“Yes. Was well done?” A thin, reedy command of Anglish.

“Yes, thank you. Are you comfortable?”

“Better. What a ride!”

Redwing left the garden feeling better. Now what? There was nothing like cramped quarters to concentrate the mind. So he went to his cabin as the deck creaked and rolled with the jet storms that whipped by it. He watched the Bowl view crawl past on his wall and did a few standing exercises, adjusted against the tilt local grav had, due to the helix SunSeeker was following. He had learned to disappear within himself, walling out a ship’s routine humming and stale smells and dead air, to create a still, silent space where he could live, rest, think. In the continual noise of the ship he had learned to hear well, picking telltale murmurs out of SunSeeker’s constant vibrations.

A call buzzed in his ear. “Cap’n, got something to see on the bridge. The jet’s really snaking now. Flares like sausages running down it, too.”

He started back, still listening to the pops and creaks of his ship. With his crew he also knew how to listen carefully, or to deliberately not hear. An essential skill, taking only a lifetime of daily practice to master.

Beth’s voice had been strained, and she had just replaced Ayaan Ali in the lead pilot’s chair, with Clare Conway in the second chair. They all looked pale, their eyes never leaving the wall screens and operations boards. SunSeeker’s long helix within the jet had worn them all down, and now the pace was picking up. He hadn’t been resting well, and neither had the others. Coffee could only do so much.

As he entered the bridge, he noted that everyone had coffee ready at the elbow. Should he tell them to switch to decaf? No, too much meddling.

Karl said as Redwing came onto the bridge, “It’s whipping around in the Knothole, just as the simulation said.”

On the biggest screen, the jet was now lit up in yellow. They were looking straight down it and could see the flexed jet now bulging very close to the Knothole edge. “See, the Knothole has big mag fields to stop it.”

“Are we driving the jet just enough to give them a scare?” Redwing leaned over the panel and switched to a flank camera view. “And what’s that secondary bump?”

Karl studied it. Redwing noted that Beth was working a different telescoping camera, focused far away from the jet, on the mirror zone. Karl said, “That’s a nonlinear effect—a backflow.”

“You mean there’s a shock wave working back toward us?” Redwing watched the small sideways oscillation evolve, working around the rim of the jet. “It’s from the big kink?”

SunSeeker could run for weeks in the jet without climbing into view of the gamma ray lasers on the Bowl rim. They were already fairly deep in the Bowl and getting a closer view of the zones near the Knothole, where centrifugal gravity was less. The mirror zone, a vast annulus, was behind their forward-looking views, and ahead loomed the forested regions just in from the Knothole. Beth had been kept somewhere in all that.

“Looks like the kink went nonlinear and launched this shock back at us,” Karl said. “I don’t understand—”

“Here’s a better view,” Beth said. “I asked the Bridge Artilect to find any part of the mirror zone that could give us an angled reflection, and it found this.”

She smiled, and Redwing saw she was enjoying this. She always seized fresh opportunity with relish, one of her best qualities. The wobbly, somewhat blurred image gave them a view from far away to the side. He watched the kink bulge warping as it met the higher mag fields at the Knothole rim, and a countershock race away up the jet. That played among the boundary mag fields of the jet, pushing out farther to the side—

“It’s going to hit the atmospheric membrane in the closest-in zone,” Beth said. “Moving at high speed—over a hundred klicks a second in sideways motion.”

“This wasn’t in the simulation, as I recall.” Redwing let his statement hang there, without a tone of sarcasm. Flat facts spoke for themselves.

Karl nodded, said nothing. Beth watched the fast-moving side shock as it plowed toward the atmosphere’s envelope, a layer sketched in by a graphic; it wasn’t truly visible in these narrow line widths. “Is there enough mass in that to do damage?”

“Plenty,” Karl said, “and the magnetic energy density, too, can hammer the envelope.” He looked worried and said no more.

“What about the structure itself?” Redwing said. He knew this huge thing had to have incredible strength to hold it together. SunSeeker had a support structure made of nuclear tensile strength materials, able to take the stresses of the ramjet scoop at the ship’s axial core. Maybe the Bowl material was similar.

Karl said in a distant tone, almost automatically, “I scanned the Bowl wraparound struts, the foundational matter, on the long-range telescopes. Had the Artilects do a spectral study. It was only a few tens of meters thick, mostly carbon composite looks like, at least on the outside. That’s pretty heavily encrusted with evident add-on machinery and cowlings. Calculated the stress.”

“Which means…?” Redwing persisted.

“The Bowl stress-support material has to be better than SunSeeker’s. Maybe lots better.”

“Should we alter our planned trajectory?” Beth asked, eyes moving among the screens.

“Not yet.” He was thinking fast but getting nothing. So many factors at play … “That display we got before, the lightning here on the bridge, it must be some kind of message.”

“I noticed something here before,” Karl said. “Look.” He thumped his command pad and brought up a recorded scene on a side screen. “See that?”

The vector locator was focused on the zone nearest the Knothole. They could see the massive mag field coils at the rim, then the boundary of the atmospheric envelope, shiny in orange, reflected jet light. There were verdant forests sprawling away from the bulky Knothole structures.

“That’s the same sort of area we were in,” Beth said. “Low gravs, huge tall trees, big spider things. And I saw some of that orange light shimmering up high, from far off, bounced off the upper boundary layer, I guess. Jet light.”

Partway into the large band of forest was a burnt brown and black slash among the lush greens, now mostly faded. Something had left a fresher black burn on the metal and ceramic portion near the Knothole, where the jet passed through.

Karl said slowly, “So instability was a major problem here. It’s damaged the Bowl before.”

“But shouldn’t forest have covered over damage pretty quickly?” Beth asked.

“Maybe it was damage to the understructure,” Karl said. “It broke systems that deliver water and nutrients. Not repaired yet.”

“That means they’re neglecting upkeep,” Redwing said. “The usual first sign of a system sliding downhill.”

“So why don’t they have defenses against the occasional jet malf?” Beth asked.

A long silence. They recalled the crackling image of the Bowl dancing in air above the bridge, sent by some mysterious agency. Karl had explained it in terms of some inductive electromagnetic fields, playing along the outside of the ceramic walls nearby. Redwing was skeptical of that mechanism but certain that the event had been a crude attempt at getting their attention. Then nothing more happened. “A trial run, maybe,” Karl had said. Redwing decided to keep to their planned helical trajectory.

Clare Conway said, rising from the copilot chair, “Cap’n, I see three small ships coming up behind us. They popped into view of long-range microwave radar minutes ago.”

Redwing flicked the radar display on the biggest screen. “Where’d they come from?”

“From the Knothole rim, looks like,” Clare said.

Karl said, “Maybe this answers Beth’s question. They’re sending out something to attack us.”

“What’s their ETA on current trajectory?” Redwing asked, keeping his voice calm.