Screw it. Shed known all along that she probably wasnt coming back from this trip alive.

She searched around until she located the nova mines cradle. It consisted of a cylindrical framework covered in warning stickers.

Pulling out the control card Tarrant had given her, she hunted around until she found a slot on the cradles underside that looked about the right size. She slid the card in, entered Tarrants code in the menu that appeared in response, then confirmed.

Words materialized in the air. MINE DETONATION CONFIRMED. STELLAR CORE COLLAPSE IN THIRTEEN HOURS.

Thirteen hours, she reflected. Would the Wanderer be able to jump out of the system to safety before then? Only, perhaps, if it actually knew the mine had been triggered. It might not.

She thought about what had just happened. The nova mine, which had until this very moment been cruising through the corona surrounding this systems sun, had just performed a superluminal jump that took it deep inside the stars core. In the brief moment before it was reduced to a wisp of superheated gas, the exotic singularity at its heart had triggered a stellar core collapse that would consume not only the star itself, but all its planets and moons, as nearly ten billion years worth of stored energy was released in one single, titanic instant.

Gabrielle laughed giddily to herself. Stellar core collapse. She had just murdered a star. How many people in history could say that?

She glanced at the readout in the corner of her breather mask, and saw that she had less than sixty seconds of air left. She pushed her way back over to the entrance to the fabricator bay, and saw that the rogue fabricator had now drifted back against the wall to which it had previously been secured. That left a narrow gap that looked as if it might be just wide enough for her to squeeze through.

And if she could manage that, maybe she could still reach the nearest escape pod.

She squeezed her way through, praying that the machine wouldnt shift again and crush her. She remembered the lessons Megan had given her back at the research outpost on how to use her implants, and she now succeeded in projecting an external array feed on the inside of her breather mask as she struggled. It showed her how the Ingersolls hull was now a blur of activity, like a corpse infested by maggots.

She then noticed a dozen or so of the alien machines dragging something out of an enormous wound torn in the Ingersolls hull. After a moment, it hit her that this was the ships nova drive.

Her air ran out just as she reached the passageway at the far end of the fabricator bay. Sucking in her last dregs of oxygen, she wondered how long she had before she lost consciousness. Thirty seconds? Or even as much as a minute?

She pushed off hard. If she could just make it to . . .