A compact yellow star at the heart of the Galaxy, searingly close to the ship. Last stop. Time to get out.

I climbed onto my seat, put my shoulders against the pod's crystalline plating, and pushed. For a heart-stopping moment I thought the shell was too strong -- then it crumbled, and I popped into space, clutching my translator box. Below me glittered the crusted wings of the ship I'd taken so far.

My plan had worked. The Great Attractor substance had added enough mass to the ship to shift its arrival point significantly closer to the system center. Now I had to rely on the Qax to do the rest--

-- jump--

-- and the ship disappeared and I was left alone in a cloud of fragments; they sparkled in the light of the compact star.

I drifted there for a while, rotating slowly. Then I squeezed the Spline distress bracelet. It turned rigid and cold.

Lipsey began to speak out of the translator box. His voice was hoarse, forced. I listened, absently picking sparkling fragments out of the space around me and stuffing them into a suit pocket.

"You haven't come out where we expected, Bolder. What have you... you're causing the Qax a lot of confusion, I can tell that much..."

A pause. "I think they've found you... but what are you doing there?"

The Spline warships rotated like eyeballs, scouring space...

Then they found my ship, inexplicably close to the Qax sun.

The Qax panicked. They sent their shell-shaped armada roaring in towards their sun. Waves of energy pounded the Xeelee ship; the great wings sagged like melting chocolate. And in the middle of that torrent of energy was a thread of cherry-red light that arrowed through the wreck and into the sun.

As I'd hoped, in their anxiety and confusion the Qax had thrown at my ship all they had -- including their only Xeelee weapon.

Of course, it was only a single starbreaker. I'm told it took a couple of days before the flares started.

Lipsey died alone, surrounded by the rage of humanity's conquerors. It was the end of an undeservedly long life. But he died laughing at them. I heard him.

A Spline freighter ingested me after a day.

The Spline sold me access to a human news channel. I figured, why not. Since I was still broke, in spite of everything, I wasn't going to be able to pay them anyway...

Humanity was rejoicing. Qax-owned ships were disappearing from the skies of the human worlds of the Solar System. The Qax were going to need every cubic foot of carrying capacity to get themselves off their home world before their sun blew up. They were going to be busy for a long, long time, and much too preoccupied to hunt me down.

And once I released my news about the Xeelee, we'd be busy, too. One day we'd go back to the Great Attractor, take on the Xeelee starbreakers.