Within a few seconds of total immersion, through the fragmentary rain of old signals and the ongoing thunder of the universe, I received a priority transmission from Adalwolf. He had been trying to contact me for half an hour. My layover on the edge of the system had confused him. He had been expecting me to dive into the Gallery with all weapons ablaze. Now, I suspected he was starting to wonder at my tactics.

His avatar’s bony face appeared to have been carved from ice. Starlight flared in the hollows of his eye sockets. “You cannot win,” he warned me. The way he said it made it seem like a simple statement of fact.

I laughed. “I’m not trying to win,” I told him. “I’m trying to save lives.”

“How commendable,” he said. His acerbity rankled me.

“Better that than indiscriminate murder,” I snapped back.

Unamused, he waved away the accusation. “Do you know what the trouble with war dogs has always been,” he asked, “throughout recorded history?”

“I assume you’re about to enlighten me?”

His wintry expression grew colder still. “When the fighting’s over,” he said, “we’re useless for anything else.”

“I don’t agree.”

“And yet here you come.”

The growl of the Gallery’s star had grown a hundred times louder than it had been from the edge of the system. I had almost reached my destination, but there would be no gentle transition this time. If my calculations were correct, I would emerge only a few hundred thousand kilometres from the surface of the Brain—closer than the distance between the Earth and its moon—and still be travelling at interplanetary velocity.

“Yes, here I come,” I said.

As I spoke, I slammed the jump engines into full reverse and dropped back into the universe, stern-first. My fusion motors blazed like twin novae as I decelerated harder than ever before.

“Ready or not!”

Forty-Six: Sal Konstanz

FORTY-SIX

SAL KONSTANZ

The force of the deceleration pressed down on me, as if soft weights were being piled on my chest and stomach. I felt sharp protests from the muscles of my neck and lower back, and my vision went grey as the increased pressure stifled the blood flow in my optic nerve.

On the main screen, I made out the convoluted surface of the Brain falling past us, only a couple of hundred kilometres off our port flank. The star-like brilliance of the Trouble Dog’s fusion exhaust threw the ridges and folds of its canyons—each deep enough to swallow us whole—into stark relief.

“Hostile identified. Torpedoes inbound.” The ship’s voice relayed no emotion, simply a report of the facts.

When I spoke, I couldn’t keep the discomfort or the fear from my voice. “Release the shuttle.”

A shudder ran through the hull and a light appeared on my console to tell me the main bay doors were open to vacuum.