Ring

“But I have to move the ship!” she wailed. The thump of her heartbeat sounded impossibly loud in the confined space of the helmet. “Can’t you see that?”

Yes. Yes, I see that.

“But I don’t know how — or where — without Louise…”

A hand rested over hers. Despite the thickness of her glove fabric, she could feel the warm roughness of Michael Poole’s palm.

I will help you. I’ll show you what you must do.

The invisible fingers tightened, pushing her hands against the waldoes. Behind her, the nightfighter opened its wings.

Morrow, crumpled against the Deck beside the crushed body of Pla

The structure of the middle Decks was fragile; it simply imploded into the string wake. Morrow saw homes which had stood for a thousand years rip loose from the Deck surfaces as if in the grip of some immense tornado; the buildings exploded, and metal sheets spun through the air. The newer structures, spun across the air in zero-gee, crumpled easily as the wake passed. Much of the surface of Deck Two was torn loose and tumbled above him, chunks of metal clattering into each other. Morrow saw patterns of straight lines and arcs on those fragments of Deck: shards of the soulless circular geometry which had dominated the Deck’s layout for centuries.

People, scattered in the air like dolls, clattered against each other in the wake. The string passed through a Temple. The golden tetrahedron — the proudest symbol of human culture — collapsed like a burst balloon around the path of the string, and shards of gold-brown glass, long and lethal, hailed through the air.

And now the string passed through another human body, that of a hapless woman. Morrow heard the banal, mundane sounds of her death: a scream, abruptly cut off, a moist, ripping sound, and the crunch of bone, sounding like a bite into a crisp apple.

The woman’s body, distorted out of recognition, was cast aside; tumbling, it impacted softly with the Deck.

The wake of a cosmic string… The wake was the mechanism that had constructed the large-scale structure of the Universe. It was the seed of galaxies. And we have let it loose inside our ship, Morrow thought.

Once the string passed through the lifedome completely, the Northern would die at last, as surely as a body severed from its head…

Morrow, immersed in his own pain, wanted to close his eyes, succumb to the oblivion of unconsciousness. Was this how it was to end, after a thousand years?

But the quality of the noise above him — the rush of air, the screams — seemed to change.

He stared up.

The string, still cutting easily through the structure, had slowed to a halt.

“Mark,” Louise hissed. “What’s happening?”

The string had cut a full quarter-mile into the lifedome. For a moment the blue glowing string hovered, like a scalpel embedded in flesh.

Then the Virtual display came to life once more. The electric-blue string executed a tight curve and sliced its way back out of the lifedome, exiting perhaps a quarter-mile above its entry point.

Louise wished there was a god, to offer up her thanks.

“It’s done a lot more damage on the way out — but we are left with an intact lifedome,” Mark said. “The ’bots and autonomic systems are sealing up the breaches in the hull.” He looked up at Louise. “I think we’ve made it.”

Louise, floating above her bed, hugged her knees against her chest. “But I don’t understand how, Mark.”

“Spi

She looked into his familiar, tired eyes, and wished she could hug him to her. “It was Spi

“In fact, we’re still out of touch with Spi

“So how did she know?” Louise studied the scarred Virtual lifedome. “The trajectory she chose to get us out of this was almost perfect, Mark. How did she know?”

Spi

It’s over, Spi