Thor's voice: 'Ten seconds to shortcut insertion, mark. Nine. Eight.'
Lianne's voice, overtop, coming from the public-address speakers. 'We should have full power back in sixty seconds. Prepare—'
'Two. One. Contact!' The red emergency lighting flickered.
The shortcut appeared like a ring of violet arcing around them, visible above their heads and beneath their feet, as the infinitesimal point expanded to swallow the massive ship.
Everything to the stern of the ring was the now familiar sky of the green star and the pursuing dark matter. But in front of the ring was an almost completely black sky. The passage through the shortcut took only a few moments as Starplex hurtled through at breakneck speed.
Keith shuddered as he realized what had happened.
Rhombus's lights swirled in patterns of astonishment. Lianne made a small sound in her throat. Jag was reflexively smoothing his fur.
All around was black emptiness, except for an indistinct white oval and three smaller white splotches high above their heads, and a handful of fainter white smudges tossed at random against the night.
They had emerged in the empty void of intergalactic space.
The white splotches weren't stars; they were whole galaxies.
And not one of them looked like the Milky Way.
Chapter XVIII
Rissa felt her throat constricting as the Rum Runner was flung away from Starplex.
'What happened?' she called.
But Longbottle was too busy to answer. He was twisting and turning in his tank, fighting to bring the ship under control. On her monitors, Rissa saw the green star swelling ahead of them, its surface a roiling ocean of fiery emerald, jade, and malachite. She fought down a wave of panic, and tried to assess for herself what had gone wrong. There's no way Keith would have cut power to the tractor beam, so either Gawst had used some sort of interfering transmission to sever the tractor, or Starplex had suffered a power failure. Either way, they'd been hurled away from the mothership, and almost directly toward the star. Through the clear wall between her air- filled chamber and Longbottle's water-filled one, Rissa saw the dolphin sharply arching his body in what seemed to be a painful way, and bashing the side of his head against the opposite wall, as if by that sheer additional effort he could force the ship in the direction he wanted it to go.
Rissa looked at her monitors, and her heart skipped a beat. She saw Starplex disappear through the shortcut to— to wherever it had gone. The great ship's windows were dark, confirming that a power failure must have occurred. If the ship was truly without power, Rissa hoped it had come through the shortcut network at New Beijing or Flatland — where there would be other vessels to help it.
Otherwise, it might not be able to return through whatever exit it emerged from — and a search of all the active exits might not be completed before Starplex's batteries ran out, leaving it without life support.
But Rissa only had a few moments to think about the fate of her husband and colleagues; the Rum Runner was still heading toward the green star.
The bow window had already darkened considerably, trying to filter out the inferno ahead of them. Longbottle was still struggling with the controls attached to his flukes and fins. Suddenly he flipped around in his tank, and Rissa saw the green star wheel away from view.
Longbottle was bringing the main engines around to face the star, and firing them as brakes. The ship rattled; Rissa could see Longbottle disabling emergency cutoffs with presses of his snout.
'Sharks!' shrieked Longbottle. At first, Rissa thought it was just a swear word for the dolphin, but then she saw what he was referring to: tendrils of dark matter were now obscuring half the sky, the gray spheres within the miasma of luster-quark gravel like the knots on a cat-o'-nine-tails.
Longbottle twisted to his right, and the ship followed suit.
But soon a much more sharply defined blackness obscured their view.
'Ship of Gawst,' said Longbottle.
'Damn,' said Rissa. She brought her hands down on the two grips that controlled the geological laser. She wasn't going to fire unless he did, but—. Ruby dots on Gawst's hull. Rissa moved her thumb over the laser's twin triggers.
Longbottle must have seen her do that. 'ACS jets,' he said. 'Not lasers. He, too, tries to get away from darmats.'
The view in the window changed again as Longbottle altered the Rum Runner's course. Green star to the rear, enemy ship to port, darmats to starboard and coming in above and below. There was only one course possible.
Longbottle jabbed controls with his snout. 'To the shortcut!' he shouted in his high-pitched voice.
Rissa flipped keys, and one of her monitors showed the hyperspace map, the maelstrom of tachyons visible around the exit point.
'More maneuverable are we than Starplex,' said Longbottle. 'An exit we may choose.'
Rissa thought for half a second. 'Can you tell where Keith and the others went?'
'No. Shortcut rotates; I can match their angle of approach, but no time to work out if that will mean we exit at the same place.'
'Then — then go for New Beijing,' said Rissa. 'Starplex will eventually end up there for repairs — if it can.'
Longbottle squirmed in his tank, and the Rum Runner arched upward then down, coming at the shortcut from above and behind. 'Insertion in seconds five,' he said.
Rissa held her breath. There was nothing visible on her monitors. Nothing at all…
A flash of purple.
A different starfield.
A massive black starship.
A starship firing on a flotilla of United Nations vessels.
Four — no, five! — dead hulks pinwheeling against the night, surrounded by clouds of expelled atmosphere.
Everything was bathed in bloody light from the red dwarf that had recently emerged from this shortcut.
It flashed in front of Rissa's eyes, the words fully formed, like a chapter title on some future textbook screen.
Waldahud forces attacking the Earth colony, seizing the one shortcut that serviced human space, a giant battle cruiser easily dispatching the tiny diplomatic craft normally stationed there — a giant battle cruiser that had all its force screens aimed forward, protecting it from the returning fire being launched by the UN ships — a giant battle cruiser that the Rum Runner was directly behind.
Rissa had never killed before, had never even deliberately injured before.
She swung the handles that aimed the laser, and leaned on the triggers.
PHANTOM wasn't here to animate in the beam for her, and the Waldahudin battleship was too far away for her to see the red dot moving across its hull — Moving across its thruster fuel storage tanks — Ripping them open — Igniting the fuel — And then — A ball of light, like a supernova — The bow window going completely black — Longbottle arching in his tank, moving the Rum Runner away from the expanding sphere of debris.
Rissa took her hands off the triggers. The window grew clear again.
She was shaking from head to foot. How many Waldahudin had been aboard a ship that size? A hundred? A thousand? If they'd planned to actually move on to Sol system and storm Earth and Mars and Luna, perhaps as many as ten thousand soldiers — All dead.
Dead.
There were other Waldahudin ships in the area, but they were tiny one-person fighter craft. The big black vessel must have been their mothership.
Rissa exhaled noisily.
