He stared at the paper scrap and then put it away, for perhaps the thousandth time. It was centuries old but still true.

Beth tapped on his door. He stood to slide the door aside and nodded with a greeting. They got right to it.

She sat across from him in his narrow cabin and he made a show of finishing a log entry. It was not entirely show. He had to keep on top of how SunSeeker sailed on the vagrant winds of plasma and magnetic fields. Plus preparations for the jet interception. And an anxious, overworked crew.

But Beth was the hardest. She had been down there for long months and managed to get back aboard, a striking feat. She had prestige with the rest of the crew. She regaled them with stories of aliens and exploits and weird doings down on the Bowl. She’d taken casualties and escaped from a prison. Figured out the alien landscape and made her team get across it. And fly back home in an alien craft. So he had promoted her two grades in the science officer ladder. When she got to Glory—and we will do that, by damn!—she would command the first landing. Still, her tight face promised trouble.

“We’re in an existential position here, sir,” she began.

“Right. We don’t have enough supplies to get to Glory. Our logistics were marginal when we sighted the Bowl. Now it’s hopeless. We’ve burned food and essentials hovering over this enormous thing. Plus time.”

Beth said with deliberation, “I mean, if we commit an overt hostile act, that sure does change the game.”

He nodded. Always concede the rhetorical stuff. “We have to start a clock running. Otherwise they’ll wait us out.”

“But their jet is the key to their Bowl. Damaging it is a mortal threat.”

“Sure it is. We don’t mean to shove a dagger in. We want to show that we can.”

Beth twisted her mouth into a wry grimace. “A pinprick, then?”

“That’s all.”

“These are aliens, Cap’n. Their civilization is older than anything we know. Hell, maybe than we can know. This maneuver, this provocation, is a huge gamble.”

“That it is.” He sat back and folded his hands on his desk. “One we’ve got to take.”

“Look, we don’t know how that damn jet operates. How the Folk run it. How unstable it is.”

“Right. Isn’t that how science works?” Redwing grinned. “If you don’t understand, do an experiment.”

Beth shook her head. “Plus we don’t understand the Glory message, or how the Folk really feel about it. I just … I worry.”

“So do I.” What could I be missing?

“There are risks to every choice. Maybe the right question is, do we want to play Russian roulette with two bullets or one?”

She sighed and got up. She was a bit wobbly. He wondered if she was truly fit for service as their backup pilot. On impulse, he got up and gave her a firm warm hug. With a sigh, too.

*   *   *

Karl showed him the external views of SunSeeker, freshly gathered by their small auto-cam bots that had flown around the entire ship. “She’s centuries old now, but holding up,” he said with a hint of pride. Karl was a bit stiff and formal, but he could not conceal his feelings completely.

The ship’s sleek after section hid behind the torus of the life zone. The shuttle cradles along the central boom were yawning yellow and orange cups for craft docking and vacuum maintenance bots. Micrometeorites had pitted the hull, and radiation burns splashed black filigrees along the flanks. The entire sleek design focused on the demands of starflight. Now their planetary-scale orbits made it hard to get adequate plasma into the magnetic funnel, and the ship barely ran. Fitful spasms sometimes passed through her, the coughs and sputters of a system hovering on the brink of shutting down entirely. The fusion fires in her belly ran soft, then hard, then not at all—until Karl and the crew could get them burning full and furious again. It reminded him of a fine ship built for the high seas, rotting beside a wharf.

Redwing nodded. “Fair enough. The mag systems, they can handle the jet?”

Ayaan Ali said, with a tired and exasperated sigh, “Our upgrades are basically fine-tuning. They seem to work. I’m pretty sure, from records and Artilect memories of Beth’s flight up the jet, that we can deal with the turbulence levels.”

“And if we can’t?” Redwing persisted.

Karl said, “The more plasma we get into our magscoop, the better. So we steer for the density ridges, held in by the helical mag field.”

Ayaan Ali pursed her full lips, and her long eyelashes flickered. Redwing recalled this was the closest she came to showing that she was irked. “The jet’s mag pressure is high. It and those fast-changing plasma pressures can punch our scoop around, too. They’re two orders of magnitude beyond our optimal design.”

Redwing saw himself as referee when crew disagreed on the tech issues, but in the end he knew he had to decide who was right. “How bad can it be if we lose our magscoop shape?”

“We’ll tumble,” Ayaan Ali said.

“And we can recover,” Karl said evenly.

They had the reliable Bear Down leptonic drive, the first to use the dark energy substrate as an energy stabilizer. Redwing did not pretend to understand its complex mechanisms that somehow drew power from the substrate of the very universe. Fundamentals were not his concern; its operation was. Karl pointed out endless details but in the end they had to play the hand they were dealt—a drive running on empty, unless they could grab enough plasma.

Ayaan Ali laid out the geometry on the big display screen that dominated the bridge. SunSeeker had to stay below the Bowl rim, or else come within the sighting angle of the domed gamma ray lasers sited there. Their “experiment” with flying a small package over the rim—and watching it disappear in a furious instant—proved that the Folk sense of diplomacy did not include letting them get out of the narrow cage SunSeeker now occupied. They could navigate in the space below the rim, down to the upper reaches of the Bowl’s air zones. Spread out as the Bowl was over hundreds of millions of kilometers, it exerted a small but steady grav pull on them. Thrusting with the thin plasma here offset that. And through the center of that volume the jet spiked like a living, writhing yellow lance.

Ayaan Ali’s 3-D display showed in detail the atmosphere’s partitions far below them. It was not continuous, or else pressure differences between the low-grav sections would cause the air to gather there to a stifling degree. Instead, firm walls isolated wedges of the Bowl, cutting off circulations to high latitudes. Yet the air zones allowed gas to flow throughout the entire circumference of the annular regions. This meant that the air could flow over zones covering the size of the entire solar system, creating weather patterns unknown on mere planets. But the air could not ascend to the higher latitudes—the “bottom” of the Bowl, toward the Knothole.

“Those partitions are a wonder,” Ayaan Ali said. “Made of some layered stuff that is flexible enough to have some give to it. But it’s hundreds of kilometers on a side!”

Redwing nodded, thinking again, What could I be missing? This thing was built by engineers who thought like gods. They must have methods we can’t see, can’t yet imagine.

Yet the Folk who ran this place had let Beth’s team escape. First from their low-grav Garden prison, then from the Bowl itself. Beth is quick, ingenious, a real leader, but still … They’re not all that smarter than we are. Bigger, though, Beth says. So how do they run this contraption?

Ayaan Ali pointed to the roughly conical section, shaded blue, that was their allowed flight volume. She said, “So we can cruise around in here, and zip across the jet when we want to. So far we’ve just circled it, mostly.”

Karl pointed at her simulation, which showed the bright jet purling down from the star, tightening as it neared the Knothole, then—as the display moved down, its smart eyes following his finger-point—beyond, where it expanded again, losing luminosity. That made the fast wind that SunSeeker had been swimming upriver against for a century, slowing them, costing them time and supplies. Coasting on the vagrant tendrils of plasma fraying off the jet had been a constant piloting problem, running Ayaan Ali ragged. Beth’s return had taken some of the burden from her, and together they would take on the reverse problem—flying into the jet’s thick, turbulent, moving cauldron of ionized particles and mag fields.