cafeteria. Martin sat against the wall. Hakim sat beside him. "I am not frightened," Hakim said, eyes glittering, face flushed as if with fever.

"I am," Martin said.

"It would be more polite for me to be frightened with you," Hakim said, shaking his head. "But I am not. I feel as if I have lived a very long time. If I must face Shaitan, now is the time to do it. Allah will have pity on us all, and we will…" He swallowed. "This talk of God does not disturb you?"

"No," Martin said, gripping Hakim's shoulder.

"Rosa did not take Allah away from us."

"Of course not."

"We will grow in Allah's sight, after this," Hakim said. "Allah loved Earth, and loves his frail children."

Martin nodded. He watched Ariel sitting at a table, getting up as table and benches sank into the floors. He smiled at her. She looked around, held up her arms, Where am I going to sit?

Martin patted the floor beside him.

She sat. "I think we should take another vote… on who should be Pan. After the Job."

Martin nodded absently.

"Poor Rosa," she said, drawing up her knees.

Martin closed his eyes. Hakim murmured a sura from the Koran. The ten Brothers coiled near the middle. Eye on Sky approached Martin.

"We we are sorry for the tragedy of the death," he said. "We we are hoping this does not make you less efficient."

"I appreciate your concern," Martin said.

Paola put an arm around Eye on Sky. "We'll do our work well."

Martin looked up into its "face," like the frayed end of a rope with eyes and a bouquet of claws. "Times past, an observation was made by one of yours," Eye on Sky said. "In we our hearing. That humans might know more about death and killing than Brothers. This is not so. Brothers have fought with each other, though not for many thousands of years. "

Paola hovered nervously, looking between them.

"We we and you will share the guilt for this vengeance," Eye on Sky said. "It is agreed, as the Brothers agreed when we ourselves set this mission along, this Job."

He smelled of tea and woodsmoke, a combination Martin had not experienced before.

"I'm glad to have you with us," Martin said.

"Until we our world was destroyed," Eye on Sky continued, "Brothers thought the stars to be peaceful, places of unity and being sure-footed. We we have learned, those of other stars are only like we ourselves."

"We're a team," Martin said, rising and extending his arms. Eye on Sky leaned forward, and Martin hugged the sinewy braid as well, feeling the leathery dry ness of its cords ripple beneath his fingers.

The ship began its sounds of dividing, familiar to them all. The door to the cafeteria admitted a mom and a snake mother, and then smoothed shut, its outlines vanishing into the wall. Fields appeared automatically around each of them, vibrating faint pastel colors. Martin watched Eye on Sky return to the center, followed by his field. The humans stayed on the periphery.

"End of deceleration in twenty seconds," the mom said.

Their weight passed from them until they floated. Martin automatically did the exercises that controlled his inner ear and his stomach.

"Separation will begin in fifteen seconds," the mom said. The snake mother made low string sounds and percussive clicks for the Brothers.

The ladder fields grew brighter. Muffled sounds of matter being rearranged, fake matter growing; Martin's hair stood on end. He thought of the decaying death ship lost in endless cold void, its fake matter fizzling away after ages, mummies of the crew surrounded by eternal haloes of cold dust, undisturbed in the interstellar medium until their arrival.

The cafeteria closed in. Fields jostled them within the smaller, rearranged space. They now occupied the sleeping quarters of the Trojan Horse.

"I told them about the Iliad," Paola whispered to Martin and Ariel. "They were very impressed. And we chose another name for the ship, when we're in disguise, so we don't have to explain Trojan Horse: Double Seed."

More sounds, sliding and scraping, something vibrating like a broken pitch pipe. Trojan Horse/Double Seedbroke free of Greyhoundand Shrike.

All three ships spread apart, each on a different course and schedule, each with a different mission, fifty billion kilometers from Leviathan, still racing at close to light-speed.

"Super deceleration in ten seconds," the mom said.

They had been through this many times before, enough to be used to it, but Martin felt a deep sense of dread: dread of the poised dreamstate, his every move second-guessed by the volumetric fields. He felt them creep around his molecules, taking inventory of his body. And dread as well for what they all would have to face if they succeeded, when the ships came back together: the lies and deceit he knew had been perpetrated on the crews.

"Good luck," Ariel said.

He tried to think of a pleasant scene on Earth, to lock this into his thoughts and avoid visions of the dead.

Instead, he saw as if through a grim documentary that the entire crew had been fed fake matter food, that they were now made of massless coerced points in space; that when the Job was done they would simply dissolve like the Red Tree Runners' Ship of the Law.

The Law would be done at the cost of their being; in fact, they were nothing right at this moment, merely illusions on a ghost ship falling again into brightness to bring death.

His unvoiced moan seemed to echo behind his closed eyes. If he opened his eyes, he would see the others, trying to do little tasks, conversing or just sitting, waiting out the constrained hours. He preferred to be alone with this nightmare.

Twenty-two hours passed.

An hour before super deceleration ended, as planned, Hakim broadcast their first message to the beings around Leviathan. He had created a simple binary signal repeating pi and the first ten prime numbers, without the Brothers' help; the moms had indicated Brother mathematics was most unusual, and not likely to be easily understood.

The signal was adjusted to disguise their velocity. It would reach Leviathan's worlds in twenty-three hours; Trojan Horse/Double Seedwould be twenty-two billion kilometers from the system by then, easily visible to Leviathan's masters.

The mom informed them that Greyhoundand Shrikewere doing well, that all was going as planned.

Martin listened to the mom's voice, acknowledged with a nod that he had heard the news and understood it, closed his eyes again, waited, still not convinced of his reality, his solidity.

Ariel touched his arm. "You don't look happy," she said.

"Nightmare," he said, shaking his head.

"You're not asleep," she said.

"Doesn't matter."

"Want to talk?"

"About what?"

"About after."

He smiled. "After we get the Job done? Or after we've decelerated?"