“Tell me why this is good news,” Pirius said grimly.
Dans paged through Virtual data, copying everything to Pirius. “Pirius, in the middle of that flare the structure of spacetime itself is distorted. Now, we know Xeelee ships fly by swimming through spacetime, that their essence is controlled spacetime defects. Surely not even a Xeelee can survive that.”
“And so—”
“So you fly through the middle of the flare. See how it will arch through the magnetic field? If you pick your course right you can avoid the worst regions, while leading the Xeelee right into it.”
“But if a Xeelee can’t survive,” Enduring Hope pointed out reasonably, “how can we?”
Pirius said, “We don’t have a choice right now.”
“Four minutes to closest approach,” Dans said.
Pirius swept his fingers through Virtual displays. “Cohl, I’m sending you Dans’s coordinates. Let’s aim for that flare. We can’t end up any more dead, and at least it’s a chance. Dans — we’ll need time to plot the maneuver. How long will the flare last?”
Dans hesitated. “Only a second or so at its fullest extent. Pirius, a neutron star is a small, very energetic object. Things happen fast… Oh.”
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 grinned at Pirius. “Boo!”
“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 cannonballed at Pirius, suddenly huge. It was a flattened orange, visibly three- dimensional, its surface mottled by electric storms. It slid beneath Claw’s prow, and for a moment, continents of orange-brown light fled beneath Pirius’s blister. All these impressions in a second; less. But now a stronger light was looming over the horizon, yellow-white: it was the site of the flare, a grim dawn approaching.
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.