The wrecked Oligarch ship had been found off the Mindanao Deeps by a sub-sea exploring party, brought up, reconditioned, studied. There were records and documents in it, and from these Seers made his decision. He brought back Danton. In secret, of course; send them to out of living graves. They were trained, made into astrogators, cosmologists. Everything in absolute secrecy, of course. And after the ship blasted off for Mars, only the three of them and Seers retained any knowledge that there had been a ship at all. The reconditioners had fixed that up. Those who had found it, the scientists who had studied it, no one remembered a thing.
"Find out what you can, then come back," Seers had said. "Don't fight. If you fight, you might never come back. We would never know then what to do. We can prepare ships like this one, Danton. In secret, of course, send them to Mars. But we don't want to take a chance like that unless we have to. If activity like that ever leaked out to the people, that would be the end of the New System. A sudden blast of insecurity would wreck our delicately balanced new order."
It was a fine ship, Danton thought. The Oligarchs knew machines. They worshiped them. The ship was also a monstrous arsenal, a hurtling fountain of destruction, loaded with hydrogen bombs and something called a proton cannon that could curl a planet up in space like a moth in a flame.
Power, death, throbbing around him, hot and terrible ... the ordnance console key inches from his fingertips. Keith had said he didn't want to go back to Earth. Not and face all that business again. Why not let go, blast, die right here when the attack came? That was a soldier's way!
"I'm going to throw her into an orbit," Danton said.
He saw the weird swirling light of the moons then, the moons of Mars, as the ship slowed in its orbit. Heavy cloud-banks drifting low in colossal valleys. And then he saw the ships. Three of them rising like giant silver beetles.
He didn't know whether he deliberately bungled and failed to lift the ship out of its orbit in time, or whether—but psychologically there weren't such things as accidental blunders. Anyway, now it was too late. Maybe everyone on earth would be wiped out because of it, but Danton blundered, moved too slowly. From the ships a white cloud of released energy flashed, blinded, billowed. His ship bucked and swerved and lurched.
Keith whispered tensely, "I'll take that ordnance, Captain. I'll take it!"
Van Ness weaved upright, sucking at an oxygen capsule, mumbling.