By the time the hole approached, Chiron's effective mass had reached about a tenth of the Sun's. For every second passing in its interior, a hundred years wore away outside.

Ahead of her, the radiation from the black hole's accretion disc was Doppler-shifted to a lethal sleet. Massive particles tore through the neural nets which comprised her awareness. She felt the nets reconfigure, healing themselves; it was painful and complex, like bone knitting.

Behind her the redshifted emptiness was broken only by the patient, glowering spark of the Squeem missile.

The black hole was only seconds away. She could make those seconds last a Virtual thousand years, if she wished.

In these last moments, she was assailed by doubt. Nobody had tried this maneuver before. Had she destroyed them all?

Gage let her enhanced awareness pan through the bulk of Chiron. Years of reaction-mass plundering had reduced the ice dwarf to a splinter, but it would survive to reach the lip of the black hole -- and so would its precious cargo, the awareness of eighty downloaded humans, the canister containing their clutch of frozen zygotes. That canister felt like a child, inside her womb of ice.

Enough.

She reduced her clock-speed to human perception. The black hole flew at her face--

The misty giant companion star ballooned over Gage's head, its thin gases battering at her face.

Chiron's lower belly dipped fifty yards into the ergosphere. The gravitational pull of the hole gripped her. It felt like pliers in her gut. She was hurled around; she was a helpless child in the grip of some too-strong adult. The fabric of Chiron cracked; Solar System ice flaked into this black hole, here on the edge of the Galaxy, flaring X-radiation as it was crushed.

Then the gravity grip released. The hole system was behind her, receding. The pit dug in spacetime by the hole's mass felt like a distant, fading ache.

She watched the patient GUTspark of the Squeem missile as it approached the hole. It matched her path almost exactly, she saw with grudging admiration.

The missile grazed the lip of the hole. There was a flare of X-radiation.

The GUTspark was gone.

It's worked. By Lethe, after all these years, it's worked.

Suddenly Gage felt utterly human. She wanted to cry, to sleep, to be held.

Cydonia, her home arcology, was an angular pyramid, huge before her, silhouetted against the light of the shrunken Sun. The ambient Martian light was like a late sunset, with the arcology drenched in a weak, deep pink color; against its surface its windows were rectangles of fluorescent light glowing a harsh pearl gray, startlingly alien.

Her boots had left crisp marks in the duricrust.

Gage wasn't nostalgic, usually, but since the hole flyby she had felt the need to retreat into the scenes and motifs of her childhood.

Moro and Mackenzie met her on this simulated Martian surface.

"It was simple," she said.

Mackenzie smiled.

Moro growled. "You've told us."