And it was still on his tail. All he could do was fly the ship; there was absolutely nothing he could do about the Xeelee.

Ahead, light flared. Over the horizon came rushing a massive flaw in the star’s crust, a pool of blue-white light kilometers wide from which starstuff poured in a vertical torrent, radiating as much energy in a fraction of a second as Earth’s sun would lose in ten thousand years. An arch, yellow-white, was forming above the star’s tight horizon, kilometers high. In places the arch feathered and streamed, tracing out the lines of the magnetic field that restrained it.

On a neutron star, events happened fast. The rent in the surface was already healing, the arch collapsing almost as soon as it had formed, its material dragged down by the star’s magisterial gravity field.

And the Claw flew right underneath it.

Pirius’s blister shuddered as if it would tear itself apart. Those mottled surface features whipped beneath, and the arch loomed above him. He had never known such a sensation of sheer speed. He might not live through this, but Lethe, it was quite a ride.

There was a punch in the small of his back, the ghost of hundreds of gravities as the Claw kicked its way out of the star’s gravity well.

The neutron star whipped away into darkness. The arch had already collapsed.

And in the last instant he glimpsed the Xeelee, behind him. No longer an implacable, converging foe, it was folding over, as if its graceful wings were crumpled in an invisible fist.

The Assimilator’s Claw hung in empty space, far from the neutron star. The crew tended their slight wounds, and tried to get used to still being alive. They saw to their ship’s systems; the encounter with the quagmites had done a good deal of damage to the GUTdrive.

And they reconstructed what had happened during those crucial moments at the magnetar.

At its heart the magnetic field embracing the flare had been as strong as any field since the first moments of the universe itself. At such field strengths atoms themselves were distorted, forced into skinny cylindrical shapes; no ordinary molecular structure could survive. Photons were split and combined. Even the structure of spacetime was distorted: it became birefringent, Pirius learned, crystalline.

It was this last which had probably done for the Xeelee. Nobody knew for sure how a nightfighter’s sublight drive worked. But the drive seemed to work by manipulating spacetime itself. In a place where spacetime crystallized, that manipulation could no longer work—but the Claw’s much cruder GUTdrive had kept functioning, despite the quagmites.

All that was straightforward enough. Just physics.

“But what I can’t get my head around,” Pirius told Dans’s Virtual, “is how you appeared out of nowhere, and squirted down the right evasive maneuver for us, based on a knowledge of the flare’s evolution before it happened.”

Dans said tinnily, “It was just an application of FTL technology. Remember, every FTL ship—”