Tarrant once again struggled to hold on to his temper. Gabrielle, I want you to understand the situation clearly. By the time Anil is finished with you, youll do anything he wants you to. You will not be the same person you are now. He shook his head. The damage is more than physical; pain like that stays with you, somewhere deep inside. I dont want to let him anywhere near you, but youre not giving me much of a choice.

Thijs was a sadist and a monster, she said quietly. But he had nothing on you, Gregor Tarrant.

Thijs, said Tarrant, was an amateur with delusions of grandeur. He moved towards the door. Well make arrangements for you to speak to Megan later today. Please dont make things any more difficult than they need be.

So that she could speak directly with Megan, they made adjustments to Gabrielles inhibitor, in order to allow her carefully limited access to the Ingersolls internal net. Corridors and walls that had previously appeared starkly uniform and grey now bloomed with information and visuals that had so far been hidden from her. She could not, however, link with the primary interface, nor communicate with the Ingersolls unseen machine-head pilot.

She was now also able to follow the Ingersolls progress closely as it passed through the outer system on the way to its centre. She saw the great blooms of superheated plasma that spun off the ancient stars surface, and she found supplementary information that told her the star was dying, literally wasting away as great sheets of its body sheared off into space, generating those vast nebula clouds filling the surrounding volume of space.

The ships computers showed her the course that the Ingersoll would follow, a parabolic curve bringing them within a few million kilometres of the stars bloated surface, before hurtling them back outwards once more towards the moon where the Wanderer waited.

Curiosity prompted Gabrielle to access an exterior image of the Ingersoll. She was thus able to see a mid-section bulge that contained the linked rings in which she and the crew resided. Something about this image made her think of a snake that had just swallowed something much larger than itself.

The thought of what she might experience were she to be given full, unrestricted access to the Ingersolls navigational systems left her with an ache deep in her belly. She promised herself that if by some miracle she survived the coming days, she would become a pilot.

They were drawing closer to their rendezvous with the star, which loomed larger by the hour in the shipboard monitors. She quickly learned that the path of a spacecraft was determined not in terms of straight lines, but rather by its movement between various orbits involving greater and lesser expenditures of energy.