Five. Four. A last glance at her crew, an acknowledging wave from Brea. The sublight drive was warming up, and despite her beefed-up inertial protection, she could feel the mighty energies of the gravastar shield generators gathering, like a slow, deep growl.

One. The ship jolted forward, its sublight drive kicking in -

She called, “Go, go!”

Nearby ships blurred, turning to streaks of light that exploded past her view and away. Directly ahead, Saturn itself loomed, becoming larger every second. And at the center of her view, a spider in the heart of its web, the Xeelee waited for her.

“Sublight nominal,” yelled Emet.

Maybe, Torec thought, but she could feel how sluggish the laden ship was, how poor its balance had become.

“Grav coming online,” engineer Brea reported, “in ten, nine…”

Red lights flared around the periphery of her vision — too much information to absorb in detail — bad news she didn’t want to know.

“Three, two,” Brea called. “Go for grav?”

She ignored the alarms. “Do it.”

“Zero.”

The sublight drive cut out — but the ship’s acceleration increased, and Saturn blurred and streaked, as if her view of it was being stirred by a spoon. The grav shield was working. The muddled vision ahead was a mark of the shield’s operation; the passage of light itself was being distorted by the spacetime wave gathering before her. It was a wonderful, remarkable thought: a new universe really was opening up ahead of her, a universe projected from the clumsy pods and modules bolted to her ship, and the expansion of that universe was drawing in the ship itself.

And now a harsher light gathered, as if burning through mist. It quickly formed a searing disc, two, three, four times the apparent size of Saturn. This was the shock front, the place where a spacetime wave was breaking. The light came from the infall of matter to that front, mass-energy lost in an instant.

The chattering voices cut off. She could only hear her crew, and her own breath rasping in her throat.

“Shock formed!” Brea yelled. Emet whooped.

At this moment Torec was alone with her crew in a spacetime bubble snipped out of the cosmos — the three of them, alone in a universe they had made. But the day wasn’t won yet.

“Is it stable?” No reply. “Engineer, is it stable?”

“Negative,” Brea said sadly.

There was a last moment of calm.

Then the disc swelled, rarefied, became a mesh of blue-white threads — and burst. The shock wave slammed into the plummeting greenship. It was a searing pulse of gravitational energy condensing into high-energy radiation and sleeting particles. The ship was smashed in an instant.

Torec’s blister hurled itself away. Tumbling, she saw the hull crushed like a toy, its bolted-on modules rupturing and drifting free. The three arms were reduced to truncated stumps. She could see nothing of her crew. The nightfighter glided smoothly over to the site of the wreckage, and, unchallenged, fired a token pink-gray beam into the dissipating cloud — a harmless marker, but the symbolism was not lost on Torec.

Then her pod flooded with foam that froze her limbs to immobility, and she was trapped in darkness.

The sick bays on Enceladus were like Navy sick bays everywhere. They did their job, but they were bare and cold, the staff unsmiling: it was a place where you got repaired, not a place where you could expect to be comfortable. Torec was keen to get out of here, but it was going to take another day before the bones of her broken arm knit well enough.

Navigator Emet had already gone. He had come out of the blowup with barely a scratch, but as soon as he had been discharged he had requested a transfer to another assignment.

Brea hadn’t come out of the smash at all.

After six hours, Darc and Nilis came to visit her.

Pirius was still on Venus. Nilis said he had told Pirius what had happened.

A Virtual replay of the last moments of the run cycled in the air over Torec’s bed, over and over. Torec was forced to watch her own blister, the interior milky with foam, shoot out of the expanding debris cloud that used to be a greenship.

Darc growled, “Look at that Xeelee. You know, Commissary, I’m prepared to believe it is alive. You can see the contempt.”

Nilis was pacing, barefoot. He was overstressed, and extremely distressed by what had happened. “Oh, my eyes, my eyes,” he kept saying.

Torec suppressed a sigh. “Sir, Brea died doing her duty.”

“But if not for me she wouldn’t have been put in harm’s way in the first place.”

Darc said thunderously, “Commissary, with respect, that’s maudlin nonsense. Brea was a soldier. Soldiers die, sir, by putting themselves in harm’s way, as you call it. It’s a question of statistics; that’s how you have to look at it.”

Nilis turned on him, eyes rimmed red, clearly furious. “And is that supposed to comfort me?”

Darc’s expression didn’t change. “If you want comfort, know that she died doing her duty.”

Nilis snorted and resumed his pacing. “Well, if we’re not allowed to complete the test program, she will have died for nothing.”

Darc laughed. “You aren’t going to trap me that way, Commissary. I’m not convinced that throwing away more time and money, and more lives, on this program is justified. I’ve seen no sign that you’re coming close to solving these instability problems with the grav shield.”

Torec knew the situation was delicate. Darc’s power was all negative. He couldn’t approve the continuation of the test program on his own, but he could get it shut down. And she was scared that after a failure that embarrassed him as much as anybody else, he was ready to use that power. She said brightly, “We still have another ship. It’s already being prepared.”

“That means nothing,” Darc said. “Ensign, engineers work on engines unless they’re stopped by force; you know that. It doesn’t mean I’ll be approving another run.”

Nilis glared. “For you to shut us down now, after just one run, would be criminally irresponsible, Commander!”

Darc was very still, sitting in his chair, not moving a muscle. But Torec could hear the menace in his voice. “I know you’re under stress. But I won’t have you say that about me. I’ve been under pressure to terminate this program since the first poor results came in. In fact, Commissary, I’ve been championing you, keeping you alive.”

Nilis wasn’t intimidated. “Oh, have you? Or are you looking out for yourself, Commander? Seeking whatever advantage you can gain from the project, while always keeping your backside covered, in the grand Navy tradition!”

Torec saw Darc’s hands close on the arms of his chair, his knuckles whiten.

To her relief, before they came to blows, there was a soft chime, and a small Virtual window opened up before her. It revealed a shining sphere. She gaped.

“I have a visitor,” she said.

When Darc saw the Ghost’s image, he snarled, “Send it away. I won’t have that monstrosity in a Naval facility.”

Enough, Torec thought. “It’s my visitor,” she said. “Not yours, sir, with respect.”

Darc shot her a glance, but he knew she was right; by ancient Navy tradition sick bay patients had a few temporary privileges. But he waved a hand at the Virtual of the test run, dispersing it — as if, Torec thought, the Silver Ghosts assigned to the project hadn’t seen the whole thing live and firsthand anyhow.

The Ghost’s bulk was barely able to pass through the door. It hovered beside Torec’s bed, massive, drifting slightly, the glaring lamps of the room casting highlights from its hide.

She shivered, as if the Ghost’s immense mass was sucking the warmth out of the air. She pulled her med-cloak a little higher, and the semisentient wrap snuggled more tightly into place. A Silver Ghost, a bedside visitor in a Navy hospital, come to see her…