For long minutes they sat in silence, the three of them in their blisters.

“Here’s something else,” Cohl said at last. “To get back to Arches from here we’ll have to complete another closed-timelike-curve trajectory.”

“A what? . . . Oh.” Another jump into the past.

“We’ll arrive two years before we set off on the mission.” She sounded awed.

Hope said, “I’ll meet my past self. Lethe. I hope I’m not as bad as I remember.”

“And, Pirius,” Cohl said, “there will be a younger version of Dans. A third version. Dans won’t have to die. None of this will be real.”

Pirius really did hate time paradoxes. “Time loops or not, we lived through this. We will remember. It’s real enough. Navigator, do you want to lay in that course?”

“Sure . . .”

Hope said dryly, “You might want to delay a little before kicking off for home, Pilot. Take a look.” He projected a Virtual into their blisters.

It was a shape, drifting in space. Pirius made out a slender body, crumpled wings folded. “It’s the fly,” he breathed.

Hope said, “We have to take it back to base.”

Cohl said, “We captured a Xeelee? Nobody ever did that before. Pirius, you said you wanted to make your name stand out. Well, perhaps you have. We’ll be heroes!”

Hope laughed. “I thought heroism is anti-Doctrinal?”

Pirius brought the greenship about and sent it skimming to the site of the derelict. “First we need to figure how to grapple that thing.”

As it turned out—when they had got hold of the Xeelee, and with difficulty secured it for FTL flight, and had hauled it all the way back to the base in Arches Cluster—they found themselves to be anything but heroes.

Chapter 4

This was the energetic heart of a large galaxy, a radiation bath where humans had to rely on their best technological capabilities to keep their fragile carbon-chemistry bodies from being fried. But to the quagmites it was a cold, dead place, in a dismal and unwelcoming era. The quagmites were survivors of a hotter, faster age than this.

They were drawn to the neutron star, for in its degenerate-matter interior there was a hint of the conditions of the warm and bright universe they had once known. But even here everything was frozen solid, comparatively. They were like humans stranded on an ice moon, a place where water, the very stuff of life, is frozen as hard as bedrock.

Still, every now and again there was a spark of something brighter—like the firefly speck which had come hurtling out of nowhere and skimmed the surface of the neutron star. The quagmites lived fast, even in this energy-starved age. To them the fractions of a second of the closest approach to the neutron star were long and drawn-out. They had plenty of time to come close, to bask in the warmth of the ship’s GUTdrive, and to feed.