Nevertheless, the Bussard module, the hilt and pommel of the dagger, was detached. Maneuvering it away from the vessel was tough, dangerous labor. Without friction or weight, it kept every gram of its considerable inertial mass. It was as hard to stop as to set in motion.

Finally it trailed aft on a cable. Fedoroff checked the positioning himself. “Done,” he grunted. “I hope.” His men clipped their lifelines to the cable. He did likewise, spoke to Telander in the bridge, and cast off. The cable was reeled back inboard, taking the engineers along.

They had need for haste. While the module would follow the hull on more or less the same orbit, differential influences were acting. They would soon cause an undesirable shift in relative alignments. But everyone must be inside before the next stage of the process. The forces about to be established would not be kind to living organisms.

Leonora Christine extended her scoopfield webs. They glistened in the sunlight, silver across starry black. From afar she might have suggested a spider, one of those adventurous little arachnids that went flying off with kites made of dewy silk. She was not, after all, anything big or important in the universe.

Yet what she did was awesome enough on the human scale. Her interior power plant sent energy coursing into the scoopfield generators. From their controlling webwork sprang a field of magnetohydrodynamic forces— invisible but reaching across thousands of kilometers; a dynamic interplay, not a static configuration, but maintained and adjusted with nigh absolute precision; enormously strong but even more enormously complex.

The forces siezed the trailing Bussard unit, brought it into micrometrically exact position with respect to the hull, locked it in place. Monitors verified that everything was in order. Captain Telander made a final check with the Patrol on Luna, received his go-ahead, and issued a command. From then on, the robots took over.

Low acceleration on ion thrust had built up a modest outward speed, measurable in tens of kilometers per second. It sufficed to start the star-drive engine. The power available increased by orders of magnitude. At a full one gravity, Leonora Christine began to move!

CHAPTER 4

In one of the garden rooms stood a viewscreen tuned to Outside. Sable and diamonds were startlingly framed by ferns, orchids, overarching fuchsia and bougainvillea. A fountain tinkled and glittered. The air was warmer here than in most places aboard, moist, full of perfumes and greenness.

None of it quite did away with the underlying pulse of driving energies. Bussard systems had not been developed to the smoothness of electric rockets. Always, now, the ship whispered and shivered. The vibration was faint, on the very edge of awareness, but it wove its way through metal, bones, and maybe dreams.

Emma Glassgold and Chi-Yuen Ai-Ling sat on a bench among the flowers. They had been walking about, feeling their way toward friendship. Since entering the garden, however, they had fallen silent.

Abruptly Glassgold winced and pulled her vision from the screen. “It was a mistake to come here,” she said. “Let us go.”