Anvil of Stars Read Online Free PDF Page A

all-absorbing envelope…"
    "No," Hakim agreed. An envelope around each star—a Dyson construct of multiple orbiting structures surrounding the star in many layers—would have reduced the stellar images to heat-waste, dull infra-red only. Martin checked the information available on the interstellar particle fluxes surrounding the stars—the stellar winds—and felt a tickle of apprehension.
    The Ship of the Law was one point eight trillion kilometers from the nearest, the Buttercup. Martin reached out to touch a glowing geometric shape pulsing slowly next to the star images. The shape unfolded like a flower into a series of pentagonal petals. He touched the petals in sequence until he had the information he desired. "The Buttercup may have large structures in orbit, besides these five dark masses. You think that's sign of armoring?"
    Hakim nodded. Martin summoned and inspected occultations, spectrum variability, brightness fluctuations. He called up absorption spectra for the stellar atmosphere, outer stellar envelope and "wind" of particles, and planetary atmospheres.
    The Ship of the Law had not sent out its remotes, and the information he received obviously came from angles and distances not their own.
    "I have obtained this additional information from the moms, three months ago," Hakim said, as if reading his thoughts. "They've kept watch on this group for a long time. Perhaps thousands of years."
    The Benefactor machines that had destroyed the Killers around Sol had collected a fragment of a killer probe and analyzed its composition, checking for minute traces of radioactive elements and proportions of other elements. Martin thought it likely the Benefactor machines knew the characteristics of populations of stars for thousands of light years around Sol, and had sent the Dawn Treader in a direction likely to encounter stars matching the suspected origins of the killer probes. Perhaps the moms know even more…
    Martin suddenly didn't like being alone with Hakim in the schoolroom, talking about such things. He wanted the others to share his responsibility and back his conclusions. He wanted a mom present. "How about the assay?" he asked, swallowing too noisily.
    "You can refer to it."
    He flushed, touched another shape marked with a spinning atom symbol, and it blossomed. The comparison between the probe's composition and the Buttercup's stellar spectra and estimated planetary makeup was close. The killer machines could have been manufactured in this system.
    Additional information came up beneath his questing fingers. Four other inhabited worlds within two hundred and ninety light years of the group had been attacked and transformed by killer probes, all within the past thousand years. There were one million three hundred thousand stars within this radius, or roughly one star for every seventy-eight and a half cubic light years. Four civilizations had been murdered, five including the Earth; only two besides the Earth had left any survivors.
    And where are those survivors? On other Ships of the Law?
    The four victim stars lay within a hypothetical sphere determined by the density of stars within the possible paths of killer probes, and complex analyses of how often those probes would reproduce, and how quickly they would saturate such a sphere. The center of the sphere was within two light years of this group of three, Buttercup, Cornflower, Firestorm.
    Hakim had been through this material already, and with growing excitement, embellished details he thought might not be obvious.
    "All right," Martin said. His hand shook. He controlled it. "It seems… interesting."
    Hakim smiled and nodded once, then watched intently while Martin perused the data again.
    On Earth, Martin's father had compared the attempt to destroy killer probes to the murder of Captain Cook by distrustful Hawaiians. To the islanders, Cook had been the powerful representative of a more technologically advanced civilization.
    If Earth's Killers lived