Blue shift! I was traveling so fast that light itself seemed as sluggish as the Doppler-shifted noise of a passing train.

The Qax gave me my head. Probably the ship was fairly immune to accidents… even if I wasn’t.

“The Xeelee hyperdrive works on unconventional principles,” the Qax told me. “On your return, we’re not sure precisely where in our system you’ll arrive — but we know it will be a fixed distance from the sun.

“The mass of the ship and sun are the deciding factors. The more mass the ship has, the closer to the sun you’ll be placed.”

I flew out to that critical return orbit. I wasn’t surprised to find a Spline gunship, pitted with weapons that tracked me like eyes. Around the curve of the orbit was another gunship, and another. I swept out of the ecliptic plane, only to find more gunships. The Qax sun was encased by a sphere of them, completely staking out my return radius. “This must be costing you a fortune,” I said. “Why?”

Lipsey said elegantly: “Oh, they’re not scared of you, Bolder. But they wouldn’t like a hundred armed Xeelee to come swarming out of that ship instead of you, now would they?”

After two months’ training I felt ready. I skimmed out to the Spline-guarded radius and closed up my wings. Lipsey, once more alone with the Qax, said gently: “Good luck, Jim Bolder.”

“Yeah.” I hit the red button—

— and gasped as the hyperdrive jump made the Qax sun wink to nothingness. Below my feet appeared a compact yellow star, set in a sky crowded with stars and dust. I became aware of a trickle of clicks and pops as instruments clustered around me began to study the hurtling wonders.

“Wow!” I said.

“Bolder,” said the Qax, “skip the epithets and report.”

“I think I’m near the center of the Galaxy.”

“Good. That is—”

— another jump—

“ — according to plan.”

“Lethe.” The yellow sun had disappeared; now I hovered below a dumbbell-shaped binary pair. Great tongues of golden starstuff arced between the twin stars. The sky was darker; I must be passing through the Galaxy and out the other side—

— jump—

— and now I was suspended below the plane of the Galaxy itself; it was a Sistine ceiling of orange and blue, the contrasts surprisingly sharp—

— jump—

— and these jumps were coming faster; I watched a dwarf star scour its way over the surface of its huge red parent and that dim disc over there must be my Galaxy—

— jump—

— and now I was inside a massive star, actually within its pinkish flesh, but before I could cry out there was another—

— jump—

— and—

— jump — jump — jumpjumpjumpjump—

I closed my eyes. There was no inward sensation of motion; only a flickering outside my eyelids that told me of skies being ripped aside like veils.

“…Bolder! Can you hear me? Bolder—”

I took a breath. “I’m okay. It’s just — fast.” I risked another look. I was passing through a frothy barrage of stars and planets; beyond them sheets of galaxies moved past as steadily as roadside trees. I said slowly: “I must be making a megalight, or more, an hour. At this rate the journey will take about two weeks—”

“Yes,” Lipsey said. “We think the Xeelee have a range of hyperdrive capabilities. The standard intragalactic version is limited to a kilolight an hour, or thereabouts. Whereas this more powerful intergalactic model—”

I tumbled into the creamy plane of an elliptical Galaxy. I wailed and closed my eyes again.

Ten days later, the popping stars no longer bothered me. I guess you can get used to anything. Even the growing gray patch ahead of me — a cloud of objects around the Great Attractor — seemed less important than the itchy confines of my suit. In fact, I felt fine until a disc of sky directly behind me turned china blue…

“I don’t get it,” I said. “Objects that I’m leaving behind should be redshifted.”

“It’s nothing to do with your motion, Bolder,” the Qax explained. “The blue shift is gravitational. You’re now close enough to the Great Attractor that light from the outside Universe is beginning to fall more steeply down its gravity well.”

I checked my instruments. “But that’s ridiculous… I’m still millions of light years away.”

The Qax didn’t bother to respond.

Two more days. The light became a hail of hard blue as it plummeted after me into this pit in space. I entered the outskirts of the mist around the Great Attractor; it resolved into individual stars and what looked like bits of galaxies.

The muddled starlight bathing my cage began to flicker. I felt my heartbeat rising. The skies riffled past me like the pages of a great book, ever slower. Finally the ship stuttered to a halt.

“I’ve arrived,” I whispered. “I’m still inside the star mist.” I looked around, clutching the arms of my couch. “I’m in orbit around what looks like a small G-type star. But the sky’s crammed with streaming stars, hundreds of them close enough to show discs. It’s blue-tinted chaos.

“And — I can see something ahead. A bank of light beyond the mist.” My breath caught at the sheer scale of it all. “That’s the Great Attractor, right?”

“Don’t touch your controls until we tell you, Bolder,” the Qax murmured.

“What? Why not?”

“You’ve got company. To your left…”

A hoard of night-dark ships came soaring away from the Great Attractor and out into the star cloud. There were small fighters like mine, swirling in flocks like starlings. And here and there I saw cup-shaped freighters miles wide, cruising like eagles.

The sky was black with ships.

“Xeelee,” I breathed. “There must be millions of them. Well, you were right, Qax… But I don’t believe in coincidence. I haven’t stumbled across the only Xeelee fleet in the area. This star cloud must be swarming with them.”

“Follow them,” said the Qax.

“What?”

“Activate your drive. You’re a lot less likely to be noticed as one of a flock than as an individual.”

“…Yeah.” I spread my wings and banked sideways into the flock. Soon I was waddling along, a self-conscious duck among swans. Inside the waldoes my sweating fingers began to cramp up with the effort.

The fleet was heading for a young star. Through the crowd ahead of me I could see the star’s disc, its violet light diamond-hard. As we neared the star the torrent of ships abruptly splashed sideways, as if encountering an invisible shield. When I reached the breaking radius I banked left and set off after the herd.

Twenty hours after my arrival the Xeelee completed their formation. With wings folded like patient vultures they completely surrounded the star.

“What now?” I asked uneasily.

“No doubt we’ll find out.”

I wished I could rub my gritty eyes. “Qax… I haven’t slept since coming out of hyperspace, you know.”

“Take a stimulant.”

Sudden as an eye blink, bloodred threads of light snaked into the star from every ship in the fleet.

Well, from every ship except one. Mine.

It was a poignant sight: a stellar Gulliver, pierced by a million tiny arrows. The star’s light flickered, oddly. And I became aware of a stirring in the ranks of the Xeelee nearest me.

“They’re starting to notice me,” I whispered. “How do I turn on my beam?”

“You don’t,” said Lipsey. “Remember that Xeelee handgun? This must be what happens at the highest setting.”

A purple arch of tortured gas erupted from the star. Soon flares covered the star’s surface; clouds of ejecta drifted through the cherry-red beams. Cup freighters moved in, placidly swallowing the star flesh.

It was like watching the death of a magnificent animal. “They’re destroying it,” I said. “But how?”

“The handgun must be a gravity wave laser,” the Qax said slowly. “The coils on the butt of that handgun are small synchrotrons. Subatomic particles move at fantastic velocities in there; the thing emits a coherent beam of gravity waves which—”