Silence. Jampudvipa usually said little, but now she said quietly, “Is there any advantage in leaving the jet?”

Beth knew Redwing should answer that, but she seethed with anger now and could not stop herself. “I don’t want to maneuver against craft that fast, with our only fuel the star’s solar wind. Or what’s left of it—the jet gets over ninety percent of the plasma that leaves the star. I can’t fly hard with no mass coming through the scoop.”

Karl Lebanon asked, head bowed, “What do the flitters fly on?”

“Not plasma, right?” Redwing turned to Beth.

“Their plume shows fusion burners, but they’re running on boron-proton. They carry their fuel and reaction mass.”

“They’re flying upstream, which costs them in momentum,” Karl said. “For us, it’s gain. We get more charged mass down the magscoop gullet. So—”

“What do we do when we get to gunplay?” Redwing asked. “We got no guns aboard, Dr. Lebanon.”

Beth said, “You’ve got the big gun, Cap’n—the torch.”

Redwing nodded somberly. “You think it can make that much difference?”

Karl said, “Whatever’s flying the flitters, Artilects or aliens, it has to be vulnerable to the jet. They have magnetic screens for sure. They must’ve been engineered to take care of problems in the jet.”

Beth turned her back on Karl, irritated that he had jumped in when Redwing clearly addressed his question to her. “So—if we push them harder, give ’em some twist, maybe we can keep them at a distance, dodge them. Not like there’s not room to play out here in the jet.”

Redwing scowled, his face more lined than she had ever seen. “It’s ten light-seconds across. Room to dodge, but—can we keep them far enough away?”

“Depends on what their weaponry is.” Karl wore a dispassionate expression, staring into space. “Nuclear, sure, we can see hardware coming and hit it with our scoop-policing lasers. But if they have gamma ray lasers, like those big domes on the Bowl rim, we’re done.”

Beth sat back and watched the flitters edge up from behind. She bit her lip, adjusted for a vortex plasma knot, felt it surge them to starboard, and said, even and controlled, “Cap’n, we don’t have much choice.”

Redwing was silent, pacing, frowning. More silence. And suddenly Beth found herself on her feet, speaking in a flat, hard voice. “You ordered us into the jet, you wanted to press the Folk, Clare got killed right here, and you now have no idea what to do?”

Redwing spun on his heel. “I have over a thousand souls aboard who signed on to go to Glory. I took an oath to deliver them. I didn’t agree to turn them over to aliens riding along in a big contraption.”

“I don’t think—”

“Point is, your job is to not think beyond your rank!”

“We all just saw Clare killed by something we don’t understand, that’s got us all terrified, and you—”

“Quiet!” Jam said, rising to her height on the deck, her dark face severe. “The captain commands. We do not question, especially under combat conditions.”

Beth stared at Jam, whom she recalled was a mere petty officer. But … she had to admit, Jam was right. “I…” Beth’s throat filled, choking off her words. “Clare…”

“Enough,” Redwing said, addressing all the bridge crew. “We’re all jumpy. Forget this happened. We are committed and we shall engage.” He turned to Beth. “But you’re lead pilot. You are carrying this ship into a battle we cannot master without you. Do it.”

So she did.

FORTY

We have need of your skills with your own kind, the cool voice said inside her mind. Tananareve felt around her, but no one had entered the narrow, warm envelope that had closed in on her as soon as the Folk sealed up this device. It smelled of dense, fleshy tissues, and indeed, the walls were softly springy, like the skyfish.

“I am certainly willing,” Tananareve said, and waited. She could see nothing and heard no sounds. Yet the voice in her head seemed to be spoken.

We desire you to be quiet of soul.

“I don’t know what that means.”

We can see you churn with emotion. This is to be expected. But calm will come with concentration.

“Uh, who are you?”

The Folk term us Ice Minds. They see us, as shall you, as those of slow thoughts, as our barred spiral galaxy turned upon its axis dozens of times. We have of late examined your species and believe you can be of use to avert the gathering catastrophe that awaits in short time.

“You know us? From Cliff’s team, I suppose?”

Those who stand now outside this reading realm.

“Reading? You’re inside my mind somehow.”

From the Folk termed Memor, we inherited her inspections of your mind. From those primates outside, we learned, again with Memor’s excursions in your selfhood, to convey meaning in your Anglish. Now the Folk at our command immerse you in this fashion, so we can use you.

She didn’t like the sound of this. “To do what?”

To prevent damage to us all. Unite so that the destination we all share can be made coherent with the purposes of the Bowl. To let life call out to life in depths and ranges greater still.

Tananareve had never liked sermons, and this sounded like one. Or maybe sanctimony varied with species. “Why are you Ice Minds? I mean, what do you look like?”

There flashed before her images that somehow blended with knowing at the same instant—vision and insight coupled, so that in a few shifting seconds she felt herself understand in a way that simple explanations did not convey. It was less a sense of learning something than of understanding it, gaining an intuitive ground in the flicker of a moment, without apparent effort.

A rumpled night terrain under steady dim stars. Dirty gray ice pocked with a few craters, black teeth of black rock, grainy tan sandbars … and fluids moving in gliding grace across this.

“You’re the ivory stuff sliding on the rocks and ice?”

And you are death to us. We remain a mystery to you myriad warmlife races. To you bustling carbon-children of thermonuclear heat and searing light. We are of the Deep and knew, shortly after the stars formed, of the beauty stark and subtle, and old to you beyond measure. Our kind came before you, in dark geometries beneath the diamond glitter of distant starlight on time-stained ices. Metabolism brims in the thin fog breath of flowing helium, sliding in intricate, coded motion, far from the ravages of any sun.

“And you live here?” Still too much like a sermon, but it had an odd feeling of being true.

The Bowl rushed at her, sharp and clear, the rotating great bright wok beneath the hard little red star, its orange jet—and then the point of view swept around, to the hull. It plunged along the metalware—humps and rhomboids and spindly stretching tubes of the outer skin—until it swept still closer and she saw endless fields of parabolic plants, all swaying with the Bowl’s rotation, focused up at the passing stars … while among them flowed that pearly fluid, lapping against odd hemispheres that might—she knew, without thinking about it—be dwellings, of a sort.

“Never thought of that. Shielded from the star, it’s kind of like being on the far outside of our solar system, in what we call the cometary sphere.”

We exploit the heat engine of leaked warmth from the Bowl’s sunswept side to our realm, so we bask in beautiful cold-dark while harvesting waste energy from below. Our minds organize as complex interactive eddies of superconductive liquids.

The view skated across huge curved fields of icy hummocks and hills, with sliding strange rivers of ivory glowing beneath the dim stars. There came to her a creeping sensation of a vast crowd on this stretching plain, a landscape of minds that lived by flowing into each other, and somehow teasing out meaning, thought … more.