“But — why? What’s the point?”
The Qax paused. “Well, this fits one of our hypotheses. Look in the central region, Bolder.”
The hole in the ring hurt my eyes. It was a sheet of space that was somehow — tilted. I saw muddled space, stars streaked like cream in coffee.
“Do you know about the Kerr metric?” asked the Qax. “No? The Great Attractor is a massive toroid rotating extremely quickly. Your own theory of relativity predicts some odd effects with such a structure. There may be closed lines in space and time, for instance—”
“Come again?”
“Time travel,” said Lipsey. “And more… Bolder, the Kerr metric describes Interfaces between Universes. Do you understand? It’s as if—”
“What?”
“As if the Xeelee don’t like this Universe, so they’re building a way out.”
I focused my monitors on the dust that walled the cavity in the stars. I saw ships — an aviary of all shapes and sizes, uncountable trillions of them.
A few light minutes from me I made out a particularly monstrous ship, a disc that must have been the size of Earth’s Moon. Hundreds of cup freighters nestled into neat pouches in the disc’s upper surface, dumping out stolen star material. Vents in the underside of the main ship emitted a constant rain of immense crystalline shafts, as if it were some huge sieve leaking rainwater.
Peering deeper into the mist of craft I could see fantastic bucket-chains of the disc-ships descending to the Great Attractor, dwindling to pinpoints against the vast carcass of the ring. Returning ships, I saw, were diverted to clouds of cup freighters for reloading.
I began to see the pattern. “So the disc-ships are huge, ah, dumper trucks,” I said. “They’re tending the Great Attractor, bringing it matter and energy. Using that crystalline stuff to grow the string, knitting it together strand by strand, with a patience that’s lasted billions of years…”
There was a flicker in my peripheral vision. My posse. They whirled around me and began to close up once more.
I closed up my wings and prepared to punch the red button. “Lipsey, I’ve seen enough. We’ve got to spread this news around all the races in our region — find a way to stop the Xeelee before they wreck our Universe. We’ve time to plan—”
He coughed apologetically. “Ah — look, Bolder, this information is Qax commercial property. You know that.”
I hesitated. “You’re kidding. We’re doomed if the Qax keep this knowledge to themselves.”
He sighed. “The Qax don’t think on those timescales. They can’t, remember. They think about profit, today.”
I forced my hand away from the escape button; a cold knot in my stomach started to tighten. Suddenly this wasn’t a game. If I tried to go home after what I’d just blurted out, the Qax wouldn’t hesitate to use their Spline warships to blast me out of the sky. Abruptly my isolation telescoped into a vivid reality, and the cage around me seemed absurdly fragile… And the Xeelee whirled tighter, reminding me that hanging around here wasn’t an option either.
I had to find more time. To my right, obscured now by the fog of fighters around me, was that dumper truck with its attendant freighters. I opened up my wings, clutched at space and lurched out of the trap. Soon I was thrusting my way into the crowded freighter formation, my wings tucked tight. The fighters blurred after me.
I rammed thoughts through my sleep-starved brain as I flew. Could I evade the waiting Spline? Maybe I could divert the ship’s hyperspace flight — but how? Prise open the melted control box? Change the ship’s mass, to change the distance I arrived from the Qax sun?
Of course I could abandon ship before I reached the Qax system, at one of the later jump points. I had that Spline emergency beacon; I’d be picked up. And if I kept quiet I could hide from the Qax, for years maybe…
But, damn it, if I did that humanity and a few hundred other races would one day end up falling into the Xeelee pit. Hiding wasn’t good enough.
I dipped under the lip of the dumper truck and dodged the processed Great Attractor material sleeting from the truck’s base. The huge icicles fell a few thousand miles and then broke up into a fine mist… and as I stared abstractedly at that mist I realized there was a way out of this. It was stupid, crazy, nearly unworkable. And my only chance.
“All right, Qax,” I said. “I’ll come home. But first…”
I dropped, spread my wings as far as they would go and whirled like a seagull through the crystal rain. The wings plated over rapidly and grew stiff and cumbersome.
“Bolder, what are you doing?”
“Wrecking this beautiful ship,” I told Lipsey with real regret.
The Xeelee fighters finally closed around me, shutting out the rain.
I pressed the button.
The Xeelee trap disappeared; I’d jumped back to the blue-tinged light of the star cloud. And then—
Jump. Jump. Jump — jump — jump — jumpjumpjump—
The skies became a blur. I slumped into sleep.
I fell towards the welcoming pool that was my home Galaxy. I peered out of my glazed-over cage as the stars’ flickering began to slow. For the first time in a month I unbuckled the straps that bound me to my couch, and prized the translator box free of the strut over my head.
Lipsey and I said our goodbyes. “Do me a favor,” I said. “Whatever happens, keep talking. Tell me what you see.”
“Whatever you say.” I imagined his noble face gazing out over the seething Qax ocean. “Bolder… I want you to know I’m sorry.”
“Yeah.” The ship — jumped — to the dumbbell binary system. It was dazzling; I’d arrived much closer than I remembered from my visit on the way out. I bunched a gloved fist in triumph. This was going to work—
— jump—
A compact yellow star at the heart of the Galaxy, searingly close to the ship. Last stop. Time to get out.
I climbed onto my seat, put my shoulders against the pod’s crystalline plating, and pushed. For a heart-stopping moment I thought the shell was too strong — then it crumbled, and I popped into space, clutching my translator box. Below me glittered the crusted wings of the ship I’d taken so far.
My plan had worked. The Great Attractor substance had added enough mass to the ship to shift its arrival point significantly closer to the system center. Now I had to rely on the Qax to do the rest—
— jump—
— and the ship disappeared and I was left alone in a cloud of fragments; they sparkled in the light of the compact star.
I drifted there for a while, rotating slowly. Then I squeezed the Spline distress bracelet. It turned rigid and cold.
Lipsey began to speak out of the translator box. His voice was hoarse, forced. I listened, absently picking sparkling fragments out of the space around me and stuffing them into a suit pocket.
“You haven’t come out where we expected, Bolder. What have you… you’re causing the Qax a lot of confusion, I can tell that much…”
A pause. “I think they’ve found you… but what are you doing there?”
The Spline warships rotated like eyeballs, scouring space…
Then they found my ship, inexplicably close to the Qax sun.
The Qax panicked. They sent their shell-shaped armada roaring in towards their sun. Waves of energy pounded the Xeelee ship; the great wings sagged like melting chocolate. And in the middle of that torrent of energy was a thread of cherry-red light that arrowed through the wreck and into the sun.
As I’d hoped, in their anxiety and confusion the Qax had thrown at my ship all they had — including their only Xeelee weapon.