Wearily he indicated the frantic motion around them. "We set up a crash schedule for the implementation of the Project, but we’re falling behind already. And we’ve lost lives." He looked up; he seemed to flinch from the failing dome.

"Why don’t you use the hyperdrive?"

"The hyperdrive has already gone," Jaar said. "Its components were stored in the structure of the dome; we lost operability soon after the start of the assault—"

"Jesus." Berg ran stiff fingers through her hair. So there was no way to run; they could only fight. And she wouldn’t be fighting merely for the good of humanity, but for her own life… "All right, Jaar; show me how these damn singularity cannons work."

Jasoft Parz felt rather proud of himself.

He wasn’t a scientist, or an engineer, by any stretch of the imagination. But, he was finding, he wasn’t completely without resource.

In his life-support box he’d found a spare skinsuit. Using a sharp edge from the box he’d sliced this apart, assembled it into a little teepeelike tent; the substance of the skinsuit, trying to restore its breached integrity, had sealed itself tight along the new seams he’d created.

He fixed the little tent over a Spline nerve-trunk. He used the facemask of the reassembled skinsuit to pump the tent full of breathable air, creating a little bubble of atmosphere in entoptic fluid.

Now he cast through the contents of the life-support box. Maybe he’d have to take the mechanism apart, to start his fire…

The Spline warship hung over the lifedome of the Hermit Crab, rolling with abrupt, jerky, mechanical motions; weapons and other constructs glinted from deep pocks in the elephant-gray hide.

Michael Poole stared at it with something approaching fascination: quite apart from its dominating physical presence there was a vague obscenity about its mixture of gross, swollen life and mechanical deadliness. Michael was reminded of myths of the past, of the undead.

No wonder Earth had been — would be — held in thrall by these things.

Michael glanced at Shira. The Friend, exhausted, disheveled, crushed by the GUT drive’s continuing two-gravity push, lay flat in the couch next to his. Her eyes were open — staring up — but unseeing. A clean blue glow flickered at the edge of his vision, somewhere close to the perimeter of the lifedome.

Harry’s disembodied head drifted like a child’s balloon. "What was that?"

"Verniers. Attitude jets."

"I know what verniers are," Harry grumbled. The head swiveled theatrically to peer up at the Spline. The huge sentient warship was now drifting away from the Crab’s zenith. "You’re turning the ship?"

Michael leaned back in his couch and folded his hands together. "I preset the program," he said. "The ship’s turning. Right around, through one hundred and eighty degrees."

"But the GUT drive is still firing." The head glanced up at the Spline again, closed one eye as if judging distances. "We must be slowing. Michael, are you hoping to rendezvous with that thing up there?"

"No." Michael smiled. "No, a rendezvous isn’t in the plan."

"Then what is, for Christ’s sake?"

"Look, Harry, you know as well as I do that this damn old tub isn’t a warship. Apart from a couple of Berry-phase archaeological image retrieval scanning lasers, I’ve nothing apart from the ship itself that I can use as a weapon." He shrugged, lying there. "Maybe if I’d brought back a few more samples from the Oort Cloud, I could throw rocks—"

"What do you mean," Harry asked ominously, " ‘apart from the ship itself’?"

"After all this two-gee thrust we’ve a huge velocity relative to the Spline. When we’ve turned around there’ll be only a couple of minutes before we close with the Spline; even with the GUT drive firing we’ll barely shed any of that…

"Do you get it, Harry? We’re going to meet the Spline ass-first, with our GUT drive blazing—"

With slow, hesitant movements, Shira raised her hands and covered her face with long fingers.

"My God," Harry breathed, and his Virtual head ballooned into a great six-foot-tall parody. "We’re going to ram a Spline warship. Oh, good plan, Michael."

"You’ve got a better suggestion?"

An image flickered into existence on the darkened dome above them: the Spline warship, as seen by the Crab’s backward-pointing cameras. The gunmetal-gray light of the Spline’s hull glittered in Harry’s huge, pixel-frosted eyes. "Michael, as soon as that Spline lines itself up and touches us with its damn starbreaker beam, this ship will be a shower of molten slag."

"Then well have died fighting. I say again: Have you got a better suggestion?"

"Yes," said Harry. "Your first idea. Let’s run back out to the cometary halo and find some rocks to throw."

Beyond Harry’s huge, translucent head the Spline’s motion seemed to have changed. Michael squinted, trying to make out patterns. Was the rolling of the warship becoming more jerky, more random?

Come to think of it, he’d expected to be dead by now.

Was there something wrong with the Spline?

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?"