Still, the dreams came, and memories of Theodore Dawn. Theodore had been a good friend to Martin, practically his only friend in the beginning. Witty, learned, Theodore had spent hours alone with Martin, talking. Martin had helped Theodore study vats of terrestrial pond water, the little micro-organisms and crustaceans and insect larvae supplied from the ship’s biological records.
But two years into the journey, Theodore had used a ladder field to hang himself and the moms had not tried to stop him. Freedom of choice.
The moms did not discipline the children or issue direct orders; nor did they protect the children from themselves.
If we all tried to kill ourselves, would they intervene? What if we went to war with each other?
Three children had committed suicide since the journey began.
Once they had numbered eighty-five.
Martin in the lead, thoughtful and quiet, they emerged into the center of the third homeball. Here the lighting was bright as a sunny day, lines and spots of warm luminosity varying in angles and brightness as they progressed toward the weapons stores.
For the last three years, they had been training with the actual vessels they would use in a real encounter. They had not yet ventured outside the ship for external flight and were confined to the hemisphere of the weapons stores, training with simulations. The simulations were convincing, but the children were beginning to grumble. Martin felt their frustration acutely. How long must they wait to actually fly?
“Fall to,” Martin said. The group broke line to form a hemisphere behind him. “Here’s today.” He slaved their wands to his and each child saw what he had planned a few hours earlier. “We’ll be dealing with an offense, kinetic weapons with passive tracking, ambush near-planet. The planet is a gas giant, and we’re taking the Dawn Treader into a graze to refuel.”
Graphics projected by his wand illustrated the procedures. They had performed this drill before; it used maneuvers necessary to other scenarios and was good general exercise.
“Let’s do it. Four hours’ training today, triple squeeze.”
The children groaned; triple squeeze condensed drill time by two thirds. It was exhausting; it also got them out sooner, and Martin needed to make his tenday report to the moms before the communal dinnertime.
The weapons locker was a broad blister on the port side of the third homeball. Martin led his group to the wide bulkhead separating the locker from the rest of the homeball. He drifted to a smooth, unmarked, curved wall and the wall opened to a circle, exhaling a sigh of colder air. Stephanie smiled at Martin and swept her arm forward magnanimously. “You first, Pan,” she said. Martin laddered into the cavernous space beyond.
All piloted weapons were stored here, and all the smaller remotes and other mobile equipment. Martin glanced up at the interior. When weightless, “up” was pointing forward or away from a door in all directions; “down” the direction of a door or neck, or pointing aft. One came up into a room, down out of a room, up into the ship’s nose, or down to the third homeball.
Inside the locker, smaller bubbles of gray spotted the pale gray and brown walls like sporangia on fern leaves. The comparison was apt; these held millions of tiny robots, makers and doers, some the size of microbes, some a meter wide, most no larger than a human fingernail. Makers could burrow deep into a moon or planetary surface and create weapons of mass destruction out of the raw materials available. Doers could insinuate themselves into many kinds of machinery and break them down.
At the end of pylons or snared in pale fields hung matte gray tubes three meters thick and ten to twenty meters long. Gray ovoids, saucers and sausage-packed spiked cylinders five to twenty-five meters across were stacked double and triple, gripped by fields wrapped around pylons.
Entering the locker, Martin always felt as if he had walked into a sculpture hall dedicated to geometric abstractions, or onto a microscope slide of plankton and bacteria magnified huge. The style—if one could think of a style with regard to such simple shapes—was the same as the style Martin had come to associate with the moms, the Central Ark, and the general design of the Dawn Treader: utilitarian, muted basic colors, a subdued raw metal appearance for all surfaces.
Martin counted the piloted weapons stored here: not including those hidden in the blisters, there were ninety separate pieces.
“Let’s study,” Stephanie said, swinging down from the middle of the ranked