“So if we can break out when Maranta is seven and a half thousand klicks away, we’ll be far enough ahead of it to escape.”

“And Gramine ?” Melvyn asked. He didn’t like Joshua’s quiet tone, as if the young captain was afraid of what he was going to say.

“We know where it’s going to be, we can leave one of the megaton nukes from the combat wasp waiting for it. Mine the ring where it will pass overhead, attach the nuke to a large rock particle. Between them, the emp pulse, the plasma wave, and the rock fragments should disable it.”

“How do we get it there?” Melvyn asked.

“You know bloody well how we get it there,” Sarha said. “Someone’s got to carry it using a manoeuvring pack, right Joshua? That’s what you did in the Ruin Ring, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. They can’t detect one person fifteen kilometres deep in the ring, not using cold gas to manoeuvre.”

“Wait a minute,” Dahybi said. He had been running flight trajectory simulations in the navigation display. “Even if you did knock out the Gramine , and that’s a bloody long shot, we’re still no better off. Maranta will just launch her combat wasps straight at us. There’s no way we can out-run them, they’ll get us before we’re halfway to the edge of Murora’s gravity field, let alone Lalonde’s jump coordinate.”

“If we accelerate at eight gees, we’ll have seven minutes fifteen seconds before the Maranta ’s combat wasps will catch us,” Joshua said. “Distance-wise that works out at about sixteen thousand kilometres.”

“That still won’t get us outside Murora’s gravity field. We couldn’t even jump blind.”

“No, but there is one place we can jump from. It’s only fifteen thousand kilometres away; we would have a twenty-second safety margin.”

“Where?” Melvyn demanded.

Joshua datavised an instruction into the flight computer. The navigational display drew a violet trajectory line from the Lady Mac towards the edge of the ring, sliding round in a retrograde curve to end at one of the four tiny ring-shepherd moonlets.

“Murora VII,” Joshua said.

A terrible realization came to Dahybi; his balls retracted as though he’d dived into an icy lake. “Oh, Christ, no , Joshua. You can’t be serious, not at that velocity.”

“So give me an alternative.”

“An alternative to what?” Sarha asked petulantly.

Still looking at Joshua, Dahybi said: “The Lagrange point. Every two-body system has them. It’s where the moonlet’s gravity is balanced by Murora’s, which means you can activate a starship’s nodes inside it without worrying about gravitonic stress desynchronization. Technically, they’re points, but in practice they work out as a relatively spherical zone. A small zone.”

“For Murora VII, about two and a half kilometres in diameter,” Joshua said. “Unfortunately, we’ll be travelling at about twenty-seven kilometres per second when we reach it. That gives us a tenth of a second to trigger the nodes.”

“Oh, shit,” Ashly grunted.

“It won’t be a problem for the flight computer,” Joshua said blandly.

“But where will the jump take us?” Melvyn asked.

“I can give us a rough alignment on Achillea, the third gas giant. It’s on the other side of the system now, about seven billion kilometres away. We’ll jump a billion kilometres, align Lady Mac properly on one of its outer moons, then jump again. No way will Maranta be able to follow us through those kind of manoeuvres. When we get to Achillea we slingshot round the moon onto a Lalonde trajectory and jump in. Total elapsed time eighty minutes maximum.”

“Oh, God . . . well, I suppose you know what you’re talking about.”

“Him?” Sarha exclaimed. “You must be joking.”

“It has a certain degree of style,” Dahybi said. He nodded approvingly. “OK, Joshua, I’ll have the nodes primed. But you’re going to have to be staggeringly accurate when we hit that Lagrange point.”

“My middle name.”

Sarha studied the bridge decking. “I know another one,” she muttered under her breath.

“So who’s the lucky one that gets to EVA in the rings and blow up the Gramine ?” Melvyn asked.

“Volunteers can draw lots,” Joshua said. “Put my name in.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Sarha said. “We all know you’re going to have to fly the Lady Mac , no one else could hit that moonlet, let alone its Lagrange point. And Ashly has to take the spaceplane down, I expect that flight’s going to need a professional. So the rest of us will draw for it.”

“Kindly include twenty of us,” Gaura said. “We are all qualified in EVA work, and we have the added advantage of being able to communicate with Aethra in case the starship should alter course.”

“Nobody is volunteering, nobody is drawing lots,” Warlow said, using excessive volume to obliterate any dissent. “This is my job. It’s what I’m designed for. And I’m the oldest here. So I qualify on all counts.”

“Don’t be so bloody morbid,” Joshua said, annoyance covering his real concern. “You just plant the nuke on a rock particle and come straight back.”

Warlow laughed, making them all wince. “Of course, so easy.”

Now, finally, under the slowly spinning inferno and looking up into a glaring formless void. Journey’s end. Chas Paske had to turn down his optical sensors’ receptivity, the light was so bright. At first he had thought some kind of miniature sun lurked up there at the centre of the flaming vortex of cloud, but now the boat had carried him faithfully under the baleful cone he could see the apex had burst open like a malignant tumour. The rent was growing larger. The cyclone was growing larger, deeper and wider.

He knew its purpose at last, that knowledge was inescapable where he was, pressed down in the bottom of the flat boat under the sheer pressure of the light. It was a mouth, jaws opening wide. One day—soon—it would devour the whole world.

He gave a wild little giggle at the notion.

That heavy, heavy light was migrating from whatever (wherever?) lay on the other side. Weighty extrinsic photons sinking slowly downwards like snow to smother the land and river in their own special frost. Whatever they touched, gleamed, as though lit from within. Even his body, shoddy, worthless thing it was now, had acquired a dignified lustre.

Above the gashed cloud was a sheer plane of white light, a mathematical absolute. The ocean into which his white silk dream river emptied. A universal ocean into which Lalonde was destined to fall like a pearl droplet, and lose itself for evermore. He felt himself wanting to rise up towards it, to defy gravity and soar. Into the perpetual light and warmth which would cleanse him and banish sorrow. It would ripple once as he penetrated the meniscus, throwing out a polished wave crown, a single ephemeral spire rising at the centre. After that there would be no trace. To pass through was to transcend.

His remoulded face was incapable of smiling. So he lay there gladly on the boat, mind virtually divorced from his body, looking up at his future, awaiting his moment of ascension. His physical purpose long since abandoned.

Even though the red cloud’s thunder had retreated to a muffled rumbling he never heard the starting gun being fired, so the first cannonball shattered his serenity with shocking abruptness.

They had known he was there, the possessed, they had been aware of him all along. From the moment he’d passed under the aegis of the red cloud he had registered in their consciousness, as an orbiting gnat might impinge upon a man’s peripheral vision. His hapless journey down the river was of no consequence to them; in his miserable degenerative state he was simply not worth their attention nor a moment’s effort. The river was bringing him surely to their bosom, they were content to let him come in his own time.

Now he was here, and they had assembled down by the docks to provide a maliciously frolicsome reception. It was a black-hearted jamboree suitable to celebrate the last possession before Lalonde escaped the universe for good.