“Cap’n, looks like I’ve found a way to offset the charge buildup these things are using against us,” she said with a deliberately casual air.

Redwing looked up from the deck, where he had sprawled. “Brilliant!”

“And she nailed that flier flat on, too,” Karl said with one of his seldom-seen grins. “There’s only one flier left, and it’s hanging back pretty far.”

“Good,” Redwing said, getting up and straightening his uniform. He was always meticulous when on the bridge. “But we’re near the top of our mission profile, right?”

Beth checked. “Yes, sir, got to turn around soon and head back down, run with the jet.”

“That will lower our plasma influx pretty far,” Karl said. “We’ll have a reduced exhaust.”

“So the exhaust will be less useful as a weapon, certainly,” Redwing said. “Let’s try to hover near our top limit, then. Can you do that, Officer Marble?”

Redwing also liked to get formal in tight situations. She had often wondered if in such moments he saw himself as fearless admiral at the helm of a battleship on tossing gray seas. Well, this was about as close to that as he was going to get, and as close as she ever wanted to be.

“Keep an eye on that flier as we make our turn.” Redwing settled into his deck chair. He looked tired and gray to Beth, but so did they all now. Hours of dodging among the jet knots, harvesting them with split-second timing and then blowing the excess post-fusion plasma out the flexing nozzle as a weapon—well, it added up fast.

The ship rumbled as she took it on a slow tipping angle. She was concentrating so didn’t notice the beeping of the comm.

Karl picked it up for her. His body went rigid and he glanced at his shocked face. “It’s … Tananareve, Cap’n. For you.”

He grabbed it. “Redwing here. How in—?” Redwing’s face showed nothing as he listened. Then his mouth slowly opened and he stared into space. “How did—?” More silence. “So they’ll let us go?”

Beth suddenly realized that this was a negotiation that could end all this madness. She kept SunSeeker in a tight helical turn, with a wary eye on the flier below, now approaching. Something told her that she should make some quick dodgy movements to make them a less predictable target. While hanging on Redwing’s every word, of course.

“Okay, details later. Right.” Redwing’s entire body was tense now, on his feet, spine ramrod straight. He gripped his chair so hard, she saw his hand turn pale. “What?” The silence seemed long and unbearable, but she noticed the seconds on her situation screen were going by slowly. “Roger. More later.”

Redwing turned to her and said, “That flier behind us, take all the evasion you can. They’re trying to shut down a weapon that’s in armed and aiming mode right now.”

She slammed the helm over hard and teased the fusion burn to its max. Then she released the bolus of searing plasma and wrenched the helm again, putting them into a flat spin, then a dive. Pops and creaks came echoing down the bridge from the connecting corridors. Karl’s tablet escaped from the ridged worktable and smacked into the bulkhead.

Redwing said, “There’s an electromagnetic precursor maybe two seconds before discharge. Look for that. Say again, Tananareve—”

Karl flicked their EM antennas into one overlay, frequencies color-coded. Beth could see the flier as a dark point among hills and valleys of Technicolor richness. “It’s buried in all this plasma emission,” Karl said.

“Integrate the whole spectral emission,” Beth said. “I don’t know what frequency it will come out in, but if we—”

“Got it.” A smooth topological surface appeared now in auburn colors, brown for valleys and nearly yellow at the peaks. The sky flexed like an ocean rolling with colliding wave fronts.

She fought the helm around again and let their speed drop a bit. This let her fill reserve chambers with incoming plasma and build to the max density they could carry. The jet wind was coming in at velocities over a thousand kilometers a second, and she could vary the inflow rate simply by moving the magscoop to angle it more fully into the stream. SunSeeker was working far from its optimal performance peak, which had been designed to run steady and smooth on interstellar plasma, orders of magnitude below the sleeting hail of knotty ionized matter rushing at them. Now she used, without thinking about it, the skills she had won from their flight up the jet when they arrived here. Through long hours she had fought violent currents, swimming upstream against conditions SunSeeker had never seen.

Now she just let her instincts rule. Her hands and eyes moved restlessly, shaping plasma and bunching it. When she saw the holding chambers were full, she began to trickle more into the fusion chambers. The boost took them up jetward and to starboard as she waited for something strange to come at them.

It wasn’t subtle. The maroon tones around the flier profile suddenly blossomed with a hard bright yellow peak. She fed the stored plasma into the chambers and goosed the drive. The helm slammed over, and she had time to shout “Incoming!”

The bridge shuddered and then wrinkled. She looked down the deck line and saw the bulwark ripple and flex. Pops and groans rose. Karl dove for the deck. She felt a tight pressure run through her like a slow, sinuous wave. Her stomach lurched. A deep bass tone rolled along the ship axis and—

—it was gone. The bridge snapped back into straight lines and firm walls. The hail of small stressed sounds fell away.

“They missed us,” Karl said.

Redwing nodded. “But what missed us? The deck got rubbery—”

“A space-time wrinkle, maybe,” Karl said. “I dunno how in hell anybody could make one, but—”

“Let me concentrate,” Beth said. “They could shoot at us again.”

She dodged and swerved and dove and soared and plunged, and time stretched the way space had moments before. She heard nothing, saw nothing but the feeds that told her what the flier was doing. It cut her off on a side curve and flared more exhaust to draw closer. She countered with her own moves. All this she did with hands incessantly moving as her eyes looked for another of the hard bright yellow peaks. But it didn’t come.

The comm beeped. Redwing answered. “Oh. Good. What? Say again. Good. Great. You’re sure. Okay. Terms come later, sure. Soon, yes.”

He hung up and turned to Beth. She allowed her eyes to stray to him and she was shocked at how old he looked.

“They’re standing down. No more pulses like that. Something called the Lambda Gun.”

She opened her mouth to say something, and the comm beeped again.

Redwing answered. “What? Look at the star?”

“Got it,” Karl said. He and Fred, who had come onto the bridge, peered at the big screen.

Geysers. The curve of the red star worked with furious energies. Flares and huge arches broke into space. Currents swept across the troubled crescent. Beth saw there was a dent in the perfect circle. Something had chewed it.

Karl said, “Look at these vectors.” He had told the Kinematic Artilect to project an acceptance cone on the thing that had missed them. He had set the basic width to be a few times the jittering pattern Beth had followed to evade whatever the flier threw at them. Within the error bars, the cone snipped a bit off the star.

Redwing frowned. “Tananareve says the Folk call it a Lambda Gun. It does something with space-time, so if it just projected on—” He stopped. Facts trump words.

They watched the star adjust gravity against its internal pressures. Huge fissures opened and closed like snapping mouths. Fountains of restless plasma worked up in slender, vibrant yellow tendrils before curving and dying. The star flooded simmering masses into the gap, and waves spread from that. Fluids shaped by strong magnetic fields moved in complex eddies. Storms peeled off this and spread, tornadoes the size of planets.