He could see this with a feverish clarity; time and again, his implants created realistic scenarios for the asteroid starship’s demise with a painful persistence he could hardly stop. Something akin to guilt compelled him to pay attention, to imagine the destruction as accurately as he could…

For he was directly responsible. He had built the Way; he had pushed a sliver into God’s finger.

They had been traveling for just under five hours. Ry Oyu floated near the bow, face calm.

The flawship shivered faintly. Olmy called up a select display of the next few thousand kilometers. He saw odd square patches floating a kilometer or so above the flaw itself.

We approach a flaw station, the Jart warned him. Begin deceleration.

He applied the clamps in reverse, making the flaw fluoresce a vivid green. By the time they came to a dead stop, they would have traveled some five million kilometers; the flaw station was probably just where the Jart had foreseen.

“We’ll reach a flaw station in about four hours,” he told the Engineer.

The Jart took him over and began to send signals through the flawship radio frequency transmitters.

79

Axis Euclid

Ram Kikura’s display showed the Thistledown spinning this way and that, like some giant’s spindle gathering thread and throwing it off. The northern first third of the asteroid had been melted and blasted away and formed a fan of glowing red haze around the remaining mass.

Hoffman’s shuttle had not been damaged, she had learned a few moments before; all communications had been cut off to allow full channels for official Hexamon signals. Thistledown’s demise would not affect the Earth or the orbiting precincts, beyond a few Old Natives temporarily blinded by the first flare.

She stood up and walked around the apartment, unable to turn away from the display. What next? How long until—

A funnel like the bell of an enormous trumpet congealed out of darkness ahead of Thistledown. Undulating like a jellyfish, the funnel had none of the qualities of the Way; something far more ominous had just come into being, a restrained, shaped black hole, like nothing this universe had ever seen before. The starship began to visibly move toward the yawning dark bell. That implied tremendous acceleration.

The uneven acceleration toward the funnel split the starship along its thinner walls with surgical precision. Tidal forces twisted the asteroid apart in latitudinal segments, as if it were being cut by a giant cake knife, each section corresponding roughly to an internal chamber.

Air and water and rock—and molten rock toward the northern end—spread outward from Thistledown like paint smeared by an enormous thumb, accompanied by a dusty debris that could only be the fragments of interior mountains, forests, cities.

Thistledown’s ruins vanished into the gaping funnel, emerging nowhere, going nowhere, creating a deficit of trillions of tons in this universe which had to be made up in some fashion.