I turned my attention back to the main screen, half expecting at any moment to see the flare of a torpedo launch.

“Shall we run anyway, just to be difficult?”

Laura clapped her hands together and rubbed her palms. Her eyes were slick, and reflected the overhead lights. “Well, why the hell not? I don’t think there’s any sense in making it easy for them, is there? If we’ve got to go, we might as well be as awkward about it as we can.”

“Okay, then.”

I saw the Trouble Dog’s avatar was watching me. “Are the engines ready to go?” I asked.

She smiled. “Of course.”

“How far can you get us before the torpedoes catch us?”

“If we burn for open space, not far. If they fire as soon as they see us accelerating, we’ll barely have broken orbit when the first warhead comes within effective range.”

I slumped down in my chair, feeling like a deflated balloon. “So we’re completely fucked?”

The Dog regarded me with default impassivity, her angelic, almost androgynous face devoid of emotional content. “There is one other option.”

“What?”

She showed me a real-time view of the Brain’s surface. “We go down.”

A red crosshair appeared over one of the deep canyons, accompanied by readouts of range and depth.

“We wouldn’t have time,” I said, feeling my strength ebbing away. “We’d have to slow down, and they’d catch us before we reached the surface.”

“Not if we were accelerating.”

I laughed bitterly. “We’d hit like a meteor. There wouldn’t be enough left of us for their missiles to lock onto.”

“No.” The view expanded. A dark patch on the shadowy canyon floor resolved into an oval-shaped aperture that looked to be at least five hundred metres across. “Not if we aim for this.”

I frowned. The Dog was offering me a lifeline but I was too sceptical to take it, too frightened of disappointment to entertain hope. “Where did that come from?”

“It has just opened.”

“Can we reach it before the torpedoes reach us?”

“At full burn, we stand a reasonable chance.”

I wiped a hand across my eyes. “And how fast will we be travelling when we hit the hole?”

“Over eight thousand metres per second.”

“Is it deep?” If we were going that fast, we’d need plenty of room in order to stop. That hole would have to be at least a hundred kilometres in depth, maybe more.

“Deep enough.”

I drew myself upright. “This isn’t just a way to cheat the Fury by killing yourself before she can kill you, is it?”

The Dog’s expression rearranged itself into an irony-dripping smile. “Perhaps.”

I glanced at Laura. She raised her palms in a shrug. “Makes no difference to me,” she said.

* * *