He watched through her eyes as her hand plucked up a silvery metal star. Her slim fingers twisted a dial in the very center, and the points lit, projecting some sort of bright, thin white beams to form a glowing pentagon around the metal star. And then, Tom felt her hooking it into the back of her neck like a neural wire.

The flash of consciousness to the distant vessel was instantaneous. Quantum-entangled photons in the ship’s CPU instantly responded to the actions of their paired photons in the Spire’s CPU. The vessel’s sensors registered in Heather’s awareness like an extension of her own body, and since Tom was hooked in with her, he felt it, too. For a moment, Tom marveled at this, at how it all felt so much more vivid than the drone he’d interfaced with at Capitol Summit or even the way he’d interface and leap system to system himself. . . .

Tom?

He was vaguely aware of the jerk in his distant body, the awareness he’d been thinking about that and he wasn’t sure how much she heard with a limited thought interface. But even now she was hearing some of this, and Tom needed to stop thinking about it.

Tom, what are you— It’s starting.

The bright pulse of a Promethean Array’s electromagnetic beam streaked past. It was the warning pulse, which meant a second pulse was incoming. Heather’s ship burned away its tiny store of metallic hydrogen fuel to soar forward into position, and then the Promethean Array’s next beam hit the rear plates of her ship—and Tom felt a massive charge of intense but incredible heat as the nuclear reaction triggered, exploding against the back plate of the ship and launching them forward into the black canopy of space.

One by one, the other vessels positioned themselves behind Heather’s. The electromagnetic pulses hit them, triggering atomic reactions—and something else, too. The ships were conductive. They used energy as propulsion but also conducted it forward so the ships behind Heather’s accelerated and, at the same time, shot energy forward and caused her vessel to accelerate even faster. Tom was aware of Heather’s neural processor tracking how much energy the ship could tolerate, her ship in the lead of the cascade formation, the fastest.