IN BED, SITTING in a darkness that suddenly turned to a fierce white light, Washen and Pamir watched the Blue World end its long, long chase. The impact came on the ship’s trailing face, between Port Denali and the outer ring of nozzles—all but one of those engines left dead and useless for now. With its bulk and rigid hull, the ship accomplished what all of the captains’ weapons couldn’t achieve. It boiled the entire world. A portion of the kinetic energy pushed downward, creating a thunder that everyone felt passing through the ship. Then the energy was reflected off the far ends of the hull, returning again, gathering around the blast zone, causing the steam and rushing waters to give a little bounce.

By then, Washen was almost blind.

One after another, the sensors and immersion eyes perched on the dying rockets were being disabled. But the polypond, by chance or design, allowed the captains and crew, and the passengers, to watch this last great drop of living, thinking moisture join with the rest of itself. Millions of years of life, and the polypond had never gathered so much of itself in one place. Could that novelty bring a weakness? An opportunity, maybe? She started to wonder, started to ask experts … and then her voice trailed away as the last of the overhead eyes were cut out and killed.

In the Blue World’s core, hyperfiber packets and shielded reactors would survive, and in the next days and weeks, they would be incorporated into the polypond’s growing bulk. But the ship’s hull remained intact. The rockets were dead, but Aasleen was working on the problem in a thousand directions. And there were always options unused, and a few tricks waiting to be discovered.

She said that much, in a quiet, angry, and rather lost voice.

Pamir preferred to say nothing.

Eventually, they attempted sex, and they kept at it until they were certain that neither one of them was genuinely interested. Then they tried sleep, and for a long while, that showed very little promise as well.

This would be a long, awful war.

Washen told herself that hard fact, again and again.

For comfort, she told her ceiling to show her a new view. Something reliable and very dark, and in its own way, absolutely beautiful.

Pamir didn’t complain.

Still awake, he lay next to Washen, hands folded behind his head, his expression studious and a little angry but fundamentally calm. Or was it simple exhaustion? Together they watched rivers of red iron flowing into new basins, and in the dark places between they saw hints of light, and life, and reminders of the possibilities still waiting.

“Contingency plans,” he muttered. “We just need to keep making them.”

He was speaking to her, or himself.

Then Washen fell asleep. For a full fifteen minutes, she was relaxed enough to dream, and it seemed to be a pleasant dream. And then the alarm shook her awake again. Eyes watering, she found herself gazing up at the ceiling. But Marrow had vanished, replaced by an expansive and thorough chart showing the subtle tides rippling through all of the Great Ship’s seas.

A mass was bearing down, from somewhere directly ahead of them.

“Pamir?” she muttered.

He said, “Here,” and offered a big hand, helping her sit.

Then before she could ask, he reported, “It’s not a big one, apparently. But it’s close.” Then with a grim look, he added, “About the mass of Ceres, about.”

An instant later, the black hole struck them.

A bit of perfect nothingness—a sizeless example of nothing made from gravity and a spin and an electromagnetic charge—dove into the hull and through, and at nearly one-third the speed of light, it cut very easily through the meat of the ship.

Thirty-three

There had been just this one voyage in her very long life. Gazing at the sum of her existence, Mere saw her little soul as a point, mathematical and spare, that wandered in every dimension, covering a genuinely tiny portion of Creation, absorbing a little of everything that it brushed up against. She saw herself as fortunate, and as blessed—which were somewhat different qualities. Alone, she was happiest. But she had been alone for too long now. “Too long,” she whispered. Then with a voice that didn’t quite sound convinced, she said, “This will work.” She examined the apparatus one last time before crawling inside, and with a Tilan’s voice, she said, “What will happen is everything.” Then with a human voice, soft and sober, she added, “Hopefully, I’ll get lucky.”

After months of fighting against her own terrific momentum, making hard burns and delicate maneuvers, Mere had done what was possible. She had acquired a suitable target, and if nothing important changed, there was better than a ninety-seven percent likelihood of a remarkably close rendezvous. But the target was a tiny thing in its own right, barely ten kilometers in diameter and still shriveling as it accelerated toward the Great Ship. A collision was a virtual impossibility. And even if the implausible happened, Mere would simply die for the final time. Her trajectory was too different; the kinetic energies would not only boil her blood, but the mind would scorch, splinter, and explode into a foolish plasma. And the bud itself would probably boil, inside and out, ripped to the core by a fleck of matter roaring into its watery face.

What Mere needed was a final enormous course correction. And after taking a thorough inventory, counting every gram of mass and every sliver of hyperfiber, she had found just one barely workable solution.

During these last months, between the bums and her little dashes of sleep, she had outfitted the Osmium with the simplest, slenderest tail imaginable. A hair would have seemed thick beside the structure. Proteins stripped from her own hair as well as her skin and deep tissues had been woven into a single, almost invisible thread—a thread doped with superconductive materials and strengthened with whispers of hyperfiber.

A slight but relentless current could be induced within the new tail.

A small body jacketed in iron could ride that tail, and if every adjustment were made in a timely fashion, the body would come off the invisible tip with a new, rather more useful trajectory.

When finished, the Osmium’s tail measured more than twenty thousand kilometers in length, with a mass slightly greater than a dozen human hearts.

Such a thin road could accept only a minimal cargo. When Mere finished her calculations for the final time, she saw what was possible and what wasn’t, and when the time came, she very nearly failed to do what was possible. Why not continue on her way, riding inside the battered remains of her ship? In some faraway future, she would emerge from the Inkwell, and a sentient and talented race would come upon her, and against very long odds, she would again find herself saved.

Surrendering her little body was almost too much.

It was a wasted, anemic human body, decidedly unappealing and insubstantial and sad. But as the autodoc began cutting away at the neck, Mere nearly said, “Stop.”

Even when her throat was severed, she could have pleaded, “No,” by speaking through a nexus. “I want to think this through again.”

Why didn’t she?

Because she was too scared to think anything through again. That was the simple, ugly truth. When the critical moment arrived, this little human found herself terrified by many things, but worst of all was the possibility that when she thought again—looking at the numbers and geometries and odds—she wouldn’t know what to do. Indecision would grab her and pull her under, and then time and the relentless trajectories would have made their choice for her.

“This is my choice,” she reminded herself.