To Crush the Moon Read Online Free PDF

crew is in storage. But Bruno, she's ertial, and on a collision course with the sun. Thirty-nine days from now.”
    “Ah. I see.” Bruno nodded at that. As a young man not yet to the century mark, he'd made his greatest fame by rescuing the sun from the fall of the first Ring Collapsiter, which would surely have destroyed it. He rose from his chair. “Well, I suppose I have work to do.”
    At this, Tamra simply rolled her eyes. “Your swashbuckling days are over, darling. We have a meeting with the navy in fifteen minutes.”
    And this was true; he'd been king for eleven hundred years, whereas he'd been a swashbuckling hero for barely more than a decade, and only then by accident. Declarant-Philander Bruno de Towaji! It seemed an improbable history now, even to him. Before that he'd been a teacher, a drunken lover, a layabout courtier, and a wilderness hermit. Ah, but like everyone in the Queendom, he had the immorbid body of a twenty-five-year-old; his soul might grow old, but his physical self could not. Was he less capable of heroism now? Surely not! So he had dutifully attended his meetings, dispensing judgments and calculations and recommendations while his wife faxed herself to the navy's flagship, the QSS
Malu'i
—Tongan for “Protector”—and ordered her seat of government temporarily transferred there.
    And yes, it might be the job of a woman to manage a fleet in time of disaster, and to rule over a Queendom in times of peace, but surely it was the job of a man to rush forward willy-nilly to survey the scene ahead of her.
    “Let the navy handle this,” his courtiers had urged as he finalized his plans. “Your Majesty, we need you
here
.” Which was blatant flattery and foolish besides, for he was first and foremost an inventor, and impatient—after all this time!—with the fussy details of governance and the inane formalities of court. The courtiers and ministers needed him more as a symbol than as a living, breathing human, and what could be more symbolic than this?
    “The navy hasn't the proper expertise,” he'd answered. For that was true; almost no one in the Queendom truly understood the mathematics of ertial shielding.
    “Then let the navy transport you,” they'd urged, as he fitted himself into his space armor, flexing and testing the joints one by one.
    “They haven't the speed,” he answered, for indeed the fastest interplanetary vessels were the ertial grappleships, and none were faster than
Boat Gods
.
    “It's bad for the Queendom if you're hurt or killed,” they'd tried, as he'd powered up the ship's systems and rolled aside the hangar roof to reveal, in a shower of loose palm fronds, the bright blue sky left behind by the storm.
    “I've made my backups,” he told them sternly. “If anything happens, restore me and await instructions. That's a command, good sirs and madams, from your king. Even from Earth, from these very islands, I can reach this mystery vessel three days ahead of the navy's best picket boats out of Neptune, and
five
days ahead of Her Majesty.”
    “May I come?” asked Hugo, his own pet robot, who'd been emancipated for more than a millennium but still chose to remain at home, learning how to be alive.
    “Not this time,” Bruno told him. “I can't spare the mass.”
    “But Sire,” his manservant Adelade said cannily, “who's to develop the wormhole in your absence?”
    And that had almost stopped him. Almost. But if there was one thing he'd learned about the hard problems of physics, it was that they often yielded when the body and mind were otherwise engaged. And he missed this derring-do, and feared that his people—even his own servants!—thought him no longer capable of it. And anyway, blast it, saving the sun was
his job
. Not Tamra's.
    Almost as an afterthought he'd said to Adelade, “Will you take stewardship of the Earth, please, until Tamra's or my return?”
    “Er, well . . .”
    “There's a good fellow. Mind the impending holidays.”
    He'd