FORTY-SEVEN

Beth felt the hairs on her neck rise, prickly and trembling as the electrical charge built again. But this time she was getting irked and instead of flattening herself yet again on the deck, she hit a hard thruster in the magscoop. Fields vented plasma and the ship lurched. The others were hitting the deck but Beth discharged a brace of capacitors in the magscoop’s leading magnetic fields. This gave a powerful burst of electrons at the far end of the scoop, moving at the speed of light. Instantly her neck hairs stopped tingling.

“Cap’n, looks like I’ve found a way to offset the charge buildup these things are using against us,” she said with a deliberately casual air.

Redwing looked up from the deck, where he had sprawled. “Brilliant!”

“And she nailed that flier flat on, too,” Karl said with one of his seldom-seen grins. “There’s only one flier left, and it’s hanging back pretty far.”

“Good,” Redwing said, getting up and straightening his uniform. He was always meticulous when on the bridge. “But we’re near the top of our mission profile, right?”

Beth checked. “Yes, sir, got to turn around soon and head back down, run with the jet.”

“That will lower our plasma influx pretty far,” Karl said. “We’ll have a reduced exhaust.”

“So the exhaust will be less useful as a weapon, certainly,” Redwing said. “Let’s try to hover near our top limit, then. Can you do that, Officer Marble?”

Redwing also liked to get formal in tight situations. She had often wondered if in such moments he saw himself as fearless admiral at the helm of a battleship on tossing gray seas. Well, this was about as close to that as he was going to get, and as close as she ever wanted to be.

“Keep an eye on that flier as we make our turn.” Redwing settled into his deck chair. He looked tired and gray to Beth, but so did they all now. Hours of dodging among the jet knots, harvesting them with split-second timing and then blowing the excess post-fusion plasma out the flexing nozzle as a weapon—well, it added up fast.

The ship rumbled as she took it on a slow tipping angle. She was concentrating so didn’t notice the beeping of the comm.

Karl picked it up for her. His body went rigid and he glanced at his shocked face. “It’s … Tananareve, Cap’n. For you.”

He grabbed it. “Redwing here. How in—?” Redwing’s face showed nothing as he listened. Then his mouth slowly opened and he stared into space. “How did—?” More silence. “So they’ll let us go?”

Beth suddenly realized that this was a negotiation that could end all this madness. She kept SunSeeker in a tight helical turn, with a wary eye on the flier below, now approaching. Something told her that she should make some quick dodgy movements to make them a less predictable target. While hanging on Redwing’s every word, of course.

“Okay, details later. Right.” Redwing’s entire body was tense now, on his feet, spine ramrod straight. He gripped his chair so hard, she saw his hand turn pale. “What?” The silence seemed long and unbearable, but she noticed the seconds on her situation screen were going by slowly. “Roger. More later.”

Redwing turned to her and said, “That flier behind us, take all the evasion you can. They’re trying to shut down a weapon that’s in armed and aiming mode right now.”

She slammed the helm over hard and teased the fusion burn to its max. Then she released the bolus of searing plasma and wrenched the helm again, putting them into a flat spin, then a dive. Pops and creaks came echoing down the bridge from the connecting corridors. Karl’s tablet escaped from the ridged worktable and smacked into the bulkhead.

Redwing said, “There’s an electromagnetic precursor maybe two seconds before discharge. Look for that. Say again, Tananareve—”

Karl flicked their EM antennas into one overlay, frequencies color-coded. Beth could see the flier as a dark point among hills and valleys of Technicolor richness. “It’s buried in all this plasma emission,” Karl said.

“Integrate the whole spectral emission,” Beth said. “I don’t know what frequency it will come out in, but if we—”

“Got it.” A smooth topological surface appeared now in auburn colors, brown for valleys and nearly yellow at the peaks. The sky flexed like an ocean rolling with colliding wave fronts.

She fought the helm around again and let their speed drop a bit. This let her fill reserve chambers with incoming plasma and build to the max density they could carry. The jet wind was coming in at velocities over a thousand kilometers a second, and she could vary the inflow rate simply by moving the magscoop to angle it more fully into the stream. SunSeeker was working far from its optimal performance peak, which had been designed to run steady and smooth on interstellar plasma, orders of magnitude below the sleeting hail of knotty ionized matter rushing at them. Now she used, without thinking about it, the skills she had won from their flight up the jet when they arrived here. Through long hours she had fought violent currents, swimming upstream against conditions SunSeeker had never seen.

Now she just let her instincts rule. Her hands and eyes moved restlessly, shaping plasma and bunching it. When she saw the holding chambers were full, she began to trickle more into the fusion chambers. The boost took them up jetward and to starboard as she waited for something strange to come at them.

It wasn’t subtle. The maroon tones around the flier profile suddenly blossomed with a hard bright yellow peak. She fed the stored plasma into the chambers and goosed the drive. The helm slammed over, and she had time to shout “Incoming!”

The bridge shuddered and then wrinkled. She looked down the deck line and saw the bulwark ripple and flex. Pops and groans rose. Karl dove for the deck. She felt a tight pressure run through her like a slow, sinuous wave. Her stomach lurched. A deep bass tone rolled along the ship axis and—

—it was gone. The bridge snapped back into straight lines and firm walls. The hail of small stressed sounds fell away.

“They missed us,” Karl said.

Redwing nodded. “But what missed us? The deck got rubbery—”

“A space-time wrinkle, maybe,” Karl said. “I dunno how in hell anybody could make one, but—”

“Let me concentrate,” Beth said. “They could shoot at us again.”

She dodged and swerved and dove and soared and plunged, and time stretched the way space had moments before. She heard nothing, saw nothing but the feeds that told her what the flier was doing. It cut her off on a side curve and flared more exhaust to draw closer. She countered with her own moves. All this she did with hands incessantly moving as her eyes looked for another of the hard bright yellow peaks. But it didn’t come.

The comm beeped. Redwing answered. “Oh. Good. What? Say again. Good. Great. You’re sure. Okay. Terms come later, sure. Soon, yes.”

He hung up and turned to Beth. She allowed her eyes to stray to him and she was shocked at how old he looked.

“They’re standing down. No more pulses like that. Something called the Lambda Gun.”

She opened her mouth to say something, and the comm beeped again.

Redwing answered. “What? Look at the star?”

“Got it,” Karl said. He and Fred, who had come onto the bridge, peered at the big screen.

Geysers. The curve of the red star worked with furious energies. Flares and huge arches broke into space. Currents swept across the troubled crescent. Beth saw there was a dent in the perfect circle. Something had chewed it.

Karl said, “Look at these vectors.” He had told the Kinematic Artilect to project an acceptance cone on the thing that had missed them. He had set the basic width to be a few times the jittering pattern Beth had followed to evade whatever the flier threw at them. Within the error bars, the cone snipped a bit off the star.

Redwing frowned. “Tananareve says the Folk call it a Lambda Gun. It does something with space-time, so if it just projected on—” He stopped. Facts trump words.

They watched the star adjust gravity against its internal pressures. Huge fissures opened and closed like snapping mouths. Fountains of restless plasma worked up in slender, vibrant yellow tendrils before curving and dying. The star flooded simmering masses into the gap, and waves spread from that. Fluids shaped by strong magnetic fields moved in complex eddies. Storms peeled off this and spread, tornadoes the size of planets.

Beth let out a long slow breath, trying to get herself back into somewhat normal condition. She was tired and worn and completely confused. Coffee no longer helped. She needed a bath, too.

She stood, wobbling a little. “Tananareve said more, Cap’n. I could tell. What?”

“We’ve got a deal. They’ll resupply us.”

Gasps. Redwing shrugged and smiled, bobbing his head when the entire bridge burst into applause. “Uh, yes. There’s more. They want some of us, maybe enough to avoid inbreeding, to stay on the Bowl. The ones who actually run this place aren’t those Folk at all. Those are like the local police on the beat, or middle managers in a bureaucracy. This thing is so old, something needs to live long enough to run it.”

“Some aliens we didn’t see down there?” Beth asked, her vision bleary, bones aching now. “Some kind of—”

Redwing shrugged, as though he should have known all along. “Ice Minds move slowly because they’re cold. They keep the memories and experience, Tananareve said. They work with something called the Diaphanous, who manage the jet and the star.”

“Plasma stuff?” Karl said. “Those were what made those sounds, that created those discharge arcs, that—”

“Killed Clare,” Beth said. “Trying to stop us from kinking the jet.”

“The cold works with the hot, then,” Karl said. “The Folk are just local managers.”

“They sure don’t think so. They imagine they’re the whole show,” Beth said. “Funny, really.”

“So why did the Ice Minds, or whatever, let us live at all?” Fred said. He had been silent the whole time but now seemed happy, smiling, eyes dancing.

“They need help with Glory,” Redwing said. “We can get there first, going full blast. We can reconnoiter. And talk to the Glorians, who think we humans are running the Bowl. They got our radio and TV, and since they were along the same line of sight, thought the Bowl was ours.”

Beth frowned. “We have to?”

“Part of the deal.” Redwing smiled. “Tananareve said it’s pretty much take it or leave it.”

Karl laughed. “No question, I’d say. We take it.”

“They do want us to straighten out that standing kink. It’s rubbing against the Knothole and it’s gonna stay that way. But if we fly through it the right way, maybe we can bust it loose.”

Karl said dryly, “There are better ways to put that, more precise. But I think with the fluences we have, and Beth as pilot, we can.”

Beth laughed, a bit dry. “Beth the perfect pilot thinks she needs sleep. Lots of it. Then more coffee.”

Redwing smiled and finally sat down in his deck chair, more relaxed than she had seen him in a long while. He looked at the walls showing their situation and said, “If we run down the jet, fix the Knothole plasma stall, then out—well, we can loop around and come back into simple orbit.”

Beth scowled. “Back into the cold sleep vaults?”

“Some stay here,” Redwing said. “The Ice Minds want some new species to give the Bowl some stability. The Folk couldn’t handle us, so they’re out of the policing business. We get that.”

Beth nodded, knowing her piloting days were very nearly over.