My good mood faded as I remembered my sister, Coyote, and the way she’d died—her insides scoured to nothingness by the superheated internal fabric of a star. I hoped I wouldn’t share the same fate. My hull armour had taken a beating—first from the Fenrir’s nuclear torpedo, which had for an instant produced temperatures hundreds of thousands of times higher than I was currently experiencing, and then from the precipitous jump into the higher dimensions. However, I was reasonably confident it’d hold, barring further injury. In the meantime, I switched my internal fabrication priorities from ammunition production to damage control, and used the medical interfaces in the command couches on the bridge to check on the unconscious women. My battlefield diagnostics found no serious injuries—at least, no new ones—and so I injected them both with a combination of analgesics and mild stimulants. Within a few minutes, they were both awake and blinking around at the bridge in a mixture of confusion and surprise.

“I thought we were dead,” the captain said, her face orange with light reflected from the external screens. She frowned at the surging sea of plasma (I had filtered the light to a tolerable level, to avoid blinding her).

“Where are we?”

I projected my avatar onto the screen and arranged its features into their most reassuring configuration.

“We are inside the sun.” I had to raise my voice to speak over the boiling roar of the cauldron in which we were immersed.

She groaned and wiped her eyes with her fingertips. “I was afraid you were going to say that.” She rolled her head and sat up straight. “And how did we get here? The last I remember, the Fenrir had us dead in her sights.”

“We jumped.”

“Jumped?”

“Yes.”

“Into the sun?”

“Yes.”

She laughed, but there was an edge to it. “You are fucking insane.” She shook her head, still smiling, and leant towards the tactical display. “Can the Fenrir find us in here?”

“Negative. The plasma masks our heat signature, and the star’s electromagnetic output will interfere with her sensors. She’d have to be right on top of us to stand a chance of detecting us.”

“But it cuts both ways, I guess?”

“If you’re asking whether my sensors are similarly affected, I’m afraid the answer is yes.”

Captain Konstanz gave a thoughtful nod. “Have you ever done anything like this before?” she asked.

“No,” I said, “but I did have a sister who tried it during the war.”

“What happened to her?”

“She died.”

“Great.” The captain slumped back. “So, what do we do now? Just sit here and wait?”

“Fenrir will come to us. She’ll have seen my heading and velocity. She’ll know where I am, and she’ll come looking.”

“And then?”

I narrowed my avatar’s eyes.

“And then, we kill her.”

Forty-Nine: Sal Konstanz

FORTY-NINE

SAL KONSTANZ