The imaging assembly hung on its pivot above the ship. It was far enough out from their thermal shield to see all and feel the full glare, so it was heating up fast. Pretty soon it would melt, despite its cooling system. Let it. They wouldn’t need it then. They’d be out there in the sunlight themselves.

Claire swiveled the mirror—already pitted, you could see it on the picture of the arch itself, but the sim kept showing it as pristine. Brushoff smoothing, Rachel recognized.

“Color is a temperature indicator, right?” Claire asked loudly so her passengers could hear. The answer echoed and danced in the air, typescripted.

Red denotes a level of 7 million degrees Kelvin.

“Good ol’ coquettish Erma,” Claire said. “Just ’cause we got guests. Never a direct answer unless you coax, folks.” A wink back at them. Then a clipped command to Erma: “Closeup the top of the arch.”

In both her cyber-eyed views the tortured sunscape shot by. The coronal loop was a shimmering, braided family of magnetic flux tubes, as intricately woven as a Victorian doily, though it seethed like snakes. Its feet were anchored in the photosphere below, held by thick, sluggish plasma.

Claire zoomed in on the arch.

Rachel thought, The hottest reachable place in the entire solar system, and our prey had to end up here.

Target acquired and resolved by SolWatch satellite. It is at the very peak of the arch. Also, very dark.

Claire laughed, a dry cackle. “Sure, dummy, it’s a hole.”

I am accessing my astrophysical context program now.

By now Rachel knew this was Ever-Perfect Erma; primly change the subject.

Claire peered forward and said, “Show me, with color coding.”

Rachel gripped the ironically named Comfort Couch and eyed Fraq. The silent birdy alien blinked, nodded, said nothing. This sun-plunging freighter-scoop was not made for tourists. They had left behind the Prefects, Admids, pseud-scholars, the whole gang, because of, thankfully, the invariant principle of No Room. Also, Dangerous As Hell, which was the final decider of who got a Comfort Couch.

That cut the candidates down to those who had balls, metaphorically at least. Rachel didn’t have the real thing, but her courage was now undoubted. Fraq might—Ythri were Victorian about stuff like that, kicking inquiring exobiologists aside in white-heat anger—but actual sperm sources, testosterone-rich, were just a metaphor, after all. So they’d got into this crazy stunt, yet again together, by metaphoric means.

Rachel watched the pilot, taking deep breaths to calm herself. Claire peered at the round black splotch up ahead. Like a fly caught in a spiderweb. Well, at least it didn’t squirm or have legs. She hated spiders, having grown up on the Gulf coast and been bitten many times.

Magnetic strands played and rippled like wheat blown by a summer’s breeze. The flux tubes were blue in this coding, and they looked eerie. But they were really just ordinary magnetic fields, the sort Claire worked with every day. The dark sphere they held was the true strangeness here. And the blue strands had snared the black fly in a firm grip.