"Do you know about the Kerr metric?" asked the Qax. "No? The Great Attractor is a massive toroid rotating extremely quickly. Your own theory of relativity predicts some odd effects with such a structure. There may be closed lines in space and time, for instance--"

"Come again?"

"Time travel," said Lipsey. "And more... Bolder, the Kerr metric describes Interfaces between Universes. Do you understand? It's as if--"

"What?"

"As if the Xeelee don't like this Universe, so they're building a way out."

I focused my monitors on the dust that walled the cavity in the stars. I saw ships -- an aviary of all shapes and sizes, uncountable trillions of them.

A few light minutes from me I made out a particularly monstrous ship, a disc that must have been the size of Earth's Moon. Hundreds of cup freighters nestled into neat pouches in the disc's upper surface, dumping out stolen star material. Vents in the underside of the main ship emitted a constant rain of immense crystalline shafts, as if it were some huge sieve leaking rainwater.

Peering deeper into the mist of craft I could see fantastic bucket-chains of the disc-ships descending to the Great Attractor, dwindling to pinpoints against the vast carcass of the ring. Returning ships, I saw, were diverted to clouds of cup freighters for reloading.

I began to see the pattern. "So the disc-ships are huge, ah, dumper trucks," I said. "They're tending the Great Attractor, bringing it matter and energy. Using that crystalline stuff to grow the string, knitting it together strand by strand, with a patience that's lasted billions of years..."

There was a flicker in my peripheral vision. My posse. They whirled around me and began to close up once more.

I closed up my wings and prepared to punch the red button. "Lipsey, I've seen enough. We've got to spread this news around all the races in our region -- find a way to stop the Xeelee before they wreck our Universe. We've time to plan--"

He coughed apologetically. "Ah -- look, Bolder, this information is Qax commercial property. You know that."

I hesitated. "You're kidding. We're doomed if the Qax keep this knowledge to themselves."

He sighed. "The Qax don't think on those timescales. They can't, remember. They think about profit, today."

I forced my hand away from the escape button; a cold knot in my stomach started to tighten. Suddenly this wasn't a game. If I tried to go home after what I'd just blurted out, the Qax wouldn't hesitate to use their Spline warships to blast me out of the sky. Abruptly my isolation telescoped into a vivid reality, and the cage around me seemed absurdly fragile... And the Xeelee whirled tighter, reminding me that hanging around here wasn't an option either.