“Those inductance coils getting worked hard?” Redwing asked.

“Running high, but within margin.” Karl got into his chair and belted up, casting a side look at Redwing, as if to say, Why don’t you sit?

Redwing never explained that he liked to move through the ship when it was having trouble. He could tell more with his feet and ears than the screens could say.

They had taken three days to cross the jet with the fusion chambers running at full bore, driving them to nearly two hundred kilometers per second. That was far higher than an orbital velocity, though still far under the ship’s coasting specs. SunSeeker now was turning in the helix Karl had calculated, cutting in an arc near the jet’s boundary, its magscoop facing the star at a steep angle and swallowing its heated plasma. They had faced such a headwind coming in and survived. But now the navigation was tougher. This time they had to remain lower than the Bowl’s rim, or else come within the firing field of the gamma ray lasers there.

“How do we know this is the optimal path?” Redwing asked Karl.

“Calculations—”

“I mean from what we’ve learned these last few days.”

“It’s working.” Karl’s lean face tightened, ending in his skewed, tight mouth above a pointed chin where he had begun to grow a goatee. “We’re brushing the mag pressures outward. Our sideways thrust drives the magnetic kink mode, feeding off the jet’s own forward momentum. We’re stimulating the flow patterns at the right wavelength to make the jet slew.”

“We’ll see sideways jet movement before it shoots through the Knothole?”

“It should.” Karl’s gaze was steady, intent. He had a lot riding on this.

“Let’s look aft. Have we got better directionals this time?” Redwing asked Ayaan Ali.

“Somewhat,” she said. “I rotated some aft antennas to get a look, the sideband controllers, too.”

She changed the color view, and Redwing watched brilliant yellow knots twist around the prow of their magscoop like neon tropical storms. “These curlers push us sideways a lot.”

A rumble ran down the axis and Redwing hung on to Ayaan Ali’s deck chair. Clare showed the acoustic monitors display in red lines on a side screen. The strains worked all down the ship axis.

“We’re getting side shear,” Redwing said mildly. He took care not to give direct piloting instructions; no backseat driving.

“I’ll fire a small side jet, let some plasma vent from the side of the magscoop, rotate on the other axis, and take our aft around some.”

Her hands traced a command in the space before her. A faint rumbling began, then a surge. The ship slid sideways and Redwing hung on to a deck chair. Multiple-axis accelerations had never been his strong point. His stomach lurched.

She worked on getting the aft view aligned. SunSeeker’s core was no mere pod sitting atop the big fuel tank that held the fusion catalysis ions. Gouts of those ions had to merge with the incoming plasma, fresh from the magscoop. In turn, the mated streams fed into the reactor. Of course, the parts had to line up that way along the axis, no matter how ornate the subsections got, hanging on the main axis, because the water reserves tank shielded the biozone and crew up front, far from the fusion reactor, and the plasma plume in the magnetic nozzle.

Redwing knew every rivet and corner of the ship and liked to prowl through all its sections. The whole stack was in zero gee, except the thick rotating toroid at the top, which the crew seldom left. A hundred and sixteen meters in diameter, looking like a dirty, scarred angel food cake, it spun lazily around to provide a full Earth g at the outside. There the walls were two meters thick and filled with water for radiation shielding. So were the bow walls, shaped into a Chinese hat with its point forward, bristling with viewing sensors. From inside, nobody could eyeball the outside except through electronic feeds. Yet they had big wall displays at high resolution and smart optics to tell them far more than a window ever could.

Ayaan Ali’s work brought the multiple camera views into alignment with some jitter. They were looking back at the Bowl and she had to tease the jet out of all the brighter oceans and lands slowly turning in the background, a complicated problem.

“Let’s get a clear look-down of the jet,” Redwing said.

To see and diagnose the plume, they had a rearview polished aluminum mirror floating out forty meters to the side. They didn’t dare risk a survey bot in the roiling plasma streams that skirted around the magscoop, with occasional dense plasma fingers jutting in.

The image tuned through different spectral lines, picking out regions where densities were high and glows twisted. On the screen, a blue-white flare tapered away for a thousand kilometers before fraying into streamers. Plasma fumed and blared along the exhaust length, ions and electrons finding each other at last and reuniting into atoms, spitting out an actinic glare. The blue pencil pointed dead astern. He was used to seeing it against the black of space, but now all around their jet was a view of the Bowl. The gray-white mirror zones glinted with occasional sparkles from the innumerable mirrors that reflected light back on the star.

Seen slightly to the side of the jet, the Knothole was a patch of dark beneath the filmy yellow and orange filigrees of the jet. Redwing supposed that at the right angle, the whole jet looked like a filmy exclamation point, with Wickramsingh’s Star as the searing bright dot.

Karl said, “See that bulge to the left? That’s the kink working toward the Knothole.”

Ayaan Ali nodded. “Wow. To think we can kick this thing around!”

“Trick is, we’re using the jet’s energy to do the work.” Karl smiled, a thin pale line. “It’s snaking like a fire hose held in by magnetic fields.”

Ayaan Ali frowned. “When it hits the Knothole, how close to the edge does it get?”

“Not too close, I think.”

“You think?”

“The calculations and simulations I’ve run, they say so.”

“Hope they’re right,” Ayaan Ali said softly.

They continued on the calculated trajectory as the ship sang with the torque. The helix gave them a side acceleration of about a tenth of a grav, so Redwing kept pacing the deck on a slight slant, inspecting the screens in the operating bays.

He also watched how everyone was holding up. His crew had been refined so they fit together like carefully crafted puzzles, each skill set reinforcing another’s. That meant excluding even personal habits, like “mineralarians,” a faction who insisted that eating animals or even plants, which both cling to life, was a moral failing. Instead, they choked down an awful mix of sugars, amino and fatty acids, minerals and vitamins, all made from rocks, air, and water. That could never work while pioneering a planet, so the mineralarians got cut from the candidate list immediately. Same for genetic fashions. Homo evolutis were automatically excluded from the expedition as too untested, though of course no one ever said so in public. That would be speciesism, a sin when SunSeeker was being built, and in Redwing’s opinion, one of the ugliest words ever devised.

But with all the years of screening, there were still wild cards in his deck. Smart people always had a trick or two you never saw until pressure brought it out. Managing people was not remotely like ordering from a menu.

As he watched an internal status board Fred was manning, Redwing felt a hard jar run down the axis. Ayaan Ali quickly corrected for a slew to their port side. The fusion chamber’s low rumble rose. It sounded, Redwing thought, a lot like the lower notes on an organ playing in a cathedral.

“Exhaust flow is pulsing,” she said. “External pressure is rising behind us.”

“Funny.” Redwing watched the screens intently. “Makes no sense.”