Good luck, that. Otherwise, SolWatch would never have seen it. In deep space there was nothing harder to find than that ebony splotch. Which was why nobody ever had, until now.

Our orbit now rises above the dense plasma layer. I can improve resolution by going to X-ray. Should I?

“Do.”

The splotch swelled. Rachel followed Claire’s gaze, squinted at the magnetic flux tubes in this ocher light. A spectrum flipper drew out new info, angles. In the X-ray, the mag fields looked sharp and spindly. But near the splotch the field lines blurred. Maybe they were tangled there, but more likely it was the splotch doing its work, warping the image.

“Coy, aren’t we?” Claire closeupped the X-ray picture. Hard radiation was the best probe of the hottest structures.

The splotch. Light there was crushed, curdled, stirred with a spectral spoon.

A fly caught in a spider’s web, then grilled over a campfire.

The arch loomed over the sun’s horizon now, a shimmering curve of blue-white, thousands of kilometers tall. The two feet anchored magnetically in the blazing plain of the chromosphere, just an outer layer of the immensity that was Sol.

Beautiful, seen in the shimmering X-ray—snaky strands purling, twinkling with scarlet hotspots. Utterly lovely, utterly deadly. No place for an ore hauler to be. Yet it could survive these conditions, hiding behind an asteroid steered in for that purpose alone.

“Time to get a divorce,” Claire said cheerily. She pointed to their stone shield.

You are surprisingly accurate. Separation from the slag shield is 338 seconds away.

“Don’t patronize me, Erma.”

I am using my personality simulation programs as expertly as my computation space allows.

“Don’t waste your running time; it’s not convincing. Pay attention to the survey, then the separation.”

The all-spectrum survey is completely automatic, as designed by SolWatch.

“Double-check it.”

I shall no doubt benefit from this advice.

Deadpan sarcasm, Rachel supposed. Erma’s tinkling voice was charming, impossible to shut out. Erma herself was an interactive intelligence, shipwired. Running the Silver Metal Lugger would be impossible without her and the bots. Skimming over the sun’s wrath might be impossible even with them, Rachel thought, watching burnt oranges and scalded yellows flower ahead.

Claire turned the ship to keep it dead center in the shield’s shadow. That jagged mound of smelted slag was starting to spin. Fused, glistening knobs came marching over the nearby horizon of it.

“Where’d that spin come from?” Claire asked. She’d started their parabolic plunge sunward with absolutely zero angular momentum in the shield.

Tidal torques acting on the asymmetric body of the shield. Also boiling off melted elements.

“I hadn’t thought of that.”

The idea was to keep the heated side of the slag shield sunward. Now that heat was coming around to radiate at them. The knobby crust Claire had stuck together from waste in Mercury orbit now smoldered in the infrared.

The shield’s far side was melting. “Can that warm us up much?”

A small perturbation. We will be safely gone before it matters.