“I thought you needed large masses to get significant gravity waves.”

“No. As long as you move a small mass fast enough… the energy must come from the same source as your ship’s — from the structure of space itself.”

“Handguns to break stars, eh?”

A shadow moved across my vision. I glanced about quickly. A dozen Xeelee slid across the blue-shifted sky and gathered into a close sphere around me.

“They’ve noticed me.” Rapidly I thought over my options. Before me was the reassuring red glow of the hyperspace button: my escape hatch, if things got too hot… but, I quickly decided, I’d come too far to go home without seeing the Great Attractor itself.

I spread my wings as far as they would go and dragged them downwards in one mighty swoop. I shot head first out of the closing trap and kept going, heading deeper into the blue-tinged star cloud. My breath was loud in my helmet.

“What now?” I gasped.

“Run!” said Lipsey.

I ran for hours. I dodged stars only light minutes apart, their surfaces distorted into surreal shapes by their proximity to each other. The bank of grayish light beyond the mist grew remorselessly brighter and wider — and all the time the Xeelee formation was a spear pointing at my shoulderblades.

At last, abruptly, I burst out of the star mist. The naked light ahead was dazzling. Heart thumping, I wrenched at the wings and skidded to a halt. I found myself in a region clear of stars and debris… and the curtain of stars on the other side was tinged blue.

So I was at the center. The bottom of the pit; the place all the stars were falling into. And at the heart of it all, flooding space with a pearly light, was the Great Attractor itself.

It was a loop, a thing of lines and curves, a construct of some immense cosmic rope. My nightfighter was positioned somewhere above the plane of the loop. The near side of the construct formed a tangled, impenetrable fence, twisted exuberantly into arcs and cusps, with shards of galaxy images glittering through the morass of spacetime defects. And the far side of the object was visible as a pale, braided band, remote across the blue-shifted sky.

And it was — astonishingly, unbearably — a single object, an artifact, at least ten million light years across.

The rough disc of space enclosed by the artifact seemed virtually clear.

…Clear, I saw as I looked more carefully, save for a single, glowing point of light, right at the geometric center of the loop.

“Qax,” I croaked. “Speak to me.”

“A massive rotating toroid,” murmured the Qax. “A made thing, of cosmic string. The Xeelee have manipulated one-dimensional space-time discontinuities, just as — in their night-fighter intrasystem drive — they manipulate two-dimensional discontinuities.”

Lipsey said, “I didn’t imagine anything like this. A ring, an artifact of cosmic string. As large as a giant galaxy. The audacity…”

“But — why? What’s the point?”

The Qax paused. “Well, this fits one of our hypotheses. Look in the central region, Bolder.”

The hole in the ring hurt my eyes. It was a sheet of space that was somehow — tilted. I saw muddled space, stars streaked like cream in coffee.

“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.

I had to find more time. To my right, obscured now by the fog of fighters around me, was that dumper truck with its attendant freighters. I opened up my wings, clutched at space and lurched out of the trap. Soon I was thrusting my way into the crowded freighter formation, my wings tucked tight. The fighters blurred after me.

I rammed thoughts through my sleep-starved brain as I flew. Could I evade the waiting Spline? Maybe I could divert the ship’s hyperspace flight — but how? Prise open the melted control box? Change the ship’s mass, to change the distance I arrived from the Qax sun?

Of course I could abandon ship before I reached the Qax system, at one of the later jump points. I had that Spline emergency beacon; I’d be picked up. And if I kept quiet I could hide from the Qax, for years maybe…

But, damn it, if I did that humanity and a few hundred other races would one day end up falling into the Xeelee pit. Hiding wasn’t good enough.

I dipped under the lip of the dumper truck and dodged the processed Great Attractor material sleeting from the truck’s base. The huge icicles fell a few thousand miles and then broke up into a fine mist… and as I stared abstractedly at that mist I realized there was a way out of this. It was stupid, crazy, nearly unworkable. And my only chance.

“All right, Qax,” I said. “I’ll come home. But first…”

I dropped, spread my wings as far as they would go and whirled like a seagull through the crystal rain. The wings plated over rapidly and grew stiff and cumbersome.

“Bolder, what are you doing?”

“Wrecking this beautiful ship,” I told Lipsey with real regret.

The Xeelee fighters finally closed around me, shutting out the rain.

I pressed the button.

The Xeelee trap disappeared; I’d jumped back to the blue-tinged light of the star cloud. And then—

Jump. Jump. Jump — jump — jump — jumpjumpjump—