Then he realized that everyone around him was shouting and laughing with glee. Besen was hugging him. He ignored his Isaac Aspect, who was still trying to lecture him, and joined in the celebration.
Their joy did not last long.
Before they had even quieted down, more mech ships appeared. These kept their distance, as if afraid. But the cosmic string was gone. It had plunged into a vast shadowy dust plume and the ships of the Myriapodia had followed, to rein it in again—Isaac said, with magnetic grapplers.
The mechs edged closer. Again Argo had to flee. Soon they were forced back, back, back—and out of Besik Bay entirely, by the gliding, steady mechs. Again virulent radiation from the churning disk far below began to cook Argo’s skin. Looking at the seethe and flare of the disk, Toby remembered that it was digesting its new meal, the doomed orange star. He could almost feel its baking heat.
Something caught his eye, a thin column of cool blue. It rose out of the very hottest center of the disk, the great white ball of blinding light. As he watched, small bright whorls raced around inside the column. He realized the whole thing was moving, pencil-straight. Fleeing the central hell.
Eerie, beautiful, a shimmering blue. Like a flowing river, cool and welcoming, he thought.
One of the galactic jets. There is another on the other side of the disk, pointing in the opposite direction. Both are ejected by the black hole.
Resplendent, graceful, its ever-changing elegance seemed violated by the Aspect’s ho-hum description. Toby was about to thrust Isaac back into its digital hole, then paused. “How come a black hole lets out anything?”
The hole spins, because it acquires the rotation of all that has ever fallen into it, in all its billions of years. Matter comes falling in from the inner edge of the disk. But the hole’s strong magnetic fields seize that mass. They fling it around, faster and faster. The spin makes hot matter corkscrew up around the poles and then out. As it cools it emits the soft blue radiance.
To Toby it seemed that a hole was a hole, and things fell in, period. But he pulled his attention away from the immense spectacle on the wall screens, whose vivid colors lit the haggard faces of the Bridge officers.
Especially his father. Killeen watched the mech ships behind them, more all the time—small, quick, drawing into a complex pattern. His eyes flitted with caged energy over the views, and a leaden pallor came over his brooding features.
They were trapped. Argo had fled the Besik cloud in the direction toward the inner edge of the disk. Killeen had turned up, to escape—and more mechs had come speeding in to block that way.
“These small craft—they’re probably suicide mechs,” Killeen muttered. He glanced at Toby. A fleeting smile. “Smart ones. Same principle as that bomb back in the Chandelier.”
“Can’t we get by them?” Toby asked earnestly. His father was a genius at slipping out of tight spots.
Killeen shook his head soberly. “Too many. Too many.”
Lieutenant Jocelyn had been working at the control panels and now she stepped back, looking at the trajectory options their computer presented. Webs of three-dimensional curves, swoops and dodges and artful evasions. Her intense eyes searched the screen, at first hopefully, and finally, slowly, coming to rest on one curve. “A single option, Cap’n. We have to go inward. The mechs don’t have that covered.”
“Of course they wouldn’t,” Killeen said. “It’s death that way.”
“There’s no other path. In all this, not a single—”
Killeen nodded. “So that’s where we head.”
Jocelyn stared at Killeen in disbelief. The entire Bridge became very quiet, the only sound a faint buzz of an open comm line. “We can’t. The heat—”
Killeen turned slowly, moving with a deceptive quiet. Yet the air around him seemed to steam and seethe with energy, purpose, granite resolve, as he looked each officer in the eye. With a slight, tilted smile he nodded to Besen, who shouldn’t have been there—letting the silence build, his gaze sweeping every corner of the Bridge, and finally coming to Toby.
“We must. That Besik cloud was there for some reason. A place to cool off, maybe, a way station. But not the final destination, no—it’s just a mass of drifting dark gas. The ancient writing from the Chandelier—it spoke of someplace here, at the True Center. There’s nothing out here but mechs and death. That place must be somewhere further in.”
“No!” Jocelyn cried. “We can’t last a day at these—”
“Quiet!” Killeen barked.
Again silence fell. The Cap’n pointed to the glimmering, ghostlike blue of the galactic jet. “I take that as a sign. A pointer. And we will follow it.”
Toby realized he had been holding his breath. He finally gasped for air. The crew stirred restlessly, murmuring, stunned. Jocelyn asked Toby’s question before he could get up the courage.
Her eyes seemed to drill through the intense air of the Bridge. “The jet goes outward. We follow it?”
Killeen stiffened. “The mechs will block us.”
“Where, then?”
“Into the jet. Maybe there’s a way.”
FOUR
Motes Such As You
Toby was passing by a minor side corridor when he caught the tang of smoke. He blinked, sniffed—and followed the acrid stink at a trot.
The corridor was unlit, the phosphors deliberately off. Ahead he saw dancing flames. There was nothing worse on a starship than fire—burning the very air they needed, while threatening to breech the hull and let in swallowing vacuum. He hurried—and stumbled over a man squatting near the fire.
When he picked himself up he saw by the orange flames that people were huddled around a big pile of smoky corn husks and popping dried branches. But the blaze was young, under control. Bright eyes danced with reflected firelight and they all laughed at his surprise. “Siddown! Take a load off,” someone called.
He knew the fire would leave sooty stains on the ceiling, as others had in innumerable nooks of the ship, but he saw the need. The Families were vagabonds. A communal fire took them back to the one shelter they trusted, even when surrounded by a threatening night.
He let himself slide into it, too. It was restful, remembering the long treks of his boyhood, the biting cold nights beneath a brilliant sky. Smoke licked at his eyes. The crackling yellow spirits danced. Shadows played on faces staring moodily into the unending mystery of flame.
“You look tired, Toby-lad,” Cermo said from nearby.
Toby was surprised to see Cermo here, and even closer, Jocelyn. Usually the highest ship’s officers kept a certain distance from the others. But here Cermo was settled onto his beefy haunches, the age-old posture. It left you always ready to jump and move, if surprised. Useless here, of course, but a warming reminder of their shared past, their wary vulnerability.
“Been working the fields,” Toby answered.
