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"Then what is, for Christ's sake?"
"Look, Harry, you know as well as I do that this damn old tub isn't a warship. Apart from a couple of
Berry-phase archaeological image retrieval scanning lasers, I've nothing apart from the ship itself that I
can use as a weapon." He shrugged, lying there. "Maybe if I'd brought back a few more samples from
the Oort Cloud, I could throw rocks "
"What do you mean," Harry asked ominously, " 'apart from the ship itself'?"
"After all this two-gee thrust we've a huge velocity relative to the Spline. When we've turned around
there'll be only a couple of minutes before we close with the Spline; even with the GUT drive firing we'll
barely shed any of that...
"Do you get it, Harry? We're going to meet the Spline ass-first, with our GUT drive blazing "
With slow, hesitant movements, Shira raised her hands and covered her face with long fingers.
"My God," Harry breathed, and his Virtual head ballooned into a great six-foot-tall parody. "We're
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going to ram a Spline warship. Oh, good plan, Michael."
"You've got a better suggestion?"
An image flickered into existence on the darkened dome above them: the Spline warship, as seen by the
Crab's backward-pointing cameras. The gunmetal-gray light of the Spline's hull glittered in Harry's huge,
pixel-frosted eyes. "Michael, as soon as that Spline lines itself up and touches us with its damn
starbreaker beam, this ship will be a shower of molten slag."
"Then well have died fighting. I say again: Have you got a better suggestion?"
"Yes," said Harry. "Your first idea. Let's run back out to the cometary halo and find some rocks to
throw."
Beyond Harry's huge, translucent head the Spline's motion seemed to have changed. Michael squinted,
trying to make out patterns. Was the rolling of the warship becoming more jerky, more random?
Come to think of it, he'd expected to be dead by now.
Was there something wrong with the Spline?
* * *
A quarter of the dome had caved in. Cannon barrels collapsed gracefully. Xeelee construction material
folded back like burning plastic, and through the breaches Miriam could see the harsh glare of the stars,
the flicker of cherry-red starbreaker light.
Molten construction material rained over the singularity plane. Friends scurried like insects as shards of
material red-hot and razor-sharp sleeted down on them. A wind blasted from the devastated area
and through the rest of the chamber; Miriam could smell smoke, burning meat.
"Jesus," Miriam breathed. She knew she was lucky; the singularity-cannon console she'd been working
at with Jaar was well away from the collapsing area. Jaar cried out inarticulately and pushed away from
the console. Berg grabbed his arm. "No!" She pulled him around. "Don't be stupid, Jaar. There's not a
damn thing you can do to help them; the best place for you is here."
Jaar twisted his head away from her, toward the ruined areas of the earth-craft.
Now a flare of cherry-red light dazzled her. The Spline had found a way through the failed dome and
had hit the chamber itself with its starbreaker beam. Raising her hand to shield her eyes from the glow of
the dome, she saw that the crystal surface over one section of the singularity plane had become muddied,
fractured; cracks were racing across it as if it were melting ice. The area had been scoured of human life.
And the singularities themselves, white-hot fireflies embedded in their web of blue light, were stirring.
Sliding.
All around the artificial cavern the Friends seemed to have lost their discipline. They wandered away
from their consoles, clung to each other in distracted knots; or they ran, hopelessly, into the devastated
area. The singularity-cannon muzzles were silent now; sparks no longer sailed upward to space.
The Friends were finished, Berg realized.
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Berg released Jaar and turned back to the console. She tried to ignore it all the stench of meat, the
wind in her face, the awesome creak of failing Xeelee construction material and thought through the
layout of this cannon control. It was all based on a straightforward touchscreen, and the logic was
obvious. Tapping lightly at colored squares she ran through the direction-finder graphics.
From the corner of her eye she saw schematic diagrams of the earth-ship huge swathes of the dome
base glaring red and graphs, lists of figures, data on more subtle damages.
Berg said, "How bad is it? Are we losing the air?"
Jaar watched her, distracted, pain of varying depths chasing across his face like multilayered ocean
currents. "No," he said, his voice a hoarse shout above the chaotic din. "The breaches in the dome are
above the bulk of the atmosphere; the singularity plane's gravity well will keep most of the air in a thick
layer close to the surface... For the next few minutes anyway. But the air is going to seep out of that
breach. It will absorb all this heat, boil out of the ruined shell... and the dome itself may fail further."
"All right. Tell me about the singularity plane."
He looked vaguely at the console and lifted a desultory hand, tapped almost casually at the touchscreen.
"We've lost control of about thirty percent of the singularities. The integrity of the restraining
electromagnetic net is gone."
Berg frowned, tried to work it out. "What does that do to us?"
"We didn't run any simulations of this scenario." He turned to face her, the sweat on his shaved scalp
glistening in the starbreaker light. "This is a catastrophic failure; we have no options from this point. The
loose singularities will attract each other, swarm together. The n-body computations would be
interesting... The singularity swarms will eventually implode, of course.
"It's over." His shoulders shook convulsively in their thin covering of begrimed, pink material.
She stared at him. She had the feeling that, just at this moment, Jaar broken open as he was would
be prepared to tell her anything she wanted to know about this damn Project: that all the questions that
had plagued her in the months since she'd fallen ass-first into the laps of these Friends of Wigner would at
last be settled... "Jesus, I wish I had time for this." She glared at the console before her, lifted her hands
to the touchscreen but the configuration was different. Blocks of light slid about as she watched; the
damn thing was changing before her eyes. "Jaar, what's happening?"
He glanced down briefly, barely interested. "Compensation for the lost singularities," he said. "The mass
distribution will continue to change until the disrupted singularities settle down to some form of stable
configuration."
"All right." She stared at the shifting color blocks; ignoring the heat of the air, the buffeting wind, she
strove to take in the whole board as a kind of gestalt. Slowly she started to see how this new pattern
matched the matrix she'd memorized earlier, and she raised her hands hesitantly to the screen
Then the shifting, the seemingly random reconfiguring, started again.
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