"I’m weak with terror," Parz said dryly. Beyond the clouding lens window of his bathyspherelike cell, comet ice gleamed, rushing at him; GUT fire blazed like sunlight. "But I don’t think we’ve got even seconds left, Qax."

The Spline, enraged by pain, closed its huge eyelid.

A cannon tube, suspended from the damaged dome, extended downward; at last its mouth touched the crystalline flooring beneath Berg’s feet and merged with it, seamlessly. Two firefly singularities moved imperceptibly closer to the cannon barrel, as if eager to be launched into space. Berg felt the gravity field within which she was embedded alter, subtly; it was like an earth tremor, and it gave her a sensation of falling in the pit of her stomach.

She turned to Jaar. "Listen to me," she said rapidly. "Here’s what we’re going to do. I want you to reconfigure this damn thing to launch a singularity pair, so that the peak of the trajectory is inside the Spline. But that’s not all. I want the singularities to merge, just at the second in which they are lodged at the heart of the Spline. Do you understand?"

Jaar looked at her, at first without apparent understanding. Then he got it. His eyes narrowed.

"How quickly can you do it?" she asked.

"Watch me."

The collision, when it came, was almost balletic.

GUT-drive fire blistered great swathes of the Spline’s writhing flesh; Michael found himself shrinking back from the bloody, carnal acres above his head. But still the Spline seemed to find it impossible to respond; those bizarre cherry-red beams, lightspeed rents in spacetime, lanced out — but they fired at random, all around them, consistently missing the Crab.

"There’s something wrong," Harry breathed. "It should have sliced us open by now. Why hasn’t it?"

And now the Crab entered the Spline itself, its burning GUT drive breaching the elephant-flesh hull. Creation light boiled away blood, flesh, in a vast, obscene, soundless explosion; the Spline’s huge body seemed to writhe back. At last the comet-ice tail of the Crab disappeared, still glowing, into the carcass of the Spline.

There was a cloud of motion around the huge wound; Michael squinted to see.

"Little robots," Harry said, amazed.

"Antibody drones," said Shira lifelessly; she stared at the scene with dull fascination.

Harry said, "The robots are damaging our hull. We’re under attack. For the first time."

"Maybe," said Poole. "But I don’t think it really matters now."

The star-core glow of the GUT drive was extinguished at last, killed by the toiling antibody drones. But still the mass of comet ice, the long, crumpling body of the Crab, slid steadily into Spline flesh.

It was almost sexual, Michael thought.

The singularity shot, with its reduced launch velocity, seemed to crawl up the translucent cannon shaft. Berg had absurd visions of the singularities rolling out of the mouth of the barrel, falling back to the crystal floor with an anticlimactic plop -

The singularities reached the mouth of the cannon shaft and soared out of sight, eclipsed by the Xeelee-material dome of the chamber.

Berg’s energy seeped out of her, now that it was done — for better or worse. She clasped the console, feeling her legs sagging under her.

Purple-red light flared silently through the cracks in the shattered dome. The Spline’s deadly cherry-red starbreaker beams flickered, died.

All over the devastated earth-craft Friends turned their faces up to the uncertain glow, oddly like flowers.

Half the dome was gone now. Beyond it, the Spline eclipsed the stars.

Its starbreaker beams stilled, the huge warship rolled like a planet across the impassive sky. An immense, bloody crater — covering fully an eighth of the Spline’s surface area — deformed its hull, Berg saw; and she couldn’t help but wince in sympathy. And as the Spline rolled she realized that the crater was matched by a second — if anything, even deeper — at the ship’s opposite pole. Weapon navels pooled with blood; and the Spline’s roll across the stars was erratic, as if some internal balance system was failing.

"Implosion wounds from the directional gravity waves," said Jaar, his voice calm and evaluating. He nodded thoughtfully. "It worked."

Berg closed her eyes. She sought feelings of triumph. Even of relief. But she was still stranded on a damn eggshell that would probably fall apart spontaneously, without any more help from the Spline. And, lest she forget, there was a merged mini-black hole, its devastating work on the Spline complete, falling out of the sky toward her…

She said, "Come on, Jaar, you beautiful bastard. If we’re going to live through this we’ve still got work to do—"

The Spline imploded.

The GUT-drive module drove into its heart like a stiletto. Muscles convulsed in compression waves that tore through the body of the Spline like seismic events, and all over the surface of the ship vessels exploded, spewing fast-freezing fluids into space.

The Qax was silent.

Jasoft Parz clung to nerve cables; the eye chamber rolled absurdly as the Spline sought escape from its agony. Parz closed his eyes and tried to feel the suffering of the Spline — every spasm, every bursting vessel.

He had been brought here to witness the destruction of Earth. Now he was determined to witness the death of a Qax, embedded in the consciousness of the Spline; he tried to sense its fear at the encroaching darkness, its frustration at its own mistakes, its dawning realization that the future — of Jim Bolder, the Qax diaspora — would, after all, come to pass.

Failure, and death.

Jasoft Parz smiled.

The Crab had come to rest at last, its tail section buried in the ravaged heart of the Spline. The lifedome, perched on the crumpled shaft of the ship, overlooked the Spline’s carcass like, Michael thought, a viewing platform over some ghastly resort of blood and ripped flesh.

He lay in his couch, the tension drained out of him. Shira, beside him, even seemed to be asleep.

"I need a shower," he said.

"Michael." Harry’s Virtual head hovered at the edge of the dome, peering out. "There’s something out here."

Michael laughed. "What, something other than a wrecked sentient warship from the future? Surprise me, Harry."

"I think it’s an eyeball. Really; a huge, ugly eyeball, yards wide. It’s come out of its socket; it’s drifting at the end of a kind of cable… an optic nerve extension, maybe."

"So?"

"So I think there’s somebody inside." Harry grinned. "I think he’s seen me. He’s waving at me…"