It was alive, and it was looking for other K-code to talk to.
“If it’s faulty,” Seria Mau said, “there’s one way to find out.”
Still kneeling, she leaned forward and extended her arms, palms up. The shadow operators lifted the red and green box until it lay across her arms, then streamed away from her like fish in an aquarium, flickering agitatedly this way and that.
“Don’t ask me if I know what I’m doing,” she warned them. “Because I don’t.”
She got to her feet, and with her train spilling out behind her, walked slowly towards the nearest wall.
Foam poured from the box.
“Dr. Haends—” it said.
“Take us up,” said Seria Mau to the wall.
The wall opened. White light spilled out to meet her, and Seria Mau Genlicher carried the package up into navigational space, where she intended to do what she should have done all along, and introduce it to the ship’s mathematics. The shadow operators, rendered suddenly thoughtful by this decision, went up after her as demure as lace. The wall closed behind them all.
The Nastic commander watched from his corner. He made one more attempt to attract her attention.
“Seria Mau Genlicher,” he whispered, “you really must listen—”
But—rapt, dissociated, pixilated in the way only a human being can be with the vertigo of commitment—she gave no sign of having noticed him, and all that happened was that the shadow operators chivvied him away. They were worried he would become involved with the train of her dress. That would have spoiled everything.
I hate to feel so weak and useless, he thought.
Shortly after that, events on his own bridge intervened. Uncle Zip, puzzled by what was going on and suddenly growing suspicious, had him shot. A realtime vacuum commando unit, which had been hacking its way grimly through the Nastic ship since the collision, finally broke into the command-and-control section and hosed it out with hand-held gamma ray lasers. The walls melted and dripped. The computers went down. The commander felt himself fade. It was a feeling of intolerable weariness, sudden cold. For a nanosecond he hung in the balance, beguiled by a shard of memory, the tiniest part of a dream. The papery structures of his home, a drowsy buzzing sound, some complex gesture he had once loved, gone too quickly to be pinned down. Curiously enough, his last thought was not for that but for Seria Mau Genlicher, chained to her horrible ship yet still fighting to be human. He was amused to find himself thinking this.
After all, he reminded himself. She was the enemy.
Two hours later and a thousand kilometres away, shrouded in blue light from the signature displays in the human quarters of El Rayo X, Uncle Zip the tailor sat on the three-legged wooden stool he had brought with him from Motel Splendido and tried to understand what was happening.
Touching the Void was under his control. He had nothing more to worry about in that direction. Nothing was alive down there in that rotten apple but his entradistas. Like the good team of lawyers they were they had begun to chop him out of his inadvertent contract with the Nastic vessel. It was a civil engineering project down there, with all the dull concussions and sudden flares you had to expect from that. Guys were getting a line open and saying, “Hey Unc, could you give that a little more?” “Could you give that a little less, Unc?” They were competing for his attention. And all the time now, his ship was gently trying to withdraw itself from the embrace of the cruiser. Uncle Zip thought of that embrace as a soft wet rottenness he would be glad to be out of. Trickles of particles flickered through the hull of El Rayo X, spun off from the destruction of the Nastic bridge. It was still hot down there. You had to give the guys their due, they were working in a heavily compromised environment. They had been dying for two hours now.
Touching the Void was his. But what was going on over there on the White Cat? It was total radio silence over there. K-ships had nothing you could call internal coms traffic: despite that you could usually tell if anyone was alive inside. Not in this case. Thirteen nanoseconds after the death of the Nastic commander, everything in the White Cat had switched itself off. The fusion engines were down. The dynaflow drivers were down. That ship wasn’t even talking to itself, let alone Uncle Zip. “I don’t have time for this,” he complained. “I got business elsewhere.” But he continued to watch. For another hour, nothing happened. Then, very slowly, a pale, wavering glow surrounded the White Cat. It was like a magnetic field, sketched slightly out from the ship’s hull; or a faint diagram of some kind of fluid supercavitation effect. It was violet in colour.
“What’s this?” Uncle Zip asked himself.
“Ionising radiation,” said his pilot in a bored voice. “Oh, and I’m getting internal traffic.”
“Hey, who asked you?” said Uncle Zip. “What kind of traffic?”
“Come to think of it, I got no idea.”
“Jesus.”
“It’s stopped now anyway. Something was producing dark matter in there. Like the whole hull was full of it for a second.”
“That long?”
The pilot consulted his displays.
“Photinos, mostly,” he said.
After that, the ionising radiation died away and nothing happened for a further two hours. Then the White Cat jumped from blacked-out to torched-up without any intervening state. “Jesus Christ!” screamed Uncle Zip. “Get us out of here!” He thought she had exploded. His pilot went on ship-time and—ignoring the faint cries of the work teams still trapped inside—ripped the last few metres of the El Rayo X from the ruins of the Nastic vessel. He was good. He got them free and facing the right direction just in time to see the White Cat accelerate from a standstill to 98 percent the speed of light in less than fourteen seconds.
“Stay with them,” Uncle Zip told him quietly.
“France chance, honey,” the pilot said. “That’s no fusion engine.” Fierce annular shockwaves in no detectable medium were spilling back along the White Cat’s course. They were the colour of mercury. A moment or two later she reached the point where Einstein’s universe would no longer put up with her, and vanished. “They were building themselves a new drive,” the pilot said. “New navigation systems. Maybe a whole new theory of everything. I can’t deal with that. My guess: we’re stuffed.”
Uncle Zip sat on his stool for thirty long seconds, staring at the empty displays. Eventually he rubbed his face.
“They’ll go to Sigma End,” he decided. “Make the best time you can.”
“I’m on it,” the pilot said.
Sigma End, Billy Anker’s old stamping ground, was a cluster of ancient research stations and lashed-up entradista satellites sited in and around the Radio RX-1 accretion disc. Everything there was abandoned, or had the air of it. Anything new attracted the attention like a campfire seen in the distance for one night on an empty coast. This was deep Radio Bay. In places like this, Earth ran out of reach. Logistics went down. Supply lines dried up. Everything was for grabs, and the mad energy of the accretion disc lay over all of it. The black hole churned and churned, ripping material out of its companion star, V404 Stueck-Manibel, a blue supergiant at the end of its life. Those two had been locked together for a few billion years or so. This was the last of it: the wreckage of a fine old relationship. It looked like everything was going down the tubes for them.