The Dymasio vanished. Syrinx felt the sharp kink in space as the ship’s patterning nodes warped the fabric of reality around her hull; to Oenone the distortion was like a flare. One that was totally quantifiable. The voidhawk instinctively knew the emergence-point coordinate.

Let’s go!syrinx broadcast loudly.

Power flooded through the voidhawk’s patterning cells. An interstice was torn open. They plunged into the expanding wormhole. Syrinx could feel Graeae generating its own wormhole away to one side, then the interstice closed behind them, sealing them in timeless oblivion. Imagination, twinned with genuine voidhawk sensorium input, provided a giddy rushing sensation for the couple of heartbeats it took to traverse the wormhole. A terminus opened at some indeterminable distance, a different texture of negation, seemingly curving round them. Starlight began to pour in, bending into a filigree of slender blue-white lines around the hull. Oenone shot out into space. Stars became hard diamond points again.

The event horizon had evaporated from the Dymasio ’s hull, depositing the starship five light-days out from Honeck’s sun. Its sensor clusters and thermo-dump panels emerged from the hull with the timidity of a hibernating creature venturing out into a spring day. As with all Adamist starships, it took time to check its location, and scan local space for stray comets or rock fragments. That crucial time lapse allowed the tremendous spacial flaws accompanying the opening of the voidhawks’ terminuses to remain undetected.

Ignorant of his invisible followers, the Dymasio ’s captain activated the starship’s main fusion drive, heading towards the next jump coordinate.

“It’s moving again,” Syrinx said. “Preparing to go insystem. Do you want to interdict?” The thought of antimatter being carried into an inhabited system disturbed her.

“What’s the new destination?” Eileen Carouch asked.

Syrinx consulted the system’s almanac stored in Oenone ’s memory cells. “It looks like Kirchol, the outer gas giant.”

“Any settlements in orbit?” She hadn’t quite grasped how to pull information from Oenone the way she could from hardware memory cores.

“None listed.”

“It has to be heading for a rendezvous, then. Don’t interdict it, follow it in.”

“Let it into an inhabited system?”

“Sure. Look, if it was just the antimatter we wanted, we could have boarded any time in the last three months. That’s how long we’ve known the stuff was on board. Dymasio has visited seven inhabited star systems since we started monitoring it, without threatening any of them. Now my agent confirms the captain has found a buyer with these separatist hotheads, and I want them. This way we can wrap up both supplier and destination. We could even come out of it with the location of the antimatter-production station. Commendations all round, so just be patient.”

“OK.” Did you catch all that?syrinx asked thetis.

Certainly did. And she’s quite right.

I know, but . . .she broadcast a complex emotional harmonic of eagerness and frustration.

Bear with it, little sister.mental laughter. Thetis always knew how to tweak her. Graeae had been born before Oenone , but there was a marked comparison in size; with a hull diameter of a hundred and fifteen metres Oenone was the largest of all Iasius ’s children. And it wasn’t until puberty’s growth hormones came into effect that Thetis outmatched her in physical tussles. But they had always been the closest, always competing against each other.

I’ve never met anyone more unsuitable for a captaincy,ruben chided. No composure, all teenage recklessness, that’s your fault, young lady. I’m jumping ship when this is over, bugger what the contract says.

She laughed out loud, quickly turning it into a cough for Eileen’s benefit. Even though she was used to the degree of honesty which affinity fostered, Ruben always astounded her with his intimate knowledge of her emotional composition. You don’t complain about my other teenage attributes,she shot back, complete with a very graphic image.

Oh, lady, you just wait till we’re off duty.

I’ll hold you to that.

The prospect almost made the tense waiting worthwhile.

Because of the need for a more precise trajectory when jumping towards a planet than for an interstellar jump, Dymasio spent a good fifty minutes re-aligning its course with considerable accuracy. Once its new orbital vector intersected Kirchol, the starship reconfigured itself for a jump.

Weapons status check, please,syrinx demanded when the light from Dymasio ’s dive flame began to fade.

Combat wasps and proximity defence systems on-line,chi replied.

OK, everybody, alert status one. We don’t know how many hostiles there are going to be around Kirchol, so we’ll proceed with extreme caution. The admiral wants this ship interdicted, not destroyed, but if we’re outnumbered we let loose the combat wasps and retreat. Let’s just hope this is the nest.

She caught an indistinct mental grumble: It can’t possibly be another decoy jump. Please.from the tiredness of the tone she guessed it was Oxley, who was actually older than Ruben, a hundred and fifty. Sinon had recommended him when she was assembling her first crew. He had stayed on mostly out of loyalty to her when she signed on with the navy. More cause for guilt.

Dymasio jumped.

Kirchol was a muddy brown globe three hundred and seventy thousand kilometres below Oenone ’s hull, attendant moons glimmering dimly in the exhausted sunlight. The gas giant had nothing like the majesty of Saturn, it was too drab, too listless. Even the stormbands lacked ferocity.

Dymasio and the two voidhawks had emerged above the south pole; insignificant on such a scale, one dull speck, and two coal-black motes, falling with imperceptible slowness as the gravity field tugged at them.

Syrinx opened her mind to Chi, combining Oenone ’s perceptual awareness with the weapons officer’s knowledge of their combat wasps’ performance capabilities. Her nerves stretching over a huge volume of space, making a far-off body tremble in reaction.

The Dymasio started to transmit a simple radio code, beaming it down towards the gas giant. Given their position, there would be no overspill falling on the populated inner system, Syrinx realized, no chance of being detected even in a few hours when the radio waves finally bridged the gulf.

An answering pulse flashed out from something in orbit around Kirchol, well outside Oenone ’s mass-detection range. The source point began to move, vaulting out of its orbit at five gees. Oenone couldn’t detect any infrared trace, and there was no reaction-drive exhaust. The radio signal cut out.

A blackhawk.the thought leapt between the edenists on both voidhawks, a shared frisson of glee.

It’s mine,syrinx told thetis on singular-engagement mode. She hadn’t forgotten how the last blackhawk had given them the slip. It rankled still.

Oh, come on,he protested.

Mine,she repeated coolly. You get all the glory nabbing that actual antimatter. What more do you want?

The next blackhawk we come across is mine.

Of course,she cooed.

Thetis retreated, his subconscious grousing away. But he knew better than try and argue with his sister when she was in that mood.

We’re going after it?Oenone demanded.

We certainly are,she reassured it.

Good, I didn’t like losing that last one. I could have matched its swallow.

No, you couldn’t. That was nineteen light-years. You’d damage your patterning cells trying to emulate that. Fifteen light-years is our limit.