“Focus it in on the prow fields,” Redwing said. “Can we snag it and narrow the exhaust, then aim at the first of those fliers?”

“I … think … so.” Beth and the entire bridge crew were concentrated on their work, belted in tight, eyes following screens, hands hitting key commands. “The workaround on that digital algorithm block is coming up, running right. The Artilects are all over this problem, but they don’t like it.”

“They don’t have to,” Redwing said.

The strange deep notes running through the ship’s hull ceased. “They’re leaving us alone, maybe,” Beth muttered.

The roiling knot of hot ions clamped within a nest of rubbery magnetic fields came slamming at them at over seven hundred kilometers a second. “Added to our speed, the impact will be well over a thousand kilometers a second,” Karl said. “Is the magscoop cinched in?”

“As much as we can,” Beth said, voice high and lips tight.

They watched the large blob come straight at them. It was far bigger than SunSeeker’s scoop, and they felt the surge, their heads snug against their chair braces. The ship groaned.

Their internal diagnostics tracked the flow of dense plasma through the magnetic funnel out front, through the tapered neck that flushed it into the reaction chambers. There lived the steadily maintained, self-shaping field geometries that further compressed the plasma, added catalysts, and—the screens showed the pulsing glow in coiled doughnuts of prickly yellow—burned with fusion fire. This got expelled at the max temperature, into an opening throat that sent this starfire into the classic magnetic nozzle facing aft.

But not exactly dead aft. Beth’s fingers flew over the complex command web. The fields slanted slightly, clamping down on the flow, shunting it sideways. The bridge surged again under this momentum change. The Ship Stability Artilect kept them from tumbling with extruded counterfields. Virulent plasma jetted out in a starboard cant. Beth altered the fusion geometry’s exit profile to include more shaping magnetic fields in the exhaust. The emerging bolt of hot plasma was like a finger scratching across the wave behind them.

“With a little bit of windage…,” Beth mused, intent on the screens.

A flier lay dead at the center of the bolt. When the exhaust struck it, the image wobbled, refracted by the complex play of forces, then sharpened. Fragments swirled where the flier had been.

“Got it,” Beth said quietly.

“Brilliant,” Redwing said. “The others—”

“The second one is taking an evasive trajectory,” Karl said. “Moving away laterally.”

Beth angled their exhaust and caught it before the flier could get away. Nobody cheered.

“The third is dropping back,” Karl said.

“We can’t fly much farther up the jet,” Redwing said. “They know that. We’ll reverse, make our turn.”

“And that third one will be waiting for us,” Beth finished for him. “And it’ll be ahead of us.”

FORTY-FOUR

Tananareve was grateful the walls of her confinement were soft but firm. Whatever was carrying her along did not trouble to make the trip pleasant. Jerks and jostles made it hard to keep focused on the sliding, cool voice of the Ice Minds in her mind, overlayered with their images of the lands where they lived.

Starlight cast stretched pale fingers across the plain of rock and ice, where vacuum flowers dutifully pointed their parabolic eyes at the slow sweep of target suns. Around the base of the light-harvesters flowed the pearly fluids that were the commingled selves of the Ice Minds. How these blended thought and became coherent, she could not imagine.

The moment hastens. We decided to revive ourselves wholly, to deal with this pressing problem.

“What problem?”

Your species. The Folk believed they could deal with you as a young and largely incompetent species, but we came to see this is not so.

She thought of saying, Gee, thanks! but sarcasm might not translate in dealing with aliens. “Look, we have been imprisoned or chased ever since we got here.”

The Folk are our— A pause. —our police. They also maintain at equilibrium. We are not at equilibrium now. They have failed to understand your kind. Now disruption proceeds.

“What? Why? How?”

Your ship has disturbed our jet. The Folk have ordered attacks on your ship. This is against our wishes. We cannot well communicate with your kind in your ship, as some of the Folk have prevented that. We wish you to speak directly to your ship through channels we shall soon open.

“That’s a lot to take in. SunSeeker is in your jet? Wow.”

Into her mind came an image of a small dark mote plowing upstream against a torrent of coiling plasma. The view backed away and she could see the jet slide sideways as it approached the Knothole. It surged over the Knothole restraining fields and into several life zones. Atmosphere belched out. Some thin girders holding the atmosphere zones apart fractured and fell. She was startled.

Your mind we can approach. The Folk Attendant Astute Astronomer Memor made deep soundings of your neural labyrinths. These we use now. We wish you to speak with your own kind and then to serve to reassure the Diaphanous.

Another alien? “Who are—?”

Into her mind came images of fluid fluxes merging in eddies and turning in fat toroids, all in intricate yellow lines against a pale blue background. Somehow she knew these were larger than continents and fuzzy at their edges, where flow was more important than barriers. Intricate coils bigger than worlds, shattering explosions—all testified to the recombining energy of the fields.

“These … live in the jet?” She could not imagine this, but lack of imagination had ceased to be a good argument here.

They evolved in the magnetic structures that dot the skin of stars. These could knot off, twist, and so make a new coil of field. Embedding information in those fields led to reproduction of traits. From that sprang intelligence, or at least awareness.

“But they don’t have bodies. How can they—?” Her grasp faltered.

You and we do not witness the chaotic tumble of great plasma clouds between the stars. We all see nothing hanging between the hard points of incandescent light, and so falsely assume that space is somehow nothing. But evolution works there against the constant forces of dissolution.

Tananareve knew a bit of general life theory. Brute forces seemed bound, inevitably, to yield forth systems that evolution drove to construct some awareness of their surroundings. It took billions of years to construct such mind-views. Those models of the external world could become more complex. Some models worked better if they had a model of … well, models. Of themselves. So came the sense of self in advanced animals. But in plasma and magnetic fields?

The Diaphanous migrated on solar storms into the greater voids where we evolved. When the building of the Bowl began, it became essential to include them, as managers of the jet and of the star itself. Only by shaping the magnetic fields of star and jet can we move the Bowl, with constant attention to momentum and stability. Who else to govern magnetic machinery than magnetic beings?

The Ice Minds sounded so reasonable, their conclusions seemed obvious. Before her inner eye played scenes of magnetic arches rising from stars, twisting and kinking to cut off and therefore give birth to new self-stabilized beings. She could sense, not merely see, waves lashing among the complex magnetic nets that surged in her mind—speech of a sort, maybe. Now the view in her mind shifted to the jet and the plight of SunSeeker, pursued by small ships of destructive intent.

“You want to—what? Broker a deal? After hounding us across—”

The Folk have failed us. Their defenses of the jet are ancient and many failed. Your ship did not even notice these, we are certain. The loosened jet now lashes across Life Zones and wreaks much ill. Yet those who bear down upon that ship now may well have to resort to a weapon we have vowed never to use. It could bring far more evil.