Touching the Void was his. But what was going on over there on the White Cat? It was total radio silence over there. K-ships had nothing you could call internal coms traffic: despite that you could usually tell if anyone was alive inside. Not in this case. Thirteen nanoseconds after the death of the Nastic commander, everything in the White Cat had switched itself off. The fusion engines were down. The dynaflow drivers were down. That ship wasn’t even talking to itself, let alone Uncle Zip. “I don’t have time for this,” he complained. “I got business elsewhere.” But he continued to watch. For another hour, nothing happened. Then, very slowly, a pale, wavering glow surrounded the White Cat. It was like a magnetic field, sketched slightly out from the ship’s hull; or a faint diagram of some kind of fluid supercavitation effect. It was violet in colour.

“What’s this?” Uncle Zip asked himself.

“Ionising radiation,” said his pilot in a bored voice. “Oh, and I’m getting internal traffic.”

“Hey, who asked you?” said Uncle Zip. “What kind of traffic?”

“Come to think of it, I got no idea.”

“Jesus.”

“It’s stopped now anyway. Something was producing dark matter in there. Like the whole hull was full of it for a second.”

“That long?”

The pilot consulted his displays.

“Photinos, mostly,” he said.

After that, the ionising radiation died away and nothing happened for a further two hours. Then the White Cat jumped from blacked-out to torched-up without any intervening state. “Jesus Christ!” screamed Uncle Zip. “Get us out of here!” He thought she had exploded. His pilot went on ship-time and—ignoring the faint cries of the work teams still trapped inside—ripped the last few metres of the El Rayo X from the ruins of the Nastic vessel. He was good. He got them free and facing the right direction just in time to see the White Cat accelerate from a standstill to 98 percent the speed of light in less than fourteen seconds.

“Stay with them,” Uncle Zip told him quietly.

“France chance, honey,” the pilot said. “That’s no fusion engine.” Fierce annular shockwaves in no detectable medium were spilling back along the White Cat’s course. They were the colour of mercury. A moment or two later she reached the point where Einstein’s universe would no longer put up with her, and vanished. “They were building themselves a new drive,” the pilot said. “New navigation systems. Maybe a whole new theory of everything. I can’t deal with that. My guess: we’re stuffed.”

Uncle Zip sat on his stool for thirty long seconds, staring at the empty displays. Eventually he rubbed his face.

“They’ll go to Sigma End,” he decided. “Make the best time you can.”

“I’m on it,” the pilot said.