Pamir stared at him.

“You’re a busy soul,” the technician said with a charitable tone. “But outfitting streakships is my business, and I’m rather good at it, and I’m just offering … sir … that we tweak your shopping list, just a little bit …”

Thirty-two

The bombardment was beautiful, scalding and delicate and beautiful. Pricks of light appeared on the surface of the Blue World, each fleck marking the detonation of a hundred-megaton blast, obliterating the sky’s roof and creating jets of white steam and stripped nuclei that rose like fingers out ahead of the shriveled but always enormous creature. Yet the bombs were only nuisances, just some of the brutal preliminary work. Larger nukes dressed inside sleek capsules of high-grade hyperfiber dove into the base of each jet, accelerating to the bottoms of the fluid and temporary craters, then accelerating, cutting deep, their diamond-clad eyes aiming for whatever seemed massive or important.

To a human eye, the Blue World looked injured. The body recoiled from each blast, submerged organs reflexively retreating, conduits and specialized vessels shredded and useless, while everything else was endowed with a soft wounded pink glow that heartened the Master Captain.

“It’s dying,” she declared.

Washen simply nodded.

“How soon—?” the Master began.

“Now.”

As Washen spoke, the world changed its look. In an instant, a vigorous blue light bled out of its depths, the illusion of strength and youth and astonishing vigor born with the sudden discharge of hundreds of weapons. Simple nukes were mixed with gamma-ray generators and antimatter mines and a few bottles filled with laser pulses—intense barrages of coherent light that until now were suspended in slowing matrixes, perched on the brink of absolute zero. Great twisting bubbles of steam expanded and collapsed again, the violent cavitation creating a prolonged roar that shattered distant structures, making soup from tissues and intricate machines. The Blue World shook and roiled, the blueness quickly collapsing into a muddy gray glow that continued to soften, edging gradually toward blackness.

“Die,” the Master coaxed.

She was pacing inside one of the auxiliary bridges. Her image was pacing beside Washen, who was standing alone on the original bridge. Each woman was trying to absorb information drawn from a multitude of sources, discounting what was suspect, concentrating on the tiny cues and glimmers that had importance. In this elaborate, enormous game, the Master was the expert. The genius. Washen had always recognized her own novice capacity in this difficult realm. Which was why she had set up a series of hardened and deeply encoded links with the woman, wanting to know the worst, and the best, as soon as possible.

Yet the Master kept asking her questions.

“Is it dead, Washen?”

She couldn’t tell.

“What do you think, my dear?”

Even if the Blue World had died—

Then the apparition beside her said, “Damn. We were close, but no!”

What did The Master see? Washen began racing through the data and the AI extrapolations … and finally she noticed something much simpler. On the surface of the Blue World, between those round zones where the water continued to boil, vigorous tendrils were pulling together an assortment of metal-foam islands and machinery—the mangled detritus stirred out of the depths by the heavy blasts.

Again, the Master cursed.

“What?” Washen asked.

The illusion of a giant human pivoted on one foot, capturing the giant woman’s unexpected grace. Then with a teacher’s warning, she said, “If you want to rule the ship, darling … if you genuinely wish to sit in my chair someday … you have to learn how to watch every little place at once …”

The little place was tucked inside the shadow of one towering rocket nozzle. Almost unnoticed, a wave had begun to build. Across a thousand kilometers of churning, mud-colored polypond, muscles were flexing, elaborate neural systems firing in succession, a sudden, vast, and very graceful power lending momentum to the water. The wave pushed away from the nozzle, gathering speed. Security troops fired little nukes, cutting a few of the muscles. But not enough, obviously. At a velocity many times the speed of sound, one hundred kilometers of living fluid grew to twice that depth, then twice again.

“The center engine,” a voice cried out.

Aasleen.

“Three waves,” she reported.

From a distance of thousands of kilometers, a trio of identical ripples was gathering, water and muscle and things less easily named suddenly reaching out of the newborn atmosphere. Fluid mechanics were being pushed to the limit. Energies gathered for this single assault were spent in moments, and lost. Scaffoldings of plastic and rubber and pressurized goo managed to give each one of the waves a backbone, and then as if to prove the impossibility of this assault, one of the waves collapsed. Hundreds of kilometers from its target, the liquid mountain split open and flattened, shreds of tissue already being gathered and sorted as the water rolled in all directions, hunting for the lowest point.

But the other two waves held together, and again, they rose up.

The Master cursed.

Washen didn’t have any breath left in her.

It was Aasleen, sitting in a distant auxiliary bridge, who quietly mentioned, “This is what we guessed. Worst case—”

But now, a second wave crumbled and died.

How many times could the polypond generate these waves? If they kept battering her fusion reactors and cutting neurons … when would the enemy grow tired and have no choice but to stop trying … ?

The last wave pulled itself toward its middle, lifting its mass into a narrow, impossible column that stood far above the atmosphere. Simple friction and the heat leaking from all those frantic machines and muscles caused the water to boil, then explode. Jets of white steam raced out into the vacuum. For a last long while—six impossible minutes—the wave continued forward, the vapor finally feeling the tug of the ship, allowing itself to plunge back down as it cooled and froze, the strangest snow falling, then melting against the face of the polypond.

What remained was made of tougher stuff.

After the water boiled free, a limb was revealed—hundreds of kilometers long, but flexible, composed of diamond bones and fullerene cords and superconducting tendrils that reached out with a motion never practiced before. Later, watching replays from every vantage, Washen would notice a lack of coordination—a slapping motion followed by three failed attempts to grab hold of the nozzle standing beside it. Three times, it came close to its own collapse. But the polypond made adjustments, improved her aim, and on the fourth attempt she managed not only to cling to the nozzle’s exterior, but also the lip above, a cap of hyperfiber protecting what might have been a living finger that was quickly and purposefully shoving itself down into the rising fire.

Surging EM currents disrupted the magnetic containment.

Finger nukes scarred the vents and mirrors.

But what killed the engine, eventually and for good, was a slurry of hyperfiber shards suspended with light—a smothering, nearly invincible flood that told a thousand AI systems that there was trouble and an overload was inevitable and if the captains didn’t give the Shut-Down order, they would gladly do it themselves.

Aasleen gave the order, grudgingly.

The Master stopped shouting at the monster and her own miserable luck. Then with a sideways glance at Washen, she said, “It can, and it knows it. So it’s going after another engine, as soon as possible.”

“I would,” Washen admitted.

Speaking only to herself. Since the Master had already vanished, leaving her standing alone on the abandoned bridge.