A quarter of the dome had caved in. Cannon barrels collapsed gracefully. Xeelee construction material folded back like burning plastic, and through the breaches Miriam could see the harsh glare of the stars, the flicker of cherry-red starbreaker light.
Molten construction material rained over the singularity plane. Friends scurried like insects as shards of material — red-hot and razor-sharp — sleeted down on them. A wind blasted from the devastated area and through the rest of the chamber; Miriam could smell smoke, burning meat.
'Jesus,' Miriam breathed. She knew she was lucky; the singularity-cannon console she’d been working at with Jaar was well away from the collapsing area. Jaar cried out inarticulately and pushed away from the console. Berg grabbed his arm. 'No!' She pulled him around. 'Don’t be stupid, Jaar. There’s not a damn thing you can do to help them; the best place for you is here.'
Jaar twisted his head away from her, toward the ruined areas of the earth-craft.
Now a flare of cherry-red light dazzled her. The Spline had found a way through the failed dome and had hit the chamber itself with its starbreaker beam. Raising her hand to shield her eyes from the glow of the dome, she saw that the crystal surface over one section of the singularity plane had become muddied, fractured; cracks were racing across it as if it were melting ice. The area had been scoured of human life. And the singularities themselves, white-hot fireflies embedded in their web of blue light, were stirring. Sliding.
All around the artificial cavern the Friends seemed to have lost their discipline. They wandered away from their consoles, clung to each other in distracted knots; or they ran, hopelessly, into the devastated area. The singularity-cannon muzzles were silent now; sparks no longer sailed upward to space.
The Friends were finished, Berg realized.
Berg released Jaar and turned back to the console. She tried to ignore it all — the stench of meat, the wind in her face, the awesome creak of failing Xeelee construction material — and thought through the layout of this cannon control. It was all based on a straightforward touchscreen, and the logic was obvious. Tapping lightly at colored squares she ran through the direction-finder graphics.
From the corner of her eye she saw schematic diagrams of the earth-ship — huge swathes of the dome base glaring red — and graphs, lists of figures, data on more subtle damages.
Berg said, 'How bad is it? Are we losing the air?'
Jaar watched her, distracted, pain of varying depths chasing across his face like multilayered ocean currents. 'No,' he said, his voice a hoarse shout above the chaotic din. 'The breaches in the dome are above the bulk of the atmosphere; the singularity plane’s gravity well will keep most of the air in a thick layer close to the surface… For the next few minutes anyway. But the air is going to seep out of that breach. It will absorb all this heat, boil out of the ruined shell… and the dome itself may fail further.'
'All right. Tell me about the singularity plane.'
He looked vaguely at the console and lifted a desultory hand, tapped almost casually at the touchscreen. 'We’ve lost control of about thirty percent of the singularities. The integrity of the restraining electromagnetic net is gone.'
Berg frowned, tried to work it out. 'What does that do to us?'
'We didn’t run any simulations of this scenario.' He turned to face her, the sweat on his shaved scalp glistening in the starbreaker light. 'This is a catastrophic failure; we have no options from this point. The loose singularities will attract each other, swarm together. The n-body computations would be interesting… The singularity swarms will eventually implode, of course.
'It’s over.' His shoulders shook convulsively in their thin covering of begrimed, pink material.
She stared at him. She had the feeling that, just at this moment, Jaar — broken open as he was — would be prepared to tell her anything she wanted to know about this damn Project: that all the questions that had plagued her in the months since she’d fallen ass-first into the laps of these Friends of Wigner would at last be settled… 'Jesus, I wish I had time for this.' She glared at the console before her, lifted her hands to the touchscreen — but the configuration was different. Blocks of light slid about as she watched; the damn thing was changing before her eyes. 'Jaar, what’s happening?'
He glanced down briefly, barely interested. 'Compensation for the lost singularities,' he said. 'The mass distribution will continue to change until the disrupted singularities settle down to some form of stable configuration.'
'All right.' She stared at the shifting color blocks; ignoring the heat of the air, the buffeting wind, she strove to take in the whole board as a kind of gestalt. Slowly she started to see how this new pattern matched the matrix she’d memorized earlier, and she raised her hands hesitantly to the screen -
Then the shifting, the seemingly random reconfiguring, started again.
She dropped her hands. 'Damn it,' she said. 'Serves me right for thinking this was going to be easy.' She grabbed Jaar’s arm; he looked down at her with an expressionless face. 'Listen, Jaar, you’re going to have to come back out of that shell of yours and help me with this. I can’t manage it myself.'
'Help you with what?'
'With firing a singularity…'
He shook his head; it was hard to be sure, but it seemed to Berg that he was almost smiling at her, patient at her ignorance. 'But there’s no point. I’ve already explained that without the thirty percent we’ve lost, we can’t complete the Project—'
'Damn you,' she shouted over the rising wind, 'I’m not planning to fire these things into Jupiter! Listen to me. I want you to help me fight back against the Spline…'
He shook his head, clearly confused and frightened, trying to pull away from her.
'What is it with you people? I know your Project was more important than your own damn life, but the thing has failed now! Why won’t you help me keep you alive?'
He stared at her, as if she were speaking a language he no longer understood.
There was a groan, like the cry of a wounded god. She glanced up, cringing; acres of dome were glowing white-hot now, vast sections peeling back to reveal the stars. Xeelee material dangled like scraps of burnt skin.
She might only have seconds left, she realized, before the control systems failed completely — or all the power failed, and she found herself playing billiards with a thousand uncontrolled, city- block-sized black holes — or the damn roof fell in…
And she was going to have to waste those seconds holding this guy’s hand.
'Jaar,' she shouted, 'your Project is finished. The only way it could succeed, in the future, is for you to start again. To construct new singularities, build a new earth-ship. But the options are limited. We can’t run, because the hyperdrive is slag, along with the Xeelee dome. So all we can do is fight. Jaar, you have to help me fight back. We have to destroy the Spline, before it destroys us.'
Still he stared at her emptily, his mouth drooping open.
In frustration she drove her fist into his arm. 'It’s for the Project, Jaar.
More of the dome imploded into spinning fragments; starbreaker light flickered.
Jasoft Parz was shaken around his eyeball chamber like a pea in a cup. Bits of his broken-open life-support kit bounced around at the end of his umbilical like some ludicrous metal placenta. But the walls of the chamber were fleshy, yielding; and he was cushioned further by entoptic fluid.
It was almost fun.
The life-box was a depressing sight. He’d stripped out so many components in his search for a way to ignite his little bonfire — not to mention bleeding half his air supply away to feed the flames — that he couldn’t believe it could sustain him for much longer than a few more minutes.
He doubted it made much difference, now, whatever the outcome of this brief, intense battle; he could see no way he personally was going to be allowed to live through this.
It didn’t seem to matter. He felt as calm as he had for years.
His improvised oxygen tent was still holding up, despite the buffeting and turbulence of the entoptic fluid. Sparking electrical fire sizzled against the raw nerve of the Spline; he must be flooding the nervous system of the disoriented Spline with agony. Through the Spline’s clouding lens he saw sheets of cherry-red light, lines of fire that seemed to crackle across space. The starbreaker beams were firing at the incoming GUT ship, then. But he could see how wild the firing was, how random.
For the first time he allowed himself to suppose that this might actually work.
'Jasoft Parz.' The Qax’s synthesized translated voice was, Parz noted with amusement, still as level and empty of meaning as a software-generated travel announcement… but it masked a scream of rage. 'You have betrayed me.'
Jasoft laughed. 'Sorry about that. But what did you expect? Who would have thought that a Spline warship would be so easy to disable… provided you’re in the right place, at the right time. In any event, you’re wrong. The truth is that you have betrayed yourself.'
'How?'
'By your damned, insufferable complacency,' Parz said. 'You were so convinced of a simple victory here. Damn it, Qax, I would have emerged from that portal with all guns blazing — hit these men from the past before they understood what was happening! But not you — even despite the fact that you
'The Spline is not yet rogue,' the Qax said. 'Its pain-suppression routines are not designed to deal with the damage you have inflicted. But within seconds heuristic routines will eliminate the disruption. And, Jasoft Parz, you may anticipate the arrival of antibody drones, to deal with the cause of the damage—'
'I’m weak with terror,' Parz said dryly. Beyond the clouding lens window of his bathyspherelike cell, comet ice gleamed, rushing at him; GUT fire blazed like sunlight. 'But I don’t think we’ve got even seconds left, Qax.'
The Spline, enraged by pain, closed its huge eyelid.
A cannon tube, suspended from the damaged dome, extended downward; at last its mouth touched the crystalline flooring beneath Berg’s feet and merged with it, seamlessly. Two firefly singularities moved imperceptibly closer to the cannon barrel, as if eager to be launched into space. Berg felt the gravity field within which she was embedded alter, subtly; it was like an earth tremor, and it gave her a sensation of falling in the pit of her stomach.
She turned to Jaar. 'Listen to me,' she said rapidly. 'Here’s what we’re going to do. I want you to reconfigure this damn thing to launch a singularity pair, so that the peak of the trajectory is inside the Spline. But that’s not all.
Jaar looked at her, at first without apparent understanding. Then he got it. His eyes narrowed.
'How quickly can you do it?' she asked.
