Mere nodded; breathing hard.

“But the Great Ship is built to survive,” she offered. “It’s designed to cross vast reaches, enduring whatever natural hazards it finds. Stellar-mass black holes are rare between the galaxies. But the tiny ones, like you’re using … the odds of one of them impacting on a target measuring just a few kilometers across …” She shook her head. “No, that’s too inevitable. The Builders wouldn’t have allowed such a porous little prison to be built.”

She said, “The All has no size.”

Again, with a surging confidence, she told both of them, “You’re trying to hit nothing with bombs tinier than my fingertip. It won’t work. You can’t succeed. In one shadow realm out of a billion … maybe … but that kind of cataclysm has to happen every day, in some shadow realm …”

Then she laughed sadly, remarking, “But we’re still here, aren’t we?”

The hyperfiber sphere was accelerating, plunging toward the ship with a fierce urgency. The first flash erupted on the leading face of the ship, which was unexpected. Mere shouldn’t have been able to see the impact up near the invisible bow. Yet there it was, a fountain of radiant gases; and an instant later, even before her racing heart could fill with blood and beat again, that knob of twisted and highly charged nothingness burst out of the ship’s trailing face. Not from inside the centermost nozzle, this time. Not even from somewhere within the forest of other towering nozzles. The black hole missed the core by nearly twenty thousand kilometers, delivering a horrible glancing blow that surely killed thousands before it emerged into space again, leaving in its wake a fierce little pinprick of heat that was already beginning to cool.

“A weak shot,” Mere almost said.

But she stopped herself. With a tight quiet voice, she said, “That was intentional. Wasn’t it? A nudge to push your target into a slightly better position.”

Silence.

But there was something smug and proud in the silence. With a low whisper, she said, “Show me. Out ahead.”

The view changed instantly, radically. What she saw was a feed from a sister bud or a machine traveling on a different trajectory. From beside the Great Ship, she could see in every direction, and with an improving deftness, she identified and studied a series of little blue marks set along the ship’s course.

Each mark was the same as the others—tiny black holes contained within neat spherical jackets of hyperfiber.

Beyond was what was interesting. Out on the fringe of what was visible—but probably no more than a week or two in the future—waited something else entirely. Mere enlarged what looked like a faint red smear, and after a moment or an hour, she managed to breathe again. But she refused to make any comment. Masking her pain to the best of her ability, the tiny woman forced herself to look in the opposite direction, gazing back into the Coal Sack with these wonderful borrowed eyes.

“You are going to die,” she said.

“I am not alive,” the polypond responded. “I am shadow and nothingness, and I have never been.”

“In every existence, the captains will defeat you,” she promised. Never in her wisp of a life had she sounded more human, a boastful, brazen, and preposterous voice saying, “They’ll find a thousand ways to make you fail. To subvert and deny what you want. To make you look silly and stupid, and miserable. And afterward, you will die.”

Silence.

“All these millions of years, you’ve kept this nebula intact. Suns pass near it and through it, but you move the gases and dusts just so. Genius and giant muscles have kept your ocean whole.” She paused, enlarging key portions of the dense black Coal Sack. “But that’s all shit now,” she growled. “Look. Already, the exhaust of so many engines—your engines, mostly—is pushing the dust, making it fall into high-density zones that are tugging at the neighboring dust and gas, and in another few thousand years—not long at all—this home of yours, this strange great body, is going to start collapsing into a hundred new suns. And you will be dead.”

Again, the creature said, “But I am only shadow.”

“A cowardly, stupid shadow,” she said.

The skin beneath her rippled and grew still, its stickiness gone. And a moment later, with a flinch of a foot, Mere caused herself to lift free. The bud’s engine had stopped firing. They were close enough to the target. The Great Ship’s mass would pull her the rest of the way home.

“Don’t lose your hold on me,” she whispered.

A purplish tendril grew out of the water, its tip reaching for her, then hesitating.

“Hold me close,” she advised. “And when you reach the surface, I think you should try to protect me.”

“For what gain? Will you help me?”

“Gladly.”

“Then tell me,” said the voice. The tendril flattened and turned into a simple mirror, showing Mere herself.

“Tell you what?”

“How will these great captains fight?”

“I do not know,” she confessed.

“What are your ship’s secret weaknesses? Offer that much.”

“Nothing I know is going to be timely or important.” Gazing at her own reflection, she shrugged her shoulders. “Sorry.”.

Silence.

“I don’t think you understand,” she warned.

Then with a cold voice, Mere explained again, “You are going to die. The captains will fight you until you are defeated. Behind us, your nebula will collapse into suns and new worlds. Your neighboring species feel no love for you, and some of them will hunt down your surviving pieces. Or worse, your pieces will fly apart and becoming separate entities, each with its own name and tiny soul.”

“How can you help me?” the voice asked.

Mere laughed.

For a very long time, she made a show of her laugh and a human brashness, then with a wide sharp smile, she declared, “Isn’t it obvious? You stupid, silly creature … don’t you see what I am to you … ?”

Thirty-seven

While the stories found their way to Washen—the accelerating estimates of damage and death; the first reports from repair teams; firsthand accounts from a random hundred survivors; plus the black hole’s mass and velocity and its precise course—she began to touch herself. First with one elegant index finger and then its mate, she stabbed at her own sides, the strong nails pressing at the mirrored uniform and the yielding flesh beneath. She wanted to suffer an ordinary, endurable pain. The ship was in misery, but all she could feel was a deep cold numbness set on top of the most trivial emotions. She was sad, of course. Grieving and still disbelieving, and in a striking fashion, she felt embarrassed. How could such a thing have happened? The worst moment in the ship’s long life, and who was it who was standing on the makeshift bridge?

Embarrassment made her grimace, for a moment. She let her hands press harder, as if trying to bore a hole through her own belly. Then thousands of years of pure habit took hold. Washen straightened her shoulders, and, pulling back her stabbing fingers, she reached for her head, taking the time and finding the perfect poise to adjust the tiny mirrored cap that lay on top.

With a command, she silenced the majority of her nexuses.

With a smooth, almost casual gesture, she captured the Master’s eye. “When you are ready,” she told the ancient woman. “Explain and reassure, please. And be as honest as you can make yourself.”

The Master appeared stern and furious. The gold of her skin glistened with perspiration, and the light in her eyes looked ready to burn. The makeshift bridge was a sketchy affair—a giant chamber full of control stations—but the majority of the stations were unused for the moment. To a casual eye, it almost appeared as if just these two women were trying to guide the ship by themselves.

“I remember my duty,” the Master Captain purred.