What would they see? A #3 General Products hull, puppeteer made, and a puppeteer in the command section. Needle should be safe. Most LEs wanted to avoid frightening a puppeteer.

The black spot that hid the sun was growing larger.

It was going to be a hell of a ride.

A sudden glare blinked white-black. Acolyte asked, sarcastically, "Missiles dont carry antimatter?"

"Maybe its a ship hit by an antimatter bullet. The light looked right. Im guessing, of course. Hindmost, keep dodging."

The puppeteers voice sang, "As opposed to what? Distract yourself. What if they kill Tunesmith? Will you choose another protector? Or choose none?"

"Hows he doing?"

The Hindmost popped up a virtual window.

Shoals of missiles and ships were converging in a shell around the mile-wide crystal sphere. Lasers and bombs sparkled among them. Against all sense, a ship had fired on Long Shot, and now others were firing too. The sphere turned, bright-dark-bright in laser light, its four archaic rocket motors flaring.

Then Long Shot was gone.

"Dodged into hyperspace," Louis said. "Crazy bastard. Hell lose them if he didnt get himself eaten."

"What will you do if Tunesmith is dead?" the Hindmost persisted.

"Theres too much tree-of-life around. I have to do something," Louis said. "Otherwise the protectors on the rim wall will take over everything. Thats no good. Theyre evolved too far out of the mainstream of hominid development, and they dont know enough. Hindmost, a Ghoul is still the best choice. They live a jackal lifestyle. Whatever lives is theirs eventually. They do best for their own kind by making life better and safer for everyone. Aside from that, their heliograph system is wonderful. We need it."

The Hindmost said, "Tunesmith is arrogant and manipulative."

The black blotch covering the sun expanded and swallowed them.

— discontinuity -

CHAPTER 8

Try an Antimatter Bomb

For two days Gray Nurse had been accelerating, then merely falling toward the sun and the Ringworld. The carrier would whip past the rim wall in a few hours. In that moment there would be an option. A linear motor ran the length of Gray Nurses hull. Fighter-lurker ships could be backfired into range of the Ringworld itself.

The crews waited.

Whatever had gone on in that Kzinti-held patch of comets and vacuum, it took place far above Gray Nurse, half-hidden in a fog of ice crystals. Fighter crews could speculate, of course. Explorer probes were on their way to do forensic work. Meanwhile the attackers were in view and running.

"The little one is a GP hull," Tec-Two Claus Raschid said. "Might be anyone."

"Anyone but puppeteers," Roxanny said. "Theyd never have the nerve."

"But the big, slow one, thats Long Shot"

The rest of the Fringe War had taken notice. Both ships were now surrounded by probes from half a dozen civilizations. Feeds were shown on the common-worn monitors. A Piersons puppeteer was at the helm of the GP#3 ship. Long Shots pilot looked like a man.

"Long Shots ours," Claus said. "This might be our chance to get it back."

The crewfolk watched the feeds. A sudden burst of firepower surrounded Long Shot — threatening an experimental ship of inestimable value — and Roxanny smiled at their cursing. Her smile slipped and the cursing stopped when the crystal sphere simply disappeared.

The voice of Command spoke at last. "Board your ships! All fighter crews board your ships now!"

Gone like a soap bubble, Roxanny thought. How? But she was scurrying along the corridor toward her station, flinching from burly hot shots who thought they could fly in these narrow confines.

Her station was Snail Darter. She crawled through the lock and took her assigned seat. Claus Raschid followed her through. The third crewman — "Wheres Forrestier?" she rapped.

Tec Oliver Forrestier swung in and took his place. The three were back to back, looking into their wall displays. Oliver asked, "Think theyll launch us this time?"

Roxanny Gauthier grinned. She liked this: herself and two males in an environment that couldnt possibly rid the air of all pheromones, in conditions too cramped to do anything beyond flirting. Claus and Oliver already found her intimidating. "Well launch," she said. "Depending on what those ships do, we could see the Ringworld close up. We might even get down to the surface. Gird up thy loins, Legal Entities! We are going in."

The ship jerked, and Louis jerked too, as everything around them shifted. Needle was out of stasis.

Views to the side showed fearsome coronas above a black horizon of blocked-out sun. Aft was only black: the sun, receding.

Louis couldnt see what the Hindmosts cabin displays saw. Good. If he could see graphs and false-color representations, he would feel the hull temperature rising. There was that about Piersons puppeteers: they never ignored danger, never pretended it wasnt there. Never turned their backs on a threat except to kick.

Ahead, arcs of glowing coronal gas streamed past. The stars were hidden in a ruby glare that might actually be Needles invisible hull giving off black body radiation.

The ships of the Fringe War… were not to be seen. The puppeteer had lost their pursuers by aerobraking his ship through the sun.

They were already nearing the ring of huge rectangles that cast shadows of night across the Ringworld. The Hindmost drifted his ship behind a shadow square, then boosted to some ferocious acceleration and ran for it.

Louis wondered idly if Tunesmith had turned off the meteor defense. Once before, the meteor defense had fired on Louis. Lying Bastard in stasis had smashed into the Ringworld floor and plowed a furrow across the land. Theyd survived without a bruise… but this time Tunesmith had futzed the timing on their stasis field.

This time the Ringworlds sun-powered superthermal laser didnt fire, or didnt fire quick enough to catch Needle.

But the Fringe War found them. "Were being followed," Acolyte said.

The Hindmost sang, "Ill lose them. Dont distract me."

The Ringworld came up like a vast fly swatter. Needle dove straight toward a long strip of nightbound land. Louis could see the Other Ocean almost below, a vast diamond dotted with clusters of islands, easing off to the side as Needle came down. The Hindmost aimed at lightning-lit cloud laid out like a flattened hourglass in a pattern several times larger than the Earth.

An eyestorm is the visible sign of a puncture in the Ringworld floor.

Its the Ringworld equivalent of the hurricanes and tornados that form on planets. Air draining through the puncture produces a partial vacuum. Air flowing from spinward slows against its spin velocity; it weighs less; it wants to rise. Air from antispinward speeds up, grows heavier, wants to sink. From overhead the pattern is a sketchy flattened hourglass with a puncture at the throat. From port or starboard the storm takes the appearance of an eye, upper lid and lower lid and a horizontal tornado whorl in the center, and perhaps an eyebrow of high cirrus.

A Ringworld protector, Tunesmith or Bram before him, would have filled in any large puncture by now. Lost air is hard to replace. The meteor crater at the heart of this storm would be a small one, and old: these storms took generations to form.

The Hindmost dove toward the whirling throat of the hourglass, slowing hard, with one large and two smaller ships still in his wake. Then Needle plunged into the black whirlwind as if in suicidal frenzy, and out. Out through the meteor crater into black interstellar space, looping hard around and up. The Hindmost fired a laser at the Ringworlds black underside. A ruby glare lit an array of spillpipes broken by another ancient meteor.