Exultant

For a moment Pirius had actually allowed himself hope; now that warm spark died. It was just too fast. “Right. So that millisecond is all we will have to compute our course, to lay it in, and to execute the maneuver.”

Cohl said, “It would take our onboard sentient tens of seconds to compute a course like that. Even if we had prior data on the shape of the flare. Which we don’t. Of course a Xeelee could do it.”

“Three minutes,” Hope said evenly.

Pirius sighed. “You know, just for a moment you had me going there, Dans.”

Dans snapped impatiently, “Lethe, you guys are so down. Maybe there’s a way even so. Pirius, have you ever heard of a Brun maneuver?”

“No.”

“Pilot school scuttlebutt. Somebody tried it, oh, a year or more back.”

Pirius hadn’t heard of such a thing. But the turnover in pilots at Arches Base was ferocious; there was little opportunity for field wisdom to be passed on.

“It didn’t work—”

“That’s reassuring.”

“But it could have,” Dans said. “I looked into it — ran some simulations — thought it might be useful some day.”

“Two minutes thirty.”

“Pirius, listen to me. Stick to your course; make for the flare. But keep listening. I’ll compute your maneuver for you. A way through the flare.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Sure it is. And when I download the new trajectory you’d better be prepared to splice it into your systems.” Dans peeled away.

“Where are you going?”

“If this doesn’t work out, don’t touch my stuff.”

“Dans!”

“That’s the last we’ll see of her,” Enduring Hope said laconically.

“Two minutes,” Cohl said. “One fifty-nine…”

Pirius shut her up.

As the Claw fell through space there was no noise, no sense of motion. The Xeelee’s slow convergence was silent, unspectacular. Even the neutron star would be invisible for all but a few seconds of closest approach. It was as if they were gliding along some smooth, invisible road.

The crew continued to work calmly, the three of them calling out numbers and curt instructions to each other. The Assimilator’s Claw was drenched with artificial intelligence, sentient and otherwise, and its systems were capable of processing data far faster than human thought. But the systems were there to support human decision-making, not to replace it. That was the nature of the greenship’s design, which in turn reflected Coalition policy, under the Doctrines. This was a human war and would always remain so.

There was no sense of peril. And yet these seconds, which counted down remorselessly inside Pirius’s head, would likely be the last of his life.

There was a flare of blue light, dead ahead, FTL blue — and then a streak of green. It was a greenship, cutting across his path. Suddenly data was chattering into the Claw’s systems. It was a new closest-approach trajectory.

Pirius saw Cohl sit up, astonished. “Where did that come from? Pilot—”

“Load the course, Navigator.”

A Virtual coalesced before Pirius: Dans’s head, disembodied. Her face was small, round, neat, with a wide, sensual mouth, a mouth made for laughing. Now that mouth gri

“Dans, what—”

“It’s not me, it’s a downloaded Virtual. The real Dans will be hitting the surface of the star in” — she closed her eyes, and the image wavered, blocky pixels fluttering, as if she was concentrating — “three, two, one. Plop. Bye-bye.”

Pirius felt a stab of regret through his fear, bafflement, adrenaline rush. “Dans, I’m sorry.”

“There was no other way — no other trajectory.”

“Trajectory from where?”

“From the future, of course. Pirius, you’re twenty seconds from closest approach.”

He glimpsed a splash of red, wheeling past the blister. It was the neutron star.

Dans said, “You need to cut in your GUTdrive. On my mark—”

“Dans, that’s insane.” So it was; the antiquated GUTdrive was a last-resort backup system.

“I knew you’d argue. Your sublight won’t work. Do it, asshole. Two, one—”

In the heart of the GUTdrive, specks of matter were compressed to conditions not seen since the aftermath of the Big Bang; released from their containment, these specks swelled immensely. This was the energy that had once driven the expansion of the universe itself; now it heated asteroid ice to a frenzied steam and forced it through rocket nozzles. A GUTdrive was just a water rocket, a piece of engineering that would have been recognizable to technicians on prespaceflight Earth twenty-five thousand years before.

But it worked, even here. A new light flared behind the ship, a ghostly gray-white, the light of the GUTdrive.

Dans winked at Pirius. “See you on the other side.” The Virtual collapsed into a cloud of dispersing pixels.

The neutron star ca

And in the same instant the Claw juddered, shook, its drive stuttering. What now? Diagnostics popped up before Pirius. Around a Virtual of the GUTdrive core, shadowy shapes swarmed. Quagmites, he saw: the strange entities that were attracted by every use of a GUTdrive in this region — living things maybe, pests for sure, feeding off the primordial energy of the GUTdrive itself, and causing the mighty engine to stutter.

“The fly’s on us!” Cohl cried.

When Pirius glanced at the reverse view he saw the Xeelee fighter. Its night-dark wings flexed and sparked as it swam through space after him. He had never seen a Xeelee so close, save in sims: he didn’t know anybody who had, and lived. It was more than inhuman, he thought, more than just alien; it was a dark, primeval thing, not of this time. But it was perfectly adapted to this environment, as humans with their clumsy gadgetry were not.

And it was still on his tail. All he could do was fly the ship; there was absolutely nothing he could do about the Xeelee.

Ahead, light flared. Over the horizon came rushing a massive flaw in the star’s crust, a pool of blue- white light kilometers wide from which starstuff poured in a vertical torrent, radiating as much energy in a fraction of a second as Earth’s sun would lose in ten thousand years. An arch, yellow-

white, was forming above the star’s tight horizon, kilometers high. In places the arch feathered and streamed, tracing out the lines of the magnetic field that restrained it.

On a neutron star, events happened fast. The rent in the surface was already healing, the arch collapsing almost as soon as it had formed, its material dragged down by the star’s magisterial gravity field.

And the Claw flew right underneath it.

Pirius’s blister shuddered as if it would tear itself apart. Those mottled surface features whipped beneath, and the arch loomed above him. He had never known such a sensation of sheer speed. He might not live through this, but Lethe, it was quite a ride.

There was a punch in the small of his back, the ghost of hundreds of gravities as the Claw kicked its way out of the star’s gravity well.

The neutron star whipped away into darkness. The arch had already collapsed.

And in the last instant he glimpsed the Xeelee, behind him. No longer an implacable, converging foe, it was folding over, as if its graceful wings were crumpled in an invisible fist.

The Assimilator’s Claw hung in empty space, far from the neutron star. The crew tended their slight wounds, and tried to get used to still being alive. They saw to their ship’s systems; the encounter with the quagmites had done a good deal of damage to the GUTdrive.