The ground trembled under Dakota’s feet. She broke into a run, bounding under the low gravity straight towards the skeletal alien ship.

She couldn’t help but feel, as she approached, that she was somehow tumbling into a trap. The ship’s spines were too much like the reaching cilia of some hungry sea creature. The beckoning space that had opened beyond the spines in anticipation of her arrival was too much like a gaping, expectant maw.

She kept her eyes half-shut and focused on the ground, her thoughts filled with the terrible, pervasive light slowly seeping over the horizon and turning the top of the valley a dull orange-red.

‹Dakota. I am maintaining a position as close to directly above you as possible. However, it may be only minutes before there is insufficient fuel to prevent drifting sunward. My records indicate there is further danger in the form of sunlight reflected from the dust and debris now being thrown up around Ikaria. The energy output from Nova Arctis is currently several billion times the average, and when reflected from clouds of particles it may prove extremely lethal.›

Almost there.

She threw herself forward, as the terrible light began to overrun even the filmsuit’s filters, dashing through the derelict’s spines and into its interior.

The impossible light began to fade as the entrance behind her flowed shut. There were no open spaces beyond the entrance. Instead, the body of the derelict began to enclose her, entombing her like a dinosaur that had stumbled into a swamp.

She felt it cool and soft against her skin and realized in a moment of terror that her filmsuit had somehow shut off by itself. She struggled to draw breath as her lungs kicked back into action, but there was no air in here to breathe.

She was buried alive, deep within a chasm on a dead world orbiting a dying sun.

Madness began to seep into her thoughts.

Then she saw stars rushing towards her.

Several minutes later, the shockwave reached Newfall.

Shallow oceans were turned to superheated steam, and the very atmosphere burned. As one hemisphere facing Nova Arctis dissipated under the equivalent of ten billion suns beating down on it, Newfall began a process of losing mass that would last, at most, a day or two.

It was like taking a flamethrower to a crumpled ball of paper. As gases burned away and the nova dug deeper towards the planetary core, Newfall’s gravity would drop, making it easier for burned-away atoms and molecules to achieve escape velocity under the intense pressure of nova heat.

Newfall would soon be little more than a memory.

Corso had cried out in terror as the Piri lurched. Then he heard a high-pitched whistling that tore at his nerves, and felt air rush past his face, tousling his hair.

The Piri was losing atmosphere. The lights had gone out.

He grabbed fistfuls of wall-fur as the air vented, sucking him in the direction of Dakota’s sleeping compartment. If he didn’t do something now, he’d be dead in seconds.

He let go of the fur, twisted around and landed just next to the entrance to the space where Dakota slept. He saw where the hull had been ripped open, sucking out half the contents of the room. He found the emergency-seal button and slapped it, waiting while the compartment was sealed off.

The howling ceased abruptly and he gasped for air. Automatic pressure sensors had picked up the oxygen drop, and hissed quietly as they replenished the supply from the Piri’s depleted supplies.

Corso paused there for the next minute or so until he had stopped shaking too violently. Then he pulled himself over to a console that still appeared to be active, though unresponsive. He couldn’t even tell if the Piri’s stacks were still functioning.

There was enough basic systems information, however, to tell him the worst had happened. He was drifting now, and in another twenty minutes or so, the Piri Reis would orbit into Ikaria’s sunward side, and then straight into the path of the nova.

Thirty-two

Dakota awoke naked between cool sheets.

She sat up with a start and looked around. Tall windows looked out over an azure sky.

There was no sign of the derelict, of Ikaria…

After staring about herself for a while, convinced she’d gone mad, she stepped over to the window and looked up to where the sun should be. Instead there was only a black dot surrounded by a visibly expanding ring of fire.

She looked down, at the empty city below her, and crumpled to her knees.

Below the window lay a chasm of such magnitude that it made the valley on Ikaria look like a crack in the pavement. Lights burned all the way down as far as she could see, illuminating windows and verandas all the way down into an apparently bottomless pit.

On the other side of the chasm, a vast alien metropolis spread out yet further.

Without knowing quite how, she became aware she was now the only living thing on this entire world.

She moved away from the windows, and from the sight of the pitiless chasm below, and noticed a door at the far end of the room. She raced over and tugged it open, finding a corridor stretching beyond. Everything-the shape of the corridor itself, of the doors, of the windows-suggested this place had been designed for creatures larger than humans, and of entirely different proportions.

Dakota wandered down steps not designed for human legs and constantly peered about her. When she reached ground level, she saw that a street stretched away into the distance.

Something about her surroundings made her sure this city had been abandoned for a long, long time. She wandered about, naked and still in shock, then turned back for fear of losing her way. Eventually she found her way back up to the room she had woken in.

The bed was of entirely human proportions, as was the data book that stood on a plinth to one side of it. She had no idea if it had been there or not when she’d woken.

She picked up the book and began to read the words there.

Some hours later, she wandered back into the empty streets in a daze. She was still naked, so clothes appeared to be a concept alien to whoever or whatever had brought her here. She didn’t feel cold, however. And though she felt hungry, the actual need to eat, just in order to stay alive, appeared to be absent.