Celestial Matters
Richard Garfinkle
 The story is narrated by Aias of Tyre, a scientist of the Delian League, who is preparing to embark on Project Sunthief as scientific commander. This project is an audacious and desperate mission to sail a spaceship carved out of a piece of the moon herself out through the spheres, to catch a piece of the sun and bring it back to earth to annihilate the Middler capital city. This, the league hopes, will finally end the war and give it victory. The Middlers have been assassinating Delian generals and politicians, so Aias is assigned a bodyguard, Captain Yellow Hare of Sparta, a woman of Xeroki ancestry. Shortly after the launch of the moon-ship, Chandra's Tear, it becomes clear that there is a saboteur on board. Aias' old friend Ramonojon, a mathematician, has expressed doubts about the rightness of annihilating an entire city and is viewed with dark suspicion by Anaxamander, the heroic military commander of the project. Mihradarius, the fire scientist who has devised the sun-catching method, keeps his own counsel. As sabotage, catastrophe, and exhilarating maneuvers overtake the voyage, Aias begins to wonder about the wisdom of the Delian strategy. Eventually he comes to understand the desperation of the Middle Kingdom, thanks to a Middler scientist stowaway, and they try to synthesize between them a way for the two world-spanning empires to resolve their differences. There remains a life-or-death race to earth on a crippled ship in the hope of bringing hope.