Pirius saw Cohl sit up, astonished. “Where did that come from? Pilot—”

“Load the course, Navigator.”

A Virtual coalesced before Pirius: Dans’s head, disembodied. Her face was small, round, neat, with a wide, sensual mouth, a mouth made for laughing. Now that mouth grinned at Pirius. “Boo!”

“Dans, what—”

“It’s not me, it’s a downloaded Virtual. The real Dans will be hitting the surface of the star in”—she closed her eyes, and the image wavered, blocky pixels fluttering, as if she was concentrating—“three, two, one. Plop. Bye-bye.”

Pirius felt a stab of regret through his fear, bafflement, adrenaline rush. “Dans, I’m sorry.”

“There was no other way—no other trajectory.”

“Trajectory from where?”

“From the future, of course. Pirius, you’re twenty seconds from closest approach.”

He glimpsed a splash of red, wheeling past the blister. It was the neutron star.

Dans said, “You need to cut in your GUTdrive. On my mark—”

“Dans, that’s insane.” So it was; the antiquated GUTdrive was a last-resort backup system.

“I knew you’d argue. Your sublight won’t work. Do it, asshole. Two, one—”

In the heart of the GUTdrive, specks of matter were compressed to conditions not seen since the aftermath of the Big Bang; released from their containment, these specks swelled immensely. This was the energy that had once driven the expansion of the universe itself; now it heated asteroid ice to a frenzied steam and forced it through rocket nozzles. A GUTdrive was just a water rocket, a piece of engineering that would have been recognizable to technicians on prespaceflight Earth twenty-five thousand years before.

But it worked, even here. A new light flared behind the ship, a ghostly gray-white, the light of the GUTdrive.

Dans winked at Pirius. “See you on the other side.” The Virtual collapsed into a cloud of dispersing pixels.

The neutron star cannonballed at Pirius, suddenly huge. It was a flattened orange, visibly three-dimensional, its surface mottled by electric storms. It slid beneath Claw’s prow, and for a moment, continents of orange-brown light fled beneath Pirius’s blister. All these impressions in a second; less. But now a stronger light was looming over the horizon, yellow-white: it was the site of the flare, a grim dawn approaching.

And in the same instant the Claw juddered, shook, its drive stuttering. What now? Diagnostics popped up before Pirius. Around a Virtual of the GUTdrive core, shadowy shapes swarmed. Quagmites, he saw: the strange entities that were attracted by every use of a GUTdrive in this region—living things maybe, pests for sure, feeding off the primordial energy of the GUTdrive itself, and causing the mighty engine to stutter.

“The fly’s on us!” Cohl cried.

When Pirius glanced at the reverse view he saw the Xeelee fighter. Its night-dark wings flexed and sparked as it swam through space after him. He had never seen a Xeelee so close, save in sims: he didn’t know anybody who had, and lived. It was more than inhuman, he thought, more than just alien; it was a dark, primeval thing, not of this time. But it was perfectly adapted to this environment, as humans with their clumsy gadgetry were not.