Orbiting far from Saturn’s patient golden face, the test rig was a set of twenty GUTdrive engines, mounted in a loose spherical framework perhaps fifty meters across. Technicians and bots crawled over it. It had been put together in a few days, and it didn’t look much like anything, let alone a weapon for striking at the most formidable fortress in the Galaxy.
But a few kilometers away, the captive Xeelee ship waited, surrounded by its usual cordon of watchful guardian drones; today, once again, the nightfighter was the test target. Spinning slowly, surrounded by its attendant cloud of bots and techs, the test rig looked as much a threat to the patient Xeelee as a spitball.
He said, “It looks like shit.”
Even that didn’t force a smile from Torec. “Actually we’ve come a long way in a few days. But we’re as underfunded as ever. We need GUTdrive generators, but all Nilis was able to get hold of are those dinged-up, decommissioned relics. You can see the scars where they have been cut out of wrecks.”
“Darc and Nilis are at each other’s throats.”
“That’s just their way. Darc is keen, once he forgets that he disapproves of the whole thing. He likes getting his hands dirty—especially on something new like this. He’s okay.”
Pirius looked covertly at her so-familiar profile, the finely carved chin, the upturned nose, the lines of her face softened by golden-brown Saturn light. “And you’ve kept busy.”
She shrugged. “It’s not so bad right now. When, if, we get through this proof-of-concept stage, I’ll be involved in developing the flight hardware. You, too, I guess.”
His need to touch her was an ache. “Torec, listen. I—”
She held up a hand, silencing him. A green light flared beyond the hull.
The techs and bots backed away from the rig, leaving only a few drones for close-in monitoring. Pirius watched Torec silently counting down, tracking the clock in her head, as she always did: Three. Two. One.
The rig quivered. Waves of distortion, easily visible, spread out from each of the GUTdrive generators, as if they were pebbles thrown in a pool.
GUTdrive engines worked by allowing a fragment of compressed mass-energy to expand, releasing energy through the decay of a unified superforce. In this configuration, rather than using that energy to drive a spacecraft, the engines were each supposed to create a spherical wave of distorted spacetime. The engines had been positioned so that the ripples moved inward, into the rig.
As the waves converged, blue-white light flared, dazzling. The flash dissipated immediately—but now a concentrated knot of distortion was traveling along the axis of the rig. Shifting, oscillating, the distortion made the stars blur as it traveled. It was like an immense drop of water, Pirius thought. As it burst from the rig the knot broke open struts, and sent the scavenged GUTdrive engines flying—and it was aimed straight at the nightfighter.